by Geert Mak
She also told me about the great girls’ secret of the Third Reich, the campaign to give the Führer a child. ‘They organised solstice parties with selected blonde girls and boys, to breed children like that. A fanatical girlfriend of ours tried to get us to come, but we thought it was nauseating. These days they deny that, no one talked about it, but those campaigns really existed.’
Immediately after the great pogrom of Kristallnacht on 9–10 November, 1938 – almost 100 Jews were killed and 7,500 Jewish shops destroyed – the teachers read aloud a printed statement: the Jewish students were to leave the school. It had obviously all been arranged beforehand, down to the last detail. Ingeborg Goldstein and Edith Rosenthal packed their bags, looked around the class, then got up and walked out of the door together. ‘You could hear a pin drop.’ Truusje stood up and protested; after all, these were their classmates. She was told to leave the classroom as well.
On Luxemburger Strasse she saw Jewish shops being sacked. ‘One Jew had hidden in his cupboard. They picked up the cupboard, with him in it, and threw it from the fourth floor, then beat him to death. It was unimaginable that something like that could happen in this peaceful city. A few people stood watching, one woman said: “Those poor Jews”, another woman put her hand over that woman's mouth right away. It was like walking around in a dream.’
It snowed that winter, and she went sledging in the park with her playmate Miryam Meyer. When she walked past the Brauns’ house the next day, a window opened. Lotte shouted: ‘Truusje, is it true that you were sledging in the park yesterday?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, then it's me or that Jewish bitch!’
Little has been said about a question that now presents itself: how could this shift in mentality take place so quickly, in both Frankfurt and Cologne, after 1933? Where, for God's sake, were all those hundreds of thousands of active communists, social democrats and Christians who had taken part in protest demonstrations not so long before this? Where were the 56.1 per cent of the public who voted against the Nazis on 5 March, 1933?
There was, of course, the atmosphere of burgeoning intimidation. Right after the National Socialists seized power, the SS and the SA were given the status of ‘auxiliary’ police. Atrocities took place on a daily basis. More than a hundred temporary torture chambers were set up in Berlin, scattered over all of the city's ‘red’ neighbourhoods. In Breslau and Munich, Jewish judges and lawyers were literally beaten out of the courthouses.
An estimated 10,000 communists and socialists were arrested in Bavaria alone in spring 1933. In Prussia, approximately 25,000 such arrests were made, and throughout the country at least another 100,000 dissidents were roughed up and terrorised.
One month after Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Reichstag burned down. Marinus van der Lubbe had, more or less by accident, set fire to the building's most vulnerable spots, the huge curtain at the back of the meeting hall and the bone dry oak panelling behind. Within minutes, the papers reported the next day, the giant hall was ‘an inferno of burning benches and lecterns’.
Van der Lubbe could have done his opponents no greater favour.
Although Van der Lubbe had no ties with the German communists, the new chancellor demanded that all KPD parliamentarians be hanged immediately. In addition, Hitler had now been given an excuse to issue a whole series of decrees, to restrict civil liberties even further and to lock up countless political and journalistic heavyweights. In this way, the movements of the left were robbed of their leadership at a single blow, and that was not all. The wave of arrests also established a new norm: after that, anyone who rocked the boat could be spirited off to a concentration camp at a moment's notice. An estimated 100,000 communists or alleged communists were killed during the Third Reich. Many times that number spent shorter or longer periods in concentration camps.
Yet ‘the good Nazi years of 1935–7’ – a period generally ignored these days – really did exist. During that time, Hitler achieved two goals no one had ever thought possible: the six million unemployed of 1933 were all working by 1937, and Germany was once again considered a power to reckon with.
It was not the war industry, however, that served as the motor to the German economy in the early years. That change came later. At first, the country's economy was stimulated largely by huge infrastructural projects: the building of harbours and roads that did not compete with existing industry, but provided new jobs and new welfare for millions of working families. The policy was an extremely daring one in those days – somewhat comparable to the New Deal in the United States – and successful to boot. In 1938 German unemployment had fallen to three per cent, as compared with thirteen per cent in Britain and twenty-five per cent in the Netherlands.
For the first time in history, the Germans were not only farmers, workers, mothers and soldiers, but also consumers. Hitler won over the German masses with a degree of luxury they had never before experienced. The Volksempfänger, a household radio, was soon affordable for almost everyone. The first Volkswagens rolled off the production lines. During the 1936 Olympics, the Reichspost experimented with live television broadcasts: a world first. A kind of inexpensive, mass tourism – unique in those days – was developed by the Nazi organisation Kraft durch Freude (KdF) and offered weekend trips to Munich, train trips to Lake Garda and cruises to Madeira that were affordable even for factory workers. Millions of Germans took advantage of this: KdF ships such as the Robert Ley and the Wilhelm Gustloff soon became household words. The birth rate, the most reliable parameter of confidence in the future, rose by almost twenty-five per cent within a year after Hitler came to power.
This breathtaking series of successes swept away almost all of the modern Germans’ reservations. Untold numbers of those who had voted liberal, social democrat, Christian or communist in 1933 were transformed from the mid-1930s into enthusiastic adepts of the führer. Even the concentration camps filled many Germans with a certain sense of well-being: the ‘antisocial’, the ‘parasites’, the ‘criminals’, the ‘do-nothings’ and ‘foreign elements’ were off the streets at last.
This also explains why the huge sterilisation campaign that began in summer 1933 met with no real protest to speak of. The fact that some 400,000 ‘recidivists’ and ‘degenerates’ were sterilised under coercion was anything but a secret: countless newspaper articles, pamphlets, public information meetings and even films were dedicated to this ‘recovery of our racial purity’. Beggars, psychiatric patients, prostitutes, homosexuals and Gypsies could be taken off the street without due process of law for ‘isolation’ or ‘re-education’. Government policy papers appeared, dealing with ‘Combating the Gypsy Plague’ and granting considerable attention to the positions of the rassenreinen Zigeuner and the Mischlinge. ‘Lives unworthy of being lived’, they suggested, were better off being terminated.
Starting in summer 1939, the Nazis introduced a special euthanasia programme for the mentally and physically handicapped. The operation had the code name T-4 (the programme's head offices were at Tiergarten Strasse 4, a stately villa that has since disappeared) and was led by a steering committee of physicians, professors and top government officials. At the start of the campaign, it was estimated that 70,000 candidates were eligible for this ‘merciful death’: one out of every five psychiatric patients. But, the T-4 officials realised, it would take far too much time to dispose of such a large group by means of individual injections: the use of gas chambers would be more in keeping with their planning. In the end, six institutions around the country were designated as locations for gassing, and eleven ‘special hospitals’ were set up to put children ‘to sleep’.
Before long, the euthanasia campaign had become a poorly guarded secret. The newspapers began filling with death notices for handicapped persons, all of whom had unexpectedly died of ‘heart failure’. Some families removed their relatives from the hospitals, but the general reaction to this silent mass murder was one of resignation. Typical was the request one potential victim's mother sent to the administ
rators of the Eckardsheim clinic at the Bethel nursing home: ‘If my son is to be withheld further life, please see to it that he is put to sleep during a seizure in [his ward] Tannenwald, please give him something to that end. I know then that he will have been in the most dedicated of hands until he drew his final breath. How else can I ever be happy again for the rest of my days?’
The killing became a part of the ‘great unspoken’. Doctors and nurses – hundreds, if not thousands, of medical people must have been involved in this operation – participated obediently. Protests did come, however, from the churches. Clergy presiding at the funerals of some of the victims spoke openly about how they had died. In a packed St Lambertus Church in August 1941, the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August von Galen, railed against the use of euthanasia. In the Bavarian town of Absberg, in early 1941, residents reportedly stopped the buses that were taking away doomed patients. But the centre of resistance often named is that of the Bethel nursing home.
Today Bethel is an enormous care complex at the edge of town, a place I would never have visited if Simon Wiesenthal's big war map had not showed it as one of the few locations of German resistance to the Nazis. The reason for its inclusion was the principled refusal of its director, Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, to admit even a single euthanasiast to the grounds. When the police vans arrived to round up ‘his patients’, he stood in the gateway himself, spread his arms and shouted: ‘You will only enter this house over my dead body.’ This was what I had been told. After the war the German churches lauded him as ‘a great shepherd of Christianity’, ‘the man with the clearest vision within the churches’ and a model of ‘unbending resistance, with no regard for his own person’.
I receive a warm welcome to the hospital archives. When the archivist hears my story, he smiles shyly. ‘Well, I'm afraid we must be honest.’ The older people probably needed a story about heroes, but the younger generation is interested only in the truth. ‘It was all investigated carefully, about ten years ago. But have a look for yourself.’
He hands me a thick report, written by Stefan Kühl and published by the student association of the University of Bielefeld. The study is part of a series dealing with National Socialism in the region, and everything about it shows that Kühl left no stone unturned while researching the archives. I start reading. The story of Bethel is indeed one about courage, but also about the want of courage. It is about knowing, consciously knowing. And it is about saying nothing – above all, about saying nothing.
‘An inhuman regime spreads and extends its inhumanity in all directions, also and especially downwards,’ the Italian concentration camp prisoner Primo Levi wrote. And it undermines our ability to judge. ‘The generally accepted realisation that one does not submit to violence, but resists it, is from now, not from then.’ Resistance must be learned; in the 1930s it was a rare capacity of the few.
The Bethel dossier is a clear example of how difficult that learning process can be.
Bethel is an Evangelical Church institution. The names of the wards come from the Promised Land: Emmaus, Capernaum, Carmel. Bethany, formerly known as Patmos, consists of a complex with eight wings that today houses a neurological clinic. In the 1930s this was home to some one hundred epileptic and multiply handicapped young people. They were the direct target of the Nazis’ campaign of genetic purification.
The first campaign, as we have already seen, comprised the sterilisation of ‘degenerates’. Bethel's management did not protest. Everyone who fit the criteria was obediently sterilised in 1933. Six years later, when the euthanasia campaign began, the staff became more agitated. In late 1939, Bethel's auxiliary branch at Brandenburg was ordered to fill out ‘registration forms’ for all its patients. This, it was claimed, was merely a ‘statistical measure’. When he read the questions, however, the head of the clinic, Reverend Paul Braune, became alarmed. He refused to complete the papers, and Bethel's management did likewise.
A few months later, in March 1940, Braune was asked to investigate the sudden death of thirteen epileptics. His inquiries, carried out at other institutions as well, confirmed his suspicions: in total silence, a campaign of murder had started. When he reported his findings to the authorities he was told that it would be wiser for him to investigate no further.
During the weeks that followed, Braune and Bodelschwingh warned everyone they could contact: colleagues at other institutions, government officials, ecclesiastical leaders. By summer 1940, all of the highest church authorities had been informed, including the Spiritual Advice Council of the Evangelical Church of Germany. On 9 July, 1940, Braune sent a memorandum to the church's leaders: ‘We beg you to act as quickly as possible, now that the greatest danger is at hand.’ The next day, the Evangelical Bishop of Würtemberg, Theophil Wurm, wrote a personal, ten-page letter to the ministry of internal affairs in which he expressed his deep concern about the rumours he was hearing.
Had the church leaders voiced a public protest at that point, the lives of tens of thousands of handicapped people would probably have been saved. Hitler was – in later years as well – very sensitive to German public opinion on this matter. Braune received a noncommital reply. One month later he was arrested by the Gestapo. Bodelschwingh was informed that a warrant had been issued for his arrest as well.
This first phase of resistance was characterised by secrecy. Everything took place behind the scenes. The most important and most obvious weapon, that of public opinion, was not wielded. Nor did Bodelschwingh ever make use of his many contacts abroad. Noteworthy was the confidence both clergymen had in the government. Both of them continued to assume that National Socialist Germany was a state under the rule of law, both saw the euthanasia programme as a mere aberration, a minor abuse in an otherwise well-run society.
The second phase began. Paul Braune was released in late October 1940, but he had to promise to no longer resist ‘the measures taken by state and party’. Everyone in his surroundings knew why he had been arrested and why he was silenced. Bodelschwingh's involvement went no further than the institutions for which he himself was responsible. Unlike some of his fellow clergymen, he never again uttered a public protest.
Meanwhile, Bethel had allowed seven Jewish patients to be sent on transport. They were the Nazis’ primary target, and were almost certainly gassed in the former Brandenburg house of correction. Five other Jewish patients were removed from the institution by their families in the nick of time. Soon afterwards, they too were probably killed. Bethel did not protect a single Jew.
For non-Jewish patients, the situation was very different. Bodelschwingh and his people continued in their stubborn refusal to fill out registration forms. The reason they gave was their own Christian conscience, but, as Kühl's study shows, they also sought a form of cooperation with the T-4 physicians. In the end, a compromise was reached. A committee of eighteen euthanasiasts was allowed to visit Bethel in March 1941 and submit a number of patients to further inspection. In this way Bodelschwingh hoped to win time, but the arrangement also had something ambiguous to it: we have our problems of conscience and law, you handle the dirty work. What's more, they allowed themselves to be talked into yet another concession: the patients were to be preselected by the clinic's own physicians. This was done so proficiently that the euthanasiasts went along with almost all their recommendations, and so finished their work much more quickly than they had expected.
There was, in other words, nothing like a director who almost literally threw himself before the trucks to save his patients. On the contrary. The reports show that the euthanasiasts saw the entire expedition to Bethel as a festive outing. The very first afternoon they ate ‘quite sumptuously’ in the city's Ratskeller, as Dr Mennecke wrote in a letter to his ‘liebe Putteli’, and on Sunday the gentlemen took the bus together to visit the monument to the Germanic chieftain Hermann/Arminius in the Teutoburg forest. They made no attempt to disguise the real reason for their visit to Bielefeld. The personnel at the Ratskeller in particular o
verheard a great deal. ‘It spread through the countryside like wildfire,’ Bodeschwingh complained in a letter to Hitler's personal physician Karl Brandt, an acquaintance of his. ‘Within a day after the doctors arrived there were farmers who came up to our patients working the field and asked them: “Did you know that the murder committee has arrived in Bielefeld?”’ In light of the ensuing unrest, he then asked: ‘Can't you ask the Führer to let matters rest, at least until after the war, when there will be a clear legal foundation for all this?’
After the euthanasiasts’ visit, plans were made to warn the families of the threatened patients. And in Bethel's archives there is indeed a draft letter from Bodelschwingh in which he points out the possibility that ‘in the near future, patients from Bethel may be transferred to other institutions’. In it, he emphasises that ‘for many of our patients it will no longer be possible to fulfill the duties agreed upon’. Stefan Kühl suspects, however, that this warning was never sent: there are no letters to be found with questions or replies from alarmed family members. And the draft letter also shows us something else: Bodelschwingh expected to have to call off his resistance within the foreseeable future.
What am I now to conclude about the Bethel affair, after my day of research? The place of honour on Wiesenthal's map of resistance is undeserved, that much is clear. Under duress, Bodelschwingh tried to save his clinic, his conscience and his own skin. That is all quite human and understandable. It would be misleading, however, to elevate him after the fact to the status of a Protestant saint of the resistance. He was not one of those with that ‘rare capacity for resistance’. The unsung Paul Braune was probably such a man, and so were a few other clergymen and physicians. Were they not fit to be made heroes of the resistance? Or was there something else? Was it the Evangelical Church's elite who were in particular need of a hero, in order to maintain their moral authority after the war?