Nazis III

       I was about sixteen years old when I met the three Degckwitz brothers whose father was the most prominent pediatritian in Hamburg as well as a professor at the University. My mother had taken my sister for an examination and came home glowing with excitement: She had had such an interesting  conversation with the professor, all about politics.

      It turned out, he was a flaming Anti-Nazi. So, when I was invited to a meeting at their house I felt very grown-up since I was probably the youngest person there. Rudolph, the oldest Degckwitz, was actually already studying medicine. His brother, Peter, had been as a soldier in Poland but for some reason was out of uniform and the youngest, Richard was still in school working toward his Abitur.

        We sat around talking about how we, in our small, limited ways, defied the Nazis. Father D.,for example, would openly, before a lecture, wave dismissively toward the lecture hall, filled with students who had risen to raise their arms in the Hitler salute. “We won’t bother with this today!” he would say.  This kind of action put him on the black list of the authorities and they subjected him periodically to house-searches. Luckily, somebody on the staff at the university would always warn him in time so that he had time to buy some cheap Hitler photos which he then hung around the house. I remember the boys laughing at the stupidity of the searchers. “If they had only checked our garbage cans the next day. We never kept the photos and always dumped them as soon as the air was clear. I have no recollection how often I went to a meeting but one way or the other I was friends with all three sons. When I went to Munich the next summer I saw Rudolph, the oldest, quite a bit.

          We had long walks along the Isar river , talking about the state of the world. Rudolph told me how he, every time he got a draft notice, would go skiing and dislodge an arm out of its socket, thus rendering him incapable for service in the army. Two years later, in l944 , when I was studying in Breslau, now Wroslov, I received word that Rudolph and another friend from Hamburg had been incarcerated for having  distributed Anti-Nazi leaflets at the university in Munich. Both survived  incarceration.

         Richard, the youngest, was drafted into the army after his final exam at school. When  pressure was put on him that he should take an officer’s training course, because educated men were needed, he wrote to his father for advice. Since mail was inspected the Nazis used this exchange as an excuse to put the father into a concentration camp. But I have been  told that he was treated with kid-gloves since he was such a prominent physician.

         I often detect a condescending tone, here as well as in Germany, when the absence of dissent is mentioned. "After all, Dachau was just a suburb of Munich,” I have heard mention more then once. “Just a short subway-ride from downtown.” Maybe that is true today but it certainly was not the case in 1942 when I decided to take a look. At that time all I knew was that pastor Bonhoeffer, the known Anti-Nazi minister, was incarcerated in Dachau. I had a very pleasant ride on a train pulled by a steam-engine which deposited me in what I took for the center of Dachau. No sign of a concentration camp, nobody around other than a lone police man who looked at me with suspicion. Somehow I felt very uncomfortable and out of place. Without speaking to anyone I took the next train home.

       I have since asked my cousin, who lives in that area and knew Dachau since she was a child. It was a sleepy artists colony and quite separate from the concentration camp. No, one did not freely and openly step up to any person and ask direction to a concentration camp. Had I been a relative wanting to visit a prisoner I would have looked humble and maybe even afraid. In other words, I would have been suspected of something and probably subjected to quite unpleasant grilling and landed on one of their lists.

       Had I wished to be a heroine and immolate myself on a public square it might never have reached the public at large the way we are used to seeing  nowadays. Since I didn’t have access to a radio I have no idea what was reported other then victories from the front. I am not trying to deny any of the atrocities perpetrated under the Nazis but am just trying to show how different times were then.