“Of course. Yes.” I nod hopefully, but I hear my own voice, a little uncertain as I speak. “Surely it will…. I do hope for the best.”
And now we are saying goodby. Mrs. M. packs the photographs in the leather case. She holds a frame, waving to me with her other hand. “Auf Wiedersehen,” she calls, “Auf Wiedersehen … in freedom!”
“Yes,” I answer from the door, “Viel Glück — and may it be soon!”
* * *
Three weeks later I read that a physician and his wife have been arrested. Dr. M. of Munich has been placed in the concentration camp at Dachau; Mrs. M., in a Munich prison. They have often made derogatory remarks, it had been reported, about the construction program of the National Socialist regime. The son of this pair, Franz M., aged fourteen months — the paragraph concludes — has been committed to the State Children’s Home. In this manner, it is to be hoped, it may still be possible to make a good National Socialist out of the boy.
HEIL
T HE LIFE OF EVERY HUMAN being in Germany has been fundamentally changed since Adolf Hitler became Chancellor. When German democracy gave way to Nazi dictatorship, the upheaval was as drastic to the private life of the individual as it was to the State. Before February, 1933, the German citizen thought of himself as a father, or a Protestant, or a florist, or a citizen of the world, or a pacifist, or a Berliner. Now he is forced to recognize that above all he is a National Socialist.
The Führer’s National Socialist Weltanschauung has to be gospel for every German citizen; his plans, and even the means to those ends, are to be unquestioningly revered.
No German group was more stringently affected by the changes of the dictatorship than the children. An adult German must be first a National Socialist, but he can — by now — be, in the second place, a shopkeeper or a manufacturer, without his shop or factory belonging to the State; but the German child is a Nazi child, and nothing else.
He attends a Nazi school; he belongs to a Nazi youth organization; the movies he is allowed to see are Nazi films. His whole life, without any reservation, belongs to the Nazi State.