Children in Nazi Germany

When I was a child, my mother bought us a German book called The Bridge, (there was a film too) a factually based story of a group of young lads who were sent out to hold a bridge against the British. They did fight, and only one of them survived.

My first novel for adults was about Nazi Germany, and when I was doing the research I was appalled to read that lads of as young as twelve were drafted into the Home Guard (Volkssturm) in the last days of the war. Some of these cracked in the horrors of the last battle in Berlin and were shot as deserters by the SS when they cried to go home.

Officially, the age remained sixteen, as Hanno’s mother pointed out to Becker, but I’ve seen so many reports by observers that younger children were fighting that I decided the rules must have been ignored by desperate Volkssturm commandants. I certainly have pictures of lads surrendering who look younger than sixteen. Mind, maybe some of them even volunteered or turned up to fight. My grandfather seems to have falsified his age and gone to the First World War when he was only fourteen.

I wrote Kummersdorf for my younger daughter, Jo, who was fourteen when I started. She’s now twenty-two. That’s how long it’s taken me. My second reason for writing it was to try and understand my own mother’s experience. She’d grown up in an environment that was totally different from the one I grew up in. I wanted to think what it was like to grow up in a totalitarian society where you had to be careful what you said, where you couldn’t easily find out a version of events that was different from the official one.

I remember talking to a man in Munich who’d been one of those Volkssturm lads. He’d been sent out to hold a position in the West, but not much happened, so all the boys went home. He was lucky. But, since we were waiting in a queue for an exhibition called ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht’, I asked him whether he’d known about the Holocaust.

Instead of saying ‘no,’ as so many Germans of that generation do, he said: ‘It was subliminal. You knew but you didn’t put it into words, because it was dangerous to put it into words, and anyway, you didn’t know how.’ This echoed what I was told by a friend who’d grown up in Communist Czechoslovakia, whose father had been persecuted during that period. She said: ‘There weren’t the words to say that you weren’t happy with everything.’

Of course, older people did have the words, but a lad like Hanno was only two when Hitler came to power. He couldn’t remember anything different. I tried to reflect that in the book, the way Hanno really knows, but couldn’t understand, about the slaughter in the East. And, of course, values were turned on their heads, so that a boy who didn’t want to help torment an elderly Jewish man on the street would feel ashamed of himself. Adults didn’t explain to children what was going on, in case they talked out of turn. Some children did repeat criticisms their parents had made of Nazism, or ‘defeatist remarks’, and some of the parents ended up in concentration camp as a result.

Effi is different, of course, because of her background. As the daughter of an emigré, she knows what the score is. She’s a child who’s had to grow up too quickly in order to survive. Luckily for her she’s always had people around who loved her.

Effis’ experience of school is based on things my mother told me. A friend who was a child in Danzig during the war told me about the teachers saying: ‘Children, if you hear your parents saying that we won’t win the war, you must contradict them.’

For an adult book about youth in Nazi Germany, I recommend:
Cat and Mouse, by Günther Grass, published by Minerva.