Anyway, as quickly as he’d jumped into that job, Wulf Bley was gone. By the end of the year he had said goodbye, I think by Christmas, and then he had left. They couldn’t do anything with him at the Broadcasting Corporation. He couldn’t do anything. He’d just washed up on the tide. He had been a young soldier, a young pilot, and then he’d cheated his way through life, but never did any training or studying. But of course he joined the Party early. I never heard of him again afterwards. He was just one of the old fighters that the Nazis had promised to look after once they were in power. They wanted to put him somewhere or other, but like many others he wasn’t what you would call a genius. At any rate, I stayed at the Broadcasting Corporation.
It was thanks to that lucky encounter with Wulf Bley that I had a contract, and a very nice contract too. Oh, I can’t remember how much exactly now, but anyway I was making over 200 marks a month. That was crazy money. Compared with what I had got by on for years, it was a princely sum. At first I worked for the board of directors, and then in the office of the former directors. That wasn’t terribly honourable in itself, because there were people there who were due to be shunted off – all the secretaries who had been senior in the former Broadcasting Corporation. They had worked for the Jews, because most of the board members had been Jews, who had all been thrown out or sent to the camps; or at any rate out of the broadcasting centre. The secretaries of the Jewish staff members had been sent to the former directors’ office to just make copies or duplicates.
Then I had some bad luck and some good luck at the same time. Shortly after starting at the Broadcasting Corporation I fell ill with a protracted cold that went to my lungs. It got worse and worse, and then I was told I should apply to the health insurer for convalescent leave, in order to spend at least four weeks on one of the newly established homes on the Baltic coast. And the doctor actually agreed, and sent me to the island of Föhr [in the North Sea] for a cure. In the end I spent six months in the sanatorium, and the Broadcasting Corporation transferred my money to me every month. Having that kind of luck was unimaginable at the time. Later I had to go for another cure, but that one lasted for only three months – all paid for by the Broadcasting Corporation.
After that, I switched to the press department of the Broadcasting Corporation and went to the Rundfunk exhibition. They discovered I did brilliant shorthand, so I wrote out the speeches of politicians and others. I even wrote out an early speech by Goebbels when he opened the exhibition. I was really very good and very quick at shorthand, and that was a big bonus for the press department. So I really liked working there.
A little while later I ended up in the Zeitfunkabteilung.3 Of course I liked that best of all. With my men. All ages, so there were the reporters and football reporters. Eduard Roderich Dietze,4 he did the tennis commentaries. Rolf Wernicke5 did football. Professor Holzamer,6 he was another reporter. Later he was the first person in charge of [the broadcaster] ZDF.
So I had a lot of work at that time. Everything started in the morning with a huge spread of coffee and cakes, and then they discussed things that were happening in Berlin and in the world. Then the radio cars went out – ‘Echo-Wagen’, they were called – the outside broadcast vehicles with the reporters. We had an Echo in the morning, an Echo at lunchtime and an Echo in the evening. Important visits from foreign dignitaries, princes or football matches, concerts and theatrical performances. There was a lot of stress. You couldn’t keep to any mealtimes or meeting times, but in the evening we always ended up having a convivial gathering. Sometimes only with a beer in the canteen, or at Eugen’s – a wonderful Berlin local. Most of the reporters were unmarried, although some were already married, and they went home after work. Somebody always had a car, and that was quite special in those days. But the reporters all had one, so I was always driven home. I was simply one of the guys and had a few wonderful years.
I particularly like to remember the 1936 Olympic Games, and of course the Broadcasting Corporation was involved in those. It was a wonderful time. More than anything it was possible for us to meet foreigners. I remember a friend called me up and said, ‘Hey, I met an Indian or a Japanese person yesterday, anyway, someone from a completely different world.’ And he had heard that she knew someone in the Corporation, and he really wanted to take a look at the Corporation. And then she approached me to see if I could make that possible. She said, ‘I sent him to you – he should be there any minute, so you’re prepared.’ And he did come. He even spoke German, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to talk to him. And then one of the senior staff members guided him through the building, in so far as he could show it to him. We had arranged to meet the man for dinner that evening. It was a sensation, being with someone who spoke a different language. That was something special. Tell a child that today, a twelve-year-old.
Berlin was in a great state of excitement. Berlin was the most hospitable city in the world. Everyone had been asked to make rooms available, because there weren’t enough hotels and bed and breakfasts. Of course we made a room available as well. You got money for it too. Ten marks a night. But it was also a great honour to have a foreign guest. I still remember that the Olympic Games had already begun, and no one had contacted us. My parents had cleared out their bedroom. They’d made it very beautiful. And no one came. But then, on the third or fourth day of the games someone from the Olympic Committee office in Berlin called to ask if we were still taking guests. Yes, of course, whenever you like! And then a couple from Holland came. So there was great excitement, and none of us went to bed. They arrived with tickets that they’d ordered in advance, and were a terribly nice couple. We walked very proudly through the city thinking, ‘We’ve got Olympic guests as well.’ They sent us things from Holland afterwards, biscuits and cheese. It was a great experience.
We were very busy at the Corporation at the time, of course, with one broadcast after another from the Olympic stadium or the area around Berlin. I hardly had time to look at the games. I only went once to an athletic event, and once to a dressage competition. It wasn’t easy to get tickets, and it was expensive as well.
But the city was transformed. The Kurfürstendamm was suddenly like being in Paris. The people were all cheerful, and the weather was fine. It was the festival that God Almighty had given the Führer. That was what Berlin 1936 was like. And if you walked through the streets you heard English and French, or you saw Indians; I remember that. The first time we saw people with different skins, not exactly Negroes – at least I don’t remember any Negroes – but dark people. I only saw one once at the zoo, but Indians, that was something special.
And of course the reports from the games were provided by the Corporation. We had good people, very good people, who made names for themselves later on and also started working on television. Rolf Wernicke was my immediate boss in sport, and was part of Zeitfunk. All the stations were part of the Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft. And every station was responsible for its own location. But they had to decide who they were broadcasting to.
There was no free speech any more. Everything was supervised and listened in on. I don’t know if they put people under surveillance before. But as I found out later, Goebbels went through every film script, however short and apparently insignificant. He poked his nose into everything, raised objections and removed actors or demanded different ones, so he always had an influence on the cast. At the Corporation there were clear directives about what you could and couldn’t do. You knew how you had to behave. There were already Party loyalists in the individual departments. Not all of them were ‘old fighters’; they were people who belonged to the Party, who had performed certain services. Sometimes they were completely clueless, artistically clueless people. But they had a good Party job; they were also SS leaders. No one would have dared resist or stand up to them.
No individual observers needed to show up any more. The people who had the say at the Corporation were all indoctrinated, after all. And from that point more and more anti-Jewishnes
s probably crept in. You weren’t aware of it everywhere, but of course you were in the Corporation Literature Department. But not in children’s or women’s broadcasting. They had recipes and children’s songs. Over time you got to know more and more people, and then you knew if somebody was a hardliner or somebody who would be a nice person if he wasn’t in the Party.
Anyway. In the first few years, at any rate until the Olympic Games, Germany was wonderful. And there wasn’t any persecution of the Jews – everything was still fine. I never personally witnessed a book-burning. But I read about it, things like that were in the papers, but they were too far away for me. I definitely wouldn’t have gone. In higher circles they must have thought more about global politics. But we didn’t, it was all very remote.
The first turning points became apparent when the Jewish shops disappeared. But there were very few of those where we lived, and all the others had gone. And at that time people giving up their shops was quite normal in any case. A lot of shops closed, even non-Jewish ones. Then gradually, even in our part of town, Jewish shops were boycotted. Even in our very peaceful and in fact completely apolitical Südende. It was a quiet suburb, and half of the people were villa owners anyway. Even so, they’d had dealings with the Jews for a long time. My father always had a Jewish clientele.
I myself had worked for a Jew for four years, and only noticed in the last year that something was happening. He wasn’t going to stay. Then we read in the paper that Jews had emigrated. I sometimes thought, he could be one of those. But that always vanished from consciousness again. You didn’t immediately connect it with any terrible things, and you couldn’t talk to just anyone about it.
I still remember us drifting slowly towards war, but before that, in March 1938, I was on my way to Graz with the reporter Rolf Wernicke. I was able to talk to him openly. We wanted to have a few cheerful days with friends. He had a radio in the car, and suddenly he stopped and said, ‘The time has come!’ We drove back to Berlin and had to do a broadcast from there. That was the Anschluss: the annexation of Austria. Wernicke was anything but a Nazi; he wasn’t interested in that. He was interested in girls and his football reports. The Anschluss was reported all over the place. Supposedly the whole German people were on their feet; the people in the Corporation made sure of that. Everything was twisted in accordance with the rules thanks to thousands of willing helpers and cheerers-on, none of whom had the faintest idea what was going on. They were all as stupid as I was.
When the concentration camps were set up, the first time we heard ‘KZ’, meaning ‘concentration camp’, they said: the only people who get put in those are those who have said something against the government, or who caused fights. Well yes, we thought, of course they’re not going to put them in prison straightaway. They were put in a concentration camp to be re-educated. No one gave it a thought. Yet our top announcer in the Rundfunk – Jule Jaenisch, a wonderful man, the whole Rundfunk wouldn’t have existed without him – who read the whole news in the morning, at lunchtime, in the evening – Jule Jaenisch was in a camp.7 ‘Yes, but why?’ ‘They say he’s homosexual.’ ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, him – gay?’ Homosexual was… homosexual was something terrible in those days. What kind of people were they? And Jule Jaenisch was such a nice, friendly man. ‘Yes, yes, they’re friendly, but they’re homosexual.’ We really were a repressed bunch.
Then all of a sudden our Rosa Lehmann Oppenheimer was gone, and her shop was shut. They had to leave. So many Germans were coming from the East at this time. We were told over and over and over again: the Sudeten Germans are all coming home to the Reich, and the villages are empty and must be repopulated. And in go the Jews. They’re all together at last. Yes, we believed that. We bought that. And so many foreigners were coming here all of a sudden. They sang differently, they spoke differently, they looked for accommodation here and they lived here, and off went the Jews, whether they wanted to or not. What really happened… They still don’t believe us… they all think we knew everything. We knew nothing. It was all kept nice and quiet, and it worked.
There was a little Jewish department store, and my Dr Goldberg was still there, and Papa’s customer next door, Herr Levi. They still went in and out. But very slowly… one or another wasn’t there any more. But how, what, why? We didn’t know. Until that terrible business in November 1938 – the night of the Reich pogrom.
We were all shocked that such a thing could happen. That they should have beaten up Jewish people, people of any kind, and that they had broken the windows of Jewish shops and taken things out. In all parts of the city. Well yes, that’s where it really began. We were shaken awake. And then somebody, a friend or relative, said that somewhere neighbours had been taken away by people in uniform. They collected them and drove them away in trucks. Where to? No one knew. Of course that was shocking for everyone who had never paid much attention to politics, and that included us… Terrible.
Of course, I was completely unaware of all of that, apart from reading and the reports on the radio. But a friend of mine, or rather her sister, came crying to us at some party or other and told us that her Jewish boss had been attacked and beaten black and blue. He was only just able to get to his flat, and he was going to leave Germany straight away. Ludwig Lesser8 was his name. And he did it, too. Some of the ones who said they didn’t give a damn – and they just had a valuable wardrobe, or a grand piano or who knows what – they left everything right where it was and they were gone. So the clever ones got out. And then there were the poor, trusting souls who couldn’t do anything, and who had supposedly been told they had to leave everything right where it was, and that they would end up in fully furnished flats in Czechoslovakia. And everyone believed it, because that was where the refugees were coming from: ‘home to the Reich’ was the motto. And I thought: right, for God’s sake, perhaps the father used to sit at a desk here, and now he’s supposed to be mucking out the byre. But that was what it was. It was a measure taken; we all understood that. We all believed that. We repressed it. Everything calmed down again for a while and we just got on with things.
At that time it wasn’t easy to assert yourself professionally as a woman, but once you had, it was acknowledged. But in fact you were supposed to get married and have children – that was the thing worth striving for. In the Rundfunk, we tended to be the intellectuals. Not the dutiful German women with braids around their heads and stout shoes and wide skirts, and of course we rejected all that. We’d heard too much about America, about jazz, and in that respect we already felt we were a bit special; we were the ones who had a better understanding of the modern age.
There were Nazi women’s groups as well. We weren’t interested in that. Of course the people I was with knew Jewish writers and sometimes listened to the radio from London. But those were things you could only talk about if you were very, very sure of the person you were talking to. You had to be incredibly careful in those days. You had to be careful not to be denounced.
And then it kicked off. I remember the summer of 1939, and I very clearly remember the day war broke out. I can still see myself standing in the Corporation building, in the office by the door, and hearing over the loudspeakers that German troops had reacted to an attack by Poland in the early hours. I remember that moment as if it was yesterday. And I also remember that everyone was very upset. Everyone. They were all younger people working at the Corporation. There was no cheering, no ‘YES!’ And no ‘Quite right!’ Everyone was deeply upset. I remember that very clearly.
And then the first reports of fallen reporters started coming in, including a friend of mine, Otti Kreppke, and a cute young volunteer who fell very quickly, in the first days of the war in the east. One reporter after another was called up. To Poland, then to Russia or Africa. Only a few survived it. And later, when Germany felt at home in Paris, in France, some of the older reporters went to Paris instead of the front. They had a great life. They always brought something very nice back with then: a bottle of cognac or some
smart gloves. One of them once brought me back an amazing hat. But the department was getting smaller and smaller.
Then we suddenly had a different director general: the former director general of Cologne, Heinrich Glasmeier9 – a nice man. But he brought all his people from Cologne with him and filled all the desirable jobs with his people.
So now we were at war. As long as you didn’t have someone who’d been called up, you repressed it. For the time being life went on quite normally. Then there were the food cards and clothes vouchers. I still remember my mother saying, ‘Oh, my good God: what am I going to give Hilde for bread?’ It was all very difficult. That was what we were worried about. We weren’t even afraid for my brother’s life. He was at war, but he was fine. It was only when the first bombs fell on German soil that you felt it in Germany, on German soil. Suddenly you had that awareness that we might be getting more of this. But we really didn’t care too much about it. And then the death notices started appearing in the papers. More and more, afterwards whole pages were filled with the fallen. That made us more thoughtful.
But we had no doubt that we would deal with it all. And we didn’t take the other countries that declared war on us all that seriously. We weren’t interested in the rest of the West. Of course we didn’t understand at the time that freedom was being taken out of our hands. We could only think the way it had been prescribed for us, printed out for us, what the papers wrote, how the radio explained it. There was only one radio station. There was also Deutschlandfunk, but nobody listened to that. It was either only culture or only science; no one listened. Everyone in the whole of Germany listened to the same Rundfunk. At any rate the masses, the popular masses did, and we were all part of that. And later in the war we heard that an English station was broadcasting in German and was of course against Hitler. You either laughed at it or kept it to yourself, and only talked about it to people who wouldn’t give you away.
The Work I Did Page 4