Long-time BSTC Member, Ingeborg McDonald,
was interviewed for the Green Valley News.

March 19, 2025

See the article below:

Under the cloud: GV woman grew up in Nazi Germany

Ingeborg McDonald

Ingeborg McDonald, 93, reflects on her early childhood in Germany, where she became aware of war early.

Ingeborg McDonald took her first school photo at age 6, in 1938.

 

McDonald spent her childhood under Nazi rule amid a cloud of fear, distrust, misinformation and with little hope of resisting. She learned how powerless a working family can be under a totalitarian state at an early age, and that lesson has been with her for a lifetime.

Oestreich McDonald was born April 20, 1932, in Bargteheide, Germany, 30 miles northeast of Hamburg.

"It was a little horse town, horse village. The expanse of farmland was huge. There were maybe two to four thousand inhabitants," she said.

Her parents were teenagers during WWI, and carving out a livelihood in the aftermath was difficult.

"My parents got married in the middle 1920s, and jobs were hard to find. My dad would find a job here, a job there. Finally, about the time I was born, he got a job at the telephone company in Hamburg," McDonald said. "The telephone company in Germany was part of the postal department, so he was a government employee."

McDonald said her family was never politically involved, preferring to focus on work and each other. Her father, Frierich Oestreich, commuted by train to Hamburg, recounting later how in the late-20s and early '30s, he would rush to the station after work, avoiding party members on the street who aggressively sought support.

"He said he didn’t want anything to do with any one of them, they almost grabbed at him. 'I just wanted to get to the railroad station to get home,' he said. We were too self-involved managing to pay for this property and working. My parents told me they did not vote ... which of course they regretted later," McDonald said.

Hitler and his party won election and consolidated their power in early 1933. Her father told her that within a year, no one could be trusted — friends, neighbors or shopkeepers. 

Learning about war

When McDonald was 6, an awareness of war dawned on her slowly and indirectly.

"I remember my first year in school," she said. "Kids don’t know what war is, but I remember my favorite teacher was drafted right away, and then I remember one of my girlfriends, her father was drafted right away, and was also killed right away. So, little by little, you heard of fathers being killed, and brothers. So little by little it sunk in what war was all about."

At 10, McDonald was required to join Hitler Youth for girls, Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM), or The League of German Girls. Every Wednesday and Saturday after school she attended meetings that could stretch to three hours.

"At age 10, it was mandatory to join the Hitler Youth. If you didn’t go, your parents would be arrested," McDonald said. "There were some games and fun, but everything was interwoven with what a great job Hitler had done, what a hero he was."

Growing up, McDonald was constantly reminded by her parents never to talk to people about what was said inside their home.

"When my dad came home from work, I had been in one of these meetings and he said to me, ‘What did they tell you today?’ Well, I told him so and so is a big hero," McDonald said. "He would say, ‘This is not good, this is not good for our country. You know what we are discussing at home, you can’t even tell your best friend. You know what will happen to us.’"

Jewish neighbors

McDonald recalled her family had difficulty maintaining friendships with two couples in the neighborhood. Both were mixed marriages — Jews married to Germans. It likely spared them from concentration camps but they were still subjected to harassment and other forms of hardship.

Beate Meyer, a researcher at the Institute of the History of German Jews in Hamburg, published "The Mixed Marriage: A Guarantee of Survival or a Reflection of German Society During the Nazi Regime?" She wrote the Nazi government incentivized or coerced divorce proceedings and took every measure to make life more difficult for Jewish spouses. 

By the time the Nazis gained control, there were 35,000 couples in mixed marriages in Germany, Meyer wrote. As Nazi control grew, that number declined.

"Mr. Cohn, he was Jewish, his wife was not," McDonald recalled. "The story with Mr. Cohn was that he had been an officer in the German Navy during World War I, and when Hitler came to power, whatever pension he had was taken away from him."

McDonald's father greatly admired Cohn but was forced to speak with him under the cover of night to avoid detection.

McDonald recalls another couple of which the wife, Frau Hilbers, was Jewish and the husband was not.

"She and my mother became particularly good friends," McDonald said. "She always made a big fuss over me. I had to sit on her lap, she hugged me and brought me little gifts."

When McDonald asked her mother why Hilbers liked her so much, she was told that the couple had adopted a little girl who was taken from them when Hitler rose to power. They weren't permitted to raise a German child.

"My mother said to me, ‘You be very nice to her. She lost a little girl, and you remind her of that little girl,'" McDonald said.

"And if we met our Jewish neighbors on the street, you didn’t dare say hello to them. If anybody caught you saying anything to them, again, it reflected badly on your parents."

McDonald came home from school one afternoon to find her mother crying. She had a letter in her hand from the Nazi party warning the family not to engage with their neighbors, and "that it had to cease immediately or my dad would lose his job."

The Oestreich family chose to maintain their friendships in secret.

War intensifies

 McDonald's father built a bomb shelter in their backyard as the end of the war neared in anticipation of bombing raids. Though they had been warned not to engage with their neighbors, they still did what they could to protect their friends.

"This lady, her husband had a big job at one of the insurance companies in Hamburg but he had been transferred. He asked my parents to look after her during alarm raids, which actually didn’t affect Bargteheide too much," McDonald said. "Still, when they went off, everybody got up, got dressed and went to the bomb shelter my dad had built. My parents did that secretly until the end of the war."

As Hamburg was bombed out, thousands of civilians flooded the countryside.

"All of a sudden, there was a trainload of refugees parked at our railroad station," McDonald said. "And then there was a knock on the door. They said your house is so many square feet, here’s a family of four, you have to put them up. So we had to make room for them. I had to give up my room."

McDonald said housing refugees caused friction over a loss of space and privacy. It also became harder for the family to learn news of the war.

"Somehow, my parents found that at a certain time of night we might be able to get London BBC to find out what was really going on. But if you were caught doing that, there would be severe punishment," she said. "In the meantime, we had refugees in our house so we had to be careful. I can remember with my parents hovering over a radio covered by a blanket ... at that time, I was 11 or 12 years old."

McDonald's father continued riding the train into Hamburg for work, despite the looming possibility of getting bombed at any moment.

Near the end

As the war came to an end, McDonald recalls a distinct memory two weeks prior to the British seizing Hamburg.

"I walked home from school with a girl that I knew. The family were Nazis," McDonald said. "People couldn’t wait for it to be over. Very timidly, I asked, 'Do you still think we’re going to win the war?’ She said, 'But of course we are, the führer is not going to let us down.’ When I told my father, he scolded me, he said, ‘What do we keep telling you?’"

That was the last time McDonald saw the girl, one of four daughters of a high-ranking Nazi officer with possible involvement in internment operations.

"They weren’t active in our town, but her father, he would come home in a big car every so often, but we didn’t know what he did. I remember seeing him walking sometimes with the boots and the brown outfit, but we didn’t know what he did," McDonald said. "I never knew exactly, but there was talk that he had been involved in some of the concentration camps."

After the British took control, the entire family committed suicide. Most likely, the father killed his wife and four daughters before taking his own life.

According to the book "Suicide in Nazi Germany" by Christian Goeschel, there were over 7,000 reported suicides in Berlin in 1945, along with thousands more in towns and cities throughout Germany. The true total will never be known given underreporting and the chaos of the time.

In "Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945," historian Florian Huber documents the condition of Demmin, a small town in northeastern Germany about 130 miles from Bargteheide, in the final moments of the war.

While the Red Army closed in, 700 Germans—10% of the local population—killed themselves either out of fear or trauma, especially women having been subjected to violent gang rapes by the Russians. Many of the women lurched down to the Tollense River at the south end of town and drowned themselves. Almost two million German women were sexually assaulted at the end of the war.

In hindsight

McDonald said she was lucky, that things could have been much worse for her family.

"I always had my loving parents. I always had a home. We weren’t bombed out, we weren't refugees. There are horror stories out there," she said.

For McDonald, the full devastation and brutality wasn't understood until after the war.

"I was 13 when the war was over," she said. "In my teenage years, the guilt we felt, my generation felt, suddenly we learned, we knew about concentration camps. But most of us, we didn’t know how bad it was."

McDonald and her brother, Harold Oestreich, moved to the United States with the sponsorship of relatives.

"I had relatives who had been in this country before World War I, and all my life from the time I grew up I heard about my American relatives, and I knew I was going to come to America. One of those relatives sponsored my brother and myself later on."

McDonald glowed as she spoke of America and learning about the promises of democracy.

"I remember coming to this country in 1951 as a young person, as the ship came into the New York Harbor to see the Statue of Liberty," she said. "My whole teenage years, I can remember how we suddenly learned about the freedom of democracy. I am a proud patriot."