Otto the Photographer

Once upon a time, there were the Nazis.

And wacky Germans trying to conquer the world - mostly because their state had become an enormous Ponzi Scheme based on military expenditures, and it was that or collapse in some five more years.

No, they were not all and the same.

And there were minions of the Nazis in puppy states, trying to quell their insecurities - small dicks? yes, they were - by the long time honoured method of singling out minorities, labelling these as enemies and eradicating them - the first ones to use this scam were the Most Catholic Kings of Spain, with that country's Marranos and Moriscos... - in some new ad nazistically gruesome way.

And resistance fighters, in every country -  even in Germany; it took some guts and then some, to be anti-nazist there...but some were, blessed be their souls.    

Finally, in the middle of the whole mess, there were those that didn't understand what the fuss was all about.

This is about one of them, "Otto the photographer", or Sergeant Major Otto Bauer, former owner of a photography studio and shop in Munich and, in the late fall of 1944, improbable commander of a Wolksturm squad tasked with taking control of a little Italian town.

Otto, a solid 42 years old with a beer belly that had hoped to avoid fighting in this war, exactly as he avoided doing it in the one before, was a devout catholic and intelligent enough to know that everything was going down the toilet extremely fast, for the Third Reich.

He thus considered his mission with the pragmatism of a small business owner.

He was tasked to re-take, with a squad composed by other "youngish" beer drinkers and a couple of little kids, a three thousand inhabitants town at the confluence of three alpine valleys, each of these occupied by part time smugglers that had more hunting rifles and testosterone than common sense.

One good thing, many of the younger hotheads were now, forever, resting in Russia - with Martinat and one half of the ArmIR.

A terrible thing - the very worst of them had managed to follow Reverberi back to Italy, deserted when the Italian Army went belly up the 9/8/1943 and loitered in in the woods around town, now.

Many of these guys didn't really like the Germans, any more than the Russians did - small issues, like the German's tendency to raid the little transport capacity the Italians and Romanians still had, to speed-up their own run-for-my-life effort during the Russian catastrophe, had kind of grated sof the surviving Alpini.

Tasked with the impossible - subdue a gun-crazy town, sprinkled with some eastern front survivor,  with a handful of middle-aged, out of shape retirees that never shoot a bird -  he did the intelligent thing.

He did not even try.

The very day he arrived, he talked to the greatest authority in town, the Priest - the Mayor was a fascist and an ass, and my great-grandfather had just profited of the sudden disappearance of the squadristi and the police to break all his bones, for a moved landmarks question  - to explain what he intended to do.

His plan:  "occupy" the town centre, to "comply", technically, with his orders -  and nothing more.

Which meant, really, that they would spend their days in the bar in front of the Town Hall, playing cards with some of the old-timers that spoke German.

No requisitions - they would have bought their bread and everything else, like anybody else. No patrols, no hunting down the people in the wood, no nothing.

He and his men would behave like tourists, and it would be very happy if the partisans recognized the little value in killing a bunch of never-has-been like them, and allowed he and his men to whether the current unpleasantness, with as little discomfort as possible for everybody.

The priest reported these terms to the local partisans, who were a bit fed of killing fascists by then - before Otto and his middle-aged office men, the town was occupied by a platoon of the Guardia Nazionale Repubblicana that really tried to take control, and discovered that little is as dangerous as chasing a poacher, armed with a long range rifle and a life of habit using it, on his very own mountains -  and agreed to the informal and very unofficial cease-fire.


Or was it that the priest - himself a bit of a thug, with a penchant for his widowed female parishioners that sat quite well with his, likewise, happily womanising parish - was so impressed by the sheer rationality of the whole, that he broke a couple of partisans particularly hot-heads that proposed to kill the old "crucchi" anyway?

Here the versions differs, depending on the political side of who is telling the story.

After a couple of months, Otto felt that he had too much time on his hands - addictive as it may be, even the Scopa card game has its limits; also, the tab Otto was running at the bar was becoming impressive - and convinced the widow of the town's photographer - a first hour fascist that, in his late'30s, volunteered for the Russian expedition; some say, to forget that his wife shagged everything that moved in town, really -  to lend him her husband's camera and black room.

He started taking photos, for a small fee - the bar tab was really huge - to, virtually, anybody.

Even to the partisans that he was supposedly chasing -  there is a photo, with the  three highest ranking members of the CLNAI in the area, standing in front of Town Hall  with their sub-machine guns raised to the sky. Taken by Otto, with his usual off-centre composition.

His last photo, before the squad was ordered back and he disappeared for some years in the bungled mess that was post-war Germany, is one of his Italian colleague - that finally managed to get back from Russia - with his wife - who was not so much of a widow as she thought.

Than, the colleague took a photo of Otto with her, one of a few times in which he was the subject.

Placing the photos side by side, we can appreciate the difference between the husband, a dark-haired and dark-skinned slim man with black eyes, and  Otto - a tall, enormous guy, with blonde hair and grey eyes.

I said disappeared for some years, because around '55 Otto returned to the Town during the summer holidays, and from then on he came back countless time as, he said, in the town he had left a piece of his heart.

Or another piece of himself.

Otto's last photo, in 1982, was a portrait of the son of the not-so-much-a-widow, a tall, huge man with blonde hairs and grey eyes.

After finally retiring, he moved in the town and finally died there, in 1999.

On his tomb, a short phrase

"Veni, Vidi, Vixi"

"I came I Saw I lived"