Diary of a Man in Despair
Page 24
39. In 1939, Göring visited Madrid, and while there wanted to confer the newly created German ‘Special Order of the German Eagle’ decoration on Spanish Chief of State Francisco Franco. Franco, however, had not forgotten that the year before, when he had offered a Spanish decoration to Hitler, the latter had refused it.
40. Bruno Brehm was awarded the German National Book Prize in 1939.
41. The Fount of Youth was the Nazi Lebensborn, an SS organisation under the direct supervision of SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, which was assigned the following functions:
(a) To provide support for large families of racially and biologically valuable antecedents.
(b) To provide facilities and care for racially and biologically valuable prospective mothers, under the assumption that these will bring similarly valuable offspring into the world.
(c) To care for such offspring.
(d) To care for the mothers of such offspring.
During the war, the Lebensborn, from a publication of which the above is taken, ran children’s homes in which children from the occupied areas were placed and reared under new names as Germans. The use of SS men as ‘studs’ in the way Reck-Malleczewen describes was widely believed, but has, say German sources, no foundation in fact.
42. On 8 November 1939, a bomb intended for Hitler exploded in Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller, killing eight and wounding sixty people. The Nazi Völkische Beobachter announced that the assassination attempt was the work of the British Intelligence Service and Otto Strasser, disaffected Nazi. It now appears that the attempt was solely the conception of one man, a Georg Elser.
43. Alexander Glaser practised law in Munich. He was shot in 1934.
44. Christian Weber, a veteran Nazi, held a number of Party posts as well as Munich administrative functions. On familiar terms with Hitler, he was one of the typically equivocal luminaries of Nazism.
45. The Führer’s order referred to here has never been found. Probably this was a word-of-mouth directive never committed to paper.
46. From 1938, Fritz Fischer was director of the Bavarian State Operetta Theatre.
47. Adolf Wagner was Nazi Gauleiter of the Oberpfalz region and Greater Munich. Paul Giesler took over his functions following Wagner’s death in 1944.
48. Friedrich Karl Freiherr von Eberstein headed the Munich police from 1936 to 1941.
49. Helmut Oldenbourg was chief of the Nazi Motor Corps for Bavaria. He died in 1957.
50. Julius Streicher published the anti-Semitic Der Stürmer and was Nazi Gauleiter of Franconia. In 1946, he was convicted of crimes against humanity by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, and sentenced to death. Earlier, Streicher’s Party posts had been taken away from him by Hitler, although he retained the title of Gauleiter, and his newspaper.
51. In 1931, Hitler’s niece was found shot in his Munich apartment. It was assumed that she had committed suicide.
52. The invasion of Russia.
53. Count Friedrich von Schulenburg was German Ambassador to Russia from 1934–41.
54. A Reich Office for Ethics in Business never existed in the Nazi governmental apparatus.
55. In the interim between the time the Soviet Army left the Ukraine and the German Army marched in, some western Ukrainians in Lemberg organised a bloody pogrom of their own. A Nazi publication of the time hailed the ‘praise-worthy moves against the Jews’.
56. The Black Corps was a weekly published by the SS. The editor was Gunter d’Alquen.
57. Ernst Niekisch was arrested by the Nazis in 1937. In 1939, he was sentenced to life in prison. He was freed at the end of the war. The newspaper he published (until 1934) was called Widerstand (Resistance).
58. Gerhard Rossbach was a well-known leader of the right-wing semi-official army called the Free Corps after World War I.
59. There is no mention of a Fuchs in the available literature on the Scholl case. Roland Freisler was the president of the People’s Court before which the two young people were tried and sentenced to death, and Freisler also was responsible for the convictions of those involved in the attempted coup of 20 July 1944.
60. Christoph Probst’s mother took the name of Kleeblatt following her second marriage. Young Probst, a medical student, was hanged with the Scholls in 1943.
61. The pun is evident only in the original, which depends upon a play on the word lügt (meaning ‘lies’, in the sense of untruths).
62. Maria Olczewska was a famous German opera star.
63. ‘Grüss Gott!’ (God be praised!) is the old and standard way of greeting in southern Germany and Austria.
64. Count Anton ‘Toni’ von Arco auf Valley shot Bavarian Minister-President Kurt Eisner in 1919. He was imprisoned for a short time in 1933, and then again in 1944, following the 20 July attempt. He died in 1945.
65. Hjalmar Schacht was president of the Reichsbank and from 1934–37 Minister of Economics in the Nazi regime. He was sent to the Flossenbürg concentration camp in 1944, and was later found innocent of charges preferred against him before the International Military Tribunal.
66. Alfred Hugenberg, who was chairman of the German National People’s Party, and for half of 1933 Minister of the Economy, was not arrested in the period of the Third Reich.
67. Karl Scharnagl resigned as mayor of Munich in 1933. He was imprisoned in Dachau for a time in 1944. From 1945–49 he was again Munich’s mayor. He died in 1963.
68. Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria never relinquished his rights to the throne, and was, as a result, considered to be the ‘King of Bavaria’ by many people. He was extremely popular with Bavarians. He died in 1955.
69. The reference is to the 100,000-man Reichswehr allowed to Germany under the Treaty of Versailles. Noncoms in that army were often made officers when the German army was vastly expanded, in defiance of the Treaty, under the Nazi regime.
70. Free Corps (Freikorps): Paramilitary units which ranged over Germany after World War I, generally used to put down leftwing revolts and uprisings.
71. ‘dinaric’, Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed.: ‘A racial type, indicating people inhabiting the coast of the northern Adriatic, characterised by tall stature, a very short head, dark wavy hair and straight or aquiline nose’.
72. The source of this quote is obscure. Reck does not elaborate.