LENEXA, Kan. — A few months after 160,000 Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, Charles Staubus would arrive in France himself with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.
“When I first got to France they took me to a large tent full of uniforms and said the people who had these are all dead. Any that you like you can have it,” Staubus said Thursday, remarking on the invasion where 2,501 Americans gave their lives.
But D-Day and Operation Overlord was a turning part in the war of Nazi-occupied France and liberating Western Europe.
By the end of April of 1945, Staubus was in Berchtesgaden, Germany, home of Adolph Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest and his other office at what was known as the Little Reich Chancellery, headed by Hans Lammers. After Hitler’s suicide and German soldiers began to flee, Staubus said he spent the night in Lammers’ office.
“I picked the lock on his desk the one thing he had left on his desk was this, a seating diagram for all the top Nazis,” Staubus said pointing to the 1938 document laid out on his bed in a Lenexa assisted living facility.
And inside Hitler’s office he found something else he’s held on to for 79 years. Hitler’s personal stationery with, “Der Fuhrer” stamped upon it.
“I lifted this lid. It was like a hope chest. There it was half-full,” he smiled.
“There were only two sheets of that, one of them I kept for my copies, and the other one I wrote my dad a letter on and told them the war was over.”
That letter dated May 8, 1945, on Hitler’s own stationery first words read “Dear Dad, Well this is it, V.E. Day.”
I asked the World War II Veteran just three months of his 100th birthday if he ever informed the U.S. army of what he took home as a memento, or in his words, “liberated.”
“They didn’t know a thing about it,” he said.