Life Lessons
From my Life in the Hitler Youth to Jerusalem
The German Emperor started the First World War – called “The War to end all Wars” – in 1914. It lasted four years and resulted in an unprecedented slaughter and cost 38 Million casualties. It ended, leaving Germany bled out, bankrupt, wracked by severe famine, unprecedented unemployment and an inflation rate which raised the value of $1 from 4 Marks to a trillion Marks. The resulting poverty wiped out life savings and pensions and caused a situation which – in the long run - made the emergence of National Socialism possible.
The war in Germany ended with a revolution, and slowly the democratic Weimar Republic was formed. Jews were finally equal, not only in theory but in practice. Many German Jews figured prominently in Banking, Manufacturing and Publishing, as well as in the federal and regional governments. They ran the affairs of state at the highest positions of authority as elected prime ministers of Prussia, Saxony and Bavaria.
Their success, however, raised concerns. So did the fact that impoverished Jews from occupied Poland and Russia streamed en masse into Germany, forming clusters of “strangers” on the edges of larger cities.
Under the surface, “rage was boiling deep within the people” (Amos Elon). An increasing number of Non-Jews felt threatened, forgotten, overrun, and estranged in their own country. Incredible wealth was created at the top, while the average person struggled in poverty.
During this time a man came into power by promising to “Make Germany great again!”. He was not even a German citizen – he was Austrian, and certainly not Aryan. Yet he promised to end unemployment, help German widows and orphans, provide healthcare, stop immigration, and help his fellow Germans to new prosperity, social and financial standing, and pride.
Does that remind you of someone?
And do Hitler’s followers remind you of the white supremacists in Charlottesville protesting the browning of America?
When Hitler came to power, he claimed to offer all kinds of good things for Germany’s benefit - but there were no democratic institutions, no checks and balances, to keep him in line. Germany had had no prior experience with democracy, so Germans only knew how to be “good subjects”, not good citizens.
Furthermore, the mindset of Jews tended to be internationalist, global, and many at the time were Socialists and Communists. Adolf Hitler, in comparison, focused on the nation. “Germany First!” was the slogan - "Deutschland Ueber Alles!"
There were many parties, but the two most important ones were 1. the left-wing Communist party, oriented towards Moscow, internationally minded, and 2. the right-wing National Socialist Party, anchored in and focused on a national Germany.
Adolf Hitler, representing the National Socialist Party, was elected by the majority of the population, not because they necessarily wanted him, but because they wanted the Communists even less.
Hitler came to power in March of 1933. Soon after the election he suspended the Reichstag and all basic civil rights. From then on there was only one newspaper and one radio station - both in Nazi hands. The right to free speech was abolished, there was no right to assembly, and it was no longer possible to be considered innocent until proven guilty.
As a small child I saw lots of marching, heard lots of "Heil Hitler", saw Hitler’s picture and nazi flags everywhere. I was told later that one small word, a half-hearted joke, any articulated thought, could be reported - and you would find yourself in the concentration camp yourself. The Nazis had something called “Sippenhaft”: “incarceration of the entire clan”. If the head of the house said something against the regime, his entire clan (parents, siblings, spouse, children) would be punished with prison.
In school we simply believed what was crammed into us, and there was no right to question. We greeted the teacher in the morning by standing up and raising our right arm, saying “Heil Hitler”. We were also taught to chant in unison “I am nothing – my people is everything” and “Fuehrer command us – we will follow you!”.
We had to say that every single day, multiple times. The idea was to drill obedience, pride, and conformity into the youth.
My indoctrination continued. As a result, by the time I was 6-7-8 years old, I had been exposed to and had integrated the most extreme Nazi views. If you had asked me back then, I would have cheerfully stated that there are “people who deserve to live and others who are better off dead”; that there should be “no compassion for sub-humans”; and that the “safety and security of the German nation justified extreme measures”.
I, who had never knowingly met a Jewish person, “hated” all Jews, with a vengeance. And I hated and despised with the same intensity Russians, Poles, blacks, retarded people, handicapped people – “inferior” or “worthless life”, as it was called.
At the age of ten every child was obligated to join the Hitler Youth, with meetings Wednesday and Saturday afternoon. From then on there were intensified indoctrination sessions. One thing we young people were told was that we needed to report people speaking against the regime, even if they were our parents!
My father-in-law had been a Socialist in his youth and was not sympathetic to Hitler. He wanted to know what the world said about us. So one evening, after the family had gone to bed, he sat in the living room, hunched over the small radio, covered with comforters and blankets to block the noise, and listened to the BBC news from England. Suddenly he heard a noise, looked up, and saw his young son in the doorway. My husband remembered, all his life, the face of his father in that moment - his eyes full of fear, terrified at having been discovered by his son who was now, he thought, “honor-bound” to report him. It was a moment my husband remembered with great sadness, because he would never have reported his father, or anyone else.
World War II started in 1939 when I was 7 years old, and it turned out to be the war with the most human losses in history. It was much worse than WWI. About 80 Million people died in the war. Millions of German and Russian soldiers died, as did 2,500 American troops, lost in one single morning at Omaha Beach in Normandy.
After the defeat in Russia, the remaining living men were incarcerated in Siberian Camps under inhuman conditions. Only a few of them survived the camps and returned home years after the end of the war, carrying their wounds (physical and psychological) until they died.
Let me tell you about my uncle. He was 17 years old when he was drafted into the army and sent East with his regiment to invade the Ukraine. After conquering a little town, the Commanding Officer ordered the soldiers to round up all Jewish citizens and lock them into the Synagogue. He then made the soldiers stand in formation and told them to burn down the synagogue with all the people in it.
While probably everyone was aghast, three soldiers stepped forward and said “Sir, we can’t do that!”. Within minutes all three had been pulled up to a tree branch with a noose around their neck, and with their three fellow soldiers dead, turning in the wind, the rest of the company did what they were told to do.
My uncle helped burn down the Synagogue. He survived, but he never got over this experience. He came back after the war and years of Prisoner of War Camp in Siberia and proceeded to drink himself to death.
I leave it to you to ask yourself – what would you have done in a similar situation? Do what you were told, even if every ounce of you revolted? Object and be added to the three corpses hanging from the tree?
This is what Hitler expected the youth to be:
“A violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth – that is what I am after. Youth must be all those things. It must be indifferent to pain. There must be no weakness or tenderness in it. I want to see once more in its eyes the gleam of pride and independence of the beast of prey. I intend to have an athletic youth – that is the first and the chief thing – I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men!”
Meanwhile, the “home front” suffered under unending air raids by British and American Forces. They were meant to punish “the Nazis”, but everyone on the ground suffered - including those who did not align with the party. Saturation bombings caused the death of hundreds of thousands of German civilians. In Hamburg alone about 49,000 civilians were killed by Allied bombings in one night alone, and these corpses were collected, doused with gasoline, and burned in the streets.
Until the end of the war in 1945, and for years afterwards, there was great want. Food and other basic supplies were hard to come by. I had to wear wooden clogs instead of leather shoes, and a homemade dress made out of a red Nazi flag - with a large pinkish area towards the hem of the skirt, where the swastika had been removed.
Hunger was fierce, and my personal salvation was the pea soup with crackers and horse meat that was served in school, thanks to the U.S. Marshall Plan. To this day I am grateful for that.
“War does not determine who is right, only who is left”, said Bertrand Russell. And Hoover said: “Old men declare war, but it is youth that must fight and die”. To this I must add that it is the civilian population that must suffer.
In 1945 my father moved my mother, me, and my two sisters, to a little village, to escape the interminable bombing raids. One morning, after a night of artillery fire, armed American soldiers occupied the village - the war had come to an end. They proceeded down the road and discovered a camp filled with shaved, sick, and emaciated skeletal men in striped prison uniforms - whose only desire was to get away from this place of horror. That afternoon I stood at the front door, shaking, crying, watching them pass by: an endless stream of suffering humanity. The men were hardly able to walk, and yet they supported and carried others even sicker. These men had been horrifically dehumanized, and yet they still had the compassion to care about others.
What I had been taught to judge as “inferior and worthless life”, I suddenly recognized as suffering, broken-down human beings, capable of more decency and kindness than anybody I had known before. I saw their pain, their despair, the hopes they once had, and their humanness.
The awful realization rose up in me, gripping my heart and my soul and my mind, that the Truth I had been taught to believe, had instead been a horrible Lie. I was overwhelmed by the growing conviction that my compliance made me responsible for the suffering and death of countless humans; that I had unknowingly participated in man’s inhumanity to man.
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I am 87 years old now, and all of this happened more than 75 years ago. But every time I speak about these experiences I am pained beyond belief.
All afternoon I stood at the front door and swore that I would never, ever, believe anything anybody told me without checking it out first - that I would never, ever, follow any doctrine, political or religious, without making sure that it was based on Truth. And that I would never, ever, follow anyone’s leadership without the most critical analysis of his character and message.
The next morning the Americans came back with trucks and collected the men of the village for clean-up work in the camp. Our landlord was one of them and he came back in the evening, and, surrounded by neighbors (with me, a 12-year old, standing in the corner) he told us what he had seen. He told us of the stacks of naked corpses along the wall, the hundreds of emaciated men, too weak to walk after surviving a typhoid epidemic, and how they sorted the living from the dead and dying, and couldn’t believe what they saw. It was too horrendous. Words failed him, and all adults in the room cried.
For many years I carried the burden of the Holocaust on my shoulders.
After the war I married, came to the United States, and raised three children. After my husband’s death in 1987, when I was only 54 years old, I took a 6-months leave of absence from work and traveled to Israel to work in a Kibbutz for several months. As a “Volunteer for Israel” I also cleaned Uzi guns on an army base: Nahal Soreq. I wanted so much to do my share, to make sure that the people of Israel have safety and security in their own country.
But, as I found out, Israelis tend to live in a bubble. Even though the West Bank is close by, there is no concern about how the Palestinians live, and there is no compassion for the sufferings of the former residents of Palestine.
One day I was staying at an Arab youth hostel on Jerusalem’s King David Street and that’s where I met my Palestinian friend Khalid, a student at Birzeit University, speaking fluent English, with a peace medal around his neck, and a deep love for his country in his heart. From him I learned about the flip side of the State of Israel: of the people who fled from the Holocaust in Europe, only to disenfranchise and dislocate the people living in the country they took over as their own.
I rented a car and Khalid took me to visit his relatives in the West Bank and in Refugee Camps in Gaza. That is when and how I learned that the children of the holocaust, forgetting their own history, do not say: “Never Again to Anybody”. No, they say “Never Again to Us”, and are satisfied with that.
I see in many Israeli Jews something that I experienced in my own youth - namely a certainty of their superiority (being chosen by God), and a disregard and icy callousness pertaining to all “others” (as if they are inferior and it doesn’t matter what happens to them.) Germans had their feelings of superiority too, not given by God, but by History - and for them “the others” were the Jews. The same lack of compassion and lack of kindness has gripped Israel, even though they should know better from personal experience. Even the Torah says: “Be kind to the stranger, because you were a stranger once in Egypt”.
One day I walked down the Via Dolorosa, the road where (according to tradition) Jesus carried his cross to his crucifixion, and had a cup of coffee in one of the little coffee shops on a side street. At the table next to me sat 8 young men speaking Hebrew and English and talking about Arabs. Suddenly I heard one of them say: “One should line them all up against a wall and mow them down with submachine guns!” I turned ice cold when I heard that, but I couldn’t let it go. I got up, went over to the table, and said: “Excuse me, I could not help overhearing what you were talking about. I am German, and my people killed 6 million of your people, and my people did to your people what you are proposing to do to the Arabs. Did you really mean what you said?”
To their credit all eight of them fell silent. I could see that they were just following unquestioningly their own kind of indoctrination. It was the first time that I said out loud the horrible sentence: “My people killed 6 million of your people”, but doing so freed me from my fear and from my shame, and it made it possible for me to shift my focus. I had wanted safety and security for the Jews, and I now want safety and security for the Palestinians as well.
I came to be convinced that there will never be peace in Israel unless, before peace negotiations and high-level talks, there is a change of mind among Israelis - unless they come to see everybody, Jews and non-Jews alike, as human beings that deserve to be treated with respect.
I am 87 years old and getting tired. But I am committed to defending human rights, and I feel driven to remind the world that, before political agreements can be reached, the inherent worth and dignity of ALL human beings must be valued, and there must be an overarching goal of justice and equity - for all. Everything else follows from that.
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I share this personal story with you now because I recognize in the machinations of this current administration goals and tactics that are terrifyingly familiar: the dehumanization of masses of people, demonized as “other”.
History, if we don’t pay attention to it, might repeat itself.
“Make Germany Great Again”, was the popular refrain of my years of indoctrination...and I am here to testify that the results of those efforts have left an indelible stain on the conscience of that entire generation. Including on my heart. I cannot hear “Make America Great again” without shivering to my core, in horror and terror. Especially given the rise of hate violence in this country.
History MUST NOT be allowed to repeat itself.
Inge Etzbach
Inge32@outlook.com