Page 52 of Hell to Pay
“No, see, I get that,” Ashleigh said eagerly. “Your dad was great, obviously. He justlookedlike a beast. The Beast in the movie is a good guy, too. That’s thepoint.And viewers really,reallywant to know about the tiara, so we have to keep giving them something to watch when they come to check where we are in the search, you see? We have to make them care about you and hope everybody got away safely and everything. Tension isreallyimportant. I do an update at the beginning ofeach bite, and a teaser at the end. It’s so good.” She sighed happily. “I’ve decided I want to be a documentary filmmaker. Seriously. Why not?”
“Why not indeed,” I said. “You certainly have a passion for storytelling.” She looked pleased, but it was no more than the truth. Anybody that excited about her work had surely found her vocation.
“That’ll be cool, to get paid.” Ben looked excited himself, though he was, as usual, eating, so it was hard to tell. “Thanks.”
“Each for each is what we teach,” Ashleigh said. “Usually I just say that when I want something, but now I kinda mean it, because this is all seriously awesome.” She had her bouncing-squirrel face again. I do seem to be surrounded by young people with boundless energy. It’s rather infectious. Now, she asked me, “What was the German Resistance called?”
“I don’t know,” I said, taken aback. “I’m not sure there was anything organized enough to be called that.”
“There weren’t any guerrillas?” Alix asked.
“Yes,” I said, “but they were all on the Nazi side, as far as I know, fighting behind the lines as the Allies advanced at the end of the war. The Werwolves, they were called. Very fanatical.”
“Ooh,” Ashleigh said. “OK, I’m filming now. Say that part again, Mrs. Stark, about the werewolves. Oh, and ask the question again, too, Alix. Please.”
We did, feeling a little foolish, and Ashleigh dutifully recorded it. Ben asked, “People didn’t eventryto fight back? Really? They didn’t, like, blow up trains or anything?”
“Not in Germany,” I said. “You must understand how deeply into society the Nazi party had burrowed, and how thoroughly and methodically the state crushed any resistance. How many men will resist if it means the death of their wives, their children, their parents?”
“Not many,” Sebastian said.
“So it has always been with tyrants,” I said. “There were a few braver souls, though. There are always a few. In the Warsaw Ghetto, the last remaining Jews fought back for nearly a month. From bunkers they built with their bare hands, from the sewers, from wherever they could hide and with whatever weapons they could find. They were defeated, they were killed, but they were going to be killed anyway and they knew it. You can see why one wouldn’t want to go meekly to one’s death.”
“Yes,” Sebastian said. “You can definitely see that. I’d sure want to take some of them with me.”
“The propaganda on the radio was quite amusing, actually,” I said. “Goebbels seemed personally affronted that they were so rude and disobedient as not to line up for slaughter. My father couldn’t quite keep his thoughts to himself on that one, although of course he only shared them in private, with my mother and me. There was the White Rose group, too, who were Aryan and could have kept their heads down and their eyes closed to the worst as everybody else did. They were distributing anti-Nazi leaflets at Munich University around the same time as the Warsaw uprising, in February 1943. That was just after the German army was defeated by the Red Army at Stalingrad and lost over a hundred thousand men in the process. Stalin was profligate with his troops, but Hitler, who didn’t have nearly as many to waste, was more so, and I suspect that had become evident to more than just my parents, though who can say? Certainly nobody said so. The British and Americans had begun to bomb the cities by then, though, and the German population was finding that war isn’t nearly as much fun as it had seemed at first, when it was all parades and flowers and the bad things were happening only to others. More fertile ground for opposition, perhaps, though it was little enough.”
“That’s it?” Ben asked. “One group distributing leaflets? That’s pretty lame.”
“That’s the only one I know of,” I said. “And it was a very small group, a few students only. They did their work secretly, of course, merely leaving the leaflets out for their fellow students to find. Their activities lasted—oh, weeks, probably, before they were informed upon by a university custodian. As I’ve told you, anyone could be an informant or a plant.Anyone.From ambition or out of genuine belief, whatever the reason. Four days after the custodian gave them up to the Gestapo, they faced their trial, which was of course a foregone conclusion, and that same day, the three leaders—a young brother and sister and their friend—were executed by guillotine, having refused to give up the names of any of their compatriots. And so ended the White Rose. They were very brave, very strong. Even the prison guards admired them, or so the story goes, but that probably doesn’t mean much when one is about to lose one’s head.”
“There was that other plot, though,” Ben said. “The one your father was involved in.”
“Yes,” I said, “and see how that ended. By the time we’re speaking of, in the spring of 1945, most people were just putting one foot in front of the other, focused on surviving, aware that the end must be coming and that Germany would lose, but afraid to say so for fear of execution as a defeatist. No, the time to resist had passed long before the war began.”
“So why didn’t they speak up then?” Ashleigh asked.
“For the same reasons,” I said. “Not fear of death so much at that point, but loss of one’s position or one’s property, even possible imprisonment, is a strong motivator. And it didn’t seem so bad at the beginning, in the early 1930s. Hitler put people back to work in the depths of the Great Depression, when a quarter of German men were unemployed. They had food and work again, and were even sent on little holidayspaid for by the state. Cruises, ski trips … ‘Strength Through Joy,’ it was called. It’s easier to abolish trade unions when workers think they don’t need them. Oh, Hitler and Goebbels were very clever. Life was getting better; what did it matter that some old Jewish professor wasn’t allowed to teach anymore? All the newspapers, the radio said that life was grand, that Germany was strong and becoming stronger, that it was the best time in history to be German, here at the start of the thousand-year Reich.”
“Still,” Alix said. “They should have seen where it was going.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “But they didn’t. You’ve probably heard the name of Martin Niemöller, or at least heard of his poem.”
“Oh, boy,” Ben said. “More poetry.” He sighed.
I smiled, but continued. If Ashleigh was bent on recording me, I was going to say what I wanted to say. “Niemöller was a Lutheran minister, a conservative and originally a supporter of Hitler, and an anti-Semite as well, though he protected the Christians of Jewish descent within his own church. As I’ve said, people are complicated. He’d even served in the Imperial Navy during the First World War, but for all that, he spoke out when Hitler Nazified the Protestant church.”
“Nazified,” Ben said. “What’s that even mean? Like, you had to say ‘Heil Hitler’ in church and do the salute instead of kneeling, or what? Not that I know very much about church.”
“For one thing,” I said, “the regime restricted membership in any German church to people of the Aryan race only.”
“Did a whole lot of Jews want to go to a Lutheran church, then?” Alix asked.
“Some did, yes,” I said. “Many German Jews considered themselves more German than Jewish, not going to the synagogue or following the dietary laws. Dr. Becker was one of those—he ate bacon, as we all did. Of course, if he hadn’t, he’d have starved. That’s part of the tragedy, though—theycouldn’t believe the new rules would apply to them, with their former military service and lack of Jewish practice. And it wasn’t just Jews. It was those of Polish, Serbian, Russian descent too—anyone who could be called a Slav.”
“Wait,” Ben said. “Russian people weren’t white? Huh?”
“Hitler had a very narrow definition,” I said. “Do you know which nation lost the greatest portion of its people in the war?"
