by Giles Milton
Erwin was not only appalled by what he read but deeply disturbed by the idea that the state should decide on what constituted acceptable art. At a stroke, all of the pencil sketches he had made during the First World War – depicting shattered landscapes and ruined villages – had become defeatist in the eyes of the Nazis. His more recent paintings, of songbirds and barn owls, were less contentious. Yet it seemed extraordinary that neither he nor his friends were any longer at liberty to choose the subject matter, the style or even the colours that they wished to use for their paintings.
Hitler held inflexible opinions on degenerate art, giving them public expression in an address to the House of German Art in Munich, some ten days after the Pforzheim article was published.
He expressed his contempt for art that was filled with ‘misformed cripples and cretins, women who inspire only disgust, men who are more like wild beasts, [and] children who, were they alive, must be regarded as under God’s curse’. Mocking the paintings of both Impressionists and Expressionists, he continued: ‘There are men who on principle feel meadows to be blue, the heavens green, clouds sulphur-yellow.’
This, he declared, was degenerate art, which, he claimed, was so damaging to the national character that those who produced such paintings should be arrested, tried and jailed.
The dictatorship expected more than mere conformity from German artists. Joseph Goebbels, in his capacity of Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, had set out his vision for the arts within days of the Nazis coming to power.
‘It is not enough for people to be more or less reconciled to our regime [or] to be persuaded to adopt a neutral attitude towards us,’ he said. ‘Rather, we want to work on people until they have capitulated to us, until they grasp ideologically what is happening in Germany today.’
Among the group of locally based artists who would be persecuted by the new order was a sculptor named Otto Baum – a future tutor to Wolfram. Baum was Professor of Art at the Stuttgart Academy and much fêted as a sculptor in the years before Hitler became chancellor.
His fortunes were to change dramatically once the Nazis seized power. His works did not find favour with them and he was sacked from his post at the Stuttgart Academy.
There was worse to come. Baum’s works were selected for inclusion in the Munich exhibition of degenerate art, turning him in an instant from celebrated sculptor into artistic pariah. His sole consolation was the fact that his sculptures were exhibited alongside more famous ‘degenerates’ such as Otto Dix and Max Beckmann.
By this point, he was struggling to make ends meet. He managed to earn a little money by making locks, a skill he had learned from his father. Not only was it scarcely enough to pay the bills but it left him with plenty of spare time in which to reflect on the swiftness of his fall from grace. Within a few short years of Nazi rule, he had been flung on to the breadline. He survived financially only because he was given a helping hand by loyal artist friends in the local community.
Baum still produced his abstract sculptures but he did so in absolute secrecy, aware that he faced several years in a concentration camp if caught. Having made them in the dead of night he would bury them in the garden, hoping that the day would dawn when he could dig them up.
There were times when it seemed that the only news was bad news. ‘An alle Parteigenossen!’ was the decree issued on Monday, 4 April 1938. ‘Der Führer hat das deutsche Volk aufgerufen.’ (‘To all party members…the Führer has summoned the German people.’) It was issued by Arthur Barth, leader of Pforzheim’s Nazi Party, and it affected everyone who lived in Pforzheim and its environs. In six days, there was to be a plebiscite on whether or not Austria should be unified with the German Reich.
‘Hitler wants this to be the biggest success in the history of voting,’ declared Herr Barth’s decree. He insisted that everyone, young and old, go to the ballot booth and cast their vote in favour of unification.
Hitler had sent his troops into Austria some three weeks earlier to enforce his demand that political power be handed over to the Austrian Nazi Party – as it had been. Now, there was to be a plebiscite to confirm the political revolution that had already taken place.
Hitler was determined to win with an overwhelming majority. To help ensure victory on the Austrian side of the border, he despatched the SS into the country and ordered them to round up Communists, Social Democrats and Jews – anyone, in fact, who might organise opposition.
It was a similar story inside the frontiers of the German Reich. On the day of the vote, brownshirts paraded through the streets of Pforzheim, knocking on doors and forcing people to go to the polling stations. Those who refused to vote were beaten or arrested.
The vote was not just about union with Austria; it was also coupled to a vote of confidence in Adolf Hitler. This was a most devious ploy on the part of the Nazi Party since it meant that anyone voting ‘no’ in the plebiscite would be doing so in defiance of Hitler and would therefore expose themselves to the risk of prosecution for treason. With rumours about ballot papers being marked so that voters could be identified, there was incentive enough to vote ‘yes’.
Knowing he was set to win a resounding victory, Hitler intended it to be celebrated in towns and villages across Germany. The inhabitants of Pforzheim were given little choice in the matter. Arthur Barth laid down exactly what was expected:
All houses and windows to be decorated with fir branches, flags and posters acquired from specific shops by Friday.
By 9 April, all windows to be illuminated with little red lamps bought from the same shops.
From Saturday, all radio sets are to be placed on windowsills so that everything can be heard in the streets.
In all inns and restaurants…all portraits of the Führer are to be decorated with greenery.
Such a decree was an extraordinary intrusion into individual lives, yet it was by no means unusual. Wolfram’s parents were growing used to being told how to behave. On this occasion, as in the past, they greeted such strictures with complete indifference and were fortunate that no Gestapo officer happened to notice their passive hilltop protest. However, in Pforzheim itself, the news provoked far stronger reactions.
Hannelore Schottgen’s mother was outraged about this manipulation of the populace instigated by Hitler. ‘Of course, he’s got his fingers in it again,’ she said to her teenage daughter. ‘On their own, the Austrians don’t want to join us. Is this guy never going to leave people alone?’
Hers was a lone voice. When the result of the plebiscite was announced – and people were told that 99 per cent of the electorate had voted yes – there was an outbreak of patriotic fervour in Pforzheim, as elsewhere. There were parties, singing and dancing in the streets, with everyone shouting: ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!’
When Wolfram’s sister, Gunhild, took a trip into town that afternoon, she noticed many of the older women wearing dirndles, the Austrian national costume, in honour of the occasion.
Those with cars headed for the Austrian border in order to join the excitement. In young Hannelore’s eyes, it seemed as if there was an extraordinary outburst of support for the Führer. Whatever people’s views, there was overwhelming praise for him.
The incorporation of Austria into the German Reich was indeed a personal triumph for Hitler. When, shortly afterwards, Hannelore’s parents organised a social evening, her father said to his friends: ‘You see, we are now one big nation – and without any war. Now Hitler’s going to solve all other problems as well.’
One of those present at the soirée responded: ‘I hope you’re right, Eugen. I’ve got two boys and war would be terrible.’
The autumn of that year brought leaden skies and heavy rain to Pforzheim. It also brought a major change to Wolfram’s life. Just a few months earlier he had turned fourteen, the age at which he could leave school. He jumped at the opportunity to quit full-time education, begging his parents to allow him to leave behind the travails of the classroom.
> When Erwin asked him what he wanted to do with his life, he heard the answer he was expecting. Over the last few years, Wolfram had developed a deepening passion for gothic woodcarving. He drew particular inspiration from the work of the medieval master craftsman, Tilman Riemenschneider, who could capture human emotions with absolute precision, wielding his chisel like an artist’s paintbrush. In the elongated fingers of his apostles, the aquiline noses of his saints and the long tresses of his prophets and bishops, Wolfram found a tender expression of piety and finesse.
Wolfram had carved his first sculpture at the age of six. Now, he told his father that he intended to make sculpting his profession. Erwin scoffed at the notion, not because he thought it ridiculous but because he feared that Wolfram would be unable to make a living. He suggested that he should first learn a trade, to have something to fall back on.
Wolfram was sent to lodge with an eccentric aunt in Stuttgart, where a position had become available for an apprentice carpenter. The hours were long and Wolfram had nothing in common with the rough types with whom he was working. Homesick, he soon returned to Pforzheim where he found employment in the workshop of a wood manufacturer.
That autumn, it seemed to Wolfram’s parents as if Germany was tipping inexorably towards war. In October, Hitler had deliberately provoked the Sudetenland crisis, claiming a large swathe of Czech territory that was inhabited by ethnic Germans and describing it as his last territorial ambition. Britain’s prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, was by now sufficiently alarmed by Hitler’s bellicose behaviour to fly to Munich and attempt to broker a deal directly with the Führer.
Hitler was contemptuous of Britain’s premier with his outmoded diplomacy and rolled umbrella. ‘If ever that silly old man comes interfering here again with his umbrella,’ he is said to have declared, ‘I’ll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach in front of the photographers.’
The ensuing Munich Agreement, which gave Hitler all of the Sudetenland, led to a flurry of anti-British propaganda in the German newspapers, expressing sentiments that were widely shared in Germany at the time.
Even friends of Wolfram’s parents, who were generally open-minded and enlightened, had a stereotypical view of the British in the year prior to the outbreak of war. They laughed at the way they dressed, supposing all Englishmen to wear a top hat and carry a rolled umbrella, while clamping a newspaper under one arm.
The umbrella was the object of greatest satire. When it rained in Germany people wore long coats with hoods or simply allowed themselves to get wet. They never carried umbrellas. Wolfram’s father called the English the regenschirmbürger – the umbrella-carrying nation, of which Chamberlain was seen as its ultimate personification.
Newspaper articles about the British changed tack in accordance with the views of the Nazi elite. So, too, did the lessons in Pforzheim’s schoolrooms. For the previous four years, children had been taught that Shakespeare was a bad man who had abandoned his wife and children. Schiller, by contrast, was portrayed as loyal and ever faithful. However, when it looked as if England was growing closer to Germany, everything went into reverse and it was said that the English were really of German origin. Shakespeare was therefore almost German and it was just by chance that he happened to have lived in England and not in Germany.
As the international friction mounted – and Britain signalled her solidarity with Poland in the event of Hitler harbouring ideas of further territorial expansion – so Shakespeare once again fell out of favour. The bard had become the barometer of international diplomacy.
It was the internal politics of Germany that were about to undergo the biggest and most dramatic alteration. Tensions were evidently being deliberately stoked by Adolf Hitler and were soon to reach breaking point.
Shortly before eight on the morning on 10 November 1938, the young Peter Rodi was kicking his way through the centre of Pforzheim on route to school. As he turned into Goethestrasse, he immediately saw that something dramatic had taken place during the night. All around him lay a scene of vandalism and destruction. Shop windows were smashed and the pavements strewn with broken glass. In places it was so deep that it looked like drifts of crystal snow.
At one point, Peter stooped down, picked up one of the shards and popped it into his pocket. Although unsure what prompted him to keep it, he must surely have realised that something of great significance had taken place – something, indeed, that was to cause shock and revulsion right across the globe. Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, was a dramatic escalation in state-orchestrated violence against the Jews of Germany.
It all began shortly before noon on the previous day. Peter was sitting in his classroom at school when someone came in – a local official – and opened all the windows. A few minutes later, there was a sudden and violent explosion that rocked the ground.
The large city synagogue, which lay just a short distance from the school, had been the target. Although the structure was still standing, the fine masonry was seriously damaged and all the windows had been blown out. The man who had entered Peter’s classroom clearly had advance knowledge of the explosion and had opened the school windows in order to preserve the glass.
Peter and his classmates were met by a disconcerting sight as they left school to go home. Someone high up on the dome of the synagogue was trying to hack off the Star of David. Unable to cut through the metal, he left it dangling at a precarious angle from the cusp of the roof.
The explosion marked the beginning of twenty-four hours of aggression directed towards Germany’s Jews, sounding the alarm to all those still living in the state of Baden.
Joseph Goebbels would later present the vandalism as a spontaneous uprising of the German people against the Jews. It was no such thing. The violence was a carefully organised response to the assassination of a Nazi official in the German embassy in Paris. Local party offices across Germany were contacted by Nazi hierarchs in Berlin and ordered to prepare a wave of retaliation targeting Jewish property.
Wolfram awoke on the morning of 10 November unaware that anything untoward had occurred during the night. His sleep had not been disturbed, nor was there any visible sign of any damage having been done in Eutingen. When he arrived at his carpentry workshop, the owner was in an agitated state. In whispers, he confided to Wolfram that the sound of breaking glass had kept him awake for much of the night.
The smashing of windows and destruction of property were only a part of the story. Brownshirts had also broken into Jewish apartments in the early hours of the morning and attacked the families living there. Twenty-three Pforzheim Jews were arrested on trumped-up charges and sent to Dachau concentration camp. Many more were beaten senseless by uniformed thugs armed with batons and cudgels.
Many people in Pforzheim who had hitherto been keen supporters of Hitler were appalled by what had happened that night. Hannelore Schottgen’s father could hardly look at his daughter when she asked him what he thought about it, as he was fighting back tears. Never having seen her parents so upset, she did not ask any more questions.
In Pforzheim, the ferocity had been directed primarily against property, but in surrounding towns, people themselves had been the principal target. In the nearby village of Eberstadt, the local Nazi Party leader, Adolf Frey, had acted with extreme brutality, paying a visit to one of the town’s oldest Jews, a widow of eighty-one named Susanna Stern, and ordering her out of her house. When she refused to get dressed, he shot her in the head and chest. When she continued to murmur her protests, he shot her for a third time.
The case was brought to court – one of the rare cases of a Nazi activist being called to account, but Frau Stern’s family were to be cheated of any justice. The elderly lady was described by the judge as a boisterous troublemaker who had provoked the attack. Frey, by contrast, aged twenty-six, was described as a ‘decent solid young man’ with an excellent reputation.
All charges against him were dropped.
Kristallnacht was a dramatic wake-u
p call for Pforzheim’s Jews. Many more now saw the writing on the wall. Of the 20,000 Jews who had lived in the state of Baden in 1933, some 7,000 had already left by 1938. Of the 800 still living in Pforzheim, 231 now decided to pack their bags and flee. Doctors, lawyers, physicians: many of the educated Jews decided to get out of Nazi Germany while they still had the chance.
Among them was the Rothschild family, owners of a large jewellery business in the centre of Pforzheim. They were on particularly friendly terms with Hannelore’s mother and father and often invited them for social evenings at their large suburban villa. By 1938, such visits had to be made clandestinely, after dark.
On one such occasion, the Rothschilds announced that they had taken the decision to leave; they needed to get rid of all their belongings in a short space of time since Jews were forbidden from taking anything with them when they emigrated. Their beautiful old dining-room furniture and two fine portraits were bought by Hannelore’s parents.
The Rothschilds were wise to get out when they did. In the months that followed Kristallnacht, all the remaining Jews of Pforzheim were moved out of their family homes and required to live in officially designated Jewish houses. The regime had decided to confine them to a ghetto that could more easily be watched and monitored by the Gestapo. There would remain until October 1940, when their fortunes were to take a sharp and terrible turn for the worse.
Uniformed marches through the centre of Pforzheim became increasingly commonplace as Germany drifted towards war. There was scarcely a public festival that did not involve the massed ranks of party stalwarts goose-stepping their way through Pforzheim. One particular day of festivity and national rejoicing fell on 20 April 1939, Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, when the Nazi hierarchy and party officials bent over backwards to organise elaborate celebrations.