An October evening on Ulm’s Lindenhof, dusk swallowing the shadows. Renate Finkh stood on the square where, not so long ago, she’d seen the communist protest marches and the processions of Brownshirts from her nursery window. Now it was her turn. Aged ten and a half, she was to be accepted into the Hitler Youth and join the Young Girls’ League. So far, she hadn’t been able to muster much enthusiasm. The games bored her and she was no good at asserting herself. She felt the old pain gnawing at her again, the pain of not being needed. Not by her parents, not by her older brothers and sisters—and not by the girls at school, who always avoided her. She was used to feeling lonely. But feeling unnecessary was worse.
The young girls and boys of Ulm stood in a rectangle, waiting to be sworn in by the youth leader and receive their knotted neckerchiefs. Renate waited indifferently, her shoulders drooping. Large crowds had always frightened her, and this was no exception; she felt out of place.
Then suddenly it happened: ‘The solemnity of the occasion, made more solemn still by the singing and music, sweeps me off my feet, raises me high and gives me an undreamed-of sense of importance.’ Staring right through the speaker who is earnestly addressing them from within a circle of torches, Renate thinks she can make out the figure of the Führer, calling her, needing her. Her, Renate Finkh. She feels her little girl’s forlornness and weakness fall away from her and, as she speaks the oath she’s gone to such pains to learn, her voice is clear and confident. The stilted lines that speak of faith and pride and strength suddenly make sense. ‘It is the first ceremony of my life, and it pierces me to the heart.’
She feels all at once very close to her parents, who admire the Führer, though they argue so much she sometimes wishes she were invisible. Now there is something uniting them all. She is no longer shut out of their world. She feels strong enough to endure anything.
I am no longer a pebble thrown into a pond, encircled by rippling rings that vanish into uncertainty. I am tied fast by my knotted neckerchief, part of a whole. Only one ring encircles my life. Its name is Germany.
Belonging. Being a part of things. The feelings described by Renate Finkh were central to the experience of millions of young Germans. Solemn initiation ceremonies like the one on Lindenhof made them feel like people in their own right, able to share in grown-up life. They felt less dependent on adults, less in thrall to their parents and teachers, who never gave them that kind of recognition. Renate suddenly saw herself in a different light—more grown-up, more important. But she had entered another form of dependency: she was now in thrall to her country and her Führer.
• • •
By attacking the grey dignitaries of Weimar, the Nazis styled themselves a party of youth. After Hitler’s inauguration, the number of people joining the Hitler Youth soared. Soon it was on its way to becoming the only state youth organisation. Slogans like ‘Youth Leading Youth’ and ‘Dawn of the New Generation’ inspired members with high expectations for the future and helped many to endure joyless lives. After joining in April 1933, Hermann-Friedrich Cordes spent all his free time with his troop, organising hikes, finding places for the boys to camp, deciding who slept in which tent. He devoted weeks to such preparations, and his enthusiasm didn’t go unnoticed. Aged twelve, he became leader of a group of ten boys his age. ‘We lived like the robber barons in the March of Brandenburg!’ he wrote in an enthusiastic letter to a friend. The Hitler Youth became a kind of home to him.
His actual home, meanwhile, had degenerated into chaos and misery. His parents stumbled through the ruins of their marriage, unable to break away from each other. Hermann’s father descended into drinking and gambling, couldn’t hold down a job and barely managed to scrape together the money for clothes and rent, while his mother seemed incapable of taking her fate into her own hands. For a time, Hermann-Friedrich’s only clothes were his Hitler Youth uniform and a cousin’s hand-me-down shirt. The bailiff was at the door again. The Cordes drifted from flat to flat like urban nomads, each dwelling more wretched than the one before. The economic boom of the early Hitler years passed the family by.
‘Just look at the boy! Skin and bone from all that running around, and quite frighteningly pale.’ Ilse Cordes knew that her son’s quiet temperament stopped him from protesting against the constant sacrifices and frequent humiliations he suffered, but seeing no way out for either of them, she clung desperately to him—and to his love for her, which helped her to bear her own burden. ‘These are difficult times for him, but now, more than ever, he is a fond and solicitous companion to his mother. May these memoirs serve as a monument to his deep filial love.’
The only bond holding the family together was their obsessive love for the fatherland. Ilse Cordes clung to her son’s success in the national movement, hoping it might make up for his life of privation.
For younger people, who knew no life but that of the Third Reich, the Nazi initiation rituals were accepted as a matter of course. Johann Radein, from Siefersheim, was born in 1932. ‘Like all those of my generation who grew up in the National Socialist age, I felt as if life always had been this way and always would.’
The Nazis’ highly emotive language, their symbols of strength and power, their flags, parades and songs were all part of everyday life, and seemed somehow eternal. When the ten-year-old Johann and his friends gathered in the hills outside Siefersheim to be inducted into the Hitler Youth, membership had been mandatory for some time. But though the organisation had grown into an immense machine with several million members, the induction ceremony had lost none of its dramatic pomp. Johann Radein was impressed by the highly decorated men standing on the hill before him, flanked by standards, waiting to receive the boys’ oaths of loyalty.
The oath of allegiance, sworn in the middle of nature, feels to me like an irrevocable bond—a sublime, memorable and unforgotten experience of a symbolic, almost religious act. Even as I return home, the feeling is overwhelming.
Johann felt like a discoverer, pushing open the door to a new world together with his sworn comrades. After the ceremony, the troop leader had pressed a collection of songs into their hands. They soon knew them all by heart. ‘It’s quite an experience to march in closed ranks down the road and through our village, singing as we go.’ The lyrics were sombre, momentous. They spoke of the future, of danger, time and eternity. Aged eleven or twelve, Johann Radein sang the song of death, yearning to sacrifice his life in battle for his country. That was another advantage of being part of a greater whole: you could give back something of what you had received.
• • •
A sense of being needed, of belonging, and deriving self-esteem from it—this was the lure of the ‘new era’. If certain unreasonable demands were also part and parcel of the system, they paled into insignificance beside such advantages. Anyone deemed worthy by the regime to participate in ‘project Germany’ was offered some kind of formal place within it. There were organisations for women and students, teachers and doctors, war victims, clerks and workers. The spirit of national community could be enjoyed by all ages.
In May 1933, on her fifteenth birthday, Lore Walb, a young girl from Alzey, began to keep a diary. The blank notebook was a birthday present; she was also given a quoit, a towel, a brown ‘Hitler jacket’ and a swastika brooch of hammered metal. Lore came from a warm, loving family, but they had their prejudices, too—against communists, and Roman Catholics, Jews, gypsies and the working class. Her father had helped found the local branch of the party; her mother was in the women’s league, her brother in the Hitler Youth. She herself was a member of the League of German Girls. When Hitler came to power, the family was overjoyed. Lore was gripped by the spirit of the new era, fascinated by the Führer’s character and ideas.
Decades later, Lore Walb put herself through an unusual experiment. She wrote a book attempting to come to terms with her former self, the small-town German girl who had kept the diary. The thoughts and feelings she had recorded in it knocked her sideways. Like so many others her age, she’d been a bandwagon jumper, a ‘follower’.
My youth in the Third Reich passed unspectacularly. My diaries document what was going on in the minds and hearts of millions of Germans. They are representative of the exultant and silent majority.
Political events had such a strong effect on young Lore that they took up more space than her private life in her diary. For her, the political and the personal were inseparable. She wrote about solstice celebrations and summer holidays, Versailles memorial days and Easter eggs, Hitler’s evening radio broadcasts and her dates with boys. The diary entries were interleaved with copies of school essays on the role of art in the national community or the wonders of ‘Winter Relief’.
Winter Relief was a charity run by the Nazis to benefit the poor and unemployed. It called on young people to do their bit for the national community by collecting donations or selling badges. The winter ritual was driven by a massive publicity and doorknocking campaign. Like hundreds of thousands of other young people, Lore Walb walked the streets with her collecting tin, doing the rounds of homes, shops and restaurants. ‘I have a clear memory of the joy I felt at taking an active part in the street collections. It was satisfying to be needed; it was inspiring to be able to use my talent for speaking.’ Lore liked the idea of sacrifice for the community. In an essay on Winter Relief, written in March 1936, she made an appeal to the children of the Reich: ‘One for all and all for one! That must be our motto. No one must exclude himself! For without individuals, there’s no community.’
That year her father died. She had always accepted his nationalist convictions without question; now the values of national community provided her with a substitute for her lost father. ‘Just as, in my dream, I had been a weak little girl holding up the heavy picture of my father, I now put all my strength into holding high Hitler’s picture.’ In the summer of 1938, Lore Walb signed up to do national labour service. She found herself having to cope with strangers and strict superiors, but more importantly, she felt useful and valued. ‘We were very popular. The girls treated us a bit like leaders, always asking our advice, I don’t know, we were somehow special.’ In the labour service camp she felt the magic of belonging. Being surrounded by a group of contemporaries made her feel more confident.
• • •
The young lawyers in the Court of Appeal in Berlin received recognition and appreciation without having to make any effort at all. In autumn 1933, Raimund Pretzel’s training was nearing its end. It hadn’t escaped his notice that the Jewish judge had left and been replaced by a younger man, tall, blond, ruddy-cheeked. The older lawyers were uncomfortable with the young man’s brash manner, but it was no concern of Pretzel’s. He and his fellow clerks ‘rose daily in importance’, he said.
The Association of National Socialist Lawyers wrote us all (me included) the most flattering letters: we were the generation who would build the new German justice. ‘Join us. Help us in the historic task assigned to us by the Führer’s will!’
The clerks were gathering confidence. They sensed that there were advantages to belonging. Raimund Pretzel lost some of his friends to the movement and others to exile. Then, in October 1933, he found himself with a few dozen other articled clerks in the little town of Jüterborg in Brandenburg, attending an eight-week course on politics. While he was there, he wore black boots and a uniform. He marched behind a flag, singing marching songs. This wasn’t something he was used to; he didn’t know any marching songs. In the past, he’d always taken refuge in doorways when flags were paraded down the streets. ‘Now we were the ones embodying an implicit threat of violence against all bystanders. They greeted the flag or disappeared. For fear of us. For fear of me.’
In the articled clerks’ camp, Pretzel learnt to do drill and give the Nazi salute. He went along with all this because he had to, if he wanted his degree—and because he found a strange sense of security in Jüterborg that he’d never felt before. When he stood naked in the shower room with the others every morning, when they tussled with each other, covered up for one another or grumbled about the instructors together, it instilled in him a feeling of camaraderie.
We trusted one another without reserve in all the actions of the day, and had boyish battles and fights. We were all the same. We floated in a comforting stream of mutual reliance and gruff familiarity…Who would deny that that brings happiness? Who would deny that men yearn for this, a yearning that is rarely satisfied in ordinary, peaceful civilian life?
Camaraderie was the cement that held the national community together, whether in the Hitler Youth, the labour service, the army or the articled clerks’ camp.
Pretzel woke from this reverie feeling hungover and disgusted with himself. Usually a critical thinker, he felt that he’d fallen into a trap. ‘You are under a spell. You live a drugged life in a dream world. You are terribly happy, but terribly demeaned; so self-satisfied, but so boundlessly loathsome, so proud and yet so despicable and inhuman.’ By letting others dictate how he spent his days, how he dressed and what words he used, he had shed not only his worries and burdens, but also responsibility for his actions. It was only when Pretzel returned to Berlin that he realised the fatal appeal of renouncing responsibility in this way. In the weeks that followed, he began to think about leaving.