Figure 1.--This photograph of my little brother (who was 3 years old at the time) and me shows us in our lederhosen. The photograph was taken during the summer of 1942. Notice my brother's Red Indian war bonnet.
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Figure 1.--This photograph of my little brother (who was 3 years old at the time) and me shows us in our lederhosen. The photograph was taken during the summer of 1942. Notice my brother's Red Indian war bonnet. |
A German boy tells us what he can remember about growing up during the NAZI era, he was quite young. His first recollections are the aftermath of Reichs-Kristallnacht. He remembers more about World War II and its aftermath and how is family coped with the post-war occupation. He provides an especially insightful study of the German self image.
I was born in December 1932, a few months before the NAZI-regime and Hitler took over. As a result my entire childhood through age 12 was under the NAZIs.
My family was rich, and we lived in the town of Hameln (Hamelin, the pied piperīs town) 40 km south west of Hannover (Hanover). I had a younger brother and three sisters.
The earliest remembrance I have in this context was in November 9-10, 1938, when I was almost 6 years old. This was Reichs-Kristallnacht (Night of the broken glass) when Jewish synagogues were burnt all over in Germany by the NAZIs. Next morning my next younger sister (4 years old) and I walked together with our nanny to the place where it happened. I do not know why she did this and later I forgot to ask her. Anyway I think she was more leftist than middle in her political conviction, and perhaps wanted us to be witness to this cruel event. Now at the location of the former synagogue a very impressive memorial has been erected. Apart from an iron plate with all the names of those who died or were tortured, it consists of a few rusted heavy iron constructions that reach into the street and make driving a little difficult. The rest of the compound is barren and has not been used again for houses or so.
In 1939 I began school. In 1940 I was in the Black Forest (Schwarzwald) in a kind of boarding house where children can stay for recreation (Kinderheim), when the war against France began. The French border was only a few kilometres away. Immediately my mother came and took me home. We went by car, and from a high positioned road in the Black Forest, my mother showed me the Vosgues mountains which are in France (in Alsace). My father was in the Wheremacht throughout the War, but thankfully was not wounded. Our little village was relatively untouched, but at night by 1943 and especially 1944, the sky was red from the bombing of nearby towns.
Figure 2.--This photograph again is of my little brother and me wearing typical summer clothes. My brother wears a shorts set with a Peter Pan collar and self-belted shirts. I wear a ordinary shirt and shorts. I am not sure why he wears kneesocks and I wear short socks. |
I do not recall a great deal about the clothes I wore as a boy. A few scattered family photographs, however, do provide some information and jog my memmory a bit.
Smocks are often more associated with French than German boys. German boys, however, also used to wear smocks--but usually younger boys than in France. I wore a smock called a "Fuhrmannskittel" when I was a litte boy. I know this for a fact because I have a photograph of me at age 3 years wearing one and holding a duckling. It was a blue smock. By my time, school age boys no longer wore them--at least to school. I believe that earlier some younger boys did wear smocks to school.
When I was about 8 years old, I wore a short wool coat. Notice the hood with a plaid lining. I also have on a wool balaklava type headwear. The long trousers had a blue stripe.
Both myself and my little brother wore lederhosen. Mine were real leather, Ny brother's lederhosen were made of [????]. The photograph was taken in our back yard (garden). Notice the checerked shirt I wore with my lederhosen (figure 1).
Mu brother and I both always wore short pants during the summer. He had some short sets, with a Peter Pan collar and self-belted shirts. I wore ordinary shirts with pointed collars and shorts. We had shofrt sleeved shirts, but often wore long sleeve shirts as well, even in the summer. I am not sure why in the photograph here that my younger brother wears kneesocks and I wear short socks (figure 2). Notice how our collars are buttoned. This was considered the proper thing to do when goung anywhere other than playing around the house.
My brother had a Red Indian war bonnet which he rather favored and like to play cowboys and Indians. [HBC note: The war bonnent is a much more elablorate one than most American boys had.] I probably did also, although I do not remember. Apparently it was alright to play cowboys and Indians even during the War.
I rememember a few details about my school and the Hitler Jugend. I was in the younger division--the Deutche Jugend.
When I was about 9 or 10 years old, a friend who was 8 years old, had a birthday party. The photigraphs taken give a good indication of how we dressed at the time. It was 1941. I wore my Seppelhose, but I was the only one in lederhosen. My friends wore all kinds if other outfits. Some look rather dated, other outfits almost modern.
Although my parents were not fully practicing NAZIs (they were both members in two less important nazi groupings), they somehow sympathy with the regime. My father was in World War II as a soldier from the very beginning (Poland, Blitzkrieg--September 1939) to the very end. Like almost everybody, at least in the middle and upper classes, my mother felt that the war against Soviet Union was just in so far as Stalin would have tried to conquer whole Europe and make it communist. We were all very much afraid what would happen if the Red Army would take over. And indeed many bad things really happened. Most of us did not know what Germans had done in Warshaw Ghetto or in the KZs. The state of information was very poor. Around 1945 most Germans were rather confused and it was of course very difficult to judge what would be right, what wrong. We all were very afraid of being conquered by any enemy. We soon could experience what we ourselves had done to others before: being humiliated by a force that was not ours. Everybody knew that war is something very horrible. Though my town was almost not bombed, we heard of the devastating bombing of Hannover and Bielefeld. In many nights I saw the red shine of burning Hannover from about 40 km distance. Many people I knew died or lost their relatives and houses and belongings. But I never heard about the concentration camps (KZs) until about February 1945 when a friend told me the first news about them. A heavy guilty consience grew, particularly with regard to the Jews and the Eastern European peoples. Towards the end of the war, and more so after the war, almost all patriotism disappeared. There were only a few exceptions, but these people dared not to say anything about their patriotism publicly.
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