Shandaken lives/ Schlegel, now 90, keeps on going

At times, the young sergeant was troubled by having to kill his former countrymen. “Soldiers in Afghanistan are killing people from a distance,” he mused. “I killed two Germans looking face-to-face. Your whole gut changes. You get a weak sensation, and you tremble a little bit. You think, what the hell did I do?”

When he entered the military at 19, Schlegel was a Catholic choir boy and a virgin who barely drank alcohol. After going through the war, he said cheerfully, “I became a rotten son-of-a-bitch.”

After one of three escapes, Schlegel joined in a raid as the Germans were evacuating their headquarters in a French town. He found himself standing in front of the desk of a German officer. “We were looking at each other,” he recalled. “I had a pistol. He reached down for his gun, and I shot him. It ripped his back out. I took his wallet and papers and brought them to General Patton. Some of them were important, showing troop transports. There were also letters and pictures of his wife and children. He was a captain in an intelligence section. He had studied to be a Lutheran minister.”

For years, he relived the shooting in his dreams and woke up sweating.

By the end of the war, he had lost his religion. “What is there in this God?” he wondered, pointing out that the German, Russian, British, and American troops all have mottoes that refer to “God and country.”

Any regrets he had about killing Germans were dispelled when his regiment went through concentration camps at Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belsen. “It wasn’t just Hitler and the SS,” he said, recalling a visit to his aunt in Germany in 1938, when she took him to a parade in support of the Fuhrer. “Hitler passed within six feet of me,” he said. “My aunt had tears in her eyes. My relatives still think he was like the Messiah. I know these people were brainwashed, but how can you allow something like the Holocaust to happen?”

After the war, Schlegel worked in New York City at a wholesale fur company managed by his father. They dealt in sable, mink, and broadtail, dressing raw pelts and bundling them for coat manufacture. One day, a call came from Henri Bendel, where Marlene Dietrich was asking for a sable coat. Schlegel, then a lowly sales manager, crossed town with furs to show Dietrich. She immediately recognized him from a meeting in Europe, when she was entertaining the troops in 1944. The sale to Dietrich boosted his status at the company.

Schlegel and his wife, Elaine, were married in 1948 and had two sons and a daughter. “Elaine had a figure like the Venus de Milo,” Schlegel said. “She liked walking and hiking, she loved people, and she wanted to save the world.” They visited the Catskills frequently, buying a cabin without plumbing in Mount Tremper for $3500 in 1949. Over the years, he fixed up the property, adding a pool and guest cottage. When he retired in 1970, the couple moved upstate full-time. Elaine worked at as a secretary at the clinic in Phoenicia, and Schlegel participated in the town government.

Their son Martin died in an accident while serving in the U.S. Navy in 1980. Elaine died of lung cancer in 1995. Schlegel considered them much better people than himself. “The only reason I’m still alive,” he said, “is because of a 1996 reunion trip to Europe. I met Arlene, a grief counselor. I was drinking heavily. A couple of times I felt like taking one of my guns and blowing my head off. All these good people died — why was I still in the world?”

Arlene convinced him that because he had kept his mental and physical capabilities, he had to keep living, taking each day as it comes.

“Since Elaine died, I’ve become a model of trying to help people and be nice and stay away from people I don’t like,” said Schlegel. He contributes to St. Jude Hospital, Indian schools for children — in honor of a Crow Indian from his platoon who loaned him $20 when he returned home flat broke — and Family of Woodstock. He figures he spends $50 a week on martinis at the American Legion, so he can spare some cash to help other people. “But I don’t drink before 1 p.m.,” he declared.

He stopped hunting after Martin died. “We loved venison. We tanned the hides and made jackets. But after my son and wife died, we weren’t eating any. Every year I still go and buy a hunting license out of nostalgia for the old days. I could probably go up in the woods and shoot something if I wanted to. There are three woodchucks living under my house. Every spring they come out, and I could shoot them right then. But I couldn’t even kill a cockroach any more.”