Berlin Finale (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Heinz Rein

  ‘Heil Hitler, Mrs Franke!’ the man says. ‘Back again?’

  Perhaps it’s supposed to sound benign, but the effect is almost inquisitorial.

  The young woman goes on sitting there motionlessly, only the expression in her eyes changes, she looks confused and puzzled.

  ‘Where is your little daughter?’ the man asks, slightly impatiently, he isn’t used to his questions going unanswered, everyone has to give him an answer straight away, because in Hitler’s Germany there isn’t a patch of earth that isn’t a parade ground or a human being who isn’t a soldier.

  By now the young woman’s facial expression has come to rest, it has returned to the present, to the air-raid shelter in the house on Petersburger Strasse, and now it falls on the man in the brown uniform. The young woman’s head moves very slowly away from the wall, her hands rise from her lap and hold her head carefully as if it were a precious, fragile vase, her slender, nervous hands tremble, her index fingers press against her ears as if to block out the surrounding noises, as if any sounds in them had to come from within.

  ‘Why don’t you answer me?’ the brown man asks, his voice having almost regained its earlier harshness. ‘As your cell administrator …’

  He gets no further. The young woman takes her hands from her face, her eyes blaze with grief and rage. ‘I apologize for not yet having reported to you,’ she says, her voice wavering up and down, her chin quivering as she seeks to control herself. ‘Something has changed in me. I will never report to you ever again!’ Her voice becomes more resolute, it is still broken, but it has stopped wavering.

  ‘National Comrade Franke, I must ask you …’ the brown-clothed man begins.

  ‘Ask me, ask me as much as you like,’ the young woman says. ‘I have had enough now, I want to bring this madness to an end, to an end, an end, an end!’ Now she is speaking loudly, her slender hands clench into fists. ‘Don’t interrupt me, I’m talking now, you people up there have done enough talking, we were only allowed to listen in silence, but now I’m not going to keep my mouth closed any more, now it’s spilling out of me and now you must listen to me. You ask where my daughter …’

  ‘I warn you, National Comrade Franke …’ the man tries to interrupt.

  The young woman sweeps his words away with her hand. ‘My daughter lies buried, somewhere between Schneidemühl and Kreuz, frozen as we fled, frozen in my arms. Do you know what that means, Party Comrade? Having to watch my child’s body slowly freezing, one limb dying after another, the life escaping from that little body, the heartbeat becoming fainter and fainter until at last that delicate creature, who had smiled one sunrise before and formed her first clumsy phrases, cold and motionless, frozen dark blue and lying, eyes broken, at my breast from which she had drunk her life …’ The young woman’s voice fails, it is as if the words are dripping as slowly and heavily as tears, and a sob rises into her throat.

  ‘Calm down, my dear Mrs Franke,’ the brown-clad man tries to interrupt.

  But the young woman’s words can no longer be stemmed, the flood of words, previously held back and pent up by terror and anxiety, has now torn holes in the dam, sweeping away all caution and reticence. ‘And why was that? I will tell you, and it isn’t a Jewish horror story and it isn’t enemy propaganda, because I was there and I saw it with my own eyes. The Party bosses secretly claimed the only train for them and their wives, they fled at dead of night when word came in that Russian tanks were twenty kilometres away from the city. Then we set off on foot – because you had already made things too hot for us – home to the Reich, in ice and snow, women, children and old people, we struggled through the thick snow and we braced ourselves against the icy wind while the Party bosses, their wives and all their suitcases steamed comfortably westward. And that was what it was like wherever went, the bosses were off and away in their cars, they kept the clearance orders in their pockets until they themselves were ready to flee, and then they proudly announced that “their” population had held out steadfastly and bravely until the very last moment. All that was left for us was the public trucks, at temperatures between fifteen and twenty below zero. What do you think, my dear cell administrator …’

  The brown-clad man tries to dam the flood of words.

  ‘National Comrade Franke, I …’

  ‘Have you heard what happened at the stations?’ the woman goes on excitedly. ‘When a train came at last, a wild charge began, and anyone who hesitated was lost under the boots of a raging crowd, which was half mad, or entirely mad with fear. Children fell under the wheels and were crushed, they were torn from their mothers’ arms and trampled, literally trampled into a shapeless pile of flesh and blood and clothes. And then the journey, the airstream came at us from the front, the east wind was behind us, and both together dragged the last warmth from our clothing, so that we felt completely naked. When the train stopped in the open countryside we got out to bury the dead beneath the earth, six children and four old people, but we had to leave them there because the ground was frozen stiff and hard as stone, so we piled them together into a mound, shovelled snow over them and put a few pine branches on top. It was a Christian burial, Mr Party Comrade, I can assure you of that, there was no proud grief about it, only curses directed at the Führer and the Party, and if there is a God in heaven, then he will make you perish just as miserably.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t know that, National Comrade,’ the man says. ‘I can understand your agitation …’

  ‘You understand nothing,’ the woman rages at him. ‘You don’t understand, and the others up there don’t understand either, you cold-snouted dogs, otherwise you would have called the whole thing off long ago.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more,’ the man says furiously. ‘I will put what you have just said down to your agitated state.’

  ‘I am agitated,’ the young woman says loudly, ‘but I know exactly what I’m saying. For far too long we have been quiet, and you have taken our silence for agreement, if anyone bears the blame it us for having tolerated you for so long. Take a look around, you friend of the people, the way they are all sitting there, dazed and intimidated, even though they are all full to bursting with rage. They don’t even dare to murmur or nod their agreement when someone screams the truth in your face. Do what you like, but I’m not taking back a word of what I’ve said.’

  ‘I’m asking you to be quiet,’ he roars at her. ‘Or …’

  ‘I’m not afraid of anything any more,’ the young woman says and leans her head back against the wall, her voice has fallen to a whisper, she closes her eyes, tears spill down her face. The brown-clad man turns round, stands there uncertainly for a moment and looks into the cellar, then walks quickly towards the exit. When he has left the cellar, the voices whir about like flies, curses and curses rise to the surface like bubbles, everyone knows what they would do with the Party big shot.

  ‘I’m anti-social,’ Schröter laughs grimly, ‘because I don’t fly that swastika rag, because I don’t take part in winter relief, because I’m not in the Labour Front. Anti-social! That bunch of rogues, that Himmelstossfn1 of the brown-shirt army! But no, he’s furious, one fellow’s made a fool out of him, and a woman has trodden on his corns, it’s unheard of!’

  ‘Who is he?’ Wiegand asks.

  ‘That’s Otto Hille, the cell administrator and now also the commissarial director of the Baltenplatz local group, one of the most dangerous Nazi bastards running around in Berlin, he has a whole heap of people on his own personal conscience. Let me tell you a few things about him.’

  XIII

  Biography of a National Socialist

  ‘It is on account of cowardice, laziness and stupidity that such a large proportion of humanity prefers to remain in tutelage, and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians.’

  Kant

  This is the biography of the cell administrator and provisional Local Group Leader Otto Hille of Berlin O 112, 65 Rigaer Strasse. First of all it seems n
ecessary to examine the structure of the NSDAP and its many sub-organizations. Here we should clearly distinguish between two organizations, the first from the Party’s genesis to its government takeover, the second from its government takeover to its fall. Here the last section will not be explored in detail, since in this phase of development the entire German people more or less voluntarily allowed the Nazi avalanche to roll over it, and because it is less psychologically fertile. National Socialism, its terrible magnitude and its uncanny power, its ruthless cruelty and absolute amorality, can be understood only if we analyse the characters and temperaments, the desires and goals, the interests and reasons of the people who joined the Party before 1933, because they were the ones who gave the Party its physiognomy, its principles and its content, which were transmitted entirely unchanged to the second phase of the Party’s history and never lost their validity. Regardless of disguises and circumlocutions, regardless of all cultural whitewashing and diplomatic elegance, the authentic substance always shimmers through. On this point Hitler was doubtless right when he said the Party must always act according to the laws it was based on. Those laws were betrayal, murder, terror, cruelty, amorality, and loyalty to those laws, having followed them everywhere and at all times, is in fact the only loyalty that can be attributed to the National Socialists.

  As heterogeneous as the elements that came together in the Party might have been, before it became the Party of state, they can still be brought down to one common denominator: all of them were misfits, or on the point of becoming misfits. First of all there were the soldiers who are unable to find their way back into a peacetime occupation or have never had one, and the officers whose profession has suddenly shed its halo and no longer gives them the opportunity to fall in line and at the same time to issue orders, eternal NCOs, accustomed to giving orders without needing to assume responsibility, since they receive their orders from above. Then there are the countless people whose civilian careers have run into the ground, and who never seek the cause within themselves, in their inadequacy or their laziness, but always in others and in the disfavour of fortune. This category includes the permanent idlers, the eternal students and those who have failed in their attempts to train as bookkeepers or foremen. Then there are those marked by nature, whose inferiority is coupled with a herostratic need for validation, and the members of the criminal gangs who are given the opportunity on their very own turf to climb into the political arena. They all decided to become politicians because the Führer had done so, and because it seemed like the easiest and least strenuous way of getting to the top.

  They were joined by the masses of the petite bourgoisie and the middle class. They were without political ambition and precisely what the Führer had once contemptuously referred to as a ‘pile of interests’. They clung to National Socialism as their only hope of saving the tottering, bursting building of the bourgeois social order against collapse and restoring its stability. Last of all we should also mention a horde of political desperados, all those whose political arrivisme had not been satisfied in other parties, who had not established themselves as they had planned, or who had been thrown out for usually quite unambiguous reasons.

  This conglomeration of mercenaries and gangsters, a bourgeois mania for ownership and failed existences, the losers in life’s battle and those persecuted by fate, a morbid urge for validation and racial arrogance, this strange and unnatural creature represented the type who claimed to be homo teutonicus novus and the bringer of a new culture, who managed to force every area of the varied life of a talented people into the Procrustean bed of a miserable political primer and condemn it to intellectual onanism. What was added later, which was heralded as thesis and dogma by scientific hangers-on and philosophical nonentities, to be passed on as an axiom from generation to generation, was only a retrospective justification and motivation. It was used only to place the mask of the upright citizen over the grimace of the barbarian. What really existed in terms of honest idealism and naïve faith remained without any influence on the so-called philosophical line and was only tolerated on the margins with deep mistrust. The essence of the Party was immutable and irrevocably rooted in the motley band of adventurers, deracinated bourgeoisie and disreputable lumpenproletariat, and not least in the herd of the apolitical petite bourgeoisie and the middle class, following inertly and insensitively on, which saw itself threatened by monopoly capital and feared sinking into the industrial proletariat.

  The cell administrator and provisional Local Group Leader Otto Hille can be seen as the prototype of a National Socialist from the period before 1933, he is what is known as an ‘old fighter’, whose Party membership card has a number below 100,000 and whose Party insignia is framed by a gold wreath of oak leaves. In his character he combines the essential features that mark out a real National Socialist: brutality and emotionlessness, impudence and arrogance, obstinacy and a lack of imagination. The data of his biography, unimportant in themselves, are elevated to a universal level by virtue of the fact that they fall under the sphere of influence of two wars and the unlimited display of power of the biggest criminal organization of all time.

  Otto Hille, Hitler’s brown-clad mercenary, is not presented here as an individual. One does not become as he is on the basis of one’s own character, one is formed that way by a barbarous age. That is why he is shown here as a type whose separate features may not occasionally match all those of his Party comrades, but may, stripped of their outer shell, capture their essence.

  Hille, born in Berlin in 1885, grows up in the cramped conditions of a petty-bourgeois parental home, he is the son of a dairyman, a pale, fair lad who begins early on to take pleasure in forcing weaker schoolmates under his sway, and shows tendencies to exhibitionism. Since he is the only son, he is expected to become something ‘better’, to climb the social ladder by at least a rung, he is sent to a Realgymnasium, a grammar school with a scientific bent, but he fails his fourth year, he has no interest in learning, he prefers to stand behind the counter in the dairy, pouring milk, weighing butter and cheese and doing sums unusually quickly. Early on he learns to deal with money, and not all the coins that pass through his hands find their way into his father’s till. Non olet,fn1 those words are almost the only ones that have stuck with him from his Latin classes, and which will accompany him throughout his life. His apprenticeship in an estate agent’s office lasts exactly four and a half months before he brings it to an end by simply not going in. He cannot be moved by threats or pleading to continue his apprenticeship. As he stands his ground, his parents, who were already the weaker parties, give in, despairing that their son’s social rise is finishing before it has begun, it is the despair of the petit bourgeois who despise their own class. The young man hangs around in the shop and in the street, he helps in the dairy from time to time when he needs money, and sometimes disappears for weeks at a time, returning to the paternal milk churns in a very reduced state. By the time he joins the Hunters’ Battalion in Lübben at the age of nineteen he already has numerous affairs, a case of gonorrhoea and a charge of passing on venereal diseases behind him.

  The habit of universalizing from personal experiences and assuming one’s own mentality as a given in others, but seeing deviant experiences as random and different mentalities as abnormal – Hille has made that habit very much his own, it leads quite naturally to the overestimation of his own person, and makes him despise those around him. Just as Hille generally judges women on the basis of his own experiences with frivolous females, so he assesses his time in the military according to the results it produced in him. Because the skill of the NCOs takes him as a young lad in poor condition and straightens him out, making him accustomed to rigid order and thrashing him into shape, he is convinced that the army in general and German compulsory military service in particular are an excellent form of schooling. The soldier’s life, with its relentless constraints, the monotony of its daily routine and its heedlessness of the concerns of the day, suits him very much.
The fact that one can live without an initiative of one’s own, and only with reference to orders and regulations, is the most surprising discovery of those years. When he has served his two years he capitulates, and now he himself is master of the barracks yard, which is only a small one but it is enough for him. It is the simplest life one could imagine: one is given orders and passes them on in a harsher tone, one receives tellings-off and passes them on with double the force to one’s subordinates, everything is precisely prescribed and regulated, the timetable is precisely fixed, there is nothing to think or think about, everyday needs are adequately satisfied and anything that is missing has to come from his father’s dairy.

  Hille is happy to go to war in 1914. Although there is a possibility of staying in Lübben as an instructor, he insists on being sent to the front. It has nothing to do with courage, bravery or enthusiasm, because war in the parade ground of Lübben is certainly less dangerous than in France or Poland, and even NCOs feel considerably happier as armchair strategists than as heroic corpses in a mass grave. Hille has his particular reasons, he has got married in the meantime, or perhaps one should say he has had to get married, since a daughter of a civilian in Lübben has found herself in an interesting condition thanks to him, and her parents insisted on the marriage. Hille, who had been more than comfortable with life lived among men, with occasional outings to prostitutes, is happy to grab the opportunity to defend the fatherland at the front, to escape the burdens of family life.

  After the war Hille cannot at first understand that his days of playing soldiers are over. There is an opportunity to go to Rossbach or Ehrhardt or Lüttwitz, but that is a particular kind of playing soldiers, it is too erratic, too adventurous, it constantly requires initiative and decision-making powers, and Hille will have nothing to do with that, he is in favour of service regulations and drill books, and if that isn’t possible then he would rather not have anything to do with it. He has only a petty-bourgeois desire for adventure, the longing for excess and transgression remains latently present, but it never entirely overwhelms a desire for subordination. Transgressions – excesses – certainly, but only if they are ordered or prescribed, the pleasurable sensation of upbraiding and tormenting people, kneading them in one’s hands like wax, only reaches its climax when one knows that one is protected from above, and responsibility has been transferred to higher regions. He loves freedom and immoderation, but they must happen only sporadically, and must be grouped around a solid core to which he can flee at any time. Since it can no longer be the barracks, it will have to be his parents’ house again.