1943 One of the stranger coincidences of the First World War is Erich Maria Remark (as he then was) and Adolf Hitler serving alongside each other in the trenches at the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) in July 1917. Some have fantasised that the two men may have rubbed shoulders, unconscious of each other’s identities.
Remark was badly wounded by a British shell and invalided out. The injuries ended his hoped-for career in music. A week before the end of hostilities, in November 1918, he was returned to the trenches in Belgium where, again, he was serving close to Corporal Adolf Hitler (who, in the intervening months, had won an Iron Cross First Class).
After the war the two ex-soldiers’ careers went in opposite directions. On his return home, Remark (who was a non-commissioned conscript) was arrested for impersonating a lieutenant, decorated with two Iron Crosses (he was already displaying a talent for fiction – or perhaps, as sympathisers have suggested, he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder: ‘shell-shock’).
Remarque (as he renamed himself) went on to publish in 1929 Im Westen Nichts Neues – All Quiet on the Western Front, routinely voted the best anti-war novel ever. It became an international bestseller after its blockbusting 1933 film tie-in. The story tracks the fortunes of six classmates swept up in the Great War, as narrated by Paul Bäumer. The soldiers reserve their hatred not for the ‘enemy’ but the armchair warriors on the home front. On the day that the Armistice is signed, Paul, realising that he can never readjust to civilian life, walks into no man’s land, and is shot.
In the same year, 1929, Hitler published his own bestseller, Mein Kampf. His hatred was reserved for the Jews who, he believed, were responsible for Germany’s defeat in 1918. His book was pro-war: fanatically so.
The Nazis banned Remarque’s detestably ‘pacifist’ novel and, on coming to power in 1933, stripped him of his German citizenship. Remarque, now rich (thanks to his book sales and film adaptation), fled to America where he continued his career as a novelist. He had a passionate affair with a fellow exile, Marlene Dietrich, and later married another Hollywood star, Paulette Goddard. German propaganda suppressed his works, alleging that he was actually a French Jew named ‘Kramer’ (‘Remark’ backwards).
Unable to lay hands on him, the Nazi party arrested Remarque’s sister, Elfriede Scholz, in 1943, on a trumped-up charge of ‘undermining the war effort’. The judge at the ‘Peoples’ Court’ frankly admitted: ‘Your brother is beyond our reach, but you will not escape us!’ She was sentenced to beheading on 16 December 1943.
Erich Maria Remarque was sent a bill by the party for the 90 marks executioner’s fee.