The German War (24 page)

Full of the hyper-aestheticism of boys just out of grammar school, Hans Albring and Eugen Altrogge were both on a kind of cultural pilgrimage. Eugen waxed lyrical about the interplay of Romanesque and Gothic styles he found in Austria, the one so solid and grounded, the other, it seemed to him, restless and expressing the ‘Faust-like’ strivings of men. Hans agreed, far less impressed by the exterior architecture of the Romanesque cathedrals of Poitiers and Rouen. Only Chartres matched his craving for soaring spires: he was so excited when their truck drove through the city in the middle of the night that he rummaged in his pack so that he could compare the reproduction of a drawing with the real cathedral, its twin towers appearing ‘far more slender and far higher’ in the moonlight. His was a particularly German gaze, informed by the late-Gothic spires of Cologne and Strasbourg, which was why the older Romanesque towers of Rouen and Poitiers seemed disappointingly squat by comparison. This was the verticality, the striving to reach the heavens, which had so overwhelmed the young Goethe when he first saw Strasbourg’s west facade and made him single it out as the epitome of ‘German architecture’.
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Like Goethe, the young photographer Liselotte Purper thought the cathedral looked best as the slanting evening light fell on its west end. While the houses hemming in the square ‘slowly sank into shadow’, she jotted in her travel diary, all the Gothic ornaments of the arches, towers and statues were revealed. She had a special reason to visit Strasbourg in September 1940. In 1919, when she was not yet seven, her parents had been expelled from the city along with other ‘Reich Germans’. It was her first visit back and, as she tramped the winding streets with her parents’ old map, she felt the pull of the ‘very special magic’ of the half-timbered houses with their brightly painted wooden shutters. Criss-crossing the bridges over the canal and walking under the plane trees and chestnuts along the bank of the river Ill, she felt she had finally come home. Strasbourg, Colmar and the villages of Alsace were welcomed back into the Reich after this 1940 victory, becoming part of a joint Gau with Baden. Special exhibitions celebrated their folk traditions and contribution to German culture. Whenever the Alsatians seemed slow to embrace their new patriotic duties, the Nazi authorities responded with further educational measures, explaining their true national identity to them once again. The Jews, meanwhile, were summarily expelled.
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Liselotte’s next stop was the Hotel Wartheland in Wielún. She came at the start of October 1940 to photograph the work of colonisation going on in these other newly ‘recovered’ territories in the east. In the Wartheland, the task was more demanding than in Alsace, and Liselotte immediately noticed the large numbers of Jews. She considered them ‘a traffic hazard’, because they were forced to walk on the street rather than the pavement. Later that month, Jews in this new Gau were ordered to doff their caps in the presence of any German in uniform and some officials started promenading with riding crops and dog whips to enforce the new code. The previous December, the SS Resettlement Office had begun expelling the Jews, clearing the western – formerly Prussian – part of the Wartheland entirely, but winter coal shortages curtailed this operation. In the most important city in the eastern Wartheland, Łód
, the Jews were herded into a provisional ghetto instead, making this the first ghetto within the Reich’s borders.
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Liselotte Purper made a trip to Litzmannstadt – as Łód
had been renamed, in honour of the German general who conquered it in 1915 – and took photographs of Jews for her own private collection. The ghetto became a popular subject and similar photos of ‘Germany’s sixth largest city’ taken by another female photo-journalist, Erika Schmachtenberger, were published in the
Münchner Illustrierte.
One of Hitler’s personal photographers, Hugo Jaeger, rushed to take colour slides of the Jews in the Kutno ghetto, creating a mixture of ‘ethnographic’ pictures of dishevelled shanty-dwellers and full-length portraits of beautiful young women. But, in October 1940, Liselotte Purper’s commission in the Wartheland was a different one.
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The new Gau became a model of colonial resettlement, or ‘re-Germanisation’. Eventually, 619,000 Polish citizens were ‘resettled’ into the rump Polish territory of the ‘General Government’ ruled by Hans Frank in order to make way for Germans. The great majority – some 435,000 – came from the Wartheland, where the new Gauleiter, Arthur Greiser, enthusiastically shared Himmler’s vision of radical colonial settlement. In the winter of 1939–40, the deportees were often forced on to the trains without adequate food, water or clothing. Because many were Jews, the SS and police chief of the Lublin district, Odilo Globo
nik, proposed in February 1940 that their journeys should be deliberately slowed down and they ‘should be allowed to starve’. When the train doors were pulled open at Cracow, D
bica and Sandomierz, station staff discovered entire goods wagons in which children and their mothers had frozen to death.
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Liselotte Purper was there to document and celebrate the other side of this resettlement action, the incoming Germans. The final partition lines agreed with the Soviets in October 1939 included stipulations for the orderly transfer of German minorities. They came from Volhynia in eastern Poland, where many could not speak German, and they came from the Baltic states, where 60,000 ethnic Germans were uprooted, ending a history of proud independence stretching back 700 years. Faced with the prospect of Soviet occupation, they agreed to be sent ‘home into the Reich’, as the German government called it: Liselotte thought they complained too much and were insufficiently grateful. She was more impressed by the simple farming folk from the Polish–Ukrainian borderlands of Volhynia and Galicia: ‘The happiness at our visit shone in all their faces.’ Despite having spent months festering in temporary German camps, while they waited for homes, farms and businesses to be cleared for them, they struck her as truly grateful. All they wanted, she thought, was to start tilling their own land ‘so that they can give the German people bread’.
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In November 1940, Liselotte travelled on to document the resettlement of ethnic Romanian Germans from Bessarabia, Bukovina and Dobruja. Joining the SS Resettlement Commission, Liselotte visited their villages near the Black Sea port of Constantia, with their tidy whitewashed houses, talking to families about their expectations as they packed their belongings. She accompanied them on the Danube steamer through the gorge and cataracts of the Iron Gates. But she did not socialise with them. Instead, the fear of catching fleas from the ‘still not disinfected’ settlers features prominently in her diary, and she became obsessed with hygiene, keeping a scorecard for the record catch of fleas on board ship: it stood at twenty in ten minutes. These minor difficulties made her feel, at the end of the journey, like a ‘shining victor’ returned from the battlefield. Both her private diary and her professional photography depict the settlers as grateful but passive recipients of the well-organised charity of Germans from the ‘old’ Reich.

In Belgrade, Liselotte was joined by her close friend, Margot Monnier. ‘Hada’, as Liselotte invariably called her in a play on her maiden name, enjoyed their expeditions so much that she often acted as Liselotte’s photographic assistant, although she actually occupied a position as head of the photographic section of the German Women’s Organisation – and as the younger sister of Eugen Hadamovsky, the head of German radio – where she could act as Liselotte’s patron. The two young women knew how to have fun, finding time to take a side trip to go shopping in Budapest. In Belgrade, the head of the local SS Resettlement Commission turned out to be an old family friend, who took Liselotte on a tour of the city’s nightlife. These two elegant and witty young women had the knack of persuading men to help them, whether it was passes from the Romanians, assistance from a German railway conductor with smuggling their purchases back into the Reich, or asking chivalrous, if rather dull, SS officers to accompany them on a night-time excursion to the castle in Budapest. After enjoying the company of the Austrian captain and officers on the steamer, they took the train to Vienna, where Liselotte and Hada ceremonially drowned the ‘last flea’.
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In the Wartheland, 28-year-old Liselotte had been hugely impressed by the female student volunteers from Germany and the girls helping the settlers as part of their compulsory Reich Labour Service. It was they who winkled out Poles returning to their former farms and sent them packing. The 18-year-old girls on Labour Service were frequently deployed in equal numbers alongside SS men in the resettlement actions. Some of them would go to the railway stations to welcome the German settlers, others would assist the SS in evicting Poles and then supervise Polish women who were forced to clean up and leave their homes spick and span for the new owners. Describing her deployment for an audience back home, a student volunteer reflected on her own reaction to watching the SS herd Polish villagers into a shed during one such eviction:

Sympathy with these creatures? – No, at most I felt quietly appalled that such people exist, people who are in their very being so infinitely alien and incomprehensible to us that there is no way to reach them. For the first time in our lives people whose life or death is a matter of indifference.

For Poles, the only way to secure their property rights was to be classified as ‘Germans’ on the new ‘National List’ which was being compiled in the annexed territories. Being registered as German also automatically entitled families to higher levels of rations, better education and improved employment prospects. Left to enact this programme of ‘Re-Germanisation’ in their own manner, other regions did not all follow Greiser’s hard line by handing over racial screening to the SS, preferring to maintain the skilled workforce crucial to the industrial heartland of Upper Silesia. Here virtually the entire population was reclassified as German. Eastern Pomerania did likewise, while in Danzig–West Prussia, the scene of the greatest violence against Poles by ethnic German militias in 1939, most of the population were classified as either German or as possessing the ‘necessary qualities to become full members of the German national community’. It would all depend on how they performed. As in Alsace, one of the new tests for men was service in the Wehrmacht.
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