He was in Normandy on D-Day. 75 years later, a former German soldier is worried for Europe.

Golz said they had no choice but to surrender. He said they were forced to march for two hours to a market hall where about 100 other German prisoners of war were being held. He recalled that the black GI guarding them rebuffed a furious French man who wanted to shoot all the Germans.
“The American had a duty to guard us, and that is what he did,” Golz said.

 MNNofA  "Paul Golz, 95, has a clear memory of being on guard duty in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944 — and realizing the invasion was underway when the skies over the Normandy coast were illuminated by flares, known as “Christmas Trees,” dropped by Allied planes to mark paratroop landing areas." . . .

  . . . "But Golz said he was not aware of what his fellow Germans had done to the Jews and Poles and countless others until he saw the footage. He said his captors were surprised when he told them he did not know what happened in places like Auschwitz, Dachau or Sachsenhausen.

“ 'I told them I did not know about this because in Germany we did not get to see or hear this,” he said. “Those who had taken part, had been a guard there, did not say anything.”

Golz said he was released in 1946 and when he returned to what was left of Germany he began to realize how lucky he was to have been captured by the Americans. In addition to losing his home, he learned that his sister had been raped by Russian soldiers and became pregnant.

“The worst I did not get to see because I was in the United States at the time,” he said.

In the years that followed, Golz said he became a student of the war he had taken part in. He began returning to Normandy on the significant anniversaries and meeting with American soldiers who were once his enemies. He recalls being deeply moved the first time he went to the American cemetery.

“They were all shot in the water on June 6,” he said. “That was on my mind when I saw the many graves. The Germans sat in a big bunker with big machine guns and just aimed at them.”

Golz said he was also asked several times to speak to French schoolchildren about the war and his small part in it. He showed a reporter the words he used to read to the classes when he made his presentation.

“These many, many young men, most of them between 18 and 25, have given their lives for our peace, for today’s Europe,” part of it reads. “Remember that and preserve this peace.”

. . . Like many Germans, Golz also takes a dim view of the thousands of Syrian refugees who have recently found shelter in his country.
“Nobody wants them, we also do not want them to stay,” Golz said. “We rebuilt our country, the Syrians also have to go back and rebuild their own country. There is no other way.”
Never mind that Golz himself became a refugee after the war when Pomerania, a region on the southern Baltic coast where his family ran a farm, was returned to Poland and the Germans were expelled.
What remains undimmed by the passage of time, however, is Golz’s belief that the invasion that spelled the end of the Third Reich saved Europe — and his life. . . .

German POW asks: 'Why did America give their young men for us?'  . . . Golz spent two years at Camp Patrick Henry, where he had “a good time” as a POW in Newport News, Va.

"He worked in the kitchen and grew vegetables in the garden. He learned how to bowl, listened radio shows, mowed the lawn, played football and made friends with Americans.

"But Golz and the other Germans were also confronted with reality of Nazi crimes against humanity when the camp showed the movie “Factories of Death” about the concentration camps.

"Golz said that after the movie was shown to the prisoners, they were punished and given only bread and water for a week." . . .