Many events, persons, and institutions have contributed importantly to shaping and supporting the author’s Inside the Cold War from Marx to Reagan project. This book and its associated Internet website InsidetheColdWar.org reflect a lifetime of study and policy engagement focused on two core aspects of human history. First is the enduring high-stakes conflict on the one side between faiths and forces of liberty, open dialogue and minds,  and peaceful progress and on the other side those of tyranny and war. Second is the continuing responsibility this conflict imposes on individuals and nations to defend and expand the sphere of human freedom against those that would crush the God-given dignity, rights, spirit, and love that are the marks of each human soul and at the heart of what is best in modern democratic civilization. As during the Cold War, those today armed with violent totalitarian ideologies and weapons of mass terror and destruction are seeking the elimination of those who do not agree with their dogmas of human nature, society, and history. In a world of increasing violence, fear, and confusion, an understanding of ignored historical contexts of ideologies, policy debates, strategies, documents and lessons of the Cold War takes on new urgency.

 

Before turning to the critical support provided in the production of this book by the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC), its president Herman Pirchner, Jr., and other important participants in a multi-year process, it is important to also acknowledge the special role of the author’s father and of others whose vision, work, and courage made a real difference to the author and this project.

 

Dr. Fritz G. A. Kraemer. The author’s father early stimulated a strong interest in questions of history, faith, strategy and the responsibilities to answer the U.S. Constitution’s call “to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Dr. Kraemer’s history includes study of the classics, history and law in Germany, England and Italy; flight from National Socialist Germany in 1933; work in international law at the League of Nations; arrival in America in 1939; becoming an American citizen and soldier fighting with an American infantry division from 1943 to the end of the Second World War; and winning a U.S. battlefield commission in the war to defeat the Nazi ideology and empire. Dr. Kraemer’s history includes finding and liberating his Swedish wife (Sven’s mother, Britta), and his British-born son (Sven, then seven years old) in May 1945. They had been held by German authorities during six difficult years of war that included German mistreatment of the author’s mother, American bombing, and the deaths of close relatives and friends.

 

Dr. Kraemer took part in the U.S. occupation of Germany, supported preparations for the Nuremberg Trial process against Nazi war criminals, and assessed growing Soviet threats. To his son he demonstrated the meaning of war in fire-bombed German cities like Frankfurt and Munich and in discussions with colleagues over the next years on the holocaust, appeasement, examples of principled resistance against Nazi and Soviet terror, and the need for a democratic post-war strategy to counter Soviet aggression. In October 1947, Dr. Kraemer brought his wife, son, and new daughter, Madeleine, to Washington D.C. to gain U.S. citizenship

 

[Book pg. 523]