Growing up under Hitler: an interview with Hans Faubel.(Interview)

HANS FAUBEL emigrated from Germany to Australia with his wife in 1960. He worked as an engineer in the Latrobe Valley for the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, and died in 2005. In an interview with Robert Murray he reflected on the Germany in which he grew up in the 1930s and the war years that followed. This is an edited version of the transcript.

I WAS BORN IN 1921 in a small spa town near Wittenberg, where Luther made his mark. My father started as a surveyor, but he developed and became a civil engineer and town planner. He was born in the same town, where most of his family lived, so it was quite a sheltered existence, which lasted until 1928. My father had very conservative parents--his father had a nursery and a small farm--but strangely enough he developed into something of a radical. He definitely didn't fit the mould in his own family. My father's uncles went to school with General Mackensen, who served during the First World War with Hindenburg. They were the people he was exposed to, but somehow he just didn't share their outlook.

By 1928, it was pretty hard to get work in the small town where we were living, and he managed to get a job at Leipzig, a city in the centre of Germany, later East Germany. It had about 600,000 citizens and big book, technical and trade fairs. He managed to get accommodation for my mother and me, just a room and a half. Accommodation was very scarce in Germany at that time, and it took years before you could get some form of flat. Most people were living in flats; only a few had their own houses.

That one and a half rooms wasn't much for three people, but later, by 1934, we took over the whole flat because the people who owned it, who'd allocated a portion to us, couldn't pay properly. So my father finished up getting that flat, which had three rooms, a kitchen and a small bathroom.

At that time--1928 to 1931--there were close to 6 million unemployed in Germany, out of a population of 60 million, which is an enormous percentage when you consider all the family members affected by it. It's not just a matter of the 6 million who were unemployed.

Robert Murray. It's more like 20 million people affected by it?

Twenty million affected by it! The effect of that depression was enormous political unrest and conflict of all kinds. At that time, Leipzig would have been divided into about one third leaning towards the Social Democrats, a lower percentage to the National, Catholic Centre and liberal parties, about 25 to 30 per cent leaning towards the Nazi Party, and a strong percentage towards the Communist Party. By 1930 I was nine, old enough to observe a lot of details.