The military government officers wondered who was the better man.

CHAPTER X The Rhineland Campaign, 1944 Military Government In Action

The first appointments were impromptu and usually also impermanent.

One morning in October in Wuerselen, a coal mining town of 16,000 inhabitants northeast of Aachen, while fighting was still going on in the outskirts, a Herr Reuters stepped out of his cellar refuge onto an almost deserted street, just where an American major had stopped his jeep.

Reuters, fifty-eight years old, had worked all his adult life as a cashier at one of the coal mines.

His salary had been too small to support a wife but sufficient for him as a bachelor to cultivate middle class appurtenances, such as a wing collar and a frock coat, without which he never appeared in public, not even on that morning in the wake of battle.

While the major, taking him for a more distinguished citizen than he was, questioned, him about candidates for appointment as Buergermeister, a miner happened along and told the major that Reuters himself would make a good mayor.

The major continued up the street and questioned a few other people who agreed that Reuters was a decent enough fellow; the next day a soldier delivered a document to Reuters' door appointing him mayor of Wuerselen.

The appointment was only the second political experience of his life, but there had been another and it was to be his undoing.

One day in 1937 he had received a notice to pay the Nazi party initiation fee and begin paying his monthly dues.

Afraid of losing his job, he had paid and been a party member ever since, without attending any meetings or benefiting from his membership, as his economic circumstances amply attested.

His term in office under the occupation lasted eighteen days.

On being dismissed he said sadly that he had hoped "to dedicate the last days of my life to the American Herren."

His successor, Herr Jansen, a bookkeeper in the Singer sewing machine factory in Wuerselen, was not a Nazi. He had not joined for two reasons: he had not been asked and his boss had not joined.

He had no discernible political convictions and did not want to be mayor.

The military government officers wondered who was the better man.