Given that the broadcast supposedly offered live coverage of a full-scale war—from the initial landings all the way to the Martians’ ultimate victory—in under forty-five minutes, one has to wonder just how gullible many Americans are.
But then I remember the millions of Germans who voted for Hitler, most of whom are still insisting they were right.
Tuesday, November 1
Gelnhausen in Hesse is the latest small town to declare itself “free of Jews.” The choice of phrase is interesting as well as repugnant, evoking, as it does, something medical. The Aryan residents of Gelnhausen have ejected more than a group of people—like a medieval town casting out those stricken with plague, they believe they have saved themselves from future infection.
People seem indifferent to this ludicrous cruelty. At work, in town, wherever I go, I never hear anyone speak against it. I know most people prefer to keep their heads down, and I know that minority groups, religious and racial, have always made for convenient scapegoats. There’s usually some small grain of truth in the accusations, and it’s true that the Jews, for historical reasons, had come to wield a disproportionate influence in German financial and professional circles.
But a disease?
It’s only twenty years since tens of thousands of Jews were fighting in the trenches for the old Germany. I had several Jewish brothers-in-arms, some of whom I discovered were Jews only after long acquaintances. When everyone’s living that close to death, nobody cares very much about ancestry.
But now it seems that nothing matters more. The Nazis are truly obsessive where the Jews are concerned—so much so that it’s hard to believe they’re using them as scapegoats. It isn’t cynicism at work here; it’s unadulterated loathing, a hatred so devoid of reason that only a psychiatrist could hope to unravel it.
Wednesday, November 2
The projected Rhine-Main-Danube Canal was in the news again today, and I remembered the map Walter drew for his homework back in June. Only a few months have passed, but it feels like so much longer.
Thursday, November 3
I visited the Gestapo office after work. I wasn’t expecting any fresh news but felt an obligation to check. Kriminalsekretär Appel was as considerate as could be expected, reminding me almost apologetically that no release date is set for those imprisoned as enemies of the state. I came away wondering what the man is doing in the Gestapo, but as Jakob later reminded me, the political police have been around much longer than the Nazis, and many men recruited before the change of government are still in their posts.
Saturday, November 5
More executions were announced on the wireless this evening between pieces of classical music. One minute we were listening to a Beethoven piano concerto, the next to a voice that could barely contain its joy in slaughter, then to some playful piece by Mozart. These people are hardly sentient.
Their victims were all convicted of treason, which has always struck me as a fairly strange notion. When I was about Walter’s age, I remember asking my father why one’s country should demand more loyalty than friends, family, or conscience, and seeing the look of surprise on his face when he found he lacked a convincing answer.
There’s no doubt I’m betraying my country, if by country you mean its government. I don’t consider myself a traitor to the German people—quite the contrary. Those who work for the Comintern see themselves as serving humanity as a whole.
There are layers and layers. The Nazis—and any other capitalist regime—would say I betray my country by working for a foreign power. The Comintern would say I’m betraying the international proletariat by allowing my involvement with a single family to distract me from political work.
I would be betraying my conscience if I acted any other way.
Monday, November 7
At lunchtime today, the news went around the canteen that a diplomat had been shot at the German embassy in Paris. The evening news added more detail—the diplomat’s name is Ernst vom Rath, and he’s now fighting for his life in a Paris hospital. More to the point as far as the world is concerned, his assailant, now under French lock and key, is a Polish Jew.
By what might seem an extraordinary coincidence, the editors of our two evening papers used identical words—“an attack by world Jewry on the Third Reich”—to describe the attempted murder, and the exact same phrase—“the heaviest consequences for Germany’s Jews”—to promise retribution.
Hitler—or someone in his circle—has seen an opportunity.
Tuesday, November 8
Several synagogues have been destroyed today, all apparently in Hesse and Hannover. There’s no reason to think that the people of these two provinces have a particular hatred of Jews, so I suspect that the local parties were following Berlin’s orders. Trial balloons, perhaps, to see how far they can go without risking a public backlash. Quite a long way, I should think.
The Polish Jew’s act has been used to justify further restrictions. The Jews are no longer allowed to publish any papers or magazines, and their children are henceforth barred from attending state elementary schools. It’s hard to see how the Nazis could make Jewish life more difficult, but if there is a way, I’m sure they’ll find it.
At the end of the wireless news, Jakob suggested, without a great deal of conviction, that today’s excesses might be enough to satisfy the bastards. I hope he’s right, but I doubt it. Vom Rath remains critically injured in his hospital bed, and if he dies they’ll have a brand-new hook on which to hang their bloodlust.
As if to rub salt in the wound, today the Führer chose to bring up last week’s American broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” According to Hitler, the show offered proof of the “corrupt condition” and “decadent state of affairs” that characterizes the Western democracies.
Wednesday, November 9
The press is attributing yesterday’s destruction of synagogues, homes, and shops in Hesse and Hannover to “the spontaneous rage of the German people.” If so, we Germans are not so angry today, because there haven’t been many new incidents. Perhaps we’re over the worst, at least for a while.
Thursday, November 10
How wrong can you be? The last twenty-fours have been terrible.
I went to bed last night thinking the worst might be over, and was woken an hour or so later by what sounded like a woman’s scream. I got up and went to the window, but all I could see at first was our empty street. And then, over the roofs, I noticed a bank of dark smoke smudging the starless sky and a faint orange glow that lined the horizon. With the window open, I could hear distant shouts from what sounded like several directions.
I got dressed and went downstairs, intent on investigation. Given that I’m a foreign agent, given that I’m needed here in this house, it would have been wiser to stay in bed, and read about it all in the morning paper. Which, of course, is what most of my fellow Germans did. Not Jakob, though—he was already buttoning up his coat when I reached the hall. Armed only with curiosity, we let ourselves out and started walking.
The noise grew louder as we made our way into the center of town, and I didn’t think it was just the narrowing distance. The further we got the surer we were that the town synagogue was the source of much of the din, and in that we weren’t mistaken. When we reached the old building, we found it was being demolished. All the windows had already been smashed, and a brownshirt with a sledgehammer was dementedly swinging it against the heavy doors. All this was lit by the bonfire in front of the building, which other storm troopers kept refueling with stuff they brought out from within. Off to one side, three men whom I took to be Jewish elders were being held under guard by another two brownshirts, and each time a new trove of holy effects was consigned to the flames one of them let out a desperate wail. Until one of the brownshirts jabbed a rifle butt hard in the man’s face.
I remembered what Dariusz Müller had told me, that th
ere were more than four hundred Jews living in Hamm, that the Jewish presence in the town went back to the thirteenth century. Time enough, you’d think, for some mutual understanding.
Considering the hour, quite a crowd had gathered—a hundred or more, some of them children. Examining the faces in the bonfire glow, I saw few looks of disgust and many of grim satisfaction. Each time a brownshirt brought out more books or scrolls for the flames most of the children and some adults wildly clapped. “Burn the whole place down!” one woman shouted, but I could see why they wouldn’t—the adjoining buildings were much too close.
Jakob noticed more activity further up the street, and we went to see what was happening there. As we approached a man came literally flying out of a doorway, swiftly followed by what looked like his wife and children and rather more slowly by two grinning brownshirts. From inside came the sounds of a home—a life—being ripped to shreds.
Our instinctive move toward the man’s prone figure was not to the brownshirts’ liking. “You two—get lost!” one of them said.
We stopped but stood our ground and might have been in trouble if an open lorry hadn’t driven up a few seconds later. The driver and his companion were both wearing black, and so were the two who got down from the already crowded back. They pulled the man to his feet; half dragged, half carried him to their vehicle; and bundled him over the tailgate. The woman’s wail was cut short by another rifle butt, and the children threw themselves across her body like a human shield.
“What can we do?” Jakob said, his tone of resignation an answer in itself.
Two choices, I thought. We could do nothing, or we could get ourselves arrested. There was shock and sympathy on the faces of quite a few onlookers, but the most opposition anyone offered was a woman shouting, “What have they done to you?” and a man muttering, “Fucking bullies.”
The two of us walked home, hearing cries in the distance, watching the sky turn slowly redder as fires blazed and multiplied. And shutting our door behind us, far from shutting it out, merely gave free rein to our shame and sense of impotence.
I slept badly and was awake an hour ahead of my usual time. Taking the opportunity, I went for a walk in the gathering light, retracing our steps from last night. The synagogue was a ruin, two of the outer walls leaning drunkenly inward, like paralyzed supplicants. Charred fragments of holy scrolls were visible in the smoldering bonfire embers.
I bought a morning paper—as I’d suspected, vom Rath died yesterday.
Walking on I saw several homes badly damaged by fire but no sign of former occupants. The two Jewish shops I knew about were both burnt out, shards from their large front windows littering the pavement. Scavengers in school uniforms were sifting through the embers.
I saw no Jews, alive or dead.
Almost everyone I did see looked stunned, but I talked only to those who also looked saddened. I was sometimes mistaken—as one woman put it, “If they murder our diplomats, what do they expect?”—but usually correct. From one person after another, I got the sense that their deepest fears had come true. What they had long suspected, but hadn’t allowed themselves to believe, was staring them full in the face.
Back home, our breakfast table seemed as punch-drunk as the town. Walter was eager for information, and although I saw no reason to hold anything back, I also warned him that today would not be a day for speaking one’s mind—that feelings would be running high, that people would be keener than usual to emphasize their loyalty.
Work was much the same, a collective sigh and shake of the head. There were exceptions—on one side some with self-satisfied smirks, on the other a few having obvious trouble repressing their anger. Could this be the end of Germany’s infatuation with the Nazis and their lunatic leader? Probably not, but I suspect quite a few are telling themselves that enough is enough.
This evening’s papers are sparse on details, but the list of towns and cities in which the people have expressed their “spontaneous rage” is quite exhaustive. The river of hatred has finally burst its banks, and where we go from here is anyone’s guess. If nothing else, this exhibition of barbarism is a gauntlet thrown at the feet of the bourgeois democracies, but if Évian was anything to go by, it’s not one they’ll want to pick up.
Saturday, November 12
Like a drunk with a truly awful hangover, the country is slowly coming to terms with what it saw of itself in the mirror three long nights ago. Denial is one popular cure, anger another. The regime’s press and wireless are still immersed in self-congratulation.
Thousands of Jews have been arrested and taken away, presumably to camps. Four perished here in Hamm, which probably means that hundreds died across the country. Those left free are mostly clinging together for safety, although it must be said that some have been taken in by goyish friends and neighbors. I imagine the queues for exit visas are longer than ever.
All I know of the foreign reaction is what the regime tells us, which isn’t very much. Mussolini has apparently been inspired to start his own anti-Jewish crusade. He must have been swayed by the sadistic violence that made up so much of the newsreel footage.
Göring, meanwhile, has been talking up Madagascar as a future home for Europe’s Jews. His atlas must have fallen open at that particular page, because I can’t think of any other reason for choosing a French-owned tropical island as a possible home for the people of Mendelssohn, Einstein, and Marx.
More chilling, for those with the slightest regard for truth or justice, is the regime’s announcement that the Jews should pay for the damage done by its own murderous rampage, with each individual or family obliged to surrender a fifth of all assets.
Monday, November 14
The next Working Group was scheduled for Wednesday, but Müller and Wosz brought it forward a couple of days, and once the meeting was underway, I understood why. The “Night of Broken Glass”—as some callous wit in Berlin has dubbed last week’s assault on the Jews—might have persuaded most Germans to push their heads even farther into the sand, but it seems to have had the opposite effect on those who already despised the regime. The sort of resistance that everyone thought both futile and reckless is suddenly back on the table.
Müller and Wosz had obviously thought things through. For the first fifteen minutes, they let everyone else pour out their feelings—how appalled and ashamed each person felt, how sitting back and doing nothing was no longer an option he or she could live with. I was one of the few to counsel caution, mostly because I didn’t want people to go too far in front of Paul Giesemann. He, of course, was the one most angered, the one who could hardly wait to take the bastards on.
Müller then calmed things down. He said he could see that most of those present were keen to step things up and that he and Wosz had been thinking about how we could do that. But as everyone there knew, there would be risks involved, and he understood why some would be unwilling to take them. Those comrades should feel free to opt out and not attend the next meeting, which would take place on November 30. In the meantime, those who opted in should set down ideas of their own for the group to discuss.
I walked home feeling both intrigued and apprehensive, and as I write I’m aware that one ear is cocked for a car in the street or a knock on the outside door. Müller and Wosz didn’t cross the line into illegality, but they more or less announced their intention of doing so, and if I am right about Giesemann, the Gestapo may be picking us up one by one. But I doubt it. Everything I know about the Gestapo—and all the other similar organizations I’ve had the misfortune to deal with—tells me that they’ll wait, let plots unfold and damning evidence gather, before they tighten their net. My late uncle Berndt once told me that expectation always satisfies more than achievement, and where security police are concerned, I think he might have been right.
So what should I do about Giesemann in the meantime? Share my suspicions with Müller is the obvious answer, but he�
��ll want to know why I suspect the young man, and that will be hard to explain without revealing my previous experience in this sort of situation. I could take a leaf out of the Nazis’ book and denounce him by anonymous letter, but that seems no way to deliver what could well be a death sentence. If Giesemann really is an informer, then he does need to die, or some of us will surely die instead. But if he’s just an impatient young man . . .
I remember when another comrade had to be killed in similar circumstances. It was in Essen in 1923, just before the rising was called off. We all felt bad about it, because we knew he’d done it only to ward off a police threat to arrest his handicapped sister. Or thought we knew. We felt a whole lot worse later on, when we found out the traitor was somebody else.
Wednesday, November 16
When I came home from work this evening, Andreas, Walter, and Erich were sitting around the kitchen table. Erich leapt to his feet and warmly shook my hand—clearly Andreas or Walter had told him that I’ve been doing my best to help out.
Andreas explained that the authorities had been short of places for all the Jews arrested last week, so Erich had been let out three weeks early. “Him and a lot of others,” he added, managing to sound both pleased and disgusted.
The old man did look remarkably happy, though, and Walter’s eyes were as bright as I’d seen them in months. Erich, by contrast, seemed more than a little distracted, and I assumed that he’d only just found out that his mother was in a KZ. He looked thinner than I remembered but also fitter—five months’ hard labor had clearly not beaten him down.
Diary of a Dead Man on Leave Page 24
