The Auslander Page 7

  There was something about singing all together, out in the open, which made the boys feel euphoric. Peter had felt something similar in the times he had gone to church at Christmas with his parents. It was a bit like that, but with hundreds of voices rather than a few score in the congregation.

  The song over, a great hush descended on the thousand or so boys gathered on the sports field by Potsdamer Strasse. The grandstand beside the field was also packed with parents and relations.

  Today, the leader of the HJ, Reichs-jugend-führer Artur Axmann, was doing them the honour of making a speech at their induction ceremony.

  At one end of the field a large platform had been erected, and public-address speakers set up on spindly scaffolding. Surrounding the platform were long red and white banners, each embossed with a black swastika. Hitler-Jugend flags from all the Berlin troops hung limply alongside.

  ‘Troop, stand easy!’ came the grating, metallic command over the speakers. ‘The Reichs-jugend-führer will be among us shortly.’

  The boys were given permission to sit on the dry grass and talk among themselves. Peter was with Gerhart Segur. ‘Shame we couldn’t get Adi here,’ said Segur. The boys had nicknames for all the Nazi leaders. Their adult supervisors tolerated the practice as long as familiarity didn’t spill into disrespect. Adolf Hitler was said to have a particular affection for the youth of Germany, so it seemed right that the boys should call him ‘Adi’.

  Segur leaned closer and whispered, ‘Adi would be much better than Axi. He’s a dreary one, for sure.’

  Peter hushed him. Their squad leader Walter Hertz, a sharp-eyed boy of sixteen, might overhear. Segur could be indiscreet, and although Peter liked him, he sometimes wondered if his new friend would land him in trouble. Segur didn’t take the HJ too seriously, unlike a lot of these boys. But he’d stuck up for Peter when some of the others had tried to bully him. Not that he needed much help. At his second meeting Peter discovered a hidden talent for boxing, which had earned him immediate respect. Any boy who called him ‘Polack Pete’ got thumped.

  Another announcement brought the boys to their feet. ‘Atten-SHUN’ shouted a Nazi official on the podium. The trumpets blew another fanfare and the drums rolled.

  ‘Eyes RIGHT!’

  The boys turned their heads as one. Heralded by the deafening throb of powerful engines, an open-topped Opel Kapitän accompanied by eight motorcycle outriders drove into the stadium. There he was, Axmann himself, standing in the back of the car, right arm extended in the Nazi salute. A blue haze of exhaust fumes pervaded the arena, causing some of the boys to cough. The car and its entourage circled them on the running track that ran round the outer edge of the field and then drew up at the podium.

  ‘He’s a fat bastard,’ whispered Segur. Axmann was a little heavy around the middle and under his chin, it was true, but Peter thought he looked impressive enough in his Party uniform.

  ‘Silence in the ranks,’ shouted Hertz. There might be trouble later.

  Peter felt privileged to see Axmann. His photograph often appeared in the HJ magazine and newspapers. And he had seen him in newsreels, usually at similar events to this. It was a thrill to see one of Germany’s leaders in the flesh. Here was a man who had been in direct contact with the great Nazi chieftains – Himmler, Göring and Goebbels, even the Führer himself.

  Axmann approached the microphones set up on the rostrum and surveyed the crowd. Peter had seen Hitler do this in newsreels, building the tension before a speech.

  Eventually he spoke.

  ‘Heil Hitler!’

  The whole stadium roared back.

  ‘HEIL HITLER!’

  Silence fell. Then there was just a brief whistle of feedback from the loudspeakers.

  ‘Comrades!’ began Axmann. ‘I come to share great news with you!

  ‘Every one of you represents, for our Fatherland on the march, the symbol of our future. Remember that the earth is in a state of unceasing evolution. Biological and physiological transformations are taking place before our eyes . . .’

  He was losing his audience. Boys snatched puzzled looks at one another, as they tried to fathom these phrases, dimly remembered from half-understood Nazi ideology classes.

  ‘. . . These will influence generations to come. The German people are not prepared to yield to these mutations like the lower species, like unthinking beasts! On the contrary, we must master and direct this metamorphosis. We must attain that state of human perfection – the Superman!’

  He paused here, obviously expecting applause. The crowd sensed what was expected of them and obliged.

  ‘To achieve this great revolution we must engender a German race that is mentally and physically pure. The young are the future elite of our race. So you must preserve your bodies and your minds from degrading contacts.’

  ‘I’m all for degrading contacts,’ whispered Segur, ‘especially if they’re with our Polish maid!’

  Peter tried to keep a straight face. He wished Segur would stop being silly and shut up. He was trying to concentrate on Axmann’s speech. Segur was trying hard not to snigger.

  ‘Segur,’ whispered the squad leader, ‘control yourself.’

  ‘The duty of your teachers is to make you lords and rulers of tomorrow! In return we ask for your faithful submission to the discipline imposed upon you and that you obey the orders given you, whatever they may be! HEIL HITLER!’

  A roar of approval greeted the end of the speech. Who would not be seduced by such a prospect of wealth and power?

  Now, as they had been trained to do, the boys all stood with their right arms raised and chanted ‘SieG HEIL, SieG HEIL, SieG HEIL’, like a great wave of sound, always in groups of three, until Axmann gestured for them to stop.

  Now came the most important moment of the ceremony, the oath of allegiance.

  The loudspeakers boomed out.

  ‘I SWEAR THAT I WILL SERVE THE FÜHRER ADOLF HITLER FAITHFULLY . . .’

  The boys all chanted confidently along. They had practised this moment, each of them, in private and in their clubhouses and meeting halls. Peter felt his heart swell with pride.

  ‘I SWEAR THAT I WILL ALWAYS STRIVE FOR THE UNITY AND COMRADESHIP OF GERMAN YOUTH.

  ‘I SWEAR OBEDIENCE TO THE Hitler-Jugend LEADER AND TO ALL LEADERS OF THE Hitler-Jugend.

  ‘I SWEAR ON OUR HOLY FLAG THAT I WILL ALWAYS BE WORTHY OF IT, SO HELP ME GOD.’

  Now he was truly one of them. He belonged in this mighty throng. Peter felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. He had never felt anything like this in church.

  With the ceremony over, the boys dispersed. Hertz grabbed Peter by the arm. ‘Where is Segur?’ he said angrily. Peter shook his head. His friend had vanished, probably off to the stand to greet his parents. ‘What on earth was happening during the Reichs-jugend-führer’s speech?’

  Peter was annoyed with Segur, too, but he wasn’t going to betray his friend. So he looked the squad leader straight in the eye and with great seriousness said, ‘I am sorry, Hertz. I think Segur was overcome with emotion at this great moment in his life.’

  Hertz had been some distance from the boys. He would have to give Segur the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But you can tell your friend I am watching him. And you. If I have any cause to doubt your National Socialist spirit, I will be happy to report your failings to the Gestapo.’

  Peter was about to protest his own innocence, but Hertz had already disappeared into the milling crowd. Peter felt affronted, being challenged like this, but he wasn’t going to let it spoil the moment. Peter felt proud to be in the Hitler-Jugend. The uniform made him feel like a real soldier. A real grown-up. Now he was a full member he had even been given a ceremonial dagger. He felt the weight of it on his belt. The black textured handle with its swastika emblem balanced perfectly with the shiny steel blade. On the hilt was engraved in Gothic lettering Treve bis in den Tod – Faithful unto Death – and on the blade itself Blut und Ehr
e – Blood and Honour. And that blade was sharp.

  As he walked towards the stand to join the Kaltenbachs he hoped he would be able to live up to that ideal. They greeted him with affectionate hugs, even Frau Kaltenbach. ‘Peter, you look every inch the political soldier,’ she told him proudly. Traudl and Charlotte were desperate to see his new dagger, though their mother told them it was not to be taken from its sheath. Only Elsbeth was missing. She was working. Peter felt a twinge of disappointment.

  .

  CHAPTER 12

  November 1941

  .

  Almost every day, the Kaltenbachs would gather round the radio to listen to another special news bulletin. Each one was trailed an hour or two in advance, each one introduced with a grand orchestral fanfare. Each one told of further successes in the east, as three German armies penetrated further and further into Soviet Russia. First it had been Byelorussia and the Ukraine, the great cities of Odessa and Kiev, Smolensk and Novgorod. Then Kursk and Kharkov, and now, unbelievably, German soldiers encircled Leningrad and were almost at the gates of Moscow.

  Peter enjoyed seeing the elation and excitement on their faces. ‘Has there ever been a more electrifying time to be alive?’ said Professor Kaltenbach to them all. ‘The Führer said that we had merely to kick down the door,’ he mused, ‘and the whole rotten structure would come tumbling down. Well, he’s been right about everything else so far.’

  Traudl and Charlotte tittered with glee. Kaltenbach continued to pontificate. ‘If Moscow falls, that will be that. The rest of the Russian Untermenschen can just slink off behind the Urals. We’ll just have to build a great defensive wall to keep them out!’

  The excitement the boys in Peter’s HJ squad felt was contagious. Each one now saw himself as a medieval lord in waiting – a soldier-farmer with his own grand estate somewhere in the vastness of Ostland. Each one with an army of Slav serfs to do his bidding.

  It was funny, thought Peter, seeing these city boys fantasising about their country estates. He’d like to see them milk a cow or pluck a chicken. But he was seduced by this vision too. He imagined he’d make a far better farmer than all of the rest of them. And he would be decent to his farmhands too. He wouldn’t talk to them like dogs.

  Peter told his friends he had his own farm back in Poland. He’d be quite happy with that. ‘Why be a minnow when you can be a pike?’ said Fassbinder. ‘In Ostland you could own land that stretches from one end of the horizon to the other.’

  A dark-haired boy named Lothar Fleischer was listening in. ‘Bruck couldn’t look after a bratwurst stall,’ he said, ‘never mind an estate. You grow up among Polacks, you pick up their lazy ways.’

  Segur spoke up at once. ‘Peter is our racial comrade, Fleischer,’ he said. ‘No one else here doubts it.’

  Fleischer was defiant. He looked directly at Peter. ‘I don’t care what they say about you. You’re still an Ausländer.’

  Peter could feel the anger building inside him. Although the other boys rallied round him, Fleischer’s friend Mehler was cawing in agreement. A fight was brewing. Walter Hertz, the squad leader, intervened.

  ‘We shall have no more Ausländer talk, Fleischer. Peter Bruck is one of us. He is a doer and a helper. He doesn’t complain. I am proud to have him in my squad. If you’re going to fight, you can do it in the boxing ring.’

  The boys drifted off, some of them patting Peter on the back as they left. Peter could tell that Fleischer’s sense of his own superiority rankled with the other boys too. Maybe it was because his father was a senior SS officer over in the General Government – a Hauptsturmführer, Fleischer boasted, in the Race and Settlement Main Office. Peter recognised the name of the organisation at once. They were the ones who had taken him from the orphanage in Warsaw.

  .

  Peter had a more immediate ambition than running his own farm. Two weeks earlier his HJ squad had visited Tempelhof Airport and the boys had been taken on a brief two-man glider ride. What a thrill it was, to race along the ground at terrific speed before lifting off into the sky. Sitting behind the pilot, hanging on for dear life, Peter had never felt more alive.

  In his fantasies, he wanted to be a Luftwaffe pilot. Not the bombers; they dropped bombs on cities and innocent people. That wasn’t real fighting. He would pilot a sleek fighter plane, like the Focke-Wulf Fw 190. The ‘Butcher Bird’ they called it. He saw himself sweeping across the snowy Russian Steppe, coming in low to destroy a Soviet tank formation. There was something glamorous about being a fighter pilot. You spent your life in comfort, on airbases well away from the front line. You were given the most technologically advanced machines known to man, and you took to the skies like a great bird of prey.

  Professor Kaltenbach was delighted to hear that Peter wanted to be a pilot. ‘I can just see you, in your Luftwaffe uniform,’ he said. ‘Did you know our fighter pilots destroyed four thousand Soviet warplanes in the first week of the war? Four thousand of them!’

  Flying sounded like a splendid way to win the war. Much better than being an ordinary soldier tramping through the snow. And, it was well known, girls found pilots irresistible.

  That was what Segur told him, with a wink. Peter wasn’t terribly interested in girls, although he always pretended he was with Segur. They didn’t like getting their hands dirty trying to get a two-cylinder working, they didn’t like getting their knees dirty scrambling round an HJ assault course. Girls didn’t like fighting, especially not boxing, which they did every week in the HJ. Imagine a girl doing that. Him and Segur, they had this little joke, whenever they trained together in the ring. If the boxing instructor was elsewhere, they would pretend to be girls, and bat away at each other’s gloves, screeching timidly, their heads turned away from each other, faces screwed up in mock displeasure.

  They were both proud to be in the Hitler-Jugend. And they were thrilled by every German victory. But Segur wasn’t one of those nutcases who seemed to think the greatest thing they could hope to do was die for the Führer. He wanted to be alive when the war ended. So did Peter. When the other boys complained about being too young to fight, Peter and Segur pretended to agree with them. But when they walked home together, Segur would have that impish look on his face and say, ‘The sooner the war’s over the better. If we have to fight, then we have to fight. I’m happy about that. But if we don’t . . .’ He shook his fist triumphantly.

  Peter asked him which of the armed services he would join. ‘I’m staying well clear of the SS, not that they would have me anyway,’ joked Segur.

  Segur’s brother Kurt was fighting in Russia with the Wehrmacht – the German army. ‘My brother says that the front line SS divisions, they get all the worst fighting to do.

  ‘They are the best,’ he went on. ‘I wouldn’t like to face them! But they get the toughest jobs and they also have the most casualties. It’s the same with all the elite fighting forces.

  ‘On top of that, imagine spending your whole life with a bunch of Jew-haters. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t stick up for the Yids, but I get bored hearing about them.’

  Peter knew he ought to report Segur for even thinking such things, let alone saying them. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. The Nazis always talked of loyalty – but Peter thought you ought to have loyalty to your friends and family as well as the Party and the German nation. He felt strongly about that, though he knew it was something to keep to himself.

  In school, and at the HJ meetings, their teachers and instructors often reminded them it was their duty to report anyone – even their parents – if they did not show the correct National Socialist spirit. At school, Ulrich, one of the boys in his class, had immediately raised his hand and said that his father had told the family that Jews were not bad people and that the Nazis were foolish to persecute them.

  The teacher had thanked him for the information and instructed the class to applaud his public-spirited action. Ulrich looked quite pleased with himself. But three days later he came to school looking
pale and sick. He did not tell anyone what had happened, but it was whispered that his father had been dragged from his home to the Gestapo headquarters in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and returned the following morning covered with bruises. Some of the boys said it served him right and the man was lucky not to have been packed off to Sachsenhausen. But most said nothing. There were no more classroom denunciations after that. Instead, the teachers told their pupils to report such disloyalty privately.

  Peter had heard of Sachsenhausen. It was an open secret in Berlin. The nearest concentration camp to the capital, it was frequently branded as a threat to parents who complained to the authorities about the amount of time their children had to spend on HJ duties.

  .

  Peter told Segur he wanted to join the Luftwaffe. ‘All the glamour, none of the pain,’ he laughed.

  ‘Unless you get shot down,’ said Segur.

  ‘There’s always a parachute,’ said Peter.

  ‘Kurt tells me the Ivans shoot our pilots in midair, as they float down,’ said Segur.

  ‘We’ll just have to not get shot down then,’ said Peter. He was determined not to be put off the idea. Segur was warming to it too.

  ‘How’s your navigation?’ said his friend. ‘Pilots need to be good at calculations and know all about fuel ratios and bomb loads.’

  ‘I’m not so clever with numbers,’ said Peter.

  ‘Ah, but all you need is to be good with a slide rule.’

  Peter’s dad had tried to teach him how to work a slide rule, shortly before he died.

  So each night the following week, Segur and Peter met in the library after school and poured over the mathematics textbooks. One evening Segur read out a question at random:

  A Stuka on take-off carries twelve dozen bombs, each weighing 10 kilos. The aircraft heads for Warsaw, the centre of International Jewry. It bombs the town. On take off, with all bombs on board and a fuel tank containing 1,500 kilos of fuel, the aircraft weighs eight tonnes. When it returns from the crusade there are still 230 kilos of fuel left. What is the weight of the aircraft when empty?