as member of a boys’ choir here. What Himmler didn’t know was that General Montgomery had passed on photographs of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to the chief negotiator of German capitulation, Admiral von Friedeburg. He in turn presented them to his superior, the Admiral of the Fleet, Karl Donitz. It appears Donitz, the last official German Head of State, was aware of the existence of concentration camps but had never seen one. Confronted with the gruesome evidence, he threw Himmler out of the Academy. Himmler then tried unsuccessfully to hide in the Waldschule, the primary school near St Mary’s my friend attended as a first-grader. Then he broke into a fire-brigade training school in the nearby suburb of Harrislee and donned the uniform of a fire chief. Thus provided with a disguise, he managed to escape to Hamburg, where his love of uniform made him change from fire chief to lowly sergeant. He moved on to Bremervorde, where refugees were arriving from the East. (Among them was a child called Angelika, destined to become my friend’s future lover.) From there he planned to take a train to Luneburg in Lower Saxony. By now Himmler was getting increasingly confident, especially since the British Army had classified him as a harmless POW. At the station he went to the toilet just before the train left, and there two secret service agents recognised him. Realising the game was up, the Nazi fugitive bit open his standard issue cyanide capsule. Sic transit gloria mundi.
An official publication by the Flensburg City Council ( Long Shadows, 2000) claims ‘in no other German city did so many initiators, responsible leaders, high-ranking executives and willing executors of the murderous Nazi regime go into hiding as in Flensburg and its environs. Not the least among them was the notorious Auschwitz-Kommandant Rudolf Hoss. According to Long Shadows ‘a veritable net of helpers assisted Hoss to disappear in Flensburg’. On 11 March 1946 he was discovered in a small village outside Flensburg, Gottrupel, and arrested by the Military Police. In June 1946 Hoss was extradited to Poland, condemned to death and executed. Manfred’s credentials as belonging to the generation of ‘Hitler’s Children’ could hardly have been more trenchant.
It is remarkable how even at its earliest stage someone’s life can be interwoven with final desperate movements of historical significance. I’m not suggesting the child Manfred could have been aware of them, but his claim to have been born into a net of evil seems the more valid. He discovered most of these things during his adolescence, many from his aunt, uncle and cousins of the anti-Nazi section of his family. It took Flensburg some time to reveal many of these events, even longer to come to terms with them. The town’s Lord Mayor at the end of the war, a certain ‘Dr Dr Kracht’ who during his term wore either SA or SS uniform, was removed from office by the British and taken to a POW camp. The distinguished doctor identifying himself with two degrees was released for good behaviour, having promised loyalty to a new German democracy and was promptly appointed Ministerialrat (Principal) in the post-war state government of Schleswig-Holstein. I believe it was above all a lack of credibility that prompted my friend to leave the country. Many of his teachers had been Nazis who taught nationalistic distortions of German history, denied the Holocaust and spoke of ‘victor’s justice and law’. Yet they’d all been officially ‘de-nazified’.
Just one more ‘generic’ comment regarding the situation in Flensburg immediately before and after the end of the war. In the throes of imminent defeat Dr and Mrs Goebbels weren’t the only parents relating to their offspring in unnatural ways. Some killed their children by delivering them to local Nazi authorities. While everyone knew the war was already lost, young boys were hastily executed for acts of defeatism.
A reliable eyewitness, Ursula von Kardoff, noted in her diary that near war’s end cities were ‘in a strange mood — a mixture of apathy and pleasure seeking. Strangers copulated in darkened streets, even in hospitals.’ Another diarist, Anthony Beevor, noted that ‘an erotic fever seemed to have taken possession of everybody. Everywhere, even on the dentist’s chair, I saw bodies locked in lascivious embrace. The women had discarded all modesty and were freely exposing their private parts.’ It was in that kind of environment that my friend’s childhood unfolded. Many mothers lived as if there were no tomorrow. Children held no promise of a brighter future; their immediate challenge was another mouth to feed. Self-abandonment was the order of the day. Inhabitants of Flensburg, including its ever increasing influx of desperate refugees, may not have participated in this moral decay with quite as much ferocity as men and women in the larger cities, yet even in this provincial border town excesses were widespread and extended to child molestation. It created a post-war society where extraordinary breaches of morality and decency continued to be committed behind closed doors, often with the full knowledge of relatives and neighbours.
By the 1950s there was a deceptive atmosphere of normality. The unspoken motto was: ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.’ Immorality and depravity continued long after the war. Nazism, Hitler and the lost war were brushed under the table. Germans did what they do best: they put their shoulders to the wheel and forgot. Hardly anyone felt responsibility or guilt. It was the survivors of the war who felt hard done by. In such a climate, the so-called ‘economic miracle’ seemed to reinforce moral corruption.
Once an entire people had succumbed to evil, the aftermath of wickedness lasted a very long time. I don’t know whether my friend will be brave enough to include in his report to Humanitas a description of the horrific abuse he continued tosuffer even when to all outward appearance the defeated and divided people of Germany seemed about to regain a portion of social propriety.
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