When the Flagpoles Bloomed

by Vera Oredsson

  On visitor’s day, Easter Monday, we visited our maternal and paternal grandparents, where we were always treated to chocolate bunnies or “nests” with all sorts of candy in them. We surprised them with bouquets of Easter lilies and tulips.

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  In 1943, when our family split up, we, through the Hitler Youth, visited various hospitals to cheer up the injured soldiers. We handed over colourful eggs and flowers, and performed shorter skits and sang.

  A young Waffen SS candidate who injured his foot during a training exercise, which I did not see as particularly heroic, started to talk to me and we became acquaintances.

  Hans was a young man of 19 with an exuberant personality and who was a little too bold. During a visit to Bromberg, which is where the hospital was, he climbed down the drainpipe from his window when he saw me outside on the road. His hospital clothes and his bad leg did not prevent him from limping with me to the station. He was the total opposite of the general perception one has of a disciplined German soldier. He was lively and mischievous, but he must have won over his superiors, given that he always got away with his misbehaviour.

  One fine morning on the farm when my mother, brother, and I sat at the breakfast table, the warped kitchen door was thrown open and my friend Ilse came in, out of breath, and shouted, “Vera, you have to come and help us right away in the yard”. At the same time she winked with a hinting smile. I suspected right away what it was about: Hans! He was here! In the distance behind the pine woods one could hear the soldiers training, shooting, and explosions.

  Mother did not understand a thing, which was just as well, because her prudishness would surely have stopped me if there was the least little suspicion that there was some sort of interest in me from the opposite sex.

  Ilse and I rushed off to the open field where a giant stone dominated in the middle of the sunshine. “Where is he?” I panted while I caught my breath by the boulder. “Who?” teased Ilse, “I said that we need help in the field.” ”You tricked me, I thought it was Hans. You know how much I like him.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear”, a male voice piped up from behind the rock and a fully-armed soldier turned out to be Hans! A big hug, a joyful exclamation: “We’re going to the front, but I’ll write.” And with that thump from his helmet, weapon, and equipment, I watched as he ran back across the field.

  “He’s crazy”, said Ilse, “running away from an exercise like that. Don’t fall in love with him because that type dies quickly”. My friend predicted correctly. We exchanged a bunch of letters, but the last one came back to me in the NSV school in the summer of 1944. It had been stamped “Died for Great Germany”. Pathetically, I burned the letters I had received from him in the school’s furnace room, including the photo of the happy 19-year-old soldier. My friends wondered under protest why I had acted this way, but I wanted to go on without any memories.

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  I mentioned my prudish mother with her Victorian values. My father turned out to be different. He was stationed outside of Dresden where Siemens had moved to, to avoid the bombings of Berlin, where it had become impossible for the engineers to work at their drawing tables. One of his visits to the family in Kruschdorf coincided with a happy episode. Visiting the family was a well-meaning order from the state and even I was free from the NSV school in Thorn. I was just about to take a bite of my sandwich with “Harzer Käse”, a strong-smelling cheese, when Father came in and hastily snatched the sandwich out of my hand with the words, “Don’t eat that now. A few nice young men from the work service are waiting outside. They would gladly like to meet the girls here in the village. I told them that my beautiful daughter would surely know a few”.

  Mother protested wildly, but Father dismissed her by saying, “They are properly educated young men and the girl is 16 years old. Don’t be so—old-fashioned”. While they were talking, I fixed myself up and went out to the group of happy boys, and together we looked for Ilse and her sisters and many others.

  The summer evening was lovely and singing merrily we walked through the village, two by two, but still together. Everything was so proper, lovely, and innocent, but was still, or because of that, so very much fun.

  We looked for the mystical park, a forgotten relic that, according to my parents, was once owned by my forefathers. Old fruit trees, mossy statues, and a small lake in the middle, it must have been made by well-off estate owners, but now the dwelling-house served as a working camp. I would like to see that park again. Is it still there? Is there anything left at all of that little German village with its fertile soil that gave the good harvests to the industrious growers?

  I myself had a little garden where seeds were sown and germinated, and the lush plants came up without the use of any fertilizer whatsoever. I admired the Swedish farmers who put in so much effort and harboured so many worries about how much their soil would yield while their West Prussian counterparts had a soil that just gave and gave, but later nothing was good enough for the Polish thieves. Explain that one.

  Even this experience gave rise to an exchange of letters and nothing more. But what do today’s youth get out of life when everything is taken from them in advance and nothing is forbidden? They do not experience that time of innocence when shyness and respectability are a source of happiness on the way to a race-conscious and idealistic lifestyle like National Socialism wanted to shape it. Not the Victorian fright and sexual fear and not today’s licentiousness and immorality, but a conscious, responsible, and sound development with taboos around all degeneracy and immoral life. I am grateful that I got to experience the Third Reich, if just for a short time, during my younger years.

  Injured soldiers are honoured.

  We Could Finally Smell the Maybells

  The second episode during which I was in touch with the SS was in the spring of 1944, but it started back in the fall of 1943.

  I had been lured by brochures from a newly-founded organization called Landdienst (Rural Service). I am sure the idea was brilliant and good, but what people do with their good ideas is decisive. Landdienst was organized through the Hitler Youth and was to educate pioneers, in other words future farmers, males and females. That such a goal did not just turn out to be too trying for a city girl like me was not the only thing I experienced. In addition, the training program I went to in West Prussia had mostly German-Baltic girls in it, who had indeed gone through a whole lot of hardships, but who proved to be totally foreign to the spirit of comradeship like the NS ideology and the idea of community. There I was, a girl from Berlin, used to the Hitler Youth and its joyful life norms, who ended up in something completely different from what the light descriptions in the brochures had lulled me into, for the purpose of becoming a farmer.

  The school was situated on a slope, like a peaceful little estate, and the leader was a farmer girl from Danzig. About 15 girls greeted me on the evening of my arrival and they were somewhat reserved, which always feels trying for the new arrival.

  At the start I had a work-experience position with a small farmer close to the school and found my place in an otherwise foreign world. Clean turnips, harvest potatoes, learn to harness a horse and tie it to the wagon, as well as learning to drive one. From the beginning I felt at home in the school, but I could not avoid feeling a certain bullying against me, which before was totally foreign to me. The Berlin girl was obviously to be humbled and the Baltic girls became a curse I preferred to avoid.

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  After awhile I got to continue my work-experience with a farmer whose large farm and property were located quite far from the school. The several kilometer long road to and from the school was full of hardships, especially in the winter. The work was hard with doing the laundry in the creek that ran just beside the farm, winter storage of carrots that were to be covered by big piles of straw to protect them from the frost, milking a whole bunch of cows by hand, and after such a hard work-day I
had to walk the long road back to the school, where I was often met by having to empty the latrines under the ridicule and scorn of the Baltic girls.

  I got stomach cramps and vomited, which resulted in a friendly doctor advising me decisively to quit. Neither my condition nor my personality were suitable to this kind of life. After the Christmas celebrations I did not go back to Landdienst, but what I had learned there came in quite handy to some neighbours during the winter months in Kruschdorf, where my mother and brother had been evacuated to from Berlin. I felt really proud of myself when, during a boil epidemic that ran rampant through the village, I could jump in and drive a horse and wagon to run errands in Bromberg, about 20 km from the village. The epidemic struck every so often in an unexplainable fashion and the suspicion of the Polish opposition’s deliberate contamination arose but could neither be proven nor dismissed.

  My failure at Landdienst had lowered my mood to zero and my surroundings in West Prussia were in many ways purely psychologically joy-killing. If the Hitler Youth had not activated me, my life in that village would have bored me to tears. As a Swedish descendant I was chosen to recruit some German-speaking Polish girls to the youth movement. I succeeded better than expected, but I had to realize that the intolerance of the West Prussian Germans was much too hard to break. After the Polish violence against the German citizens in the fall of 1939, when so many lost their loved ones, feelings of revenge lived on in many of them. But I with my Swedish heritage wanted to break this trend of hundreds of years of hatred on both sides. Or the conviction: We National Socialists will show that we are better. But I met with a massive resistance, and after a fierce confrontation with one of the high-up leaders of Bromberg, I got bloody well furious. This is what happened: One of the early beautiful spring days in 1944 we drove our wagons full of many youths in a caravan to a larger town where we had a meeting for a big HJ manifestation. “My” Polish girls asked me insistently to be allowed to wear a scarf just like the German girls so they did not feel marked out as being second-class citizens. I did not think it would matter and approved of it. So we drove with merriment and song to the meeting place. Upon our arrival, I was immediately ordered to see the Ringführer (a high rank amongst the HJ) and got a good telling-off for allowing scarves to be worn by non-fully-affiliated German citizens. Through the window I could see how another leader harshly gathered in the scarves from the humiliated and sad girls. I was so angry! I tore off my scarf and roared, “I am Swedish, take my scarf too!” and left the room. There were no happy girls who turned around and drove home, and my time as leader in the HJ was short.

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  With unbroken conviction of National Socialism’s ideology, a conviction that was not crushed by careerists of the above type, I was so bold as to contact a high SS leader who I knew was on leave at that time and was visiting his family in the neighbouring village. The family was happy about the arrival of their new-born child. Their first child was a girl who was already a teenager.

  It turned out that the house was surrounded by a beautiful garden where smiling Polish girls took care of the paths. A stylish woman in her lower middle-age called out to her husband on my behalf. He came and turned out to be a nice confidence-inspiring person who I could easily confide in about all my troubles: my problem with the schools, HJ in Bromberg, and my being lost when it came to education and my future goals. He found exactly what I needed: the elite school within the NSV. A National Socialist school in the social sector that partly stood under the protection of the SS. He gave me hope and asked me to fill in an application form at the Gestapo in Bromberg right away. He advised me though not to be too spiteful towards the undiplomatic Ringführer in Bromberg. She had lost both her father and siblings during the blood-red days in August-September, 1939. But my attitude to break the vicious circle in West Prussia was right, according to him.

  My third meeting with the SS was thus the next day. I visited their office in Bromberg. It was really unpretentious. It was not at all like the flashy offices with portraits of Hitler, shining giant hawks with golden swastikas in their talons or the extravagance of swastika banners that one sees in the movies. A sign with the word “Gestapo” on a house along the street. A security guard post outside where my papers were checked. Then I went up a few steps and entered a simply-furnished room quite similar to a contemporary post-office or police station. Upon my inquiry I was given a few forms to fill in. It is common that the surname is written first, but I wrote my habitual first name Vera, but had just written the V when I discovered that my last name was to be written first. That is actually the only thing I remember from all the questions. The following comments came from the examiner: “That von, we’ll cross that out. It’s a snobbish title that you should forget within the community and upon acceptance into the school”. I told them about my mistake with the V, that it stood for Vera and nothing else. With a happy “Heil Hitler!” I left the office and went with light steps to the station. At Bromberg’s station I ate my obligatory coupon-free vegetable soup before a real chug-chug train took me back to Kruschdorf.

  Just a few weeks later I got a welcome letter from the NSV school in Thorn with a ticket and schedule. A lucky meeting that forever secured my National Socialist conviction.

  A happy Vera on the beach, 1943.

  Gladiolus

  The name Thorn was printed in capital letters above the train station, like all the other stations around the world in the 1940s. A soldier helped me out of the train car with my heavy suitcase, and with a sort of timid curiosity I now stood on the platform, prepared to start a new “career”. Two girls in my age, 15-16 years old, looked searchingly around amongst the arriving passengers and I understood by their clothes, brown linen dresses and white aprons, that they were junior students at the National Socialist School for future nurses and social-working posts in society, and that they were looking for me. They saw me and came a little fumbling towards me with my name on the tips of their tongues. A confirmative “yes” from my side and a “welcome” from theirs and then we went through town, which was characterized by a medieval atmosphere. Spring decorated the gardens and made a good impression on me and eased my nervousness. The girls’ attitude had a calming effect as well.

  At the end of Litzmanstraße, a 3-storey building rose up amongst the houses. The yellow bricks shone unpolished, which is so common in West Prussia. The building was surrounded by a large garden. Inside it was clean and bright. The whole mood seemed to me to be friendly, even though ELITE was written with capital letters. I was shown to my room with three beds, tables, and chairs. There was lots of space. I opened my suitcase. On top was my “Führer portrait”, which brought delight to my roommates. We had already made a good connection during our walk and now this broke the ice completely. They discussed where the portrait should be hung, and after awhile the Führer was looking down on us with his clear blue eyes, his broken collar, and uniform hat. It was a splash of colour on the light wallpaper. Thus started my life in the NSV school. That is to say, the brown one.

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  In the brown school there was a 3-month trial period. After three months you either got to stay on there or you got sent to the so-called blue school, which was not so centered on politics. Their education was pretty much the same, but more specialized in baby and mother care, but free from racial biology and political schooling, which we got from the SS.

  The SS functionary was a slender, elderly gentleman with glasses and completely bald. A friendly soul. We respectlessly called him “Das Bächlein”. He loved to end his lectures by playing a piece from Bach on the organ in our common room, which doubled as a classroom. “Bach” is German for “brook”, which runs murmuring through the landscape. Bächlein, where the suffix “-lein” always means “dainty”, “small” or “sweet” emphasizes nevertheless our devotion.

  But one day in July our interest was not particularly focused on his rings and colours which were conveyed
on the blackboard. Otherwise the lectures on racial biology were quite interesting, but on a beautiful warm day in July our gazes kept going towards the open window. In the middle of his lecture he stopped and said with a little put-on sharpness: “I can tell that the girls’ attention isn’t the best today. I find it meaningless to stand here and babble. We’ll change the lecture to one in History, that is to say Thorn’s history, with a walk through the town together.” Laughing and overjoyed, we confirmed our positive attitude to the change and followed him out.

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  Our walk around Thorn, a town with history. It is a town with Swedish connections. It was built by the river Weichsel with its medieval steeples that tower majestically over the plains. During our guided tour we looked down the river from an iron bridge. “Oh, if only we could go swimming here!” On such a summer day like this we all longed to cool off, but the Weichsel was still forbidden to swim in. Our guide saw our longing and said happily (and in hindsight full of faithful naivety): “In a couple of years girls, after our victory, this river will flow as clean as a glittering ribbon through West Prussia and you’ll be able to swim in it as much as you want”.

  We visited the cathedral with its stately arches. We looked at a castle with medieval gray towers from the outside. The towers looked as if they terrifyingly looked down on us. Parks and lanes lined the city. Tired after our long tour, we rested on our beds and took a breather.

  We were drowsy but we could still hear upset voices through our closed door. That surprised us, since there was always an imposed silence at this time. I myself felt ill, sometimes feeling feverish, sometimes freezing. Everything somehow foreboded an approaching catastrophe. Suddenly our door was thrown open and our superintendent shouted angrily, “Someone has tried to assassinate the Führer!” Our reaction was unequivocal horror, but we all reacted differently. One girl cried buckets, another sat stiff and white as a ghost on the edge of her bed, while others screamed their curses on the assassin. I do not remember how I got over the first shock.