Manfred & Eva in 1985

Eva Krutein, a native of Danzig (now Gdansk), was a music teacher, opera coach, composer (piano and harpsichord), writer, concert and book reviewer. She and her family emigrated from Germany to Chile, and later from there to California. In a trilogy of memoris, Eva bore witness to WWII, revolutionary Chile, and California in the 1960s.

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photos courtesy Wernher Krutein, PhotoVault

Manfed Krutein was born during the closing months of WWI in Konigsberg, then capital of the German state of East Prussia. He grew up in the city of Kiel, the son of a trade school teacher. In 1936 he entered the Navy for an education in Naval Architecture (ship building). He attended the Technical University of Danzig where he met Eva Lehnert. He married Eva in 1942, the year he received his Master's Degree.

With the outbreak of WWII, Manfred was called back to the Navy. He served on a U-boat in the North Atlantic through 1941, when he became director of submarine repair at St. Nazaire on the coast of occupied France. In 1945, as the Allies made their advance, Manfred was flown to Wilhelmshaven, Germany to become Technical Director of the Navy shipyard.

Manfred stayed on in Wilhelmshaven after the war to help dissassemble the shipyard under the direction of the British. He later opened his own civilian shipyard to serve the port area.

The threat of Soviet occupation of Western Europe caused Manfred to sell his shipyard. He had seen enough of war. In 1951 he tried to immigrate to the U.S. but the German quota was closed. He took Eva and their three children to Chile instead. In Chile Manfred switched careers to underseas mining and engineering.

After the appearance of Sputnik in 1960, U.S. immigration laws were made more lenient for scientists and engineers. Manfred applied for and received a visa. He and Eva by then had five children, and the family followed him to California.

In 1970, the CIA approached Manfred to direct a mission to secretly raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean using the newly built research ship Glomar Explorer. He had to pretend to the world and his family that the Glomar Explorer was actually ocean mining for manganese modules. After the successful mission, Manfred continued to work in ocean mining.

Manfred was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma (bone marrow cancer) in 1993. He stormed out of hospice and managed to fight the cancer for nine years.

[compiled from reports in Walden Ponderings, O.S. Space Newsletter (both August, 2002) and information provided by Eva Krutein]