by Heath, Tim
The Winterhilfswerke (WHW), or Winter Relief Fund, was established in September 1933. The WHW collected donations from businesses, institutions and wealthy individuals around Germany, donating such funds to those Germans suffering from the combined effects of poverty, unemployment and homelessness. Again, this proved to be a success. It was of huge benefit to the poor working-class families of the industrial heartland who suffered particular hardships during the past winters of the pre-Hitler years. The WHW adopted the morale-boosting slogan of ‘A People Helps Itself’.
It was also in 1933 that Hitler ordered the rearmament of Germany. The rearmament programme would further aid the problem of unemployment as well as form the foundation of Nazi aggression in Europe.
Kirsten Eckermann was ten years old when the Nazis came to power in 1933:
I remember my father’s initial excitement over Hitler. My father and mother had both suffered like many German families as a consequence of the First World War. My father had lost members of his family in that war and I suppose looking back he can be forgiven in a sense because of that. We lived in the industrial village as some called it in central Berlin. The men there were all labourers but some were very skilled at their work. There were times when unemployment caused great misery and if men could not work they could not feed their families and violence in the home became frequent.
My father like many men of his kind was a very strong disciplinarian with a temper. He rarely ever displayed any open affection towards me. Even as a young child he would not kiss and cuddle me very often. I always did what I was told and obeyed my parents, it was the way that girls were expected to be. I myself was never really interested in politics and often ignored the conversations that my mother and father had about Hitler and the Nazi Party. The name Hitler was mentioned many times in our house. There were days when my father would come home drunk and all he would go on about was Hitler. I dared not leave the room without my parents’ permission and had to sit there and listen to him rant on and on until he had got it out of his system.
I know that there were a great many working-class Germans who blamed Jews for their predicament. That was because they had been listening to Hitler and he had exploited their fears to further himself politically, though of course there were obvious problems and maybe Jews were to blame for some of them. Many factories, workhouses and businesses in the streets were under Jewish ownership. When the men lost their jobs they obviously blamed the Jewish bosses and there was that resentment that Hitler and the Nazis exploited. My mother also once tried to find work within a Jewish-owned shop but had to leave because one of the owner’s sons had tried to make sexual advances toward her. My father was furious but he could do very little about it at that time. Hitler considered Germany to be a racial sewer and he would shout and rage about how the inferior races, if tolerated, would destroy the Germanic race and its purity.
Hitler for some strange reason attracted girls and held their attention. ‘Germany for Germans’ he would shout at every meeting and he would do so with an immense depth of emotion. He would almost make you cry and he touched you in a way that no one else could. It really was no surprise to where this was all leading. I don’t think many really considered the long-term reality of a Nazi government and the penalties that would have to be paid as a result of supporting it.
At school Nazi influence came into the classroom very rapidly. There were many Jewish children in our school but once the Nazis had gained control this soon changed. At my school, Jewish children became the subject of ridicule and over a period of time became victims of bullying from the non-Jewish children and the teachers. We dared not talk to Jewish children anymore as our teachers said it was forbidden. Groups of girls would gang up and single out a Jewish girl: they then pulled her hair and tore at her clothes and as she lay crying on the ground they would spit on her and shout ‘Juden’ repeatedly.
My god, those were dreadful times and it is one of the many reasons why up until now I have refused to talk about it. For heaven’s sake, all we needed was bread – it just all went too far.
As Hitler began his programmes to mobilize his workers and rearm Germany, he also began to put into effect plans to rid Germany of undesirable racial elements by introducing discriminatory laws. Jews, gypsies, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and blacks were all considered as undesirables. When questioned on the issue, Hitler raged, ‘Because they are independent of the German will and of German values, as an uncommitted race of criminals they can therefore contribute nothing to my Germany.’
The Jewish families who chose to remain in Germany were soon deprived of their citizenship. They were deemed unemployable and were not allowed to own even a motor vehicle. Jewish children were often expelled from public schools, while families had their valuables and property confiscated. Jews were in some cases also deprived of everyday essentials such as food and medicine. Such acts of racial extremity shocked many visiting foreigners.
Hitler had become so completely obsessed with racial purity that he had had numerous meetings with key henchmen to discuss what he referred to as the ‘Jewish Problem’. While Hitler and those within his close circle discussed the Jewish Problem, violence towards Jews on the streets was becoming commonplace. Kirsten Eckermann:
Though it was some years until Kristallnacht (‘Night of Broken Glass’) of the 9th November 1938, when Jews were murdered by Nazi mobs, violence towards Jews could be witnessed regularly on the streets of Berlin in particular. Of course, we used to have to buy goods from Jewish-owned shops and before Hitler became Chancellor we never really thought anything about it much.
Once Hitler was in power he wasted little time in nurturing the resentment, which existed between working-class Germans and the rich Jewish families who owned businesses. It had been there for a while and was like dynamite waiting to be lit. The Nazis had gone to great lengths to prevent Germans from using Jewish-owned shops. Often it was the job of the SA/Brownshirts or Sturmabteilung (Storm Troopers) as they were known to us, to do this work. They would paint the Star of David on the front of the shop and add things such as ‘Juden’ or ‘Achtung Juden!’ (Beware Jews!) to make sure you knew not to buy goods from there.
I often went with my mother to buy the few goods and there were to be many occasions where we could not help but witness violence. A group of SA men were gathered outside a shop that had just received its Star of David symbol; they had also painted a skull and cross bones onto the front window. ‘Don’t buy from Jewish shops,’ they cried as people walked by, ‘Buy from German shops only’, ‘Keep away from these dogs!’ and things like that. The owner of the shop had tried desperately in vain to reason with the SA, but in return they turned on the man and began to beat him in front of his wife and children. Other SA members began to smash the windows of the shop while the man was on the ground being beaten. My mother took me by the hand and quickly walked away from the scene. We had to push through a large crowd who had come to watch and as we pushed our way through, I remember the screams of that man’s family, hysterical screams of the man’s wife and the children. I looked up at my mother and asked ‘mutter, why are they doing that?’ And ‘why can’t we buy food from there anymore?’ I understood the scrawl that the SA men had painted upon the shop windows but still did not fully understand why they had to do that to those people.
In school, they began to teach ‘Mein Kampf’ and they told us that if we did not destroy the Jews within our society then they would destroy us. When I joined and became a member of the Jung Madel (Young Maidens) and Bund Deutscher Madel (League of German Maidens), I began to understand the situation more, though I still could not fully grasp the politics. I can say with all honesty that I was not anti-Jewish, and that I would not have physically harmed anyone regardless of their race, etc. We were told it was the rightful way for us as German girls, and we had certain obligations to fulfil for our country and must obey the new German order in the name of Adolf Hitler our Führer.
The Nazi
s also wanted to create within its Third Reich a new culture, and on 10 May 1933, a parade of students arrived at the University of Berlin where a huge pile of books were set on fire. The books burned were all those concerned with traditional German thought, society and home, and in fact any material that referred to the German people and what was now regarded by many as ‘the bastard culture’ of the old Germany.
The Reich Chamber of Culture was created, under the direction of Dr Joseph Goebbels. Any individual or body engaged in fine arts, music or theatre, radio, etc, were all required to join their respective chambers. Anyone failing to comply with the strict legislation was given a jail term. Of all the chambers, the music one fared best, as music was the least political. That said, music written by Jewish composers and playwrights, such as Mendelssohn and Reinhardt, were forbidden. Jewish musicians were also removed from orchestras and opera.
The press and radio in Nazi Germany were also subject to the new culture laws. Everything was scrutinized, and journalists were told what to write and how to write it. Often editors of newspapers had to be Nazi sympathizers who had to be both politically and racially clean. Those newspapers that had been under Jewish ownership were closed down and their equipment confiscated, along with any funds. Radio suffered in exactly the same way by being totally under state control. Radio was by far the most important propaganda tool the Nazis had. As a result, the broadcasts were unexciting and monotonous in content, so few Germans listened to the radio. The film industry also suffered. German films generally attracted very small audiences at first. Most would spend their time watching B-class Hollywood movies instead. Most of the German films produced at the time were of such poor quality, that even the lower classes of German society found them boring. A former bomber crewman with the Luftwaffe, Horst Frank, commented during the writing of this work:
The German films were dreadful, and were constantly interrupted with propaganda and it is probably just as well that we paid little attention to them. We were much more interested in our girlfriends to actually watch those awful films. We only went to those places so as we could get into the warm and away from our parents’ homes and things. Most of the time we went to the Haus Vaterland (House of the Fatherland) – this was a very popular amusement centre in the Saarlandstrasse. We would get together and put our money together and that is where we would take our girlfriends. It was a popular place with young people back then. At home, girls were often chaperoned by their mothers and fathers and you dared not touch them or kiss them in their parents’ presence, not even on the cheek or anything.
With the dictatorial control of the Third Reich in place, even children became victims of Nazi propaganda, culture and ideology. The Hitler Jugend for boys had been in existence since 1926, under the direction of Kurt Gruber, who on 19 and 20 August 1927, led 300 Hitler Youths in a march at the Nuremberg Rally, earning himself a special commendation from Hitler. It was, however, not until Hitler gained power in the mid-1930s that the female equivalent to the male Hitler Youth – the Bund Deutscher Madel would come into existence. The only other country that could boast a strong and regimented fascist youth movement at the time was Germany’s ally, Italy.
The Italian equivalent to the Hitler Youth and BDM was the Opera Nazionale Balilla Organization (ONB). It is interesting to note that Italy’s fascist youth organization chose not to educate its children, particularly females, to the levels of political awareness that existed within the Hitler Youth. Italian society would also have never tolerated the militarization of its children and young people. The Italian fascist youth organization was more symbolic of Italy’s support for Nazi Germany than an active or aggressive political force.
The uniform worn by girls of the German BDM and the Italian ONB were of a similar pattern, which does reaffirm to some extent that Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini created the ONB purely out of fascist uniformity, and not through any political or social necessity. That said, there was, however, in fascist Italy at the time, substantial acts of violence aimed at minority groups such as blacks and gypsies. The hatred of anything Jewish was encouraged and endorsed by Mussolini.
In reality, though, fascism and war had no place in the hearts of the Italian people, so Italy’s subsequent costly alliance with Nazi Germany was to be short lived. Mussolini was later executed and his body strung up at an Esso petrol station in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, where mobs of people kicked and punched his corpse. It was a violent and undignified end for the man many German girls referred to as ‘Hitler’s Clown’.
The German youth of the 1930s already had a strong identity of its own, much like the modern youth society of today. Yet, owing to the strict family values of the day, German youth, particularly girls, were both very confined and repressed. Hitler understood the vital role that youth plays within a society, and his Third Reich would be no exception. He also understood, more than most, that the ethic in which the youth form the foundation of every society, both old and modern, allows each society to define the role of its youth via its own individual sets of rules and its cultural teachings.
The youth, especially of the feminine gender, were to prove an important factor within the social fabric of Hitler’s new Germany. It was the female that would bear the biological burden of the Nazi Aryan-race philosophy, though in the beginning much of what Hitler was offering girls and young women in Germany appeared attractive.
Young girls were soon to find themselves under pressure to ensure that they became, in every sense, the embodiment of Aryan culture. That said, one must also note that the issue of male supremacy and domination over females in Hitler’s Third Reich was very clear, and therefore the standing of young males and men as masters within the Third Reich was never questionable.
Hitler was obsessed with young girls and women, yet the thought of women working as equals with males in politics he found unacceptable. This is reflected in the fact that, before the Nazis came to power, women had the vote and there were thirty female MPs. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they threw out all of the women MPs. They were also removed from clinical practices, positions within the civil service and the teaching profession. They were also banned from law courts as judges, lawyers and even jurors.
Hitler was of the opinion that women were unable to think logically or reason objectively, since they allowed themselves to be ruled only by their emotions. Yet for most women, particularly young girls, it can be said that the Nazis had particularly sinister intentions in the way that they were to form at least one half of the gene pool of the Aryan Race – they were to be Hitler’s biological Nazis.
Married women were supposed to fulfil their role as child-bearers and wives, and not have jobs. Childless women were labelled traitors, while mothers of large families were given certain financial benefits and presented with a variety of awards. A German woman giving birth to her sixth child could earn herself tea and cakes with Hitler himself, as a reward for procurement of children for the state.
Upon reflection, it is strange to think that, even after all the prejudice orchestrated by Hitler and the Nazis towards their womenfolk, they would remain loyal. By the time Hitler’s life finally reached its insane conclusion, many young girls and women would be lying dead or wounded in the ruins of such cities as Aachen and Berlin, after fighting in a vain bid to save the Third Reich, whose leaders looked upon them as no more than second-class citizens who were only fit for motherhood.
In creating his youth movement, Hitler viewed himself as the architect of a new generation of German boys and girls, from the very young to those in their teens. During the mid-1930s, Hitler defiantly crowed to the outside world the pride that he had for his Hitler Youth generation: ‘The youth who graduate from my academies will terrify the world.’
In later years, those very words would receive their prophetic justification.
Chapter Two
Mitte Girls and the Jung Madel
It is early morning in the Mitte borough of Berlin, the only sound
s being those emanating from the nearby factories and workhouses. A member of the local district Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) is busy walking the streets, pausing every so often to paste posters at suitable vantage points along the way. By the time the children leave their homes for the short walk to school, the Mitte is bustling with life. Men cycling home from their ‘graveyard’ shifts, while others mill around the streets, smoking and talking amongst themselves, before disappearing inside their homes.
On the way to school, a group of girls, aged from nine to eleven, stop to look at one of the brightly coloured posters pasted on a board at the end of their street. The poster depicts a broadly smiling girl in uniform, and the poster is emblazoned with the words: ‘All ten-year-olds join the Hitler Youth!’ For some, the allure of the image of the smiling girl on the poster is just too much. The girls gather around and gaze at the poster. They talk about becoming Hitler Youths in the twin organizations of the league of German girls. Not wishing to receive a tongue-lashing for being late for school, they reluctantly walk away and continue their journey. The poster and its contents, however, would be on their minds for the remainder of the day. On their way home, they would look at it again, absorbing the image of the smiling girl. For some, she personified everything that they could never imagine themselves being.
The Mitte girls did not have popstar icons with which to identify or create an identity for themselves. Instead, via his propaganda, Dr Goebbels offered them a chance to become servants of the Reich and Hitler. In turn, they would be offered a nice uniform to wear, trips to summer camp, and the chance to become a part of what was the new prosperity of German society.