Destined to Witness

  Predicting that I would make an “outstanding machinist,” von Vett concluded the interview by promising me an excellent apprenticeship with a first-rate firm. I thanked him, gave the mandatory Heil Hitler salute, and prepared to leave. But he called me back. “Aren’t you going to shake my hand?” the SS man wanted to know. I turned around, shook his hand. When I finally left the room, I was happy about the outcome of the interview, but very confused about von Vett’s strange affinity for me.

  I never saw or heard of the SS man again, but he kept his word. A few days after our meeting, I was notified by the Hamburg branch of Gottfried Lindner A. G., a highly regarded truck-trailer construction firm, to come in for an interview.

  On a Monday in April 1940, dressed in brand-new, stiff blue coveralls, I began my three-year machinist apprenticeship with Lindner A. G., on Bramfelderstrasse, a ten-minute bicycle ride from my home. Besides me, there were three other new apprentices reporting for work: Heinz Scheel, an easygoing fellow with a weightlifter’s physique; lanky Ingolf Dieter, the good-natured son of a midlevel police officer; and Lisa Röhling, a wholesome, girl-next-door type who was to learn the trade of bookkeeping in the front office. After Meister Neumann, the shop’s technical boss, welcomed us in his office, he took us fellows out to the plant, where my unaccustomed senses were assaulted by the earsplitting noise that issued from various large machines, thick smoke that wafted throughout the shop and made breathing difficult, and arc welders’ strobelike beams that attacked my eyes from every angle. “Don’t look into the beams,” Meister Neumann cautioned us, “or you’ll injure your eyes.”

  My immediate reaction was deep regret over my choice of occupation. What had I gotten myself into? Why did I have to pick such a dangerous, hostile environment in which to make my living for the rest of my working days? Why hadn’t I been smart like my buddy, Fiffi Peters, who on this same day was starting his apprenticeship as a waiter in Hamburg’s elegant Rathauskeller at City Hall, dressed in an immaculate black tuxedo. But I realized that my regrets were far too late, and decided to quit my futile grousing and make the most of my situation.

  Meister Neumann, a tall middle-aged man with a graying crew cut, a ruddy complexion, and an unmistakable Berlin accent, led us to a large wire cage that was equipped with a long workbench. On the wall above the workbench was a large poster with an illustration of a blond Siegfried-type worker with rolled-up sleeves and bulging muscles, holding a heavy hammer in his right hand. ARBEIT ADELT (Work ennobles)! the poster proclaimed in large letters against the backdrop of a swastika flag. If the poster’s intent was to inspire us, it had totally missed its purpose with me. All I could see in my immediate future was a lot of toil and drudgery and very little, if any, nobility.

  “This is your workstation,” Herr Neumann announced. He explained that the cage was there for our protection and that we were allowed to leave it only to go to the washroom, on break, or when it was time to quit. “From time to time,” Meister Neumann continued, “you’ll be assigned as helpers to a journeyman in various phases of the trailer production. You will at all times be courteous to the journeymen, always address them with Herr and Sie, instead of by their first names and with the familiar Du. And you will do without fail whatever they ask you to do. Is that understood?”

  We all said yes, but I could tell by the miserable expressions on the faces of my two compatriots that their hearts—like mine—weren’t in it.

  It took a while before I had resigned myself to the fact that, as Pastor Ottmer had predicted, at age fourteen my childhood was irretrievably behind me. Braced for a culture shock, I steeled myself to enter a coarse, frequently cruel adult world. I found it difficult to dismiss from my mind an incident in another Hamburg machine shop that had made the news several years earlier. A machinist, attempting a practical joke, had sneaked up on a sleeping coworker during noon break and inserted the hose of a pressurized oxygen tank in the vicinity of the sleeping man’s rectum in order to “pump him up just a little.” When he tried to gradually open the oxygen valve, the oxygen escaped with such a force that it tore the intestines of the unsuspecting worker and killed him instantly. Keeping that grisly story in mind, I decided never to be caught napping.

  As first-year apprentices, we became the quintessential gofers who were taught to regard our state of virtual indentured servitude to a bunch of vulgar and often abusive journeymen and an unsympathetic Meister as part of the natural order of the universe. Under the tutelage of these mostly foul-mouthed and uncouth proletarians, all of whom—regardless of age—displayed a childish predilection for scatological and sexual “humor,” we apprentices had no choice but to grow up fast if we intended to survive in this less than wholesome milieu. While the journeymen roared their approval, we demonstrated our newly found “manhood” by outgrossing each other with a dedication that deserved a better cause. There was only one boundary to our obnoxious behavior that none of us crossed. We never exposed our parents to the filth we were learning on our job. This meant that, as far as my mother was concerned, I was still her innocent son who wouldn’t hurt a fly. By the same token, I was sure that even the more obnoxious journeymen at the shop were respectful and loving husbands to their wives, decent role models to their children, and good neighbors, like the journeymen I knew in Barmbek.

  Journeymen seemed to regard it as their most sacred duty to impress upon us apprentices at every opportunity—and there were many—that we were a bunch of nitwits who were totally unfit for, and a disgrace to, our chosen trade. The only positive aspect in my new situation was that the low esteem in which journeymen held apprentices, especially the first-year variety, was universal and that, with the exception of one horrific incident, I was never singled out for demeaning treatment because of my race. While tolerating the status quo for the moment because I had no choice, I looked forward to the day when I added a few more inches to my height and a few more pounds to my frame to make a journeyman think twice before messing with me. Meanwhile, I took solace in the thought that three years hence, nobody, not even Meister Neumann, would be able to push me around.

  Since we apprentices were to be seen only and not heard, initially communication between us and the journeymen was a pretty one-sided affair and largely confined to matters directly related to the job. Yet, by keeping my mouth shut and my eyes and ears open, I soon had a pretty good idea of what made the journeymen tick. Although they were too careful to openly say so, their sarcastic comments following each radio announcement left no doubt that they were no admirers of Hitler and the Nazi regime. Even their coworker Peter Schmidt, whom they had chosen as their Obmann (shop steward), and who was the official representative of the Nazi Party, frequently joined in the snickers at the government’s expense. Schmidt, I learned, was the only man in the plant who had been singled out to take a cruise with his wife to Madeira, Portugal, under the auspices of the much vaunted Kraft Durch Freude program that supposedly was available to all German workers. On paydays, I frequently heard grumbling that since 1933, labor unions, along with pay raises, had disappeared, and that the only way workers could increase their pay was by working faster, more hours, and producing more.

  As the journeymen got to know me better, they became less careful about what they said while I was around, with the result I heard a lot that wasn’t meant for my ears, such as the most blatant gossip about Hitler and members of his top echelon. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, that married paragon of family values, was referred to as der Bock von Babelsberg (the he-goat from Babelsberg), after the German movie capital in Berlin, because of his alleged excessive use of the casting couch and his numerous dalliances with various movie stars. Through the same unimpeachable sources I learned that supermacho SA chief Ernst Röhm, an Oliver Hardy look-alike, had actually been sleeping with his young SA troopers before he was branded a traitor and murdered on Hitler’s orders. Another juicy tidbit was that Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring’s mother had had a rich Jewish lover who supported Göring during h
is youth. Because of his inability to resist stuffing his immense girth into ever-fancier medal-bedecked uniforms, Göring was the butt of most of the political jokes in the plant. The workers still snickered about his much ballyhooed “Wedding of the Decade” in 1935, when he married an obscure actress named Emmy Sonnemann, and the subsequent birth of their daughter, despite rumors that injuries he had sustained during the abortive 1923 Nazi putsch in Munich had left him sterile or impotent or both. The girl’s name, Edda, the jokesters claimed, was an acronym that stood for Emmy dankt dem Adjutanten (Emmy thanks the adjutant), implying that Göring achieved fatherhood only with a little assist from his aide. Also in for regular ribbings came labor czar Robert Ley, who, it was alleged, was actually a Jew who had dropped the letter v from his original name, Levy, and who, it was alleged, was a certified alcoholic. Plumpish Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, according to my older colleagues, hid his homosexual tendencies behind the respectability of marriage and fatherhood; and Luftwaffe General Field Marshal Erhard Milch, another Aryanized Jew, had his Jewish mother remove his racial stigma by claiming that he was not her biological son but his late Aryan father’s out-of-wedlock child. As far as my coworkers were concerned, nothing was sacred, which meant that even the Führer himself was not immune to their scrutiny and ridicule. Thus I learned that contrary to the official version, which held that Hitler had no romantic interest in women because he had dedicated his entire existence to the German people, he once had carried on a sizzling, incestuous love affair with his teenage niece Geli Raubal, who killed herself when the affair went sour. I also heard persistent rumors that the Führer and film actress-director Leni Riefenstahl were an item.

  All this reckless talk, which, if overheard by the wrong person could have landed the purveyors in a concentration camp, was normal everyday conversation fare, indicating to what degree mass support for Hitler and his henchmen had eroded and what little respect they enjoyed with the working class.

  HANS VOLLMER

  It had been my intention to say goodbye to boxing for good, but I soon changed my mind. Somehow, boxing had gotten into my blood. I needed the physical exertion, the feeling that my body was performing at its peak, and I also enjoyed the camaraderie, the esprit de corps inside and outside the ring. Rudi convinced me that even without a championship belt, amateur boxing had its own rewards, and persuaded me to keep training. But shortly thereafter, he and several of the older club members were drafted by the Wehrmacht, and the Bramfeld Boxing Club collapsed. What was left of its membership was taken over by Box Verein Polizei, a much larger organization sponsored by the Hamburg Police. Strangely enough, nobody objected when I, along with several of my old Bramfeld teammates, showed up for training at the downtown Polizei Kaserne (police barracks) gym, although the gym was crawling with cops whose top commander was none other than archracist SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. To this day I wonder why I was allowed to mingle freely with Hamburg’s Finest without stirring a ripple and what possessed me to take the chance of regularly putting myself in harm’s way, since coming to the attention of just one SS-connected policeman who took exception to the presence of a non-Aryan could have sealed my fate.

  While training regularly at the Polizei Kaserne and at the club’s local branch on Bachstrasse, I met a young middleweight junior division champ, Hans Vollmer, an extremely savvy boxer three years older and nearly a head taller than I, who, despite his youth, had the uncanny ability to send opponents to dreamland with one single punch of his right. Soon he became my best friend and the vicarious outlet for my frustrated boxing ambitions. Each time he prepared for a fight, I experienced the tension and the excitement just like he did, and when he won a boxing contest, I felt as if it was my victory as well.

  Despite our preoccupation with boxing, our friendship was not confined to the boxing ring, but extended to our spare time. A third-year vulcanizer apprentice, a trade in which he learned to process rubber, Hans frequently joined me in our off hours to check out the various nightspots. Since Hans lived in Barmbek’s neighboring district of Hamm, which was notoriously devoid of places for young people to hang out, we either dropped in at Café König in my neighborhood or at one of the many dives on St. Pauli’s Reeperbahn.

  Frequenting places crowded with feisty young men provided countless opportunities for getting into trouble. Hans and I usually avoided confrontation by simply walking away from challenges, especially since our boxing coach had impressed upon us that outside the ring a boxer’s fists are lethal weapons that he must use with the utmost discretion. But on one occasion, Hans decided to ignore the coach’s advice. We had walked past a group of men in their early twenties who were standing in front of a nightclub when one of them, a beefy six-footer, seemed to be bothered by my presence. “What’s the Neger doing here?” he inquired, loud enough for us to hear.

  As if stung by a hornet, Hans spun around and faced the man. “What was it you just said?” Hans demanded.

  “I asked what the Neger is doing here,” the man repeated, then stretched himself to his full six feet and added menacingly, “And what’s that to you?”

  At that moment the other men began to encircle us in an obvious move to join the fracas.

  I had hoped that the man who had insulted me would take a better look at Hans and notice the flattened nose, the scar over his left eyebrow, the broad shoulders and narrow hips, and conclude that he was facing a seasoned boxer and call the whole thing off. But instead he raised his fists in an awkward boxing stance and advanced toward Hans. Before he could take another step, Hans’s lightning-quick right fist had landed on his jaw with a sickening crunch that sounded like breaking bones. As if felled by a bullet, the six-footer collapsed as his knees buckled beneath him, then crashed backward to the ground where he remained mumbling unintelligibly while tiny rivers of blood oozed from both corners of his mouth.

  As soon as they had witnessed Hans’s handiwork, the other three men ran in every direction, eager to spare themselves a similar fate. No matter how much Hans invited them to return and even the score, they kept their distance, visibly drained of their belligerence. A firm believer in quitting while ahead, I told Hans to forget about extending challenges and to get the hell out of the place. I was particularly concerned that if Hans had broken his opponent’s jaw or worse, there could be extremely unpleasant repercussions, especially if his victim was a Nazi. Fortunately, we were able to leave the scene without incident and never heard another word about Hans’s swift action on my behalf.

  I had been at Hans’s modest apartment in Hamm many times and met his father, also a vulcanizer, and his mother, a Red Cross nurse, both of whom were immensely proud of their only child’s achievements in the boxing ring. From the few times I had met Hans’s parents, I had always assumed that they were just an ordinary working couple whose biggest adventure in life was watching their only child achieve victories in the boxing ring. But I soon learned never to judge a book by its cover. One day when Hans and I stopped by his apartment, I heard his mother and several men talking in a foreign language I couldn’t identify. When I asked Hans, he told me that his mother was Russian and that she would often meet with Russian workers to help them with their problems if she could. The people his mother was entertaining were Russian Fremdarbeiter (foreign workers) who had been captured by German forces in Russia and forced to work in the German war industry.

  I found it hard to believe that Frau Vollmer, who looked and sounded like a bona fide Hamburg Hausfrau, and who even spoke unadulterated Hamburg Platt, was a Russian. When I asked how she got to Hamburg, she told me a touching love story that would have made Dr. Zhivago turn green with envy. During World War I, her future husband was a wounded German soldier captured by the Russians and moved deep into Russia to a military hospital where she was a young nurse. While she nursed the German soldier back to health, they fell in love, but when the war ended, the soldier was shipped back home to Germany. Before leaving, he vowed to return to Russia as soon as po
ssible and come for his beloved nurse. She said three years passed during which she saw neither hide nor hair of her lover, but she never gave up her belief that he would make good on his promise and return to her. Then one wintry night, she said, there was a knock on her door and a near-frozen Hans Vollmer, Sr., stood outside, ready to take her back to his homeland and marry her.

  From the moment I heard that story, I looked at Hans and his parents with different eyes. It made me wonder why, when some people will go to the end of the world to be united with their loved ones, my own father didn’t take a single step to be reunited with my mother and me.

  A few days later, Hans dropped in unexpectedly with the horrifying news that his home had been totally destroyed by a direct hit during the previous night’s bombing attack. Like many Hamburgers, he and his parents had become lax about going to an air-raid shelter each time the alarm sounded, but this time, inexplicably, they heeded the warning. Some of his neighbors who had ignored the sirens were later recovered from the rubble as corpses.

  Within a few weeks, the Vollmers were provided with a much more spacious apartment in an upscale neighborhood and lavishly compensated for their losses in a widely publicized government display of generosity toward early bombing victims. When Hans proudly showed me around his newly decorated and furnished apartment that, unlike their old hole in the wall, boasted such luxury features as a full-size, tiled bathroom and a modern electric kitchen, I secretly wished that my home would be next on the RAF’s demolition list. Eventually, my wish would come true, but not in the way I had hoped.