Cruel World (23 page)

For the German boys who came to the United States there were also revelations. They were instructed to guard against exaggeration, and respect the institutions of other countries, but to know their facts and be able to provide convincing evidence of the worth of National Socialism lest they and Germany be put down. One boy horrified the Connecticut family he stayed with before the opening of school by immediately putting a photograph of Hitler on his bureau, and amazed his peers by declaring that he had “let his Führer down” when he lost a tennis match to a girl. But, like the American students, the Germans soon learned to blend in. They were warmly welcomed and some were quite taken with “this rather strange but lovely type of American girl” they met at school parties. They found that the Americans were “interested in Germany and made comparisons between Roosevelt and Germany, between the New Deal and the German labor service.” But, concerning Kristallnacht, “even Americans who were very friendly toward Germany said, ‘Not this. This we can’t understand.’ ”
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In England, where they were also well received, they found “a lack of toughness” on the sports field and were surprised that “anti-German propaganda” was so widespread and that people were “misinformed” about Hitler’s programs.

No one’s beliefs were changed by the exchanges. Rolf Stoves, a German student at Choate, though full of praise for American hospitality, noted
that although he was constantly assured that America was a free and democratic country where he could do as he pleased, everyone “tried to convince me how bad it was in Germany and that I had better change my belief.” With time, he continued, he had “learned to understand the reasons why our form of government looks so terrible to democratic observers,” but he hoped that the Americans would “understand that we Germans like the form of government we chose for our country as well as you like your political ideas.”
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On one thing the boys from all countries agreed: the idea of confronting their new classmates on the battlefield filled them with dismay. Rolf Stoves hoped “with all my heart that someday the United States and Germany will come to a peaceful understanding … and safer peace for all nations.”
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This hope was not to be fulfilled for a long time: more than half of his class from Feldafing would perish in the coming war.

The war would open a plethora of new opportunities for Nazi control of children, and they took advantage of every one. For years the Nazi Party had run camps in the country to improve the health of city children. Once the bombing of cities began, tens of thousands of children were evacuated to the countryside under this program, the Kinderlandverschickung, or KLV. Children aged six to ten were sent to families, and ten- to fourteen-year-olds to communal camps. In addition, a plan was made to place mothers with very small children in rural homes. This plan was not obligatory, and some parents were reluctant to send their children far away. But the fact that schools were often moved in toto often persuaded them otherwise. Estimates of the total number of children who did eventually participate in this program range from three to five million. The exact number of camps is also unclear, probably due to the fact that a “camp” could have anywhere from twenty children in a house to a thousand children in a large establishment, but they surely numbered in the thousands, many of which would be set up in newly conquered Poland.

Specially trained cooks and housekeepers, plus medical staff, were provided, but these adults were not entirely in control. Yet another special training school was set up to prepare teenaged HJ and BDM members for duty as “camp squad leaders” who, in addition to carrying on HJ activities, would supervise the children during the time they would normally have spent with their families. Once separated from parents and the mainline school authorities, these children too were available for full-time indoctrination and premilitary training.
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By all accounts, conditions in the KLV camps varied tremendously. In his memoir,
A Hitler Youth in Poland
, Jost Hermand describes five different camps to which he was sent in the course of the war. The contrasts are staggering. One was a brick schoolhouse with no running water or electricity, in a tiny and remote Polish village, without stores or post office, where “when it rained the main street dissolved in an impassable field of mud”; another was a large and luxurious villa, given to Hitler by Mussolini, in San Remo on the Italian Riviera, where the boys were waited on hand and foot; and there was an exciting ski camp, where they received training suitable for mountain troops.

The routine in the Polish village camp was standard. In the morning classes were conducted by teachers, some of whom lapsed into apathy in this remote location. When they went home in the afternoon, the boys came under the control of their usually seventeen-year-old HJ camp leaders, who supervised competitive games, marching, and “physical hardening.” There were the usual songfests and indoctrination sessions. The leaders (one of whom carried a club and gave his orders with whistle blasts) had absolute authority, and sadistic punishments and “mindless harassment” were not rare.

In this totalitarian world of children, one’s place in the pecking order became all important: “We ourselves were part of a pyramidal social hierarchy in which the individual had to assert himself, often quite cruelly, in order to be accepted.” No one helped anyone else. At the top were the boys who excelled in the sometimes vicious games and roughhousing. Being tagged a “sissy” was anathema; one of the worst things that could happen was to have one’s mother visit. Many mothers did try to move near their children, but this practice was publicly condemned as “disruptive” by Hitler Youth chief Artur Axmann, who succeeded Baldur von Schirach in July 1940. The boys, therefore, aware that their outgoing mail was censored, never complained in their letters home, lest a parent appear, and they concealed the true situation in their camp from their family when they went home. In the absence of parents, gaining the approval of one’s peers governed behavior, as Jost Hermand vividly describes: “Even when the local Party leader, with whom we normally had little to do, ordered us to chop the heads off chickens, twist the heads off pigeons with our hands or clobber little rabbits behind the ears with a stick and then cut their throats, we did it without blinking an eye. After all, none of us wanted to be called a ‘sissy.’ ”
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This must have been especially hard for thirteen-year-old Jost, an unathletic boy with a stutter, who loved animals. But status
was all, and he even stabbed himself in the thigh with his HJ dagger one evening in order to impress his colleagues.
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Supervision, drill-sergeant-like during physical activities, was markedly lax in the little leisure time the boys had, and virtually nonexistent at night; dormitory life was rife with hazing, mass masturbation, and sexual sadism. There was no contact at all with the outside world by radio or otherwise. This group of fifty boys did not leave the isolated camp once between June 1943 and February 1944 and knew little of what was going on in occupied Poland, but occasionally they had a glimpse:

The horrified boys did not try to protect the woman. Jost’s reactions were very confused; he

It was not until the summer of 1944, when appalling sanitary conditions and poor food led to outbreaks of hepatitis and a nasty plague of boils, that Jost, whose arm was infected, defied the communications taboo and smuggled a letter describing his plight to his mother via a Polish nurse. Frau Hermand did not just reply; she traveled to Poland and appeared in the offices of the feared Gauleiter who ruled the area in which the camp was located. This led to an investigation by Party authorities and the replacement of the camp leader, who had not reported the illnesses so as
not to appear to be a “worrywart.” Conditions became more humane after this crisis; the boys were even allowed to keep pets.
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At the last camp Jost attended, in a small town with modern conveniences, good teachers and normal contact with people soon brought the boys back from savagery. They were allowed to wear civilian clothes, and grow their hair longer. Here, in late 1944, they at last learned the true state of the war. Fear of the HJ leaders receded, and the boys began to question their authority. In January 1945, Jost’s group fled before the Red Army. When at last they arrived in Berlin, waiting HJ officials told them they were to be sent to a new camp in Pomerania:

(photo credit p2.1)

Hitler’s determination to purge the German people of “alien” elements and force hundreds of thousands of unwanted German citizens to seek refuge in other countries could not have come at a worse time. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, huge waves of migrants, seeking refuge from revolutions, war, poverty, and depression had swept into the more peaceful and prosperous areas. The High Commission for Refugees of the League of Nations, set up in 1921, was still dealing with the problems of several million Russians displaced by World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. Everyone had thought that the Bolsheviks would not last and that the Russians would soon go home. They were wrong. In their places of exile the Russians formed a “social group
sui generis
, least favored in the fight for existence.”
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Soon they would be joined by Greek refugees expelled from Turkey, plus countless others uprooted in both international and internal conflicts. The problem of what to do with the resulting hordes of stateless human beings had been partly solved by the issuance of so-called Nansen passports, which gave certain refugees a modicum of civil status in the countries in which they now found themselves.

These enormous demographic movements, combined with shaky economic conditions and fears of Communism, had led to feelings of unease and the imposition of immigration controls and quotas in a number of countries. In 1924 the United States Congress, in an effort to “protect” the country from the mostly Eastern European and Mediterranean influx of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which limited total immigration to some 150,000 a year and granted lopsided percentages of the quota to England (66,000) and Germany (26,000). No special concessions were provided for refugees. Interestingly enough, Mexico, the source of much cheap agricultural labor, did not have such a quota.

In this period, as today, starvation and displacement were worldwide phenomena. Every American child was told not to waste food because of the starving Armenians or Chinese. Years after the end of World War I, feeding programs set up by Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Commission, often in conjunction with the Quakers, were still tunneling food to families in Belgium, Germany, and Austria,
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as well as to millions in the famine-stricken Soviet Union.