As a pastor, he would call it divine providence. Others — OK, readers of this newspaper — might call it beshert.
But semantics aside, the Rev. Douglas K. Huneke believes only circumstances out of the ordinary led to the upcoming screening in the Mill Valley Film Festival of a German-made documentary he consulted on and appears in.
The chain of events started when Huneke delivered a talk in June at The Redwoods retirement community in Mill Valley. His topic was Nazi-era rescuers and their role in the Holocaust.
Huneke, the spiritual leader of Tiburon’s Westminster Presbyterian Church, wrote a 1985 book called “The Moses of Rovno,” about a German Righteous Gentile, Hermann Graebe, who later moved to San Francisco. In his talk, Huneke mentioned that a movie about Graebe had just been completed and would be aired on German television in the fall.
It just so happened that the new program director at The Redwoods also was an independent film producer. She happened to be a judge in the documentary category for the Mill Valley Film Festival, and she asked him if it would be possible to obtain a copy. After viewing it, she recommended it to the jury.
The film, “Not Wanted in Germany,” will be shown on Sunday, Oct. 8.
The documentary has not yet aired in Germany. Even Huneke, himself, hasn’t seen the film, only snippets of it.
But he is intimate with the subject matter, as Graebe, who died in 1986, was his close friend and Huneke became his biographer.
Graebe joined the Nazi Party in 1931. After Germany invaded Russia in World War II, he was sent to Ukraine, where he worked for the German railroad industry.
While there, he witnessed the SS Mobile Killing Units, and opened illegal building sites to employ Jews. In 1944, he managed to shepherd more than 100 Jews to safety, living in trains for two months and accompanying the Jews to the Belgian border. He tried to save hundreds of others, but he could not.
After the war, he became the only German to testify against the SS-Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine. That made him a pariah in Germany, and he immigrated with his family to the United States.
Later, Graebe collaborated with the U.S. Army administration in gathering evidence for the Nuremberg Trials. He returned to Germany to testify, which further labeled him as a traitor in his homeland. After that, he never went back.
In 1965, Yad Vashem in Israel recognized Graebe as a Righteous Gentile. Then, a few months later, an article in Der Spiegel, the German weekly magazine, called Graebe a liar and untrustworthy.
While Graebe’s efforts have never officially been recognized in Germany, his hometown of Solingen has put up a memorial plaque honoring his courage. And it was because of a high school teacher there, who became so taken with Graebe’s story, that film producer Dietrich Schubert heard about Graebe and decided to make the movie.
Schubert wanted to “get the people of Germany to redeem themselves for the foul way they treated him,” said Huneke.
Now, to coincide with the airing of the film on German television next month, the German version of Huneke’s book will be published, as well as a paperback version in English.
“What this does is put before the German people a very powerful, humane human being who is the opposite of what the Reich was all about,” said Huneke. “This reminds those who were good-willed and not anti-Semitic that they have role models among their own peers in Germany.”
People like Graebe, said Huneke, “have to be held up as the opposite of those who are professional haters.”