Special Guest Post by Matt Graydon, Author of Leaving Fatherland

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Oskar Bachmann always imagined that giving his first lecture would be the defining moment of his life. It was, but not in the way he expected. Growing up a misfit in Nazi Germany, a victim of his father’s beatings, Oskar’s love of books is a constant comfort in a world turned upside-down by violence.

The Inspiration for Leaving Fatherland

Inspiration for a novel can come from so many places. With historical fiction it can often be a case of finding historical events that have not been depicted in fictional tales or providing a different perspective on one that has. This is partly the case with my own story - Leaving Fatherland. A spark of an idea had surfaced in my mind as a child as I had listened to tales from the 1940s told across the family dinner table as I grew up in Winchester in the 1970s and 80s. 

Mother often recounted stories from her own family dinner table as an adolescent. They centred on her father, a former World War I gunner in the British Army, sharing conversation and Lincolnshire potatoes with his eldest daughter, twice imprisoned for being a conscientious objector; his Royal Navy son, an officer on the minesweeper, HMS Rifleman; and his daughter’s boyfriend, Werner Augustus Döhr, a former reconnaissance crew member on a Luftwaffe Junkers 88. 

That dinner table, and all its contradictions, struck a chord with me as did Mother’s stories of her family hosting prisoners of war for Christmas dinner, and her mother gifting them sewing kits to send home to their own mothers. The scenes often played out in my mind, acting as an antidote to the jaded, polarised stories of war more familiar in comic books, novels and movies. As I came to know my German family, and more of Werner’s story, my urge grew to use it as inspiration to create my own novel. My research was extensive; life in Nazi Germany, the Luftwaffe, the history of psychology and typhus vaccination, World War II in North Africa, et cetera. Over time, the story of Leaving Fatherland emerged.

My Uncle Werner was born in Dortmund on 28th September 1914. I have no memory of him and met him only once in Germany, as a small child in 1970. In researching his life and by extension using this as inspiration to craft events in the life of my protagonist, Oskar Bachmann, I drew heavily on the recollections of my cousins, Peter, now deceased, Hannah and Carl. Werner came from academic stock, his father August Wilhelm Döhr, has a school named after him and was a committed social democrat, instrumental in setting up free, non-religious, schools in Germany in the 1920s.

Werner attended the Oberrealschule Gelsenkirchen Buer until Easter 1934, passing his Abitur before spending the Winter semester 1934-1935 at the University of Göttingen and the Summer semester 1935 at the University of Freiburg. He was then called to military service, a must for all men under 25 under the Nazi regime and spent October 1935 to September 1937 at Schönwalde Military Airfield near Berlin.

 Werner’s Schönwalde certificate from September 1937

He is believed to have attended the Berlin Games in 1936. He returned to his studies for the Winter semester 1937 at the University of Marburg staying through to the Summer Semester of 1938. We know from New York passenger records that Werner arrived in New York City in September 1938 and spent the Winter Semester 1938 through to Spring 1940 at the liberal Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.

Passenger log, S.S. New York, September 1938

His yearbook entry below is interesting – showing his disdain for the Nazis, in his description of them as ‘wild beasts.’ To earn extra money while in America Werner worked for the cutter on ‘Gone with the Wind’ and maintained a strange affinity to the film throughout his life.

Courtesy The Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, Bates College

After a letter from his father, which we believe warned against the potential dangers of staying in America, he returned home to Germany. This could not have been across the Atlantic Ocean at this point. By summer 1940, when Werner would have looked to travel home, Germany controlled much of the European Atlantic coast, and its submarines could easily reach the merchant ships sailing from North America, Gibraltar, and the Cape of Good Hope. 

We believe, due in part to certain books Werner owned, Japanese and Russian phrasebooks for example, that he caught a ship from San Francisco to Japan and then another ship to Russia, travelling the length of the Siberian Express back to Moscow and on to Berlin. At this point there were still friendly relations between Germany and Russia. 

After training, he joined the Luftwaffe and was stationed at Derna Airbase, Libya in 1941, becoming part of the reconnaissance team in the Battle of Malta. He received two Iron Cross First Class. His Commander-in-Chief was Kesselring. 

View of North African desert, believed to be from the cockpit of writer’s uncle’s Ju-88, in summer 1942.

Then in the Summer of 1942 he was part of an aircrew whose Ju-88 was shot down in the North African desert. Although the precise location is unknown, we believe it likely this was in the Mersa Matruh area, close to the Libya / Egypt border. Picked up by Canadian forces, Werner was then transferred to Cairo and later shipped to Canada as a prisoner of war (POW), staying in the country for several years, one of 34,000 German prisoners of war detained in Canada on behalf of the British government during WW2.

In 1946 my Uncle was transferred back to England and was held POW at Pingley Camp. The camp hierarchy awarded him the job of postman, a role he carried out by motorbike and one that included regular visits to Kirton Lindsey, the nearby town where his future wife, my aunty, Roslyn, and my mother lived. On one visit to a local farm he met Roslyn and a romance eventually blossomed. 

Aerial view of Pingley Camp in the 1940s

This would have been difficult. Fraternisation between Germans and the local population was strictly forbidden by the British government, and not lifted until Christmas 1946. Werner decided to return to Germany to continue his teaching studies but finding his parents’ home area desolate and having to barter for milk with tea towels his stay was a short one. He returned to England to marry Roslyn in Scunthorpe in 1947 and took up a teaching post at Kirton Lindsey Secondary Modern, becoming a highly respected member of staff, as the letter below indicates.

Reference from Chairman of the Governors

There were still many in the area who were suspicious of Werner, some going as far as throwing the Nazi salute as they passed him in the street. But his easy style and charisma, as well as a well-received speech at a Women’s Institute meeting at Kirton Lindsey Town Hall, eventually won most over. 

Roslyn and Werner lived in my grandparents’ house in Kirton Lindsey, until my Cousin Carl was born in 1949. They then moved to another house in Kirton, before Werner headed to take up another teaching post in Oxfordshire, eventually returning to a de-Nazified Fatherland in the mid-1950s.

Other than events in Chapters Six, Seventeen, Eighteen and Nineteen of Leaving Fatherland—notably Oskar’s visit to Berlin during the 1936 Olympic Games, his crash in the desert in a Ju-88, his capture and later imprisonment at Pingley Camp, falling in love with an ‘English Rose’ (my Aunty Roslyn), and the well-received speech at the Women’s Institute, most of the story and its characters are entirely fictional. The novel does, however, reference real events and places, and names of people who actually lived during the period.

Matt Graydon,

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About the Author

Matt Graydon has always written stories, first as a schoolboy, then as a journalist and PR and now, in the culmination of his life’s work, as a writer of striking historical fiction. He likes to explore offbeat perspectives, inspired by true stories, especially in his tales of life in wartime. Matt is half-Irish, grew up in a loving but strictly religious home and spent many months in hospital beds as a child. Now he enjoys spending his non-writing time standing in remote fields at night viewing and photographing stars and galaxies through his telescope or attempting to keep his unruly Surrey garden in check. He lives in the one-pub village of South Nutfield with his wife and daughter, and sometimes son, who easily exceeded his father’s one year stay at university in the 1980s. Oh, and the family Cockapoo, Ozzy, a regular companion under the armchair, inherited from his grandpa, where he writes. Well-travelled, his passion for writing was ignited, at age 21, during a three-month, action-packed, hitch-hike across the USA, when his escapades made great material for an in-depth diary and, perhaps, one day, story. Find out more from Matt's website https://www.mattgraydon.com/ and find him on Facebook and Twitter @graydonwrites