Berlin at War (42 page)

ment was forbidden, other more imaginative activities were devised for

those who dared to transgress. In one instance, an entire dormitory of

boys was hauled out of bed and forced to stand to attention in the

an evil cradling

195

courtyard in their nightclothes. They were informed that one of their

number had evidently urinated in a stairwell, and that they would stand

there until the culprit made himself known. ‘For hours on end, we stood

there, by the flag pole in the freezing cold’, remembered Erich Neumann;

‘nobody owned up.’36

In some ways, Erich might have considered himself fortunate.

Gerhard Ritter well remembered the military character of the collec-

tive punishments that were meted out to the boys in his camp:

Punishment exercises were as aggressive and bloody-minded as in the

German military . . . Up, up, march, march! Lie down! Up! Down! Crawl!

Hop! Form into a column! Repeated hour after hour, regardless of the

weather or the conditions. The earth was frozen so solid that one’s knees

were battered black and blue. Or in the thaw, we had to throw ourselves

down in the mud and the puddles. And, at the next roll-call, we had to

present ourselves and our muddied clothes, once again, in perfect order.37

The political indoctrination could be more subtle, but was nonethe-

less effective. Numerous everyday activities – from singing around

the campfire to organised model building – were laden with political

significance, or at the very least intended to strengthen the team spirit

and collective identity of the children. As Jost Hermand recollected,

‘We participated in rituals such as hoisting the flag, marching drills

and roll-calls, calculated to serve the same goals, and intended to

wean us from all unboyish, “weak” activities and to engender in us

a sense of the grand task that awaited us.’38

In some instances, the indoctrination process was made rather more

explicit. Erich Neumann recalled that the area surrounding his camp

in Lobsens, near Posen, was considered ‘enemy territory’, because of

its predominantly Polish population. It was treated accordingly:

Breaking open the local tombs and playing football with the bones was

supposed to distance us, and harden us towards the ‘subhumans’ who

were living there. Woe betide those who did anything to a German

boy, or to those Poles who dared to stand up for themselves and gave

one of us a black eye. Then the authorities would avert their gaze, and

we would run amok. It got so bad that the Hitler Youth boys would

only ever go out in large groups.39

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berlin at war

The experiences of some evacuees were even darker. Dietrich

Schwalbe had been sent from Berlin to a KLV camp outside Lódz˙ in

occupied Poland, from where his class would take regular trips not

only into the surrounding countryside to witness the squalor in which

many Polish peasant families lived,40 but also into the city, to pass

through the Jewish ghetto. Dietrich recalled the scene:

The tram had to stop in front of the entrance, so that the gate could

be opened. Beyond, there was a long fence on both sides of the track

. . . The tram was not permitted to stop and had to proceed at a fairly

fast pace to prevent people mounting or dismounting the carriage. In

the ghetto, one saw children and many older people, mostly wearing

black and occasionally pushing two-wheeled handcarts. It all looked

pretty grim.41

It is highly unlikely that there was anything accidental about the choice

of such destinations. It is reasonable to suggest that those KLV camps

that were located in the ‘hostile’ areas of occupied Poland or Bohemia

were intended to act not only as the vanguard of German colonial

settlement, but also as nurseries of ethnic hatred and bigotry.42

Such indoctrination was no random happenstance. The KLV was

viewed by the Nazis as a grand socio-political experiment: an opportun -

ity to free German youth from the shackles of their families and forge

them into model Aryans. Though the Nazis publicly trumpeted family

life as the ideal, many senior ideologists were profoundly suspicious of

the old-fashioned, bourgeois beliefs and values – such as Christianity,

tolerance and old-style morality – that still prevailed in the German

Volk
. What better way of neutralising those undesirable influences than

to effectively remove a generation of German children from the bosom

of their families and have them raised in an environment that could be

better shaped to suit the ‘new’ values of the Nazi Party?

Far from being an afterthought, this revolutionary aspect was advo-

cated by the regime from the very start of the evacuation programme.

In Hitler’s first discussions of the KLV plan, it was stipulated that the

measure was to be accompanied by the dismissal of as much as 50 per

cent of German school-teaching staff.43 Thus, at a stroke, both parents

and teachers were effectively to be sidelined from the raising of

German children.

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197

As a result, many parents felt disquiet about the KLV programme.

When in the summer of 1943 the
Sicherheitsdienst
of the SS launched

an investigation to try to establish why only around 15 per cent of

Berlin’s eligible children were placed in KLV camps, the conclusions

were clear. Aside from the understandable desire to keep their chil-

dren close to them, parents were concerned by rumours of poor

treatment of the children, who were often placed in ‘hostile’ environ -

ments, and fears that medical care would be insufficient in the event

of illness or injury. Parents of girls, meanwhile, feared for the honour

of their daughters. The report presciently concluded that ‘no trust’

was expressed in the Hitler Youth, and suggested that it would be

advisable to allow the schools to have more involvement in the

KLV.44

This lack of trust was not aided by the fact that letters home could

be censored, a fact that many parents only appreciated when they

received letters from their children with blacked-out sections. One

particularly punctilious camp leader even wrote to the parents of the

children in her charge to try to explain the policy:

As you know, the children’s letters are subject to inspection. Do not

see any malicious intent in this, it is not an attempt to interfere in the

trusting relationship between parent and child. It should also not be

regarded, as one father has claimed in a complaint to the camp lead-

ership, as a consequence of raising our children in a culture of secrecy.

Rather we want to achieve the opposite. What is in the letters is, for

us, an official secret. We want to be open with the children. For this

reason, I said to the girls on the first day, that rumours and snap judge-

ments about the camp must cease, as such material could be exploited

by enemy propaganda.

. . .

So, please do not see my instruction to have outgoing post submitted

unsealed, as a form of censorship, but rather view it in an attitude

appropriate to the times and the conditions of war.45

Parents were not initially permitted to visit their children in the

KLV camps. As the information leaflet explained: ‘in view of the trans-

port difficulties resulting from the war, a visit by parents to the place

of accommodation cannot take place’.46 Yet, parental contact could

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berlin at war

not be excluded entirely, and, though it was strongly discouraged,

parents were eventually given the right to assuage their fears by

inspecting the camps themselves.

Kurt Radener’s father chose to visit his son’s camp in Elgersburg

in Thuringia, in February 1941, where young Kurt had already spent

over two months. He stayed for a number of days, inspecting every-

thing he could and spending as much time with his son as possible.

He reported back in a letter to his wife that the accommodation – a

large guest house – was adequate, though ‘awfully’ cold, with the

temperature in his own room barely reaching 4°C. Sixteen boys – all

of Kurt’s school class from Tempelhof – were living there in small

rooms under the eaves. Kurt’s room was simply furnished, with a

dresser, a dusty old wardrobe and a bed with grey covers. In the corner

was a heating duct, which gave off precious little warmth as the boilers

were only fired in the evenings. The children spent their mornings in

classes, and in the afternoons they were kept busy with ‘Hitler Youth

service’ and other activities. Kurt, his father noted, spent his free time

doing his homework or model-making. The food he found ‘modest’

but ‘palatable’, with lentil soup, roast mutton and goulash on the menu

during his visit. He concluded, on a most positive note:

My dear Klärchen

You really need not be upset about little Kurt. He is cheerful, chirpy,

has young, warm blood and really doesn’t understand your concerns.

. . . He smiles and is happy. He doesn’t look bad, though his face is

thin, but he is healthy and has not yet been il. . . .

The advantage of the evacuation lies in the comradely contact to

one another and the orderly discharge of one’s responsibilities. In this

regard, I am very pleased with the whole operation. And would there-

fore like for him to remain in the KLV camp.47

It is unlikely that young Kurt was terribly impressed by his father’s

arrival. Often, such visits could be the trigger for bullying, with the

victim immediately, and sometimes indelibly, labelled a mummy’s boy

or a weakling. Jost Hermand was initially delighted to see his mother,

who turned up at his camp in occupied Poland in the spring of 1941.

His joy did not last long:

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199

This invasion of our KLV world was very embarrassing for me because

it was immediately interpreted by the other boys as a sign of my depend-

ency and weakness. As a result, I fell back at least two rungs on the

ladder . . . After a few days, I managed to persuade her to leave so that

the other boys would stop making fun of me.48

Bullying was endemic in the KLV camps. As Jost Hermand remem-

bered, his dormitory had a firmly established pecking order, which

was maintained by brute force. Whatever the teachers knew of this,

he is certain that they would have done little to combat it. ‘As fascist

educators’, he recalled, they were ‘committed to the principles of

“toughening-up” and the selection of the fittest.’49 Sex, too, appears to

have played a role in the maintenance of the hierarchy in the dormitory.

Jost Hermand recalled that: ‘everybody knew exactly . . . which one of

the boys he had to satisfy manually at night and who had to satisfy him’.50

In most instances, sexual activity took on a more benign aspect. As

one KLV veteran put it, the camp was where he ‘made [him]self

acquainted with onanism’.51 Yet, beyond the confines of the dormitory,

the evacuation also served to facilitate what for many was the first

unsupervised contact with the opposite sex. For some, this sexual

awakening was the primary memory of their KLV experience, but it

was often not seen in a positive light. Jost Hermand was damning:

Without any mental or cultural stimulation, without the mediation of

a social identity, without instruction in the biological function of the

pleasurable physical sensations, we were allowed to regress into a prim-

itive physicality [in which] we were increasingly preoccupied with our

bodies:
Völkerball
, field exercises, washing, and the constant manipu la-

tion of our genitalia . . .

When we arrived at Lichtenberg station on 10 August, we were not

the same boys who – confused and curious – had left for the unknown

east nine months earlier. Some of the boys, especially those from the

‘good’ upper-middle-class families, were belatedly ashamed of the lasciv-

iousness unleashed in the camp, and they resolved from now on to live

more ascetic lives. Even the tougher boys had some guilt feelings.52

Yet, for many – perhaps the majority – the KLV was, on balance,

a positive experience, a healthy blast of independence, adventure and

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berlin at war

self-reliance. For Werner Lenz, who had grown up in a working-class

family in the inner-city district of Friedrichshain, it presented a tremen-

dous opportunity to take part in activities – skiing, hiking and hill

walking – that were previously unknown to him.53 Gerhard Ritter, too,

viewed the experience very positively. ‘Only a decade or so later’, he

recalled, ‘did I comprehend all the things that the KLV had given me

and had taught me: the power of a sense of community, toughening

up, self-confidence, one’s physical capabilities, stamina, an under-

standing of one’s fellow man and a love of nature.’54

For many of that generation, taking part in the KLV would not be

the only period that they would spend away from home. Many of them

would subsequently be sent on a number of other ‘actions’ – voluntary

and involuntary – ranging from helping with the harvest in the coun-