Sitting in a Randallstown living room, Rosemarie Claussen, the blond, blue-eyed goddaughter of Adolf Hitler, recalls how Nazis fed her father — a Nazi General, Berlin’s police commander and Hitler’s bodyguard during the 1936 Olympics — a poison pill when he refused to obey Hitler’s orders.
“But they told everyone he had had a heart attack,” she said.
In her speech Saturday during the Repentance, Reconciliation & Restoration conference, Claussen will recount the horrors of the Nazi regime, fleeing Berlin in cattle trains and toiling on a farm as a refugee before realizing God’s power and finally forgiving the Nazis, Russians and herself.
“As a German, [the people] who killed Jewish people, I now want to speak up for them,” she said. “We have kicked the Jewish people and now we must love them.”
When War World II ended, Claussen found herself far from the warm woman and devout Christian she is now.
“I was damaged — full of hate and bitterness,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to come close to people. I had no identity. My mother said please don’t tell anyone that my father was a general. So we lived in Western Germany, and I hated myself.”
This changed when she “found freedom through Jesus’ message,” she says. “We cannot have a relationship with God if we cannot forgive.”
In 1976, Claussen founded the Joshua Mission which hosts seminars and ministers to prisoners and everyday men and women to build relationships between people, churches and nations.
She stays in strangers’ homes when traveling all over the world including Auschwitz, Israel and North Dakota.
Mae Bochau of Randallstown opened her home to Claussen, whom she just met Friday.
“We need to hear Rosemarie’s story and unite Christians and Jewish people,” Bochau said.
Claussen says in this age we need gatherings like this weekend’s because “we need to come together, Jews and Christians.”
“Everybody is looking for a solution and the church is without an answer.”
If Christians could remember their shared roots with Jews and not be concerned about who is right or wrong, or where the other group worships, the two religions could reconcile, Claussen added.
IF YOU GO
Repentance, Reconciliation & Restoration
The Gathering Pace: 6120 Day Long Lane, Columbia
Friday: 7 p.m;
Saturday: 9:30 a.m., 1 p.m. and 7 p.m.
Ellicott Mills Middle School: 4445 Montgomery Road, Ellicott City
Sunday: 10 a.m.
Cost: Free, donations accepted
Info.: 410-313-9660, ext. 202; [email protected]
