Authors: Jane Thynne
Faith and Beauty
Faith and Beauty
By the same author:
A War of Flowers
The Winter Garden
Black Roses
The Weighing of the Heart
Patrimony
The Shell House
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015
A CBS company
Copyright © Thynker Ltd, 2015
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
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The right of Jane Thynne to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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Hardback ISBN: 978-1-47113-192-9
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-47113-193-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-47113-195-0
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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‘We want girls who believe unreservedly in Germany and the Führer, and will instil that faith into the hearts of their children. Then National Socialism and thus Germany itself will last for ever.’
Dr Jutta Rüdiger, head of the Faith and Beauty Society
‘In the peoples of Germany there has been given to the world a race unmixed by intermarriage with other races, a peculiar people and pure, like no one but themselves.’
Tacitus, Germania
‘Who will ever ask in three or five hundred years’ time, whether a Fräulein Muller or Schulze was unhappy?’
Heinrich Himmler
For John Carey
Contents
Berlin, April 1939
It is cold in the dense woods of the Grunewald at seven o’clock on an April morning. Even though Spring has dotted the moss with bluebells and wild daffodils and filled the tops of the pines with nesting birds, the temperature is still enough to goose-pimple the arms and cause the hardiest hiker to shiver. It’s gloomy, too, even in the glades, where the early sun filtering through the boughs gives only a greenish, watery light and leaves most of the tangled ferns and mulch in darkness. The mist hangs low between the closely packed trees, confusing any traveller unwise enough to stray from the path. The mix of wood here – pine, oak and birch – has remained unchanged for thousands of years, and wild boar forage for beech mast in the undergrowth as they have always done. Hunters search for deer and pig along dirt tracks that have been trodden since the Middle Ages. Though the city is only a few miles away to the west, the forest could be the same primaeval place it was in the Ice Age, when melt water first created the lakes surrounding Berlin’s flat sandy plain and the early German tribes emerged from the boggy swamps.
In the Grunewald, history slips by like a leaf falling to the forest floor.
Hedwig Holz squinted down the barrel of the Walther PPK pistol, released the safety lever, cocked the hammer, took aim, shut her eyes tightly, and squeezed.
Nothing happened.
She dropped the pistol with a sigh, aligned it again, keeping two fingers wrapped around the grip and a little finger curled beneath the magazine the way she had been shown, and aimed again. Despite the freezing air, she could feel a trail of sweat running down her brow and a maddening itch from her woollen vest just below her arm that she longed to scratch. What was more, in her hurry to dress that morning she had chosen the tighter of her two skirts and the waistband was now digging in uncomfortably. Yet she had to stop these trivial bodily sensations from distracting her, just as she must ignore the thrushes flitting between their nests in the high pines, the squirrels scrambling among the branches, and the whole awakening Grunewald around her. She must concentrate. Straighten her arm, feel the cold metal of the pistol burn against her palm, find the target and shoot. Even without her glasses, how hard could that be?
She aimed, shut her eyes again and fired, but although the gun worked this time, the shot veered wildly off course, ricocheting around the tranquil woods and provoking a chorus of screeches from the crows overhead. Hedwig flinched, brushed the sweaty trails of hair from her brow with the back of her sleeve and aimed again. The rustling in the trees above had broken her concentration, and her next shot went even wider, sending a flutter of birds up into the sky and provoking muffled laughs from the gaggle of girls behind her.
They had been there for an hour now, a group of twenty young women, all startlingly alike from a distance, with blue eyes, plaits of various shades of gold pinned up on their heads and white smocks with neckties over a navy serge pinafore, ankle socks and clumpy black boots. They made a curious sight as they threaded their way along the woodland path behind their leader – an Amazonian figure called Fräulein von Essen, who wore a leather jerkin and carried a satchel of ammunition and a target which she established a hundred metres away from the firing site. They could expect to be there for another hour at least, Hedwig thought despondently, until Fräulein von Essen was satisfied that every girl among them could shoot a man at a hundred paces.
Shooting was the last activity Hedwig expected when she joined the Faith and Beauty Society. Far from shooting a man, all most girls wanted was to capture one. The Glaube und Schönheit Society was, after all, the Third Reich’s elite finishing school for young women. Its girls were the pearls of the Reich and the plan was to equip them with the poise, polish and talent required to marry into the top ranks of the Nazi hierarchy.
To this end, every weekend, and several evenings in the week, a select group of girls would gather at the Faith and Beauty community house in the picturesque woods outside Neu-Babelsberg to be educated in the finer points of civilization: history, the arts, music, dancing and dinner party conversation. How to discuss Beethoven intelligently and dazzle a man with knowledge of the Franco-Prussian War. How to make tapestries and play chamber music. How to waltz, sketch a head and paint a decent landscape in watercolours. Any old Bride School or Mother Class could teach a girl to cook a herring, the wisdom went, but some German girls should be setting their sights on higher things. That was why Reichsjugendführer Baldur von Schirach, head of all Nazi youth groups, had hit on the idea of a society for the cream of the nation’s young women. Those who passed the selection procedure were the Third Reich’s Vestal Virgins, according to the introductory talk – a comparison that made Hedwig blush profusely when she heard it for the first time.
Every girl applying to the Faith and Beauty Society must be blonde and blue-eyed – the precise colour was measured against an eye chart containing sixty different shades – but there was no actual stipulation that they must also be beautiful, which was fortunate for Hedwig, whose moon-like face was earnest, rather than exquisite, and whose mousy hair could only be called blonde by a vivid stretch of the imagination. She was tall and bosomy, a born worrier with a perpetually anxious air that vanished only when a good-natured smile lit up her face, exposing her wonky teeth.
Hedwig’s appearance was in stark contrast to her only friend in the society, Lotti Franke, a slender beauty with thick, honey-gold hair, a bold gaze and full mouth. Lotti looked like a girl in a Renaissance portrait, with eyes as blue as gas flames and skin like whipped cream. Although Faith and Beauty girls were encouraged to acquire a suntan, Lotti maintained that sunlight caused wrinkles and insisted on coating herself with Nivea and remaining as pale as wax.
Despite their physical differences, the two had been close since they met on the very first day of school, with their satchels on their backs and the traditional cone of sweets in their hands. Frau Mann, the Faith and Beauty principal, never lost a chance to boast that the two girls proved the egalitarian nature of the society. In the Third Reich, elites weren’t just for the rich. The other girls might come from middle-class homes with pianos and maids, but Hedwig and Lotti were unambiguously from the wrong side of the tracks. Hedwig and her five brothers inhabited a cramped apartment in Moabit – four rooms with a cuckoo clock in the parlour, a pervasive aroma of pork fat and a bathroom they shared with another family. Lotti’s family was even poorer than Hedwig’s. It had been a great sacrifice for the Frankes to find the fees, but Lotti was an only child, and generally Lotti got what Lotti wanted. And what she really wanted was a ticket to a better life. To meet all the right people and leave working-class Berlin behind for ever.
Lotti was passionate about fashion, and as part of her Faith and Beauty course she had chosen to study costume design at the nearby Ufa film studios in Babelsberg. She had met any number of film stars – Lilian Harvey, Willy Fritsch, Brigitte Horney and Marika Rökk – and she was full of snippets of celebrity gossip. Which actor was sleeping with someone else’s wife, who had undergone cosmetic surgery, what girl had caught Reichsminister Goebbels’ eye. All the Faith and Beauty girls crowded round her. Lotti was the type who knew secrets, and even though she probably made most of them up, hearing about a film star’s drug habit was infinitely more diverting than a lecture on Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow.