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LIVING WITH HITLER’S LEGACY SHORT SUMMARY This Book is about growing up in Germany in the aftermath of World War II. It was inspired by my discussions with a Jewish-American friend and a collection of photographs taken by my mother's second husband, one of Hitler’s SS bodyguards who had the special permission to take photographs in and around the Reichs Chancellery. He also documented the armed SS forces in his photographs. I plan to publish more of them in a future volume. Also included in this book are original letters, diary pages and stories about, or related to me by, my family members. My father was a resistor, who helped some people escape and later worked for the Allies - my mother the business manager of the Hitler Youth in her State. A whole branch of my family had enthusiastically supported the Party and killed themselves, much like the followers of the Reverend Jones in Jonestown, when they heard that Hitler committed suicide. It made me compare the Third Reich to a Cult, and this comparison actually began to explain some of the insane things that happened during that era. Some of the Middle Eastern
groups and nations today appear to be run like Cults also, and I am suggesting
to work with their resistors in deposing their leaders, where this may be
necessary. The greatest job left for us to do is understanding and
"deprogramming" their followers. It should be a task well worth
the effort as it might finally bring us lasting Peace.
TABLE
OF CONTENTS Title
(Subject) Fritz (Family Photographs) Those eyes — those haunting eyes . . . Actually, it's a family trait: dark circles under the eyes. We all have them, even if we feel just fine. But it's more than that in Fritz' case. I showed his picture to several friends, and they all had the same reaction, "He looks as if he's going to die." Was he aware of it? I found Fritz' picture in a pile Aunt Tina left for me. How thoughtful of her! She knew how much I loved her family pictures, so she labeled the box with my name. Fritz' picture has been haunting me since I first saw it. In my mind, I have titled it, "Have a Look at Your Enemy." He is a soldier like any soldier, with short blonde hair, good-looking in his well-fitted uniform — a medal pinned to the lapel; Nazi emblems above his right breast pocket and on his cap. Nothing unusual there. But his face is that of a child — a sad child. And those transparent eyes stare out of the picture — into some source of light that cannot be seen. They have seen too much for their years. I often wonder, "Would he have survived if he had lived through the War?" Somehow I feel he wouldn't have. I remember turning the picture over. Fritz had written on it in German script: Viel
leisten, Perform
much, I later learned that at least one of the von Moldtkes had been a resistance fighter. Was Fritz aware of that? Or did he just like the verse? A small newspaper clipping is attached to the back of the picture. We didn't have Scotch Tape in those days, so Aunt Tina had used the edge of a block of postage stamps to attach it. It is titled, "Promotions." And it reads, "Zeven. Private First Class, Fritz Högemann, who died in the East, was posthumously promoted to Corporal."
[Comment: Pomerania
was the State in Eastern Germany where my mother's family had lived since the
1600s. All Germans had to leave in
1945, and it's now Polish. This
story is about how my mother (Mutti - she was a nursing student at the time)
escaped, leaving behind my Grandmother (Oma).
Oma was subsequently captured by the Soviets, causing her to go insane.]
I was proud of my stories. I read them to my friends and just about everyone liked them. But now I was in Germany, ready to stand the test: I said a quick prayer before I took out the neat, computer-generated pages and, for the first time, read something I wrote to Mutti. I picked "her" story, the one about the violets. She interrupted me a few times. First to laugh at my description of how she rescued the ailing flowers from the supermarket dumpster. "Guess what I found last week," she said with a grin on her face, "thirty dozen eggs, all one day past the expiration date. I made a hook from a clothes hanger, fished them out and then gave them away to everyone in the neighborhood." Mutti didn't need to rummage through garbage dumps, and I was uncomfortable with the thought, but I felt it was a mission to her. Next she explained that she had actually never been unemployed; it had been the Hitler Youth — not the League of German Girls — who had hired her as their regional office manager before it ever came to that. It seemed important to her, so I promised to include it in my next story. Then we got to the War, when she and her boss, Dr. Engler, fled from Pomerania and tried to board a ship to Denmark. This time I interrupted, "Why Denmark?" "I'll have to tell you the whole story," she replied. "There's much more to it than that. See, I was working at the City Hospital in Stettin [Pomerania] when the Russians were approaching, and Oma stayed home in Köslin. She said, 'I'll wait here for Grandpa to return from his Volkssturm duties. I'll join you when I have to get out of here.' So I didn't leave with the other hospital workers, but kept waiting for Oma. Then Dr. Engler said, 'You have to get out immediately! You know what will happen to you when the Russians come!' So I packed my little backpack, and he had a small suitcase, and that's how we started, both of us with one bicycle. One of us would ride, the other walk. Then the first one parked the bicycle at a tree some distance ahead and the other picked it up and rode for a while, and so on. That wasn't easy because we had to do it at night. During the day, the roads were filled with refugees and the Russians were all over the place already. About a week later, we found a pile of bicycles that had been requisitioned by the Government and left there, abandoned. We took one, and then things got a little easier for us." My mind wandered to Mrs. Engler's description of her earlier escape. "It was time to leave, but my husband was then in charge of training Red Cross nurses in Stettin — your mother was one of them — and he was bent on saving this vehicle, a hospital unit on wheels. I was pregnant at the time and couldn't stay a day longer. We agreed that I'd contact him through the mail service of the Wehrmacht as soon as I arrived in the West. He ended up having to leave only a few weeks later, and the vehicle was lost on the island Rügen. That was some trip for us with those bodies hanging along the road." She said that so matter-of-factly that I might not have taken notice had I not read a description of the escape route from Pomerania in 1945. [Footnote: Christian Graf von Krockow — Die Stunde der Frauen — A Report from Pomerania 1944 through 1947, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt GmbH, Stuttgart.] "Those bodies" were Germans who had been strung up above the roadway. Some appeared to have been hanged by foreigners, maybe the advancing Russians, maybe the foreign laborers who had been enslaved to do work in Germany. Others had been hanged by the Nazis and they bore signs such as, "I am hanging here because I didn't believe in the Führer" or "I was too much of a coward to fight for our women and children." I recalled another report about the flight from Pomerania, this one by my newly found second cousin Wilfried. He was sitting in the comfortable dining room of the Bremen hotel he owns, filling me in on his side of the family story. "You know what happened to my grandfather Willi, your grandmother's brother? His wife had broken her hip and couldn't get up. When the Russians were coming and everyone left in a panic, my grandfather put her in a wheelbarrow, and that's how both died. They were crushed by the stampeding refugees, simply run over." His voice cracked slightly and he turned his face to the side. He wasn't an emotional person. My mother interrupted my straying thoughts. "It was difficult to ride the bikes with our luggage. At the Oder River, we caught up with our mobile hospital unit on its way to Rügen. We put our backpack and suitcase on it and agreed to meet the driver there. But by the time we approached, the Rügen Dam had been blown up, and no one could get on the island any more. All we now had left were our canvas sneakers with holes in them and the uniforms we had on, and even those weren't ours. Strictly speaking, they belonged to the Red Cross." "In Rostock, Dr. Engler asked about ships. That was risky since we had no business being there. He discovered that two hospital ships for the wounded were ready to leave for Denmark and offered our medical services to them. The people on the first ship didn't want us, and we were disappointed. But the crew of the second one was glad to take us on board because Dr. Engler was a surgeon and they had only an internist. They even took our bikes and gave us sandwiches. On board, where usually the coal is kept, they now had mattresses with the wounded. But, listen to this: right after we left the harbor, the air-raid alarms went off and a low-flying plane struck the earlier ship." "We hurried into our lifeboats and got there to help, just as it was starting to sink. And," Her flow of words stopped. "It was terrible!" "We had to decide within seconds who could live and who would have to be left on the ship to die. And the wounded were screaming in pain. And they had just been eating, and the pea soup was everywhere, all over the wounded and the dying; all that green and all that blood!" She shook her head and rocked back and forth. "In Denmark, they put the wounded into a collection camp and the personnel was quarantined in the Castle Nyborg. Then Dr. Engler said, 'I've gotten word from a soldier that my wife is in the West, in Elm, near Bremervörde. We must go there. And we'd better go right away. We need to find work before all the men return from the War.' So we quietly took our bikes and sneaked out of there." "By now I had found a coat to wear. A deserting German Air Force officer had thrown his away. Later, one of the men at Nyborg died who wore an old coat with good horn buttons. I pulled those off before anyone else could get to them and sewed them onto mine, to replace the military buttons. That's how things were done back then. I wore that coat long after you were born." "When we reached the German border, Dr. Engler used his cigarette rations to bribe his way past the British. Then we got to the Elbe River. That turned out to be more of a problem since all the bridges had been blown up. We had to get on a boat or military float. So Dr. Engler put my arm and leg in a wooden splint that he stuffed with hay, bandaged me all up and told the boat owner I was the wife of an important British official who needed specialized treatment in Hamburg. That and a few more cigarettes got us across all the obstacles. When we finally found Dr. Engler's wife and baby in Elm, they were living in a small room that had been confiscated from a local farmer." "We all moved into that one room with her, and it had no heat and was so drafty! The couple shared a single bed, but the children and I each had only one part of a three-part mattress. I was so uncomfortable that I made myself a mattress of straw. Worst of all, we couldn't even wash ourselves because we didn't have any curtains and the British were always looking in. Besides, none of us had a change of clothes. We would have had to borrow someone else's underwear to wash ours." I recalled Mrs. Engler's matter-of-fact assessment of the situation. "You wouldn't think that you can go for months without washing, but we did it and we found that life goes on, this way or that way." "Dr. Engler stayed away for weeks, trying to find work. We thought he might not return, and so I began taking trips on my bicycle to find a job and a place for me to stay. On one of my trips, I found a parachute in a field, and we unraveled the silk and crocheted ourselves sets of underwear. It was heavy, especially when it got wet. We had to hold it up with strings, but it served us fine while we were washing ours." Mutti paused. "Was Oma in a Camp?" I asked. I had often suspected that my grandmother might have been in some sort of concentration camp because of her erratic mental state. "It wasn't really a Camp," Mutti responded. "She stayed in Pomerania too long, waiting for Grandpa who had been sent to fight with the Volkssturm, the People's Militia. And then the Russians came, and Oma also took a few of her things, locked up our beautiful house, put the key in her pocket and left by bicycle, never to return. That's when the Russians captured her, and she was assigned to cook for their officers. One day she heard that some Russians discovered our neighbor's wine cellar, got drunk and burned down our house." "One of the Russians saw my picture on Oma's night stand, pointed to it and asked, 'Who?' She explained that I was her daughter, and so he said, 'I want to marry your daughter.' Can you imagine her fear then that I might not have gotten away to the West and might return? But we made it, thank God." "Months later, the Russians let Oma go. On her father's farm in Wolfshagen she found her brother Otto and his wife. Together, they made it to Cologne, and that's where I located them three years later through the Search Service of the Red Cross. All three of them were living in a stable." I recalled Oma telling me about her time in Cologne, "The Catholic Church was giving out dishes one day, but only to Catholics. Well, I thought that wasn't fair. We Lutherans needed dishes too! Needless to say, I turned Catholic for one day." She showed me the last three survivors of those Catholic plates. "I wanted to have Oma with me," Mutti added, "but that wasn't easy. She ended up losing her food rations because she was registered in Cologne. And she couldn't find a job in the North either. But by then I was working in a hospital, where they let me take soup home for her. Earlier, while in the Hitler Youth, I had learned to make felt slippers. I taught Oma, so that she could make something we could trade on the black market." I vividly recalled Oma's warm slippers. All of us wore them for years to come. "Dr. Engler finally returned from his job search," Mutti added. "He had found work for both of us in the Bremervörde Hospital. Oh yes, the Bremervörde Hospital," she sighed. "They took one look at me and said, 'She has some strength left in her.' See, the elevators were out, and the patients needed to be carried up and down the stairs. I tell you, some of those farm women were heavy. That's where I first damaged my spine. I also had to carry the dead to the morgue in the cellar. One day, one of the dead opened his eyes and I had to move him back up. Everything was in such a state of confusion. But it was better than not working." I looked up to see whether she was joking. She wasn't. "I couldn't wait until an office position might open up for me, but only chief physicians were allowed to have a secretary. Dr. Engler wasn't. He was working for Dr. Puls at that time, who was relatively young and not expected to retire any time soon. One day I came down with typhus and was moved to Zeven, where they had opened up a hospital station for infectious diseases in the Secondary School. I talked to its Chief Physician, Dr. Bartelheimer, and he happened to need a secretary. That's how I ended up in Zeven, even though I hated to leave the Englers. And guess what: a few months later I opened the newspaper and saw that Dr. Puls died from a heart attack and Dr. Engler became the Chief Physician after all. See, you never know how things turn out. But by that time I had met your father as one of the patients in the Zeven Hospital. And Dr. Bartelheimer was nice to work for, so I stayed." I was scribbling furiously on my computer printouts while my thoughts went to our school director who had asked us in 1963 to write a term paper about the life of one of our parents. When I asked Mutti, she refused, saying, "My life wasn't interesting enough." "Are you going to write about this?" Mutti asked, pointing to my pages. I nodded. "Then tell them this," she added. "Tell them: We all went through the same experience. Hitler didn't have to force us. We all supported him, thinking we were into a good thing. And we knew so little. Yes, sometimes we heard about one thing or another, like someone going to a concentration camp. But we thought that was for people who had done something wrong. We didn't know what was happening there. We couldn't even visualize those Camps. All of us — it was War, and we had to replace the men. Everyone had a job to do, and everyone was busy and, at night, the airplanes came and threw bombs. There really wasn't any time to think." "We all kept pushing, and no one had the time to sit back and think it all through. We were too tired to do that. We worked and worked, hoping everything would turn out okay. And then, when the War ended and we heard what really had been going on, we just stood there, held our head in our hands and thought, 'Where on earth did we go wrong?'" "And then the whole thing started all over again. Our houses had been bombed, and we had to find work and food and a place to stay. We hadn't even found time to bury our dead or to cry for them. And when things finally became better, our youth was practically gone." She paused for a while. Then she pointed at my notes and said, "Don't forget to tell them: We believed in Hitler and our world broke down."
It appears that this diary was written by a Dutch member of the Armed SS. His presence may have saved my stepfather Herbert's [Bert's] life: 5:45
a.m. Martin,
the Belgian, joins me in the basement and tells me something in detail.
He says there is a man from Frankfurt upstairs and he wants to go home. At
10 a.m. I go upstairs to find Herbert in the camp, but he isn't sure what to do
next. I do my best to convince him,
but he doesn't get ready. He shaves
- I guess I better say he rakes over his face.
Then we both go down to the basement to say goodbye to the family.
These people advise us to wear white arm bands.
We leave through the back door of the basement, and I am unsure about
what we will be faced with. I am
also unsure about what my partner thinks or feels because I am too busy trying
to exhibit a calm and firm behavior myself.
I often watch whether I act decisively enough. There
is a garage behind the house, and we walk in that direction.
A Russian tries to siphon gasoline from a car on blocks, using a hose and
a canister. Herbert approaches him,
takes the hose from his hands and siphons the gasoline within seconds, to the
amazement of the 'Iwan.' Instead of
thanking him, the Iwan takes him by the collar and asks, "Soldier -
Germanski?" To which we answer
with indignation, "Nix, Nix." – No, No. "I
am French," Herbert says with a French accent. We quickly depart to avoid problems. In
one part of the garage, a few women are trying to sort out their household
items: furniture, suitcases, boxes,
baskets, knapsacks, etc. We look
around this crazy assortments of things, and the women don't pay us any mind.
Herbert finds a coloring kit in a bathtub.
He asks one of the women whether he may use it. We
color our arm bands: Herbert uses
French colors, I use my Dutch ones. We
have thus become foreigners and are able to march on. The
sun was bright and warm in the streets. I
never before noticed how bright it can become, probably because we had been in
that basement for so long. We
walked along the River Spree in the direction of the Reichstags Building.
Germans walked the streets with their white armbands - the foreigners
proudly showed off their colors. Some
of the Russians wore battle uniforms; others weekend uniforms with daggers, etc.
Vehicles and arms were lined up along the street. Where
the Schiffbauer Dam continued in an arch, I noticed what was left of the
vehicles of our department: four
Panzer radio cars: Nos. 01-02-03
and 04, partially burned. Civilians
were busily removing parts. The
bodies of the occupants lay on the street.
Whether they died fighting or afterwards could not be determined any
more, and we didn't stand there, but looked only from the corners of our eyes. The dead looked mistreated.
The uniforms were brown with blood.
That was the last I saw of our AA-11. We
continued along the Reichtstags Building, then along the East-West Axis.
Things here looked a lot worse than anything I'd ever seen.
All trees had their right sides shot to pieces:
ancient oaks were blown up, and one bomb hole followed another. Fallen
soldiers - Russians - Germans - no one cared about them.
Canons hit by head-on bombs; soldiers moved about in their uniforms. At
the Victory Column, Russian officers were taking photographs; others drove by in
their Jeeps. No
one noticed us - no one. The
Russians I saw were too busy celebrating their victory - from the lowest to the
highest ranks - everyone acted as if he had played the main part.
The few remaining German soldiers who somehow managed not to be arrested
walked absent-mindedly through this frantic activity. We
both didn't speak, but I couldn't stop being amazed. I am still not sure what amazed me most:
the destruction or the frantically moving people and vehicles. At
the end of the Axis, we continued through an underpass; I believe it is called
the "Knee Joint"; and after that we noticed buildings.
A Russian Artillery column marched on the other side of the Schiller
Theatre; we slowly and watchfully passed them. I
had tied my watch around my ankle and I didn't own anything other than the
little we had to eat and a few cigarettes.
But I was afraid because my arms were tanned, except where the watch had
been. People
lined up at an old pump to fetch water. Other
people begged for water in broken German. We
walked on the other side of the street to avoid the Russians.
Here men, woman and children were busily removing rubble, using shovels. Suddenly,
six Russians came from behind and asked us whether we could sell them a small
pistol. Herbert told them something
in French, which neither I nor the Russians could understand.
They got the message that we didn't own pistols, but weren't happy with
that and started to quarrel. We
tried to go on our way, but two of the Russians held me and checked my pockets
without finding anything of value or of interest.
They did the same with Herbert, and I was glad that we both survived.
We went on and I began to think that we needed identification papers.
But saviors appear when the need is greatest. Shortly
after the "Knee Joint," near the Schiller Theater, I overheard a young
girl, who was talking to an older woman. I
noticed that she was from Holland and asked her about it.
She was happy to find a fellow country man.
Her name was Toni and she came from Voorburg-The Hague; had worked for
Siemens during the War. ... Now
she’d lost all she owned, including her laundry and suitcases.
But she still had her Dutch passport.
In Schoeneweide, [where she had stayed with a friend,] she was raped by
the Russians. She didn't know what
to do now, but she wanted to get back to Holland as soon as possible. She didn't have any money to board a train, and there weren't
any trains anyway. Herbert, who
stood a little to the side, wasn’t listening.
So I approached him and said, "I found a Dutch woman with a
passport. Let's take her with
us." Herbert didn't seem
comfortable with it, but he nodded passively - probably to appease me. But,
Oh God, Toni couldn't walk. She was
bleeding because of the rape. I
personally didn't feel great either. I
had taken on a burden, not a relief. We
had no other choice than to take her by her arms, from the right and left, and
to carry her along. Near
the Radio Tower we found an improvised first-aid station:
a Catholic Priest and a few women. We
were told that a dentist could give Toni a shot.
After that, we continued along the Avus Highway.
Endless columns of Russians walked the Avus in the direction of Potsdam. Herbert didn't want to walk along with such a column.
He wanted to capture a paddle boat and go down the River Havel in the
direction of Braunschweig. We
stopped at the first few houses, where we encountered two old people who were in
a bad mood and not willing to give us much information.
But they advised us now to take the Havel because the Russians were
watching it intently. So
we continued walking. It was 1 or 2
p.m. We had to be off the street
before 6. We
left the Avus soon, in a place with a camp on the right.
There we were faced by a Panzer column of three or four T 34's that had
been brought there for repairs. The
camp was deserted. We checked it
out, and I took six blankets and a white bed sheet.
We also took a few French gas masks to put the items in.
Then we continued through the forests along the Avus.
We heard sounds of engines, but they were two or three miles away. There
had been battles in this forest too. Parts
of the Arie [Forest?] were destroyed. Bodies
lay about, and somewhat further we noticed a giant heap of ammunition. About
4 p.m., the sun was low in the sky, we passed another camp, where we decided to
spend the night. Two Lithuanian
girls continued on their way, without paying attention to us.
After a walk around, we took a few food items from the camp kitchen.
They didn't have much, just powder for sauces - we used that to make
soup. We
found clean linens in a clothing depot and made up three beds in a small
bedroom, which we swept clean. We
then lit the stove and cooked the food. Five
or six Russian officers walked about the camp, neatly dressed.
I took a deep breath and was afraid they'd ask us something that might
become a problem to us, but they continued their conversation without taking
note of us. We
made ourselves comfortable and were glad to have found a place to sleep. Suddenly
there was a knock on the door, and a good-looking Russian soldier with Panzer
insignia on his shoulder stripe - a German 08 - sat down at our table
to talk with us. We
didn't let him disturb us and began to eat, but Toni didn't appreciate the
presence of the Russian. I would
have preferred it too if he had left us. Suddenly
he got up to leave - thank God. We carefully locked the inside of the window shutters and put
a broom under the door latch. We
weren't finished with our discussion, when the Iwan returned, bread under his
arm and a small bottle of liquor in his pocket. It
is clear to us why. But we are determined … The diary ends here, and I can't help but worry about Toni's fate. We know Bert and the Dutchman survived. The next and last page of this diary contains a list of towns Bert and the Dutchman passed while escaping from Berlin: 5/5/45
Berlin Bismarckstrasse - Avus OT camp 5/6/45
Batelsteig-Potsdam 5/7/45
Wittfriesen 5/8/45
Hasselhof 5/9/45
Straach 5/10/45
Crossed the Elbe River near Goswig; spent the night in the Hotel
"Green Tree" in Woerlitz 5/11/45
Raghun 5/12/45
Crossed the Mulde in Raghun. Spent
the night in a gynecological clinic in Zoerbig. 5/13/45
Zoerbig 5/14/45 Said goodbye to Herbert in Halle. |