Berlin 1936 Read online

  EXCERPT FROM THE DAILY INSTRUCTIONS OF THE REICH PRESS CONFERENCE: “We urgently warn against burdening reports on the Olympic Games with racial perspectives.”

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  The Goebbelses have put their marital crisis behind them. Not for the first time, Adolf Hitler is the one who has mediated between them. “Afterward a long time with the Führer,” Goebbels writes in his diary. “He praises Magda a lot. He finds her enchanting, thinks she’s the best woman I could find anywhere.” Hitler’s concern is entirely selfish. He himself is a source of tension between the couple. The Goebbelses have a complicated triangular relationship with the Führer, in which private and public affairs are closely intermingled. When Hitler met Magda Goebbels in 1931, he seems to have fallen in love with her. After she married his paladin Goebbels, he was disappointed, which made the future propaganda minister fear for his future. “Poor Hitler!” he wrote in his diary. “I’m almost ashamed that I’m so happy. Hopefully, it won’t cloud our friendship.” But the very next day, Goebbels has been reassured: “He loves Magda. But he’s happy for me.” Goebbels concluded his diary entry with a telling sentence: “All three of us will be good to one another.” An arrangement is agreed. Hitler gives his blessing to Joseph and Magda’s marriage, and Goebbels allows his wife to have a platonic relationship with Hitler, which in turn brings the two men closer together. At the same time, Magda Goebbels slips into the role of the First Lady of the Third Reich. She offers Hitler advice and spends significant time alone with him. Goebbels, for his part, is completely dependent on Hitler. The Führer is not only the “boss,” as Goebbels calls him in his diaries, but the secret head of the family. Goebbels seems to realize this but idealizes his relationship to Hitler to the point of kitsch. “He is very charming with me,” Goebbels gushes on one occasion. “If I speak with him alone, he talks to me like a father. That’s the way I like him best.”

  The Lüdecke affair is now dead and buried. The first week of the Olympic Games is nearing its conclusion, and this evening Goebbels will be in the spotlight at a ceremonial reception at the State Opera. The propaganda minister is very satisfied with himself. Everything seems to have returned to normal. Nonetheless, in a few days, Joseph Goebbels will meet a woman who will completely derail his and Magda’s lives.

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  “Short sentences express more than long ones, and complex sentences are alien to the German language,” declares Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick in the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger newspaper. “Especially today, when a word is once more a word, a command is a command, and countless facts of our modern life have to be communicated and understood quickly, concisely and unambiguously, our language must be particularly transparent.” Frick was awarded his doctorate in law from Heidelberg University in 1901. Back then, a doctoral thesis wasn’t necessary to obtain the title.

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  There’s not a day of the Olympics that doesn’t feature a distinguished reception, a fashionable party or some other social event. Every representative of the Third Reich who’s anyone is hosting their own festivities during the Games. Frick invites guests to the Pergamon Museum, and Sports Leader Tschammer und Osten uses his official villa as a venue. Hitler is staging a number of receptions in the Chancellery, and Foreign Minister von Neurath is opening the doors of Charlottenburg Palace, while Berlin’s police president, Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorff, uses the Prussian parliament building. The coming days will feature private receptions hosted by Göring, Ribbentrop and Goebbels, but tonight everyone is heading to the State Opera, where the Reich government and the government of Prussia are holding an official function.

  In the building, preparations for the event have been going on for weeks. A purpose-built, free-standing staircase now connects the vestibule with the stalls, and this has required parts of the opera house’s first and second balconies to be dismantled. Historical conservation standards are simply ignored. The loggias and boudoirs have been covered in cream-colored silk. The seating area for the audience has been raised and converted, along with the stage, into a huge banquet- and ballroom. Servants dressed in red tailcoats, knee breeches and powdered wigs are everywhere holding torches affixed to long staffs. “Foreigners are spoiled, indulged, flattered and fooled,” the journalist Bella Fromm writes in her diary. “The propaganda machinery is trying to give visitors a positive impression of the Third Reich using the Olympics as camouflage.” It’s a classic case of bread and circuses.

  Göring, in his capacity as Prussian state premier, and Goebbels, representing the Reich government, greet the waves of people arriving, which include almost the entire diplomatic corps, representatives of the Nazi Party and government, and members of the German and International Olympic Committees as well as numerous artists and guests of honor. To avoid fighting over territory, the two hosts have claimed two impressive loggias directly across from one another, where they hold court with their respective entourages. The actress Jenny Jugo can be seen at Goebbels’s side, while her colleague Carola Höhn rubs shoulders with Göring. The actor Gustav Gründgens and the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler are clever enough to visit both loggias.

  The evening begins with music. After a fanfare march, played by the band of Hitler’s house guard “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler,” the Berlin Philharmonic plays—what else?—the prelude to Wagner’s Meistersinger. “Göring and I spoke,” writes Goebbels in his diary. “Three minutes each. I was in top form. Every sentence hit its mark.” Indeed, Goebbels’s short address is a masterpiece of demagoguery and manipulation. It isn’t easy for him to open his heart to foreign guests, Goebbels purrs, because a lot of people outside Germany treat whatever he says as propaganda. And yet propaganda is the furthest thing from his mind this evening. Germany, he says, has invited its guests to a “festival of joy and peace.” Goebbels adds: “My impression is that this festival is perhaps more important than many of the conferences that were held in the postwar period…We want to get to know and appreciate one another and build a bridge with which to unite the peoples of Europe.” Adolf Hitler’s Germany as a motor for peace in Europe? Goebbels is all aglow with his own verbal gymnastics, but he reveals his true intention in his diary that day: “It was a major feat of propaganda.”

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  And Hitler himself? The Reich chancellor doesn’t attend the reception hosted by his government. Like everything else during the Olympics, his absence too is calculated: it is supposed to reinforce the image of the Führer who labors tirelessly and the faithful patriarch who doesn’t care for leisure-time amusements and social events. Hitler’s popularity reaches its zenith in the summer of 1936, penetrating deep even into the working classes. Willy Brandt, later chancellor of West Germany, who has traveled in secret from his Norwegian exile to Berlin, asks: “Why can’t we admit that even people who used to vote left are impressed?”

  In terms of foreign policy, up to the summer of 1936 Hitler’s regime has been characterized by risk, political provocation and blackmail. In mid-October 1933, Germany announced it was quitting the League of Nations and the Geneva Convention, signaling the start of a massive rearmament initiative. Less than two years later, in mid-March 1935, Hitler introduced universal conscription, violating one of the most important provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. Instead of the agreed-upon 10,000 men, the reconstituted Wehrmacht will have a strength of 550,000 soldiers. In March 1936, Hitler achieved his greatest coup to date as he sent troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, calling this violation of international agreement a “restoration of the national honor and sovereignty of the Reich.” The treaties of Versailles and Locarno both forbade Germany from stationing troops in the Rhineland, which was conceived as a buffer zone with France. According to the agreements, a German violation of this provision would be regarded as a hostile act and a disruption of world peace. In other words, the German government has given the rest of Europe a casus belli.

  Hitler wagered
everything on a single card in the spring of 1936, and he was correspondingly nervous. “The 48 hours after the troops marched into the Rhineland were the tensest time in my life,” he will admit years later. How would Paris react? Would the result be war? Hitler later says: “If the French had pushed forward into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs. The military forces at our disposal would not have sufficed to put up even moderate resistance.” But nothing happened. London and Paris exchanged notes of protest—and that was the end of it. Hitler has exposed the indecision of the Western European powers. He has humiliated them, leading them around by the nose in the political arena. A few weeks later, at the Berlin Olympics, he’s putting forward what is presumably his best face. Following up provocations and broken promises with gestures of reserve and reliability was typical of the early years of the Nazi dictatorship. Thus the sporting festival in Berlin is the icing on the cake of the violation of international law in the Rhineland.

  The Olympics are the high point of Hitler’s massive hypocrisy. Despite the crass contempt he has displayed for agreements in the preceding months, he’s able to assume the mantle of the peace-loving statesman. But the dictator puts down his true intentions in a memorandum sometime in August 1936. We don’t know precisely when it was composed, but it’s possible that Hitler is formulating his monstrous plans at the same time as Goebbels is pompously invoking peace between nations in the State Opera. In any case, Hitler already sees war with the Soviet Union as inevitable. Germany, he believes, is “overpopulated” and needs “living space.” The top-secret memorandum concludes with some ominous words: “I hereby define the following tasks: (1) The German army must be ready for deployment within four years. (2) The German economy must be capable of war within four years.” In three years, the Second World War will begin.

  DAILY REPORT OF THE STATE POLICE OFFICE, BERLIN: “At 10:10 p.m. a Communist Party propaganda flyer measuring 3 × 8 centimeters was discovered stuck to the telephone booth on the corner of Kantstrasse and Wielandstrasse in the Charlottenburg district. In addition, an Olympic telephone directory was torn off. Flyer removed. No culprit located.”

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  That evening Thomas Wolfe, Heinz Ledig and his girlfriend are still in Potsdam. They’ve left Sanssouci Palace and have settled down in a rustic restaurant. The three of them are devouring a platter of hearty sausage specialities, drinking beer and laughing. Wolfe’s mood has apparently improved. “Still,” Ledig will recall, “on the way back to the train station he stopped in front of shop windows and the reflective surfaces of advertisements for minutes at a time. Pensive and irritated, his neck comically stretched, he compared his powerful, handsome head with the ‘Sweinsgesicht’ with which the lady illustrator had contradicted his mother’s opinion.”

  EXCERPT FROM THE BERLINER LOKAL-ANZEIGER: “Olympics spectator from Denmark, in her thirties, widow, medium build, fashionable, domestic, nice home, seeks to marry a well-situated cosmopolitan man of similar age who lives in Berlin. Serious, personal answers only.”

  The publisher Ernst Rowohlt loves hearty German food. “Suddenly beads of sweat appeared on his forehead of the sort he would get after consuming several plates of pork belly with carrots.” Credit 7

  Friday, 7 August 1936

  REICH WEATHER SERVICE FORECAST FOR BERLIN: High pressure, mostly sunny, with temperatures rising throughout the day, slight winds, dry. Highs of 23°C.

  There’s chaos in the offices of the Rowohlt publishing house at Eislebener Strasse 7. Since early morning, boxes are being packed, moved around and stored. Piles of books covering almost every square foot of office space, which takes up a whole floor of the pre–First World War building, have been pushed to one side or fashioned into makeshift seats. Even the desks, where editors read manuscripts or correct page proofs, are being requisitioned for different uses. Ernst Rowohlt is visibly nervous. He paces throughout the various offices, searching desperately for some important papers he’s unable to find in all the confusion and repeatedly barking: “Ledig, you lazybones, on the fifteenth it’s the first of the month!” Heinz Ledig and the other Rowohlt employees know their boss and don’t take his moods too seriously. At some point Rowohlt murmurs that this will all be the death of him. Then he leaves to have lunch. In the meantime, his secretaries Fräulein Seibert and Fräulein Ploschitzky, the editors, the apprentice and Ledig get things straightened out.

  Rowohlt isn’t moving house. All the activity is in preparation for an event that is as regular as the weather, and just as disruptive: the “authors’ evening” Rowohlt hosts every three months. The events are little more than boozed-up parties, although Rowohlt prefers the term “authors’ evening” because that sounds more important. Plates, glasses and silverware are now piled up where, a few hours ago, manuscripts were being polished. A giant barrel of beer is at the ready in one corner, and cases of wine are stacked in another. Rowohlt orders the food from the Schlichter restaurant on nearby Augsburger Strasse. If the publisher had his way, pork belly with carrots or broad beans with bacon would be on the menu, but the boss takes pity on his guests’ more delicate palates and has ordered lighter fare: salad, vegetables, ham and roast beef. But before Schlichter arrives and begins to arrange his many bowls and platters into a sumptuous buffet, Ledig and the others have to finish making space. The race is on.

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  “Sven Hedin visits a Labor Service camp,” reads the headline in the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger. The accompanying article contains hardly any information beyond that, but Joseph Goebbels is prepared to exploit the famous Swedish explorer’s visit to Germany any way he can. In the small town of Werder near Potsdam, the Reich Labor Service has set up a work camp, Elisabethhöhe, for young women. The girls who live there, or “labor maidens,” as the Nazis call them, work in gardens and fields, feed livestock and look after children. “Voluntary service for the German people” is what the Nazis call it. It’s impossible to tell from the articles what Hedin and the girls discussed. In any case, the naively idealistic intellectual fits the role of the “useful idiot” to perfection. “It was a pleasure I won’t forget to see and meet the girls in Elisabethhöhe,” the Swedish scientist writes in the guest book. “Long live the maidens of Germany!”

  Around 35 miles from Werder is the small city of Oranienburg. There, the authorities are building a camp that won’t under any circumstances be shown to international guests like Hedin. There are no visitors and no guest books here. Since mid-July, prisoners from the Esterwegen concentration camp in western Germany have been clearing an expanse of forest between Oranienburg and the neighboring community of Sachsenhausen. Using primitive tools, the prisoners are felling massive trees and digging up their roots. They are also being forced to build roads, barracks and watchtowers and erect barbed-wire fences. In the coming weeks, a monstrous facility will sprout from the ground. Over the coming years, more than 200,000 people will be interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp that is being built in the summer of 1936.

  From the very beginning, conditions there are inhumane. “At night prisoners weren’t allowed to leave their barracks,” one early prisoner will recall. “And because there was no latrine in the barracks, in one of the small empty rooms in between the building’s two halves there were tubs from marmalade, margarine and things like that, which were often overflowing by the morning. These had to be carried more than 100 yards to the next latrine trench—a disgusting job no one did voluntarily.” There’s no direct water supply to the camp in August 1936, so water has to be brought in barrels from nearby Oranienburg. The helpless prisoners are subjected to their SS guards’ every whim. Abuse and torture are everyday occurrences. For the most minor of infractions, prisoners have to stand at attention for hours, exposed to the elements. They’re beaten with sticks and hung from hooks with their hands bound behind their backs. A fair number of them collapse physically from the hard labor and their terror of the SS. All o
f this is taking place 5 miles away from the city limits of Berlin—a 40-minute local train ride from the city center.

  It’s tempting to blame the blanket of National Socialist propaganda during the Olympic Games for the fact that Germany can build a concentration camp without attracting any international outrage and protest. But Hedin and countless other visitors from abroad could easily get a more realistic picture of Adolf Hitler’s Germany in the summer of 1936. The free German press in exile, for instance, runs extensive reports about despotism and injustice in the Nazi state. In July, the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Workers Illustrated Newspaper), published in Prague, smuggled into Germany a 16-page pamphlet with the seemingly harmless title “Get to Know Beautiful Germany: An Indispensable Guide for Every Visitor to the Olympic Games in Berlin.” The cover featured an idyllic German landscape, but inside a map pinpointed almost all of the then-existing concentration camps, penal facilities and court prisons. “SA torture chambers have not been included,” a footnote read. “They are too many in number.”

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  “That’s Cádiz,” says the captain of the Usaramo, pointing straight ahead. On the ship’s bridge, Hannes Trautloft stares out at the coastline before him. The sun dances over the surface of the water, blinding him, so that he has to squint to make out anything at all. In the distance, he sees countless white houses, with an eighteenth-century cathedral rising from their midst. So that’s Cádiz, Trautloft murmurs, the gateway to Africa. After a full week at sea, he, Max von Hoyos and the other members of the Travel Club Union will shortly begin their Spanish mission. The rest of the passengers have disembarked, and the crew is beginning to unload the hold. Trautloft watches as a crane lifts one crate after another from the belly of the Usaramo and deposits them on the quay. Suddenly, one big piece of cargo comes loose and plummets 30 feet to the harbor cobblestones below. When it breaks open, it reveals a gigantic, 550-pound aerial bomb. The deadly device lies there in the Spanish midday sun as if being presented on a plate. It’s lucky that the bomb didn’t explode and cause a massacre in the crowded harbor. “After this little incident, we sat by the radio and listened to the results from the Olympic Games in Berlin,” Trautloft will remember.