8/30/2023 0 Comments Hitler youth knifeIn one of his letters home, Dad mentioned to his sister, Edna, that he captured eight Germans “all by myself.” At the time the Germans were desperate to be captured by the Americans, rather than the Russians heading east. Upon my pestering about the German knife, Dad mentioned that many of the guys in his outfit carried Hitler Youth knives as utility tools. Dad’s service records show he was detached from the 97th Infantry Division and got to Europe shortly after D Day. An Infantry captain in Patton’s Third Army, Dad’s dress uniform had three rows of ribbons and a Combat Infantryman badge, and he served in the European and Pacific theaters of the war. I never learned much about Dad’s service first hand because he didn’t tell war stories. Today, the blade shows wear, and that came from Dad and probably the former owner. The year I was born, 1952, Dad used the blade to gut a nice whitetail doe he killed. Dad used the German knife on his first Iowa deer hunts after the war in the late 1940s. It was Dad’s utility knife, and I remember him using it to cut pieces out of a tire to repair the elevator on the corn picker. It was the first knife I ever saw that could shave hair. Dad used the German knife whenever he needed a sharp blade for something on the farm.Īnd it was sharp. When I was growing up on an Iowa farm in the 1960s, the Hitler Youth Knife, a Nazi SS dagger, bayonets and Japanese Samurai swords hung in the garage, in no particular place of honor. My dad was an infantry captain with Patton’s Third Army on its push toward Berlin.
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