The majority of people in the West do not believe in past lives, but I do because I can remember one.

It started at a young age, when kids on the playground played Transformers and Thundercats, I thought the war was real and the enemy was coming. It was a heavy, oppressive feeling that no kid my age should have gone through. My first fireworks show was a nightmare as my parents threw a hand over my mouth and l screamed bloody murder, while they looked on helpless. Thunder absolutely paralyzed me and I hid under the blankets until it was over, fearful for my life.

In high school we learned about Nazi Germany and I became fascinated. Years later, after the dreams came, I put myself through self-hypnosis sessions to remember. I was a Nazi, the worst of the worst, right? That’s what Americans believed. The ultimate enemy in everyone’s eyes. Except I wasn’t really.

I’ve shed many tears since then and my heart has been heavy with grief over events that transpired 60-80 years ago. It’s hard to let go, especially when your hopes and dreams were an utter failure that came crashing down around you, quite literally. The irony is that you believe death is an escape, but it really isn’t. That shit will follow you and haunt you until you can somehow put it behind you and heal.

My name was Johannes, I grew up in the Rheinland. I went to war at 18 after I finished school. This was WW1 we are talking about and it was an utter shit-show. I didn’t get memories of this until much later, around the centennial, for whatever reason. Most of all I remember the mud. That’s one thing I hated when I was stationed in Iraq too. The fucking mud. I was injured and received an Iron Cross. This time around I got an ARCOM. The sound of incoming rockets hitting our base reminded me so much of then. The outgoing artillery too that rocked the walls of our trailers and the explosions. I don’t know why I gravitate to war so much.

I have dreams weekly just about. I remember so many small little mundane details. Like the color of my uniform. My face at 20 years old. I had blue eyes and freckles. My lips were full and plump and my hair was dark and tight up on my head in the military style. The shape of a snowflake drifting lazily down. My friend dying in my arms. The bullet hole in his guts and the red soaking his dark tunic. The feeling of fucking a woman from behind, holding my child, shooting a soldier in the back as he ran by me and feeling heart wrenchingly terrible about taking a human life.

I joined the Nazi party and the SS early, in 31 and I was in it all the way. I really needed something to follow, something to believe in. Religion was for the old people of the old country. This was the new religion.

I died in 45. I put a barrel in my mouth and a bullet in my skull in the ruins of a building as the Russians closed in on us. I died alone. The instant the bullet went into my head I was outside of my body. I watched it fall and hit the ground in the rubble and dust as a red puddle formed under my head. My beautiful body. I didn’t realize what a treasure life is then. It sounds weird to say, but I lament the loss of my life.

I stood over myself for a while and looked at my fallen form. I don’t remember how long I stayed or if I wandered. I don’t remember a tunnel of light. I was the same, my uniform and pack were dirty. My face streaked with tears and mud. Suddenly I was in some sort of cathedral and the most beautiful giant marble figure stood in front of me. A perfect white statue of a man holding a globe of light. I walked toward that light and cried. It was the light of creation.

I cannot tell this to many people, only a few close friends and family. Reincarnation is hardly believed in the west, but I remember so many things. I found myself, in the records archive. I existed and what I remembered was real.

I carry this burden with me daily. Some days I don’t think about it, but others I do. He wants to be remembered and he is deeply upset and being unable to fulfill his duty. He can’t rest until I can put him to sleep somehow. He stays with me always and has always been there, as long as I can remember. His emotions run deep and hot. They are my emotions too. This life is being taken over by him.

I get sick when I see stuff about Neo Nazis or the alt-right on the news. Most of all I hate being misrepresented and misunderstood by so many people and by history. The view of the German people back then was really cartoonishly evil, but that’s now what we were like. We were people with hopes and dreams and love and hate just like anyone. We were people that wanted a better future. I don’t appreciate all the misappropriation going on now; it angers me deeply.

I’m super liberal now and very against the alt-right. But at the same time I can’t stand it anytime someone brings up Nazi Germany. It makes life difficult for me. I also married a Jewish man who knows everything and I’m the opposite gender, which I fucking hate sometimes. Johannes would be pissed to know that is what awaited him. They actually believed in reincarnation, all of them in his little sect, but he thought he’s be reincarnated as some holy warrior in Germany to carry on the legacy. I dunno, that’s what you get, bud.

I just had to get this off my chest. Someone had to know this deep, dark secret I carry everywhere with me. The funny thing is, we’re everywhere too. Millions of us died in Germany. Everyone is reincarnated from something, from somewhere. When I meet someone who was there, I just know. I look in their eye and I see it, that twinkle. I wonder if that is why there are so many Nazi sympathizers too. You can’t help but to feel overwhelmingly strong feelings about the topic any time it comes up. From the first moment, it’s just unavoidable and inescapable, that feeling of a place and people you one loved so deeply and lost. I believe there are many more too who don’t speak up due to political incorrectness.

It’s incredibly hard balancing these feelings with my ultra-liberal agenda, LBR. I try to take it in stride and live my life to the fullest now. Maybe I’ll write a book one day so Johannes can be heard in the pages of history and I can finally get my peace.

I’m open to questions, but please be kind.