The currency reform hit me and my little family hard. The rug was suddenly pulled out from under us. The black market, which had made sure the three of us got along, was no more. In fact there was no getting along any more. Our calculation that the few hundred Reichsmarks that we had, together with the basic rations that we received from the authorities, would be about enough for Friedel and Roy-Peter until I was sufficiently recovered to leave the sanatorium, dissolved into the air. The money wasn't worth anything anymore.

There was no alternative: I discharged myself from the sanatorium, gave up the support of the IRO and looked for a job that would bring in Deutschmarks. There was only one possibility for me: I had to find a place in the US Army somewhere. After hunting around I found a job as interpreter and translator with the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Giessen. That was a US military agency that had been formed during the Second World War to protect American units from espionage, sabotage and subversion. It also had the job of detecting and neutralizing enemy intelligence services. In the US Zone their first task at the end of the war was to hunt down the so-called “Werwolf”, a Nazi resistance organization which everybody talked about, although (like Himmler's planned fortress in the Alps) it never really existed.

So from the autumn of 1948 I was employed as an interpreter with the 66th CIC Group in Giessen, and I traveled there every day on the train. To a post in which there wasn't much to do. It was headed by a captain and all the other soldiers were sergeants. They all wore civilian clothes at work. It was quite a pleasant job. Most of the other employees spoke little or no German, and so I and another German colleague had to all the translating. In those days people still worked on Saturdays, and the normal working week was forty-eight hours. I earned 231 DM gross per month, from which deductions were made for social insurance and for a daily hot lunch in the canteen reserved for German employees of the US Army; I got about 190 DM net. Even in those days that didn't make you rich. I was very glad to have got any job at