Howard, Sigrid
Posted on 14 September, 2021 by in Veterans By Name, H
July 13 2020
Nearly all of Larry Martin’s WW II veterans gave me written permission to use their information. The day in July 2015 when I interviewed Sigrid on DVD I had forgotten to bring a printed written release with me. I asked Sigrid at the end of the interview if she would give me a verbal release to use her information. Sigrid replied YES she would give me oral permission to use her information as I wanted. Larry Martin
This Bio is being written by Larry Martin from notes taken in July 2015 as well as memory.
Sigrid Burkhardt Howard was born in Berlin in 1927. Sigrid’s father had to be a Nazi member because he worked in a airplane factory before the war. During the war he helped people who had been bombed out of their residents find new places to live usually by doubling up with another family. Sigrid had to be de-nazified after the war because she had been in what was called the Bund Deutscher Madl or called the BDM Sigrid called it the League of German girls which was the girls form of the boys Nazi Youth. Sigrid told me in our DVD interview that she would have turned her parents into the Gestapo if they had said anything bad about Hitler. One reason for this attitude was brain washing and Hitler always gave candy to the children after bombing raids so in her words “Hitler was God” to her as a child or a teenage girl. Sigrid lost both grandparents to bombings in Berlin in 1943 by the American 8th Air Force. She said the English bombed Berlin also but not to the extent that the American’s did. Sigrid told of her rape by Russians in 1945 when she was turned in by a older German man who was told by the Russians that they would rape his wife right now in front of him to death if they did not tell them where the young girl was hidden. He told them and they raped Sigrid. She became pregnant but had a abortion later. The German man who told was forced out of his neighborhood because he told the Russian soldiers where Sigrid was hidden. Sigrid also talked about how women could fight and kill also. She said she had been trained on the use of a rifle and killed two Russian soldiers (not the ones who raper her). She told me that when she married a American solder Clifford Howard in 1947 she was able to come to America. Sigrid also teared up when she spoke of the many freedoms that we enjoyed in America. (FREEDOM IS NEVER FREE AND WILL NEVER BE FREE) That is my opinion. She was spit at and attacked by some people in American because she was a German and had been in Berlin during the war. Sigrid also told me that her parents never believed that the “Holocaust” ever happened.
Nearly all of Larry Martin’s WW II veterans gave Sigrid’s interview I had forgotten to have a printed written release with me. I asked Sigrid at the end of the interview if she would give me a verbal release to use her information. Sigrid replied YES she would give me oral permission to use her information as I wanted. Larry Martin