Authors: Roger Moorhouse
ment was forbidden, other more imaginative activities were devised for
those who dared to transgress. In one instance, an entire dormitory of
boys was hauled out of bed and forced to stand to attention in the
an evil cradling
195
courtyard in their nightclothes. They were informed that one of their
number had evidently urinated in a stairwell, and that they would stand
there until the culprit made himself known. ‘For hours on end, we stood
there, by the flag pole in the freezing cold’, remembered Erich Neumann;
‘nobody owned up.’36
In some ways, Erich might have considered himself fortunate.
Gerhard Ritter well remembered the military character of the collec-
tive punishments that were meted out to the boys in his camp:
Punishment exercises were as aggressive and bloody-minded as in the
German military . . . Up, up, march, march! Lie down! Up! Down! Crawl!
Hop! Form into a column! Repeated hour after hour, regardless of the
weather or the conditions. The earth was frozen so solid that one’s knees
were battered black and blue. Or in the thaw, we had to throw ourselves
down in the mud and the puddles. And, at the next roll-call, we had to
present ourselves and our muddied clothes, once again, in perfect order.37
The political indoctrination could be more subtle, but was nonethe-
less effective. Numerous everyday activities – from singing around
the campfire to organised model building – were laden with political
significance, or at the very least intended to strengthen the team spirit
and collective identity of the children. As Jost Hermand recollected,
‘We participated in rituals such as hoisting the flag, marching drills
and roll-calls, calculated to serve the same goals, and intended to
wean us from all unboyish, “weak” activities and to engender in us
a sense of the grand task that awaited us.’38
In some instances, the indoctrination process was made rather more
explicit. Erich Neumann recalled that the area surrounding his camp
in Lobsens, near Posen, was considered ‘enemy territory’, because of
its predominantly Polish population. It was treated accordingly:
Breaking open the local tombs and playing football with the bones was
supposed to distance us, and harden us towards the ‘subhumans’ who
were living there. Woe betide those who did anything to a German
boy, or to those Poles who dared to stand up for themselves and gave
one of us a black eye. Then the authorities would avert their gaze, and
we would run amok. It got so bad that the Hitler Youth boys would
only ever go out in large groups.39
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berlin at war
The experiences of some evacuees were even darker. Dietrich
Schwalbe had been sent from Berlin to a KLV camp outside Lódz˙ in
occupied Poland, from where his class would take regular trips not
only into the surrounding countryside to witness the squalor in which
many Polish peasant families lived,40 but also into the city, to pass
through the Jewish ghetto. Dietrich recalled the scene:
The tram had to stop in front of the entrance, so that the gate could
be opened. Beyond, there was a long fence on both sides of the track
. . . The tram was not permitted to stop and had to proceed at a fairly
fast pace to prevent people mounting or dismounting the carriage. In
the ghetto, one saw children and many older people, mostly wearing
black and occasionally pushing two-wheeled handcarts. It all looked
pretty grim.41
It is highly unlikely that there was anything accidental about the choice
of such destinations. It is reasonable to suggest that those KLV camps
that were located in the ‘hostile’ areas of occupied Poland or Bohemia
were intended to act not only as the vanguard of German colonial
settlement, but also as nurseries of ethnic hatred and bigotry.42
Such indoctrination was no random happenstance. The KLV was
viewed by the Nazis as a grand socio-political experiment: an opportun -
ity to free German youth from the shackles of their families and forge
them into model Aryans. Though the Nazis publicly trumpeted family
life as the ideal, many senior ideologists were profoundly suspicious of
the old-fashioned, bourgeois beliefs and values – such as Christianity,
tolerance and old-style morality – that still prevailed in the German
Volk
. What better way of neutralising those undesirable influences than
to effectively remove a generation of German children from the bosom
of their families and have them raised in an environment that could be
better shaped to suit the ‘new’ values of the Nazi Party?
Far from being an afterthought, this revolutionary aspect was advo-
cated by the regime from the very start of the evacuation programme.
In Hitler’s first discussions of the KLV plan, it was stipulated that the
measure was to be accompanied by the dismissal of as much as 50 per
cent of German school-teaching staff.43 Thus, at a stroke, both parents
and teachers were effectively to be sidelined from the raising of
German children.
an evil cradling
197
As a result, many parents felt disquiet about the KLV programme.
When in the summer of 1943 the
Sicherheitsdienst
of the SS launched
an investigation to try to establish why only around 15 per cent of
Berlin’s eligible children were placed in KLV camps, the conclusions
were clear. Aside from the understandable desire to keep their chil-
dren close to them, parents were concerned by rumours of poor
treatment of the children, who were often placed in ‘hostile’ environ -
ments, and fears that medical care would be insufficient in the event
of illness or injury. Parents of girls, meanwhile, feared for the honour
of their daughters. The report presciently concluded that ‘no trust’
was expressed in the Hitler Youth, and suggested that it would be
advisable to allow the schools to have more involvement in the
KLV.44
This lack of trust was not aided by the fact that letters home could
be censored, a fact that many parents only appreciated when they
received letters from their children with blacked-out sections. One
particularly punctilious camp leader even wrote to the parents of the
children in her charge to try to explain the policy:
As you know, the children’s letters are subject to inspection. Do not
see any malicious intent in this, it is not an attempt to interfere in the
trusting relationship between parent and child. It should also not be
regarded, as one father has claimed in a complaint to the camp lead-
ership, as a consequence of raising our children in a culture of secrecy.
Rather we want to achieve the opposite. What is in the letters is, for
us, an official secret. We want to be open with the children. For this
reason, I said to the girls on the first day, that rumours and snap judge-
ments about the camp must cease, as such material could be exploited
by enemy propaganda.
. . .
So, please do not see my instruction to have outgoing post submitted
unsealed, as a form of censorship, but rather view it in an attitude
appropriate to the times and the conditions of war.45
Parents were not initially permitted to visit their children in the
KLV camps. As the information leaflet explained: ‘in view of the trans-
port difficulties resulting from the war, a visit by parents to the place
of accommodation cannot take place’.46 Yet, parental contact could
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berlin at war
not be excluded entirely, and, though it was strongly discouraged,
parents were eventually given the right to assuage their fears by
inspecting the camps themselves.
Kurt Radener’s father chose to visit his son’s camp in Elgersburg
in Thuringia, in February 1941, where young Kurt had already spent
over two months. He stayed for a number of days, inspecting every-
thing he could and spending as much time with his son as possible.
He reported back in a letter to his wife that the accommodation – a
large guest house – was adequate, though ‘awfully’ cold, with the
temperature in his own room barely reaching 4°C. Sixteen boys – all
of Kurt’s school class from Tempelhof – were living there in small
rooms under the eaves. Kurt’s room was simply furnished, with a
dresser, a dusty old wardrobe and a bed with grey covers. In the corner
was a heating duct, which gave off precious little warmth as the boilers
were only fired in the evenings. The children spent their mornings in
classes, and in the afternoons they were kept busy with ‘Hitler Youth
service’ and other activities. Kurt, his father noted, spent his free time
doing his homework or model-making. The food he found ‘modest’
but ‘palatable’, with lentil soup, roast mutton and goulash on the menu
during his visit. He concluded, on a most positive note:
My dear Klärchen
You really need not be upset about little Kurt. He is cheerful, chirpy,
has young, warm blood and really doesn’t understand your concerns.
. . . He smiles and is happy. He doesn’t look bad, though his face is
thin, but he is healthy and has not yet been il. . . .
The advantage of the evacuation lies in the comradely contact to
one another and the orderly discharge of one’s responsibilities. In this
regard, I am very pleased with the whole operation. And would there-
fore like for him to remain in the KLV camp.47
It is unlikely that young Kurt was terribly impressed by his father’s
arrival. Often, such visits could be the trigger for bullying, with the
victim immediately, and sometimes indelibly, labelled a mummy’s boy
or a weakling. Jost Hermand was initially delighted to see his mother,
who turned up at his camp in occupied Poland in the spring of 1941.
His joy did not last long:
an evil cradling
199
This invasion of our KLV world was very embarrassing for me because
it was immediately interpreted by the other boys as a sign of my depend-
ency and weakness. As a result, I fell back at least two rungs on the
ladder . . . After a few days, I managed to persuade her to leave so that
the other boys would stop making fun of me.48
Bullying was endemic in the KLV camps. As Jost Hermand remem-
bered, his dormitory had a firmly established pecking order, which
was maintained by brute force. Whatever the teachers knew of this,
he is certain that they would have done little to combat it. ‘As fascist
educators’, he recalled, they were ‘committed to the principles of
“toughening-up” and the selection of the fittest.’49 Sex, too, appears to
have played a role in the maintenance of the hierarchy in the dormitory.
Jost Hermand recalled that: ‘everybody knew exactly . . . which one of
the boys he had to satisfy manually at night and who had to satisfy him’.50
In most instances, sexual activity took on a more benign aspect. As
one KLV veteran put it, the camp was where he ‘made [him]self
acquainted with onanism’.51 Yet, beyond the confines of the dormitory,
the evacuation also served to facilitate what for many was the first
unsupervised contact with the opposite sex. For some, this sexual
awakening was the primary memory of their KLV experience, but it
was often not seen in a positive light. Jost Hermand was damning:
Without any mental or cultural stimulation, without the mediation of
a social identity, without instruction in the biological function of the
pleasurable physical sensations, we were allowed to regress into a prim-
itive physicality [in which] we were increasingly preoccupied with our
bodies:
Völkerball
, field exercises, washing, and the constant manipu la-
tion of our genitalia . . .
When we arrived at Lichtenberg station on 10 August, we were not
the same boys who – confused and curious – had left for the unknown
east nine months earlier. Some of the boys, especially those from the
‘good’ upper-middle-class families, were belatedly ashamed of the lasciv-
iousness unleashed in the camp, and they resolved from now on to live
more ascetic lives. Even the tougher boys had some guilt feelings.52
Yet, for many – perhaps the majority – the KLV was, on balance,
a positive experience, a healthy blast of independence, adventure and
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berlin at war
self-reliance. For Werner Lenz, who had grown up in a working-class
family in the inner-city district of Friedrichshain, it presented a tremen-
dous opportunity to take part in activities – skiing, hiking and hill
walking – that were previously unknown to him.53 Gerhard Ritter, too,
viewed the experience very positively. ‘Only a decade or so later’, he
recalled, ‘did I comprehend all the things that the KLV had given me
and had taught me: the power of a sense of community, toughening
up, self-confidence, one’s physical capabilities, stamina, an under-
standing of one’s fellow man and a love of nature.’54
For many of that generation, taking part in the KLV would not be
the only period that they would spend away from home. Many of them
would subsequently be sent on a number of other ‘actions’ – voluntary
and involuntary – ranging from helping with the harvest in the coun-