The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  Failing that course, Tietjen pledged to prepare the next summer’s festival and then request release from his Bayreuth tasks because of work pressure elsewhere. His exit would be described in public as temporary but he and the family would know it was for good. Should that second proposal be found unacceptable too, then Tietjen said he would summon his ‘last remaining physical reserves’ and stay on despite everything to ensure the festival kept running. ‘Naturally’ Wieland would be detailed to produce the stage designs for a planned new production of Tannhäuser (in the end shelved) and Wolfgang would be included in the team as an assistant. But if that were to happen, a firm line under the past would need to be drawn by all concerned (specifically including ‘Dr Strobel’, who would have to stop running to Wieland with complaints). Tietjen, at any rate, represented himself as ready for ‘reconciliation’.

  Few documents better show Tietjen’s diplomatic skill, at least matching that of his ambassador father. Although pragmatic in tone and seemingly flexible in content, his memorandum left the Wagners next to no alternative. Course one was surely out of the question. Course two on the face of it amounted to more or less what Wieland was after; but neither Winifred nor Wolfgang felt the ‘heir’ was ready to take over and Tietjen at least surmised that Hitler thought the same. In other words he was calling Wieland’s bluff. That left course three, but this too was not quite what it seemed. Wieland had recently told Winifred angrily that he would not work on designs for a new Tannhäuser anyway, so Tietjen was making a ‘generous offer’ that he must have been aware had already been refused. As for when the brothers would finally take control, that remained as unclear as ever. Tietjen had often said that he and Winifred would step down after peace had come and a vast new building complex – into which the Festspielhaus would be subsumed – had been erected on the ‘Green Hill’, a scheme much favoured by Hitler. But who could say when that might happen, if at all? The longer the war lasted the less likely Nazi victory seemed.

  Outmanoeuvred by his wily adversary, Wieland bit by bit grudgingly backed down – a strategic retreat rather than an admission of defeat. In 1943 he actually managed to swallow his pride and (replacing the ejected Preetorius) cooperated with Tietjen and Wolfgang on Meistersinger, the first and last production on which the uneasy trio worked together. A year later Tietjen was still firmly in control and, aware that Hitler seemed to have given up neither on the war nor the Bayreuth festival, he began looking into plans for a 1945 season. In a letter of 17 December 1944, he told Winifred she would be ‘astonished to learn’ that there were no insuperable material or artistic obstacles to a repeat of the tried and true Meistersinger. The wherewithal could even be found for a wholly new production if the Führer so wished although, given the current strains, he did not regard that course as ‘morally’ justifiable.13 Tietjen was spared having his moral scruples on that score put to the test. By the following summer the war was over, American troops were in Bayreuth and the festival was shelved for six years.

  One might think that Winifred, given her long-standing link with ‘Wolf’, must have been playing a decisive role in all this, but in fact she was not. Although Hitler had insisted that the festival continue during the war, he only attended once himself – on 23 July 1940 for, prophetically enough, Götterdämmerung. That may well have been the last occasion on which he and Winifred met, and it is so described by Wolfgang among others. Winifred herself said the same at her ‘denazification’ trial in 1947; but decades later she changed her tune, holding that Hitler had, in fact, visited Wahnfried shortly before Wehrmacht officers sought vainly to blow him to bits at his East Prussian headquarters in July 1944. She claimed to recall that on leaving the house on that occasion he had turned to her muttering that ‘I hear the wings of the victory goddess rustling’ – a remark that at that stage of the war even she found odd and ascribed to pep-up injections he was being given by Theo Morell, his doctor.14

  Winifred’s memory may simply have played her false although (unlike her judgement) it did not often do so. Hitler’s comment would have been unremarkable had he made it during what was, without doubt, his last festival visit if not, perhaps, his very last trip to Wahnfried. By the summer of 1940 German troops had already occupied much of Europe from Poland to the English Channel and a tripartite pact was imminent between the key axis powers – Germany, Italy and Japan. At that time the fickle ‘victory goddess’ did indeed seem to have settled in Berlin, but a year later she began to flutter off for good. In June 1941 the Nazi supremo ordered invasion of the Soviet Union, disastrously opening up another front while still deeply involved in action against the British; then in December, delighted by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and sniffing global victory, Hitler sealed his fate by declaring war on the United States. In 1942 the British smashed Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein; in 1943 the Russians crushed Paulus’s Sixth Army at Stalingrad and in June 1944 the western allies launched their D-Day Normandy landings. Small wonder that even the Wagner-doting ‘Führer’ did not find the time to squeeze in attendance at the Bayreuth festival. Perhaps he did not really feel like going. As the tide of war turned against him, it seems that Hitler selected the Master’s works rather less often from his private record collection and lighter fare rather more.

  Even if Hitler did make that 1944 visit to Wahnfried, most signs are that during the war his relations with Winifred cooled – and not just, or even mainly, because of the ‘Friedelind affair’. The two of them stayed in sporadic touch but no evidence has come to light that the ‘mistress of Bayreuth’, unlike her sons and Verena, visited ‘Wolf’ in Berlin after 1940 as she had often done in pre-war days. Apparently her letters did not always get through. She claimed that Hitler warned her that Martin Bormann, his Machiavellian close aide, was intercepting some of them and that in future she should contact him via his doctor. That could be true. Bormann was no fan of the Wagners and had in effect replaced the more amenable Rudolf Hess after the latter fled to Scotland in 1941. On the other hand Hitler might just have got sick of Winifred’s frequent requests for help of one sort or another, and sought an excuse for evading more of them. She did, for instance, detest Fritz Wächtler, the brutal Gauleiter of Bayreuth, and vainly pleaded with ‘Wolf’ to replace him. More in her favour by far, she repeatedly intervened on behalf of Nazi victims, Jews and non-Jews, whom she felt ‘worthy’ of the Führer’s clemency. As usual, she put down the cases of injustice brought to her attention as deplorable but isolated incidents for which Hitler could not be held responsible.

  Only once, she maintained, was ‘Wolf’ really angry with her and that was because she did not intervene when he felt she should have done. In 1941 Ulrich Roller, son of Hitler’s revered Alfred Roller and himself a talented stage designer who had worked as an assistant at Bayreuth, was killed in action in the east. It turned out that Winifred had meant to ask the Führer to ensure that Ulrich be spared combat but the young man, then serving at a concentration camp, had begged her not to intercede on his behalf. It seems he was so shattered by the horrors he saw at the camp that he preferred to take his chance at the front instead. Hitler regarded his death as a useless sacifice of ‘Aryan talent’ and at least partly blamed Winifred for it.

  For most of the war Wieland was spared the kind of dreadful dilemma that Ulrich Roller faced. The worst battle the Bayreuth ‘heir’ felt called upon to wage was the one against Tietjen, and although he lost a decisive round of it he continued to believe he would eventually emerge on top. But that prospect began to fade by the summer of 1944, at the latest. As allied forces ineluctably closed in on Germany from east and west all theatres throughout the Reich were ordered to be closed – the decree covered those in Altenburg, where Wieland had recently staged a new production, and Vienna, where he had offered designs (later lost in a bombing raid) for a projected new Ring. Key artists and stage workers who had hitherto kept their civilian jobs were now drummed into war service – in the case of Overhoff, for the second time. Even the favoure
d few who, like Wieland, had been granted special protection by Hitler began to feel vulnerable: all the more so since their status looked bound to count against them should the war be lost. Had it not been for his new brother-in-law, Bodo Lafferentz, who offered him a job in a hush-hush research establishment in Bayreuth, even the ‘heir’ might have found himself drawn into combat. As it was, Wieland could sit out most of the rest of the war, from September 1944 to April 1945, in Lafferentz’s Institut für physikalische Forschung (Institute for Physical Research) housed in a former cotton mill at the foot of the Green Hill. It was an enterprise a lot less harmless than its name implies, and it was decades before its real role and that of its restless, inventive founder were widely realised.15

  For most devotees of the Bayreuth festival the name of Bodo Lafferentz probably rings only a distant bell at best. Those with long memories may recall that he was the man who handled the Kriegsfestspiele logistics as head of Kraft durch Freude, that he thus got to know the Wagners well and that he eventually married Verena, the ‘baby’ of the family. The few inclined to delve more deeply may even be aware that Lafferentz (born in 1897) was twenty-three years older than the comely ‘Nickel’ and that when he met her he was already a married man. In fact his divorce from his first wife came through only a few days before he wed his new spouse at Wahnfried on 26 December 1943, with Wieland and Wolfgang as witnesses. Given the age difference, was this perhaps a ‘strategic union’ – rather like Chamberlain’s marriage to Eva in the very same place on exactly the same day thirty-five years before? Ruggedly handsome and boundlessly ambitious, Lafferentz won entry to a clan that had the Führer’s special blessing, and Verena, with her husband’s manifest authority behind her, stood to gain a weight she had hitherto lacked in family counsels. If such calculation was involved at the start it did not bring much of the benefit hoped for, at least not for long. But that question apart, the available evidence suggests the marriage was firm and harmonious. It produced five children and ended only with Lafferentz’s death in 1974. Verena never remarried.

  More needs to be said about Lafferentz than that, however. Apart from heading Kraft durch Freude, he was a senior director of the Volkswagen concern and ran a clutch of research outfits from a base in Berlin. All these activities were, in fact, related. Shortly before the war Hitler had charged Robert Ley, a doggedly loyal associate since the 1920s, with construction of a plant to build a car (the famous VW ‘Beetle’) that the masses could afford to buy. Ley headed the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labour Front), into which independent trade unions had been subsumed in 1933 and of which Kraft durch Freude was a part. Hence Lafferentz entered the picture. Indeed, it was he who from a spotter plane pinpointed the site where the VW plant was then built and who became responsible from Berlin for sales of the projected vehicle – initially known as the ‘KdF car’. However, the newly founded company soon went onto a war footing, the ‘Beetle’ was used for military purposes alone and Lafferentz found himself with an underemployed Berlin team. The KdF boss was not a man to stand around idle, let alone to relinquish ground won in the Nazi hierarchy. Impressed by his qualities as a manager and ‘ideas man’, the SS had already made him an Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) in 1939. Armed with this rank and with contacts that went right up to Himmler and, sporadically, to Hitler himself, Lafferentz reorganised his Berlin operation into a Forschungs-und Verwertungsgesellschaft (research and implementation company) that busied itself with all manner of schemes to help the war effort. Later he was awarded the SS’s coveted Totenkopfring with its death’s head insignia.

  Was Lafferentz, then, a ‘fanatical Nazi’ as one contemporary historian of the Bayreuth festival maintains? Certainly he was no Nazi activist from the movement’s early years like Goebbels, Göring or – indeed – the notorious drunkard and womaniser Ley. Nor is there any sign that he was an ideologue or racist, let alone that he was personally brutal. On the contrary Lotte Warburg, a woman of Jewish descent who had to abandon her estate near Bayreuth and flee abroad, described Lafferentz almost glowingly in her diary as a pleasant-spoken, ‘very good-looking gentleman’.16 That was the way he seems to have struck most people. A gifted linguist with a degree in economics, he only joined the party after Hitler came to power and it seems that he got to know Ley, who opened the KdF door for him, more or less by chance while on a trip abroad. But like so many ambitious managers of the time Lafferentz put his talents wholly at the disposal of a murderous regime and turned a blind eye to the moral implications of his work. Volkswagen, for instance, made use of around twenty thousand prisoners – in part from concentration camps – to boost its labour force in the course of the war; indeed in 1941 Himmler proposed setting up just such a camp next door to the VW headquarters. Although in the end that particular plan was not implemented there is no record that Lafferentz and his fellow directors raised objections to it. Besides, at least two of the research projects in which Lafferentz was involved from Berlin made use of concentration-camp labour. One of them was established close to Auschwitz and sought to extract urgently needed rubber from plants found in the Soviet Union. The other was that Bayreuth institute to which Wieland bolted for around half a year. It aimed to develop a better guidance system for flying bombs and, as such, was part of Hitler’s drive for a Wunderwaffe (miracle weapon) to snatch victory for the Reich from the jaws of defeat.

  It is easy enough to see how Lafferentz came to set up the latter project. Volkswagen had been deeply involved in construction of the V-1 flying bombs, first launched against Britain in mid-1944. Despite their destructive power and the threatening noise they made, the ‘doodlebugs’ (as the British called them) were too inaccurate and vulnerable to turn the war in Germany’s favour. Few can have been better aware than Lafferentz of these flaws, or of the kudos awaiting anyone able to eradicate them on the V-1 and similar weapons. As for the decision to site the institute in Bayreuth, that arguably made strategic sense. The town was (still) relatively far from the front and had almost never been a target for allied bombers, so there seemed a fair chance that work could go ahead largely undisturbed. That apart, Lafferentz was evidently a dab hand at linking ‘business’ interests with those of himself and his family. One of his research ‘firms’, for instance, consisted of a single person – Adolf Reissinger, Gertrud’s schoolteacher father, who had always fancied himself as something of a natural scientist. Another project, apparently aimed at developing floating docks for sea-fired rockets, was moved late in the war to Überlingen on the Bodensee – handily close not only to Winifred’s summer chalet at Nussdorf but to the possible bolt-hole of Switzerland across the lake. The Bayreuth facility fitted much the same pattern. Set up just ten minutes’ drive from the Wagner family seat where Lafferentz and Verena had married a few months before, it soon proved useful, perhaps even a lifesaver, for Wieland.

  Just what the Bayreuth ‘heir’ found to do there is unclear. He had no scientific expertise and although it has been claimed that he was the institute’s deputy civilian leader, proof of that is lacking. A few years before he died, Lafferentz told Wieland’s English biographer that the young man had spent most of his time constructing stage models and working out lighting systems for them.17 That could well be true, although Lafferentz was evidently less than forthright to his interlocutor about the institute’s real purpose, saying simply that it had sought to devise a tracking system for anti-aircraft defence. Whatever Wieland’s role, Gertrud reported that he returned home daily looking ever grimmer – as well he might. His place of work was one of the direct offshoots (Aussenstelle, as they were called) of Flossenbürg, a concentration camp hard by the Czech border about eighty kilometres south-east of Bayreuth.

  Flossenbürg, it is true, was not designed as an extermination centre like Auschwitz (although some thirty thousand prisoners died there in the course of the war), and conditions at its Bayreuth ‘branch’– one of about a hundred such Aussenstelle scattered across north Bavaria and Saxony – were less appalling tha
n those at the main camp. They had to be. The eighty-five prisoners there from nine countries were picked for their value to the research effort and, although subject to threats and beating, needed to be kept alive. There is no evidence that either Wieland or Lafferentz personally mishandled inmates; indeed, after the war at least one ex-prisoner testified that the pair had acted humanely, in the ghastly circumstances. Lafferentz was, in any case, rarely on the spot. He still lived and worked for most of the time close to his headquarters in Berlin and turned up in Bayreuth only occasionally. Nonetheless the ‘institute’ was part of the concentration-camp network that spread ineluctably across the Reich year by year, it was largely run on slave labour under guard from the SS – and the ‘heir’ joined in, thanks to his influential brother-in-law’s backing, to save his skin.

  The Aussenstelle offered only a temporary refuge. In April 1945, with American troops streaming ever closer, the plant was abandoned and the prisoners were marched back to the main camp. One of them died on the three-day journey, others did so in a subsequent trek south after Flossenbürg itself was evacuated. The civilian personnel fled – some, like Werner Rambauske, the institute’s chief scientist, bearing details of their research that they then made available to the Allies. As a result Rambauske later became one of the hundreds of boffins from Nazi Germany (like Wernher von Braun and his Peenemünde rocket team) who were transferred to the United States to work for the American military.18 Wieland and Lafferentz made off too, taking with them to Winifred’s Nussdorf chalet not scientific blueprints but rare Wagner manuscripts from the Wahnfried archive. A selfless bid, one might think, to ensure that the irreplaceable documents escaped destruction. Wolfgang, who had been drawn into the Bayreuth ‘home guard’ and did not accompany the fleeing pair, has a less flattering explanation. The manuscripts were removed, he writes, ‘not for safety’s sake but because of their monetary value, which might help to keep the wolf from the door or provide them (i.e. Wieland and Lafferentz) with the wherewithal to start a new life’.19