Feb 5, 2015 By Suzanne Elliott 4 min read

The stories Fritz Ottenheimer told kept the attention of the 400 or so 10th-graders at Bethel Park High School.

It was nearly impossible for the students to imagine the cruelty and fear that Ottenheimer, now 89, faced as a young Jewish boy and teen growing up in Germany as Adolph Hitler came to power.

“I was 8 years old when Adolph Hitler came to power,” Ottenheimer told the assembled students. “Even at 8, I could tell there was something drastic happening.”

Ottenheimer spoke Feb. 4 to the students who are studying the Holocaust through literature, said Nancy Rose Aloi, superintendent of the Bethel Park School District, who attended the talk and following question-and-answer session.

“Soon there are not going to be a lot of Holocaust survivors,” Aloi said.

Indeed. Even Ottenheimer joked about his age.

“It’s easy to be a celebrity when you’re born in a place at the wrong time and live a long time,” he joked. “That’s why I am a celebrity.”

Still, Ottenheimer’s story is compelling. He grew up in Constance, Germany, in the southern end of the country next to the Swiss border. His family ran a small menswear store, he said.

“My father was on his way to open the store not too long after Hitler came to power,” he said. “There were loudspeakers around the town telling people not to buy from the Jews and buy from Germans. My father was shocked that day to learn he was not a German.”

Ottenheimer told the students there was a Nazi storm trooper standing outside the front of his father’s store who was tasked with the duty of keeping shoppers away.

“My father went home and got a bag,” he said. “My father then went back to the store and went in. He took the shirts and ties out of the front window and put out his World War I medals. He went back out and stood next to the storm trooper.”

People took notice of what was happening at the store and began gathering in front of it in support of his father, who fought for Germany during World War I. But as Adolph Hitler and his Nazi party became more entrenched, that initial show of support dwindled.

“The propaganda machine went into action,” Ottenheimer said. “Jewish people were considered criminals, dirty foreigners. That was when things started to get rough.”

When Hitler came to power, Ottenheimer said the unemployment rate was high. Hitler promised to change all of that. And he did; by building guns, airplanes and tanks.

“When people get hungry they get desperate and they believe anything,” said Ottenheimer, adding that it became obvious to many that Germany was gearing up to fight another war.

“In 1938, when I was 13, Hitler announced to the world that he was going to take Austria and make it part of Germany,” he said.

While Hitler successfully annexed Austria, the country of his birth, without violence, it was the Austrian Jews who shed light on the dictator’s true agenda; the annihilation of the Jews. Austrian Jews began showing up in Constance in the hope of slipping across the border into Switzerland and turned to the Ottenheimer family for help.

The reality of what was really taking place in Germany, however, was still hard for its Jewish residents to process. In August 1938, the Swiss closed its border and three months later in November 1938, the Constance synagogue was bombed. Shortly afterward, all of the Jewish men in Constance – including Ottenheimer’s father – were arrested by the Gestapo, the German secret police.

Ottenheimer said his father was taken to Dachau concentration camp and was released several weeks later.

“He was not read of any charges or accused of committing a crime,” he said. “It was basically harassment.”

Ottenheimer said his family had applied in 1936 for permission to immigrate to the United States and were finally granted permission to do so in May 1939.

His family ended up in New York City. His mother got a job cleaning houses, while his father got a job as a porter in a movie theater. Ottenheimer himself joined the U.S. Army.

“I fought against the Fatherland and took part on the final drive across Germany,” he said.

Ottenheimer went on to earn a degree in mechanical engineering. He moved to Pittsburgh in 1950 and worked for Westinghouse for 30 years before retiring in 1987. He now lives in Oakland and devotes his life to talking with as many people as possible about the Holocaust.