husband, Camille Desmoulins, rocking herself to and fro on the wooden steps to the guillotine behind her, singing:
Dear cradle, who lulled my Camille to sleep, smothering him beneath your roses
Death-bell, who sang him to his grave with your sweet tongue.
Hundreds of thousands are all
The uncounted who under the blade fall.
63
With the audience facing the spectacle of the guillotine and the impending slaughter of an entire generation in terror and revolutionary war, the final curtain fell. Before the standing ovations began, there was a long and shocked silence. 64
2
Closing Ranks
In September 1939, August Töpperwien was impressed by the ‘machinelike precision’ with which the country went on to a war footing. In fact, many of the measures he marvelled at depended on a great deal of improvisation. Töpperwien’s wife Gretel went off to the Solingen shops to buy extra plates and spoons to help feed the evacuees from the Saarland. To clear the western border region with France of civilians, special trains were laid on for those without transport. They were met at the stations by teenage girls and boys from the League of German Girls (BDM), and Hitler Youth, served soup at makeshift railway canteens by the National Socialist People’s Welfare and accommodated in school buildings which had just served as military assembly points. The success of the operation depended on goodwill. 1
Farmers trekked eastwards out of the Saar region. Their carts piled high with bedding and leading their horses and livestock, they brought chaos to the streets and prompted a spontaneous outpouring of solidarity. In the Hessian village of Altenburschla, Ernst Guicking’s father welcomed a mother and her four young children into their farmhouse. With Ernst himself stationed on the Saarland front, his family farm saw this as a direct kind of exchange: ‘We are happy to do everything we can, if only you can return to us soon. Let God grant that.’ But his tolerance, if not his patriotism, had clear limits. When the evacuees finally returned home two months later, it came none too soon for the old man: ‘In the long run we couldn’t have kept them here. Just think of how dreadful the beds looked. We couldn’t cope because they were very unclean.’ While the hosts were blaming the evacuees for infesting villages with lice, the Catholic Church was complaining that there was no place for devout Saarlanders to worship in Protestant Thuringia. By early November the Security Police estimated that up to 80 per cent of the evacuees were so unhappy with their reception that they had either tried to make their own arrangements or turned around and gone home again. 2
Compared to the dislocations which were still to come, the Saarland evacuation was small-scale and, if not forgotten, at least soon overlaid by other experiences of war. Yet the dynamics at work were also a foretaste of what was to come. There was a genuine upsurge of patriotic goodwill, which helped mobilise teenage volunteers, like the BDM girls who turned out at railway stations in the night to provide hot drinks, and which enabled individual hosts to open their doors to bedraggled and needy strangers. This was exactly the kind of patriotism the Nazis had aimed to foster before the war through Hot Pot Sundays where middle-class professionals and managers ate from the same pot of stew along with their workers, or by taking youth groups to different parts of the Reich so as to overcome regional antagonisms and prejudices. Bolstered by references to the German ‘national community’ formed in the crucible of the previous war, such spontaneous national solidarity was seen as a kind of test of the nation’s ability to meet this new challenge through purposeful and united action. 3
It was a test that German society never really passed. There was no lack of patriotic commitment or understanding of the justice of the German cause. The flaw lay in the very notion that a few ritual
Dear cradle, who lulled my Camille to sleep, smothering him beneath your roses
Death-bell, who sang him to his grave with your sweet tongue.
Hundreds of thousands are all
The uncounted who under the blade fall.
63
With the audience facing the spectacle of the guillotine and the impending slaughter of an entire generation in terror and revolutionary war, the final curtain fell. Before the standing ovations began, there was a long and shocked silence. 64
2
Closing Ranks
In September 1939, August Töpperwien was impressed by the ‘machinelike precision’ with which the country went on to a war footing. In fact, many of the measures he marvelled at depended on a great deal of improvisation. Töpperwien’s wife Gretel went off to the Solingen shops to buy extra plates and spoons to help feed the evacuees from the Saarland. To clear the western border region with France of civilians, special trains were laid on for those without transport. They were met at the stations by teenage girls and boys from the League of German Girls (BDM), and Hitler Youth, served soup at makeshift railway canteens by the National Socialist People’s Welfare and accommodated in school buildings which had just served as military assembly points. The success of the operation depended on goodwill. 1
Farmers trekked eastwards out of the Saar region. Their carts piled high with bedding and leading their horses and livestock, they brought chaos to the streets and prompted a spontaneous outpouring of solidarity. In the Hessian village of Altenburschla, Ernst Guicking’s father welcomed a mother and her four young children into their farmhouse. With Ernst himself stationed on the Saarland front, his family farm saw this as a direct kind of exchange: ‘We are happy to do everything we can, if only you can return to us soon. Let God grant that.’ But his tolerance, if not his patriotism, had clear limits. When the evacuees finally returned home two months later, it came none too soon for the old man: ‘In the long run we couldn’t have kept them here. Just think of how dreadful the beds looked. We couldn’t cope because they were very unclean.’ While the hosts were blaming the evacuees for infesting villages with lice, the Catholic Church was complaining that there was no place for devout Saarlanders to worship in Protestant Thuringia. By early November the Security Police estimated that up to 80 per cent of the evacuees were so unhappy with their reception that they had either tried to make their own arrangements or turned around and gone home again. 2
Compared to the dislocations which were still to come, the Saarland evacuation was small-scale and, if not forgotten, at least soon overlaid by other experiences of war. Yet the dynamics at work were also a foretaste of what was to come. There was a genuine upsurge of patriotic goodwill, which helped mobilise teenage volunteers, like the BDM girls who turned out at railway stations in the night to provide hot drinks, and which enabled individual hosts to open their doors to bedraggled and needy strangers. This was exactly the kind of patriotism the Nazis had aimed to foster before the war through Hot Pot Sundays where middle-class professionals and managers ate from the same pot of stew along with their workers, or by taking youth groups to different parts of the Reich so as to overcome regional antagonisms and prejudices. Bolstered by references to the German ‘national community’ formed in the crucible of the previous war, such spontaneous national solidarity was seen as a kind of test of the nation’s ability to meet this new challenge through purposeful and united action. 3
It was a test that German society never really passed. There was no lack of patriotic commitment or understanding of the justice of the German cause. The flaw lay in the very notion that a few ritual
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