After the Reich (123 page)
Authors: Giles MacDonogh
Zuffenhausen camp
Zühlsdorff, Volkmar von
Zweig, Arnold
Gerhard Ziemer gives the figure of 2,280,000, Alfred de Zayas 2,211,000.
To some extent he based the book on his own family. As a teenager the author was privileged to meet his two brothers. One had literally shot himself in the foot to avoid fighting Hitler’s war.
At this stage the Soviet share included eastern Germany within its 1937 borders. Much of this was later hived off and awarded to Poland.
This is disputed. Michael Balfour says Morgenthau wrote the first draft: Michael Balfour and John Mair,
Four Power Control in Germany and Austria 1945-1946
, Oxford 1956, 20 n3.
This was an Anglo-American brassière: the French word applies to a baby garment, and has no lumps.
Once again Bavaria was seen as the harmless part of Germany. The monster was always Prussia.
The assistant Soviet commander in Germany, Sokolovsky, specifically mentioned the
Herrenvolk
to justify the rapes. (See Norman M. Naimark,
The Russians in Germany - A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949
, Cambridge, Mass. and London 1995, 79.)
In February 1943 Hitler drove past a group of Russian slave-labourers working on the road outside Zaporozhe. Filled with loathing he remarked, ‘It is quite right to make Slavs do this, these robots! Otherwise they would have no right to their share of the sun!’ Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhl, eds,
The Hitler Book
, translated by Giles MacDonogh, London 2005, 102.
A variant on a Venetian dish,
risibisi
(rice and peas), and popular in Vienna. The author came across it as a child, at a rare surviving Jewish home in the 2nd Bezirk.
Schärf had suffered at the hands of Dollfuss’s Corporate State when he had been put in the concentration camp at Wöllersdorf, and again under the Nazis when he had spent a few months in captivity after the Anschluss.
From
Parteigenosse
: Party comrade of member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP).
G’schaftlhuber
, a busybody;
Adabei
, from
auch dabei
, meaning also present: someone who doesn’t want to miss the party.
O + the fifth letter of the alphabet = Oe, or Ö (Austria).
This was Willy Prinz von Thurn und Taxis’s view (‘Memoiren’, unpublished MS, 25).
The socialist had supported the Anschluss with Germany. The communists had not.
This now seems unlikely.
The equivalent of the Royal National Theatre performing in a music hall.
The Tyrolean innkeeper Andreas Hofer had fought Napoleon, and was shot by the French in 1810.
See below pp. 82-4.
The Josefstadt is where Anna Schmidt is engaged as a soubrette in
The Third Man
.
Romanian-born Colonel General Alexander Löhr was handed over to the Yugoslavs by the British, and later executed for ordering the bombardment of Belgrade. Colonel General Lothar Rendulic, born in Wiener Neustadt, was sentenced to twenty-five years for war crimes. He was released in 1951.
Brunswick’s palace was pulled down and replaced by a shopping centre.
Lasch was sentenced to death
in absentia
and his family arrested. Koch escaped from Pillau after telling the population to stand firm.
The irony was that the room had been made for the Royal Schloss in Berlin - another victim of the war - and Prussia’s first king, the spendthrift Frederick I. His austere son, Frederick William, gave the room to Peter the Great in exchange for a squad of tall soldiers, a commodity he valued more highly than amber.
The sexual attraction of conquerors to the women of the defeated should have appealed to the ‘psychologist’. The straitlaced Helmuth James von Moltke had been shocked when he visited Paris in August 1940 to find the women ‘positively queuing up to get a German soldier into bed’ (
Letters to Freya
, London 1991, 97).
Mainz was bombed early on in the war, and grass was already growing on the ruins.
Zuckmayer called his parents ‘the Badgers’.
Jürgen von Kardorff had died in action in Russia in 1943; Graf Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg together with Nikolaus von Halem, Ulrich von Hassell, Julius Leber, Werner von Haeften, and Claus von Stauffenberg had all died as a result of their roles in 20 July 1944; Bernhard von Mutius, Dietrich von Mandelsloh, Graf Wolf Werner von der Schulenburg, Martin Raschke, Josias and Werner von Veltheim had all died as soldiers in the war. The Lehndorffs and the Schweinitzes were noble Prussian families. For Graf Heinrich von Lehndorff-Steinort see below p. 164; the others, presumably, died in Hitler’s war.
The inmates were recognisable by the coloured triangles they wore. The original concentration camp prisoners were political: they wore red; anti-social groups such as drunks, beggars and the ‘work-shy’ wore black; the professional criminal, green; Jehovah’s Witnesses, lilac; returned emigrants, blue; homosexuals, pink. It should be recalled that homosexuality was also illegal in Britain until the 1960s. The Jews wore two triangles stitched together to make a Star of David, one yellow and one with the colour of the crime that had given the pretext to incarcerate them. See Bruno Heilig,
Men Crucified
, London 1941, 73-4. The lion’s share at Dachau was made up of 44,401 ‘reds’. There were 22,100 Jews, 1,066 ‘blacks’, 759 ‘greens’, 126 Wehrmacht men, 110 ‘pinks’ including one who had been readmitted after discharge, 85 ‘lilacs’ and 16 ‘blues’.
See below pp. 82-4.
There is a photograph of this.
An allusion to Schiller’s play of that name.
R. F. Keeling (
Gruesome Harvest
, Chicago 1947, 56-7) gives the official figure as 1,198, but the Germans thought it more like 5,000.
In 1939 there were nearly 3,000 prisoners. Just under a thousand of these were ‘greens’ or criminals, and 688 were political prisoners. There were 930 ‘anti-socials’, 143 Jehovah’s Witnesses and 51 homosexuals. (Robert H. Abzug,
Inside the Vicious Heart
, New York and Oxford 1985, 106.)
Literally ‘Oxen Joe’. As a boy, Müller had looked after the cows on his parents’ Bavarian farm.
An atomised sweet omelette filled with raisins and a favourite of the Emperor Franz Joseph - hence the name.
There can have been very little left of the town. The Allies had bombed it relentlessly. Only a thin strip of old houses remained when the author visited it in the early 1990s.
The monument had been built in 1927 to commemorate the German victory over the Russians in 1914 - which had actually been achieved elsewhere. The battle was deemed to have been won in Tannenberg to compensate for the resounding defeat inflicted on the Teutonic Knights by the Poles in 1410.
Hindenburg and his wife for good; Frederick William and his son returned after much controversy in 1991. The remains of the Garrison Church having been dynamited in the 1960s, Frederick William was reburied in the Friedenskirche. Frederick the Great finally achieved his original wish and was interred on the terrace at Sanssouci, next to his dogs.
The two kings were moved again in 1952, when they were sent to Burg Hohenzollern near Hechingen in Württemberg. It was here that Frederick the Great’s coffin collapsed, and a new one had to be made.
Information from Prince Friedrich Wilhelm von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, 14 May 1996. The prince told the author he had noticed the theft when the coffin was changed in 1952.
This had been going on for days, despite the draconian methods the Party used to deter soldiers and civilians from leaving.
When the British architect Lord Foster adapted the building for use by the Bundestag, the more decorous graffiti were retained; the obscenities, however, were scratched out. (Author’s visits to the Reichstag building, see
Financial Times
, 9 August 2002 and 2 September 2004.) ‡ From the German word
Uhr
, meaning watch.
Almost certainly a reference to Tolstoy’s
The Cossacks
.
James Stern found an echo of this in bombed-out Nuremberg. He observed two boys playing in the sand. They had built a castle. Suddenly one of the boys began to make a wailing noise like a siren: ‘Ich bin ein Amerikaner!’ The other jumped up with a tin can filled with sand: ‘Ich bin ein Engländer!’ They flapped their arms and cried, ‘Boom! Boom! Boom!’ and launched their sand at the castle.
Procopius,
The Secret History
, trans. G. A. Williamson, London 1990, 41, has just three ways: ‘And though she brought three openings into service, she often found fault with nature, grumbling because nature had not made the openings in her nipples wider than is normal, so that she could devise another variety of intercourse in that region.’
Eisenhower’s mistress, Kay Summersby, was there and took a dim view of the Russian women soldiers in their knee-length skirts: ‘No British, American or French girl would been caught dead in their uniforms’ (
Eisenhower was my Boss
, Watford 1949, 224).
See below Chapter 20.
Howley must be confused: in our more prosperous times a kilo of rye flour would require 700 ml of water for a 1.6 kg German rye
Landbrot
: it is therefore more than a third water and may be happily kept for a week.
At Advent a ramshackle Christmas market appeared by the ruins of the Schloss. It was a refreshing symbol of the return of normality.
In the Czech lands in the west, the Germans made up just over a third of the population in the 1930 census, with roughly two-thirds of these in Bohemia and the rest in Moravia. In Czechoslovakia as a whole, Germans were 22.53 per cent of the population, with Czechs and Slovakians making up 66.24 per cent together. There was a significant Magyar minority in Slovakia. Of these 3,318,445 people, 3,231,688 had Czech nationality. (Theodor Schieder, ed.,
Tschechoslowakei
, Berlin 1957, 7.)
The German population was declining. In 1920 it had been 23.64 per cent. In the German core, towns had seen the Czech communities grow: in Aussig they had advanced from 10 per cent in 1910 to a third in 1930; in Brüx from 20 per cent to a third; in Reichenberg the Germans had declined by 10 per cent; in Troppau the Czechs had been 10 per cent, now they were a third, and so on. (Schieder, ed.,
Tschechoslowakei
, 10.)
See above p. 44.
Kaschauer
in German, from the German name of the town, Kaschau.
From Part One of Goethe’s
Faust
. Gretchen asks Faust the question he most dreads: whether he believes in God.
Not to be confused with the town of Tábor.
‘Swabian’ is a Hungarian word for an ethnic German. In 1910 they had been nearly 10 per cent of the population, but by the census of 1941 they were down to 4.8 per cent (719,449 people). The principle denominations were Bannater Schwaben, and Batschka-Deutsche from the Balkan areas, as well as the Germans on the eastern side of the Neusiedlersee around Ödenburg (Sopron) and the Schwäbische Türkei.
They kept themselves aloof, generally in small communities such as Villany on the southern border, and rarely dared to speak German. In the author’s experience many of their children have only a rudimentary knowledge of the language now.
The list of those to be expelled runs to 16.5 million people: 9.3 million within the 1937 Reich borders and 7.2 outside. There were 2,382,000 East Prussians, 1,822,000 East Pomeranians, 614,000 in Brandenburg east of the Oder, 4,469,000 Silesians, 240,000 in Memel and the Baltic States, 373,000 in Danzig, 1,293,000 in Poland, 3,493,000 in Czechoslovakia, 601,000 in Hungary, 509,000 in Yugoslavia and 785,000 in Romania. The Russians were not planning to export their 1.8 million Volga Germans, but they were due to be resettled.
After the Second World War the Poles demanded the return of their countrymen in the Ruhr, many of whom had lived there for generations.
Village near Preussisch Holland. The Schloss by Jean de Bodt survived, and was even restored in the 1980s.
Yet when the author visited the city in 1992 a tiny band of Germans had somehow managed to re-establish themselves in Kaliningrad, and even had their own church and pastor. They were naturally one of the first stops for the many
Heimatgruppen
who wanted to visit the city where they had been born and grew up.
See below p. 374.
This was true only up to a point: half a million largely Catholic Germans remained in Upper Silesia, because the Poles refused to recognise their nationality, and there were the ‘autochthones’ in East Prussia. Most of these left before the 1980s. As many as 30,000 remain around Olszstyn.
There were unsuccessful attempts to bring Gimborski to trial in the 1960s.
The ‘giant mountains’ (
sic
) rise to over 1,600 metres.