When My Mother met Hitler, by Leslie Wilson

I don't have a photo of my mother as a teenager, but here she is
aged 20.

Gerda, my mother, was the daughter of a police officer, born in Germany, but living in Graz, Austria, where my grandfather had been posted at the Anschluss. She had a mother who suffered from depression, (though at this time my grandmother had only had one nervous breakdown, after months of persecution when my grandfather was in danger of losing not only his job, but his life.)

My grandmother disliked and feared the Nazis, which my mother understood as 'some kind of phobia connected with Hitler', and knew she had to be careful about mentioning him to her mother, for fear she should become ill again.

My grandmother after her first nervous breakdown

My grandfather had been reinstated in his job, largely because my grandmother had put on her best clothes and gone to plead for him with a high official who had fixed things in Berlin, as the documents I have seen confirm. He was doing well in his career now, but he was reticent about Hitler. Sometimes Gerda tried to ask him questions about the Führer, but he was non-commital and changed the subject.

It wasn't safe to tell your children how you felt. They might, quite innocently, say something at school, and the teachers might pass it on. My grandfather had decided to go along with a system he detested and he had to be very careful. 'I could have resisted,' he told my mother years later, 'but I thought about you and your mother.' If he had been taken to concentration camp and murdered there, there would have been no state money for them. They would have been left to the charity of relatives.

It was just before the outbreak of war, when Gerda was thirteen or fourteen, that Hitler visited Graz. She wrote: 'Everywhere I see pictures of Hitler surrounded by cheering crowds, ecstatic adoring youngsters, and I am beginning to envy those to whom he speaks.' Meanwhile, flags and banners adorned with swastikas and 'EIN VOLK, EIN REICH, EIN FÜHRER,' began to appear everywhere. It was only a year since Austria had been 'taken home into the Reich', to widespread jubilation, and now the Führer was coming in person. 'Excitement,' my mother wrote, 'grows to fever pitch.'

Graz in the Forties

And then she discovered the ecstatic truth. She had been chosen to be among those who met Hitler! She lay awake in her excitement, and was worried to see the next morning, that her mother looked pale and ill. Maybe it was the fact that the man she really regarded as Antichrist was coming to the city that filled my grandmother with horror. But she only went to lie down, so my mother was free to escape from the apartment, feeling slightly guilty, and run to the place where the schoolgirls were waiting for the Führer. 'Then,' she wrote, 'the intolerable waiting starts.'

Why did they choose my mother, the daughter of a man with a shadow in his past and a mother who had a psychological illness - which was bad news in the Nazi period? She wasn't even a member of the German Girls' League. She had joined at first, but had quickly left because she found it boring and annoying: 'Too much standing around for hours so you could form a swastika when some important person flew over,' she told me. She also said her teacher told her the family would lose their ration book if she left the League, but she did anyway, and the family did kept the ration book.
Gerda was probably chosen because she was a pretty girl with blonde hair. She looked like the Aryan ideal.

My mother's ID card from 1943. A typical
bad id document photo!

My mother described the roar of cheering as Hitler's motorcade approached them: 'Throats are choked with excitement, eyes blinded by tears of emotion; in a delirium of joy and happiness hands are raised to jubilant heights in the Hitler salute. At this instant everyone present feels that this is the moment in history to be talked about to children and grandchildren for years to come.

'Then, as in the close-up of a film, everything fades and there is only a fair-skinned face, a wing of fine dark hair falling across a broad forehead, the compelling gaze of hypnotic blue eyes, the firm grip of his hand, a flash of gold as he laughs at something I have said in reply to his question, something to do with school, I think. I am aware of my madly-pumping heart and the blood roaring in my ears when he smiles kindly, pats my cheek and moves on to the next child in line.'

Photograph: German Federal archive via Wikimedia Commons,
clipped by me. 

Afterwards, she wrote: 'the memory of the brief moment when I was actually speaking to the Führer, an event so momentous that it almost seems like a dream, makes all else pale into insignificance.'

Re-reading her account of the meeting takes me right to the heart of the German and Austrian experience of the mass Nazi event, something so powerful and adrenaline-fuelled that it would sweep you away even if you weren't one of the favoured ones. I remember seeing a TV programme about Jews who survived Nazism by hiding; one of them, in Berlin, would go to Nazi events because you were safer in a crowd, and he said he'd so often wished they had let him be part of it, it had felt so marvellous.

And Hitler had charm - though the gold tooth is less appealing. In those days it wasn't as off-putting as it would be now. Hitler was good with children. You can see that charm in some old videos - I have never liked to see it, I don't want to be beguiled by him even for a second, and yet if one doesn't see it, how can one understand his success?

I had to let myself feel it when I wrote, in Saving Rafael, about Jenny going to see Hitler with her school, and even though she and her family hated him and she was far more aware than my mother, she too was caught up in the mass experience, a communal high that was temporarily irresistible.

My mother did tell me about it, and about Hitler's intensely blue eyes, when I was a child - but it was a different kind of telling than she or anyone else had dreamed of on that day. Now Hitler had been exposed as exactly what my grandmother always knew he was, the quintessence of evil, though she had been accused of phobia and mania for doing so.


Shadow of War, by Gerda Erika Baker, Lion publishing, 1990

From Family History to Fiction

by Leslie Wilson

Following Barbara Mitchelhill's excellent and interesting blog about finding 'a special air-raid shelter', I'm also going to blog about writing an incident during an air-raid - but it is something completely different, I think.


When I was in my teens, my mother (pictured here) told me a story that I remember thus; she was in Berlin, during the war, when there was an air-raid, and she was sent to take shelter in the cellar of a hotel. The hotel caught fire, and they were trapped. Because it was very hot inside there, 'they' broke into the wine cellar to get something to drink. My mother described a scene of champagne corks popping, and people getting drunk, very quickly, because they were dehydrated, and starting to dance with each other. 'But then,' she said, 'we were dug out.'

In her memoir (Shadow of War, Gerda Erika Baker, published by Lion, 1990) she tells the story differently: here she says: 'Someone from somewhere gets wine into which we dip our handkerchiefs, which we then hold over our mouth and nose.'

Now I could suppose that she wrote down the true account, and that I had remembered it wrong. Maybe I did. On the other hand, my father gave her extensive feedback while she was writing the book, and he didn't like her to put in anything that he saw as 'unseemly.' In another place in her memoir, she appealed to me and I told her to ignore my father, but here, my feeling is that she submitted to him. She had experienced a lot of horrific stuff and his ring-fencing of what could be described may have given her a sense of safety. I don't know. One thing is sure; she never in her life went back to Berlin, and when I talked to her about my visits to the city, she just switched off. She didn't want to hear about it.

Anyway, when I saw that she hadn't written the story, I thought it was mine, though I waited for quite a long time before I decided to use it in Saving Rafael. But then I had to start working out how the whole thing might be possible. The first issue was that people didn't get dug out when buildings were on fire above them, and, having chosen the first really heavy raid on Berlin for the episode, I could nowhere find any references to fire-engines operating during air-raids. People went into blazing buildings to get as much of their stuff out as was possible, but that was different.

I had two sources which proved invaluable. One was a German dvd called Luftangriff auf Berlin (Air Attack on Berlin) and the other was a book entitled Berlin im Zweiten Weltkrieg, (Berlin in World War Two) edited by Hans Dieter Schäfer.


The dvd gave me many of the scenes that I have described in Rafael, the people pushing their belongings along blazing streets, weeping; the charred rigid corpse being brought out of a ruined building. And the useful and pragmatic air-raid precaution that must have saved many lives in the capital. A civil defence newsreel shows people making escape hatches between neighbouring cellars, then roughly walling them up again, bricks in front of a wooden gate. In the book I found an account of a couple whose apartment, in Charlottenburg, was on fire, making their way through cellars to safety using the 'Durchbruch' which means 'the breakthrough.' Having seen the dvd, it was clear to me what the Durchbruch was.

So then I had to imagine why they'd be trapped in the cellar - and indeed, why my mother might have been trapped. The building next door had to have been hit, and there had to have been enough damage to block the Durchbruch. Then the people would have to dig themselves out. That would hold everyone in there long enough for the episode with the champagne to happen. I decided to give them music, too. I'd watched the appalling Zara Leander, a Swedish actor who became the idol of Nazi film, in the schlocky Die Grosse Liebe (The Great Love) - a film whose hero, incidentally, is a nasty bully who demonstrates very effectively what kind of man was officially admired at the time. The appalling hero and heroine of this movie make each other's acquaintance properly during an air-raid, and the shelter, underneath her luxury apartment block, was the one I reproduced beneath the luxury hotel in Rafael, with sofas, lamps, and a wind-up gramophone in case the clients got bored.

It took a lot of thinking through, to match the fiction and the original story to historical probability, but it was worth it. After all, why make it up when the facts give you such wonderful images? I think that does say something about my kind of historical fiction - I could make it up, I have enough imagination - but to me, it's also a fascinating imaginative challenge to do what I have just described. And to imagine what it felt like; the smoke in your nose and throat, what it's like to be so close to death - one must feel numb and terrified by turns - and how it feels to be dancing, with the person you love (who's a Jew, though none of the people there know it) - and maybe that's the last dance and the last time you'll be in each other's arms.