I found $40,000 in Confederate bills in the attic of the house where I grew up in Atlanta. And stacks of letters stamped with swastikas.

I read the letters, and after a long search I found their owner, just before he died. How they got there is pretty amazing.

Long story, but it starts with Marguerite Pressly Kratina, who was born in Augusta, GA in 1890 to a country lawyer named Charles Pressly, who was childhood friends with Woodrow Wilson.

Marguerite was the previous owner of the house.

Her story is really instructive for Americans today, I think.

Marguerite seems to have been kind and generous with friends, a supportive spouse and loving mother.

But she was a racist anti-Semite who seems to have embraced Hitler's tyranny until it threatened her own family.

Marguerite moved to Dresden in 1926 with her new husband Rudolf Kratina, a cellist in the extraordinary Dresden State Orchestra.

Known as the "jewel box of Germany" and "the Florence on the Elbe," Dresden was one of Europe's most beautiful cities and a cradle of culture.

Several times a week, Marguerite would write to her parents about life in her new home.

There were games of bridge at the Bellevue, shopping on the Prager Strasse, strolls through the Grand Garden, and plays at the Schauspielhaus.

Life was pretty good.

Of course, it wasn't so good for most in Germany, where the Great Depression had led to widespread unemployment, starvation and misery.

That proved fertile ground for the rise of Hitler, and when the Nazis took power, Marguerite saw it as a welcome change.

"Don't worry," she wrote her father in April, 1933, "we mind our step all right. In fact, we're very enthusiastic over the reforms and the general cleaning up politically and morally. Theater, movies, everything is going to be purged and it was very necessary."

Marguerite could "never attend a reunion of Confederate Vets without tears," and felt the same, she wrote, for "the grey armies of my adopted Vaterland."

Describing Hitler's 1934 visit during "Reich Theater Week," she wrote of the "throngs of people chanting his name, the flags draping the Budgundstrasse, the military men in their handsome frocks, marching to the Das Deutschlandlied...It made me feel like I do when I hear Dixie."

Marguerite (M) came from a devoutly Catholic family, which probably helped her father secure appointment as v consul to France during WWI.

The one letter I found from that period is by M's mother from her hospital bed in Neuilly as bombs rain down on Paris. It's incredible.

She has TB, and she likes Neuilly (just west of Paris) "for its better air and pretty homes," comparing it to "the Hill to Augusta."

But "the battle they have been expecting is on" and "the fall of a bomb is heard about every 15 minutes."

Marguerite, I later learned, loathed Paris and the French and was very vocal about it. She had made things so awkward, in fact, that her father had forbidden her to speak to the press. And as an act of rebellion, she taught herself German.

When Marguerite moved to Dresden, she renounced her American citizenship.

She would later regret this decision.

Having at first welcomed the Nazis' "reforms," her eyes "were suddenly opened."

It was after the Night of the Long Knives, she says, that she had this epiphany.

"And I saw what pretended to be a national reawakening was simply the beginning of a reign of terror."

She writes this just over a year after the massacre while on vacation in Norway.

Only there, away from the censors, can she talk freely, she tells her parents.

"Brutal is what I call their entire outlook. You may think I am rabid, and have changed, but I assure you I was of good faith until last June a year."

Still, Marguerite was content to continue her life in Dresden. And if she disapproved of the Nazis' tactics, she very much agreed with their ideology: Jews, like Blacks in her home town of Augusta, were below her, deserving of disdain.

It was only YEARS later, when the government raised the specter of Catholic persecution, that her "soul was filled with dread."

Even worse, there were rumors that the Hitler Youth might be made compulsory. "I tremble," she wrote her mother...

"To think of having to give [them] my only child."

By '38, Marguerite was desperate for a way out. "But no one will have a foreigner now anywhere at all.

"Do get Papa to find out, if I took back my nationality, if it could help either Rudi or Friedrich if matters become worse?"

Friedrich was 10 years old in 1938. Fearing he'd be press ganged into the Hitler Youth, Marguerite began cutting his meals, hoping recruiters would see his scrawny build and look elsewhere.

I put the letters down for years, but when I was back in Atlanta one Christmas, I started reading again. And it occurred to me that Friedrich could still be alive. Every now and then, I'd google his name. And finally one day I got a hit.