Jack Norton
Jack was born in Bautzen, Germany, the home of the Wendish who established Serbin, the small community south of Giddings.
The following paragraphs are from a letter exchange between Jack and Will.
“When some of the more despicable German/Batzner citizens learned of our location, hundreds streamed into the Post Platz. They screamed death to the Jews and yelled for us to jump out of the window. Finally, Nazis in uniform came storming up the stairs to do the job. My mother threw the window open and showed at the window sill our group ready to jump. Three women, one of whom had already become insane, and five children. The people screaming for us to jump never stopped. And yet, for some reason I still cannot fathom, the advance on the Nazis on the stairs stopped. The rest of the story is too long. We escaped during the night, hid in a cave, nearly starved, etc.
“My mother died of numerous beatings and starvation in a concentration camp in Riga. My father was sent in a ship with hundreds of other concentration camp inmates into the Baltic Sea in the cold months of early 1945 as the Russians were approaching the Riga area. The ship was then bombed and straffed by the Germans until everyone was killed. My immediately junior brother was clubbed to death with a rifle butt by a drunken Russian soldier, while he was suffering from dysentery and rejected homosexual advances from the Russian soldier. My poor, beautiful sister, only 14 years old, who had spent four years in ghettos and concentration camps was killed in a gas chamber, when she unwittingly joined a line-up marked for death. Through sheer Nazis caprice her substitute mother and her girlfriend found survival in a second line.”
(Jack joined the U.S. Army and was used extensively throughout the Army as an interpreter/translator during WWII.)
“Near the end of the war, I crossed the Rhine with a unit to which I was attached, near Wesel. A few days later I was sent further south to a just captured small town named Hadamar. It was an idyllic, beautiful German town located in a valley not too far from Frankfurt. On a mountainside overlooking the town was a large insane asylum, forever to be known as the Hadamar Murder Factory.
“Here the Nazis began in 1945 the practice of euthanasia of Germany’s mentally handicapped, mostly children. During the war they also killed here mentally and physically handicapped slave laborers from many nations. Thousands of non Jews were the victims. Unknown to nearly all Germans even today, during the last days of the war the Nazis sent to Hadamar for extermination also several train loads of hopelessly wounded German soldiers. Quite coincidentally I captured a male nurse named Heinrich Ruoff, who had given most of the deadly injections from the beginning of the euthanasia program. Ruoff and several others were tried by an allied tribunal, convicted, and hung for the atrocities against foreigners. The court held that it had no jurisdiction regarding the murder of Germans. After the war, an American born nephew of Ruoff was in one of my classes and, I believe, on the basketball team at Ohio University.”
Included in Jack’s discussion of the “surprised” reaction of the citizens of Hadamar was the following discussion of the real Jack Norton.
Jack earned the Silver Star, which is second only to the Medal of Honor for valor, in Korea. When I asked him what he had done to earn that recognition, his answer was simply “I only did what I had to do to save my men.” It was obvious that he did not want to discuss it further and I never pressed him for more details.
While we were serving together in Germany in the 1960s, he was offered a position as Aide deCamp to the Commanding General, U.S. Army, Europe. The offer was based on his native German language that would make him a valuable interpreter when the general met with German officials.
Jack declined the offer because he believed his German had become so unused that he might make mistakes in translating important negotiations. He told me privately, however, that the real reason he refused the promotion was that it would require him to shake hands with Germans and he just could not do that.
So here’s the perspective.
Jack Norton was born as Jack Nussbaum. Does anyone question why he changed his name?
We visited in Burton about 30 years ago. I was surprised when Jack asked about Serbin, knew its location and its connection with his hometown of Bautzen, and wanted to visit.
Think how different Jack Nussbaum’s life would have been if he had been born in Serbin, Texas, instead of Bautzen, Germany.
What do you think Jack Norton would say if he heard someone complain about living in “racist, white supremist” America today?
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