Some Background on Helmut Lessing
At one time I was the webmaster of holdrege.com which was a web home for Holdrege, Nebraska, that I had set up. I added little towns around Holdrege to the website and included information about them. A close neighbor was Atlanta, Nebraska, which is all but defunct now, but during World War II it had a brand spanking new prisoner-of-war camp. It is long gone, but information had been gathered and published about the camp so I had links to that information. The community is largely made up of descendants of Swedes that came to the city at the turn of the century. They planted trees and gardens and built some very beautiful churches on these wind-swept plains. The Camp Atlanta prisoners were mainly German, and they quickly began to adjust to life there. There were many among them that were Lutherans, and after a while they confided in the ministry that since they were prisoners and anyone of any age had been sent to the military, their families were quickly running out of food and clothing.
Now we had a nation sending bombers to kill as many of these people as we can, and we had a compassionate church that was well rooted in Germany. The church members, in particular the Bertrand, Nebraska, Lutheran Church, were notified and they got the addresses of the churches in Germany where these prisoners were from and collected food and blankets. These were shipped to Lutheran Churches in Germany and distributed at the discretion of the churches there. Helmut was a young teenager there at the time and he and his family were lucky enough to get some of these goods.
Mister Lessing, now about 75, contacted me from Frankfurt and asked me to assist him in trying to find some of the people that had sent the goods, or at least their relatives. He wanted to do what he could to help them understand that even 50 years later people were still grateful for what the area people had done for him and many others. He succeeded in contacting a number of people, mostly children of the ones that had sent the aid. During that process we became friends, and Helmut sent me a synopsis that he wrote in 1972 of his life.
He can speak five languages, loves to travel, and has been married to the same fine lady, Gudrun, for over 50 years. Here is a picture of Helmut and Gudrun Lessing in Frankfurt, Germany, with grandchildren:
I have placed the article by Mr. Lessing on a separate page: Lessing Story
