Destined to Witness Read online

  Two days later, the moment I had dreaded with ever-mounting anguish arrived. Herr Schürmann, with a joyfulness bordering on ecstasy, chalked in the final two names on his chart. He then took a wet sponge and carefully erased the last remaining empty square, the one that represented me, thereby graphically emphasizing my non-person status. “Congratulations, class! We have just reached our goal of one hundred percent HJ membership,” he rejoiced. “I am extremely proud of you and grateful that you have brought honor to your class and to me. I think we should let the principal in on the good news.” With that, he left the classroom, only to return a few minutes later with Wriede in tow.

  The principal praised the class for having “dedicated your lives to Adolf Hitler and his vision of the Third Reich.” Since it was a Saturday and therefore only a half school day, he explained, the class would get the promised day off the following Monday. The news was greeted with a deafening roar of approval that lasted until Wriede restored decorum by reminding us that we were not in a Judenschule where lack of discipline was the order of the day. Since none of us had ever attended a Judenschule, we were obliged to take the principal’s word.

  I had followed the morning’s proceedings with growing embarrassment, since I was painfully aware that none of the praise heaped on the class by Schürmann and Wriede included me. The only thing that helped somewhat to restore my morale was the thought of not having to return to school until Tuesday. Thus, by the time school let out at noon, I had bounced back and was chatting and laughing with several classmates as we crossed the lobby on our way out. Just before leaving the building, I heard a familiar voice shout, “You, come here!”

  When I turned around, I saw the principal standing in the door of his office. I knew at once that he meant me, since he had never addressed me by my name.

  “Come in a minute; I have to talk to you,” he announced.

  Suddenly, a sinking feeling got hold of me. I had no idea of what the principal wanted to discuss with me, but I was convinced that it was nothing I wanted to hear. My instincts proved only too right.

  “I am a fair man,” Wriede started, “and I hope you are fair, too. Are you?”

  I assured him that I was fair, indeed.

  “That’s good,” he continued, “because then you’ll agree that it would be very unfair to give you a day off when you have done nothing to earn it. You wouldn’t want that, would you—to get something you didn’t earn?”

  Now the cat was out of the bag and I realized how Wriede had been setting me up.

  “Well, would you?” the principal insisted.

  “No,” I finally replied, “but—”

  “That’s good,” Wriede cut me off, “because I have already spoken with Herr Dutke, and he’s told me that it is all right with him if you spend a day in his class. So on Monday morning you report to Herr Dutke. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” I answered, although at that time, at age ten, I really hadn’t been able to figure out why Wriede treated me so meanly.

  “That’s all. Heil Hitler!” Wriede dismissed me.

  “Heil Hitler!” I saluted and walked out of his office and home.

  I never told my mother what had happened. I was certain that had I done so, she would have defied Wriede by keeping me out of school on Monday, regardless of the consequences to her. So to keep her from getting upset and to avoid trouble, I went to school on Monday as if nothing had happened, as a special “guest” in Herr Dutke’s class, where, after being welcomed with a sneer, I had to put up for an entire day with Dutke’s snide racist remarks.

  THE MORELLS

  The fact that all of my classmates had become card-carrying members of the Hitlerjugend had in no way affected our relationship. Those who were close to me before they joined the Jungvolk remained so afterward. We continued to play and have fun together and visit each other’s homes as if nothing had changed. Since we were too young and naive to see the big picture, we remained totally oblivious to the visual irony we created—a boy with an obviously generous amount of African genes playing in brotherly harmony with a bunch of blond boys in Nazi uniforms. Although my classmates were bona fide Jungvolk Pimpfe, few were true converts to Nazi ideology. Some had joined merely to get Schürmann and Wriede off their backs, while others had been pressured by their fathers, who feared that not having their sons join could hurt them on their jobs. The rest had merely jumped on the bandwagon in order not to be left out, a feeling I understood only too well. Whatever their reasons for joining, most of them stopped being active members after just a few short months when the novelty of going to meetings, on hikes, and to demonstrations had worn off, and dropped out altogether within a year or two. It became quite obvious to me that to most of my classmates, the Jungvolk was no more than a fad whose time had run out.

  A typical example of the fleeting interest the boys had for the Hitler Youth was Eugen Braun, the blacksmith’s son. One of the first on our block to join and wear the organization’s uniform, he even played in his troop’s drum-and-fanfare corps, which—to some people’s delight and others’ chagrin—made the windows rattle as it strutted through the neighborhood. But within a few months, before I had a chance to turn completely green with envy, Eugen had quit the Jungvolk, hung up his uniform, and turned to other interests.

  This relatively quick disillusionment with the HJ—which, as a matter of sour grapes, I welcomed from the bottom of my heart—did not occur in my class alone but was manifest throughout my school and, I suspect, throughout the city and beyond. I suspect that despite the massive, and much publicized, presence of Hitler Youth at Nazi rallies, the percentage of German boys and girls who were active participants in Hitler Youth activities on a regular basis was relatively small. In theory, the Nazis had intended to forge the Hitler Youth into a tool that would get hold of German youngsters from the moment they were ten years old and mold them until they were adults and ready to join the Nazi Party. Except for a few hard-core Hitler Youth members who followed the prescribed course, the plan remained a Nazi utopia. There was talk at the time that the Nazis wanted to boost the embarrassingly low HJ membership by establishing the Pflicht (compulsory) HJ for reluctant joiners. Fortunately, when the plan was inaugurated at the beginning of the war it was never vigorously enforced and, as a result, was mainly ignored.

  There were other aspects of the Hitler Youth movement that never quite caught on. Very few girls, for instance, followed the fashion dictates of the Nazi Party, which championed hair—preferably blond—braided and coiled in Schnecken (snails) above the ears, or tied into a bun. No girl in my school or neighborhood would have wanted to be seen dead with that kind of Nazi poster girl look. Instead, they wore their hair any which way from sleek pageboys to fashionable perms.

  I suspect that the vast majority of the men in my neighborhood became involved with the Nazis for reasons that had little to do with ideology. Like most German men, they were better craftsmen, mechanics, tailors, and butchers than students of politics. The German school system, which had reserved secondary and higher education for an intellectual elite, simply didn’t prepare them for political and philosophical thinking. Under Hitler, most of them had prospered beyond their wildest dreams; they had steady employment, tax deductions for multiple children, free health care, and many other formerly unheard-of benefits. They were convinced that a political party that had made good on its promise to wipe out unemployment, the scourge of the working class, deserved their support. Their monstrous guilt, however, one that will never be erased, is that they let the perks they enjoyed under the Nazis make them blind and deaf to the suffering and annihilation of countless fellow citizens whom the Nazis had branded as undesirable.

  Among the highly ballyhooed perks that helped make the Nazis attractive to “the man in the street” were the all-pervasive Kraft Durch Freude (Strength Through Joy) programs of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, which were designed to keep working people fit by giving them affordable recreation that ranged from visits t
o the opera and the theater to Mediterranean cruises on a fleet of specially built luxury liners. Some joined the party because they liked the way they looked in a uniform and enjoyed participating in parades and the paramilitary spectaculars for which the Nazis were famous. In addition to giving them ranks of authority and a wide range of new activities, the Nazi Party brought excitement and a sense of being macho, even heroic, into their humdrum proletarian lives. Above all, it provided them with a framework that made respectable their favorite pastime of carousing and hanging out with the boys.

  Typical of the men in my neighborhood whom the Nazi Party had given an entirely new lifestyle and identity was Herr Wilhelm Morell, a bald blue-collar type. A mechanic at Hamburg’s largest department store chain, he was a devoted husband to his rather corpulent wife and a doting father to my buddy Karl and his two brothers, Hans and Gerd. All the Morell boys had inherited their father’s broad, Slavic-looking face. The Morells lived around the corner from me in a tiny first-floor apartment at the end of an alley of two-story row houses that linked Stückenstrasse with Haferkamp, the location of Eugen Braun’s blacksmith shop.

  Before my very eyes, Herr Morell underwent a most amazing transformation that, to some extent, explains the curious attraction the Nazi Party held for the average German man. Within only a few short months of joining the party, Herr Morell acquired an entirely new persona. From a drab, quiet, and unassuming working stiff whose idea of a rip-roaring time was an occasional couple of beers with the boys from the shop at the neighborhood pub, he turned into a dashingly uniformed small-time official who, with the single-mindedness of a beaver building a dam, strutted purposefully about the neighborhood in the never-ending pursuit of his new duties. The fact that his new position as a bottom-level Blockleiter (block warden) was part time and unsalaried did nothing to diminish his zeal. Considering himself the eyes and ears of his party on our block, Morell ministered to a vast portfolio of concerns that ranged from keeping tabs on anti-Nazi utterances to arranging for the awarding of Mutter Kreuze (mother crosses) to mothers who had given birth to four or more Aryan kids, to spying on welfare recipients to make sure they were not living above their means. In addition, he attended meetings, marched in parades, stood for hours in any kind of weather shaking a metal can while collecting money for various Nazi charities, including the vaunted Winterhilfswerk (winter aid project), whose motto was Keiner soll hungern, keiner soll frieren (No one shall starve, no one shall freeze). He also went from door to door passing out copies of virulently anti-Semitic Nazi literature. Parteigenosse (party comrade) Morell accepted unquestioningly his party’s doctrine that Jews are the root of all evil, although I doubt seriously that in our blue-collar environment he ever knowingly met a Jew face-to-face, let alone was harmed by one. At the same time, he was totally color blind and exhibited a curious case of schizophrenia where I was concerned. For some inexplicable reason, his bigoted thinking did not extend to me. On the contrary, as the closest buddy of Karl, I was included in most of the Morells’ activities and treated almost like a member of the family. To the dismay of my mother, who had come by her loathing of Nazis honestly, I had become a virtual fixture in the home of the biggest Nazi on the block—in the lion’s den, so to speak. But since she liked Karl and didn’t want to interfere with our friendship, she reluctantly looked the other way while keeping her fingers crossed.

  As his party’s loyal lookout man, it hadn’t escaped Herr Morell’s notice that we didn’t fly a Nazi swastika flag from our window on national holidays, as had become the unwritten law. When he asked my mother the reason for this serious nonfeasance, she told him that she simply couldn’t afford to buy a flag, which I knew was only half of the truth. He told her not to worry and the next day presented us with a brand-new swastika flag, replete with mast, compliments of his Nazi Party chapter. Herr Morell even came to our apartment and personally installed a mast base outside one of our windows. Thus deprived of any excuse, my mother decided to fly a Nazi flag on every national holiday henceforth to avoid unnecessary trouble.

  Strangely enough, and contrary to what one might expect from the sons of the biggest Nazi in the neighborhood, only one of the Morell boys was an active member of the Jungvolk. Hans, the oldest, was an eager Pimpf who regularly attended functions, while Karl, with the tacit approval of his dad, joined on paper only and never took part in a single Jungvolk meeting. Gerd was too young to join. When I asked Karl why his father let him get away without participating, Karl told me that his father had tried at first to get him to go to meetings but had finally gotten tired of nagging. “As long as I keep my membership so he can tell anyone who wants to know that I’m in the Hitler Youth, it’s okay with him,” Karl explained.

  Through my intimate contact with the Morells throughout the years, I was well informed about the private goings-on in various households on our block, especially who was considered a reliable Genosse (comrade) and who needed watching, for despite his slavish devotion to his duties, Father Morell could not resist gossiping with his family and friends about what he had learned as a result of his various investigations. By keeping my mouth shut and my ears open, I learned, for instance, that one of our neighbors had been sentenced to a prison term for violating Paragraph 175 of Germany’s penal code, which outlawed homosexual conduct. Herr Morell seemed to have the goods on everybody in the community who had strayed—or was suspected of having strayed—from the narrow path of righteousness, including some of his own Nazi cronies. “He’s been warned two times already,” I once overheard him saying. “If we catch him doing it again, he’ll be kicked out of the party.” Although much of what I heard while playing mouse during Morell’s discussions with his inner circle was way over my head at the time, by letting it sink in and putting two and two together, I usually came up with four.

  HERR DUTKE

  I would be hard pressed to decide which of the two biggest bigots among my teachers was the meanest, Herr Wriede or horn-rimmed Herr Dutke. Dutke used to delight in wearing his Nazi uniform in the classroom to lend an especially festive note to his courses of Volkskunde (folklore), which he used mainly to vent his racist hostility. “Stop that negerhafte Grinsen (negrified grinning),” he once hissed at me when he caught me joining the class in innocent laughter. “Negroes don’t have a thing to grin about in National Socialist Germany.” To drive home his point, he frequently picked pupils who came closest to what he and his fellow Nazis considered the ideal Aryan type by having them stand in front of the class and pointing out their blond hair, blue eyes, “nobly formed skull,” and other “desirable” physical features. Ironically, behind his back, my classmates referred to arch-Nazi Dutke by a term my mother had taught me never to use in a derogatory context. They called him “the Jew,” partly because of his large hook nose and partly because of his exaggerated entrepreneurial spirit, both of which the Nazis had identified as unmistakably Jewish traits. Dutke, a little party wheel who also taught music and physics, was known throughout the school to use every imaginable opportunity to augment his teacher’s salary with some rather suspect business deals. Although his deals were highly unethical, if not illegal, he operated with impunity, most likely because of his Nazi Party affiliation.

  Dutke hated my ten-year-old guts not only as a matter of Nazi principle but also because on two occasions I had, quite unintentionally, obstructed his ceaseless effort to combine the business of education with his habitual need to hustle students. While wearing his music teacher’s hat, he announced one day that he would teach the class how to play the harmonica, something I had already accomplished on my own. To do that, he said, everybody needed to buy a harmonica. It so happened, he explained, that because of his special connections, he was able to offer every student a real bargain on the purchase of a small Hohner instrument.

  As it turned out, all of my classmates went for it and, after consulting their parents, placed their orders. The only person in the class who didn’t order a harmonica was, you guessed it—not because I
wanted to thwart Dutke’s scheme to make a little money on the side but because I already had a harmonica, and quite a superior instrument at that. After I had taught myself to play the harmonica on a cheap instrument about a year earlier, my mother had rewarded me by buying me a rather expensive, chromatic deluxe Hohner harmonica. Dutke, however, regarded my refusal to buy a harmonica from him as a personal affront. He retaliated by forbidding me to bring my harmonica to his class or to participate in any way, although my instrument was in the same key as the harmonicas he had ordered.

  A similar scenario unfolded in physics class, where Dutke tried to teach us the workings of a crystal detector radio set. After several lectures on the subject, he showed up in class with a single earphone in which he had soldered—quite ingeniously, I thought—the miniature circuitry of a crystal detector set. He then demonstrated to us that all one had to do with his “invention” was to attach one of the two wires coming out of the earphone to a water faucet for grounding while holding one up into the air as antenna and, presto, one could listen to the Norddeutscher Rundfunk, Hamburg’s state-owned and-operated radio station.

  He then told the class that for only a few Reichsmarks, they, too, could become the proud owners of a “pocket detector radio.” With television still on the drawing board and radio the undisputed mass communications king, we kids were duly impressed with Dutke’s gizmo, which seemed to foreshadow the advent of the transistor radio. The idea of being able to listen to radio wherever one happened to be had tremendous appeal, and many of my classmates were ready to talk their parents out of the necessary cash to acquire the intriguing toy.

  I was so impressed with the idea of a truly portable miniature radio set that required no batteries or electric input that I went straight home and started some tinkering of my own. After working an entire Sunday, I came up with a small, three-by-four-by-two-inch wooden box into which I had fitted the circuitry and earphone of a crystal set. In principle, my little radio box worked just like Dutke’s boxless earphone.