The troupe crisscrossed the countryside in flatbed trucks wooing voters. Usually from the truck platform or the sidewalk, they sang, danced, and acted out cabaret-style skits: serious drama à la Brecht, a contentious legal sketch on abortion, a spoof on the design of women’s bathing suits, or daily political news with portrayals of Hitler. It was a mix of the group’s ideas and those from headquarters in Berlin.
For Klaus and friends, it was hardly a carefree jaunt through the countryside. The farms, small towns, and seafaring villages around Kiel were mostly Protestant and vulnerable to a fascist message. As early as 1925, Nazi leaders had identified the farmers’ vote in the northern part of Prussia as crucial for making “the sea-embraced Nordmark ours.” Prominent Nazis came to speak. The rural crowds, often first-time voters, came out in droves to hear fervid orations filled with slogans and vague promises.
The Red Spark played in one town and their Nazi counterparts in another. Klaus’s sometime girlfriend Lisa Attenberger—three years older than he, pretty, flirtatious, and sassy enough to more than offset his reserve—was part of the troupe. According to her, Klaus always cast himself against type in reactionary roles, including Hitler. Anticipating cudgels and knives in the sidewalk crowd, they brought along protection from their own paramilitary group, the Red Front. The Nazis did the same with the SA.
Klaus and his colleagues printed flyers in attic rooms that the KPD rented. They attended a required program on Marx, Engels, and Lenin but had little time for it. The politicking was all consuming, especially for Lisa, who was not a student and worked full-time.
One day, city authorities notified her to come in for an STD exam. Someone had reported that she “had many men in the booth.” Apparently, the authorities had other motives, namely her relationship with Klaus. At the end of the exam, they asked if she had slept with him. She said she didn’t remember.
Lisa wasn’t Klaus’s only interest—nor obviously he, hers. He had an unnamed “soul mate” someplace away from Kiel with whom he was in love—a person fighting for the cause with him—and then she left him. Years later, when he described this unidentified woman as very shrewd and unscrupulous, “the Beast and the Devil,” he said, his feelings seemed still raw.
* * *
—
The presidential vote was held on March 13, 1932. That morning, the Kieler Zeitung, a mainstream newspaper that supported Hitler, ran the headline “Destroy the System: Vote Adolf Hitler.”
By the end of the polling, no candidate had a majority, so a runoff was held on Sunday, April 10. Hindenburg won with 53 percent to Hitler’s 36.8 percent. Thälmann, losing support in the second round, finished with 10 percent.
Although Hitler’s total averaged below 50 percent in Kiel and its province of Schleswig-Holstein, seven of the twenty-four districts gave him an absolute majority in both rounds. The next day, the headline in the Kieler Zeitung read, “Heil Hitler,” omitting from the front page that Hindenburg had actually won.
The Nazis had rolled up gains with a strong nationalist message. They sold the public racial prejudices, economic strength, dislike of foreigners, and rejection of the Versailles Treaty.
One week later, Klaus spoke at the Seeburg on the capitalist forces against socialism. Gerhard spoke on the “‘fascization’ of worker rights.” Although students who were SPD members could no longer be officially part of the group, the lectures were open to all.
The Fuchses’ new political alignment didn’t change the political message much. Occasionally someone in the group lectured on the Soviet Union or included references in newsletters. Mostly they argued for opportunities for the working class or slammed the Nazis for a long list of wrongs: warmongering, terrorism, cowardice, and/or deception. On those occasions, the Nazis, as usual, went straight to the officials with complaints of horrible mistreatment.
Both sides attended the others’ events and watched for an opening to provoke. At the end of April, Gerhard and Klaus called for a strike to challenge another university fee increase. The Nazis rejected their request to join in and belittled them in the press.
Meanwhile, the Nazis were raising funds for schools in territory ceded by Germany to Denmark as the result of a 1920 plebiscite. Gerhart attacked the Nazis’ effort, condemning what underlay it, namely Deutschtum, the Nazi creed that demanded possession of all foreign lands with a German culture in order to create a pure, world-dominant Germany. This was the path to war, Gerhard charged.
At the end of May, the newly reelected president, Hindenburg, chose a new chancellor, Franz von Papen. A semi-closeted conservative and monarchist, he formed a cabinet of politically inexperienced businessmen and aristocrats who immediately set about trying to dismantle the Weimar Republic.
One of Papen’s first actions would change the course of world history: he reversed the ban on the SA, and thus gave Hitler back his most effective weapon. According to newspapers sympathetic to the Nazis, it was to protect the public against the Marxist violence and Reichsbanner terror that filled the streets. In actuality, it gave free rein to Hitler’s incitement to violence. After a row in the Schloss garden, next to the university, officials found a grenade. Unreported by the newspapers, the first murder in Kiel after the SA were set loose was a Reichsbanner man.
* * *
—
On the morning of June 23, 1932, around 11:00, the university inspector Karl Lichtenfeld passed the Freitreppe, the “Free Steps” that led down to the garden from the university’s main building. Students milled peacefully around during their break, and two handed out flyers. When Lichtenfeld took one, he noted the title, “Prohibition,” and that it was sponsored by the socialist students.
Seeing perhaps as many as fifty men clustered throughout the garden, he feared that the flyer’s strident sentences such as “The Nazi leadership has to conceal the treason that it uses with its twelve million voters” could provoke riots. He quickly made a needed trip to the library and returned to find groups of nonstudents moving between three specific points around the grounds and bordering streets.
The bell for classes rang, and most students went in, leaving half a dozen or so that Lichtenfeld recognized as Nazis, along with a larger group gathered at either end of the path in front of the entrance. Among these Lichtenfeld spotted Gerhard, well-known and one of two students wearing the communist lapel pin with hammer and sickle.
Lichtenfeld, seeing no overt conflict but sensing tension between the Nazis and the communists, secured some of the doors at the top of the steps. Two policemen arrived and smoothly dispersed everyone—many departing on bicycles. The police maintained a double patrol around the building for the next few hours.
After this near confrontation, the Nazi students sent a complaint to the rector and to the newspapers, a ploy to aggravate university officials. They alleged being attacked and mistreated in “unspeakable ways” by socialist students and demanded protection.
At 3:30 that afternoon, the rector sent Gerhard a letter to revoke permission for a lecture at the Seeburg that evening. Gerhard searched for the rector to persuade him to change his mind, but his plea failed.
The university councillor Hoepner summoned Gerhard to his chamber the next afternoon, where he asked about the “incident.” With an attitude Hoepner deemed disrespectful, Gerhard denied having amassed the fifty to sixty men at the garden but acknowledged that some were acquaintances of his.
The Nazis swiftly issued a “notice” clarifying their complaint against the socialist students and stressing a ban. At the end, they requested permission to wear brown uniforms with a shoulder strap and red swastika, which the Prussian government had barred.
At the University Senate meeting the next day, its members enacted more measures to keep the peace—police posts, protection for Nazi students, restrictions on the Seeburg. Gerhard received a reprimand for improper behavior against officials and students with different beliefs. The
Nazis were denied permission to wear uniforms or armbands.
On July 1, a group calling itself “University of the KPD-Kiel”—with no individual’s name attached—distributed a flyer at the Freitreppe that labeled the Nazi students “masters in the methods of the lowest, wickedest, and dirtiest slander.” With more flyers, complaints, and wringing of hands, the university brought Gerhard up on disciplinary charges. The Nazis insisted on “immediate dispersal of the Red Student Group” and the members’ expulsion.
The head of the Nazi students, Walther Essmann, wrote to the rector for a quick verdict, but the rector had already left for vacation.
On July 20, the focal point of German unrest, Adolf Hitler himself, came to Kiel. At 4:15 in the afternoon, forty thousand adoring followers rallied in and around the city’s largest auditorium. Reinhard Sunkel, who had insinuated the Nazis into Kiel several years before, introduced him. Hitler’s hour-long oration churned up the usual grievances—the 30 percent unemployment, the onerous provisions of the Versailles Treaty, and the violence in the streets that was eating away at Germany’s social fabric. Then he spelled out a new future for the German nation: the importance of the farmers and working class as the fundamental basis for economic growth, coming together as the Volk, to bury class divisions. He fed his audience a simple word, Volk, that to his listeners embraced the pure and powerful tribe of German myth. The crowd went wild.
“With subhumanity,” Hitler insisted, “there is no understanding—we will clean up with them!”
Evidently, with shades of the Valkyrie, he and his audience would choose who was to live and who was to die. Rarely at this point were Jews singled out and directly named unless the atmosphere welcomed it, but the Nazi point of view was already well established. The party platform from 1920 defined Jews not as “racial comrades” but rather as the root of Germany’s and the world’s problems.
At the end of the speech, there was a clash between the SA and the communists, which required a massive police contingent to break up.
That very same day, Chancellor Papen dismissed the Prussian cabinet in what became known as the Preussenschlag. Already in charge of the federal government, he used the pretext of the chaos in the streets to put himself in charge of the Prussian state government as well. Of course, the chaos he decried was largely his own doing, the result of his decision to legalize the SA.
When Klaus heard the news, he rushed to find his friends—communists, Social Democrats, and in particular the Reichsbanner. They had gathered spontaneously, eager to fight for the autonomy of the Prussian government. But they had to sit and do nothing. The Prussian president and other Social Democrats called for calm, deferring to a future decision by the Reich court, and otherwise putting up no resistance.
The broken spirit of the SPD members weighed heavily on Klaus. They had been forced to withdraw from the Free Socialist Student Group a few months before, and now their party sat passively in the face of Germany’s destruction. Helpless, he watched as the SPD basically ceased to participate in political action. From then on, he knew that he and his like-minded comrades had to resist largely alone. The battle in the next Reichstag election set for July 31, a last-ditch effort to revive the dysfunctional parliamentary body, would have to come from them.
On Election Day in July, the National Socialists won 46 percent of the vote in Kiel. Nationally, they won 230 of the 608 seats in the Reichstag with 38 percent of the vote. The Nazis were now the largest party in the parliament, but it was still without a governing coalition.
* * *
—
When the winter semester began in October, so did the formal senate proceedings against Gerhard for disparaging Deutschtum, the Nazis’ dream of a greater Germany. During the break, the university had collected about seventy-five pages of letters, sworn affidavits, minutes of meetings, and flyers. To the consternation of the Nazis, these showed no direct link from the offending flyer to Gerhard. And naturally he denied everything. That he was responsible or at least fundamentally involved was little in doubt, but no hard proof existed, so the university dropped the charges for lack of evidence. Although unstated, the tone of the official records was one of relief at the outcome.
By the time the senate decision came down on November 7, Gerhard had left Kiel for Berlin with his girlfriend, Karin, ostensibly to prepare for law exams at the University of Berlin, but he couldn’t turn from the political crisis. The communist leadership named him editor of a bimonthly newsletter Mahnruf (Warning cry), with 140,000 subscribers. Emil wrote to Paul Geheeb, “Gerhard has the doggedness of the Fuchses and the certainty of his convictions.”
With Gerhard gone from Kiel, Klaus would come into his own as a leader. The Nazis, and the rector, would see that he did not lack his brother’s zeal. But where Gerhard had aggression, Klaus had steely, quiet determination. And while the Nazis hated Gerhard, Klaus they would try to kill.
CHAPTER 4
Leader, Kiel 1933
As the new leader of the Free Socialist Student Group, Klaus showed the sense of obligation, responsibility, and self-righteousness that some would later characterize as arrogance. At twenty-one, in his first solo conflict, he still maintained his quiet reserve, but he was uncompromising, was wary of being used, and, like his father, had an impulsive streak.
With the Nazi students having a new representative too, Werner Krugmann, the university councillor Hoepner used the moment to establish ground rules. He requested that Klaus come to his chambers at 1:00 p.m. on November 15. Krugmann was scheduled at 3:00 p.m. for the same day. None of the other university clubs received such a summons.
Klaus had already distributed a flyer for the lecture “Fighting the Suppression of the Socialists” that bore his name and official approval. Hoepner delivered a strong reprimand to him. He wanted “the dragged-out battle” between the socialist and the Nazi groups to stop. If not, he threatened “suspension of the guilty academic union and disciplinary punishment for the responsible official.” The new orders limited attendance at an event to members of the political group. They required all announcements and advertisements on groups’ bulletin boards to adhere to a 1929 regulation that ruled out politically volatile content. Klaus told Hoepner that “he would tell this to the members of [his group] but that he couldn’t make assurances about anyone’s behavior.”
But Klaus’s reserved and polite demeanor didn’t stem from timidity. Three days after the meeting with Hoepner, he responded with his group’s conclusion: “On the basis of the arguments presented, we cannot obey your order.” He objected to the threats of “the most severe disciplinary action” to pressure him to agree to the restriction on the rights of the student body. “A factual intellectual debate is best suited to maintain ‘quiet and order’ at the university. Preventing such an argument would achieve the opposite result,” he wrote to Hoepner. The order, he said, didn’t hinder the Nazis at all, because they never held public meetings or debates or used the bulletin board to post events. They mostly complained. It restricted the socialist students only.
Klaus promptly posted his response on the group’s bulletin board in direct violation of the new order. Authorities just as promptly confiscated it and warned him.
On November 22, Klaus and Councillor Hoepner met again, and when he emerged from the administrator’s office, he found the Nazi leader, Werner Krugmann, and another Nazi member in the anteroom waiting for their own appointment. The three started a conversation, which led to a dialogue over the next several days in which they discussed how to respond to this suppression. They decided on yet another protest against fee increases. Klaus argued for an approach not limited to resolutions and flyers but one that “really mobilizes the student body to fight.” Krugmann, the Nazi, fell back to a much less aggressive approach—flyers only—and then failed to respond to Klaus’s letter arguing for more action.
Thrown into this curious dialogue was an election for st
udent council representatives. Klaus and another group member were running, and Klaus decided to go after the Nazis. He remembered that with an earlier fee increase they had delayed action and then said it was too late to protest. He wanted to call out their duplicity, not hear another excuse. He released a one-page flyer advertising the group’s candidates and their pledge to fight:
Against the University reaction!
For the Interests of underprivileged students!
Against the Education monopoly!
Then it described the agreement of the socialists and the Nazis to fight together, but pointed out,
The NSDStB and the FrKSt [both Nazi groups] have permanently delayed an answer. No student would blame us if we are suspicious especially after the experience of last semester. All the more, the former leader of the NSDStB declared at the first exchange: “It is a brilliant university scandal.”
We do not want a Scandal!
What we want is
A tough and untiring fight.
The single-spaced taunt of the unnamed Nazis Essmann and Krugmann urged students to fight. Students stood on corners around campus and in front of academic buildings handing out the message.
Writing about the flyer to Hoepner, Klaus stressed that everything in it was accurate and that Essmann had confronted him immediately upon reading the “scandal” comment. He also branded Essmann’s comment about scandal as dangerous. He feared that the Nazis’ intent was to weaken the university rather than support students. “I therefore thought it my duty to point out this danger to the student body.”
Essmann, feeling besmirched, went to the rector, emphatically denied all, and threw in a few more grievances.
Years later, Klaus remarked that he “had violated some standard of decent behaviour” by not giving the Nazis an ultimatum before issuing the flyer. “I came to accept that in such a struggle of this kind are prejudices which are weaknesses and which you must fight against.” But his prejudices and his sense of obligation at that age were integrated as a whole—“one-sided” and “unbending,” as his father had said.
Atomic Spy Page 5