Forgotten Land (29 page)
Authors: Max Egremont
Technical-minded, and obsessed with gliding, he hoped to do war service attached to the navy – but in January 1944 he was sent to Königsberg to serve in an anti-aircraft battery and then to Tilsit for pilot training. To glide over the eastern frontier district, to see Memel and the crystal lakes, the Baltic and the Reich’s borders, gave him a surge of patriotism, a sense of his land’s beauty. On his return to Palmnicken, a friend told him that the war was lost and he should join a committee for free Germany. To Martin Bergau, this was treachery and nonsense. Still only fifteen, he returned to the battery in the summer of 1944, to have a terrifying affirmation of what his friend had said. The warning signs began: the invasion of Normandy in June, rumours about the assassination attempt on Hitler in July and, in August, the most obvious – the giant British raids on Königsberg. The burned corpses of women and children among the ruins enraged him.
He was given the choice of staying with the battery or of going on a flying course further west, at Allenstein. Opting for the flying course, he wept when saying goodbye to his comrades, yet was soon happily gliding over Masuria, as if above an endless tranquillity and beauty. Even here, still supposedly miles from the front, the wounded were flooding into the town’s military hospital. From the air, Martin Bergau could see the refugees, at first only single wagons interrupting his idyll, then much longer lines.
In August 1940, the widow of Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau died in the Insterburg hospital, looked after by her grandson Hans von Lehndorff, who was an assistant surgeon there. Her
husband had gone three years before; the death of the old man, in 1937, had been marked by an obituary in the London
Times,
hailing Januschau as the best sort of Junker: an unashamed nationalist, ‘reckless and hard-hitting in political controversy, but endowed with a fund of mother wit, a genial personality, and a warm heart which gained him the respect and often the affection of his opponents’. Ten of his eighteen grandchildren were at the burial in the park at Januschau.
husband had gone three years before; the death of the old man, in 1937, had been marked by an obituary in the London
Times,
hailing Januschau as the best sort of Junker: an unashamed nationalist, ‘reckless and hard-hitting in political controversy, but endowed with a fund of mother wit, a genial personality, and a warm heart which gained him the respect and often the affection of his opponents’. Ten of his eighteen grandchildren were at the burial in the park at Januschau.
By the end of 1941, several members of Hans von Lehndorff’s family had been killed in the war. His notebook told his true feelings, at this time of German victories: ‘It is not for our Germany that our brothers have fallen.’ Lehndorff felt that even if the war was won, there would be nothing left of the world into which he had been born. His Christian faith had grown, as if to challenge godless National Socialism. He joined a Bible-study group of forty or fifty people: mostly older men, led by a teacher who had been ordained in the anti-Nazi Confessional Church. Lehndorff felt as if he was one of the persecuted early Christians in the catacombs of Rome.
Johannes Jänicke was also part of the group which met sometimes in the church, sometimes in private houses. Koch, the Nazi Gauleiter, let the teacher continue with his ministry; Lehndorff recalled later – when the Gauleiter was put on trial – how grateful the congregation had once been to him. During the winter of 1943, as the war began to turn against the Germans on the eastern front, they discussed the Ten Commandments, analysing, with the help of soldiers on leave, the fifth, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ This dilemma – of active resistance or acquiescence – confronted Lehndorff when he was ordered to take up military duties. His superior at the hospital declared him to be indispensable, so he stayed. Lehndorff saw the hand of God in this escape either from death at the front or from disobedience that carried the death sentence.
In June 1944, he went to Berlin during his leave – partly to visit a friend who was in the Moabit prison under sentence of
death for having conspired against the regime. Shocked by the bomb-damaged city, Lehndorff saw other friends, who hinted that something would happen soon. He called at the Goebbels family house, to try to intercede for his friend; the family was not there and Lehndorff met two guests – an old woman and her beautiful granddaughter, both calm supporters of the regime, apparently still with complete faith in the Führer.
death for having conspired against the regime. Shocked by the bomb-damaged city, Lehndorff saw other friends, who hinted that something would happen soon. He called at the Goebbels family house, to try to intercede for his friend; the family was not there and Lehndorff met two guests – an old woman and her beautiful granddaughter, both calm supporters of the regime, apparently still with complete faith in the Führer.
Back in East Prussia, Lehndorff saw signs of disintegration amid the old brutality. In Königsberg, his mother had been arrested, ostensibly because of her friendship with a clergyman who was politically ‘unreliable’. At Insterburg, his cousin Heinrich, the owner of Steinort, came to see him to say that the denouement of the plot against Hitler was imminent. Hans felt that there was a Christian basis to the assassination but believed that with the violence should come forgiveness. Soon the Bible class had grown to more than a hundred, many of them young men about to go to the front; and when a local leader of the Hitler Youth asked if he and his colleagues could join, Lehndorff wept.
On 25 and 26 July, Russian bombers attacked Insterburg, damaging the church, although it remained standing. At Rastenburg, on 20 July, another bomb had exploded, the culmination of what Lehndorff had heard in Berlin. His involvement, small beside that of his cousin Heinrich, who paid for it with his life, troubled his strengthening belief in non-violence. He felt that the failure of the conspirators had been for the best. Untested by what would have been demanded of them if they had succeeded, their ideals had stayed pure, martyrdom transforming them into a beautiful myth.
In Berlin, on 30 January 1933, Alexander Dohna saw the triumphalist National Socialist demonstrations. In March, before the ceremony at the Garrison Church in Potsdam, he wrote to President Paul von Hindenburg, who had appointed Hitler chancellor, to wish him luck. Over a year later, Dohna attended Hindenburg’s funeral at Tannenberg – a magnificent spectacle, he thought, with the First World War generals in their imperial uniforms and the evident pride of the old soldiers.
There was much, he claimed later, that he and his friends disapproved of in the Nazis: their boycott of Jewish businesses, the propaganda against the churches. But many joined the party, to influence it or from real enthusiasm – and stability of a kind returned to their lives. Income from farming and timber sales went up; by 1936 the Dohna finances were in much better shape. Alexander Dohna could afford to restore the lead figures on Schlobitten’s façade. He could install central heating in the east wing and buy electric cookers for the kitchen.
In the summer of 1933, Hitler came to East Prussia, with Reinhard Heydrich and Himmler and Alexander Dohna’s old school friend Karl Wolff, then Himmler’s adjutant. Invited to meet them at a cousin’s house, Dohna thought Hitler crude; as a vegetarian and teetotaller, the new Chancellor seemed ill suited to the table habits of the East Prussian gentry. Heydrich flew into a rage during the after-dinner game of bridge. Himmler was quieter, more reflective, it seemed to Dohna, as the Nazi poked around at an archaeological site in the woods at Prökelwitz, on the Dohna
estates, searching for evidence of early Aryan (or German) life before the arrival of the Orders.
estates, searching for evidence of early Aryan (or German) life before the arrival of the Orders.
It was Göring, the war hero and the son of a former governor of German South-West Africa, with whom the old families felt most at ease, partly because he was the nearest to them in his tastes and manner. Dohna invited Göring to shoot, giving his guest the same rooms as the Emperor William II had used thirty years before. A list of approved food and drink was sent beforehand by the Prime Minister of Prussia’s adjutant – beer, Sekt, different types of Schnapps, asparagus, mushrooms, morels, light meats, new potatoes, fruit and crab or crayfish and caviar. Dohna met Göring at Marienburg airport, to find the fat Marshal in Luftwaffe uniform, wearing the Pour le Mérite and accompanied by six huge suitcases. The joviality was switched on, manifesting itself particularly to the children of the house. Göring was as unlike Hitler in his tastes and appetites as it was possible to be: he ate like a horse, wore clothes of blinding brightness and listened to all the complaints about the regime, instructing his adjutant to make notes. Dohna showed him the Schlobitten art collection in the hope of proving that such places were worthy of special treatment. Göring shot three roebuck before flying back to Berlin.
Koch, the Gauleiter, perhaps seeing the Junkers as a challenge to his authority, not only ignored their special pleading but inspired criticism of them in the East Prussian press. In December 1934, Dohna went to Berlin, to speak to Göring about this; the Prime Minister of Prussia was distant, but in the autumn of 1935 Koch was suspended. The Gauleiter, however, appealed to Hitler and was reinstated.
To the Junkers, the suspension of Koch showed that Göring was almost a gentleman; his love of hunting was another reason that they felt drawn to him. They knew, after all, about his extraordinary efforts to improve his vast domain that lay south from Königsberg, near the new Polish border. This was Rominten, the former hunting preserve of the Prussian kings – some sixty
thousand acres of woodland and open country that had been cherished by the Hohenzollerns since the Grand Duke Albrecht in the sixteenth century.
thousand acres of woodland and open country that had been cherished by the Hohenzollerns since the Grand Duke Albrecht in the sixteenth century.
For William II, the last German Emperor, Rominten was an isolated feudal world, far from the new industrial Germany and socialist Berlin. The village, now the Russian Krasnolesye in the Kaliningrad district, has an air of dishevelment, with old grey German houses along a main street that includes the school where the schoolmaster worked for a year without pay. But you can go freely into the forest now, quite different to the German time, when much of it was out of bounds to the public.
Ponds and a larger lake, its banks overgrown, and glades and meadows interrupt the dense, dark trees, bringing light to the journey before the old life appears – the last Emperor’s bridge over the Rominte stream, long stripped of the carved stone stags that once decorated its balustrades. Memorials, obvious or symbolic, are scattered through the forest: a tall stone dedicated to Prince Friedrich Carl von Preussen, who hunted there before his death in 1884; another marking the hundredth stag shot at Rominten by the last Emperor; and one with the name Gertrud Frevert, and the year of her death, 1940, when she shot herself.
Gertrud’s husband, Walter Frevert, a forester and huntsman, wrote about the lost Rominten. He had known the forest in all its guises: its solitude, its appeal to sportsmen and its power – almost tangible in the white winter nights, the sudden spring and the stifling summers when the place rang with birdsong. Frevert had seen all the types of wild creature that lived in it. He had killed, or helped to kill, many of them: the deer, the elk, the boar, the wolves, the lynx and the hares.
Near the end of one of his books, there’s a photograph of Walter Frevert returning from stalking, dressed in his hunting kit of high leather boots, breeches and a dark-green Loden coat.
Binoculars are strung round his neck; he wears a brimmed hat with a frothy plume and a bright silver badge and has a rifle slung over one shoulder. A roundish face looks at the camera, not smiling but clearly at ease in his kingdom, a place that, he believed, should impose a certain morality through its magnificence. Walter Frevert’s
Rominten: The East Prussian Hunting Paradise
– a bestseller on its publication in 1957 and still in print – is not only an account of the forest but a portrait of the man for whom Frevert worked: Hermann Göring.
Binoculars are strung round his neck; he wears a brimmed hat with a frothy plume and a bright silver badge and has a rifle slung over one shoulder. A roundish face looks at the camera, not smiling but clearly at ease in his kingdom, a place that, he believed, should impose a certain morality through its magnificence. Walter Frevert’s
Rominten: The East Prussian Hunting Paradise
– a bestseller on its publication in 1957 and still in print – is not only an account of the forest but a portrait of the man for whom Frevert worked: Hermann Göring.
A romantic, moved not only by nature but by ceremony and by music, Walter Frevert was born in 1897, the son of a dentist who owned property near Hamm in North-Rhine-Westphalia. A keen hunter from early on, encouraged by his father, the boy declared what he wanted to be: ‘A hunter, a soldier, a father’ – all of which he fulfilled in a life of success and tragedy. During the First World War, he joined the army, a volunteer aged only seventeen (like Peter Kollwitz), and, after winning the Iron Cross on the western front, found the final surrender unbearable; his country and his Emperor, the ideals of his life, for which he would gladly have died, had been destroyed. How could he and his comrades return to humdrum civilian lives when they could never forget the dead of Cambrai or of Verdun? It would be better to go on fighting in some distant place, to win, he said, the laurels of victory or to die.
Frevert did fight with the Freikorps against the Poles in Upper Silesia. But he also stuck to his studies and qualified as a forester. He had been briefly in East Prussia during the war, finding it ‘an El Dorado’, but it was not until 1936, after years working in the woods at Battenberg, that he was called east, to a post at Nassawen on the north-east edge of the Rominten Heath. After the Emperor’s abdication, the Prussian state had the use of the huge property, although it was still owned by the exiled monarch; the Social Democratic Chief Minister of Prussia went there with his guests and other ministers. When the Nazis came to power in
1933, the new Prussian Prime Minister was Hermann Göring – a passionate hunter, who made himself chief huntsman of the Reich (Reichsjägermeister) and took Rominten seriously in hand, buying it from the Emperor for the new Germany.
1933, the new Prussian Prime Minister was Hermann Göring – a passionate hunter, who made himself chief huntsman of the Reich (Reichsjägermeister) and took Rominten seriously in hand, buying it from the Emperor for the new Germany.
An East Prussian forest.
The forest’s hunting lodge – with its chapel nearby dedicated to St Hubert – had been built by William II in the style of the Norwegian wooden houses that he had seen during his northern summer cruises. By the time Frevert arrived, more buildings had already been finished or were under construction, planned by the forest’s new master – a complex of high-ceilinged halls, sitting rooms with cavernous stone fireplaces, areas for the storage of guns and equipment, further guest accommodation and long sheds for the treatment of what had been killed. Inside, the walls were covered with hunting trophies – deer antlers, skins, pelts, snarling wild boar with curving white tusks, glum-looking elk.
Walter Frevert was nervous when he first met Göring. Introduced
by a colleague as the best dog-handler in Germany, Frevert felt Göring’s impatience as the Reichsjägermeister declared that he never needed dogs to find a wounded deer, as he always shot the animal dead. An officer in the party advised that one should be completely straight in any dealings with this formidable man. Soon Frevert, as careful in the handling of people as he was with his beloved bloodhounds, had the Reichsjägermeister’s trust.
by a colleague as the best dog-handler in Germany, Frevert felt Göring’s impatience as the Reichsjägermeister declared that he never needed dogs to find a wounded deer, as he always shot the animal dead. An officer in the party advised that one should be completely straight in any dealings with this formidable man. Soon Frevert, as careful in the handling of people as he was with his beloved bloodhounds, had the Reichsjägermeister’s trust.
Göring introduced new game laws, many of which still stand in Germany today, setting up a national Deutsche Jägerschaft, of which Walter Frevert was a member, to enforce them. Rare animals and birds were protected, the cruellest traps were forbidden and taxes were levied on hunters to pay for work on the forests and nature reserves. The new officials had to be National Socialists – Frevert joined the party in May 1933 – and Göring’s role as a conservationist went alongside the delight he took in the hunt and the kill. When Poland was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union in the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in 1939, he pushed successfully for the enormous virgin forests of Białystok in the east of the country to be treated as German, ostensibly for the value of their timber. This brought into Göring’s hands a unique natural world, undisturbed since pre-history – and the origin of the devilish pact entered into by Walter Frevert.
At Rominten, in an eastern dawn that came an hour earlier than in Berlin, Frevert, Göring and his guests pursued stags whose nicknames reflected their size and splendour: the Lieutenant, the Matador, the Chandelier, the Robber Chief, the Prince, the Recruit, Theoderich, the Schoolmaster. The greatest were reserved for the Reichsjägermeister or for his more important visitors: the British Ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson; King Boris of Bulgaria; Miklós Horthy, Regent of Hungary; Count Józef Lipski, the Polish ambassador: Franz von Papen (one of Hitler’s predecessors as Chancellor), Konstantin von Neurath (the former Foreign Minister) or Himmler. Göring liked to stalk his prey rather than wait for it on a high seat – a raised platform some twenty or thirty feet high – in a forest glade. He would set out before dawn, walking
often with Frevert, perhaps for seven hours, to find a stag. Like the last Emperor, the Reichsjägermeister’s longest visit each year was in late September and October: the time of the rut, when the woodland echoed to the beasts’ roars. In January, he shot wild boar, in piercing cold with the creak of footsteps through deep snow breaking the forest’s silence.
often with Frevert, perhaps for seven hours, to find a stag. Like the last Emperor, the Reichsjägermeister’s longest visit each year was in late September and October: the time of the rut, when the woodland echoed to the beasts’ roars. In January, he shot wild boar, in piercing cold with the creak of footsteps through deep snow breaking the forest’s silence.
Nevile Henderson gives a vignette of Göring’s Rominten during October 1937, a year after Hitler had occupied the Rhineland, openly breaking the Treaty of Versailles. Having arrived early in the morning, the British ambassador was sent out that afternoon to a high seat to wait for the large stag (‘a fourteen pointer’) that had been seen close by. Göring liked to tell the British that they had become soft, that the Germans were the only ones actively fighting Bolshevism – and this had been reinforced at Rominten with some sharp banter about Henderson’s fellow countrymen being quite good with shotguns but useless rifle shots. Anxious to prove his host wrong, the Ambassador, seeing the stag some way off, left the high seat and approached the animal on his hands and knees before shooting it through the heart. Göring said afterwards how good it was to see a diplomat crawl.
The Englishman never forgot the display of the day’s kill in a ritual that seemed to reach back to some elemental myth. In the evening, after the guests and their host had eaten, the dead stags were laid out on the grass in front of the lodge, the scene lit by a huge, crackling bonfire of pine branches. Behind the beasts stood the foresters in their dark-green uniforms, outlined against the flames and the light of a full moon. Walter Frevert announced the number of stags that had been shot and who had killed them, Göring answered with some words of thanks; and the foresters sounded a fanfare – the
Halali
to mark the death of the stag – through long thin horns that were looped across their chests. As the notes faded, Henderson – ‘the so cool Englishman’ much moved at last – seized Frevert’s hand and said, ‘That was the most beautiful day’s hunting of my life.’
Halali
to mark the death of the stag – through long thin horns that were looped across their chests. As the notes faded, Henderson – ‘the so cool Englishman’ much moved at last – seized Frevert’s hand and said, ‘That was the most beautiful day’s hunting of my life.’
At Rominten, Frevert claimed, the new, brutal Germany vanished, to be replaced by the forest and its natural world. Göring’s ideas on conservation, the massively increased spending on the place, his decision to cut the number of deer killed each year to let the stock grow – these were what delighted Frevert. The forester claimed to have been repelled by Göring’s sycophants but always, after 1945, spoke admiringly of him, declaring that only those who foresaw what National Socialism would become were entitled to throw stones. The revival of order and confidence, the surge in prosperity and the power handed to Frevert at Rominten made him reluctant to seek out distant truths. So his devotion to this man, whom he called ‘cunning like a fox’, grew.
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