Paul Marzell

Paul Marzell was born and raised in Philadelphia and currently resides in western Pennsylvania with his wife, Janet and Golden Retriever, Nala. He is a United States Air Force veteran and served in West Germany in the early sixties. He earned BSBA and MBA degrees in operations management and financial analysis from Temple University and Golden Gate University. Heimat is his first novel. He worked in the airline industry for thirty years with Trans World Airlines and USAirways in nonmanagement and management positions.

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HEIMAT

Historical Fiction

Matthias left for the US in 1929 for a better future and left Germany's dismal post-World War One economy and humiliation of defeat behind. He was joined by his friend Josef Turner, who went on a whim. Matthias's plan to return to his Heimat, Neisse, as an example of American success began to change when he, Josef, and other emigrants, Edo and Feliks, saved an American diplomat from the tracks in Berlin's Bahnhof. Their heroic act created a friendship that sustained them through broken promises, misconceptions of the American dream, the Depression, Prohibition, assimilation into American culture, and World War Two.
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Letters from family and others urged him to return to Germany as the Nazi regime improved Germany's economy and raised its national pride. But the war severed contact with his family and sent him and his friends on separate paths. In a shipyard building ships to carry the means of destruction to Germany and their Heimat. Into the US Army to fight in the Pacific. Germany's Wehrmacht invading France and Russia and fighting Americans in the Bulge of the Battle. The OSS and resistance fighters in Poland. And the Nuremberg trials to bring Nazi war criminals to justice.

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