by Jane Thynne
Faith and Beauty
By the same author:
A War of Flowers
The Winter Garden
Black Roses
The Weighing of the Heart
Patrimony
The Shell House
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015
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Copyright © Thynker Ltd, 2015
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
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Hardback ISBN: 978-1-47113-192-9
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-47113-193-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-47113-195-0
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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‘We want girls who believe unreservedly in Germany and the Führer, and will instil that faith into the hearts of their children. Then National Socialism and thus Germany itself will last for ever.’
Dr Jutta Rüdiger, head of the Faith and Beauty Society
‘In the peoples of Germany there has been given to the world a race unmixed by intermarriage with other races, a peculiar people and pure, like no one but themselves.’
Tacitus, Germania
‘Who will ever ask in three or five hundred years’ time, whether a Fräulein Muller or Schulze was unhappy?’
Heinrich Himmler
For John Carey
Contents
Berlin, April 1939
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Berlin, April 1939
It is cold in the dense woods of the Grunewald at seven o’clock on an April morning. Even though Spring has dotted the moss with bluebells and wild daffodils and filled the tops of the pines with nesting birds, the temperature is still enough to goose-pimple the arms and cause the hardiest hiker to shiver. It’s gloomy, too, even in the glades, where the early sun filtering through the boughs gives only a greenish, watery light and leaves most of the tangled ferns and mulch in darkness. The mist hangs low between the closely packed trees, confusing any traveller unwise enough to stray from the path. The mix of wood here – pine, oak and birch – has remained unchanged for thousands of years, and wild boar forage for beech mast in the undergrowth as they have always done. Hunters search for deer and pig along dirt tracks that have been trodden since the Middle Ages. Though the city is only a few miles away to the west, the forest could be the same primaeval place it was in the Ice Age, when melt water first created the lakes surrounding Berlin’s flat sandy plain and the early German tribes emerged from the boggy swamps.
In the Grunewald, history slips by like a leaf falling to the forest floor.
Hedwig Holz squinted down the barrel of the Walther PPK pistol, released the safety lever, cocked the hammer, took aim, shut her eyes tightly, and squeezed.
Nothing happened.
She dropped the pistol with a sigh, aligned it again, keeping two fingers wrapped around the grip and a little finger curled beneath the magazine the way she had been shown, and aimed again. Despite the freezing air, she could feel a trail of sweat running down her brow and a maddening itch from her woollen vest just below her arm that she longed to scratch. What was more, in her hurry to dress that morning she had chosen the tighter of her two skirts and the waistband was now digging in uncomfortably. Yet she had to stop these trivial bodily sensations from distracting her, just as she must ignore the thrushes flitting between their nests in the high pines, the squirrels scrambling among the branches, and the whole awakening Grunewald around her. She must concentrate. Straighten her arm, feel the cold metal of the pistol burn against her palm, find the target and shoot. Even without her glasses, how hard could that be?
She aimed, shut her eyes again and fired, but although the gun worked this time, the shot veered wildly off course, ricocheting around the tranquil woods and provoking a chorus of screeches from the crows overhead. Hedwig flinched, brushed the sweaty trails of hair from her brow with the back of her sleeve and aimed again. The rustling in the trees above had broken her concentration, and her next shot went even wider, sending a flutter of birds up into the sky and provoking muffled laughs from the gaggle of girls behind her.
They had been there for an hour now, a group of twenty young women, all startlingly alike from a distance, with blue eyes, plaits of various shades of gold pinned up on their heads and white smocks with neckties over a navy serge pinafore, ankle socks and clumpy black boots. They made a curious sight as they threaded their way along the woodland path behind their leader – an Amazonian figure called Fräulein von Essen, who wore a leather jerkin and carried a satchel of ammunition and a target which she established a hundred metres away from the firing site. They could expect to be there for another hour at least, Hedwig thought despondently, until Fräulein von Essen was satisfied that every girl among them could shoot a man at a hundred paces.
Shooting was the last activity Hedwig expected when she joined the Faith and Beauty Society. Far from shooting a man, all most girls wanted was to capture one. The Glaube und Schönheit Society was, after all, the Third Reich’s elite finishing school for young women. Its girls were the pearls of the Reich and the plan was to equip them with the poise, polish and talent requi
red to marry into the top ranks of the Nazi hierarchy.
To this end, every weekend, and several evenings in the week, a select group of girls would gather at the Faith and Beauty community house in the picturesque woods outside Neu-Babelsberg to be educated in the finer points of civilization: history, the arts, music, dancing and dinner party conversation. How to discuss Beethoven intelligently and dazzle a man with knowledge of the Franco-Prussian War. How to make tapestries and play chamber music. How to waltz, sketch a head and paint a decent landscape in watercolours. Any old Bride School or Mother Class could teach a girl to cook a herring, the wisdom went, but some German girls should be setting their sights on higher things. That was why Reichsjugendführer Baldur von Schirach, head of all Nazi youth groups, had hit on the idea of a society for the cream of the nation’s young women. Those who passed the selection procedure were the Third Reich’s Vestal Virgins, according to the introductory talk – a comparison that made Hedwig blush profusely when she heard it for the first time.
Every girl applying to the Faith and Beauty Society must be blonde and blue-eyed – the precise colour was measured against an eye chart containing sixty different shades – but there was no actual stipulation that they must also be beautiful, which was fortunate for Hedwig, whose moon-like face was earnest, rather than exquisite, and whose mousy hair could only be called blonde by a vivid stretch of the imagination. She was tall and bosomy, a born worrier with a perpetually anxious air that vanished only when a good-natured smile lit up her face, exposing her wonky teeth.
Hedwig’s appearance was in stark contrast to her only friend in the society, Lotti Franke, a slender beauty with thick, honey-gold hair, a bold gaze and full mouth. Lotti looked like a girl in a Renaissance portrait, with eyes as blue as gas flames and skin like whipped cream. Although Faith and Beauty girls were encouraged to acquire a suntan, Lotti maintained that sunlight caused wrinkles and insisted on coating herself with Nivea and remaining as pale as wax.
Despite their physical differences, the two had been close since they met on the very first day of school, with their satchels on their backs and the traditional cone of sweets in their hands. Frau Mann, the Faith and Beauty principal, never lost a chance to boast that the two girls proved the egalitarian nature of the society. In the Third Reich, elites weren’t just for the rich. The other girls might come from middle-class homes with pianos and maids, but Hedwig and Lotti were unambiguously from the wrong side of the tracks. Hedwig and her five brothers inhabited a cramped apartment in Moabit – four rooms with a cuckoo clock in the parlour, a pervasive aroma of pork fat and a bathroom they shared with another family. Lotti’s family was even poorer than Hedwig’s. It had been a great sacrifice for the Frankes to find the fees, but Lotti was an only child, and generally Lotti got what Lotti wanted. And what she really wanted was a ticket to a better life. To meet all the right people and leave working-class Berlin behind for ever.
Lotti was passionate about fashion, and as part of her Faith and Beauty course she had chosen to study costume design at the nearby Ufa film studios in Babelsberg. She had met any number of film stars – Lilian Harvey, Willy Fritsch, Brigitte Horney and Marika Rökk – and she was full of snippets of celebrity gossip. Which actor was sleeping with someone else’s wife, who had undergone cosmetic surgery, what girl had caught Reichsminister Goebbels’ eye. All the Faith and Beauty girls crowded round her. Lotti was the type who knew secrets, and even though she probably made most of them up, hearing about a film star’s drug habit was infinitely more diverting than a lecture on Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow.
Hedwig braced herself, focused and took aim again. The gun was heavy – half a kilo of iron that had to be aimed with a straightened right arm. Her next shot went even wider, provoking unrestrained shrieks of laughter from her fellow students. Damn pistol shooting. And archery. What on earth was it for? Fräulein von Essen told them archery would reawaken their sense of the mediaeval, but Hedwig had a nine-to-five job as a librarian. She had never had a sense of the mediaeval and didn’t want one now. When would she ever need to handle a bow and arrow? Let alone a gun?
As if reading her thoughts, Fräulein von Essen stared at her, flint-eyed, and signalled, with an infinitesimal incline of the head, that she should try again. Hedwig needn’t think that mere ineptitude would reprieve her from pistol practice. They could stay there all day, as far as Fräulein von Essen was concerned. Didn’t Hedwig remember taking that oath to the Führer about loyalty, sacrifice and achievement?
Hedwig was distracted – that was the problem – and it was Lotti who was distracting her. She had not turned up for pistol practice that morning, nor had Hedwig seen her at their previous community meeting. She was out during the day, of course, but everyone was supposed to congregate at the community house at six for dinner and evening instruction and Lotti had already missed a two-part talk on Mediaeval Tapestries.
Hedwig knew what the problem was, of course. Lotti was in love. When Hedwig asked her who the lucky man was, she had turned secretive, so Hedwig assumed he must be unsuitable. She had no idea who it could be, but Lotti had been making endless outings over recent weeks and refused to tell Hedwig where she had been. God forbid she had eloped. The thought of what that would do to Herr and Frau Franke, who worshipped their clever daughter and had gladly donated their savings for her Faith and Beauty training, made Hedwig wince.
When her next shot veered even further from the target, prompting a further burst of hilarity from the others, Fräulein von Essen put an unexpected stop to Hedwig’s misery by ordering her to give someone else a try, so she moved gratefully to the back of the group, leant against the trunk of a tree and miserably surveyed the dank, mushroomy woods around her.
She knew she was supposed to like the forest. They were constantly sent on hikes with a knapsack and compass, the branches whipping in their face and the undergrowth threatening to trip them up, and besides, true Germans belonged in the woods. They had learnt that in the weekly Race Ancestry lessons; according to the Roman author Tacitus, the German race had originated in the forest before giving birth to the whole of human civilization. The original Germans were blue-eyed with golden hair and vigorous bodies, and life in the forest had made them a tough, warrior race.
But the silence unnerved her. Berlin was a cacophony of noise, yet here were only pigeons rustling and cooing, the occasional sound of a deer crashing through the undergrowth and the sporadic crack of the girls’ guns.
That morning though, the silence had been shattered by a bevy of construction workers who had begun work a few hundred metres away, building an air-raid shelter. Because of the warmongering of the British, the whole of Berlin was digging air-raid shelters now. Wherever you went in town the rattle of drills and clang of spades could be heard in the background, preparing for the day that British bombers appeared in the skies. Everyone was talking about war but Hedwig didn’t believe it for a second. As far as she was concerned, the chances of any actual fighting were as remote as those ancient battles between the rival tribes of Europe that Tacitus wrote about. No foreign country had stood in the Führer’s way before, and there was really no reason to suppose they would now.
On the way back Fräulein von Essen couldn’t resist a dig at Hedwig’s hopeless aim.
‘Back again tomorrow, ladies. And perhaps this time Hedwig Holz will be able to manage just a single shot on target.’
Chapter One
Berlin, in April 1939, was partying like there was no tomorrow.
The Führer was fifty and the whole of Germany was in a frenzy. The 20th itself had been declared a National Holiday and the largest military parade ever held – five hours’ worth of stormtroopers, hurricane troopers, tornado troopers and every other type of trooper – was proceeding along the new East-West axis, the great triumphal boulevard that ran all the way from Unter den Linden to the Olympic stadium. Guns and tanks glittered in the morning air as the boots of fifty thousand soldiers thudded rhythmically into the gro
und. Heinkel bombers, Messerschmitt fighters and Stuka dive bombers performed fly pasts at five-minute intervals, leaving lightning flashes of vapour in the sky. Deputations of the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls had arrived from all over Germany. There were armoured cars, cannons, Howitzers and anti-aircraft guns. And more than a million spectators, most of them carrying black bread sandwiches, bottles of beer and swastika flags.
Clara Vine shuffled her feet and looked down at her glossy Ferragamo leather pumps. They were hand-stitched in Florence, had cost the earth and they hurt like hell.
Why on earth had she not worn comfortable shoes?
She was hungry and thirsty and longing to sit down. She had been there since nine that morning, but had only managed to secure a place three deep opposite the Führer’s saluting podium on the Charlottenburger Chaussee. The view to her right was obscured by a large woman with a squashed felt hat, accompanied by two boys of around six and seven. To begin with Clara had pitied the children, doomed to spend the morning fenced in by a forest of legs, but after hours of their relentless wails, enquiring when exactly the Führer was coming and how much longer would he be, her sympathy was wearing thin. To her left was a war veteran, medals pinned proudly to his chest, saluting frenetically like someone with uncontrollable muscle spasms. He had come all the way from Saxony and he was not the only one. Thousands of visitors had poured into the city. The stations were teeming and every hotel from the Adlon down was block-booked. People who couldn’t afford anywhere else had pitched their tents in the parks.
Like all birthdays, Hitler’s special day had begun with presents, but that was where the ordinariness ended. Vast marble tables had been assembled in the Reich Chancellery to display Meissen porcelain, silver candlesticks and Titian paintings, alongside rather more modest gifts from ordinary people, largely made up of swastika cakes and cushions. The Pope, the King of England and Henry Ford had sent telegrams. The engineer Ferdinand Porsche had presented Hitler with a shiny black convertible VW beetle. Rudolf Hess had acquired a collection of priceless letters written by the Führer’s hero, Frederick the Great, and Albert Speer had given him an entire scale model of the Welthauptstadt, the new world capital, with buildings made out of balsa wood and glass and a thirteen-foot model of the proposed triumphal arch. This was, without doubt, Hitler’s favourite present and he pored over it like a boy with a train set until he could be persuaded to tear himself away.
