by Heinz Rein
He moves to Berlin with his family, his wife and three children, and takes over his father’s dairy on Weidenweg. This happens in such a way that his wife occupies the position of his mother, who has died during the war, she looks after the housekeeping and the shop, she worries and struggles and toils while Hille doesn’t worry about a thing. In the atmosphere of the eastern part of Berlin the spirit of his youth again envelops him, the conversations of the adolescents and their suggestive songs, the evening gatherings in Petersburger Platz and the Weberwiese, the secluded little cinemas and the primitive cafés whose only attraction lay in their faint lighting and poor visibility. Hille is by now thirty-five years old, but he still hasn’t really emerged from puberty. He begins to live a dissolute lifestyle, hanging around in dubious bars with equally dubious girls, he eagerly visits racetracks and knows the horses in Ruhleben and Mariendorf, Hoppegarten and Karlshorst almost better than he knows his own children, he throws himself into the speculating frenzy of early inflation, and busies himself with all kinds of things – but not with regular, honest work. When his wife pours the heavy milk churns into the containers early in the morning he is still asleep, and when she closes the shop at midday he is just getting up, and rages if his food isn’t ready on the table. But the roots of the soldier’s life are too firm within him, his instability and inconstancy lack superior authority, he tries to join the police but is turned down; at last, following the general flow, he becomes a member of the Social Democratic Party. Very soon he realizes that he has gone to the wrong address, they debate and vote, and it isn’t what he’s after, he only feels comfortable where he is given orders and no responsibility, his interest remains meagre, and when he is told one day that he will have to be excluded from the party if he doesn’t change his way of life he leaves of his own accord, taking with him a very poor opinion of soft and spineless politicians striving for a form of state that they call democracy, in which everyone is supposed to have the same rights and duties. That is too much for his NCO’s brain, the concept of state is inseparably bound up with the concept of orders, in fact the two are synonymous. He is not even satisfied with the association of former Lübben Hunters or the Kyffhäuser Veterans’ Association, the familiar noises issue from throats raw with alcohol, and sometimes there is some disorderly marching, but there is nothing behind it, no power or vigour, only drunkenness and sentimentality.
Hille roams through life like a hunting dog, always with his nose to the ground and his ears pricked. What goes on around him doesn’t affect him unless it is directly related to him. Elections and Reichstag sessions, factory councils and constitutional issues are empty concepts as far as he is concerned, Rathenau’sfn2 murder means less to him than a disqualification of Rastenberger,fn3 and the conference of Locarno is far less important than the weight of Nebukadnezzar in the Big Easter Prize at Karlshorst.
Towards the end of 1923 Hille has his first run-in with the law, it begins with Clärchen’s Widow’s Ball on Auguststrasse and ends in criminal court 111 in Moabit. He has a fight with a man over a girl when dancing, the argument continues in the street, Hille knocks his adversary down with one blow of his fist, the other man falls badly with the back of his head against the edge of the kerb, fractured skull and death, arrest and a court case are the consequences. Hille has a lenient judge and is sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for accidental homicide contrary to the law on self-defence while in a state of inebriation.
Hille serves his sentence in Plötzensee. He is a model prisoner, not because he is contrite and regrets destroying a human life, but because the old Prussian order has taken hold of him again. If it were not a prison, the big red-brick building between the cycle track and Spandau Canal would be his ideal place to live, it is full of order and discipline, precision and cleanliness, the fist of authority, which one would not have expected from the easy-going Weimar Republic, is in evidence here. There is even the possibility of promotion, and Hille soon becomes a trusted inmate. As soon as he feels he has got his hands on even the merest hint of power, he becomes ruthless and severe towards his fellow prisoners, who are now his subordinates, and becomes a supporter and spy to the prison warders. This works best on the corridor whose cells are under his control, everything goes like clockwork, and by the time the year is up Hille is almost sorry to have to return to a civilian life without authority and without orders.
But he soon finds the place to which his character and inclination suit him. At first he won’t have anything to do with the new Party, he isn’t happy with the attribute ‘socialist’ or the class denominator ‘worker’, for which the words ‘national’ and ‘German’ only partly compensate, and he hasn’t got the slightest interest in politics, he was alarmed by his experiences during his one-year membership of the SPD, but soon he sees that the new Party with the long name is doing a quite different kind of politics, here there are no debates and votes, here the orders are issued and delivered from above, here everything is thought out in advance, here everything is done under the motto ‘The Führer is always right’. The very fact that the man at the head of the party is a Führer – a leader – and not a chairman proves that everything is done in a different way here from the other twenty parties. Hille’s surprise soon turns to joy when he notices that there is also a warlike style of ruling and acting here, that people don’t ask about his lifestyle and his previous life – apart from the Aryan purity of his gonorrhoea-infected blood – but only whether he will blindly obey and carry out orders. That is the right thing for Hille, so he becomes a fighter for Adolf Hitler, the unknown corporal of the First World War and the godlike field marshal of the brown-clad host, and just as Hille once parroted phrases and value judgements during training classes without the slightest concern for their content, now he willingly absorbs the new political terminology without thinking about it. He knows what he needs to know, he says what he is told to speak, and that is quite enough.
Now life begins again, there are marches and parades, orders and obedience, people bow to his authority and he has the prospect of soon being one of those who issue the orders. In the SA he is soon a staff sergeant, shortly afterwards is promoted to squad leader, and as he kept his wing in Plötzensee in an excellent state of discipline and order, his squad is soon known in the district between Ostkreuz and Zentralviehhof as the most spirited and combative unit in the battalion. The first political brawls with the communists now begin in the magnificent beer halls in the east, and street battles on the edges of Friedrichshain and amidst the allotments between Eldenaer Strasse and Landsberger Chaussee. If Hille had stayed in the background where possible, at Souchez and Le Mort Homme, since the French were always very good shots, now he is right at the front, since these are unarmed opponents who have barely any experience of war or none at all, and in any case Hille is usually under the influence of alcohol and wants to impress his comrades’ wives. His heroic misdeeds soon make him look ready for more important tasks: he is put in charge of an SA battalion, and when Dr Goebbels comes to Berlin to take over the leadership of the Berlin district of the NSDAP, Hille and his unit are appointed personal bodyguards to the new Gauleiter. When Hille announces the presence of his battalion and makes his stiff salute, he is startled at first, then he wants to tear furiously into the miserable little Jew boy with the club foot who is playing a mean joke on him, but his military discipline is stronger than his impulse, and that is his good fortune, because the little man with the Jewish appearance is in fact the new man that the Führer has sent to conquer Berlin. Hille is disappointed, but he quickly discovers Aryan traits in the doctor’s face, and when Goebbels delivers the first speech to the gathered Berlin SA in the Sportpalast, Hille is convinced that the Führer has made the right choice. He laps up the slogans and ready-made phrases of the new Gauleiter, and when he is sitting in the battalion’s local pub with his trusty followers, gulping down yet another beer, he speaks enthusiastically about Goebbels as a man whose ‘face is full of determination’. From now on
the SA-man Hille is a constant companion of Dr Goebbels, whether in the Pharus Halls on Müllerstrasse or on the tennis courts in Wilmersdorf, in the Friedrichshain auditorium or the Neue Welt in Hasenheide.
Before we come to the summit, the highlight of Hille’s career, we should also mention that early in 1931 he withdrew from public life to Plötzensee prison for six months, after adding a little touch to a betting slip, which the judge interpreted as forgery; it also seems necessary to say a few more things about his private life. A person’s public life develops out of their private life, the political and intellectual features of a person’s character do not come out of nowhere, it is more of a synthesis of innate disposition and environmental influences, which are initially manifested in his private life. Any political single-mindedness and philosophical pose which at first appear indistinctly and are, for the reasons from which they emerge, difficult to recognize, are illuminated as if by lightning when one rummages around in the private backdrops of the great heroes and political geniuses.
Since his return from the First World War Hille has not touched a regular piece of work, he has allowed himself to be carried along in the stream of that agitated time without thinking about the direction or the speed of the stream, until he is washed up on the shallow brown Nazi shore. Having previously spent his time between racetrack and pub, his trail now leads from the pub to the meeting room and back from there to the pub. He is a tireless fighter, less out of passion than from a dislike of his home, where he is merely a bed lodger and often not even that. His wife is merely a domestic animal, obliged to work and sort everything out for him, to create the material basis for his life as a political idler, and look after their three children. Even though Hille thoroughly despises his wife and can’t forget the fact that she first locked onto him only because he actually got a bit too close to her between two dances in the dark garden of the Lindenhof in Lübben, he sleeps with her every now and again, becoming suddenly violent if she refuses to be accommodating in any way or put up with the fact that he isn’t worried about getting her pregnant yet again. Hille has no tender feelings or gentler impulses towards his wife, and is quite clearly incapable of them in any case.
Hille makes no attempt to expand the narrow economic foundation offered by the dairy business or indeed to do any other work, he is now every inch the politician and moves along the same line as most of his comrades in the battalion, who are unemployed either out of inclination or incapacity. In the end Hille has succeeded in transposing a piece of barracks-yard existence into his present life, he can now do his brawling under cover of the swastika flag of a political idealism and compensate for his feelings of inadequacy with a belief in his racial superiority. His hatred for Jews – like other of his views, experiences and opinions – is based on highly personal experiences which he carries over to all Jews. It may be interesting to present these experiences as a way of finding out how Hille draws logical conclusions, and thus characterize his intellectual disposition. When his wife fell pregnant again, the Jewish doctor who lived around the corner on Thaerstrasse and was treating his wife took Hille to account, asking him to ensure that his wife no longer had to lift the heavy milk churns, and also recommended that he ease off on her a little in private. Hille refused to allow such an intrusion into his conjugal life and unhesitatingly forbade the impudent Jew access to his house. The miscarriage that his wife suffered a short time later, leading to a serious condition in her lower abdomen, was an unforeseeable coincidence and only attributable to her increasing sickliness. The second experience that reinforced Hille’s hatred of the Jews was one that he had with the owner of the building that housed the dairy, and who had the misfortune of being called Levinsohn. This insolent Hebrew crook had had the audacity to remind Hille that his rent was overdue and, when he ignored the reminder, to bring a legal case against him.
So his character already displays all the features which the Hitlerian side of the German spirit would later apply to almost the whole of Europe.
The year 1933 is in fact the highlight of Hille’s life. The intoxication of power, the triumph over all enemies are overwhelming feelings, they later make way for calm, even upward development, the complete absorption of the people and the saturation of the whole life of the nation with the brown lye of National Socialist ideas. In 1933 Hille runs the boycott against Jewish shops on Frankfurter Allee, he himself organizes and guards the security cordons around the department stores of Tietz and Brünn. He leads his battalion in the heroic action on Grenadierstrasse, in which some old Jews are beaten up and have their beards shaved off, but then he disappears from the street. He is appointed a major in the SA, but soon leaves the active unit, since the SA is soon seen as not being entirely respectable, and as the proletarian organization of the Party. Now Hille devotes himself entirely to Party work, he becomes a block warden and then a cell administrator, and even practises a profession: he becomes an adviser in the district management of the German Labour Front. Admittedly he brings no specialist knowledge to the task, and still less industriousness, and neither does he have the intention to acquire the former or display the other, but the work effectively does itself, an efficient secretary does everything for him, he only has to put his name at the bottom of documents, and in any case he has always been of the opinion that the number of possible errors diminishes of its own accord the more he is able to reduce the volume of work. It is all so easy, and there is nothing that has not been precisely regulated or organized, everything is controlled down to the very last dots on the ‘i’s, one need have nothing but a good memory for when and how the many regulations, implementations, commands, guidelines, decrees, injunctions and orders are to be applied. But the most wonderful thing is the great lack of responsibility because everything is decreed from above, one is only an executive organ, not only is initiative unnecessary, it is even undesirable, because everything must be identically aligned and synchronized. Everything happens in conformity with something, in conformity with duty, in conformity with order, in conformity with instructions, in conformity with command, except that the phrase ‘in conformity with conscience’ is excluded from this vocabulary. Hille takes his office as an instrument of power that is guided from above and applied downward with full force.
It is a wonderful life for Hille, the natural subaltern. He speaks at meetings, and nothing could be easier. The speeches are often delivered ready-made in manuscript, but their themes are always precisely outlined, and all one needs to do is learn them by heart, but even that isn’t difficult because the content of the speeches – apart from the respective events of the day – is always the same, and the newspapers and radio provide enough points of reference that one can use quite safely, since they all derive from the same murky sources.
At this point we must ask the question of whether Hille is in fact convinced about what he pretends to say and believe, for which he is supposedly fighting and working. The answer is not difficult. Of course he doesn’t believe it, he isn’t that stupid, he knows himself very well and can also to some extent judge the figures who have been thrown up to the top by the brown wave. They are all former battalion comrades or friends from other battalions who now occupy positions in the state and the judiciary, in the offices of the Party and the Labour Front, old fighters, as they call themselves, and then even officially receive this title, whose only fitness for the job is their set of beliefs and their Party membership card. He knows that many of them are degenerate characters, drinkers, con men, incompetents and idlers, and when he looks at himself in the mirror he can’t help grinning at his reflection at the thought of his own career. This knowledge of his own shabbiness and that of his fellows only produces in him a boundless contempt for the mass of people who have allowed themselves to be lured in, and who are still caged, still allowing themselves to be duped and obeying the horde of brown-shirted martinets. Hille has recognized the suggestive power of repetition that creates faith, and just as his Führer begins each speech by saying that h
e was once an unknown soldier before he decided to become a politician, Hille always reminds his listeners that only National Socialism keeps the German people from tumbling into the abyss, that only a horde of tireless and selfless men guided by great ideals have swung the wheel of history around at the last minute. The countless slogans and commonplaces provided by the training letters and the journal Arbeitertum slip smoothly from his tongue, and in the end he almost believes them himself. When Hille stands on the podium on a shop floor or in a meeting room and lets his eye wander over the crowd while his tongue once again mechanically forms the clichés delivered a hundred times before, he must struggle to control himself to keep from directing a scornful snigger at the faces raised in devotion to listen to him. Anyone observing him speaking from close by can easily tell that even in moments of great excitement he remains quite cold and inwardly uninvolved, because he has performed this role many times before and is sure of its success. The feeling of power increasingly becomes the instrument that he plays more than any other, its maintenance and reinforcement the goal of his political work. The question of what the power is based upon is unimportant, whether it be founded in the disturbing menace of the Gestapo or in the fear of economic disadvantage, the bayonets of the newly established Reich Army or the hearts of the people, when he strides through the crowd and it parts to let him pass. When he carries the banners through the streets and all hands are raised in the Hitler salute, he doesn’t care in the slightest whether it is done out of respect or fear, the only important thing is that it is done. What an intoxicating feeling it is to be esteemed, admired, respected, revered or even feared and hated. Both respect and hatred prove that he is no longer an insignificant somebody or other, but that he is elevated above the crowd and that he has been granted permission to look down.