Hitler's Home Front: Memoirs of a Hitler Youth - Don A. Gregory, Wilhelm R. Gehlen (2016)

Chapter 2. Home, Family, School and Church

Isuggested to my Brother Len that when he was old enough he should volunteer for an SS (Schutzstaffel) outfit, but despite his fanatical devotion to the Reich, he didn’t like the idea. He was only fifteen near the end of the war, so he couldn’t be drafted into the SS or Wehrmacht, but belonging to the Hitler Youth was a must. I still think it was two things that kept him at home: his stomach (he was always hungry) and his authority as a leader in the local Hitler Youth. He relished giving orders to lower-ranking members during duty hours, but I don’t think many of them were obeyed. He was, however, a genius in finding something for the table in the winter or during really bad shortages. For all his faults and his fanaticism, I still think today that we might have starved to death without him.

Len was totally uninterested in anything other than the Hitler Youth. His duties came before everything else. Once he was asked to deliver draft notices to boys that had come of military age, which was eighteen at the beginning of the war but was sixteen by the end. Len, being the ever-devoted Hitler Youth, got on his bike and took off with a handful of orders waving in the wind. I got the full story of what happened when he returned. The first address was that of a Wehrmacht captain who was then serving in Italy. When Len knocked on the door, a dishevelled-looking woman answered with, ‘What do you want?’

‘Heil Hitler,’ Len responded, ‘I have here the call up orders for Heinz Bücker. He has to sign in my presence. Can I speak with him?’

‘Piss off,’ was the woman’s answer to that. In German, it doesn’t sound much different and means exactly the same thing.

‘Pardon me madam,’ Len insisted in an official sounding tone (according to him). ‘This is by order of the NSDAP and the Wehrmacht.’

‘Look, Hitler boy,’ the woman shot back, ‘I’m not your madam; my son isn’t home, and I told you to piss off.’

‘Frau Bücker, I have to report this to my superiors in the Wehrkommando [local military office] unless your son signs the order in my presence. They will send the police for him,’ Len threatened.

She was not at all moved. ‘I don’t care if they send the Reichs Heini himself [a nickname for Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler and it means just what it sounds like]. My son isn’t going anywhere, even if ordered by the Wehrmacht or the Pope. You got that?’

Well, Brother Len knew he was beaten and he never went back to Frau Bücker’s house. Whether Heinz was eventually arrested, I don’t know, but this woman had put a serious dent in Brother Len’s crown.

At the next address he was invited in by the woman of the house. She was a widow; her husband had been killed in a freak sawmill accident in 1938.

‘Yes, I do understand,’ the woman said ‘and my son will be pleased to serve our Führer, Volk, und Vaterland.’

Her son signed the orders. Len gave him a copy and told him to report on Tuesday to the local high school gymnasium at 5:00 p.m.. The woman shed a few tears and talked about garden work, meat rationing and the lack of eggs. Len, so he told me later, was disgusted with her story.

‘Here I was,’ Len said, ‘taking an order of the highest importance to this house and all the woman could do was ramble on about food and her garden.’

‘Well,’ I asked ‘did you volunteer to help with her garden while her son is away at the front?’

‘I have better things to do with my time; more important things.’

‘Yes, like digging tank traps that wouldn’t stop even a horse and cart.’

‘This is for a better future for all of us,’ he bragged. ‘Yesterday, I met an old man who complained no end about this war. He said he had seen it all, the Loretto and Vimy Ridge in 1915, and Passchendaele in 1917. We will show the older generation what we can do; no more Langemarcks or Ypres.’

‘Hitler was at Langemarck and we still lost that war.’

‘The Führer cannot win a war on his own.’

‘I hope he wins this one,’ I mumbled, ‘these air raids are going to destroy our country, and in Russia our army’s going backward.’

‘We’ll go forward again,’ he said confidently.

At that point, I gave up arguing with Len. There was no point; he knew everything.

Len, who was three years older than me, was the sort of guy who thought he knew everything, and who had to be first in whatever the Nazis ordered. He was the only person I have ever known who would forcefully argue for or against any issue just to hear himself talk. He had advanced from Jungvolk to Hitler Youth well ahead of me and he never let me forget that he was my boss - and I never forgot to remind him that Mum was his boss. By 1941, he was already a sort of platoon leader (Kameradschaftsführer). Len liked the title ‘Führer’; it smelled of Hitler, our real Führer. Anyone with even a molecule of authority was a Führer of some sort in those days, be it the postman or the tram driver. Brother Len of course thought he had many more molecules of authority than the average Führer. I was only a Jungvolk member, and not very keen on marching, drumming and taking orders from kids hardly older than myself, especially my brother. He was a full-fledged Hitler Youth and in his eyes that meant something very special. After all, anyone in uniform had official status, whether it was a soldier, a ticket seller at the tram station or even a porter operating a lift. Some of those with a uniform and a hat would use their new-found position to order people around who would ordinarily have ignored them. Ours was a small community where everyone knew everyone else and those things were not easily forgotten after the war either.

I remember clearly one day in the winter of 1943 when Brother Len came up with one of his great plans for catching a goose. There were many recipes in Mother’s cookbook for how to prepare goose but we never had one during the war and when they did become available long after the war, we couldn’t afford one. There was some swampy land with a small lake fed by a creek not far away from our house that even Brögger Flönz avoided. He was the Forstmeister (Forest Manager) who walked the woods and fields in our area. Brögger was his real name and Flönz derives from the word Flinte, which means shotgun in old English, so the name sort of fit. Sometimes in deepest winter, a few snow geese would congregate at the lake and Len had an idea how we could catch one. Somewhere he had found a book that described tricks that kids could play on chickens and he figured the same thing would work with a goose. So, late one evening we set off for this lake. Len brought with him about twelve feet of strong string and a piece of fatback. He tied the string to the fatback and placed it out in a clearing while I watched the operation. When he finished setting his ‘trap’, I asked him what the idea was and how this was going to catch a goose.

‘Well, it’s simple,’ he said. ‘Suppose four geese come and each one wants to swallow the greasy bacon and they swallow the string with it. They all start pulling and the bacon comes out again. They swallow again and again, until they get tired, then we just walk over and pick them up.’

Well, I didn’t fully understand all this, but I stayed with him in the freezing cold until 9:00 a.m. the next day and finally asked, ‘Why wouldn’t the geese just fly away when we walked over to grab them?’ He wanted to give it another try the next day when it was foggy and a light drizzle was falling. I flatly refused to go along with that plan, but he never stopped trying to find ways to catch geese and pheasants.

* * *

Early in the Third Reich, the NSV advised instituting what became called Eintopfsonntag, or literally translated, ‘one pot Sundays’ and it became the law of the land. On the first Sunday of the month from October through March, the Sunday main meal was to consist of a stew cooked in one pot. This was supposed to save the family money so there would be more to donate to the Winterhilfswerk (WHW - the Winter Help Work programme). Later in the war, this was extended to two Sundays per month and finally, out of necessity, almost every day’s main meal was Eintopf. A leaflet distributed to all households by the NSV stated that the meal should cost no more than fifty Pfennigs, about twenty-five cents at the time. People with gardens had no problem reaching that target but adding meat to the stew and staying within the fifty-Pfennig limit meant that the housewife had to atomize an ounce of meat (if there was any) to add to the stew. The NSV leaflet did not mention meat and Hitler, being a vegetarian, decreed that only vegetables were to be used. Hitler himself was seen on many occasions in German cities on the first Sunday of the month having a meal of Eintopf at the local NSV meeting hall. When he invited the Party bosses to the Chancellery dining hall to have Eintopf dinner with him, they came in droves at first. The novelty soon wore off and by 1939, only a very few dignitaries attended these dinners. Average German citizens followed the Eintopf decree out of necessity, but you rarely saw a skinny Party ‘Bonzen’ (big shot Party men), as we called them. There was another farce to this Eintopf day. Sturmabteilung (SA - the Brownshirts) snoopers could knock on your door on Eintopf Sunday and demand to see what was cooking on your stove and if you had a good-size piece of meat boiling away with the stew, you were branded a parasite on the rest of the community. This was serious business. In some larger cities - and it happened a few times in Magdeburg where an uncle lived - your name was published in the paper like a common criminal. One good thing came out of this stew Sunday however; never in history were so many creative recipes invented in such a short period of time.

I remember Granddad Willem Gehlen as a pipe-smoking, stomping and orders-shouting bundle of energy and only my mother was able to tame him to some degree. Of course, he was too old to be drafted into ‘Hitler’s war’ as he called it, and it would have been below his dignity to support the Nazi ideology under any circumstance. ‘Give me Kaiser Wilhelm anytime. I’ll go with him through thick and thin’ was Granddad’s answer when discussions came around to anything to do with the Nazi government. Granddad Willem died in late 1942, but he continued to be our inspiration to survive the hard times that came at the end of the war and after. I never knew my Grandmother Gehlen; she died long before the war. Neither do I remember my Grandmother Zander from my mother’s side, but Mum’s dad I do remember. He came to visit a few times, but was killed in one of the Schweinfurt raids. He was a tool maker and worked for SKF (Schweinfurt Kugellager Fabrik), the ball-bearing company. This industry was a favourite target of Allied bombers throughout the war.

Granddad was in charge of our family’s garden until he died, and after he passed away, the responsibility should have gone to Brother Len but he was our number-one shirker. He would do anything for Hitler including digging eight-foot-deep anti-tank ditches, but digging in the garden, planting vegetables or weeding was below his dignity, so the job became mine. What he did do well was order me about, making sure the freshly-planted onions stood in a row like a parade of stormtroopers. When he planted onions or potatoes, he did it with a measuring stick. ‘Things have to be done exact,’ he used to say. I didn’t know what he meant by that until the onions sprouted their first shoots. They were all twenty centimetres apart, no more, no less. They looked like a company of RAD men on their way to work. Even in fruit picking he was mostly useless, despite the fact that he thought he knew everything there was to know about the subject, but he never failed at being first to the dinner table.

One day in the spring of 1942, Granddad Willem had an argument with Mum about his constant pipe-smoking in the kitchen and Mum got rather loud with him. He walked out into the garden to calm down and the two of us sat on the bench under the cherry tree discussing this and that and looking over the rows of newly-planted beans and onions. There was not too much to harvest as yet, but plenty of weeds were coming up. ‘Okay,’ Granddad said, ‘Let’s do a “Quer durch den Garten” (across the garden) dinner today.’

I was puzzled, with no idea what he meant.

‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

He slipped on his self-made wooden clogs and as I followed him, he explained to me what was edible and what was not. Granddad Willem made his and our shoes, which I guess would be called clogs today. It was something he had learned how to do from his father back in the late 1800s. They were made from freshly-cut willow blocks and Granddad had all the tools of the trade to make them. He made two sizes and they either fitted or they didn’t. There was also no difference in left nor right; they (did or didn’t) fit either foot. He had made a good supply by the time he died in the summer of 1942. If they were too small, you got the bigger size and if they were too large, you pushed a handful of straw into the end to make up the difference for a perfect fit. For the whole war I only got one new pair of shoes and that was in 1943. So, what did other kids less fortunate than us wear when feet outgrew shoes? Klepperkes, they were called; a wooden, inch-thick contraption with attached leather straps and if you wore them long enough, you ended up with flat feet.

He picked a few young onion shoots, some wilted leek leaves, dandelion leaves, some herbs, and a few stalks from leftover winter brussel sprouts. Then in the shed he picked up a few carrots, potatoes, and a preserved jar of rabbit meat and proceeded to the kitchen. These were Eintopf ingredients, he told me, and that evening Mum made a tasty meal from weeds, rabbit and wilted vegetables, so ‘across the garden’ became a favourite dish in our house. You might think that you can only eat the sprouts of the brussel sprout plant but you’re wrong. Even today in most Balkan countries the local vegetable markets sell the stems too. You just peel off the hard outer part and cut the inner white part into small pieces and cook like any other sprouts.

Then there was Aunt Kaline; everyone called her Carol, my dad’s sister, who also lived with us after her husband Mathias Hansen was killed in September 1942 and had been buried near Staraja-Russa. Died for ‘Führer, Volk und Vaterland’ the telegram said. All of us felt sorry for her, but we also knew there were thousands of war widows who had no family at all. We were glad she came to live with us and she did more than her share helping with the housework. Her cooking, however, was something Brother Len and I feared. She hadn’t had too much experience in that department, but probably Len and I were spoiled because of Mum’s cooking skills.

The youngest Gehlen living at our house at the end of the war was Baby Fred. He was born during an air raid in late 1941. He was a happy baby in spite of what was going on around him. When he got old enough to walk, he was another one of my responsibilities whenever he was outside and he loved being outside. Maybe it was because he was born during an air raid, but he seemed to have no fear of anything and would walk right up to a 600lb horse and try to talk to it. I think Mum liked him best, probably because he never complained like the rest of us.

Mum was the boss of the house; well, most of the time anyway, even when Dad was home. When it came to things regarding keeping the family fed and clothed, no one argued with her. During the Second World War it took a lot of knowledge and imagination for a housewife to feed a family. She, or whoever did the cooking, had to make sure the food was healthy, somewhat palatable and free of known poisons. My mother was born in 1900 and as a young girl spent two years at a convent in Aachen during the First World War, learning how to maintain a household. Most important for us, she learned cooking and anyone who says there is nothing special to boiling potatoes or cabbage has never eaten either prepared correctly. There were ninety-five nuns in the convent and at one time, about sixty teenage girls. After two years’ training, they had the opportunity to become a nun and some of the girls did. Even during the Third Reich, a few convents were still in operation that provided this training. Hitler had created a more promising future for young girls, however, and so most preferred to do a year of government service at a farm with the prospect of marrying a soldier and raising children. My mother’s recipes were mostly her own inventions and dated from the inflation of the early 1920s. They were perfect for the bad times that were to come again. During the war, her skills developed into a fine art. We owed much of our survival and health to her foresight in writing down the recipes two decades earlier and creating new ones based on them.

* * *

We didn’t have a refrigerator in our home so the only way of preserving food was to dry it or can it. Some things were a problem right away after rationing began, like keeping our small ration of butter in a reasonably solid state. This required expert attention. It was put into a small container and immersed in cold water in a shaded outdoor building. Most German rural houses had sheds built onto the side of the house you could get into from the kitchen without stepping outside. The darkest corner was selected for storing perishable food. There was also a wooden trapdoor in the shed that led to our air-raid shelter, but there was no room for us during raids. The shelter had rows of shelves with canned fruit, rabbit meat and vegetables, plus coal, wood shavings, and winter potatoes. During high alert we used the front-door lintel for shelter. It was the strongest part of the whole house. Granddad Willem never bothered with seeking shelter and he died before air raids became commonplace. Only once was he really upset about an air raid and that was when a bomb destroyed part of the food-processing factory he had helped build. He swore at the Party, the SS, and the SA for what they had brought upon the German people.

There were no washing machines or dryers in those days. Washing was done in a metal tub using a zinc washboard. You hoped for a sunny day so the clothes would dry. Bleaching your wash was done by laying the items flat on a grassy spot of ground in the sun. Most villages had a public Bleiche, a bit of grassy ground specially reserved for bleaching your washing, and letting kids play on the Bleiche was verboten (forbidden). Sometimes these white and coloured spots on the ground were an invitation for fighter-bombers to stitch a few holes in your clothes with their Bord Waffen (cannon).

One day in April 1940, a stray bomb was dropped by a British aircraft and partly destroyed a barn a few miles from us - not much really for a war being on, but Brother Len, who knew everything, commented, ‘We will retaliate’. Yes, Brother Len knows, I thought. But Granddad Willem was not to be deceived by the tranquillity.

‘War will come to us, probably sooner than later, you mark my words,’ he said that evening while we were sitting around the table eating a meal of fried potatoes and sour herrings. This was a favourite meal for Granddad. He knew everything about herrings that there was to know, and there’s a lot about herrings to be known; although he never saw an ocean and the only time in his life he was ever away from home was in the Great War.

Bismarck is well known to any reader of history; he was the Iron Chancellor of nineteeth-century Germany, but what isn’t so well known is that one of his favourite foods was pickled herring. To this day, pickled herrings are called Bismarck Herrings in Germany. There is also of course the battleship Bismarck of the Second World War that came to grief in the Atlantic in May 1941, but only after it battled with the British battlecruiser Hood north of Iceland, and sank her with the assistance of the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. But here, we’ll stay with the lesser-known Bismarck, the herring. There were no herrings swimming in ponds along the Chemin des Dames, or in shell holes on the Verdun Battlefield, but somehow Granddad had learned all there was to know about these fish. After the war, he had a thriving business selling pickled herrings and pulled a hand cart with a barrel full of the creatures around town. When he wasn’t pulling herrings in a cart, he was busy with trowel and spirit-level building things. He built a workshop across the road from us for his friend Jupp, who later became a major food packing businessman and distributor in the area.

* * *

I went to school when Sütterlin script was still the handwriting one had to learn in Germany. This was replaced in 1940, but its use was not forbidden. Many wrote in this older style until well after the war. Today, it is difficult to find anyone who can read it, especially if it is written by someone with poor penmanship. For the first four years in school, children used slates to write on to save paper. Books were used until they fell apart. Teachers didn’t have a higher standard of living than the parents who sent their children to the schools. No teacher had a car; some had a bicycle, but most of them walked to school like their students. School went from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. but homework had to be done and that usually took an hour. Our school, like hundreds more, was called the ‘Adolf Hitler School’. It was built in 1938 and Hitler himself came to the dedication. It was a major event in our town and it was planned down to the last detail.

We didn’t get school meals, as there was no dining hall or kitchen. Outside in the schoolyard, there was a water fountain that, as far as I can remember, never worked. We took our own lunches to school, made from whatever Mum had. After the war, they were provided, brought by a horse-drawn cart from a communal kitchen in town. By the time the food reached us, it was inedible. In the winter, it was stone cold and in the summer, it had gone sour if any milk had been used in its preparation. We ate it anyway if we were hungry enough and many of us were. Barley soup was a favourite of the kitchen, if not of ours, but at least it was nutritious and one could survive on it. There was also barley bread that was hard as paving bricks and no amount of dunking it in any liquid would soften it. A good friend of mine, who lives up north in Massachusetts, was captured by the German Army in Salerno (Italy) in 1943 and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp in Pomerania. He told me that they lived on potatoes and barley soup; fortunately it was cooked in real milk, as they worked on a dairy farm. We couldn’t afford milk in our barley soup even when it was available, but at least we had ration cards to get other things if they were in the shops. The POWs weren’t so fortunate; for them, they had to eat what was given to them or starve. To this day, I cannot bear to eat anything made from barley.

Large coloured posters were hung up in our school classrooms with pictures of plants, the parts of them that were needed for manufacturing medicines, and a description of the healing power of each one. In the beginning, at least to most of us school kids, the plants looked like a bunch of weeds, which in fact they were. During growing and flowering season, we were required to gather as many of these plants, their blooms and roots as we could. Of course, some kids weren’t anxious to do this, but school hours usually ended at 1:00 p.m. and we were exempt from homework if we brought a bag of medicinal plants to school the next day. A lot of the plants we collected were totally useless and some were poisonous, like Deadly Nightshade and Fingerhut (Foxglove). Washing your hands after picking was mandatory, or you could wake up the next morning with a rash or worse. Over the weeks and months we collected the plants; we learned to recognise the ones we had seen on the charts. We knew it was important for the war and we all had relatives that were fighting on the front somewhere.

My father was one of the lucky ones. He was in the first wave of the attack on Russia (Operation Barbarossa) on 22 June 1941. He was the commander of a Sturmgeschütz (tracked assault gun) unit and his first battle was at Dünaburg (Dangavpils). In August 1941, his unit, Assault Gun Brigade 184, took Velikiye Luki on the Lovat River. His division was then taken out of the drive to Leningrad and assigned to break through to Toropez-Rzhev, move on to Selizharovo, and finally occupy Klin, just north of Moscow. Hitler came to visit the soldiers at Velikiye Luki on 30 August 1942. It’s easy to find stories in modern history books about how Hitler never wanted to be with the men at the front, but I have a Feldpost letter written by a soldier who was there. He got Hitler’s autograph on a scrap of paper and even took his picture, had it developed, and sent it to his family. In his letter he said that Hitler arrived at 11:00 a.m., had a pea soup lunch with the men, and shook hands with them. The letter continued with, ‘He then walked right to the trenches to say hello to the men on guard duty. He told us he was glad to be with his soldiers at the front.’ So-called historians who don’t bother doing their homework would never write about such things.

Klin was briefly occupied by German forces during the Battle of Moscow but was presently retaken by the Russians. Parts of Dad’s unit reached Cholm in December 1941 and ended up being surrounded while the rest of his unit escaped the pocket. Once inside the pocket, they soon lost their airstrip and were supplied by the Luftwaffe via air drops from Ju-52s and bombers, but ammunition, medical equipment and weapons had priority over food. The few motorised assault guns that were available had no fuel and couldn’t be moved from one threatened point to another inside the pocket. The soldiers dug in on the south-eastern perimeter between houses and factories. There was one place that, in better times, had been a fur treatment facility that was stacked with untreated furs. These sure came handy in the bitter winter but they were so infested with lice that the German soldiers called the position ‘the lice bunker’. German forward artillery observers directed fire to protect their position there. Our soldiers were supposed to live off the land, but they found out just how little there was to eat anywhere around. Supplies were dropped but there was never enough for the 7,000 soldiers inside the pocket. By February, rations had gone down to 50 grams (two ounces) of black bread and a slice of sausage or a spoonful of jam a day.

They held out until March when relief finally came. Dad was wounded earlier and flown out to recuperate, eventually being sent to the military hospital in Bottrop in Germany. He came out of Cholm with a stomach ulcer, a leg wound and a belated Cholm Shield medal, which was awarded to the survivors in May 1942. General Scherer, the commander, was awarded the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross. Whether he lived on two ounces of black bread and a spoonful of jam a day, I don’t know. Dad recovered in time for the Belgorod Operation Citadel in August 1943, where they lost all their guns and trucks. He made his way back riding on a Russian Panje cart or walking. Due to his age, he was then assigned a job as a POW guard, then an instructor at Hillersleben and Ohrdruf Proving Grounds. The war ended for him in Denmark where he surrendered to a resistance unit that treated the Germans very well. He was back home in the summer of 1945 and a few months later, he was driving trams again.

* * *

Religion was a touchy subject for the Nazis and I can only write about our own experiences. The attempt to curtail the influence of religion on the German people as a whole did not affect us in our small town. New regulations from the government regarding churches were ignored by the pastors and their parishioners whenever possible. We couldn’t see how the Nazis’ meddling in religion was going to help win a war anyway. Living in a predominantly Catholic area, there were about a dozen Catholic churches, but I only remember three Protestant ones. Our own church, built in the 1890s, was designed by the Kirchenbaumeister (church architect) van Kann and we were very proud of it. At that time, our village had 970 inhabitants and 95 per cent of them were Catholic. Several of the well-off citizens donated the money to build the church and the land was donated by a local farmer. We even had a steeple built and it rose to a respectable height of about 160 feet, with a clock face that was visible for miles around.

German churches had always been a sanctuary for the hard-pressed of the population. Life wasn’t easy in small villages; nobody owned a car, maybe a bicycle or a 125cc DKW motorbike, so a church within walking distance became a refuge you could get to. Catholic churches were usually packed at Sunday’s High Mass at 10:00 a.m. Even the soldiers had the inscription ‘Gott mit uns’ (God with us) on their belt buckles. Every battalion in the Wehrmacht had two chaplains assigned to it; one Catholic and one Protestant. You were one or the other in the Wehrmacht or you kept your mouth shut, especially if you were a Jehovah’s Witness or a Jew who had somehow slipped through the net. The former Gauleiter (district leader) from Thuringia, Artur Dinter, tried unsuccessfully to create a German Volkskirche (People’s Church) in 1934 and even held a few congresses, but the idea soon fizzled out. Hitler feared a rival to his NSDAP and had already dismissed Dinter as Gauleiter in 1927. He ran afoul of too many high-ranking Nazis when he started attacking Hitler in his newspaper and that soon got him kicked out of the Party for good.

Our pastor during the war was Father Andreas Gilles. He was born on 8 May 1879 in Nideggen in the Eifel and was pastor for our church until his retirement in December 1954. I still remember his often controversial sermons from the pulpit during the war, and to say he was an anti-National Socialist would be an understatement, but nobody ever denounced him. He would not allow any uniformed Party men to attend church services. Soldiers in uniform and even the Hitler Youth had to leave their military decorations and flags behind. Although the Party dictated school curricula and eventually forbade religious lessons in schools, the Nazis’ authority, at least in our community, stopped at the church door. On weekdays, three services were held and on Sunday mornings, there were six, starting at 6:00 a.m. On Sunday afternoons, there was a one-hour Andacht (prayer) service. Since the pastor was banned from giving religious classes in our school, parents were advised to send their children to church at certain times for religious education. For obvious reasons, care had to be taken by the church to ensure that the lessons did not clash with normal school hours or Hitler Youth activities, but as far as I remember, we never had a problem. After all, even the local Nazis were well-known members of the community and church. People quickly realised that a chicken or a dozen eggs given to them under the table did more good than arguing about religion.

The first restrictions on the church came soon after the war began and some seemed reasonable enough. Church bells were not supposed to ring and blackout restrictions were enforced. Our pastor and chaplain were required to open their basements as air-raid shelters, because there was no underground shelter in the church; they would have done that anyway. Later all electricity was cut off in the church; masses could only be held by candlelight. In early 1942, the church, with no way around it, was required to give up its two big bells to the war industry. Brass and bronze were needed in ammunition factories. Some of the largest bells then in existence, like the Cologne Cathedral bells, went into the melting pot. So in January 1942, the bells were rung for the last time until 1961, when two new bells were donated to the church.

By 1940, the first bombs had already fallen in our vicinity and the Church Warden was made an air-raid warden to assist Mr Vink. The WHW was forever begging for more clothing, the war industry wanted our aluminium saucepans to make planes, and iron railings were demanded to make tanks and guns. Earlier than that, in 1938, before the war, the Party confiscated the money that had been collected in the community for church renovations. Afterward, the WHW and other Nazi organisations didn’t get much of anything from the people voluntarily. Even the stained-glass windows in our church were taken and normal windows, painted in different colours, were installed with blackout curtains. Our church was also forbidden to display Catholic flags on the occasion of the death of Pope Pius XI. The Party continued to introduce more and more restrictions; Corpus Christi Day, Ascension Day and All Saints Day, which were up to that time holy days, were officially abolished. We held our religious processions each year anyway. Ascension and Corpus Christi were both on Thursdays and observed as religious holidays throughout the war. I remember Ascension Day in June 1944 when a procession of about 300 people, men, women, and children, walked through the streets of the village at 11:00 a.m. with crosses in their hands singing psalms. Suddenly an alert was sounded. Everyone who could run disappeared under the huge chestnut trees, but no Jabos (our name for Allied fighter-bombers or Jagdbombers) came near us. The Lord was with us that day I reckon and nobody from our village ascended to Heaven on that Ascension Day.

Throughout the war, we celebrated Christmas the traditional way and there was never any interference from the Party. Hitler had no interest in changing that sort of thing, but Himmler did, and to get his hands around that holiday, he resurrected the Sonnenwende (Solstice) celebrations of 21 June and 21 December. The SS was required to participate and, as members of the Hitler Youth, so were we beginning in 1941. Granddad Willem, after some argument with Mum, finally gave in and let us go, but he himself refused to attend. Brother Len and I marched with the rest of the local HJ and BDM to a field outside town on a cold and windy 21 December. A big bonfire was lit and speeches were made by our Hitler Youth leader. We sang songs that had absolutely nothing to do with Christmas. Instead of ‘Silent Night, Holy Night,’ it was ‘High in the Night’ and ‘Clear Stars Bridging Heaven’. Len, of course loved it. I didn’t; simply because first, it was too cold and I had a runny nose and no handkerchief and second, instead of getting candy as we expected, we got a paper certificate saying that we had attended the festival. The homecoming afterward was much more to my liking. Granddad Willem was already busy setting up the Christmas tree and we decorated it with baubles that had been handed down in our family from almost a hundred years before. He had ‘liberated’ the tree, as he did every Christmas, in the middle of the night either from the cemetery or the nearby forest. Granddad Willem had the vision of an owl and he could smell Brögger Flönz miles away. He never got caught.

Younger children got toys at Christmas but most of them were war or Party related. There were wind-up tin tanks and guns and lead figures of SA and SS men and even Hitler, Goebbels and Göring. We could buy these for a few Pfennigs and today they sell among collectors for hundreds of dollars. Girls had jump ropes and hopscotch tiles and some collected Glanzbilder, which were small glossy lithographs. Whole scrapbooks were filled with them. The older children didn’t have much time for playing with toys. They were busy with scrap collecting and searching for medicinal plants. Weekends were spent with the Hitler Youth - marching, singing and listening to Nazi-oriented speeches. Camping weekends were welcomed by all. It meant being away from school, living in tents, cooking over open fires and pretending to learn how to be a good soldier in the future. Most of the camping weekends ended after June 1944. Being out anywhere was downright dangerous by that time and a group of Hitler Youth was a certain target for the Jabos.

Mum was careful to save enough food coupons in the weeks before Christmas to make a good selection of candy, cookies and other goodies. No Christmas is completed in Germany without Spekulatius. Now the name might sound like the name of a saint of some sort (Holy Spekulatius?), or the name of an illness. Suffering from Spekulatius certainly sounds serious, but it is in fact a traditional German Christmas cookie. They can be bought today in most shops at Christmas but you can bake your own.