When Paul Mengelberg saw Adolf Hitler in the flesh during his time in the German navy, he said the dictator had eyes like steel.
“They looked right through you,” said the Second World War veteran and German prisoner of war.
Mengelberg, now a resident of Longlac at age 94 , was captured by the British forces on July 1, 1940 and arrived by ship in Halifax on Jan. 21, 1941. He spent time at several different internment camps in Canada including the Angler camp outside of Marathon.
A prisoner of war for more than six years, Mengelberg made his way back to Canada in 1951 and shared his story with a Lakehead University history class Tuesday afternoon at the Bora Laskin theatre.
Mengelberg recalled his childhood growing up in interwar Germany, where inflation hit the country hard and money printed on any given day was useless the next. He once waited in line for hours to buy a jar of honey only to have it sold out by the time he got to the counter.
He said there were times of chaos with constant streetfights leading up into Hitler’s time in power.
“When Hitler took over, everything was quiet and we had work,” Mengelberg said. “It was promising in the beginning, but then everything went kaput.”
Growing up, Mengelberg was a member of the boy scouts and said one day they arrived at the building they’d hold their meetings in only to discover it in flames, burned to the ground by the Hitler movement.
He said because of his appearance as a young teenager, he was frequently mistaken for being Jewish and was often assaulted.
“My boyhood in the early 1930s wasn’t too happy sometimes,” he said.
When he was just shy of his 18 th birthday, Mengelberg joined the German navy in 1934. Working the control room on U-boat 26, he had to be on the ball and said there was no room to be afraid.
When his crew was captured in July 1940, he said the British were waiting for them just off the tip of southwest Ireland; their submarine was depth charged and they tried to hide for six hours, trying to shake the British destroyer.
“We slowly got up again and then we tried to get away into the darkness,” Mengelberg said. “Then the submarine came and the officer on the bridge was maybe confused so he rang the alarm.”
He said three bombs from the destroyer scuttled their u-boat and the fight was over.
Mengelberg said he wants people, especially youth, to respect their fellow human beings, a lesson he learned during his time in the British and Canadian internment camps.
“The British forces, they treated you as a human being,” he said. “In Canada? Well, I’m here now.”
The former P.O.W. said he chose to come back to Canada because of the Canadian attitude, especially of those in the north he experienced during the war.
“I wanted to come back and I did,” he said.
