I was overseas when this was first posted, but I want to chime in now with my Krammer remembrances. I was not a history major, but a German major, and I think that's how I got into his history of Nazi Germany class at A&M when it was all booked up, because there is a requirement for German majors to take German history. We had a great class, he was always super sharp. A couple of things I recall:
1. His father fought in the Austro-Hungarian Army in WWI, and he used to quote an old Hungarian proverb: "When an old man dies, it's like a library burning down." It was never more true than in his own case.
2. I had read Shirer's Rise and Fall of the 3rd Reich before going in, so I knew the material better than most students, so I was kind of that annoying nerd who always answers everything. But I STILL learned so much more in that class.
3. Someone in our class had a father who had been a doctor who had operated on the guy who captured Hermann Goering, and when that guy passed away, he gave him Goering's pistol (I believe it was a Walther). The guy had it all documented. He brought it to class and passed it around the table. Everybody got to hold it. This was 1993. Administrators would go ape **** over that today. But it was perfectly harmless and he carried it around in a cardboard box.
4. I really got to know Krammer when I went on an exchange program at the German University of Tuebingen, which has student and professor exchange programs with A&M. I had been there one semester already when I saw Dr. Krammer walking (shuffling in eccentric old man style) down the street. I stopped him and he recognized me and said my name. Turns out he had just arrived for a semester teaching at the university. I immediately signed up for his class, which was on the history of German-American relations. It was taught in German. His German was not as good as mine (I was very good in those days), but is more like what I speak now, which I called "rusty fluent." That class was fun.
5. When I became a journalist after college (that was my second major), I ended up working near Alvin, Texas, and I wrote to him and borrowed some of his notes on the German POW camp in Alvin, which he mailed to me. I used them in a feature story in my paper. Sadly, the notes were lost in the mail on the return trip, something I've been kicking myself over for years, but he forgave me.
I had some great profs at A&M, but he was very likely the best.
