Arthur S. Link of Princeton University inaugurated the series in 1982 as a part of East Carolina University's seventy-fifth anniversary celebration. Professor Link lectured on "Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World." The second lecture was presented by Professor Donald F. Lach of the University of Chicago and was entitled 'Fantasy and Reality in the West's Response to Asia."
The lecture by Professor Hans A. Schmitt is the third in the series and is the first to be published. Professor Schmitt has an intimate connection with his topic, for it is autobiographical in part. Born to a gentile father and Jewish mother in Frankfurt, Germany, he was twelve years old in the year that Adolph Hitler came to power. In 1938 Schmitt emigrated to the United States and received his A.B. degree from Washington and Lee University. He earned his M.A. in 1943 and, after having his academic life interrupted by World War II, received his Ph.D. in modern European history from the University of Chicago. He has taught at the University of Oklahoma, Tulane University, New York University, and is presently Professor of History at the University of Virginia.
During his career, Schmitt has won numerous awards, and his first book, The Path to European Union: From the Marshall Plan to the Common Market, won the Louis C. Beer Prize from the American Historical Association. From that auspicious beginning, he has published seven books and over thirty articles. Whether one looks at his biographical studies, his challenge to popular myths of modern Europe, or his analysis of the weaknesses of the contemporary European nation-states, the reader becomes conscious that Schmitt recognizes, as he once wrote in an essay for his mentor, that "any historian of modern times could not isolate himself from the present." He has sought through his scholarship to stimulate in the world of which he is a part an effective, reasoned, and enlightened conversation with the past for the purpose of better illuminating the paths, choices, hazards, and limits before us today. We are pleased to begin the publication of the Lawrence F. Brewster Lecture in History series with this address.
Fred D. Ragan, Chairman
Department of History
Great events throw long shadows which are noticed only at a distance. I doubt that many Frenchmen, taking their after-dinner promenade on N4ay 5, 1789, realized, indeed could have realized, that future generations would remember the day ending as the beginning of a new era, in fact as the prelude to what our university catalogs call "modern history." A student of mine, Elizabeth Greicus wrote in her dissertation on Russia's Progressive Bloc and its attempts to affect the conduct of the First World War: "Thursday, February 23, [1917], was the International Women's Day. Later it became known as the beginning of the February Revolution. At the time, however, no one recognized it as such. Trotsky pointed out [in his auto-biography] that not even the most militant socialist organizations had called for strikes and demonstrations on the 23rd. The movement began in the industrial Vyborg section when crowds of workers demanded bread. Others joined the demonstrations and overflowed to the Petrograd district. There were occasional clashes with the police, but the day ended without serious conflicts. Most people did not consider the disorders significant and expected them to pass. 1
January 30, 1933 in Germany was equally ordinary. Around 11 o'clock in the morning, the 42nd cabinet of the Weimar Republic was sworn in at the presidential palace. Only three of its eleven members, Adolf Hitler, Wilhelm Frick, and Herman Göring, were National Socialists. Three of the ministers were holdovers, another had served in an earlier cabinet. The new Vice- Chancellor, Frang von Papen, predicted on that day: "In two months we will have pushed Hitler into such a corner, he will squeal." In the afternoon Goring and Frick held a strategy session with two Catholic leaders, Ludwig Perlitius and Hans Bell, the latter a signer of the Treaty of Versailles. Certainly, Liberals and Socialists were uneasy. The Nazis staged a torchlight parade that evening, but who could possibly have seen the day as the beginning of Germany's destruction, or imagined the consequences this event would inflict on Europe and the world? 2
Ordinary people were affected even less. It was a cold day, another commonplace phenomenon of the season. The first symptoms of spring were six weeks away, and the tragedies set in motion in Berlin's government quarter lay years in the future. If there was a difference between this and preceding revolutions it was perhaps the speed with which an ordinary German's world began to change in a variety of little ways by the time the cherry and apple trees bloomed in the orchards of the section of Germany in which I was born.
Since my home town, Frankfort am Main, was the place of publication of one of Germany's most respected newspapers, the Frankfurter Zeitung, whose copies can be found in many American research libraries, I have recently been able to recapture some details of what was to follow Hitler's investiture within the year, and to merge this record with my own view of the first mad months of the Hitler regime.
The printed pages yielded some troubling surprises. From January until September the Zeitung's editorial responses to the new order ranged from rejection to a descending trajectory of acceptance. At the beginning stood the classic editorial of January31, in which the paper declared Hitler unfit for high office. A devious and timid rumination about the Nuremburg party congress, in the September 7 issue, pleading that no German citizen deserved ostracism on account of his birth, closes this chapter in the paper's history.3
But before the curtain fell, too much was told to allow any literate Frankfurter to claim that he did not, or could not know how different the new Germany was from the old. For the first time since 1918 streets were renamed on a scale confusing native and tourist alike. Heine, Mendelsohn, and Ebert gave way to Hitler, Göring, Horst Wessel, and other heroes of the "movement." Several new holidays replaced constitution day, and instead of one national banner, the black-red-and-gold of the revolution of 1848, the new government adopted two, the black- white-and-red of the empire, to gain the approval of Germany's befuddled conservatives, and the true symbol of the new state: a red flag with a black swastika on a white circular field in the center. For the first time in German history school was closed to observe a chancellor's birthday.
By themselves, these symbolic and ceremonial innovations were harmless enough. Other changes seemed, in part at least, cut from the cloth of farce rather than history: professional organizations of every kind rushed to proclaim their solidarity with National Socialism. Teachers' organizations proved particularly susceptible to the herd instinct. Within three months all of them had surrendered to the National Socialist Teachers Union. By June, even the Association of German Teachers of the Dance got in step, declaring that it "stood firmly" "behind the people's chancellor Adolf Hitler."
Every one of the acts of homage was accompanied by the expulsion of all Jewish members from the ranks of the conforming organization. One day my father came home, more than ordinarily depressed. Germany's big-league soccer clubs had joined the procession and ousted all Jews from their rolls. Full of sadness and indignation he turned in his membership card of the First Football Club of Nuremberg, whose burgundy jersey he had worn on the playing field for eleven years.
At German universities a wave of student militancy created conditions both bizarre and sinister. The young seized the fugitive moment to get even with their professors. At the University of Frankfurt, which was named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, students demanded the dismissal of 28 professors (not all of them Jews) who did "not enjoy {their] confidence ...." In Berlin, student leaders published twelve theses which demanded that works of Jews be henceforth published in Hebrew, or, if published in German, labelled as translations. While the government decided in April that non-Aryans must be kept at 1.5 per cent of total enrollment, children of World War I veterans excepted, revolutionary enthusiasts in Frankfurt subjected this minority to constant molestations, including the lifting of academic identification cards, from which no agency of the educational establishment made any move to protect the victims.
The older generation was not slow to take its cue from those very students it was charged with educating. Frankfurt's new rector (the rough equivalent of a University president in this country) announced that his university's chief mission was to disseminate the "ethnic idea," whose exact tenets he was careful to leave undefined. The University of Münster gave an honorary doctor of laws degree to the provincial party chief of Westphalia. When Göttingen's internationally esteemed physicist, James Frank, protested the mistreatment of Jews, he was hastily disavowed by the rest of the faculty. The climax of this sordid chapter in the history of German learning, of which the foregoing constitutes only a microscopic sample, came on May 10 when students throughout Germany took the day off to burn the books of all authors whom the new Ministry of Propaganda had declared to be offensive to the new government: Jews, liberals, cosmopolitans, sophisticates, men and women gifted with a sense of humor-an odd assortment of undesirables, among whom Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse are probably the best known, at least in the English-speaking world. In Frankfurt this auto da fe was supervised by University Chaplain Fricke whose presence lent both secular and divine sanction to the bonfire.
Fifty years later, when one still struggles to comprehend this unbelievable chapter of human history, harassment of a small minority, arrests of avowed revolutionaries, and the desecration of inanimate objects may appear trivial compared to the horrors yet to come. What of events more plainly identifiable as atrocities? These occurred the moment Hitler came to power, and they were covered by the press. On M arch 20, the opening of Dachau concentration camp was both announced and explained by the Ministry of the Interior in Berlin. The facility was dedicated to the task of converting Communists into useful members of society. The release expressed some doubt whether this could be done, but concluded by consoling its readers that the detention of these subversives would at least protect the nation from the threat they posed to its well- being.
Other periodic reports also emphasized the positive social and humanitarian functions of the camps. In a long interview, the commandant of Heuberg concentration camp near Stuttgart-- identified as a retired major--described the burdens and responsibilities of his office. On weekends, in particular, when ordinary citizens enjoyed a rest, he and his staff faced many' troubled individuals wanting to know the whereabouts of sequestered relatives. As a result of the rising speed and quantity of arrests, and the attendant chaos in his records he was often unable to provide answers. But he assured the newspapers that he and his staff, though exhausted from their ongoing labors of human reclamation, did their best to satisfy these petitioners.
The German public accepted the concentration camp as a legitimate component of the law- enforcement process. Even before all parties had been outlawed in June, the new detention centers became the human warehouses for political dissenters, including some Jews. Persons listening to Radio Moscow, for instance, faced arrest on the charge of participating in illegal communist meetings. Jews "approaching German girls in an offensive manner were threatened by the same fate.
At the same time, the government denied foreign reports which put the number of detainees at 100,000. Besides numerous official editorials against "atrocity propaganda," the authorities insisted on a much smaller figure: 16,000 in Prussia and 22,000 for the entire country. This still did not explain why thousands of citizens were suffering imprisonment without trial for actions which had never before been punishable. For the first time Germans paid an unexpected price for unity. To be sure, persecutions were nothing new, here as elsewhere. Jews had been treated with great cruelty as recently as the seventeenth century; civil rights were denied religious minorities as late as the nineteenth century. Between 1820 and 1850 a host of independent minds, like Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx, had preferred exile to German prison cells. But the rigorous and total exclusion of representative political groups from public life, quick]y followed by the outlawing of all parties, by a central government which applied its draconian decrees mercilessly to all of Germany by detaining thousands illegal]y, that was without precedent. But few good citizens seemed to mind.
Oppression was neither secret nor furtive.
In the first week of March, Hermann Göring, the new minister-president of Prussia, rode into Frankfurt, surrounded by SA, SS, and eighty uniformed members of the police. In a speech on the eve of the last parliamentary elections he promised his cheering followers that respect for the law would not be allowed to interfere with the prosecution of the opposition: "My business," he said, "is not to dispense justice, but to destroy and exterminate."
The ballot box did not serve these destructive ends. In the elections of March 5, only the Communists lost votes in Frankfurt; the Social Democrats and the smaller middle-class parties actually registered some gains. After the municipal elections the following week, many city councils throughout Germany still contained opposition majorities. Storm troops and police stepped in. Frankfurt's Lord Mayor was arrested to "protect him from the wrath of the people." The next day armed men blocked all exits of city hall, while the same fate overtook his deputy and the municipal superintendent of schools.
During factory council elections in the Ruhr, only one third of the miners and steel workers voted for National Socialist candidates. To remedy this error of judgment a new law stipulated that 2/3 of all such councils must henceforth consist of Hitler's followers. The government simply waived rules as need arose.
Gloom descended over our home. It was only a year since my father had found work again, after two years of unemployment. Now this. Never of a happy disposition, he succumbed to chronic dejection. As a family we withdrew into our own world, alienated from our immediate surroundings, suspicious, weighing every word spoken within hearing of a stranger, revealing only to each other our outraged reaction to the day's events. Slowly, but obsessively, the concern about escape came to dominate our thoughts. Very slowly, because for a man like my father, who spoke no language other than German, any foreign refuge spelled the end of his life as a bread-winner. This was not true of my mother who spoke both English and French fluently, a fact which made the topic even more delicate. Would we emigrate one day without our father? The idea was abhorrent to all of us. Whenever the conversation reached that point, my mother changed the subject before my father could launch into what became increasingly familiar and depressing tirades lamenting his uselessness to all of us.
We had friends who persisted in believing that this new government of incompetent rowdies would not last long. I remember the father of Heiner M., who went about his daily tasks with a fixed, confident smile until Christmas Day 1934, when he locked the door of his study, drew a pistol from his desk, and blew out his brains. Suicides of civil servants, professors, and other professional men, dismissed because of ancestry or political beliefs, became epidemic. Once again it is worth recalling that we learned this, not by some secret grapevine, but from our newspapers.
In this grim world only children retained the capacity for laughter. The proliferating public holidays provided one source of comic relief. After the March 5 elections endowed the Hitler cabinet, a coalition of Nazis and Conservatives, with a slight 52 percent majority in parliament, our home-room teacher announced that "the historic turning point implicit in the overwhelming [sic] victory of the national front" would be observed by a school holiday on March 8. My class-mates and I, 12-year-old emerging men of the world, sneered at such bombast, but if a suspension of classes went with historic turning points, we could only hope that history would keep on turning ever sharper corners.
Fate granted us this frivolous wish. If a narrow election victory occasioned such rejoicing, then the opening of the new parliament deserved more elaborate celebration. A fire had gutted the parliament building in Berlin one week before the balloting. The perpetrators were never identified; the public official thought to have had the best opportunity to commit the arson, Hermann Göring, went to his death insisting that this was one crime of which he was totally innocent. Still, the conflagration came as a godsend to the Nazis. They blamed the disaster on the Communists, outlawed their party, and proscribed its members. The parliamentary premiere was staged in Potsdam, the Berlin suburb which had since the seventeenth century been the second residence of the electors of Brandenburg and kings of Prussia. The Reichstag would open in the Garrison Church, in whose crypt Hitler's favorite Prussian King, Frederick the Great, lay buried.
Parliamentary openings had heretofore gone largely unnoticed. The new Minister of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment, Joseph Goebbels, explained why that was going to change. According to his proclamation the recent election had at last united all Germans. "Many millions, all tribes, estates, and confessions," he intoned, "have clasped hands, rising above differences of class and religion." This wonder-working effect of a 52 per cent majority, a secular loaves and fishes miracle, was to be observed in all towns and villages.
Then came the damper on our holiday joy. We would not have to attend classes on March 21, but we would have to gather in the school auditorium to witness the unfolding of this programmed rebirth. Our principal was to explain the historic significance of the day, followed by a broadcast of the ceremonies which would include speeches by President Hindenburg and Chancellor Hitler. Schools lacking a radio were ordered to procure one. "The festivities must be so arranged," the proclamation concluded, "that all students realize that they are witnessing the beginning of a new epoch."
At our worm's-eye level the impact of this production was, however, small. We never had paid much attention to the orations our principal was required to deliver on national holidays. The routine obsequies to history, teeming with allusions to German greatness, never moved us. We dozed, yawned, and fidgeted through all of it. March 21 turned out to be more of the same. The broadcast was a dismal failure. Our school's loudspeaker was adequate for classroom use, but its emanations barely reached half of the auditorium audience. The transmission drowned in static, and the speeches remained incomprehensible, even to the front rows. A radio reporter's breathless account of Hindenburg's and Hitler's descent to the church basement, where they gazed briefly and wordlessly at the casket containing Frederick the Great's bones, was likewise smothered by electronic noise. Fortunately, it was all over by one o'clock, and we ran home as fast as our feet would carry us to salvage what we could of the holiday.
What did the "national revolution" actually mean to us children? Recently, social historians have claimed that our generation had found in Hitler a new father. Since our elders returned defeated from World War I, these scholars reason, they had failed us as authority figures, and the Führer stepped into a void which had surrounded us since birth. This hypothesis lacks historic substance. In reality, we feared our fathers as much as we feared any dictator. We viewed them as anything but failures. They had fought a hostile world to a standstill, and their heroism became the stuff of legends and myths. We needed no surrogate father. The American historian, Daniel Horn, has qualified these assumptions by pointing out that in 1936, before membership became compulsory, only 55 per cent of Germany's eligible boys had joined the Hitler Youth.4
In my class, joining youth organizations was likewise not fashionable. Of about forty boys, three entered the Hitler Youth or its auxiliary, the Jungvolk, in 1933. A somewhat larger number belonged to the Protestant "Bible Circle" until it was dissolved. School and society preempted so much of our day that we were unwilling to surrender any more time to organized activities. Our ambition was to evade, not conform. Once one reached the age where career worries necessitated submission, this independence wilted, but in our early teens grades were all that mattered to our parents, and liberty was all that counted with us.
I remember, therefore, no individual or collective surge to join a real or imaginary vanguard of history. We had no revolutionary ambitions, no conscious desire to be remembered by future generations. Our acknowledgment of the events of the Spring of 1933 consisted of a little obscene, two-line joke: "Why is the Führer not allowed to fart?" "Because the whole nation stands behind him." To began to make the rounds after the "day of Potsdam,' and constituted our "cohort's" most significant contribution to the folklore of the new era.
Most of us continued to play the same games. With adults they remained games of evasion; with each other they expressed friendship or rivalry, depending on our relationships. The political theater around us was mysterious and absurd, as the adult world had always been.
But the revolution wanted us, of course, and did its best to penetrate our secret universe. Late in April, the new Prussian Minister of Education issued a directive exhorting school faculties to reconsider failing grades whose recipients had "devoted their entire strength to the liberation movement of Adolf Hitler." Slyly, His Excellency left the final decision to the teachers, but he encouraged them "to take into account the greatness and the needs of the times, and to judge generously." So far as I was aware of it, parental reaction to this ukase was hostile, chiefly because our progenitors feared that such policies would devalue our diplomas and obstruct our path to personal success. No one could tell how long this regime would last. Once it was gone, we would be among its victims since no one would take our degrees seriously. That was the common view. To us it made little difference. The injection of politics into grading certainly created no rush among my peers to devote their "entire strength to the liberation movement of Adolf Hitler."
My own next brush with the new reality came one afternoon in May, shortly after the book- burnings. My mother was entertaining some friends at tea, while I sat in my father's study, banished from the cream cakes and tarts, halfheartedly decimating my homework. Suddenly the bell of our second-story apartment rang--not in the ordinary manner--but as if someone of great weight, or in a great hurry, had simply planted his thumb on the button and left it there until his summons was answered. I rushed to open the door and found myself face to face with two storm troopers and a civilian who identified himself as a member of the state police. Without invitation the strangers entered the hallway where the civilian asked me whether I knew the whereabouts of a Fräulein Hildebrand. She was the maid in the other household sharing our duplex, and I only knew that I had not seen her for quite a while. I also knew that she was a member of some militant left-wing organization--I have quite forgotten which--and therefore lucky to have cleared out before the visitors arrived. At this point my' mother emerged from the drawing room, but the civilian, a rotund, jovial sort, glanced over her shoulder at the hen party, and told her in a soft voice which invited no contradiction to resume the entertainment of her friends. He followed me to the study, sat down, patted me on the shoulder, and asked whether my father possessed any forbidden or subversive books. He was not the least bit frightening; the two storm troopers, standing rather forlornly in the hall, even less so.
The entire mission struck me as a waste of time. Did my interrogator expect to find Miss Hildebrand in our apartment? Did I look to him like a son who would denounce his father? I knew of course, that adults needed humoring and assured him, therefore, that my father did not read anything he was not supposed to. He smiled at that and left me to my homework. Then he and his martial followers rummaged in the bookcases and after a while departed with an armful of volumes they told me were unfit for the library of a good German household. I cannot remember what all they confiscated. One book which turned out to be missing, I gathered subsequently from my parents, was a treatise on tax law by a former Frankfurt professor named Sinzheimer. What they left behind was much more remarkable. They' did not touch the works of Heinrich Heine, Germany's greatest Jewish writer of the nineteenth century, and a rebel and political exile in his day'. One book for which I had trembled was Emil Ludwig's biography of the businessman and amateur archeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, the slipshod excavator of Troy. It was a recent Christmas present, and I knew that its author was proscribed because he was a Jew and because of his derogatory books on the Kaiser and Bismarck. But our uninvited guests had not touched my property', nor--wonder of wonders--had they laid a hand on Karl Marx' Das Kapital. I still possess the copy which escaped their patriotic vigilance, and while it has never figured among my favorite reading, this escape from the Gestapo had made it a treasured relic of my childhood.
This was the only call the secret police paid us. I might add that they did not find Fräulein Hildebrand. Several years later I thought I saw her on a street in Amsterdam. She gave no sign of recognition, and I made no effort to approach her.
But to get back to school: since universities were obviously adopting national socialism with such speed that the government could barely keep up with their enthusiasms, the authorities could turn their attention to the secondary sector. On May 9, the new guidelines for secondary education emerged. This time the set of tablets originated in the German ministry' of the interior, indicating that the jurisdiction which individual states had traditionally exercised in this field was now being usurped by the national government. A custom of centuries, identified with those national founding fathers whom we were constantly exhorted to emulate, had ended. But while that may have troubled some of our elders--not many of them apparently--it was the message, rather than the strategy, of its dissemination which affected us. The minister handed down four commandments:
We first felt the impact of point four. More physical education was a popular prospect. All it actually meant was one more hour of athletics a week Content of these classes changed only minutely. Instead of putting a small shot, we were taught to throw dummy' hand grenades. The sinister and martial implications of the exercise were, however largely obscured by the fact that the object remained to throw the dummy as far, rather than as accurately as possible.
Next in importance for us came point two. As it happened, I advanced from sixth to the seventh grade just before these new policy instructions appeared. This meant that history was about to make its first appearance on my lesson plan. I had looked forward to this enrichment of my school day, but found my expectations once more disappointed.
History, like everything else in school, started on page one of a dreary manual--with the old Egyptians--and a year and a half later, before I left Germany, we were still wallowing in the origins of the Roman Republic. Our teacher had not yet reached territory whose exploration was of the slightest interest to me, although I lived in a part of Germany which teemed with reminders of ancient Rome. In fact, outside of Frankfurt, in the wooded hills of the Taunus mountains near Bad Homburg, stood the Saalburg: a reconstructed Roman fort from the time of Emperor Hadrian. In the neighboring suburb of Heddernheim, people digging in their yards often exhumed shards of Roman pottery. An entire subdivision in that locality', called the Römerstadt, included streets named after the Antonine emperors, during whose reigns the eastern boundaries of the empire had extended far enough to cross our region. But our elders spoiled these associations for us. I remember Sunday excursions to the Saalburg during which every gravestone became a testing site for my; Latin. In our tight and worried lives nothing was allowed to be fun; everything became an examination subject.
What I am leading to is the confession that starting history in 1914 would have suited me to the ground. The war and the revolution, that was interesting. However, I do not doubt that our teachers would have succeeded in making even these events as dull as they made the history of the ancients. In any; case, I never found out. The first year of history passed, little affected by the new maxims, except that we gathered from our teacher, a horsefaced, perpetually unshaven individual named Meyer, that the peoples of the Near East--except the Egyptians--were entirely too much like Jews for comfort, and that their decline in the face of Greece and Rome confirmed current beliefs about nordic superiority. This it was only proper that straight-nosed Hellenes defeated hook-nosed Persians at Salamis, and that Romans should eventually throw salt on the nuns of Carthage.
While Herr Studienrat Meyer used every opportunity to sharpen our "vision of racial differences," he seemed to entertain no suspicion of my own tainted blood. I was blond and blue-eyed, the latter physical characteristic inherited from my Jewish grandfather, to whom I also owe my middle name Adolf. (My Aryan father had brown eyes). Nothing in my appearance indicated any ties with Asian Semites or North African Phoenicians. However, when our biology teacher began to take seriously the intent of the third point on the ministerial blueprint for education, the battle between the new "ethnic idea" and my own hybrid origins had to be joined.
As soon as Hitler began housekeeping in the Berlin chancellory, talk of "race" filled the air. Nordic man began to spook in every half-educated brain. Girls began to bleach their hair, and-- for all I know--so did men. But since most Germans were not blond, other categories of physical respectability had to be devised to ferret out the impurities in the national bloodstream. Terms such as "saxon," "alpine," and "dinaric" reassured members of the brunette majority whose antecedents excluded semitic, negroid, and other unforgivable defects. (In view of the growing friendship with Japan, it was never decided where orientals fitted into this scale of racial values).
After the publication of the ministerial ukase these preoccupations also entered our classroom. Herr Döring, who taught us biology, decided to put his science at the disposal of national re- education. Our dreary sallies into botanical classification suddenly stopped. Instead, we were subjected to protracted measurements of all parts of our physique not covered by clothing: Arms, hands, noses, and craniums. The results were painstakingly recorded on sheets of graph paper. The proceedings delighted us, of course. While this went on, we had no homework; all we had to do was appear in class, have our dimensions recorded, and keep reasonably quiet while our teacher accumulated a formidable set of numbers about each of us.
Once again my recollections do not indicate that any of us took this experiment seriously. There ensued endless banter about one classmate's bulbous nose, and another one's flat head, or a third one's bow legs. Some of it might sound cruel, but it was not intended to give offense, and none of the victims took it amiss. If anybody was anxious to "pass" as this type or that, he gave no indication. All of us took it as a lark.
And then came the great day when the meaning of it all was to be revealed to us. I do not doubt that Herr Döring consumed much midnight oil drawing new and exciting lessons from his columns of figures. How extensive a presentation he had planned will never be known, because the new Linné ineptly began his talk with the juiciest item on his list of findings. Our teacher decided to start with a flourish by announcing who among us belonged to the elect, whose cranial, skeletal and dermatological characteristics confirmed membership in the nordic race. To whet our expectations he announced that only 7.7 per cent of the school population (Good God! Had he measured every child from grade five to twelve?!) dwelled at the blond and blue- eyed apex of the human race. After the statistics came the names, in alphabetical order. Naturally, my friend and neighbor, Fritz Ewald, a wiry, hawk-faced, ashblond lad, was on the list. That was to be expected. But when he approached the end of the alphabet whose name should he call but mine! It was the first time in my so far undistinguished school career that I was in the top seven per cent of anything. What added to the thrill, however, was not the honor, neither desired nor prized, but the sudden overpowering pleasure which I felt when I realized that the announcement placed a teacher at my mercy. The minute he subsided, my hand shot up. "Yes, Schmitt," Herr Döring said with an indulgent smile, "What is it?" "Sir, can persons of Jewish descent be Nordic?" I asked. "Of course not, my boy. That is the point of our work," he replied. "Our new racial science allows us to identify and separate such people from the national community." "Then there must be a mistake," I said, as humbly as I could. "My mother is Jewish."
I have no idea what went through the teacher's mind during the endless seconds of silence which followed. Nor do I know what my peers thought of my revelation, which, of course, had been no news to most of them. I think that some of them were annoyed that I had put a premature end to our biological holiday. Herr Döring was momentarily speechless, while his hands fiddled nervously with his sheets of graph paper. Then he shuffled them together in a neat pile, took a deep breath, and told us to get out our herbals. Indeed, I had ruined the entire project, and it was back to counting pistils and stamens. Henceforth I did my biology homework with unusual diligence, convinced that this teacher would miss no opportunity to cause me difficulties should I be caught unprepared. But I need not have worried. For the rest of the year he never called on me again.
Summer liberated us school children for six weeks during July and August. My mother went to Switzerland and France, exploring employment opportunities and possible havens of emigration, but without success. For me it was the first summer in which I took an interest in girls, and in the meadow below our house, hidden in the tall grass, smoked my first cigar, one of my father's Swiss Stumpen. Contrary to convention, I did not get sick. I found smoking to be enjoyable, and I still do. Even the new Germany left us in peace. Despite its authoritarian cast, the life of a German child was not as relentlessly organized as an American child's seems to be. No one seemed to worry that we would spend six weeks doing nothing that was either constructive or useful. We played in the streets, ate fruit from the trees of a neighbor's orchard; in short, we had a thoroughly good time without a thought of tomorrow.
The resumption of school introduced us to a new classroom ritual. We were not only to rise and come to attention when a teacher entered the class, but were to "raise the right hand at eye level" and hold it there until he had returned the salute and told us to sit down. This perturbed me greatly. Until then I had managed to avoid this concession to our new masters, and I knew that my father likewise made it a point not to render what had, of late, come to be called the "German salute." Should I refuse to participate in this ceremony? My parents explained to me that I could not violate school rules, that I must, therefore, raise my hand with everyone else, but under no circumstance must I ever say "Heil Hitler!" I had a feeling that if I pressed my own preference, which consisted of simply standing at attention, I would cause trouble to my parents rather than to myself. It had become quite clear to me that the national synchronization of political beliefs concerned adults, while childhood remained a privileged reserve of irreverence and irresponsibility. No informer listened to our conversation; no law demanded of us new commitments and explicit changes of attitude. The fact that children did not count suddenly turned into an advantage. But I realized that I must not use this discovery to jeopardize my parents' safety'.
The last great event of 1933 was Hitler's visit to Frankfurt. It took place on September23, and was to open construction of the Frankfurt-Darmstadt leg of the new, grandiose north-south Autobahn. He was to make his way from the airport to the work site, turn the first spade full of earth, make a speech, and then dash back to his plane.
By then the government's stagecraft knew how to turn even so brief a visit into an epic occasion. At seven o'clock in the morning a battalion of some 700 unemployed laborers lined up at the Federal Labor Office. On an improvised rostrum, decorated with flowers and flags, the office's director formally surrendered his control of this contingent. On this day, thanks to Hitler's statesmanship, these men were to take leave of the army of the unemployed and begin work on this Appian Way of the future. After three "Heils" to the nation's savior, these chosen helots, preceded by a band of the Frankfurt SA, marched to the square in front of the stock exchange. There followed more speeches eulogizing the unforgettable occasion, and more cheers for the man whom one excited orator described, for the first time, as "the greatest German of all." Then the local party chief handed each of the 700 a spade and made them shoulder it like a weapon, after which they re-formed and began another martial progress to the distant site where construction was scheduled to begin the next day.
While the proletarian elect trotted toward their destination, the notables rushed in their Mercedes Benzes to the airport, where a squadron of planes carrying Hitler, his entire cabinet, and an assortment of party luminaries had just landed. More panegyrics, exchanges of bouquets of flowers, and then everyone took his proper place in the motorcade: Hitler by himself in car number one, the flowers in car number two, the ministers in vehicles three and four, and so on down the line. At the work site in the municipal forest, the patriotic sermons continued, including the announcement by the Gauleiter and Governor of Hesse-Nassau, that all necessary rights-of-way in his province had been donated by their selfless owners. Then the chief engineer in charge of the project reported to the Führer, in soldierly fashion, that 700 German workers had "fallen in" to join the battle against unemployment. He handed Hitler what the papers called an Ehrenspaten (a spade of honor, or honorary spade--however one translated it--it did not make much sense), and the "greatest German" seized it "with determination," and thrust it "vigorously" into the ground. Then he made a few extemporaneous remarks, shook hands with some of the workmen--a folksy gesture quickly imitated by his retinue of ministers and uniformed epigones. For a fleeting moment the great fraternized with the humble, in a manner reminiscent of the former Kaiser's visits to Ruhr factories during the war when he bade the steelworkers to toil as devotedly at their "anvil" as he assured them he labored for the good of the country on his throne.
Almost lost in this succession of ceremonies was a brief moment on Hitler's return to the airport when he passed, according to the official report, a "cordon of 35,000 cheering school children." That is where we came in.
The events of September 23 were not only carried by all radio stations, they also brought us yet another holiday, half nuisance and half fun. Fun because it meant no classes and some time off, nuisance because part of the day had to be spent in the observance of another great moment in the hectic pageant of contemporary history. Early in the morning, while the 700 ex- unemployed marched hither and yon, with and without spades, we boarded special streetcars which took us to our designated spot on the route along which the motorcade was to travel. This logistic miracle, bringing each schoolchild in a matter of hours to a designated place on the periphery of the city, undoubtedly gave many school administrators sleepless nights, but our group, at least, got to its destination without difficulty and on schedule. Then we stood for hours awaiting the great moment when Germany's leaders would pass before our eyes.
I seem to recollect that our teachers were in a far greater tizzy than we. Several of them honored the day by appearing in uniform. Our gym teacher, Herr Reitz, could be seen rushing up and down the street looking both harassed and important in his storm trooper's wardrobe, embellished, as we registered with awe, by the three diamonds of a company commander. We had no idea that such greatness dwelt among us. At the same time, we noted that the leather strap with which his cap was anchored to his chin kept slipping off, until its upward progress was arrested by his nose which protruded more visibly and effectively than the receding lower portion of his face. Nor was it very clear what agitated him so. After we had been unloaded and lined up along the sector of the street which was to resound with our cheers, we had neither inclination nor opportunity for mischief. But poor Sturmführer Reitz acted as if each class was competing for a prize in neatness, and he kept jogging back and forth inspecting his sector, pushing us into an ever straighter line, gradually getting into a profuse sweat. Our math master, Lepke, had draped the uniform of an Amtswalter over his copious belly. It included brown jodhpurs and jackboots of the same color as the storm-troop outfit, but his shirt was adorned with different insignia of rank, denoting his membership in the executive committee of the local party organization. Amtswalter Lepke displayed more dignity. He stood quietly, only occasionally running a wary and threatening eve over our ranks, snuffing out by his very glance any stirrings of levity or unrest.
As the hour of the great arrival drew nigh, an announcement informed us that a deputation of youths would wait on the Führer before he passed us, present him with another bouquet of flowers (1933 was a banner year for Germany's flag makers and florists) and ask him to drive slowly so that we could get a good look at Germany's savior.
And then the great moment finally came. We heard distant band music, the Badenweiler March , Hitler's reputed favorite, of which repeated performances at every public appearance soon must have made him as sick as Harry Truman, years later, of the Missouri Waltz. Then the motorcade must have executed a complicated about-face, because when its first vehicles reached us, its sequence had been reversed. Motorized storm troops began to pass us, and then successive carloads of uniformed, impeccably-tailored dignitaries, whose insignia of rank, all polished to a fine gloss, identified them as persons of general rank in SA, SS, and Police. Only a few cognoscenti among us recognized the occupants of the lead vehicles as our new mayor, the Gauleiter, and other stars of the local hierarchy. But soon the quality of the cast improved. The familiar faces of Goebbels and Hess, the deputy party leader, slowly floated past, each of them transfixed with beatific smiles. We noted that Goebbels had a splendid tan, obviously he was enjoying a place in the sun in more ways than one. Another car, filled with one or two generals and cabinet ministers in civilian clothes, struck us an anti-climactic, probably, in part, because an approaching roar indicated that He was nigh. Our eyes turned left in the direction of the cheers, and the man for whom they were intended hove into view. And there he was, standing erect in the car, dressed rather like the poor relation of the gilded knights who had passed us in such numbers: brown shirt and black tie, jodphurs and jackboots, hatless and coatless, raising his hand in his personal version of the national salute--first up to eye level and then bending the arm at the elbow until his hand rested palm upward by his right ear. For the first and only time, I saw Hitler face to face. It struck me then that he did not look like the photos in newspapers, magazines, and shop windows. The ascetic and martial leanness of these likenesses was missing from his fleshy, immobile, impassive countenance. It was as if he were passing us without noticing our presence, slowly and repeatedly saluting like a wound-up doll, neither frowning nor smiling, looking straight ahead, his gaze riveted on some distant object which only he perceived.
Hitler passed us in a matter of seconds. As soon as I had noticed how different and really odd he looked, he had moved on, and it was only then that I became aware of my own outstretched arm and my own open mouth shouting: "Heil, Heil," along with the thousands around me. Quickly I lowered my hand. I trembled with a sudden fit of consternation and embarrassment. What on earth had made me act like that? I felt humiliated; I still do when I think of this moment. No one noticed when I stopped cheering. No one would have noticed in this crush if I had never started. But the fact remained that I had lent my voice to this chorus of 35,000 cheeping children without any deliberate exercise of my physical will. I had acted without conscious awareness of what I was doing.
When I got home I told my mother what had happened. She told me not to worry about it. Involuntary gestures, she said, did not count. I should just remember how easy it was to lose control of one's body and voice. but I did not fail to notice that she did not tell my father of my confession, and I knew better than to share this part of the day's events with him. He must not know of this act of betrayal.
My classmates had enjoyed the spectacle, and kept talking about it for days. None of us had ever seen so many famous men in one motorcade; most of us, I daresay, never would again. A great number, as I found out in 1945, would later pay with their lives for this moment of excitement.
Life returned to normal, and our teachers went back to their classroom civvies. My family kept looking for an exit. In 1934, when the school curriculum was drastically altered to do justice to the first of the educational maxims of the national revolution, the formation of "political man," they found an escape hatch for me by sending me out of the country to continue my schooling in Holland. But that is another story, a turn in my fate of which I had no premonition in the autumn of 1933.
1. Elizabeth A. Greicus, "Efforts of tbe Progressive Bloc to influence the Conduct of the War in Russia", 1915-1917. Unpub. Diss., Tulane University, 1969, pp. 298-299.
2. Eliot B. Wheaton, The Nazi Revolution, 1933-1935, (New York, 1969), pp. 213-225.
3. The subsequent reconstruction of events which the writer did not himself observe is based on the Frankfurter Zeitung for the year 1933.
4. Daniel Horn, "Youth Resistence in the Third Reich: A Social Portrait," Journal of Social History, 7, 1973, pp.31-45; for a variation on the same theme, see the same author's "The Struggle for Catholic Youth in Germany: An Assessment," Catholic Historical Review, 65, 1979, pp. 56l-582.
First Published: November 1984
First Online Edition: 26 June 2000
Last Revised: 26 June 2000
Kenneth Wilburn, Web Editor for the Brewster Lectures
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