“He’s a Jew baiter,” Karin said.
“He was a front soldier and hates the Reds. I think we must hear him for ourselves. My dear Karin, it is time you knew your Germany a little better. Anyway you’ve never before claimed to love the Jews.”
“Don’t be an ass, Longo. I am a Jew,” she said.
“Your old fellow may be a Jew.” Longo smiled. “But you, my dear girl, are a German.”
“Anyway, Herr Hitler is not my Germany.”
“How do you know, until you hear what he has to say?”
Our Jägerschnitzel arrived. They were crisp and excellent. I was famished. The others, too: we wolfed our food. Normally I would have been intensely aware of Karin’s nearness, her scent, of everything she said, but I was lost in memories of the afternoon’s encounter in the woods. Could I arrange to see Lilly again? How much did a train ticket to Strasbourg cost?
Longo ordered more beer. The atmosphere in the tavern was rambunctious. Students and tourists crowded the heavy old beer tables, singing.
Karin began teasing Longo about his Schmiss. The scars of his Verbindungbrüder were bigger than his. Did they compare scars? And whose really was biggest?
Away from the Rhenanenhaus, Longo was his debonaire self, able to laugh at Karin’s sallies. Someone, somewhere, was playing a piano badly. Suddenly Longo left the table, and Karin slid along the bench until she was next to Mick. I didn’t pay much attention, I kept seeing Lily in thick silver rain, tilting her face to the sky, laughing as raindrops dribbled off her chin.
Someone was playing “Anybody See My Gal” and I recognized Longo’s harsh touch at the piano, pounding out his beloved ragtime. Mick and Karin were in urgent conversation, but I couldn’t hear a word. I closed my eyes and saw a motorcycle speeding across horizontal yellow plains toward a range of red mountains crisp against the sky.
She was holding Mick’s hand between hers like it was something precious.
Longo started into “Ain’t She Sweet.”
Fringe politicians delivering speeches in hired halls were a dime a dozen. Who bothered keeping track? Radio wasn’t widespread. My parents didn’t own a set. The newspapers my father took—the F-Zeit and the Vossische—would not have paid much attention to a rabble-rouser from the uncivilized Deep South of Germany or, even worse, Austria. Anyway, I only saw the football and the racing pages.
We ate our Jägerschnitzel, drank down our tankards of beer, and went off to see the elephant.
Karin was flushed and seemed excited but not drunk. She must have been aware that Longo, Mick, and I were entranced with her.
As we walked past the formations of rugged, often astonishingly ugly youths wearing brown shirts and red-and-white armbands with the weird, jagged black cross, we were mostly concerned with ourselves, each of us with sex, love, loneliness probably foremost in our minds.
And the militant atmosphere in the streets wasn’t unfamiliar. All political parties had paramilitaries, uniformed tribes of fighters. This was the world we’d come of age in. Squads of NSDAP toughs might have been overgrown Boy Scouts for all they spooked us, and Mick probably viewed them as just one more strange German tendency, like preferring Pilsner to porter. Like riding through a summer day in a top-down Mercedes at eighty miles per hour, or making love to Alsatian girls in the steep woods between the castle and the town.
Along the Hauptstraße we were joined by Longo’s two Korpsbrüder, the languid sunburned blonds, Hugo and Willy. Instead of their flamboyant Oxford bags they wore regular trousers, and open-necked shirts, perhaps to fit in better with the crowd. Longo fell back to chat with them. Karin linked arms with Mick. We passed more squads of uniformed youth, some carrying rubber truncheons. There were also ordinary citizens and tourists curious to see what was causing such a fuss on a sticky summer evening that smelled like rank thunder.
It was nearly nine o’clock. The Danubian Oddball was already an hour late, but from the excitement outside the Stadthalle it seemed he was expected at any moment. A tiny girl clutched a bouquet of flowers and was guarded by a woman who wore the traditional hat with red balls of the Black Forest. A pair of beefy brownshirts were sizing people up at the door. Longo linked arms with Karin, who was still linked with Mick, and the three of them swept inside together. I was about to follow when a flurry rippled through the crowd and I turned around and saw a big open Mercedes four-door—a breezer we called them, all black, much more massive and powerful than Longo’s S-Class—drawing up. Behind it another Mercedes, just the same. A squad of very rugged, sunburned brownshirts leaped from the second car and began shoving bystanders aside and linking arms to clear a path. I was practically in the doorway and one of them pushed me roughly.
A man wearing an ordinary brown trench coat over an ordinary blue suit climbed out of the first Mercedes. The brownshirts began thrusting out a stiff-armed salute, chanting “Heil! Heil! Heil!”
He returned the salute—wearily, I thought. Of course it was Hitler, but he looked unremarkable, he could have been the owner of a stationery store or a minor official from the town hall. Dark hair cropped very close on the sides, military-style, and the toothbrush mustache. The little girl was led forward by her mother to offer her bouquet. Hitler patted the blonde head but did not accept the flowers. Shooting his shirt cuffs he began to stroll almost languidly along the pathway cleared by his bodyguard. He seemed to have no difficulty ignoring the tumult surrounding him, the salutes, the yelping, the general male hysteria. The mob of acolytes was pressing against the linked arms of Hitler’s bodyguards, trying to get as near him as possible, and the bodyguards were huffing and grunting and straining to hold them back, you could read the effort on their red faces. As for Hitler, it was as if he were taking a stroll in the garden all alone. He simply ignored everything, and sauntered inside the hall.
The chain of linked arms broke down, an excited mob rushed the door, and I was swept along with them.
The hall was packed. Did we stand or were we sitting on benches? I can’t remember. A cloud of cigarette smoke floated above everyone. Bats flickered in the rafters.
I watched those bats a good portion of the evening because after the hysteria provoked by Hitler’s arrival, his speech was for the most part dull. It was difficult to hear, for one thing. The problem wasn’t the Austrian accent, he had already trained that out of himself. His German was neutral, perhaps with the slightest tinge of Bavarian. But there were upward of a thousand crammed into the old hall, and more spilling out onto the outside steps, and no sound system other than the speaker’s vocal cords. So it took an effort to speak and a greater effort to hear him because at first he spoke so softly and hesitantly. We were all straining to listen.
Soon after he began came the first references to Jews as bloodsuckers. Aliens. War profiteers. Such language was not unusual. There were boys at Klinger-Oberrealschule, and a couple of teachers, who spoke that way.
Some writers say Hitler possessed powers of nearly magical enchantment which allowed him to enthrall ordinary, decent Germans. I don’t know how many ordinary, decent Germans were in the Stadthalle that night, they were mostly boys in brown shirts, and the slack-jawed bruisers around me looked as bored as I felt. After the first ten minutes or so I gave up trying to listen. I tuned Herr Hitler out, watched bats fluttering around the rafters, scanned the crowd for my companions, and daydreamed exciting sex with Lilly.
Hitler spoke for at least an hour. During most of that time he seemed disconnected from the crowd, which was becoming restless. He still had a way to go as a speaker. Or maybe he was just tired that evening. Even the early tirade against the Jews sounded pro forma. Only toward the end of his speech did he begin stirring up the hall, letting passion in.
He used a trick: he began repeating the word Deutschland until almost every sentence contained a Deutschland, pronounced ever more raucously and harshly, until even the drowsiest brownshirts caught the rhythm. Deutschland. Deutschland! They were opening their throats, stomping their boots and
howling along with him. Then, abruptly, he stopped.
While the howls crashed over him he stood at attention, arms at his sides, a blissful expression on his face, as if the hysteria he’d summoned from the crowd was a miracle cure for him. He allowed himself to soak it up for a few more moments. Then he nodded precisely, like an engineer pleased with his work, and moved briskly off the platform. His personal protection squad flanked him and they moved for the exit in a scrum, while the audience simpered and moaned.
As soon as their führer had left the hall, the brownshirts began streaming for the door, and I was pulled along in the undertow. Outside, the pair of big Mercedes were already pulling away and the crowd was seething with something like anger. I caught sight of Karin and Mick and Longo, who was shaking hands with his Korpsbrüder. I began making my way toward my friends. Clutching Mick’s arm, Karin looked pale and slight, the day’s color gone from her cheeks.
“Let’s get away,” Mick was saying. “I don’t much like the smell of this.”
Hearing English spoken, a pair of brownshirt boys wearing buckled leather shoulder-straps turned to stare at us. The night smelled clogged, unclean—the summer rankness of the Neckar, the crowd of overheated men and restless, frantic boys. How much did I take in, how much did I miss? My first sex, my first Hitler—I was struck, dazed. I am aware from the history books that Jews were attacked and beaten in Heidelberg that night. We all sensed the blood anger in those rancorous uniformed boys. Karin looked as if she’d seen a ghost; perhaps she had.
After his farewells to his Korpsbrüder Longo reached for Karin’s other hand, brought it to his lips, kissed it. A repulsive gesture, really, at that point, but she didn’t react. What had he been thinking? Was it sadism, bringing her to hear Hitler? Or could Longo sense what was coming? Maybe he felt it in his German bones, maybe he was trying to warn her.
“Lasst uns gehen!” Longo said. Let’s go.
When we were past the last squad of brownshirts, back in student territory, Longo spoke English. “The man is a villain. Crude. Don’t think I don’t see it.”
Mick had placed his tweed jacket over Karin’s shoulders. It was raining hard by then.
The Mercedes was in a garage close by the Rhenanenhaus. The garage attendant and Longo and I worked together to unfold the top and snap it down to cover us for the journey home.
“What a wonderful day,” Karin said. She was wearing Mick’s jacket and shivering. “What an interesting talk. What lively companions you have, Longo. Where do you keep your little uniform?”
“Don’t speak of it, Karin. And please do not mention it to your father. Those brutes are hardly companions of mine.”
Longo probably was wary of the baron, at that time still a powerful figure. We drove back to Walden through slashing rain. I don’t remember conversation, just lighting cigarettes, and the desolate outskirts of Niederrad: darkened shops and wet pavement glistening. It was after midnight when the Mercedes rolled through the iron gates. Longo drew up outside the main house to let Karin out under the porte cochere. She got out without a word and ran inside.
Longo departed early the next morning. When I told my father we had attended an NSDAP rally he was furious, not just with Longo but with me.
“What were you thinking of, bringing the young lady there? Bad enough that you show up yourself, but you had no business exposing the Weinbrenners’ daughter to such trash. Really, Billy, I’m disappointed by such a failure of judgment.”
But I don’t see how I could have stopped Longo from bringing Karin to the Stadthalle. All sorts of speakers—KPD, SDP, nationalists—ranted in hired halls every night all over Germany. Herr Hitler was a nobody. But it was no use making excuses to my father. I had never seen him so annoyed.
Many years later, in February 1945, I came across Longo in one of our POW cages in the western Netherlands. He didn’t remember me at first. During the standard POW interrogation, without revealing my identity, I asked him when he had joined the Nazi party.
“Nineteen twenty-eight.”
The year after our Heidelberg excursion. It didn’t make him a veteran Nazi, one of the “old fighters,” but it would have meant a respectably low number on his membership card.
He complimented me on my German, and that was when I told him I’d come of age at Walden, son of the manager of Baron Weinbrenner’s racing stable.
He peered at me closely, then his face broke into a grin. “Ah so! Billy!” He reached across the interview table and clapped me on the shoulder. “My old comrade! I remember you well! Ah, those happy days at Walden!”
I asked him what Karin had thought of his decision to join the party.
“I never told Karin, of course.” He smiled, shaking his head. “That little girl had a temper. She would have spat in my face!”
Longo had always understood himself to be a cheerful bon vivant, a cosmopolitan, scion of a proud family. After departing Walden in his Mercedes he didn’t show up again until the following summer when a new crop of yearlings was being trained to the track. After that he was an occasional weekend guest. He rode well. He brought cases of excellent wines. I don’t think her parents would have been displeased had he asked to marry Karin; all grown-ups at Walden were keen for Karin to “settle down,” and Longo with his excellent family, his law degree, and his good looks was thought a “good catch.” But by then she had met Anna von Rabou and started working at the famous UFA studio. Her parents could not understand what in the world she was doing there. It made no sense to them that a daughter of theirs would choose to spend her time with a mob of actors and writers.
When I interviewed Longo at the POW camp he didn’t really have much to say about Karin, or about anything except the war. His recent experiences as a tank commander in Normandy were very fresh in his mind. He described a couple of dismaying episodes in a disconcertingly lighthearted manner, but many POWs I interviewed told their most horrifying stories in a similar tone.
Karin once remarked that Longo was like the façade of an elegant, old-fashioned building with nothing behind it. “He was like the false streets they keep at Warner’s and MGM.”
During his interrogation Longo described how one of his men had brutally and needlessly executed two Canadian prisoners. Such things were terrible for discipline, but after weeks of combat he’d been losing control of his young soldiers. “You must rely on discipline and training but those break down after a while and soldiers in a killing field become frightened, hunted beasts. Mein lieber Freund Billy, do you remember the Weinbrenners’ chauffeur? The one-eyed Solomon?”
“Yes. Of course.”
I felt sorry for Longo, and still I loathed him. He must have sensed it.
“Believe me or not, Billy, after what happened to the chauffeur, and to the baron’s lawyer, what was his name—Kaufman—I felt quite ashamed of having joined the party.”
“Did you tear up your card?”
“Ah, but it wasn’t so simple. I was in Berlin, you know. I had a government post. My father was no party man, far from it, but he had been able to fix that job for me. To quit the party then would have put not only me but my father in jeopardy.”
“I see.”
“I stopped visiting the Weinbrenners long before the chauffeur was killed, but not for the reason you think. I couldn’t have done anything to help them, you see. I wasn’t in a strong position at work. There were people in the ministry who didn’t like me, didn’t believe I was on the team, which I wasn’t. I’d only have made the baron’s situation more precarious by interfering. The best I could do was to stay away.”
When I asked if he remembered our outing to Heidelberg, he shook his head. He said he had no memory of taking Karin Weinbrenner to hear Hitler at the Stadthalle.
Was he lying to himself, or just lying, or had he really forgotten? I don’t know.
The fact was, a few days after we saw Herr Hitler, Karin fell ill and was taken by her mother to the Burghölzli Clinic at the University of Zurich. My mother
said Karin had suffered a “nervous breakdown”—the first time I heard that phrase.
My father was certain it was the encounter with “that fellow” and his entourage that was to blame. “She’s a sensitive creature, Karin, a thoroughbred. The trash those people speak, it’s disgusting. There ought to be a law.”
1938
Eleven days before the SS Volendam was due to sail from Rotterdam, a Polish Jewish boy shot a German diplomat in Paris. Pogroms organized by the regime broke out all over Germany. Shops were smashed; Jews were assaulted, sometimes killed. Reichskristallnacht, they called it afterward: Night of Crystal, Night of Broken Glass. It was worse in urbane, civilized Frankfurt than in many places.
Six party rascals in a hijacked beer truck smashed down the iron gates at Walden and broke into the house. The only people staying there were Karin, her father, and Herta, widow of the chauffeur.
There wasn’t much left to plunder at Walden. Using drapery cord, the Sturmtruppen tied Karin and her father to chairs in the library and forced Herta to lead them down to the wine cellar.
She recognized two of them—local boys, classmates of mine from Grundschule, members of the Winnetou tribe, who’d played in the Walden woods and cadged snacks from the kitchen.
All the baron’s wine had been “auctioned” off, with only bosses from party headquarters of Hesse allowed to bid. The wine cellar was empty, and this annoyed the invaders. They stormed through the house looking for hidden Jewish treasure, taking breaks to suck beer from barrels on their hijacked truck. When they stumbled back into the library they were so drunk they could hardly stand. They shouted at the baron that he’d be executed on the spot unless he showed them where he’d buried his gold.
He shook his head. “No buried gold here, lads. If you want to help yourself to my property, by all means, go ahead, but you’ll find most of it’s in the basement at the Städel. They’ve picked me clean to the bone.”
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