The Willow Wren by Philipp Schott (free ebook reader for iphone txt) 📕

found completely blameless. Class IV is for the simple Nazi followers, Class III for minor officials, Class II for the activists and militants and Class I for the major offenders such as war criminals. Class III, IV and V are dismissed, with III being on probation for a few years where they are restricted from some jobs and IV with some lighter restrictions. Class I goes to trial with the risk of the death penalty. For all their crimes and faults, the Nazis kept excellent records, so what is recorded about your papa’s activities is likely accurate and if the Allies read that and classified him as II, that means he did not commit any crimes.”

This was pretty abstract to me, but Theodor looked visibly relieved.

Herr Rittmann went on. “Your papa’s class is one of the larger ones. They will be kept for a few years to be denazified. The truth is that the activists and militants of the Nazi Party represent the cream of the German crop with respect to the major professions required to run a country. Ten percent of all German adults were in the Nazi Party, with a much higher percentage in the educated classes! The Allies want people like your papa to help run Germany. They don’t want to do it themselves forever.”

“How will they denazify them?”

“Who knows?” Herr Rittmann chuckled.

“And here, in the Soviet zone?”

“Ah, yes, here it is different.” He smiled broadly. “Here they do not need to denazify because here German socialists are at home and can help run this part of the country. People like me.”

“You? You are a socialist?”

“Yes, I am. I have always been one. This is why I said your papa and I do not see eye to eye politically. But during the Nazi time I kept very quiet about politics.”

“So, you did not join the Party?”

“The Nazi Party? No!” He laughed. “It was easier for ordinary workers to avoid joining. I suppose I’m a bit like your papa — clever enough to know what to say to whom and when to say it.”

I’m sure Theodor and I both had questions about the implications of socialists helping the Soviets and ex-Nazis helping the Americans and British, but it was time to go back home and check on Mama and our siblings. Also any questions I had were vague and unfocused. And ultimately I did not care that much about politics, so long as it did not lead to war again. We thanked Herr Rittmann for his time and went back across the street to our place. Mama was waiting for us. She had wiped her face and fixed her hair. She gave us both a big hug.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Winter 1945–46

We did not hear from Papa again for almost two months. And then when we did hear from him, it was a brief Christmas message that was delivered in late January. It consisted of three sentences. In the first he wrote that the English had allowed them to celebrate a proper German Christmas. The second stated that they were even permitted some special foods, and in the closing sentence he wished us a good Christmas. That we probably did not have access to special foods ourselves did not seem to occur to him, or possibly he knew this and thought we would want to know about his relative good fortune regardless, given how he had suffered. According to Herr Rittmann, it was likely that Papa had almost starved to death in the American camp. I cannot speak for the others, but my reaction was to shrug inwardly. Papa, who I had not seen since last spring, and especially his diet were abstractions to me at this point. The letter may as well have come from a distant acquaintance for all the emotional impact it had on me. His first letters naturally had had a much bigger impact because they contained so much information, much of it shocking, but even that quickly faded into the background for me. This may have been because we were starving, and starvation tends to focus the mind on the immediate and the tangible.

We were so lucky that it was a relatively mild winter. Had it not been, the combination of cold and poor nutrition would have killed many more people. As it was, elderly and ill people steadily, quietly disappeared from Colditz, as if simply deleted. Sometimes roughly one a week, sometimes in clusters of two or three or four. There was no fuss and there were no big funerals. Even though I hardly knew any of the individuals who died this way, there was a palpable sense of diminishment in the town, a sense of ebbing, with everyone still alive straining to swim against this tide.

We were also lucky that the Russians had begun to establish a ration system since the informal markets, which were at the best of times somewhat capricious and unreliable, had disappeared entirely by mid-winter. When the occupation began, we assumed that the Russians hated the Germans so much that they would simply allow us all to starve, perhaps to save on the cost of bullets. But after the immediate post-war chaos and revenge lust settled down, they appeared to come to the realization that, as Herr Rittmann said, they would need some Germans alive after all, just like the Western Allies had realized. Moreover, a political angle was starting to become evident. By February 1946, posters began to appear exhorting the advantages of communism and trumpeting how the “Soviet Big Brother” (only much later did I learn the irony inherent in this phrase) stood in solidarity with his “German Little Brother” and was generously helping him to rebuild and join the glorious family of socialist nations. It was better not to have a nation of half-dead starvation victims in your family, lest it make the family appear less glorious and reflect poorly on your family values. Incidentally Churchill made his famous Iron Curtain speech around this