1944

by Jay Winik

  The Schulte household was run by a staff of servants, including a cook; a butler; a gardener for the sprawling grounds, which needed daily cultivating; a tutor for the children; and a hefty woman who bathed the children and took them on strolls for exercise. At Christmastime, the family feasted on oysters and champagne, and the children rode their toy rocking horse or enthusiastically played with a large collection of sturdy, green-enameled clockwork trains. When not nibbling on raisin cakes in one of the many local coffeehouses, they also vacationed, often, but only in Germany—usually in the Black Forest.

  Schulte’s family was Protestant, and politically conservative, so after World War I his parents voted for the right-wing National People’s Party from 1919 on. Yet in religion and politics the Schultes were neither doctrinaire nor overly ideological; they eschewed excessive religious observance—Schulte himself, even after he had children, did not go to church—and read the Frankfurter Zeitung, one of Germany’s most prominent liberal dailies. And one of Eduard’s closest childhood friends was a Jew, a fact that would shape his views for many years to come; together, the two would hop onto bicycles, explore Düsseldorf, and swap their dreams and stories. Schulte was never an anti-Semite.

  From his earliest years, Eduard was an achiever. He read Robinson Crusoe, thrilled to James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer, and lingered for hours over the large glossy pictures in Theodore Roosevelt’s African safari stories. As he grew older, he was poised for success, standing out as a model student at the elite Düsseldorf municipal Gymnasium: there, he studied Latin and then turned his attention to Greek. He absorbed enough that he was able to read Homer in the original, and could recite passages from the Odyssey by heart. Typical of most Germans of his day, his English was spotty at best. He also showed an inclination toward leadership: rarely boastful, he was able to ingratiate himself with those above him, and to dominate—or inspire—those below him.

  As a boy he fantasized often about what he wanted to do in life, imagining himself deftly negotiating his way out of crises. And he thought about money; ambitious and single-minded, he wanted to be rich. Soon he conquered the musty particulars of the German banking system and showed an impressive talent for the stock market. In the spring of 1913, after earning a degree in stock exchange law, Schulte moved to Berlin, where he became a junior employee of one of Germany’s largest banks. Three years later, he joined the office of supply in the Prussian war ministry; though still young, he was responsible for the production and sale of soap in Germany, a mundane-sounding but significant position. His rise was swift. He married in 1917; had two sons, Wolfgang and Ruprecht; and by the age of thirty had become a general manager at Sunlicht Soap, where he flourished. More than ever, he could rejoice in his good fortune.

  Then failure struck. The economy slowed, inflation was high, and Eduard was laid off. No job prospects captured his interest. The Bavarian civil service offered him a position; he turned it down. The pay was only a small fraction of his salary at Sunlicht, and he had no desire to spend the rest of his working days huddled over stacks of government papers. For a while, little stirred his imagination. He wandered along the streets of Berlin, until one day he bumped into a family friend. On the friend’s advice, Schulte applied to be the general manager of one of Germany’s oldest corporations, the industrial giant Giesche, which was the leading producer of nonferrous metals, particularly zinc. Old, conservative, and distinguished—the official history of the corporation filled three hefty volumes, and its tentacles were seemingly everywhere—Giesche also produced chemicals and dyes; maintained river barges; and owned basalt quarries. With little overstatement, the New York Times called Giesche one of the “oldest industrial undertakings in the world” and one of the “most valuable” in Europe. Schulte’s application was a long shot—he was not quite thirty-five years old—but he wangled a series of interviews, and soon thereafter, he was hired as the head of the corporation.

  At the outset, after World War I, Giesche was deep in debt and unable to finance the modernization of new mines. Through careful management, Schulte was able to secure much-needed loans, and shrewdly, he forged a partnership with the legendary American financier Averell Harriman and Harriman’s Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Giesche had headquarters in Breslau (Wroclaw), where Schulte moved with his family; and also in Poland, in the town of Kattowitz (Katowice).

  Breslau was a bustling city—the largest and most significant in eastern Germany—and it had been one of Germany’s most impressive cultural centers. Now, in the mid-1920s, it teemed with daily newspapers, baroque buildings, open-air concerts in the summer, and ice skating in the winter. There was also a thriving university. Yet for all of its activity, Breslau was not another Munich or Hamburg, nor was it as cosmopolitan as Berlin, London, or Paris. The air was dirty, the streets were narrow, and large factories belched plumes of black smoke into the sky. The surrounding region, once prosperous, was now impoverished compared with a flourishing western Germany. Moreover, as the worldwide economy stalled, many of its residents had a sense of dread.

  For Eduard, however, life couldn’t have been better. His family moved into a spacious ten-room apartment bought by the corporation in a wealthy suburb, in a building that was architecturally the equal to thousands in Paris, London, and Berlin. The home was ideally located: within a few minutes in each direction there was a school for the children, a tennis club where the family played, and a park where they strolled. In the summers, they took excursions to the Giant Mountains. And when Schulte took business trips to Berlin, London, Switzerland, or New York City, a posh hotel suite always awaited him—in New York he stayed at the Waldorf Astoria; in Berlin, at the exclusive Coburg. He made money and invested it wisely. In the great crash of 1929 he lost it, and in 1932 the zinc market collapsed. However, by 1935, Giesche, now intertwined with the Nazi government, was again filling its coffers, and Schulte was once more a rich man.

  He felt right at home with the widespread ethic of German purity, yet he ridiculed the hand kissing and smoking jackets so prevalent among Germany’s gentry. Still, he was both fussy and vain and cared deeply about his appearance. He wore his hair carefully cropped—he did this to hide the fact that he was going bald—and his teeth were crooked, to his great annoyance. He dressed well, bringing back the finest materials from London for tailored suits. Nor did he have the look of someone with a serious disability, despite his amputation. At home he exercised regularly with a punching bag to keep fit. He also relished solitude, and hunting on his country estate.

  His marriage to his wife, Clara, was enduring. The two functioned as a team. In many ways they were opposites, however: he was a practical businessman, with little love for theory; she was an intellectual who loved the life of the mind and had studied at the Sorbonne and in London. Where he was reserved, aloof, a masterpiece of understatement, she was warm and sensitive—she was also prone to depression. Where he avoided the limelight, she frequently made herself the center of attention—at gatherings around the fireplace in her home, she was an engaging raconteur, and she formed a salon in Breslau to discuss current events. But they were alike in at least one regard: he worked hard, often sixteen hours a day, and she kept an equally busy schedule, writing two historical novels.

  A German first, Schulte was intensely patriotic. He was no great admirer of democracy, and he thought that Germany’s defeat in World War I was a debacle. Beyond that, laconic and aloof, he studiously kept his political views to himself; scratch the surface, however, and there were indications that after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Schulte no longer fitted in with Germany. Ironically, he had been skeptical about the overrepresentation of aristocrats in the previous government. Then, as Germany’s economic crisis worsened, as the number of hungry people increased—at one point, over 15 million Germans were on welfare, and in Berlin there was the spectacle of the world’s longest bread line stretching down the Kurfürstendamm—the problem for Schulte was no longer the right or the left. It was the
inexorable growth of the Nazi Party, which had all but eviscerated both sides.

  For Schulte, the alarms were everywhere. Dissension and intrigue now honeycombed the nation. There were the Nazi hooligans parading through the streets; there were the signs that Hitler seemed to be talking first out of one side of his mouth and then out of the other; and there was the casual brute force routinely used against real and imagined political enemies. The trouble with Germany, it was argued, was not simply Jews but deceit, traitors, and foreign conspiracies. One afternoon, a Polish worker was beaten to death by storm troopers in front of the Schulte family’s eyes. It was blind, wanton slaughter. Then came the Night of the Long Knives: in June 1934, Hitler’s henchmen arrested and murdered scores of his presumed political adversaries. Over several days, the Nazi SS and Gestapo—the notorious secret police—systematically eliminated opponents of the regime; a number of the vice chancellor’s closest colleagues were murdered, some eighty-five all told; unthinkably, the vice chancellor himself was placed under house arrest on trumped-up charges while two of his associates were shot. The body of one opponent, a state commissioner, was discovered in a wooded area outside Munich, hacked to pieces, evidently by pickaxes. And the cabinet and the courts had blessed these extrajudicial killings, reversing centuries of German law. Meanwhile, thousands more were rounded up for the sole vice of their political opinions.

  Yet for most Germans, this seemed to be the dawn of a wondrous new era of regeneration and prosperity, of Germany’s long-awaited resurgence and growth. The provocative extremes of poverty and wealth were lessened; and nationally, there was an outpouring of patriotic fervor, as well as an all-out mobilization of resources. Most Germans were ecstatic. They saw the new government as unencumbered by outworn sentiments, outdated strategies, and the ineffectual ways of the old aristocratic regime. It was, they thought, an era destined to last a millennium. Where the old state had been impoverished and ripping open at the seams, the Nazis now began to forge the Germans into a single nation. Foreigners might have mercilessly lampooned Hitler, but like no other politician he knew how to appeal to the Germans’ simmering resentments. And the people cheered.

  But not Schulte. Increasingly exhausted and dispirited, he concluded that the Nazis were little more than “gangsters,” monsters who would “ruin Germany.” But with his disgust came caution—rabid Nazi sympathizers were everywhere. Most of his colleagues at Giesche were enthusiastic about the Nazis; so were the gardener and the charwoman at home; he feared that even his children would eventually be—they were forced to join the Hitler Youth. Still, he knew that if he wasn’t careful with his opinions, the Nazi state would tighten its net around him, and the more he struggled to be free, or to speak out, the more he would become entangled in its mesh. By this stage, not even his closest friends knew what strong emotions ran just beneath the surface.

  Because of such misgivings, his options seemed limited. Some around him argued that it was Hitler who would be co-opted by a benign government, and not vice versa. Others said Hitler was the German counterpart of Franklin Roosevelt, the man who at long last could feel the pulse of the people, genuinely able to inspire the masses, and defend their interests. True, at times the Nazis seemed to be prophets of death as much as of life, and progenitors of medieval terror as much as of progress, but wasn’t all this for the betterment of the state? Schulte thought otherwise, but he held his tongue.

  As time passed, the Nazi Party’s iron hand only tightened its grip. There was no tide of indignation at home that could threaten to swamp the party, no backlash from the center. Hitler plunged ahead. He eliminated unemployment, built superhighways, presided over the Olympic Games, and began to rearm Germany. He cultivated the image of a peacemaker, and in the nation he had a receptive audience. Yet he also harangued the German people rather than consulted them; at times he compelled them rather than persuaded them; and he told them tales rather than the truth. However, the people, seemingly intoxicated by his conquests, blithely followed his lead. These were heady days for the Nazis, a time of apparently high purpose and creativity. Hitler’s diplomacy reunited the Germans, and his armies revolutionized warfare—inventing the famed blitzkrieg and bringing the nations of Europe into the Nazi orbit. Over time, Hitler’s victories would spread the German boot from the Rhineland to Austria, from Czechoslovakia to Poland, and even to Paris.

  For the most part, Schulte remained uneasy about anything that smacked of activism against the regime; it was too dangerous. To be sure, there were times where he might rasp impatiently against the Nazis to his wife, Clara, but to the outside world he had to pretend otherwise. He adapted like a chameleon to the changing world. Still, these were bitter years for him.

  Actually, he had seen Hitler clearly from the beginning. One day in 1933, as the election campaign in Germany approached its climax and swastikas decorated telegraph poles, he was invited to Hermann Göring’s private residence for an extraordinary meeting between the regime itself and representatives of Germany’s banking elite and industrial titans. The Nazis needed money.

  Krupp Steelworks was there; so were the director of United Steel and the head of IG Farben. That Göring hosted this meeting at his famous Präsidentenpalast spoke volumes. Göring had been a flying ace in World War I and was now Hitler’s charismatic public face in the Reichstag, Germany’s lower parliament. Most of the invitees, seated in carefully arranged chairs, beamed in anticipation of what they were about to hear. The Führer kept everyone waiting for fifteen minutes, and then dramatically entered. He shook Schulte’s hand and everyone else’s, and then launched into a stinging diatribe about the urgent need for rearmament, about the evils of liberalism, and about the pitfalls of Bolshevism and social democracy. He would, he said, restore the Wehrmacht to its former glory. He snapped that Germany needed a “new spirit” and a new “political system,” then paused to let the implications sink in. He attacked his partners in the governing coalition—the right-wing German nationalists—who, he insisted, would have to stand aside for the National Socialists; then he darkly hinted that an “armed takeover” of the government might be necessary. As quickly as he had entered, he left the meeting. At that point Göring made a stunning announcement to the men who sat before him: the next elections, in March 1933, would be the “last” for the decade, if not for the century.

  An enthusiastic industrialist, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, having already expressed “the unanimous feeling of the industrialists in support of the Chancellor,” rose to pledge 1 million marks to the regime, while the others promised 2 million more. As for Schulte? He was mute the entire time, doing his best to digest Hitler’s monologue. As he got into his limousine after the meeting, he couldn’t help thinking that Hitler was a “raving lunatic” who was putting Germany, even the world, on the path to ruination. And when, as Göring had promised, the Nazi Party held the last parliamentary vote for a decade, Schulte saw his fears coming true.

  Alienated more than ever, in 1938 Schulte took long absences from Giesche, spending months abroad. On one warm July afternoon, Schulte found himself in London, strolling on Heath Street with Julius Schloss, an old friend and business colleague who had taken the unusual step of emigrating to England. Crowds were milling about in the streets, and the two ambled into Jack Straw’s Castle, a local pub. Schloss had no great love for Hitler, and, quite suddenly, Schulte decided to unburden himself. War was imminent, Schulte said. The annexation of Austria was just the beginning, Czechoslovakia would be next, and then Poland and beyond. Schloss thought otherwise, suggesting that Germany’s generals and bankers would do whatever they could to prevent war. Schulte shook his head; no, Hitler had cowed the opposition, and the German people were pliantly falling in line behind him.

  Might not Germany moderate itself? Schloss wondered.

  No, Schulte said. Hitler had cleverly hidden his “ultimate aims.”

  The two were silent, and then Schulte continued. If he were Jewish, he exclaimed, he would board the n
ext train out of Germany, as quickly as possible. But, he sighed, he was German. His family, and everything else he held dear, was there. And he couldn’t see himself living in New York or Paris or London.

  Then, after temporizing, he insisted that he would stay in Germany until “the bitter end.”

  But after Kristallnacht, after the takeover of Austria—the infamous Anschluss—after the rape of Czechoslovakia and the overrunning of Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, the bitter end seemed bitter indeed. In Berlin, Schulte slowly absorbed these brutal events. By 1940, to him all this was not glory, but Germany bleeding from every pore. And the image of a continent being squeezed in Hitler’s fist was now a ghastly one. Surrounded by fanatical Nazis, he felt marooned, depressed, alienated from his own nation. The brownshirted mobs grew more belligerent by the day, and it seemed that the Führer’s mystique grew more powerful by the hour. Meanwhile, over the years, Schulte had watched with increasing dread the Nazis’ rearmament, the slayings of their critics, the burning of books, the establishment of concentration camps, the screaming taunts of the Nazis’ supporters, and of course the war.