In Europe

by Geert Mak

  On 31 July, 1932, national elections were held for the Reichstag. The NSDAP again became the most powerful party by far: it doubled its seats, to 230 of the 604 now contested. According to constitutional procedure, Hitler had to be appointed chancellor: more Germans had voted for his party than for any other. But this situation was unacceptable to the nation's political grandees. Hindenburg refused to appoint Hitler chancellor. He could not justify it, he said, ‘to God, my conscience or my fatherland’ if he were to place all power in the hands of one party, especially one party so singularly intolerant towards those with other ideas. Behind closed doors, he said that he would appoint ‘that little corporal’ to the position of postman, but never to that of chancellor.

  The threat posed by the Nazis did not drive the social democrats and communists closer together. Their relations were still based on old grudges. In early 1932, the KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann went so far as to call the social democrats ‘the moderate wing of fascism’. Ten months later, however, this did not keep the communists from joining forces with the National Socialists in a wildcat strike of Berlin trams and buses against the moderate proposals made by the ‘reformist’ trade unions. On Alexanderplatz, Nazis and ‘Kozis’ jointly stormed a tram running on line 3, fought against the police together at the Schöneberg garages and cooperated in plundering a car belonging to the SPD house organ Vorwärts. Tauntingly, that paper wrote: ‘Yesterday one still heard cries of “Brown-Shirted Thuggery” from one side, and “Red Untermenschen” from the other! But today a new and solid alliance has been forged! What class-conscious worker could fail to blush at the sight!’

  Papen, meanwhile, remained in office at the head of a ‘national cabinet’ and governed by decree. Hitler was furious. Finally, the Reichstag passed a vote of no confidence against Papen. The violence in the streets increased. New elections were scheduled. On 6 November, two days after the Berlin public transport strike, the Nazis lost two million votes, but nonetheless remained the biggest party with 196 of the 584 seats.

  Interestingly enough, it was not in Berlin's working-class neighbour-hoods that the NSDAP lost the most votes. Through their brief alliance with the Nazis, the communists had unintentionally given a signal that was to have far-reaching consequences: the Nazis, at least in certain workers’ circles, were no longer pariahs. They belonged.

  The day after the elections, the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution was celebrated with a flourish at the Soviet embassy on Unter den Linden. The arrival of the new order was in the air. It was to be the last major Soviet gathering – for the time being – in Berlin. Even Papen dropped in. The caviar was flown in from Moscow, the wines from the Crimea. Hundreds of guests, diplomats, army officers and journalists elbowed up to the buffet tables, while Lenin looked on.

  Throughout that entire year, the success of Stalin's Five-Year Plan had been the talk of Berlin's diplomatic and financial circles: entire cities had been raised from nothing in the Soviet Union, gigantic factories for machinery and tractors built. The country was laying the foundations for lightning-fast industrialisation. In the eyes of many Europeans, the East was giving flower to an attractive and tempting alternative: it was energetic, modern, socially aware and united. Even the Nazis were fascinated by what was going on in Russia: the four-year plan launched by Göring in 1936, with which he hoped to create the most powerful military-industrial complex in Europe, was clearly inspired by the Soviet example.

  In winter 1932, the German political scene was caught in a deadlock. The new chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher, tried to forge a national coalition from all the parties represented in the Reichstag. On the right he hoped to draw the most reasonable among the Nazis into his cabinet, and on the left the most modern social democrats. He was also hoping in this way to cause a rift within the Nazi party itself. Following the electoral setback in November, Hitler was encountering major problems within his party, his support was dwindling quickly and the Nazis were faced with huge debts. Schleicher, on the other hand, was in complete control, and enjoyed the full support of the military.

  In retrospect, it was this temporary setback that finally brought Hitler to power: by early 1933, a number of the country's conservative leaders considered him weak enough to cooperate with safely. On 4 January, the banker Kurt von Schröder arranged a dinner at his villa in Cologne for Franz von Papen and Adolf Hitler. Later that month they met again, at the home of the champagne dealer Joachim von Ribbentrop in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem. Within the political elite, a milieu from which he had always been carefully excluded, Hitler had become salonfähig.

  And so it was that Papen betrayed his successor and old friend Schleicher. He told Schleicher about the meeting, and claimed that he had tried to win Hitler's support for Schleicher's government. In fact, however, Papen and Hitler had decided to form a new coalition and bring about Schleicher's downfall at the first opportunity. Hitler was to be made chancellor, and Papen would ‘neutralise’ this with cabinet ministers of his own persuasion. ‘He is going to work for us,’ is what he literally said about Hitler.

  The chief remaining obstacle was the president. Papen had something of a father-son relationship with Hindenburg. For that reason, he was the perfect person to undermine the president's resistance to Hitler's chancellorship. How he did so is a mystery, even today. Papen probably convinced the old gentleman that this was the only way to prevent a putsch. In addition, the presidential family was caught up at that moment in a tax-evasion scandal, and pressure was perhaps exerted on Hindenburg's son Oskar as well.

  Whatever the case, the old general became party to the conspiracy against Schleicher. When the chancellor reported to Hindenburg in January that his plans for a national coalition had failed, everyone expected the president to disband parliament and call for new elections. Instead, however, he commissioned Papen to form a new government. That was all the opportunity Hitler needed to slip into the chancellery.

  The very next day, Göring was able to hang the swastika banner in front of the ministry of internal affairs. Now the Reichstag could be burned to the ground, a wild, solo attack by the Dutch Soviet-style communist Marinus van der Lubbe that was immediately put to good use by the Nazis. Now a host of decrees and emergency measures could be put into effect. Now all the critical journalists, communists, social democrats, artists, Jews and other troublemakers could be arrested and ground to a pulp.

  Was Berlin, in 1933, a pro-Nazi or an anti-Nazi town? Only five days before the change of power, on 25 January, the communists organised a mass demonstration against ‘the rise of fascism’. Hundreds of thousands of people took part, and even Vorwärts was impressed: ‘In the bitter cold and lashed by the wind they walked for hours, in threadbare coats, thin jackets and worn-out shoes. Tens of thousands of pale faces which spoke of a crisis, and which spoke of the sacrifices they were willing to make for the cause they consider just.’

  Five days later, on the evening of 30 January, tens of thousands of Brownshirts bearing torches filed past the chancellery, where Hitler – in evening attire – looked on from an open window. Out on the street, Kessler noted ‘a complete carnival mood’. The Nazis were ecstatic about this ‘day of national exaltation’ with its ‘roiling, red and brightly burning sea of torches’. The other part of the city's population was stunned. ‘Thinking’ Berlin had never thought that Hitler could come to power. For a little while, everyone hoped against hope that it would all turn out well. And then the great exodus began. Bertolt Brecht was among the first to pack his bags, immediately after the fire at the Reichstag. Kessler went to Paris in early March and never returned: he died four years later, forgotten and penniless, in a French village inn. At Kessler's funeral, old André Gide saw none of the artists whom he ‘during his life had so generously caused to be indebted to him’. The Mann family left for France, and from there for California. Joseph Roth began his melancholy wanderings across Europe, until he met his end at the Parisian Café de la Poste, felled by wine, Pernod and cog
nac.

  The Romanisches Café emptied out. The writer Hans Sahl saw the last customers reading, playing chess, consulting maps and railway timetables, and writing letters. ‘Blessed was he with an uncle in Amsterdam, a cousin in Shanghai or a niece in Valparaíso.’ In March of 1933, Sebastian Haffner was still enjoying idyllic afternoons with a Jewish girlfriend in Grunewald. ‘The world was very peaceful and springy.’ Every ten minutes a cheerful class of schoolchildren would pass by, led by a prim teacher wearing a lorgnette, and each class greeted him enthusiastically and in unison: ‘Juda verrecke!’ In the end, he was able to escape to London in 1938.

  Some had drawn their conclusions earlier, however, and had left the country after the 1932 elections. Albert Einstein left for California. George Grosz, who had already received threats, had a nightmare about the coming disaster and immediately, impulsive as he was, bought a ticket for America. Marlene Dietrich had harboured a deep hatred of the Nazis from the start. After 1932, she never set foot in Berlin again. She became a beacon to the German exiles in Hollywood and Paris, and during the war she performed on all the Allied fronts, a soldier among the soldiers. Only after her death, sixty years later, did she return to her city, to Schöneberg cemetery. She received flowers and many tributes, a square close to the Tiergarten was named after her, but there were also those who spat on her grave, and furious letters appeared in the papers:‘Whore!’ ‘Traitress!’

  The last relatively normal parliamentary elections were held a month after Hitler took power: this time, the Nazis won 43.9 per cent of the vote. A new secret police force, the Gestapo, was formed. The first concentration camp was built at Dachau two weeks later. In his diary, the Jewish professor Victor Klemperer noted that the maid of one of his Jewish colleagues had already quit her job. ‘She had been offered a safe position, and Herr Professor would soon probably no longer be able to afford a maid.’ At a chemist's he saw a tube of toothpaste with a swastika on it. ‘People have not yet started to fear for their lives, but they fear for their daily sustenance and freedom.’

  A few days later, on 31 March, the Reichstag – already sorely decimated after the arrests of communists and social democrats – granted Hitler dictatorial powers. Special penal courts, the Sondergerichte, were now established and a new category of crimes coined, including heimtückische Angriffe, foul criticism of the government. The first anti-Semitic measures were announced: Jews were to be dismissed from posts at schools and in public offices, and Jewish businesses were to be boycotted. New words were heard everywhere: Gleichschaltung, Rassenschande, Belange, Artfremd. Käthe Kollwitz was dismissed from the Academy of Arts. For being a member of the social-democrat association of physicians, her husband Karl lost all his national health patients in one fell swoop. One month later, on Opernplatz, across from the university, the books of Walter Rathenau, Heinrich Heine, the Mann brothers, Alfred Döblin, Stefan Zweig and others were burned. Bella Fromm wrote: ‘Not a day goes by without the Gestapo arresting an “unreliable” colleague.’ Meanwhile, ‘Heil Hitler!’ had become the mandatory greeting, the Horst-Wessel song the mandatory hymn:

  Die Strasse frei den braunen Bataillonen!

  Die Strasse frei dem Sturmabteilungsmann!

  Es schaun aufs Hakenkreuz voll Hoffnung schon Millionen.

  Der Tag für Freiheit en für Brot bricht an.

  That summer, the term ‘total state’ first began to appear in Nazi speeches. Shortly afterwards, the NSDAP was declared the only legal party in Germany. Under pressure from the Nazis, the German Evangelical Church replaced the newly chosen Reichsbischof Friedrich von Bodelschwingh with army chaplain Ludwig Müller. Shortly after his appointment, Pastor Müller had himself photographed in a toga, his arm stretched out in the Nazi salute; it was in protest against this coup that the Bekennende Kirche was established.

  In July 1933, Hitler signed a concordat with the Vatican guaranteeing the autonomy of the Catholic Church in Germany, as long as they did not meddle in affairs of state. (This did not, by the way, keep the Vatican from having the anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender Sorge read aloud in all German Catholic churches in 1937.) In late November the Gestapo was officially given supra-legal status. A little over a year after the Nazis had seized power, Kurt and Elisabeth von Schleicher were murdered by six SS men in their villa on the Wannsee.

  My long wait at Tempelhof airport is like slipping back sixty years in time. Tempelhof is now a little airfield and a big museum, all rolled into one. Of all the airfields I have ever seen in Europe, it is perhaps also the most deserving of the description ‘field’: once this was a parade ground where planes were occasionally allowed to land, and that is how it has remained, here in the middle of the city. A hypermodern terminal was built here in 1934. With its enormous semicircular awning, it is one of the few intact examples of Nazi architecture.

  The circular plaza at the front fits the picture, and the former government buildings give it a fine theatrical touch. The first reaction is: keep your head down, the new order rules here, come on, raise that right arm! Then come the genteel sounds of the airport terminal, and after that the impressive semicircle of buildings, the gesture to the rest of the world that says: here comes the new Germany!

  And now I am up in the waiting lounge with its 1930s Bakelite coziness. I recognise almost everything here, from newspaper photographs and newsreels: Hitler under the awning, stepping out of his Focke-Wulf Condor as the crowds cheer; Göring leaving for a working visit to the Eastern Front; Hitler's friend Albert Speer in his English-tailored tweed jacket, standing on the ladder of a plane; Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel crossing the tarmac with firm tread on 8 May, 1945, surrounded by Allied officers; the Americans and the Berlin airlift: it all happened here.

  I have never been here before, but everything in this place is etched in my memory, as though they were my own recollections.

  Chapter SEVENTEEN

  Bielefeld

  THE PHOTOGRAPH OF ANNE FRANK, HER MOTHER AND HER SISTER Margot has no date on it. Anne looks to be about three. It's still winter-coat weather, but the girls’ knees are already bare. The place where the picture was taken has been carefully documented by the people from Frankfurt's Historisches Museum: right in front of Café Hauptwache, in the city's shopping district. The little photo-booth picture of mother and daughters, taken at the nearby Tietz department store, does have a date on it: 10 March, 1933. They are wearing exactly the same clothes, the photographs were probably made during the same shopping spree. These were the final, innocent days of Frankfurt.

  Three days later the SA raised the swastika banner above the balcony of the town hall, and three weeks later a boycott was pronounced against most Jewish shops and businesses. After the Easter holidays, Margot's ‘non-Aryan’ teacher seemed to have disappeared into thin air. During those same weeks, Otto Frank began making plans to emigrate. Within a year the whole family was living on Merwedeplein in Amsterdam. The rest of the story we know.

  Had the Franks remained in Germany, it would have been – strikingly enough – little Margot who first suffered under the deluge of measures that went into force in January 1933. I see her in another archive photo: a summery photograph of the first-form class of the Ludwig-Richter-Schule, taken during a school outing in June 1932. The girls are wearing thin summer dresses, some of them have sun hats as well. The five Jewish children are standing among the others, there is nothing different or conspicuous about them. Margot is leaning towards a little girlfriend, a typically blonde German girl.

  One year later all the casualness had disappeared. Margot's ‘democratic’ principal was replaced in April 1933 by a Nazi. One by one, the Jewish girls in her class stopped coming to school. And she was no longer allowed to play with most of her former girlfriends, for fear of neigh-bours and informants.

  The Frank family home at Ganghofstrasse 24 is still standing, marked by a massive stone monument dedicated by the city's young people – ‘Her life and death, our duty’ – and the same trees around it, now thick
and old.

  On my next journey through Amsterdam I was given a van to use, a little one in which you could make a cup of coffee, type a column or even sleep. That was to be it for me in the coming months, this was to be my European house.

  It is clear spring weather today, and I steer my new acquisition along the back roads of the old Germany, through all those hills where our grandparents mailed their postcards in the 1930s – Pension Die Fröhlichen Wanderer, ‘Gutbürgerlicher Abendtisch!’ – past half-timbered villages smelling of fresh buns and newly ironed aprons. They are still there, unchanged, the rocks upon which Germany stands. The forests have their first light-green haze, the fields are brown, farmers are out ploughing everywhere, on the village square the little soldiers in the bell tower creak the hours away.

  I drive past Cologne-Klettenberg, where an Amsterdam acquaintance of mine grew up in the 1930s. In those days Truusje Roegholt lived at Lohrbergstrasse 1. On the corner across from her lived her playmates Anna and Lotte Braun, in a house hung with portraits of Nazi leaders and with a swastika banner stained with real human blood, probably from some fight on the street. ‘Mr Braun was a real beast of a man, even on his deathbed he wore an armband with a swastika on it,’ she told me. ‘But what did we know, and what didn't we know? People simply didn't talk. The Third Reich was a dictatorship based, to a great extent, on silence. But you saw a great deal, even as a child.’