The House by the Lake

by Thomas Harding

  This would soon change, however. On 24 October 1929, three weeks after the reading of Otto’s will in the lawyer’s office, the New York Stock Exchange fell by a massive 11 per cent in one day. After years of excessive speculation, the market had received a string of bad news – disappointing corporate results, a worsening agricultural recession, falling consumer purchasing – which had derailed the market confidence. Four days later, on 28 October, the NYSE lost another 13 per cent, and another 12 per cent the following day. This marked the start of a three-year collapse of the NYSE, which resulted in an 89 per cent loss in the market’s overall value by July 1932.

  The Wall Street Crash, as the market rout became known, had profound consequences for the German economy, as well as its politics. When the American banks, which only a few years before had eagerly lent money to the Weimar Republic, now called in their loans, the German debtors were unable to pay. Almost overnight, Germany had lost one of its major sources of investment. German international trade fell to 50 per cent of its level the year before, crop prices fell 60 per cent and the rate of unemployment rose to 14 per cent of the working age population, amounting to some 3.2 million people.

  In the midst of this crisis many turned to the now vocal far-right political groups who blamed the betrayal at Versailles, war profiteers, communists and, most of all, the Jews, for Germany’s economic collapse. One such group was the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), or the Nazi Party. Originally founded as the German Workers Party (DAP) in January 1919, the Munich-based party was one of dozens of volkisch or ‘folk’ organisations – ostensibly far-right groups – now operating in post-war Germany. These groups attracted considerable support by promoting the ideas of national supremacy and ethnic purity, and by extension being anti-Slav and anti-Semitic. In September 1919, when Adolf Hitler had participated in his first DAP meeting, only forty other people had been present. By July 1921, Hitler had taken over as party leader and, within two years, membership had climbed to more than 20,000 people. Since then, the Nazi Party had spread across the country, and was now a significant political force.

  So it was that, in the September 1930 elections, the Nazi Party surprised everyone when it received over six million votes, 18 per cent of the ballot, making Hitler’s party the second largest in the Reichstag. For the first time, anti-Semitism became an ideology upon which it was possible to win elections. The extreme, and up till now minority, views of Robert von Schultz had suddenly become mainstream.

  A few weeks after the 1930 elections, and not long after he took control of the Groß Glienicke Estate, Robert was approached by a senior member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), or Brownshirts – the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party – to see if they could use his Groß Glienicke Estate for training. Though not a member of the party, Robert consented, and soon brown-shirted thugs could be seen taking part in rifle practice, drills and hand-to-hand fighting in the grounds of the estate, a few hundred metres from the Alexanders’ weekend house.

  6

  ALEXANDER

  1930

  IT WAS THE autumn of 1930, and Elsie arrived at her first day of lectures at Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University. She had the grades to study where she liked, but had elected to remain in Berlin, partly because it allowed her to live with her parents, and partly because this was where her father had studied medicine.

  Pushing open the wide double doors, Elsie found herself in an enormous lecture hall. In front of her, long rows of wooden benches descended to a large wooden desk, lectern and blackboard. All she could see were the backs of hundreds of her fellow students’ heads, young Germans who, like herself, were studying medicine. To Elsie, the 7 a.m. lecture was already a hardship given her propensity for sleep. Worse still, with all the seats occupied, Elsie was forced to stand at the back of the hall with the other latecomers, straining to hear the mumbling professor explain the basics of human anatomy.

  Over the next few days, Elsie woke earlier and earlier, hoping to secure a seat. Eventually, she found that the only way to guarantee a spot near the front of the hall was if she got up at six. Now that she was able to actually hear the lecture, she realised that she wasn’t particularly interested. Much of the course involved rote learning – the Latin names of parts of the body, the various elements of the circulatory system, cellular and sub-cellular structures – which was tiresome. Having grown up surrounded by artists and actors, theatre directors and photographers, Elsie discovered that she was keener to study the philosophy of Kant and the novels of Goethe than how to cure syphilis or when to remove an optic nerve.

  Always a curious person, and inspired by the work of the many Jewish correspondents she had either met through her father or whose articles she had read in the newspaper, she now decided to study journalism. Many of the country’s leading newspapers were owned and managed by Jews1, and while the vast majority of their journalists were male, there were some notable exceptions. These were Elsie’s heroines: journalists such as Bella Fromm, for instance, who worked as the diplomatic correspondent for the Ullstein papers, and Elisabeth Castonier, a satirist who wrote for a weekly paper named Die Ente.

  Towards the end of the academic year Elsie approached her supervisor to see if she could switch course. When he told her that she could – it was quite common for students to move from one course to the next, from one university to another – Elsie informed her parents that she no longer wanted to become a doctor, and instead wished to move to Heidelberg to study journalism. Heidelberg was Germany’s oldest university, situated in south-west of the country, an hour’s drive from the French border and a ten-hour train journey from Berlin.

  In the first week of October 1931, Elsie and her family gathered at Anhalter Bahnhof, one of Berlin’s main railway stations and known as the ‘gateway to the south’. While her parents would clearly miss her, the same was probably not true for her sister. Over the past few months, Bella had become preoccupied with her new boyfriend, Harold, a handsome young Englishman, who was in Berlin to study German banking. With her black Olympia Erika typewriter in one hand and a suitcase in another, Elsie boarded the train and waved goodbye to her family.

  Elsie had chosen her university not only for its journalism course, but also because of its liberal reputation, led as it was by professors such as the philosopher Karl Jaspers and the economist Alfred Weber. It was a town noted for the beauty of its landscape, nestled as it was between the Rhine River and the Königstuhl Mountains, as well as for its picturesque town centre, featuring a romantic castle, ancient red stone bridge and a medieval marketplace. It wasn’t Berlin, but she was ready for something different.

  Now nineteen, and living away from home for the first time, Elsie started a diary. It was a simple notebook, bound in black leather, its pages thinly lined in blue. Many of her concerns were typical of a girl her age. She wondered if she had friends and why she felt so lonely despite her parents’ love. She said that her father was a ‘mensch, full of love, kindness, a sense of duty’, and asked why there were ‘so few persons of this quality’. She claimed that he loved her most of all his children, but noted that his melancholia put distance between them. ‘He is also very proud of me, why? Because I’m intelligent? I can’t help that, it is really only that duty calls me to be doing something.’

  In her diary, Elsie documented her growing unease.

  Why then am I here? I didn’t will it at all, now I must abide, ‘live’. And I have such a dread of life. So many individuals live not really as they would like. They eat and sleep and for income they must earn money, labour on. This labour becomes the content of their life, it becomes a circular thing, to eat in order to work, to work in order to eat. I call that existing. And life? Pappi lives, as did Goethe, Mozart, Rilke, Beethoven. Whether they were happy? What does being happy really mean. Am I happy? Have I never been?

  Gradually, Elsie began to adjust to being away from home and adapted to her new life in Heidelberg. In July 1932, nine months after Elsie’s arrival
at the university, Germany held a national election. It was the first time that Elsie was eligible to vote and she was excited by the prospect. Appalled by the Nazi Party, and put off like so many of her class by the radical rhetoric of the Communist Party and its leader Ernst Thälmann, Elsie cast her ballot for the Social Democrats. She was disappointed by the result. For the first time, the Nazi Party won the most seats, with 37 per cent of the vote. In the days that followed, however, neither Adolf Hitler nor any other party was able to attract enough support to form a government.

  With such an unclear result, Paul von Hindenburg – who had remained in office as president since 1925 – declared that another election would need to be held, later that year, on 6 November 1932. While Elsie kept herself busy with studies, all around her fierce political campaigning was taking place. Between 11 October and election day, Adolf Hitler gave more than fifty speeches, sometimes as many as three a day. On 1 November, for instance, he spoke to over 40,000 people in Karlsruhe, a town less than an hour’s drive from Heidelberg. Many of the students from Elsie’s class attended the event.

  On 6 November, Elsie voted again, along with 36 million other German citizens. Despite the Nazi Party share of the vote decreasing to 33 per cent, they were again the leading party and once again unable to attract sufficient support from other parties to form a government. Over that Christmas and into the new year, President Hindenburg worked hard to build a coalition.

  Meanwhile, Elsie’s letter entries remained focused on her family, particularly the news that Bella had become engaged to Harold.

  5 January 1933

  1933: What will it bring? I do not know. But what it will take from me, that I know: my sister. Bella is engaged and is to be wed this summer. Off to London. That means an end not only to her childhood, but to mine. For even if I do marry someone, I am so closely bound to her that I cannot imagine a home without Bella.

  But Bella deserves to be happy. We had a splendid childhood. And this memory she should take with her and think about it whenever clouds appear. And if she is terribly happy, she should consider that the foundation of her good fortune was the sunshine in Glienicke, the childhood at home. And what will I do? I am afraid of this year.

  Elsie kept in touch with her family by telephone and mail, and closely followed political events by reading the newspapers. During the first few weeks of 1933, President Hindenburg continued his efforts to form a government that did not include Hitler. It soon became clear that his attempts were in vain, however, for no stable coalition could be formed without including the Nazi Party.

  Over the next few days the vice chancellor Franz von Papen and Hitler engaged in a series of tough negotiations to resolve who would head the next government. It was now that the founder of the Stahlhelm, Franz Seldte, agreed not only to support the Nazi Party, but also that his troops would be folded into the Sturmabteilung (SA). With the hundreds of thousands of Stahlhelm members now behind the Nazi Party, Papen encouraged Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor. As part of the deal, Seldte would join the cabinet as minister for labour. After further consideration, Hindenburg concluded that he had no choice and, on 30 January 1933, reluctantly appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor.

  In the days following his appointment, and unhappy with leading a minority government, Hitler called for yet another round of national elections, this time on 5 March. Nazi paramilitary groups launched a series of violent attacks on the other parties. Newspapers that were critical of the government were raided and closed down. Brownshirts broke up meetings of the Social Democrats and the Catholic Centre Party, beating up their speakers and members of the audience. The leader of the Communist Party, Ernst Thälmann, was arrested and placed in jail, accused of fomenting the violent overthrow of the government.

  Dismayed and infuriated by the Nazi Party’s growing power, and hoping to gain an audience for her views, Elsie submitted articles and opinion columns to the Berlin newspapers in early February 1933. These pieces were only obliquely critical of the regime, for Elsie worried that she would attract too much attention to herself. To her surprise, some of her articles were published, including one about the Winterhilfswerk, a Nazi Party charity that encouraged people to eat less meat and the money saved would be donated to the poor during winter. In her article, Elsie called the campaign hypocritical, pointing out that most affluent people were able to give money while continuing to eat fine food.

  Elsie’s burgeoning career soon came to a rapid end, however. On 27 February 1933, a fire erupted at the Reichstag. The police were called and found a young Dutch communist by the name of Marinus van der Lubbe at the scene of the crime. Van der Lubbe admitted starting the fire and was arrested. Within a few hours, Adolf Hitler contacted President Hindenburg, encouraging him to suspend civil liberties and so protect Germany from the Communist Party. Though the true identity of the arsonists was hotly contested then, and has been ever since, the following day, on 28 February, the president signed the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending civil liberties, including habeas corpus, the right of free association, the secrecy of the post and freedom of the press. Elsie’s future profession had been curtailed before she had even graduated. Germany was now being governed as a dictatorship.

  The 5 March election was held only six days after the Reichstag fire. In the preceding days, more than four thousand communists were arrested and placed in jail, considerably suppressing the anti-Nazi vote. On election day itself, over 50,000 ‘monitors’, belonging to the SA, stood guard at polling stations, intimidating those who were about to vote. When the votes were counted, the Nazi Party had raised their share from 33 to 44 per cent, with over 17 million Germans now voting for the Nazi Party. Quickly gaining the support of the German Nationalist People’s Party (DNVP), who had won 8 per cent of the vote, Adolf Hitler now commanded a majority.

  Hoping to unite the country and demonstrate a link between the Nazis and their imperial antecedents, Hitler declared that a mass rally would be held in Potsdam on 21 March. He understood that even though the Kaiser had been forced out of power fifteen years earlier, a large proportion of the population held the royal family, and the traditions they stood for, in high regard. Indeed, many longed for the stability and military power epitomised by the emperor. Potsdam was Prussia’s capital, and was considered by many to be the spiritual centre of the German Empire.

  The so-called ‘Day of Potsdam’ was covered in great detail by both German and foreign correspondents. When Hitler arrived that morning in his open-air car, the city was decorated with thousands of banners, both the swastika-emblazoned flag of the Nazi Party, as well as the black, white and red tricolour of imperial Germany. Tens of thousands of citizens lined the streets twenty-deep to see the new chancellor drive slowly by, followed by vast columns of SA and Stahlhelm troops, marching in perfect unison.

  Later that day, Hitler visited the former Crown Prince Wilhelm – the deposed Kaiser’s son – at Cecilienhof, the royal family’s home in Potsdam. With his father still exiled in the Netherlands, Wilhelm was the most senior member of the royal family remaining in Germany. Already a member of the Stahlhelm and a supporter of the Nazi Party, through this meeting the prince declared his public endorsement of Hitler and his party, thus merging the royalist and Nazi Party causes.

  Finally, in a carefully choreographed moment2, Hitler and Hindenburg met in the street, surrounded by cheering crowds. The chancellor wearing a dark conservative suit, the president, his full military attire, including a pike helmet and a jacket bedecked with medals, they shook hands; Hitler’s hands were bare, Hindenburg’s gloved. Their palms still gripped, Hitler gave a slight bow, appearing to humble himself before Germany’s president. It was a highly symbolic day, an effort by the chancellor to wrap himself in Germany’s Prussian and military past.

  Two days later, parliament met at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, where the legislature had re-established itself since the Reichstag fire, and passed the ‘Enabling Act’, effectively giving the chancellor
the power to pass laws without consulting parliament. Hitler had assumed absolute control of the political process.

  On 1 April, less than two weeks after the Day of Potsdam, Elsie was back in Berlin for the Easter holidays. With the Jewish festival of Passover due to begin a few days later, she had hoped for a period of peace and enjoyment at the family’s apartment on the Kaiserallee.

  On the radio, the Alexanders heard Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, calling for a national boycott of Jewish businesses. Not knowing what to expect, they had remained at the apartment. Early that morning, the family became aware of a commotion outside their building. They saw a small group of people gathering on the pavement, next to the bronze sign that announced that this was where Dr Alexander had his consultancy rooms. It had been easy to find him. The general telephone book listed the details, as did the Jewish telephone directory, which not only gave Alfred’s street address, but announced at the front of the book that he was head of the Berlin Chamber of Physicians.