Life under Hitler.(Letter to the editor)

SIR: As a German born a year after Hans Faubel, I would like to comment on "Growing Up under Hitler" (July-August 2006). Like his parents, mine sent me to a gymnasium. Unlike him, I grew up not in a provincial town but in Berlin, have Jewish ancestors, and left Germany on a Kindertransport before the war.

While my headmaster was also dispatched to premature retirement in 1933, he was not replaced for some years. In Prussia, when Hitler came to power, forty-six of the 137 senior educational administrators and 60 per cent of staff at the teacher training institutions were dismissed. The government decreed that a teacher was to be greeted by his class with "Heil Hitler". However, although my Goethe Gymnasium had Jewish students until after the Olympic Games, I recall no anti-Semitism among teachers or students. I know now that this was not so in the provinces, but I can only talk about my own school. During the weekly religious period, Protestants, Catholics and Jews trooped off to their respective teachers. Nor do I remember any of our teachers wearing a party badge. The school had a liberal reputation, which was the reason my parents had chosen it.

When we did eventually get our new headmaster, he turned out to be Goebbels' brother-in-law. But he was unable to turn his staff into true believers in a hurry. He wanted to expel me in 1937 for impertinence, but my "Ordinarius" Gruber put his foot down, spoke up on my behalf, and I collected instead an official warning from the "Herr Direktor" in the college auditorium in front of the assembled school. Form master Gruber, by the way, was an officer of the reserve with duelling scars.

Faubel discusses the Winter Aid activities, the "one-pot" Sundays, and the collection of foodstuffs within the context of the Great Depression. These things had no effect on the number of unemployed. In the self-published My Berlin Suitcase I had this to say:

 
   Occasionally one encounters the 
   view ... that Hitler had a good 
   knowledge of economic theory. 
   This is not so. All economic 
   indicators show that the trough 
   of the Depression occurred 
   when he came to power. It is not 
   difficult for a dictator who can 
   eliminate opposition to achieve 
   a measure of full employment in 
   a comparatively short time, even 
   without the assistance of an 
   upsurge of the world economy. 
   Hitler banned all trade unions 
   other than the one state-sponsored 
   union whose officials 
   were paid by the government 
   and did the Nazi party's bidding. 
   There were no unions pushing 
   for higher wages and prices 
   remained stable ... The warning 
   of a little spell in a concentration 
   camp was enough to silence 
   malcontents. He then introduced 
   the Arbeitsdienst, a year's 
   compulsory work for all school 
   leavers ... Then two years' 
   universal military service 
   became the law of the land so 
   that the age cohorts of three 
   years disappeared from the 
   unemployment queues. Strict 
   exchange controls held capital 
   captive ... Rearmament 
   invigorated industrial production 
   via the multiplier effect and 
   boosted employment. A policy 
   of rearmament is of course 
   inefficient and ineffective unless 
   the products of such rearmament 
   are put to use. They were, in 
   1939 and 1940 and 1941. But 
   did this turn out ...