Brigitte Knorrek was the most beautiful woman in town. Not a classical beauty: her legs were a little too short for that, her nose a little too long and her hips a little too heavy. It was more that Brigitte Knorrek was striking. She shone. No one else had such perfectly waved hair, such a red pout, such skilfully plucked eyebrows and such an impressive décolleté. What was more, she knew it. She walked the streets of Ludwigsfelde like a model on a catwalk.
Those who saw her still rave today about the girl in the stiffened petticoat who walked across the fairground with swaying hips and treated her schoolmates to candy floss and dodgem-car rides. The girls got the candy floss and the boys got to ride in her dodgem car; one after the other, they climbed in with her and then out again. If she took a special shine to one of them, he got to stay in for another round. Brigitte Knorrek was a kind of jackpot.
The mothers of Ludwigsfelde warned their sons about the girl, but of course that only spurred them on. Brigitte Knorrek was not only attractive; she also had a reputation for being rich and generous. Her parents were from Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia. They had had to leave their big hair salon and their house when they fled west from the Russians. They had wanted to go to Berlin, but only got as far as Ludwigsfelde—Lu, as people called it—a town set amid Brandenburg’s pinewoods, with nothing but a station, a bar and the ruins of the munitions factory.
People wore trousers sewn from horse blankets, exchanged their valuables for turnips and potatoes with the farmers from the neighbouring villages and made soup out of dandelions and stinging nettles. But Brigitte Knorrek’s parents were soon as well off as in Gleiwitz. Not long after their arrival, they opened the first hair salon in Ludwigsfelde since the war. It was in a small residential street between the station and the motorway. People always need a haircut.
Everyone went to the Knorreks; everyone knew the classy mother, the hunchbacked father, the severe aunt, the sprightly grandma, the beautiful Brigitte and her sister, Ursula, who had found work with a big American cosmetics company in West Berlin. The Knorreks were the first to be able to afford a car, wore clothes of good material, and when Brigitte Knorrek came home from school, there was always a big tureen of soup waiting on the table.
She seldom came home alone; she almost always brought hungry children with her. Dieter, a boy from a neighbouring village, would wait at the Knorreks’ in Theaterstrasse until his mother, a nurse, came to pick him up. Inge, a pale, sickly girl, came for lunch every day and was rigged out by her friend like a dressing-up doll. ‘Come on, Inge,’ she would shout. ‘Let’s try on some new outfits and go to West Berlin. See if anything fits you.’ And she would throw all her clothes on the bed, preparing for their trip. Then there was Heiner, a taciturn boy two classes above Brigitte Knorrek. He had it hardest of all.
Heinrich Scholl lived on the other side of the motorway in a small house with a big garden. The garden was lovely; there was an apple tree and a cherry tree which the grown-ups sat under on warm summer evenings, drinking schnapps and playing cards with the neighbours. You could have had a wonderful time there, climbing trees and running around, but in Heinrich Scholl’s childhood there was no question of that. He was only allowed in the garden to prune the roses or mow the lawn. If he was disobedient, his father took the hoe and clouted him over the back with it. His mother hit him with the chopping board.
Heiner was unloved from birth. He was born in those winter days of 1943 when Hitler’s army was defeated at Stalingrad, the air raids began on German towns and the allied forces dropped the first bombs on the Ludwigsfelde munitions factory, where Heinrich Scholl’s father, Erich, was among the workers. His mother, Elfriede, was forty-three years old. For a long time, Elfriede Scholl had hoped for a child of her own, and when it hadn’t worked out, she had adopted a girl from the home. The girl was called Christa; when Heinrich Scholl was born she was ten years old and it was hard enough to feed her. There was no room for another child in his mother’s life, not any more.
Before the war, Elfriede Scholl had been a cashier at the cheese counter in the Berlin department store Kaufhaus des Westens, and worn fur coats and hats like the customers she sold cheese to. Her husband had worked as a lathe operator at Daimler in Berlin. They had had a good life until he was moved to the aircraft-engine works in Ludwigsfelde in 1936. They may have had a new house with a garden, but the town was a dump, and the big factory, their only reason for moving there, lay in ruins nine years after their arrival. Erich Scholl no longer had work and they had to share the house with his sister-in-law’s family, who had fled from Silesia. There were nine of them living in one downstairs room, a kitchen and two little garret rooms.
In 1948, Heinrich Scholl’s father finally found work in a uranium mine in the Ore Mountains, but it was the worst work imaginable. For two years he stuck it out in the dank, lightless underground shafts. When he returned to his family in Ludwigsfelde, the big strapping man had become a coughing, boozing tyrant who bawled at his wife and beat his son.
Heinrich Scholl’s earliest childhood memory is of the day he slipped in the garden of his parents’ house and fell in the cesspit. He only just managed to get a handhold and crawl back onto the grass on all fours. He stank to high heaven; he felt sick. His father found him on the grass next to the pit, and perhaps it was the last time that Heinrich Scholl hoped to be comforted the way other children were when something awful happened to them. He never forgot his father’s blows. When Erich Scholl died a few years later, his son didn’t shed a tear.
He didn’t expect anything of his parents, didn’t wonder at their severity or their ignorance; he thought he was a bad boy who didn’t deserve to be treated any better. When he was eight years old, his adoptive sister, Christa, gave birth to a son. She called him Gerhard, and for reasons Heinrich Scholl couldn’t fathom, this new child was the object of all the love and attention that had never been bestowed on him. His mother picked little Gerhard up when he cried; she hugged and kissed him when he fell down and hurt himself. He had caught polio in kindergarten and fell down a lot; when he did, he would scream like a stuck pig and Heinrich Scholl was always the one to get the blame.
He went to school, he had to take care of the garden and the household—and now he had to take care of the sick boy too. When Gerhard was asleep at last, his mother would come home from her work in the co-op store and, without a word, she would tip onto the table the grocery coupons her customers had paid with. Heinrich Scholl had to sit up until far into the night, sticking them onto newspaper with flour paste. His friend Hans recalls how Heinrich Scholl sometimes turned up outside his house. ‘He didn’t ring the bell; he just waited on the street until I spotted him.’ When Hans wanted to pick him up to go swimming, Heinrich Scholl’s mother would scream through the house: ‘You’re not going anywhere until the lawn’s been mown.’
School was the only place where Heinrich Scholl felt safe. The teachers were kind to him; they liked this boy who was so clever, so hardworking and conscientious. He was good enough to go on to grammar school after eighth form, but his mother wouldn’t hear of it. She wanted her son to learn a trade and earn money. Heinrich Scholl was to become a panel beater. It was the first time he went against his mother’s wishes. He didn’t want to be a panel beater. He was short and slightly built and good at painting. The headmaster sent for his mother and told her that her son was far too clever to leave school. She said she didn’t care; he had to earn money; she couldn’t keep up the house by herself. The headmaster promised to help with the school fees. A hundred and fifty marks a month. She agreed to that.
In comparison with Heinrich Scholl’s life, Brigitte Knorrek’s was paradise. Gitti was the youngest in the family—an autumn crocus. She had her own room and was always getting beautiful clothes and West German marks from her sister in Berlin. The family flat was on the same floor as the hair salon; even in the hall it smelt of fresh soap, and when Gitti’s mother saw Heinrich Scholl she would call out: ‘Hello, Heiner, how are you? Are you hungry?’
Frau Knorrek was a tall woman with severe features, who had to run the show alone, because her husband, the master barber, may have been small and old and hunchbacked, but he still liked chasing after other women and spending the salon takings in the bar. She liked the small, helpful boy; he was so different from her spoilt daughter, who took money from the shop kitty without asking and stood half the class tickets to the funfair. Heiner didn’t mind helping out in the salon, washing the floor, fetching coal from the cellar. He soon came to the Knorreks’ every day, and because he was always slipped a few marks for helping out and always handed the money over at home, his mother made no objection.
Besides Gitti and her mother, Gitti’s grandma was also part of the household, and her aunt Anni often called in too. They were all strong, energetic women, who had learnt in the difficult days of the war to rely solely on themselves and not to mince matters. Gitti, who was born in September 1944, only knew about the war from her mother’s meagre accounts. She had no memories at all of the salon in Gleiwitz or the flight west. Her home was the shop in Ludwigsfelde with its adjustable chairs and its hood dryers, its clean-shaven gentlemen and its permed ladies. A small, self-contained world, where she wielded the sceptre like a queen. Gitti was direct, self-assertive, uncompromising. She didn’t ask if she could do a thing; she just did it, and she would brook no argument. When Heiner brought his friend Hans to lunch, she sometimes sent Hans home again, because she didn’t like his shirt. Her girlfriends got told how to do their hair, and anyone who ignored her was given a hard time. One girl in Gitti’s class, who paid no heed when she was advised that her bun didn’t go with her side-swept fringe, was ‘Frau Hitler’ for ever afterwards.
Heinrich Scholl’s best friend Hans couldn’t stand Gitti’s airs and graces, and stopped going to her house for lunch. Some of the girls in her class also kept their distance, because they didn’t want to be snubbed. But most of them weren’t bothered by Gitti’s manner. ‘It’s just the way she was,’ her friend Inge says. ‘If she said a sweater was blue, not red, then blue it was. But she didn’t mean any harm by it.’
‘She wasn’t at all uptight; she was a real mate,’ one of Brigitte Scholl’s male school friends says, and tells how in tenth form they went to their chemistry teacher’s house together to get him to give them their exam questions. ‘And who came up with the idea? Who was right up there at the front? Brigitte!’ He has forgotten how it turned out, he says, but he still clearly remembers her fearlessness.
The salon became Heinrich Scholl’s home from home. He felt at ease among the strong women who thanked him for his help, always had a dish of soup for him and even looked after him when he was ill. His stomach often hurt and Gitti’s mother would give him ‘rolling cures’. She made him a pot of camomile tea, swaddled him in hot towels and turned him from his belly onto his back and back again until he felt better.
He was still Gitti’s school friend, the poor boy from the terrible home, but after the death of the hunchbacked Herr Knorrek, Heinrich Scholl slipped imperceptibly into the role of the man in the house. Gitti’s mother left more and more of the handiwork to him and even asked his advice on her salon. Heinrich Scholl was hardworking, clever and as uncomplicated as a trusty servant. It just wasn’t quite clear to anyone what the relationship was between the trusty servant and the daughter of the house; they probably weren’t so sure themselves.
He helped her with her maths homework. She showed him how to embroider little mats and knit a scarf. In the summer they cycled to the gravel pit to swim or sunbathed on the deserted motorway. When Brigitte Knorrek had an admirer to visit, she would vanish into her room with him, while Heinrich Scholl sat outside the door with her friend Inge and played a round of Ludo. Or two. Until Gitti and her admirer re-emerged.
‘Gitti and Heiner were like children together; it wasn’t a proper relationship,’ says Dieter Fahle, the boy from the neighbouring village. ‘Heiner always just tagged along with the Knorreks. He came from an awful home. Nowadays you’d say he was damaged by his environment.’
Brigitte Scholl’s friend Inge says: ‘They always got on well, did Heiner and Brigitte. But Heiner wasn’t an option for most of the girls, because he was so short.’
Heinrich Scholl says: ‘Gitti’s boyfriends were in a different league from me. But sometimes I was allowed to help out sexually. I may have been short, but I was a good gymnast and the only one of her men who managed to climb secretly into her room from the courtyard.’
Gitti had several boyfriends. One was called Wolfgang and waited for her at the station in Teltow every evening. He was apprenticed to an electrician there; she helped out in a beauty salon. Wolfgang cycled from Ludwigsfelde to Teltow and took the train back just so he could travel with Gitti. The train—an old one with a steam engine and wooden seats—left at 7 pm on the dot. At 7.20 it arrived in Ludwigsfelde. They only had twenty minutes, but they had those twenty minutes all to themselves, because the shift workers took an earlier train. When they arrived in Ludwigsfelde, they straightened their clothes, then Gitti sat on the crossbar of Wolfgang’s bike and got a lift home to Theaterstrasse.
Manfred Schlögel, who was always known as Schnuppi, met Gitti at Lake Siethen. He was three years older than her, a big broad-shouldered fellow. When he shot down Potsdamer Strasse on his Java 350, people turned to look—all the more when Gitti was riding pillion in a short skirt. Schnuppi belonged to the same rowing club as Heinrich Scholl and his friends. They would all sit in one boat: in the middle, the powerful Schnuppi had to keep the pace up, while little Heiner, as the stroke, had to set the rhythm.
Gitti sat on a rug on the bank and looked on.
When the day drew to a close and the men got out of the boat, there was drinking and merrymaking, and whoever wanted to be alone got Gitti’s school friend Maria to give them the keys to her mother’s bungalow on the neighbouring plot. Sometimes Maria’s mother turned up unexpectedly, and Gitti and Schnuppi had to jump quickly into the lake and swim back to the boathouse.
Beside the motorbike, Schnuppi owned a canoe. It had a cover that protected its occupants from the weather and hid them from view. This made for a safer meeting place than the bungalow, but summer was soon over and in the winter there was only Gitti’s little room next to the salon, where her mother could burst in at any moment. One evening, Gitti told Schnuppi she had something to tell him: she was seeing Ulli, the dentist’s son.
‘She gave me the brush-off, completely out of the blue,’ says Manfred Schlögel. ‘There was no reason whatsoever. But that’s just the way she was; my mother had warned me.’
The next summer came: the summer of 1961. Ludwigsfelde now boasted a clubhouse and wedding-cake-style houses like the ones on Berlin’s Stalinallee. The ruins of the old Daimler works were cleared away and a new works was opened where they built twenty-cylinder engines, East Germany’s first jet plane and a motor scooter called the ‘Weasel’. Half the town worked there.
Schnuppi was a lathe operator in Hall 8. Heinrich Scholl was apprenticed to a toolmaker along with Assi, as he called his friend Hans. Women were in demand too, but factory work wasn’t Gitti’s thing. She wanted to become a beautician and persuaded her friend Inge to join her. The only institute that trained beauticians was in Dresden and it cost three thousand marks to train there.
Frau Knorrek paid for Gitti without demur, but Inge’s parents couldn’t afford the expensive college. The young women went their separate ways.
It was to be a summer of separations. But none of them knew that yet. For now, the days were long and hot and full of promise. The boys from Lake Siethen had finished school and decided to meet up in Bansin, on the Baltic Sea, home to the biggest campsite in East Germany. The girls stayed in Ludwigsfelde. Gitti had been given a dog by her new boyfriend—a small brown cocker spaniel. And camping wasn’t her thing anyway.
Heiner and Assi took the suburban train to Oranienburg at the end of the line and from there they cycled all the way up the B96. Th
ey reached Bansin in the middle of the night. They had earned fifty marks from a farmer, sent a sailor’s kitbag packed with tinned food and a spirit cooker on ahead by post and devised an ingenious system for surviving the next three weeks. They collected whatever departing holidaymakers left behind—sun-tan oil, bottles of beer, tins of food. And they cadged food off the girls who worked in the hotel kitchens—bread, cheese, sausage, ham and anything else left over from the cold buffets. It worked well. They had plenty to eat, swam in the Baltic and flirted with the kitchen girls. Heinrich Scholl and his friend remember every day in Bansin as hot and sunny.
Schnuppi, Gitti’s former love, arrived in Bansin on his motorbike a few days after Heinrich Scholl. It was 30 July 1961; he still remembers the exact date. In the evening, he headed for the beer tent. Hundreds of young people were sitting inside at long tables. Schnuppi sat down with two boys who were playing the guitar. ‘“Tutti Frutti” and all that,’ he says. ‘All the great music from the West.’
The guitarists were attracting more and more beer-tent visitors, including a group of young men with shorn heads. Schnuppi knew the ‘baldies’ from the beach. One was a barber’s apprentice and had given his mates a ‘holiday cut’. Manfred Schlögel—Schnuppi—says they were actually perfectly harmless.
The boys with the shorn heads began to dance, in between the benches and on the tables. ‘Off the tables,’ the landlord yelled. The baldies laughed and carried on dancing. The landlord fetched the local policeman; the local policeman fetched a riot squad. The baldies suddenly sprouted hats and vanished into the crowd, but one of them was caught and led off. ‘Let him go,’ Schnuppi and his friends shouted. The police got out their batons. ‘Workers hitting workers!’ Schnuppi yelled. Each sentence, he says, was to cost him a year.
The Scholl Case Page 3