White Rose Black Forest(24)
The cancer spread.
Within weeks, Hitler had consolidated his power. The rights of free speech, press, and public assembly were abolished, and thus the German experiment with freedom and democracy ended. The German citizenry ceded absolute power to Hitler and his Nazis without so much as a whimper. The people didn’t seem to feel oppressed by the new regime. They had no great faith in a dysfunctional and poorly designed democratic system. Kids began to wear Nazi armbands to school, and the new greeting of extending one’s arm while saying “Heil Hitler” became a way of signaling loyalty to the party.
The enthusiasm for a leadership that promised to place Germany back on its pedestal as one of the great nations of the world was contagious. Franka felt it. Almost every young person she knew felt it. It seemed like the German people were on the brink of something momentous and incredible. The support for the new National Socialist system came from all sides. Franka even noticed in the paper that an organization called the Association of German National Jews had voiced their support for the new Nazi regime.
Franka saw the change almost immediately. A new ruling class was rising in cities and towns throughout Germany, and they were determined to make their presence known. Fortified by the party emblems in their buttonholes, the party-membership cards in their pockets, and the swastikas on their sleeves, the previously obscure and unnoticed group began to assert themselves. Josef Donitz, a local grocer, began wearing a storm trooper’s uniform to work. Within weeks he took over the local government without the formality or troubles of an election. The local fire chief, a lifetime friend of Franka’s father, was elbowed out of his job by a junior fireman who was a known alcoholic and just happened to be a member of the party. Employees with party credentials spoke sharply to management, who began to listen respectfully. On every level of social and political life, the National Socialist revolution manifested itself as a kind of seepage upward—the scum rising to the top.
Franka’s mother’s determination pushed her past the timelines that the doctors laid out for her. For Sarah, “six months to live” meant “I’ll see you next year to make you eat your words.” She wanted to spend her time outside, in the wondrous natural playground that seemed to stretch without boundary all around them. Franka’s father, Thomas, bought the cabin in the mountains from his uncle Hermann, who had used it as a hunting lodge on his expeditions to shoot red deer and boar. Franka and her mother took to refurbishing the cabin while Thomas worked on making it habitable in time for the warmer months. They spent most of that summer of 1933 up there, luxuriating in their time together. Franka grew to adore the sight of her family sitting outside the cabin as she returned with her friends from a hike in the mountains. On those warm summer nights when the sun set behind the cabin, bathing the sky and trees in orange and red, when the smell of food on the stove mixed with the smoke from her father’s pipe, it seemed like they’d found their own little piece of heaven. At the end of that glorious summer, when Sarah declared that she was going to see the same again the next year, Fredi wrapped loving arms around her. Franka and her father remained silent. Only Fredi seemed to believe it was possible, but time would prove him right.
School changed. The Nazis were determined to be the party of youth. Commanding and controlling the allegiances of Germany’s youth was a fundamental goal. The influence of the National Socialist revolution was evident when Franka returned to Freiburg after that summer. The Nazi flag was hoisted in every classroom, and suddenly portraits of Adolf Hitler, the demigod at the head of the nation, appeared in place of crucifixes on the walls. The visage of a man she wouldn’t have recognized a year before was now in every classroom. Books from the school library that were deemed subversive were taken out, piled high, and burned in the yard. Franka asked the librarian what they had taken and was told that the local party members had removed any books, fact or fiction, that expressed a liberal idea, or suggested that the people themselves, rather than the führer, should control their own destinies. New books on how the National Socialists had rescued Germany from the abyss of the Weimar Republic soon filled the gaps on the shelves. These new books were written in childish, simple language, but none of the teachers complained. They all became members of the National Socialist Teachers League. Eager to retain their jobs, and under pressure from the local government, they began championing the new ideas of the Nazis. Franka’s favorite teacher, Herr Stiegel, was one of the few to protest the new ways, insisting that his lessons remain the same as they had been before the new government came to power. He lasted two weeks, and when Franka and some of the other students went to visit him at his old house outside town, they found it empty. They never saw him again. Nina Hess boasted afterward that she had informed on him to one of the local Nazi leaders. She was rewarded with a red sash signifying her loyalty to the National Socialist regime, which she wore every day for the rest of the school year.
No one wanted to be left behind, and Franka found herself swept up in the tidal wave of enthusiasm for the new dawn of the Aryan people. The Nazis had started using that term, “Aryan,” to describe the characteristics of ideal Germans. Franka was undoubtedly one of the superrace they described. There was something gratifying in being told by the government that your blond hair and blue eyes were perfect, that they made you the ideal German. She didn’t know any other races, but the National Socialists insisted that she and her friends were blood born into a master race, and that they were superior to all others. It felt good. She felt part of something important.