Resistance Women

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “So official,” she joked to hide her rising trepidation, but after a closer look, she gasped. “The Los Angeles Times?”

  “That’s right. I’m covering the rally for them as well as the Judische Nachrichtenblatt. Under a nom de plume.”

  “What if the Gestapo finds out?”

  “Writing for a non-Jewish newspaper is the least offensive crime I plan to commit against the Nazis.” His brow furrowed. “You don’t expect to bring them down without breaking their rules, do you?”

  “No—no, of course not.”

  She steeled herself as they approached the massive parade grounds. They had missed the arrival of Hitler’s motorcade, but throngs of Nazi faithful still milled about excitedly, swastika flags clenched in fists, pins like Dieter’s glinting on lapels, arms snapping out the Hitler salute when acquaintances met, impromptu chorales breaking into the “Horst Wessel Lied.”

  As the crowd pressed upon them, Natan seized Sara’s hand and led her through the crush of people into the stadium, where they joined the press corps, a pocket of watchful stoicism amid the frenzy. As Natan conferred with colleagues, Sara took in the scene. The air was electric with expectation and euphoria, the seats filled with men and women in various Nazi regalia from simple armbands to full uniforms, their rapt gazes fixed upon the parade grounds, where more than 150,000 marchers paraded in precise geometric formations. Boys clad in the uniforms of the Hitler Youth performed on drums and trumpets; girls in the middy blouses and full, dark blue skirts of the Bund Deutscher Mädel sang anthems to the Führer and the Fatherland. Transfixed with foreboding, Sara felt herself shrinking inwardly the more the audience roared approval. She knew the spectacle was designed to inspire Hitler’s worshippers and intimidate everyone else, and she hated to feel its power working upon herself.

  Day by day, the pageant at the parade grounds varied little—marchers, songs, speeches by party dignitaries, displays of reinvigorated military might—but on the evening of September 15, the rally would culminate in the much-anticipated announcement of new party policies.

  Natan managed to claim two places for them in the press box at Congress Hall, modeled after the Colosseum in Rome, with seating for more than fifty thousand. As they awaited the first speaker, Sara quietly debated the possibilities with a few members of the foreign press she had befriended. As their predictions grew more and more dire, they concluded that whatever Hitler and his inner circle had devised would inevitably be worse than anything they had yet imagined.

  Before long, Göring took the stage. After a brief preface, he began to praise the Weimar flag, calling it “the symbol of national glory in the days before the war,” which even afterward had remained “encased in glory.” In the future the Nazis expected the old Imperial flag to be treated with respect, but, he noted, tapping the podium with a forefinger for emphasis, “in the struggles for the regeneration of Germany the swastika has become for us a holy symbol.” For that reason, the current German flag would be retired, superseded by the swastika banner of the National Socialists.

  “Well, why not?” said Natan ironically. “The Nazi Party has become the state and the state is the party.”

  “It’s wrong,” said Sara, indignant. “Germany and the Nazi Party are not one and the same.”

  But even as she spoke, she wondered if that were true anymore.

  Then Göring announced two additional laws, cruel and chilling, his words so unbelievable and wrong that they pinned her in place, trembling, unable to cover her ears or look away.

  The first was the Reich Citizenship Law, which redefined citizenship based upon parentage rather than birthplace. Jews were identified as “not of German blood” and were thereby stripped of their citizenship and all associated civil rights, including the right to vote. Even Jews who had converted to Christianity were bound by the decree.

  Then Göring announced the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.

  “In bygone years, the German people have suffered much from the unpardonable sin of racial impurity,” he shouted, to a thunderous roar of accord from the audience. “German women must be protected against racial contamination.”

  To that end, marriages between Germans and Jews were henceforth forbidden. Marriages made in violation of the law were declared void, and extramarital relations between Germans and “non-Aryans” were prohibited. Marriages conducted abroad with the intention of circumventing the decree would not be recognized in Germany. In order to prevent the defilement of German domestic servants by Jewish employers, Jews could no longer hire German women under the age of forty-five years. Violators were subject to punishments including fines, imprisonment, or, in the most egregious circumstances, hard labor at a concentration camp.

  Sickened, Sara forgot to take notes, her hands clenched around her pad and pencil until her knuckles turned white and her fingers ached. It did not matter. Every provision of the abhorrent new laws was seared into her memory.

  Eventually the rally ended. Sara and Natan collected their luggage from his friend’s home and traveled back to Berlin. Unnerved and shaken, Sara felt as if she had aged a year since she had last sat aboard a train. Only a few days before, she was German, a citizen of the country of her birth. Now, following a rubber-stamp vote in the Reichstag and the stroke of a pen, she was stateless, a woman without a homeland. Or so the law decreed, although she felt no less German than before.

  Reports of the new laws had already been widely published by the time Sara and Natan arrived home, and yet their parents hastened to meet them in the foyer, ashen-faced, seeking verification, hoping in vain that the press had misrepresented the new decrees. Natan confirmed their worst fears and divulged something they had not yet read in the papers: The new laws revoked all exemptions for Jewish veterans of the Great War. The modest protection their father’s past honorable service had provided the Weitz family was no more.

  “I fought for this country,” Sara’s father said, pained and bewildered, sinking heavily into a chair. “I bled for this country. I was willing to give my life for it. How can anyone deny that I am a citizen?”

  As his breathing became labored, Sara and her mother flew to his side, loosened his necktie, and offered soothing reassurances they did not themselves believe. When calm was restored, Sara’s mother ventured that perhaps it would be prudent for them to stay with Amalie in Switzerland until the implications of the new laws became clear.

  One implication was perfectly clear to Sara: She could not marry Dieter now, even if she wanted to with all her heart.

  The next day when Sara returned to school, the atmosphere on campus was tense and expectant, with undercurrents of malevolence and apprehension sweeping through the quadrangles and corridors. Some of her professors excised politics from their lectures so completely that one could almost believe they were unaware of what had taken place. Others wove the rally and the Nuremberg Laws into their lectures, some in outrage, others in jubilation. After one lecture in which a venerable professor praised the Führer and waxed rhapsodic about cleansing the university of the poison of Jewish influence, Sara and several Jewish classmates instinctively drew together as the students streamed from the hall.

  They gathered outside a discreet distance away to share information, ponder rumors, worry aloud about their Jewish friends who had stopped attending classes—“We thought we had lost you too,” one classmate told Sara—and speculate about what their loss of citizenship would mean for their status at the university. Would they be expelled? Would Jews be forbidden to practice the few occupations remaining open to them? Would intermarried couples be required to live apart? Would Jews be forced to emigrate from the country of their birth, the only homeland they knew?

  German Jews no longer had any voice in the political process. Would those who had not been silenced speak for them, or would they look the other way and count their blessings that it was the Jews who suffered and not themselves?

  Sara and her friends had no answers and little ho
pe, only questions, anger, and fear.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  March–May 1936

  Mildred

  Every day, reports describing in assiduous detail the budget priorities of Hitler’s regime crossed Arvid’s desk at the Ministry of Economics. Mildred marveled at the documents he smuggled home to copy and pass on to Alexander Hirschfeld and her own contacts at the American embassy, indisputable evidence that despite Hitler’s protests to the contrary, he was rebuilding the German military. Surely this intelligence would compel other nations of Europe as well as the isolationist United States into action, dowsing the smoldering embers of war before they ignited and scorched the entire continent.

  In the first week of March, Arvid came home from work badly shaken. He drew Mildred away from the door and murmured, “Funds are being dispensed to the Wehrmacht in a way that can only mean Hitler intends to mobilize troops.”

  Mildred felt a cold fist tighten in her chest. “Where?” she mouthed, barely breathing the word. “When?”

  He shrugged and shook his head.

  It was wretched having so little to go on, a handful of facts adding up to a vague, undefined threat. Mildred scanned the newspapers, seeking a careless aside that might inadvertently reveal the truth, but it was like hearing an ominous rumble of thunder, searching the skies for the storm cloud, and finding endless, unbroken blue.

  Then, on March 7, Hitler sent thirty thousand German troops into the Rhineland, the territory between the Rhine River in western Germany and the borders of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and Switzerland. Even though Mildred had expected the army to move, she was still shocked by the egregious violation of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which had banned Germany from establishing any military presence in the region and explicitly stated that the Allies would regard any violation as a threat to world peace. Six years after that, in 1925, Germany had joined France, Britain, and Italy in signing the Locarno Treaties, confirming the border between France and Germany, making permanent the demilitarization of the Rhineland, and declaring that if either France or Germany attacked the other, Britain and Italy would be required to assist the nation under assault.

  A demilitarized Rhineland had been the single greatest bulwark maintaining peace in Europe, and now it was over.

  Mildred waited anxiously to see how the nations of Europe would counter Germany’s aggressive move, but a month passed, and then another, and they did nothing but issue statements of condemnation. She imagined outraged, confounded men debating in council rooms in London, Brussels, and Paris—and when their anger was spent, throwing their hands helplessly into the air and deciding yet again to wait and see. Mildred could almost hear their rationalizations: Hitler had long regarded the imposed demilitarization as shameful and degrading to the German people. Perhaps occupying the Rhineland would satisfy him. Why put their own troops in harm’s way and jeopardize the peace and stability of Europe by provoking Hitler if he wanted no more than what he had already taken?

  “He will always want more,” said Arvid as Mildred lay in his arms in bed one morning in early May, both of them reluctant to get up and face the day. “The Rhineland, the constant adulation of the people, the timid acquiescence of the great leaders of Europe—none of it will ever be enough to fill the void where his soul should be.”

  Mildred imagined a dusty, echoing hollow in Hitler’s chest, empty of all compassion and empathy. Strange that such a cold, dark place should be the source of so much heated rhetoric and fiery hatred for the Jews. How much more would Germany’s Jews be able to endure? Only a few days before, Sara had turned up at the Harnacks’ flat tearful and distressed, having just been informed that Jews would no longer be permitted to sit for doctoral exams.

  “I’ve worked so hard for so many years,” Sara had lamented, choking back tears, “and just when my degree is within reach, it’s snatched away. What am I to do now?”

  Mildred had comforted her young friend as best she could, plying her with Kaffee und Kuchen and offering pragmatic advice—to secure a copy of her transcript, obtain letters of recommendation from favorite professors, create a portfolio of her papers and research, and continue to read and study on her own so she would not lose ground while she arranged to transfer to a university abroad.

  “Ambassador Dodd has influence at the University of Chicago,” said Mildred. “Martha would put in a good word for you with her father. I myself have contacts at the University of Wisconsin—”

  “I can’t leave Germany now,” said Sara, startled out of her tears. Shaking her head, she took a handkerchief from her book bag and wiped her eyes. “You need me.”

  She meant the resistance needed her, but she was clever enough not to say so aloud, not even in the presumed security of the Harnacks’ flat. “We could spare you for the sake of your future,” said Mildred.

  “What future will I have if I don’t do my part to stop my country from hurtling toward its own destruction?” Sara gestured as if indicating the edge of a precipice. “I don’t see you packing up and heading back to America, even though all you have to do is buy a ticket and brandish your American passport, and you’re halfway home.”

  Mildred shrugged noncommittally to hide her chagrin. Arvid alone knew that a month after the German army occupied the Rhineland, she had written to William Ellery Leonard, her former mentor at the University of Wisconsin, to inquire about joining the faculty of the English Department. His reply, regretful and yet oddly sanguine given her circumstances, described state budgets severely tightened due to the Great Depression, staffing cutbacks, and a surplus of unemployed academics. Unlike most scholars competing for scarce positions in academia, Mildred had not earned her doctorate, which put her at a distinct disadvantage. She seemed to have found her niche in Berlin introducing great works of American and British literature to Germans, he wrote condescendingly. Perhaps she should resolve to find greater satisfaction in that.

  “Even for me, leaving wouldn’t be as easy as you might think,” Mildred told Sara. First and foremost, she could not bear to leave Arvid. In Berlin she had a job and a higher purpose in the fledgling resistance. If she returned to America, safer but heartbroken, she would be entirely dependent upon the generosity of her siblings until she found work—if she found work, when millions of others were unemployed and struggling.

  Mildred was grateful for her job at the Abendgymnasium, which remained fulfilling despite the Nazi influence over the curriculum and admissions policies. Although the National Socialists constantly boasted about Germany’s miraculous economic recovery, the economy had improved only slightly under Hitler’s rule. It was true that many men had found decent jobs thanks to public works schemes like the National Labor Service—building roads, digging irrigation ditches for farms, planting trees—but the dramatically improved unemployment statistics Hitler boasted about were illusory. Women, who were not supposed to be working outside the home at all but attending to “Kinder, Kirche, Küche,” were no longer included in the official count of the unemployed. Although Jews had been driven from the workforce in vast numbers, they were not counted either because they were not considered citizens. The reinstatement of the draft had shifted many young men from the unemployment rolls to the military, and other men hired to work in the factories built to turn out equipment for the troops improved the statistics even more. Arvid, uniquely positioned to understand the real state of things, acknowledged that the economy had shown some genuine growth. “But to declare a swift and complete restoration, and to attribute it to Hitler’s financial genius?” He shook his head. “Propaganda, nothing more.”

  Hitler lied with impunity, Mildred thought grimly one evening in early June as she walked to the Abendgymnasium. Why shouldn’t he, when he suffered no ill consequences, when his fanatical admirers disregarded all evidence that contradicted him? She wondered sometimes if the Führer believed his own lies, but she suspected the answer was much simpler, that he was ruthlessly calculating—

  H
er train of thought abruptly broke when, from a block away, she spotted two gleaming black cars parked in front of the Abendgymnasium, swastika banners on the front grilles and fenders. Two SS officers flanked the entrance to the building.

  Ignoring the impulse to flee, she forced herself to approach with her usual smooth, brisk stride. Surprise inspections of schools had become commonplace. She had no reason to believe the Gestapo had come for her.

  She greeted the officers with a demure nod as she passed between them. Inside, the halls buzzed with tension as students and faculty hurried between offices and classrooms, some pausing in alcoves to exchange furtive whispers, glancing nervously over their shoulders and swiftly dispersing. Mildred saw her own apprehension reflected in some faces, but others were lit up with the gleam of zealotry. Just ahead, a familiar burly figure emerged from the throng, an instructor from the History Department she knew to be no friend to the Nazis. “Einhard,” she said, catching hold of his arm, “what’s going on?”

  “The SS received an anonymous report,” he said, looking warily past her to the students racing off to class as if he believed the accuser mingled among them—which, Mildred supposed, could very well be true. “An accusation of seditious teachings. We’re supposed to carry on as usual, but each member of the faculty will be pulled from class at some point and questioned. Those officers by the front door are there to remind us not to leave early.”

  Mildred managed a smile. “How fortunate for me that I have a room on the ground floor, with accommodating windows.”

  Einhard strangled out a laugh. “I might pay you a visit if this goes on too late.” He briefly rested a hand on her shoulder before hurrying off to the stairwell.