Biography of Marga Dieter
Marga Dieter participated in a panel discussion at UMass Amherst in April 2005,
commemorating the Office of Jewish Affairs' tenth anniversary—"One By One:
Descendants of the Third Reich and the Holocaust in Dialogue"
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Marga Dieter was born in 1939 in Worms, Germany. Her father, a fledgling banker in 1930, lost his job in the economic downturn and became a farm laborer. Not a member of the Nazi Party and without an essential job at home, he would have been drafted into the German army as soon as the Second World War broke out. Instead, he enlisted in the Navy and rose to the rank of Chief Petty Officer. He was captured in 1944 while serving with the Naval Strategic Planning group in Marseille, and was held as a prisoner of war in Arizona and later in England until his release in November 1947. Consequently Dieter met her father for the first time when she was almost nine years old.
The Holocaust was not taught in the schools where Dieter grew up. Even though her parents talked about the events leading up to the war, including Kristallnacht, she only came face to face with being regarded as a perpetrator when she arrived in the United States in 1960. She set out to learn the history of her family, and German history, and this eventually led to the encounter with Zella Brown and other Jewish people seeking dialogue with each other. Listening to each other’s stories, this small group embraced their 2000 years of Jewish German history with its culmination in the Holocaust and attempted to lift the black cloak of shame and hatred.
With a degree in French Literature from Simmons College and a German Gymnasium education, Dieter has been a teacher of French and German in elementary and high schools, colleges, and in corporations that have overseas affiliations.
Dieter recently [2005] finished her first novel, “Collateral Damage: The homefront.”
Photo by Rebecca Reid
