In Europe (36 page)

The Romanisches Café emptied out. The writer Hans Sahl saw the last customers reading, playing chess, consulting maps and railway timetables, and writing letters. ‘Blessed was he with an uncle in Amsterdam, a cousin in Shanghai or a niece in Valparaíso.’ In March of 1933, Sebastian Haffner was still enjoying idyllic afternoons with a Jewish girlfriend in Grunewald. ‘The world was very peaceful and springy.’ Every ten minutes a cheerful class of schoolchildren would pass by, led by a prim teacher wearing a lorgnette, and each class greeted him enthusiastically and in unison: ‘
Juda verrecke!
’ In the end, he was able to escape to London in 1938.

Some had drawn their conclusions earlier, however, and had left the country after the 1932 elections. Albert Einstein left for California. George Grosz, who had already received threats, had a nightmare about the coming disaster and immediately, impulsive as he was, bought a ticket for America. Marlene Dietrich had harboured a deep hatred of the Nazis from the start. After 1932, she never set foot in Berlin again. She became a beacon to the German exiles in Hollywood and Paris, and during the war she performed on all the Allied fronts, a soldier among the soldiers. Only after her death, sixty years later, did she return to her city, to Schöneberg cemetery. She received flowers and many tributes, a square
close to the Tiergarten was named after her, but there were also those who spat on her grave, and furious letters appeared in the papers:‘Whore!’ ‘Traitress!’

The last relatively normal parliamentary elections were held a month after Hitler took power: this time, the Nazis won 43.9 per cent of the vote. A new secret police force, the Gestapo, was formed. The first concentration camp was built at Dachau two weeks later. In his diary, the Jewish professor Victor Klemperer noted that the maid of one of his Jewish colleagues had already quit her job. ‘She had been offered a safe position, and Herr Professor would soon probably no longer be able to afford a maid.’ At a chemist's he saw a tube of toothpaste with a swastika on it. ‘People have not yet started to fear for their lives, but they fear for their daily sustenance and freedom.’

A few days later, on 31 March, the Reichstag – already sorely decimated after the arrests of communists and social democrats – granted Hitler dictatorial powers. Special penal courts, the
Sondergerichte
, were now established and a new category of crimes coined, including
heimtückische Angriffe
, foul criticism of the government. The first anti-Semitic measures were announced: Jews were to be dismissed from posts at schools and in public offices, and Jewish businesses were to be boycotted. New words were heard everywhere:
Gleichschaltung, Rassenschande, Belange, Artfremd
. Käthe Kollwitz was dismissed from the Academy of Arts. For being a member of the social-democrat association of physicians, her husband Karl lost all his national health patients in one fell swoop. One month later, on Opernplatz, across from the university, the books of Walter Rathenau, Heinrich Heine, the Mann brothers, Alfred Döblin, Stefan Zweig and others were burned. Bella Fromm wrote: ‘Not a day goes by without the Gestapo arresting an “unreliable” colleague.’ Meanwhile, ‘
Heil
Hitler!’ had become the mandatory greeting, the Horst-Wessel song the mandatory hymn:

That summer, the term ‘total state’ first began to appear in Nazi speeches. Shortly afterwards, the NSDAP was declared the only legal party in Germany. Under pressure from the Nazis, the German Evangelical Church replaced the newly chosen Reichsbischof Friedrich von Bodelschwingh with army chaplain Ludwig Müller. Shortly after his appointment, Pastor Müller had himself photographed in a toga, his arm stretched out in the Nazi salute; it was in protest against this coup that the Bekennende Kirche was established.

In July 1933, Hitler signed a concordat with the Vatican guaranteeing the autonomy of the Catholic Church in Germany, as long as they did not meddle in affairs of state. (This did not, by the way, keep the Vatican from having the anti-Nazi encyclical
Mit brennender Sorge
read aloud in all German Catholic churches in 1937.) In late November the Gestapo was officially given supra-legal status. A little over a year after the Nazis had seized power, Kurt and Elisabeth von Schleicher were murdered by six SS men in their villa on the Wannsee.

My long wait at Tempelhof airport is like slipping back sixty years in time. Tempelhof is now a little airfield and a big museum, all rolled into one. Of all the airfields I have ever seen in Europe, it is perhaps also the most deserving of the description ‘field’: once this was a parade ground where planes were occasionally allowed to land, and that is how it has remained, here in the middle of the city. A hypermodern terminal was built here in 1934. With its enormous semicircular awning, it is one of the few intact examples of Nazi architecture.

The circular plaza at the front fits the picture, and the former government buildings give it a fine theatrical touch. The first reaction is: keep your head down, the new order rules here, come on, raise that right arm! Then come the genteel sounds of the airport terminal, and after that the impressive semicircle of buildings, the gesture to the rest of the world that says: here comes the new Germany!

And now I am up in the waiting lounge with its 1930s Bakelite coziness. I recognise almost everything here, from newspaper photographs and newsreels: Hitler under the awning, stepping out of his Focke-Wulf Condor as the crowds cheer; Göring leaving for a working visit to the Eastern Front; Hitler's friend Albert Speer in his English-tailored tweed
jacket, standing on the ladder of a plane; Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel crossing the tarmac with firm tread on 8 May, 1945, surrounded by Allied officers; the Americans and the Berlin airlift: it all happened here.

I have never been here before, but everything in this place is etched in my memory, as though they were my own recollections.

THE PHOTOGRAPH OF ANNE FRANK, HER MOTHER AND HER SISTER
Margot has no date on it. Anne looks to be about three. It's still winter-coat weather, but the girls’ knees are already bare. The place where the picture was taken has been carefully documented by the people from Frankfurt's Historisches Museum: right in front of Café Hauptwache, in the city's shopping district. The little photo-booth picture of mother and daughters, taken at the nearby Tietz department store, does have a date on it: 10 March, 1933. They are wearing exactly the same clothes, the photographs were probably made during the same shopping spree. These were the final, innocent days of Frankfurt.

Three days later the SA raised the swastika banner above the balcony of the town hall, and three weeks later a boycott was pronounced against most Jewish shops and businesses. After the Easter holidays, Margot's ‘non-Aryan’ teacher seemed to have disappeared into thin air. During those same weeks, Otto Frank began making plans to emigrate. Within a year the whole family was living on Merwedeplein in Amsterdam. The rest of the story we know.

Had the Franks remained in Germany, it would have been – strikingly enough – little Margot who first suffered under the deluge of measures that went into force in January 1933. I see her in another archive photo: a summery photograph of the first-form class of the Ludwig-Richter-Schule, taken during a school outing in June 1932. The girls are wearing thin summer dresses, some of them have sun hats as well. The five Jewish children are standing among the others, there is nothing different or conspicuous about them. Margot is leaning towards a little girlfriend, a typically blonde German girl.

One year later all the casualness had disappeared. Margot's ‘democratic’ principal was replaced in April 1933 by a Nazi. One by one, the Jewish girls in her class stopped coming to school. And she was no longer allowed to play with most of her former girlfriends, for fear of neigh-bours and informants.

The Frank family home at Ganghofstrasse 24 is still standing, marked by a massive stone monument dedicated by the city's young people – ‘Her life and death, our duty’ – and the same trees around it, now thick and old.

On my next journey through Amsterdam I was given a van to use, a little one in which you could make a cup of coffee, type a column or even sleep. That was to be it for me in the coming months, this was to be my European house.

It is clear spring weather today, and I steer my new acquisition along the back roads of the old Germany, through all those hills where our grandparents mailed their postcards in the 1930s – Pension Die Fröhlichen Wanderer, ‘
Gutbürgerlicher Abendtisch!
’ – past half-timbered villages smelling of fresh buns and newly ironed aprons. They are still there, unchanged, the rocks upon which Germany stands. The forests have their first light-green haze, the fields are brown, farmers are out ploughing everywhere, on the village square the little soldiers in the bell tower creak the hours away.

I drive past Cologne-Klettenberg, where an Amsterdam acquaintance of mine grew up in the 1930s. In those days Truusje Roegholt lived at Lohrbergstrasse 1. On the corner across from her lived her playmates Anna and Lotte Braun, in a house hung with portraits of Nazi leaders and with a swastika banner stained with real human blood, probably from some fight on the street. ‘Mr Braun was a real beast of a man, even on his deathbed he wore an armband with a swastika on it,’ she told me. ‘But what did we know, and what didn't we know? People simply didn't talk. The Third Reich was a dictatorship based, to a great extent, on silence. But you saw a great deal, even as a child.’

She remembered vividly, for example, the first triumphal scenes. ‘Right from the start you saw everyone marching in nice, new uniforms. Heaven knows where the money came from. But the effect was stunning. All
those poor people who had never owned a set of decent clothes, suddenly they were someone. They sang the greatest nonsense, but they had new shoes!’

She also told me about the great girls’ secret of the Third Reich, the campaign to give the Führer a child. ‘They organised solstice parties with selected blonde girls and boys, to breed children like that. A fanatical girlfriend of ours tried to get us to come, but we thought it was nauseating. These days they deny that, no one talked about it, but those campaigns really existed.’

Immediately after the great pogrom of Kristallnacht on 9–10 November, 1938 – almost 100 Jews were killed and 7,500 Jewish shops destroyed – the teachers read aloud a printed statement: the Jewish students were to leave the school. It had obviously all been arranged beforehand, down to the last detail. Ingeborg Goldstein and Edith Rosenthal packed their bags, looked around the class, then got up and walked out of the door together. ‘You could hear a pin drop.’ Truusje stood up and protested; after all, these were their classmates. She was told to leave the classroom as well.

On Luxemburger Strasse she saw Jewish shops being sacked. ‘One Jew had hidden in his cupboard. They picked up the cupboard, with him in it, and threw it from the fourth floor, then beat him to death. It was unimaginable that something like that could happen in this peaceful city. A few people stood watching, one woman said: “Those poor Jews”, another woman put her hand over that woman's mouth right away. It was like walking around in a dream.’

It snowed that winter, and she went sledging in the park with her playmate Miryam Meyer. When she walked past the Brauns’ house the next day, a window opened. Lotte shouted: ‘Truusje, is it true that you were sledging in the park yesterday?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, then it's me or that Jewish bitch!’

Little has been said about a question that now presents itself: how could this shift in mentality take place so quickly, in both Frankfurt and Cologne, after 1933? Where, for God's sake, were all those hundreds of thousands of active communists, social democrats and Christians who had taken part in protest demonstrations not so long before this? Where were the
56.1 per cent of the public who voted against the Nazis on 5 March, 1933?

There was, of course, the atmosphere of burgeoning intimidation. Right after the National Socialists seized power, the SS and the SA were given the status of ‘auxiliary’ police. Atrocities took place on a daily basis. More than a hundred temporary torture chambers were set up in Berlin, scattered over all of the city's ‘red’ neighbourhoods. In Breslau and Munich, Jewish judges and lawyers were literally beaten out of the courthouses.

An estimated 10,000 communists and socialists were arrested in Bavaria alone in spring 1933. In Prussia, approximately 25,000 such arrests were made, and throughout the country at least another 100,000 dissidents were roughed up and terrorised.

One month after Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Reichstag burned down. Marinus van der Lubbe had, more or less by accident, set fire to the building's most vulnerable spots, the huge curtain at the back of the meeting hall and the bone dry oak panelling behind. Within minutes, the papers reported the next day, the giant hall was ‘an inferno of burning benches and lecterns’.

Van der Lubbe could have done his opponents no greater favour.

Although Van der Lubbe had no ties with the German communists, the new chancellor demanded that all KPD parliamentarians be hanged immediately. In addition, Hitler had now been given an excuse to issue a whole series of decrees, to restrict civil liberties even further and to lock up countless political and journalistic heavyweights. In this way, the movements of the left were robbed of their leadership at a single blow, and that was not all. The wave of arrests also established a new norm: after that, anyone who rocked the boat could be spirited off to a concentration camp at a moment's notice. An estimated 100,000 communists or alleged communists were killed during the Third Reich. Many times that number spent shorter or longer periods in concentration camps.

Yet ‘the good Nazi years of 1935–7’ – a period generally ignored these days – really did exist. During that time, Hitler achieved two goals no one had ever thought possible: the six million unemployed of 1933 were all working by 1937, and Germany was once again considered a power to reckon with.