A child of hitler pdf

Hitler

A CHILD of HITLER GERMANY IN THE DAYS WHEN GOD WORE A SWASTIKA

Alfons Heck

Digital Edition ISBN 978-0-939650-82-8

Digital Edition Copyright © 2011 by Alfons Heck. All rights reserved. This book, or any portion thereof, may not be reproduced in any form, except for review purposes, without the written

permission of the publisher.

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For my wife, June

The events in this account happened more than 40 years ago. I was a teenager at the time, and what few notes I had made were destroyed in the air raids. Therefore, I have used my imagination to recreate conversations and to dramatize scenes. While I cannot vouch for the accuracy of every name and date, what I am sure of is that this is how I experienced Nazi Germany. In that sense, it is fully my autobiography.

-Alfons Heck

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Alfons Heck...

...at Heck farm.

...in Kameval costume. ...with brother Rudolf at First Communion.

It was a disheartening experience to watch Hitler take over the youth of Germany, poison their minds, and prepare them for the sinister ends he had in store for them. I had not believed it possible until I saw it with my own eyes.

William L. Shirer

The Nightmare Years

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FOREWORD In just 12 years, 1933 to 1945, Adolf Hitler came, saw, was seen,

conquered and was eradicated. The results of that reign still linger overpoweringly-on the political map of the world, and in individual human cost. Alfons Heck says it, in the final words of this book: "Tragically, now, we are the other part of the Holocaust, the generation burdened with the enormity of Auschwitz. That is our life sentence, for we became the enthusiastic victims of our Führer."

All of Hitler's victims were blameless, including the enthusiastic children who wore his colors and swastika, and swore a solemn oath of fealty to evil. Children become part of the society to which they belong, and if that society is forced into evil, then who shall be held to blame? Alfons Heck writes of an exciting, colorful, stirring childhood. He remembers, accurately, being part of a Germany renascent, powerful, something to be dealt with. The fascination in Heck's marvelous story is the fascination with evil, with the satanic Pied Piper who led a generation to pain and suffering.

Blame the children or the society? Hardly. It would be to blame the rubble for the bombs, the wreckage for the tornado. We are all beasts of burden, and the burden is life; hardly in our power to determine the ingredients of the load.

Heck tells a story that needs to be told, and he needs to make no apologies for what happened. He was there and his report in A Child of Hitler is not an apologia but a crucial look at what was happening to a talented boy growing into manhood within a system he had no way of truly measuring.

Leo Coughlin Former Foreign Editor and Editor "Perspective" Baltimore Sun

It's extraordinary that Alfons Heck survived to write this account, and perhaps equally remarkable that he can tell his story so fully, that is, with complete acknowledgment of his participation in a cause so widely despised. He writes factually but vividly; often the horror lies between the lines. Reading A Child of Hitler seems necessary for a full understanding of World War II-and to comprehend the chilling possibilities of a captivated childhood.

Alexander B. Cruden National and Foreign Editor

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Detroit Free Press

I first knew Alfons Heck as a soft, precise voice on a long distance line, a voice that never flagged or rose as we worked over a long story about his experiences that he had written for my weekly newspaper. I met him some time later, when he came to Boston and appeared on a local television talk show. We had a long, easy conversation about Germany and German Texans, about history and reminiscences and family. The voice, it turned out, belonged to someone you would never pick out of a crowd as a former Hitler Youth leader: trim instead of burly, dark instead of blond, reserved and almost courtly.

Even more surprising was his appearance on TV. His soft answers could not turn away the wrath of the callers. Again and again they pressed him to confess his complicity in evil in their abstract terms-to agree with them that because he had been a fanatic, he was guilty of fanaticism's crimes. Quietly, precisely, he returned again and again to the particulars of his own life instead-not defending his fanaticism or denying the horrors, but insisting on the understanding that begins at a human scale. He told the story of one person's Nazism in a human voice.

In this book, he tells his story again. He does not offer a full history of Hitler's war on humanity; he does not begin with the point of view of a historian, or a poet, or any other kind of generalizer. The very ordinariness of his starting point, and of his voice, is part of this book's power. The most profound horror of Nazism was how it taught a generation of Germans not to hear the sound of the human voice, but to listen instead to the bugles and the whirlwind. Alfons Heck once shouted along. It matters that we pay attention to his human voice now.

John Ferguson Senior Editor The Boston Phoenix

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Map I

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Further map explanation The #10 indicates the present city offices, which were built long after the

war. Earlier, that was the location of our Volksschule. The Cusanus Gymnasium is and was located on the Kurfürstenstrasse. Both the Wehrmacht barracks and the penitentiary, where the French took me, are just off the map. Our farm was shaped like a T: the long rectangle was the house, the other section the stables. The synagogue (#11) was a POW camp after 1940. The present Neustrasse was Adolf Hitler Strasse. The path from #7 to #8 was my way to the Hitler Youth headquarters after the air attack. The original headquarters (#9) were severely damaged and we moved into the basement of the Gymnasium until the end.

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Map II

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Further map explanation All of the Autobahnen were built after the war, with the exception of the

Cologne-Frankfurt section. Prior to that they were major two lane highways. The most important was the Koblenz-Trier section which ran just south of Wittlich. The xxxxx indicate the fortifications of the Westwall. They were lightest along the Luxembourg border, but very heavy where we were and south of us, since we faced France. The armored train location is my best educated guess. The distance to Bitburg was perhaps 26 miles, due to the winding road through the Eifel mountains. The terrain west to the border is fairly flat, direct distance roughly 21-22 miles, but it can be as much as 30, depending on the route one prefers. Along the winding, beautiful Mosel, it's about 50 miles to the French border, but that was a sightseeing route. Also, the very important rail line from Koblenz to the border, which is not shown, ran roughly parallel to the Autobahn of today. These two arteries were very dangerous, being under constant attack from the summer of 1944 on, but most of the villages were practically untouched by destruction until the very last two months.

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CHAPTER 1 In Hitler's Germany, my Germany, childhood ended at the age of 10,

with admission to the Jungvolk, the junior branch of the Hitler Youth. Thereafter we children became the political soldiers of the Third Reich.

In reality, though, the basic training of almost every child began at six, upon entrance to elementary school. For me, that year was 1933, three months after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor. I have only a child's recollection of the early years of his rule, but I vividly remember the wild enthusiasm of the people when German troops marched through my hometown on March 7, 1936, in the process of taking back the Rhineland from the hated French, whose soldiers had left in 1932.

Reprinted from Wittlich so wie es war 2 Wittlich in 1933, before the storm (looking at the town from the south)

I was born in Wittlich, a small wine producing town just 25 miles east of the French border in the Mosel valley of the Rhineland. My paternal ancestors had come from the Bordeaux region of France around 1770 and settled in this tiny hamlet of Wittlich. By 1933, the population was still only 8,000 or so, but the distinctly medieval-looking town was now the county seat and a major trade center.

Under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the Rhineland had been not only demilitarized, but placed under French occupation for 15 years. France (and to some degree the unprotesting British) handed Hitler the first of his bloodless victories by allowing fewer than 3,000 German troops to re-enter the region unchallenged by France's vastly superior army. There would be much more appeasement-over the Sudetenland, Austria, Czechoslovakia-enough to convince Hitler that he had become invincible, and that he could attack

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Poland with impunity. That turned out to be a delusion which may have cost as many as 50 million lives.

None of this, of course, was apparent to the people of Wittlich in 1936. On that March evening, perched on the shoulders of my Uncle Franz, I watched a torchlight parade of brown-shined storm troopers and Hitler Youth formations, through a bunting draped marketplace packed with what seemed to be the whole population. Clusters of people hung from windows and balconies, and a continuous storm of Heil Hitler drowned out the music of the first military band the people had seen in 14 years. That's a long time for a German to be without genuine, military march music, but what drove the populace into a fever pitch of excitement was the man who stood in a black, open Mercedes touring car parked in front of the medieval city hall. It was the Führer himself, acknowledging with a thin smile and an outstretched arm the near-delirious homage of the crowd. It was the first time I had ever seen him, and although I met him face to face years later, I will never forget the rapture he evoked that night. Some of the more dour citizens who normally could barely nod a greeting in return, were shouting their lungs out. On that evening, Hitler surely symbolized the promise of a new Germany, a proud Reich that had once again found its rightful place.

Unlike our elders, we, the children of the '30s, knew nothing of the turmoil or freedom of the Weimar Republic. As soon as the Nazi regime came into power, it revamped the educational structure from top to bottom, and with very little resistance. Our indoctrination, therefore, did not begin with admission to the Jungvolk at age 10, but from our very first day in the Volksschule, the elementary school. We five- and six-year-olds received an almost daily dose of nationalistic instruction, which we swallowed as naturally as our morning milk. It was repeated endlessly that Adolf Hitler had restored Germany's dignity and pride and freed us from the shackles of Versailles, the harsh peace treaty that had plunged our country into more than a decade of bloody political uproar. Even in working democracies, children are too immature to question the veracity of what they are taught by their educators. Unless they have singularly aware parents, the very young become defenseless receptacles for whatever is crammed into them. We, who had never heard the bracing tones of dissent, never doubted for a moment that we were fortunate to live in a country of such glowing hopes.

And unless one was Jewish, a gypsy, a homosexual or a political opponent of Nazism, the Germany of the '30s had indeed become a land of promise. It's no exaggeration to say that if Hitler had died in 1938, he would

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have been celebrated as one of the greatest statesmen of German history, despite the persecution of the Jews (violent anti-Semitism had become an ugly feature of public German life by then, but very few would have predicted it would end in genocide).

There was another event in 1936 which I clearly remember: the Olympic Games, held in Berlin that year. They not only further enhanced the German feeling of pride, but they also served as the showcase for what the Nazi regime had accomplished in just three years. Jesse Owens' achievement in winning four gold medals has been sadly politicized to the disgust of Owens himself, who did not ·feel slighted by the German people. Although Hitler's desire to have a Germanic-Nordic type as a hero of the 1936 Olympics was unfulfilled, Germany did rank first in medals gained. I saw Leni Riefenstahl's superbly filmed movie of the Olympics at least a hundred times, since it was a staple in our Hitler Youth entertainment, and Jesse Owens' feat was never excised from the film, as some critics have claimed. It's silly to assume Hitler's racial policies were influenced by Owens. Hitler himself claimed that even the most inferior races were capable of producing brilliant specimens. It was his conviction that that was what made the Jews so dangerous. To us innocents in the Hitler Youth, the Jews were usually proclaimed as devious and cunning overachievers, especially in their aim of polluting our pure Aryan race, whatever that meant.

The year 1936 was, for me, not characterized primarily by public events, significant as they were. I encountered the irrevocability of death for the first time that year when my grandfather died. From the time I could walk, he and I had been inseparable. Every evening he would take me with him to a pub for his stein of beer before supper. For weeks after his death, his dog Heini and I wandered forlornly to his grave every day, until we were convinced he wouldn't come back. With the resilience of youth, my grief abated, but the dog's didn't. Heini was found dead on my grandfather's grave that fall. The Wittlicher Tageblatt wrote a touching obituary on how the dog had starved itself to death.

I had been just six weeks old when my parents moved to Oberhausen, a large city in the industrial heartland of Germany, the Ruhr, and my grandparents, whose children were all adults, had persuaded my parents to leave me behind temporarily. It would be easier that way, they had argued, to get settled in their business, especially since my twin brother Rudi was still frail from a hernia operation. At birth we had together weighed just six and a half pounds. I suppose my mother never had a chance against my

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grandmother, the undisputed matriarch of the family. The "temporary" stay stretched into a year, then two. My mother, a gentle and pious woman, capitulated after the third year when my grandmother told her rather cruelly that she was neither a good Hausfrau nor had any business sense. The grocery store, which my grandparents bought for them, had failed miserably in its second year, supposedly because my mother had given most of its stock away to poor people. It was many years later that I discovered my father's incompetence rather than my mother's gullibility had ruined the business. There was no doubt, though, that my mother was a failure as a Hausfrau. She was extraordinarily disorganized and hurriedly started three or four different tasks in the house at one time without properly finishing one. My Aunt Maria, who was as meticulous as a column of bookkeeping entries, and as unbending as a Prussian drill sergeant, never tired of telling how she had once found my infant brother asleep under a mountain of dirty diapers, while my mother frantically ran from room to room looking for him.

I was never again considered my mother's son by either my grandparents or my uncles and aunts. It's similar to buying a dog. Once you bring it home, you soon forget its mother. I must have been four years old when I first remember meeting my mother. She scooped me up in her arms, covered me with kisses and broke into uncontrollable sobs. I tore myself loose and ran, to the glee of my grandmother. That, with some modifications, remained the tone of my relationship with my mother for the next 15 years. I could not bring myself to return her love. It wasn't that I felt she had forsaken me when I was six weeks old. Quite the contrary. I knew nobody could stand up to my grandmother's iron determination. She was then 56 years old, had borne eight children, stood a scant five feet tall, weighed 98 pounds and carried the punch of a steam shovel. As long as my grandfather lived, she deferred to him in public, as befits a German wife, but it was she who gave the final assent to every major decision. That was sometimes unfortunate, because my grandfather had more business sense. Her greatest desire was to possess land and good milk cows. It was he who persuaded her that we should also plant tobacco in the fields below our vineyards-a radical idea in the early '20s. Within a few years, it made the farm quite prosperous. When he decided, though, to become a partner in the first and only movie theatre within 20 kilometers, she raised so much hell that he reluctantly abandoned the idea. That, she later admitted, had been a miscalculation that made the other partner wealthy within 10 years.

After my grandfather died, most of her decisions went unchallenged, but

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she made few mistakes when it came to land, tobacco and cows. She was, within the proper restraints of German male oriented society, an independent and successful woman, despite her very limited schooling. She could barely read and write, but as many of her opponents found out, she could never be cajoled. No wonder she found my mother, who was well-educated but hopelessly trusting, unfit to have married her first-born. Ironically, it was she who had arranged the match.

Although my parents had known each other all their lives, their romance began when they were both 34. Romance is a poor word to describe my parents' emotions when they first met. Undoubtedly there was some attraction, although the two seemingly had very little in common. My father was a typical German male of that time: loud, opinionated, hard-working and imbued with the conviction that men are inherently superior to women. He had served all four years of World War I in the trenches, but although he was proud to be called a Frontschwein, literally a "pig of the front", he was by no means enamored of the government in general and the Kaiser in particular, who had gotten him there. In the bitter disillusionment of Germany's defeat in 1918, he had briefly become a Communist and then a Social Democrat, perhaps out of deference to my grandmother who was a rigidly devout Catholic. He was never active in the party, hating even the early Nazis (then a largely forlorn band among a plethora of right-wing groups). When he began to court my mother in 1926, he faced many years of labor on the farm, with little pay. As the first-born, he would eventually inherit the farm, but that might be 20 years away. Unlike his brothers, he had not learned a trade, and the economic condition of Germany during the '20s was so bad that he was fortunate to live modestly on a good farm. But he was a proud man, toughened by the war, and he undoubtedly resented the long wait for the farm. Even as the designated heir, he was little better off than a respected farmhand. I'm convinced that he married my mother in part because she stood to inherit a valuable vineyard from her parents, who had only two daughters, my mother the older. Once both sets of parents realized their offspring's' mutual interest, their business sense took over. Since my mother was rather tall and lanky and already 34, her bargaining position-or rather that of her parents-wasn't as good as that of my father's. At 34, he was of ideal marrying age and stood to inherit a nice farm (albeit many years hence). My aunt told me once that the marriage took place because both of my parents felt trapped: they were working for their parents almost as farmhands. When my maternal grandfather agreed to sell one of his smaller vineyards to help establish the prospective couple in the grocery business, the deal was struck.

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Both sets of grandparents gained the most. My father foolishly relinquished his claim to the farm in return for a distant store, and my maternal grandparents got rid of an ungainly daughter. (The younger one had always been their favorite.) It was thus that a marriage began with almost no love, never an essential ingredient in Germany. Little love was generated during the long years of the marriage, but it lasted nevertheless, not unhappier than many, perhaps just as good as most. It was essentially a banding of two lost people for the purpose of common survival, and it worked in that sense. The big winner was my grandmother, especially after my grandfather's death, for now she was solely in charge, and could eventually bestow the farm on one of her three younger sons. She gleefully told the family that no law required her to designate anyone as sale heir once the first-born relinquished his claim.

There was one person my grandmother loved more than all other members of her family, and that was me. "Maybe because she stole you from our mother," my twin brother Rudi once said. But even he conceded that I was the luckier of us. While he grew up in an apartment in the grimiest area of Germany, I was raised in one of the most enchanting valleys of the land by a woman who adored me, and who had the means to give me every educational and social advantage. Far from ever feeling abandoned by my parents, I knew what my grandmother represented. As a child my greatest fear was that one day she would ship me back to my parents.

Over 90 percent of the population of the Rhineland was then Roman Catholic and my grandmother had decided that I should become a priest. It was an ambition wholeheartedly shared by my mother, although nobody asked for her approval. At the age of nine, when the subject was broached, I had nothing against the idea. I had been an altar boy for six months, ever since our first communion (on which my grandmother spent more money than her daughters' weddings, since we were the only twins that year). My brother Rudi took the necessary religious instruction in Wittlich rather than in Oberhausen, his home parish. That was one of the few periods in our childhood that we lived together, but we usually fought, mainly because I already thought of myself as the first-born. (I was 15 minutes older than Rudi.)

Because we were too much for one family to handle, my maternal grandparents took my brother to their small wine and fruit farm during his summer vacations. We seemed driven to surpass each other. It undoubtedly had something to do with my grandmother's undisguised preference for me.

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Many years later my brother told me that he had resented my status deeply. Soon, though, these childhood tribulations became insignificant.

On the cool, windy afternoon of April 20, 1938, Adolf Hitler's forty- ninth birthday, I was sworn into the Jungvolk, the junior branch of the Hitler Youth. Since 1936, the Hitler Youth had been the sole legal youth movement in the country, entrusted with the education of Germany's young; but it was still possible not to belong. The following December, 1939, the Reich Youth Service law made membership compulsory for every healthy German child over nine. That meant Aryan children, only, of course. Severely handicapped children could not belong, even if their parents happened to be fanatic Nazis. At that time retarded children and adults were killed in the euthanasia centers which the regime had quietly established, usually in mental institutions. Here, so-called nutzlose Esser, (useless eaters) were put to death by injection or gas. This was the testing ground for an efficient method that would soon exterminate millions in near total secrecy.

Frau Friedhoff, Wittlich A Jungvolk horde

When I was sworn into the Jungvolk, I had been thoroughly conditioned, despite my Catholic upbringing, to accept the two basic tenets of the Nazi creed: belief in the innate superiority of the Germanic-Nordic race, and the conviction that total submission to the welfare of the state-personified by the Führer-was my first duty. To me the Fatherland was a somewhat mystical yet real concept of a nation which was infinitely dear and threatened by unrelenting enemies. This concept of the Fatherland and the striving toward a

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nationalistic ideal (not necessarily distilled from the pages of Mein Kampf) were two elements common to those who joined the Hitler Youth voluntarily. Adolf Hitler ceaselessly encouraged the feeling that we were his trusted helpers and used it with brilliant intuition. It was expressed in the oath we swore with our left hand gripping the flag and three fingers of the right extended to the sky:

I promise in the Hitler Youth to do my duty at all times in love and faithfulness to help the Führer-so help me God.

And then followed the gut-stirring fifes, drums and fanfares of the most effective party song ever written, the Hitler Youth anthem:

Forward, forward call the bright fanfares .... we march for Hitler through night and suffering with the banner for freedom and bread.

Its last line, repeated for emphasis, carried a message, which turned out to be prophetic for many of us:

Our banner means more to us than death.

But it would be a fallacy to assume that we joined simply to serve the Fatherland. Such sentiments only came to the fore at special occasions, like induction ceremonies, flag consecrations and as a part of the many boring speeches we had to endure. Like most 10-year-olds, I craved action, and the Hitler Youth had that in abundance. Far from being forced to enter the ranks of the Jungvolk, I could barely contain my impatience and was, in fact, accepted before I was quite 10. It seemed like an exciting life, free from parental supervision, filled with "duties" that seemed sheer pleasure. Precision marching was something one could endure for hiking, camping, war games in the field, and a constant emphasis on sports. As William L. Shirer said in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Germany was filled with bands of superbly fit children always marching and singing. To a degree, our pre-war activities resembled those of the Boy Scouts, with much more emphasis on discipline and political indoctrination. There were the paraphernalia and the symbols, the pomp and the mysticism, very close in feeling to religious rituals. One of the first significant demands was the so-called Mutprobe: "test of courage", which was usually administered after a six-month period of probation. The members of my Schar, a platoon-like unit of about 40-50 boys, were required to dive off the three-meter board-about 10 feet high-head first into the town's swimming pool. There were some stinging belly flops, but the pain was worth it when our Fähnleinführer, the l5-year-old leader of our Fähnlein, (literally "little flag") a company-like unit of about 160 boys, handed us the coveted dagger with its inscription Blood and Honor. From that moment on we were fully accepted.

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Before membership in the Hitler Youth became compulsory, an astonishing six and a half million boys and girls had joined, testifying to its unquestioned magnetism. Despite the regime's efforts to impose the concept of Gleichschaltung, (roughly "the effort to streamline the people") to coordinate them in the belief that all are equally valuable, Germany still remained a society with fairly rigid class distinctions. That was not as apparent in the Hitler Youth. Ironic as it may seem, a youth movement spawned by one of the most intolerant ideologies the world has ever known, was surprisingly democratic in the treatment of its members, in that most had an equal chance to succeed regardless of family background. One of my first leaders was the son of day laborers.

Frau Friedhoff, Wittlich Part of a Gefolgschaft of Hitlerjugend before departing for camp

Had it not been for our common duty in the Hitler Youth, I wouldn't have dreamed of associating with him. Many of our parents did not like the idea of that all-encompassing camaraderie with social inferiors; but that only heightened our sense of alienation from our elders, who eventually became afraid of us, or more correctly, of the power we wielded. In 1938, though, I was just a Pimpf, a nobody.

The first friend of my childhood was Heinz Ermann, whose parents had a cattle business just up the street from us. Heinz and I were nearly the same age, and we met in Kindergarten, too young for genuine friendship. We

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gravitated toward each other because we wore identical jumpsuits, and because we were beaten by our respective aunts one afternoon for deciding to roll around in a mud puddle. I soon discovered that Heinz's mother gave out cookies for no reason at all, and I usually followed him home after Kindergarten. Both his Aunt Ella and his Uncle Siegfried were much more tolerant than my aunts and uncles, or even my grandmother, who would never take the time to play marbles with us the way Uncle Siegfried did. Siegfried looked after the cattle, while Heinz's father did the trading, and there were always people in their yard, feeling cows and calves and yelling at each other. Usually the deals were consumed with a handshake and the inevitable shot of Schnapps, a clear, raw wine brandy that lubricated all transactions in my hometown. I was fascinated by Siegfried's wooden leg, a remembrance of the 1914 Battle of the Sommes, where he had earned the Iron Cross I. Class for conspicuous bravery. He was proud of his service for the Fatherland; but as it turned out, the Fatherland wasn't proud of him. Just 13 years after he showed me how to play marbles and sit correctly on a horse, Siegfried and the whole Ermann family were gassed in Auschwitz for being Jewish "subhumans."

Nobody except a demented prophet of doom could have foreseen their terrible fate. The half million Jews of Germany, less than one percent of our population, knew they faced difficult times with Hitler's ascendance to power, but they were hardly prepared for the onslaught of repressive measures against them. Most considered themselves Germans first and Jews second. For the past 14 years, Hitler had blamed them for every misfortune that had befallen Germany-especially the defeat of World War I, triggered by Jew- inspired Leftist slackers on the home front; but many believed he would moderate once he legitimately headed the government. They reasoned since he had gained power by making them the scapegoats, his fury was largely a political pretense to gather votes and would abate under the weight of his new respectability. They were dead wrong. Hitler changed his mind on many issues, but never on the "Jewish Question". His hatred of all Jews remained an abiding, all-encompassing obsession to his last breath.

Heinz Ermann and I started elementary school together in April of 1933, just three months after the near senile President Paul von Hindenburg had appointed Hitler Chancellor, believing he alone could avert the threat of Communist-inspired political chaos. In the very same month, the government passed the Law Against The Overcrowding Of German Schools, a measure aimed solely at the Jews. Heinz and several other Jewish children in my class were dismissed. From then on, they received their education from the rabbi

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and other Jewish teachers in a utility building next to the synagogue. I was sad that we no longer went to school together each morning, but it was a relief for Heinz. Almost immediately, he and the other Jewish children had been singled out for special treatment by the terrifying Herr Becker, whom we feared so much that we frequently wet our pants when he yelled: "Bend down for your punishment!"

In pre-war Germany, teachers were expected to thrash their elementary school pupils. None of us could expect any sympathy at home for having been whipped at school. On the contrary, any such complaint would usually invite a second, parental beating. Most parents counted themselves lucky to have Herr Becker teach their children. He was a strict disciplinarian, but he got results. Every year, the highest percentage of his pupils went on to the Gymnasium.

Herr Becker probably had never heard of child psychology. His method of motivating children was quite simple. He gave us our homework assignments with one standing instruction: "If I catch any of you unprepared tomorrow morning, I'll whip you black and blue." Since he did exactly that, his record was impressive. He only showed mercy to less-gifted children if he was convinced they had worked hard and just couldn't grasp it. He would then shrug and sigh, citing Goethe: "Even the Gods battle in vain against stupidity." Every parent knew if Herr Becker pronounced your child dumb, you might as well forget Gymnasium and find him a job as a cobbler's apprentice. He made my grandmother very happy with his verdict that I should have no trouble-intellectually at least-in preparing for the priesthood. But that, he admonished, would have to wait until I had served my two years in the army.

Herr Becker was both a good party member and a pious Catholic, not at all an unusual combination in my hometown. Even before it became the official policy of the government, he had never hidden his conviction that the Jews were "different" from us. But this prejudice, shared by millions of Germans, quickly turned to outright hatred after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Racial Laws of September 1935. From then on, Jews were no longer legal German citizens, but members of an inferior, alien race despite their impressive achievements. Herr Becker demonstrated to us in his weekly "racial science" instruction how and why they were different. "Just observe the shape of their noses," he said. "If they are formed like an upside-down 6, that's usually a good indication of their Jewishness, although some have obstructed such tell-tale signs by their infamous mixing with us." I thought then that Heinz must have been very successful at this "mixing": he looked

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very much like any of us, and certainly more Germanic than I with my French blood. In Heinz's case, I knew it wasn't a Jewish trick, but I wasn't so sure about the others.

Strangely, Herr Becker seldom beat Jewish children like he whipped us. Instead, he made them sit in a corner, which he sneeringly designated as "Israel." He never called on them, which I perceived as a blessing, but we quickly realized that he wanted us to despise the Jews. It was the first time I had experienced discrimination, and it bewildered me. Suddenly, the awesome figure of authority in whose power we were delivered each morning, proclaimed that some people were bad because they were Jewish. I knew, of course, that Heinz and his family went to the synagogue, while we went to the St. Markus church. When Heinz's aunt got married in the spring of 1932, our family was invited to the ceremony in the synagogue and to the wedding feast at Ermann's. I was fascinated by the strange language of the prayers and impressed by the men who kept their hats on in church. I was most envious that Heinz apparently never had to face confession, an ordeal which I dreaded already at the age of six. But my curiosity ended there.

There were frequent remarks around our dinner table at the farm, which could have been interpreted as anti-Semitic. My grandmother once chided my Uncle Franz for having bought a calf from Herr Ermann without checking with her first. "You never buy anything from a Jew without haggling, Du dummer Narr, " she said with her usual redundancy when she used the word Narr. "They expect it, and they lose all respect for you if you don't." But this sort of observation wasn't intended to be malicious; it was merely a statement of fact. My grandmother not only valued the quality of Herr Ermann's cattle; she was genuinely fond of the Ermanns, and to the day of their deportation lit their Sabbath fire for Frau Ermann, a pious woman who deplored her family's indifference to their religion.

All Catholic children knew that the Jews had killed Christ, which seemed worse than being a Protestant (although they too had to leave our classroom when the priest arrived for our religious instruction in elementary school). One day I asked Heinz why his ancestors had killed Jesus, and after some frowning he shrugged: "I sure don't know. He was one of us, but I think the Romans did him in. He wanted to be king." It seemed like a good reason, and it ended our interest in the strange ways of religion until we met Herr Becker who was both pious and patriotic.

With the callousness of youth, I forgot Heinz pretty fast. Herr Becker

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announced the removal of the Jewish pupils by saying, almost regretfully, "They have no business being among us true Germans." And then he fixed me with a stern eye, "No German boy can ever be true friends with a Jewish boy, because no matter how nice he seems, he'll grow up to be your enemy." While I found that hard to believe, even from Herr Becker who knew everything, he didn't whip me as readily as before. Despite occasional pangs of guilt, I visited Heinz less and less at home, especially since Uncle Siegfried no longer joked with me.

One afternoon, Heinz came to our farm, all dressed up in his best velvet suit. "My Uncle Herbert is taking me with him for a while," he said, but with little enthusiasm.

"Maybe that's best, Heinz," said my grandmother. "It'll be nice for you seeing a big city." Uncle Herbert was a rabbi in Cologne, although I'm no longer sure if that was the city. I didn't know it at that time, but Heinz's father had decided to send his only son away, since it was impossible for a Jewish child to remain anonymous in a small town. Sooner or later, somebody would call Heinz a dirty Jew-or worse-in Wittlich, and his father wanted to spare him that. In the years before it became mandatory to wear the yellow patch with the word Jude in it, Jews, especially if they looked non-Jewish like Heinz who was blond, could remain relatively inconspicuous in the larger centers.

My grandmother gave us a piece of cake, normally a Sunday treat, and then we shook hands awkwardly. "Auf Wiedersehen. Frau Heck," he said, but he just nodded to me. We both knew then that our friendship, which never had a chance to mature, had ended. I never lumped Heinz in with the "bad" Jews, who were determined to do us in with the help of the Bolsheviks, but I never mentioned his name either. Later, when I had to undergo character interviews in the Hitler Youth prior to promotions, I always denied having associated with a Jew even at the age of seven. I readily admitted that I did not consider my father to be an eager National Socialist, a question that always came up in family background checks. I instinctively realized that such admission could not hurt my career. Quite the contrary: it was a measure of one's dedication to prevail against parental indifference or hostility. To feel anything but disdain for a Jew, however, would have aroused suspicion.

25

Reprinted from Wittlich so wie es war 2 The new Wehrmacht barracks, home of the 105th Infantry Regiment, Wittlich, 1938

By 1938, Heinz had become a fleeting memory. In that, my first summer in the Jungvolk, Wittlich became a garrison town. Just south of the city, a huge complex of brick buildings was erected as the home of the I05th Infantry Regiment. Wittlich was situated in the third line of defense of the "Westwall", which the Allies called the "Siegfried Line". It was Germany's counterpart to the long-established Maginot Line, but the Westwall extended further north, bordering Luxembourg and Belgium, although here it wasn't as heavily fortified. The French claimed their Maginot Line was invincible, making it quite easy for Nazi propaganda to portray it as a constant threat, especially to us in the Rhineland.

As might be expected, most townspeople greeted the garrison with jubilation. It elevated Wittlich to a military center of some significance; but more important than the prestige, it gave the town's economy a tremendous and lasting boost. My family belonged to the many apolitical Germans who became impressed not with Hitler's political ideology, but with his undeniable success in restoring full employment and economic order as well as social stability to a devastated, beaten-down nation which suffered from a massive inferiority complex.

When he came to power in 1933, there were six million people unemployed in a population of 64 million. By 1938, that number had sunk to a minuscule 200,000 out of a work force of 25 million. It was an impressive achievement, even if it depended on conscription, a vastly expanded army, on massive rearmament and public works programs such as the construction of the Autobahnen under the "Four-Year" plans, which prepared the economy for