From School to War: Growing Up in Hitler’s Germany (Contemporary Nonfiction) Page 3

  Just down the street by the square was a small Lutheran church I loved to visit, known as the Markt Kirche. Completed in 1466, it featured the old church architecture—large stone walls, heavy oak pews, and narrow stained windows with portraits of saints. It had a high tower with a bell, which rang regularly on the hour, quarter hour, and half hour, and a church elder rang the bell when a parishioner died. My grandparents were regular churchgoers, but my immediate family only attended for special occasions: Christmas, Easter, baptisms, weddings, and funerals. One service we always attended was Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Though I went to the services with my family, I just went to please my mother, since I was never religious.

  In my research on the town, I also discovered its role in the wars that periodically swept through the region, when one noble family, religious group, or country sought to win in a continuing power struggle. For example, during the Thirty Years’ War, from 1618 to 1644, troops organized by the Catholic churches based in Austria burned much of the predominantly Protestant town to the ground. Afterward, the farmers who had fled returned and rebuilt over the next few years, until Eschwege became a flourishing farming and market town again. Later, during World War II, the English Air Force (the RAF) demolished the railroad station, although this time the rest of the town escaped any harm.

  Yet despite the recurring destruction over the centuries, remnants from that old town remained, so for hundreds of years after the fighting ended, the farmers plowed up old guns, bullets, and cannonballs. They even found the barrels of old cannons, as well as bows, small arrows, and arrowheads from much earlier battles.

  We studied a lot of history in school starting in first grade, and living where so much history had taken place made it feel much more real. For example, I could walk across a field and imagine what it was like when the opposing armies of the Catholic Austrians and the Protestant Germans with their Swedish allies faced each other across a field. Back then, as I imagined the scene, the soldiers on horseback rode proudly into battle, ready to charge and spear their opponents with their bayonets, while the soldiers on the ground aimed their guns and brought down several dozen of the advancing enemy. It also helped me remember the past when I saw the tombstones from these wars in meadows. As I saw the names and dates on the stones I imagined these individual soldiers as they fought valiantly against the enemy.

  From time to time, I also went to the banks of the Werra River, where I watched the factory workers load the leather goods onto the ships for shipment to other countries. At the same time, I noticed the dark sludge that lapped up on the sides of the ships, since the German industries dumped the residue of leather manufacturing into the Werra, with little concern about what would happen to the river after they dumped this refuse. Today, the river has been cleaned up. People have become more knowledgeable about pollution and Germany has become one of the most environmentally conscious countries in the world. As a result, the fish once decimated by pollution have returned and the Werra has become a popular area for fishing, swimming, and boating. Back then it was simply an industrial dumping ground due to the leather factory, but now that old factory is gone.

  In many ways, the town reminded me of life in Lingen, because here too we could run around freely, and we swam in the Werra, and we went to play at the beach, in spite of being forbidden to go there.

  An Early Scientific Calling

  Besides exploring the world around me and having adventures, these early years set me on my path to my future, since from early childhood I was interested in science and determined to be a doctor. Early on I saw some movies about doctors at work that piqued my interest. In 1939, when I was eleven, I saw a film that was a major influence on my life—Robert Koch, der Brekaemfer des Todes—The Fighter Against Death, starring the great actor Emil Jannings. The film told the story of Dr. Koch, who discovered the tuberculosis bacterium and later worked on cholera in Africa. In the film, one of his fellow doctors injected himself with the bacterium to show that a drug created by another doctor could cure him. But unfortunately, after injecting himself, the doctor did not survive the experiment and died a terrible death. His body was wracked by the convulsive coughs of a TB patient whose lungs were filled with phlegm, and he shook violently with delirium in his last days. Later, Dr. Koch repeated the experiment on himself using the drug he had created to combat the disease. This time it worked.

  I left the film impressed by the doctor who risked experimenting on himself, and with Dr. Koch’s great success in finding a cure for this terrible disease, though at the time I wasn’t concerned with the ethical issues of experimenting on another patient with an unproven drug. I was also impressed that Dr. Koch had started out as a country doctor, since I lived in a country town. As such, Dr. Koch knew all of his patients personally, and when he treated them it was like one friend helping another, since he had such a warm bedside manner—at least as it was portrayed in the movie.

  Also, Dr. Koch was actively trying to make the whole community become a healthier place. In one scene, he came into a school where all the doors and windows were closed, since a teacher had invited him to come to her classroom as a guest, to talk to the students about how to live a healthier life. The teacher mistakenly thought that an enclosed environment was safer, though Dr. Koch clearly disagreed. After talking to the students for a few minutes, he began singing a song he had written with a chorus that concluded, “Let air and sunshine in the open window.” Once the singing ended, he urged the teacher to immediately open the windows in the classroom, since he firmly believed that fresh air would prevent getting many diseases.

  Robert Koch, der Brekaemfer des Todes was one of the many films I saw in which doctors were the heroes, and I loved the way these doctors were all-knowing and eager to help others. Seeing these qualities in the movies helped me recognize that the local doctors I knew behaved in a similar way to help both their own patients and the larger community.

  I also developed my interest in science from the experiments Hansi and I conducted when I was only eight years old and Hansi was seven. For one experiment we collected tadpole eggs and watched the tadpoles emerge. Then we experimented by keeping some tadpoles in the light and others in the dark to see which ones would grow more quickly. As it turned out, the tadpoles kept in the light did grow more quickly, as I expected—an early form of hypothesis testing—though I didn’t know the scientific term at the time.

  When I was eight or nine, I even began practicing what doctors do. I dressed the wounds when my friends had accidents and got sores and scrapes. I would run to the family medicine cabinet to get some antiseptic and bandages, and then bandaged their wounds. When we played war games in which teams represented different sides in a war—typically the Germans battling the French—inevitably some players were injured when they fell on the ground and scraped a knee or an elbow. Then the great Dr. Dettbarn took care of them.

  In some cases, the players imagined they had a wound from one of the play swords or guns as we chased each other, using sticks for swords and our fingers for guns, and we fell as if wounded when someone aimed their sticks or fingers at us. I took care of their imaginary wounds, too. When the “injured” came to the medical treatment center in the woods with their “wounds,” I treated these imaginary scars of battle by wrapping bandages across the players’ arms and chests. When I was done, the players looked like partially dressed mummies because I used so many of the bandages I found in the family’s medicine cabinet. In turn, the kids loved showing off their bandaged wounds, their true badges of honor in battle, even though these battles were strictly play and no one was really injured, apart from some small scrapes.

  When my father saw me do these experiments and dress the wounds of my friends, he encouraged my dream. I told him I wanted to become a doctor when I grew up, and he told me, “That’s wonderful. I don’t want you or Hansi to follow the family tradition and become army officers.”

  “Why not?” I asked my father. He told me, “It takes too
long when you are in the army before you are your own master. You have to follow too many rules as a soldier, and it takes you a very long time to rise through the ranks to become an officer. And you both are so independent and adventurous. I don’t think a military career would be right for you.”

  But perhaps the most important reason my father didn’t want us to become soldiers was the danger of a military career, which is why Hansi and I had discovered him practicing how to write with his foot in case he lost his hands or arms to a bullet or bomb because he felt he always had to be prepared for the worst.

  “You just never know what’s going to happen,” my father told me. “You always have to be on your guard that the worst might occur. So I don’t want you both to be exposed to the constant danger of a military life.”

  Thus, since I was set on becoming a doctor, my father sought to encourage me even more by buying me many books on science and scientists starting when I was eight. I loved reading these books. I was especially fascinated to read about Dr. Berend, who described the diphtheria bacterium, and about Dr. Roentgen, who discovered X-rays, much like I had previously become fascinated by the work of Dr. Koch.

  However, the greatest influence of all on my plans for the future was the book The Microbe Hunters, written in 1926, which described the major scientific discoveries up to that time. The author, Paul DeKruif, wrote in a lively, dramatic style, presenting the process of solving life’s most important secrets like unraveling a mystery. He described the work of the scientists and doctors I had previously learned about, as well as the discoveries of Dr. Paul Ehrlich, who first treated syphilis with arsenic. Though arsenic is commonly thought of as a deadly poison, Dr. Ehrlich found it had medical properties when given in small doses, so it could be used to treat syphilis. Later Dr. August Paul Von Wasserman invented a test for syphilis, which still lives on as the “Wasserman test.” This is a simple blood test in which a doctor takes a small sample of blood from a pinprick and looks for signs of the syphilis microbe under a microscope. The Microbe Hunters also includes dozens of other discoveries. Even today, this book serves as a monument to these early scientific pioneers, and I still give it to young men and women considering a career in science or medicine.

  When I was around ten years old, my father bought me a microscope. It was a very simple microscope, just a long black tube with an eyepiece and a platform for a slide, but it could magnify whatever was put under it. I remember when my father presented it to me with great fanfare. He opened the box slowly and pulled the microscope out of its wrappings like he was unveiling a new find. Then he announced with great solemnity, “This is the beginning of your life as a scientist. It will reveal things you cannot see with the human eye, and you will find a whole tiny world of discovery in there.”

  This gift from my father was truly a beginning. I was excited to get that microscope and eager to perform my first experiment. I realized that we could look at this hidden world around us and reveal the many mysteries that formed our environment and made us who we were—the veins of leaves, the small particles floating in the blood, and the tiny S-shaped organisms that swim in the water and undulate like microscopic fish.

  To discover these mysteries, Hansi and I set up our first scientific experiments to look at what is in the water. We gathered water from the river Werra in a cup and poured a little onto a slide with a small concave surface. When we looked into the microscope eyepiece, what we saw was amazing. The faint bluish bit of water on the slide teemed with life. We saw little cells of different shapes that moved around like squirming eels but were invisible to the human eye. Though we didn’t know what they were, we were astonished by this observation, since we had never seen anything like this before. For comparison, we created a slide of water from the tap in the kitchen. In contrast to all the life we saw in the river water, the tap water showed no life at all.

  This first scientific experiment made me curious to see even more. I wanted to see how other things around me looked under the microscope. What would their surfaces reveal? What secrets lay underneath?

  As a result, Hansi and I began to gather things around us to see what they looked like under our microscope. Though it wasn’t a sophisticated high-power microscope, it had a variety of magnifications. While these magnifications were small compared to the much more powerful magnifications of modern microscopes, they were large enough for us to begin our investigations and comparisons of the many things that existed in this otherwise unseen world. We compared leaves from the trees and plants around us. We compared the shoots of an onion with an oak leaf and a leaf from a linden tree. To keep track of what we observed, we got a notebook and made notes of the differences we found.

  I even took a drop of blood from my finger and was fascinated to see the different structures in the sample. Though initially I had no idea about the tiny strange forms I looked at, I was curious to learn more. Soon I began to hear the strange names that scientists give to these very small particles, such as “platelets” for the round forms in the blood, which look like plates in the dinner cabinet.

  An Early Introduction to the Nazis

  Before we moved to Eschwege from Leipzig, my father had been reactivated into the Vehrmacht, the newly reorganized armed forces under the direct order of Hitler. Though my father had originally been in the German army, or Reichswehr, he became part of the Vehrmacht in 1935 and was assigned to its garrison in Eschwege.

  After we had been there several years, I began attending the Friedrich Wilhelm Schule, known as a Real Gymnasium.* Since the school stressed science and mathematics I liked it very much and had many friends there, some of whom I am still in touch with today. When I first started at the Schule, some of my friends and I were members of the Jungvolk, one of the youth organizations established by the Nazi Party, made up of boys from ten to thirteen. Since we were still very young we mainly ran around and played games on the streets, and for an hour or two one of the teachers taught us a little bit about the Hitler Jugend, the next youth organization we would be expected to join.

  We learned that the Jugend would prepare us to be strong men, able to defend Germany as soldiers and leaders. Additionally, under the leadership of a young man in his early twenties, we read books we selected from the popular books of the day, including those by Mark Twain and Karl May, a popular German author known for his books set in the American West and still widely read, though he died in 1912. Yet, while the Jungvolk was established by the Nazi Party, it was not a particularly militaristic organization because of our young age. Instead, our military training would begin with the Hitler Jugend and, because our young leader praised it highly, we were eager to join once we were old enough.

  Since one of my friends lived next to a slaughterhouse he obtained the horns of slaughtered cows, which we used in our play in various ways. We tied the horns to our heads and pretended to be the early Germanic warriors, who wore leather caps with horns on either side. We also tied the horns to our belts and used them as canteens by filling them with water. Then we drank from them, as did the ancient Germans long before the Middle Ages. Wearing these horns made us feel superior to other children who were not in the Jungvolk, since the horns were a symbol of strength and power to us. It was the beginning of our conditioning to want to be part of the youth movement the Nazis were creating.

  Since we enjoyed being part of the Jungvolk so much, we were delighted to move up to the Hitler Jugend, which all boys from thirteen to eighteen were required to join by a 1939 act, with the exception of boys from undesirable ethnicities, such as those with Jewish or Gypsy parents. Though the Jugend was not directly connected to the school, virtually all my schoolmates participated since not doing so would be viewed as a hostile attack on the state. Their parents could be considered civically irresponsible and could be jailed if their sons didn’t become members.

  Once we joined the Hitler Jugend, we participated in a number of daily activities. While we mostly continued playing war games, our play became more
directed and regulated. For example, we learned to march in formation and unison, although we did not march in a goose step, as did the real army. We lined up for these formations according to height, and since I was then short, I had to stand at the end of the line, which was a disappointment to me. Standing there reminded me of the games where the least skilled boys ended up being the last to be chosen for a team.

  Later in boarding school I would finally grow tall, but at the time I couldn’t know this, and I was very aware of my place in the formation. Once we lined up, at the direction of the Stamm Fuhrer, or troop leader, we marched around on the street as he called out orders: “March forward . . . Turn right . . . Turn left . . . Now reverse,” and as one body, we responded to his directions. It felt exhilarating to be part of this group. I felt a strong sense of belonging and companionship, which was one of the tools the Nazis used to gain loyalty and commitment to their cause.

  At that time, though, we knew little of the Nazis’ intentions, since the war was not yet in our backyard. Most of us did not really understand the Nazi ideology. Instead, we thought being in the Jugend was great fun. It was like going to a country fair and getting together for a party, where we played hide-and-seek and tag in the fields.