By Diane Petryk
MIFFLINBURG — “I tried so hard.”
Bitter tears put a tremble in Kathleen Hause’s voice when she tells how she worked for three years to get her husband his Purple Heart before he died.
She failed. But promises she hears now indicate it was the bureaucracy that failed her — and Alfred S. Hause. He died Aug. 11 without getting the medal that became his last desire in life. Just 10 days before he died, at 89, he recalled being blase about his younger days and forgetting about it after becoming busy with other things after World War II, including becoming director of veterans affairs in Union County, but later he began to think the Purple Heart was the one thing he was missing.
Hause, of Mifflinburg, enlisted in the Army the day after Pearl Harbor, was captured in North Africa and was held prisoner for 26 months at the German’s Stalag 8B. There, with his fluent German, he helped other American boys stay alive by translating impatient guards’ demands. But, one day, one of those guards hit Hause over the head with a shovel. His injury was so severe he later had to have surgery to repair his skull.
The Purple Heart is awarded to soldiers who are injured at the hands of the enemy.
Army regulations say being awarded the medal requires a witness to the enemy attack or an affidavit supported by statements of witnesses. This was the sticking point for Hause: apparent lack of documentation.
The Germans kept no records of medical treatment given prisoners, and Hause’s surgery was done stateside.
But after The Daily Item published an article on Hause’s predicament Aug. 1, retired Army Lt. Col. Robert Boehnlein, of Lewisburg, stepped up to help. He once was administrator in charge of awards for the Army.
Boehnlein was making progress, getting the vital records he would need, when time ran out for Alfred Hause. But he hasn’t given up.
With the permission Hause gave him before he died, Boehnlein obtained records — a two-inch high sheaf of them — from the Lebanon VA Medical Center. “Numerous entries show how poorly he was treated by the German guards while he was held in captivity,” Boehnlein said.
In those records, in Hause’s own handwriting, were found notes about how his nose was broken twice by the guards. Hause wrote: “On May 3, my birthday, I got my first beating, which broke my nose on the left side. A few weeks later, I got hit across the nose again with a rifle butt.”
Mrs. Hause said: “He wrote how he was once stripped naked, thrown out in sub-zero weather and water thrown on him.” They would make him stand outside that way for an hour. “That in itself ... I don't understand,” she said.
Boehnlein said: “I have provided a privacy statement that Kathleen has signed which I’ve forwarded to the Department of the Army giving me further permissions to continue this effort. I have since provided excerpts of the medical records which outline his mistreatment, torture, assault with a deadly weapon, confinement to railroad boxcars (in the heat of North Africa) with no food or water and a denial of medical attention.”
On Monday, he called the Army to press for a decision or guidance on what else he needs to provide.
He also is asking the National Archives for records of Hause’s repatriation physical, which would have taken place in France shortly after the end of the war.
In dying, Hause suffered a lot, too, his widow said. “But you never heard him say he was hurting. He never got his appetite back after being starved. He could never cry after that.
“I watched him for five nights, fading a little more, a little more. I was just hoping he’d get that damn Purple Heart.”
