In the mid-1930s, while still in our 'teens, we had both become members of the Youth Corps of the Deutscher Bund, which was particularly strong in Chicago and was then rapidly expanding there, owing to the vigorous activities of a group of pro-Nazis. Lothar rapidly became prominent among them and by the time the war broke out in Europe, our age then being twenty-one, he was recognized as one of its leaders!

Naturally our sympathies were with Germany, but Lothar felt much more strongly on the matter than I did. He threw himself into a campaign aimed at giving Germany all the help that was possible; whereas my attitude was isolationist, and I maintained that as American citizens we ought to use such influence as we possessed to keep the United States strictly neutral.

In America the repercussions of Pearl Harbour were terrific. Isolationism disappeared overnight and almost to a man the people were behind the Government in its declaration of war on Japan. But in Chicago opinion was far from being so unanimous about the U.S. also entering the war against Germany. On this, for the first time in our lives, Lothar and I not only differed fundamentally, but quarrelled violently. I held that, although it might be distasteful to us, our duty lay in loyalty to the United States and, if need be, we must fight for the country in which we had been born and reared and under whose just laws we had been enabled to earn an honourable living. He held that blood counted for more than the accident of being born outside Germany, that in the triumph of the Nazi ideology lay the only cure for the decadence which infested the great democracies, and that it would be shameful to cling to our easy way of life instead of doing our utmost to help Hitler in his struggle. In short, the United States having declared war on Germany, he declared himself to be personally at war with the United States.

Of course, he was not such a fool as to say so openly, but he obtained exemption from continuing his lectures at the University on the excuse that he intended to join the U.S. Air Force, and shortly afterwards disappeared from Chicago.

The telepathic tie that united us kept me to some extent informed about him as, from time to time when I happened to think of him, I had visual images of his surroundings and people he was with. I felt certain that he had gone to South America and from there, via North Africa and Italy, succeeded in reaching Germany.