Even if there may not have been broad support for a return to the prewar political system, many Germans did feel a certain nostalgia for the better times the nation enjoyed under the old Kaiser (Emperor). Many times, we sang the popular drinking tune, “Wir wollen unsern Kaiser Wilhelm wieder-haben!” (“We want to see our Emperor Wilhelm back!”) Yet, the more the economic crisis deepened, the more the mainstream political parties lost out to extremist organizations like the Nazi and Communist parties.
Various political parties visited even small communities like ours to pass out leaflets and plaster their campaign posters, but the Nazi Party’s SA was by far the most visible. The Nazis were also the most effective in using party propaganda and the media to spread their nationalist and demagogic message. Fanning popular resentment over the Versailles Treaty, the Great Depression, and the ineffectiveness of Germany’s existing political institutions, their leader, Adolf Hitler, pledged to restore Germany to greatness and face down all its enemies at home and abroad. His promises to lift the nation out of crisis were particularly successful in winning him support among less educated, working class laborers.
Yet, uneasy as many educated Germans felt about the Nazis, their left-wing counterparts, the Communists, appeared even worse. Many viewed the Nazi Party as the strongest alternative to the Communist Party, fearing that the Communists might impose the same repressive political and economic system that existed in the Soviet Union. Even though my family strongly disliked the Nazis as a party, we did favor their opposition to Communism and Versailles and their calls for Germany to restore its economic and military power.
In the election of November 1932, the Nazis actually lost seats in the Reichstag (German parliament), but they did receive more votes than any other party. As a result, after political maneuvering, President Hindenburg named Hitler to be the new chancellor. Few Germans even remotely imagined the future consequences of placing Hitler and the Nazis in charge of Germany.
Upon gaining control of the government, Hitler soon began to mobilize the six million unemployed for projects like the building of the Autobahn (highway) system. From the perspective of an unemployed man without the means to support his family, it was natural to support a government that brought work and good wages.
Furthermore, the Nazis introduced other programs designed to win popular support for the party and its policies. For example, the regime offered workers who joined the government’s official labor union the chance to take discounted vacation cruises abroad, while rewarding highly performing workers with completely free cruises. Because of the program’s success, the government’s union paid for the construction of purpose-built cruise ships like the Wilhelm Gustloff to meet the demand. The Nazis’ program to provide families living in large cities with the opportunity to send their children to specially built camps in the countryside was also highly popular.
On March 16, 1935, Hitler unilaterally scrapped the Treaty of Versailles and ordered Germany’s rearmament. In addition to creating the Luftwaffe (German air force), the Nazi government also commenced the rebuilding of the Wehrmacht, which previously had been limited to 100,000 troops under the Treaty of Versailles. The rising economy and renewal of Germany’s military power helped build popular support for the Nazis and give Germans a growing sense of national confidence.
My family supported these measures and benefited from the greatly improved business climate that permitted us to sell more of our farm products at a better price. Yet, whatever agreement we may have had with specific policies, we still remained opposed to the Nazi Party. Perhaps what most affected our lives was the gradual but continual increase in the dictatorial character of the government as it inexorably transformed Germany into a totalitarian state.
When a fire at the Reichstag in February 1933 was blamed on the Communists, we supported a crackdown against them. Like most Germans, we were pleased that the government seemed to be restoring a sense of social discipline and political order to society. However, Hitler used this incident to claim emergency powers and eliminate all open political opposition. Within a short period of time, the Nazis began issuing more and more orders about what we must do, and imposing more and more restrictions on what we were permitted to do.
Although my parents and my grandfather were not politically inclined, they perhaps possessed a more independent mindset and more questioning attitude than many other Germans. They strongly opposed the huge expansion of government control over our lives and felt a deep sense of mistrust for the regime as well as unease about the future.
Though the Nazis came to power when I was only twelve years old, I began to follow politics very closely and develop my own opinions at this time. It seemed to me that the overall situation in Germany was improving under the Nazis, but I also possessed mixed feelings about Hitler and doubts about where he was leading the country.
In 1934, a guest Lutheran pastor visited our church in Püggen. Sitting in our pew, we were shocked when he began to preach Nazi ideology from the pulpit, his loud voice booming through our little chapel. Pounding on the lectern, his sermon proclaimed that God had blessed Germany by bringing Hitler and the Nazis to us. Claiming that everything that the Nazis were doing was good for Germany, he told us that we must follow them. My family shook our heads in stunned disbelief at the government’s sacrilegious misuse of religion in an attempt to justify its own authority.
NAZI RULE
The sense of political repression may have been more pronounced in the larger cities, but it would be an exaggeration to say that there was a climate of fear in our rural community. Although the Nazis increasingly restricted the freedom to express dissenting views in public, we still openly discussed politics inside our families and among close friends. Still, I grew increasingly cautious about sharing my opinions if I was uncertain of someone else’s political views, even if I knew them fairly well.
It was understood that we risked denunciation to the police or the party if we expressed anti-Nazi views around the wrong people. Once the authorities identified you as holding anti-Nazi sentiments, they would make it difficult for you to keep your job or operate your business. They would isolate you within your community. If you openly opposed the regime and resisted these lesser pressures, you would almost certainly face arrest and imprisonment. Under a dictatorship, intimidation and fear are enough to force most people to keep their mouths shut.
Only a small group of top Nazi leaders dominated government policymaking, but the Nazi Party began to recruit many more people into its ranks as the regime increased its control over German society. Probably half of the new members joined for pragmatic reasons like maintaining their job or gaining advancement, while the other half joined out of ideological conviction. Of course, many people sought membership in the Nazi Party for a combination of reasons.
In our extended family, one of my uncles in the nearby village of Hohendolsleben became a Nazi Party official. He wanted to improve his situation as a farmer, but also believed in the Nazi ideology. My parents were very careful to avoid any discussion of politics when our families spent time together, but strongly disagreed with his views. Their son later volunteered for the SS and was killed at the age of 18 during the first week of fighting in France.
Although the higher echelons of the party included a number of educated people who believed in the Nazi ideology, the Nazis relied primarily on supporters among the less educated working class to fill its ranks. My family and most other farm owners in Püggen found it very difficult to accept the authority of these kinds of people when they became Nazi officials.
After putting on a Nazi uniform, a former hired laborer who was once a nice fellow quietly doing his job would suddenly start acting like a petty tyrant. While exercising great caution in expressing our political opinions around such people, we frequently grumbled about this phenomenon among ourselves. “This son of a gun was shoveling manure, but now he acts like a big shot. You have to watch out for him.”
If a farmer or bu
sinessman applied to the local government for some type of required permit, his request first had to obtain the written approval of the local Nazi Party organization before the government would consider it. If the farmer in question was not a member of the Party or at least friendly to it, Nazi officials would frequently make it difficult to acquire the necessary document. A direct appeal to the Party might resolve the problem, but would leave the citizen indebted and humiliated.
My family never publicly expressed our disapproval of the regime, but our unfavorable attitude was recognized by the local authorities. In response, they would sometimes burden our family with certain undesirable tasks. When one of the newly minted local Nazi Party officials demanded that my grandfather perform some unreasonable order, he simply refused to obey. Believing that he could intimidate this elderly man into submitting to his authority, the party official came to our farm a couple of days later and confronted my grandfather in front of the Altenteil (my grandparents’ home).
Instead of yielding, my grandfather grew angry. Grabbing a shovel, he threatened to chop the man’s head off unless he got off the property and stopped harassing him. If this Nazi had not backed down, I feel certain my grandfather would have tried to kill him. The Nazis rarely tolerated such resistance, but perhaps because of his age my grandfather suffered no punishment for his bold act of defiance.
Some years later on his eightieth birthday, my grandfather received a gift from the local company that purchased our family’s grain. Anticipating that the wooden box contained several bottles of wine, he reacted with disgust when it instead held a framed photograph of Hitler. Of all my family, his view of the Nazis was perhaps the most unrelentingly negative.
Before Hitler came to power, what I least comprehended was the depth of Nazi animosity toward Germany’s Jewish population. Because I viewed a Jewish person as simply being a German of a different religion and had never experienced problems with one, the Nazis’ hostility seemed irrational to me, as it probably did to most Germans.
While there were no Jewish families residing in Püggen, my family had long maintained a friendly commercial relationship with a Jewish businessman from Berlin. Until the mid-1930s, he regularly showed up at our farm with a truck to buy the apples from our orchards. The only other Jewish person I knew about in my youth was a German veteran of the Great War who had been wounded in battle and left with a metal plate in his head.
Beginning in 1933, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Josef Göbbels, unleashed a long and intense media campaign that attempted to dehumanize and vilify the Jewish population. A more educated man than his leader, Göbbels oratory was the equal of Hitler’s and highly effective.
In various ways, he and the Nazis sought to blame the Jews for exploiting Germans who were facing financial hardship in the Great Depression. More generally, they also alleged that the Jews conspired in one way or another to bring about most of Germany’s and the world’s other problems. Because most people tend to believe what they read and hear, the Nazi dictatorship’s monopoly over the media gave it a powerful ability to manipulate German opinion.
The relentless accusations gradually convinced large numbers of Germans to see the Jews as a threat to society. While not personally developing anti-Semitic feelings, I probably did grow more indifferent to what happened to Jewish people. As a result of the Nazi propaganda, many Germans like myself would react with apathy to the increasingly ruthless measures taken against the Jewish population in the years to come.
Chapter 3
PRELUDE TO WAR
1936–1939
ON MARCH 7, 1936, WE LEARNED from the radio that Hitler was ordering the army to march into the German Rhineland, a territory next to France, which the Treaty of Versailles had demilitarized. The commentator told us what Hitler was saying and described the deployment of German troops into the region. While the action only represented a reassertion of full sovereign control over German territory, there was a sense of pride among Germans at what was seen as a rectification of a wrong done to our country. Encountering no foreign resistance, the operation increased Hitler’s public support.
When we went to the cinema in the mid-1930s, we frequently watched the large Nazi Party rallies and parades on the newsreels that ran before the start of the feature film. My parents even encountered a display of Nazi pageantry firsthand when they attended the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin. My family and many others considered these spectacles simply another form of propaganda. Nonetheless, we perhaps naively thought that relations with our foreign neighbors would improve if they witnessed Germany’s renewed national strength.
Most people continued to feel a sense of bitterness toward France and Britain for Germany’s humiliation at Versailles and its isolation from the most civilized and developed group of countries of which Germany was naturally a part. We also felt threatened by what we saw as a barbaric and backward Communist regime in Russia. While Germany’s security justified an increase in the size of its military beyond the restrictive levels permitted under the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler would go further, and ultimately make Germany threatening to its neighbors rather than respected by them.
As the Wehrmacht expanded in size and increased the tempo of its training, we began to see more military activity. On September 21, 1936, the German Army conducted its largest military maneuvers since the Great War, an exercise in which my cousin Heinrich participated. In this operation, trucks were used to transfer a whole division from the Rhine River in the west to the Oder River in eastern Germany in a single night. Heinrich later told me that the division’s shortage of vehicles had required it to confiscate all the civilian trucks it could find in order to pull the mission off.
As a 16-year-old, I was naturally excited by the impressive military display. Standing alone outside in front of our farm, I watched for hours as the long convoy of vehicles hauling infantry and artillery rumbled through our village along the main highway. Even as my desire to experience soldiering firsthand grew, the Nazi regime was leading Germany inexorably into another war.
By this time, too, females were beginning to dominate my thoughts. The year before, I had taken my first train trip alone to visit relatives in Nordhausen, where I met my second cousin, Ruth. Two years later, she made a return visit to our family in Püggen. Our relationship developed into my first romance, though we never did more than exchange a few innocent kisses. As a token of my affection for her, I would leave a chocolate candy on her pillow in the guestroom at night.
After turning sixteen, I asked my parents to pay for weekly dance lessons with a group of other students in Beetzendorf. Since there was almost no opportunity for us to socialize at school, these dance classes were one of the few places that boys my age could meet girls outside our immediate community. Indeed, it was better to see girls who lived elsewhere in order to facilitate the secrecy that surrounded relationships at that time.
While learning to dance the waltz, the polka, and other popular steps, I met a pretty girl named Hilde, who lived in the nearby village of Audorf. Because dating was not socially permissible, we had to keep the relationship concealed from her parents. Although my parents knew that I dated, they trusted me to behave appropriately and never questioned me about whom I was seeing.
Hilde and I arranged each of our three or four meetings like a clandestine operation. About six or seven in the evening, I would ride my bike the eight miles from Püggen to Audorf and meet her secretly at her family’s farm. Hoping her parents would not discover us, we would talk and flirt with each other until about midnight inside their barn. Despite contemporary social conventions that placed kissing out of bounds, we did it anyway. Once, she even invited me into her room in the house, but I declined the offer, fearing there might be real trouble with her family.
Even as we remained alert for her father during the hours in the barn, I also had to keep an eye on my bicycle. Boys from Audorf who were rivals for her attention might try to steal it as punishment for “poaching” a female o
n their territory. Happily, I succeeded in eluding either fate.
About this time, my family welcomed two 17-year-old females from eastern Germany who would assist my mother and spend a year learning to run a farm household. Instead of freely choosing such training as in the past, these girls had been compelled to undergo this instruction. They were only the latest trainees to stay with my family in what was now a steady cycle of involuntary female apprenticeship imposed by the Nazi regime.
Since there were only three or four girls their age in Püggen, our trainees naturally drew the interest of the four or five boys in our community. My parents had given these girls rooms on the second floor of the south side of our house, but the local boys mistakenly thought they were staying on the north side.
On several nights, the boys stood under those windows and whistled, attempting to draw the attention of the girls they believed to be upstairs. Much to their misfortune, Aunt Hedwig’s room was located close to that side and the commotion outside annoyed her. When she had finally had enough, she opened the window and dumped her chamber pot on the unsuspecting boys below. They never returned.
While there was no romantic interest between me and our female trainees, we occasionally kidded around together and played tricks on each other. Having further developed my technical knowledge of electrical equipment by this time, I hatched a rather devious scheme.
One evening as we were eating supper and listening to music on the radio, I excused myself from the table and left the dining room just before the regularly scheduled news program was to begin. In another room I had rigged up a microphone made from a spare radio and wired it into the speakers of my family’s radio. Cutting off the regular broadcast, I switched on the microphone. Mimicking the normal announcer I intoned, “The government has decided that all young women who have been assigned to work on farms will have to serve another six months.”
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