Cleanup job reveals
pieces of the past

By Diane Prokop
Times Staff Writer

The 60-year-old teletype had fallen from a stack of papers and onto the dining-room floor of Brian McGrogan’s home.
"Oh my God," his son Brian Jr. said while scanning the words on the old teletype correspondence.
Tank forces drove eleven . . . repeat . . . eleven miles to within one . . . repeat . . . one mile of Nordheim.
Nordheim is a town in central Germany.
Although the story behind the teletype isn’t clear, it’s one of many links to World War II Germany that the McGrogans are discovering as they sift through boxes of papers and photographs that once belonged to a German-born woman who grew up in East Orange, N.J.
A few years ago, McGrogan and his son, who do clean-outs as a side business, were asked by the attorney for Ingeborg Schmidt to haul away items from the elderly woman’s storage unit after she’d passed away in Newtown. An auction firm had removed other possessions from the unit but left the collection of papers behind, said McGrogan.
"Usually there aren’t a lot of people that want bins of paper," he added.
But the old papers intrigued McGrogan, who earns his living as a SEPTA bus driver. He stacked the mounds of material on the dining-room table of his Penndel home, where it stayed until McGrogan and his son got around to the task of inspecting the papers and organizing everything in boxes and binders.
The personal effects included letters with envelopes and stamps spanning the 1860s to 2000, photos from the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, documents with the Nazi seal, wartime newspaper clippings, and a letter describing an Aug. 6, 1944 attack that Schmidt had witnessed on a Daimler Mercedes plant.
There is even an original document labeled "Report of Burial," dated April 20, 1945, for an American soldier identified as Pvt. Joseph A. Krentz. It is marked Restricted and reads: "This man is one of two infantrymen shot by SS Troops while on a scouting patrol at Capen, Germany."
The lifetime of material apparently was amassed by Schmidt, who was born in Germany, moved to East Orange, N.J., as a child and returned to Germany to attend college prior to the outbreak of World War II.
"There’s a reason why this woman saved all of this," the elder McGrogan said.
From McGrogan’s inspection of the material while cataloguing the boxes and boxes of papers, documents and notes, he believes Schmidt may have had plans at one point of being an author.
"There’s enough material here for four or five books . . . and at least one movie," McGrogan said.
During the six weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Schmidt had worked as a secretary to Alex Dreier, an NBC broadcaster and the last journalist to leave Berlin when the Nazis expelled foreign reporters.
The paperwork also indicates that Schmidt’s uncle was a Nazi. The woman’s father had written to her, warning that she’d disgrace the family if she empathized with Nazi ideology, that she was in the country solely to go to school.
The young woman rebelled. She met a Luftwaffe pilot, Heinz Endlich, on Christmas Day in 1943. When she became engaged to him, authorities of the Third Reich upheld her privileges of German citizenship.
From details in some of the correspondence, their daughter’s activities in Germany were bringing hardship to her parents as they tried to establish their lives in New Jersey. For example, Schmidt’s father, a banker, apparently was forced to leave his job.
"She was very intelligent . . . a straight-A student," said McGrogan, whose papers include report cards, "and she was very intrigued by German society. I think she wanted to take the world by the horns and document it, but she never got around to writing the book."
As allied forces gained control of the war and American troops flooded into Germany, Schmidt portrayed herself as an American in need of help. She was interrogated and eventually released from the Ninth Army Internment Corporation in Osterburg.
McGrogan noted that correspondent George Dorsey also interviewed Ingeborg Schmidt for a story published in a May 1945 issue of Stars and Stripes magazine. She told him that she didn’t believe the "rumors" of the Holocaust and mass exterminations of Jews.
"At 17, I had other things on my mind besides politics," she said. "I’ve lived in both countries and I could understand how the Americans felt and how the Germans felt. There’s good and bad in both systems . . . you can’t understand this unless you had been brought up like I was."
Schmidt worked for an Americans graves registry before her official release and return to the United States in the fall of 1946.
McGrogan said some of the paperwork also leads him to believe that Schmidt may have been employed as a translator during the ensuing Nuremberg Trials and prosecution of Nazi war criminals.
Back in the United States, Schmidt married a man named William Anderson and turned to a career as a teacher in northern New Jersey. The collection of papers includes a photo of the teacher in the May 20, 1951 edition of the Newark Sunday News.
After Schmidt’s death about five years ago, McGrogan and his son were hired to haul away the remaining contents of a storage unit as an attorney completed the last stages of settling the woman’s affairs.
There apparently was no family to accept any of the items. Her body was transported to Germany for burial.
The memorabilia and papers shared by McGrogan represent just a fraction of the material he is sorting through, McGrogan said. He isn’t sure what he’ll eventually do with it all. He does know one thing, however.
"This woman’s story has to be told," he said. "I can’t break it up." ••
Reporter Diane Prokop can be reached at 215-354-3036 or dprokop@phillynews.com