The capital of the Reich, he thought, must be gloomier than ever. Fritz had heard that the Gestapo had veritable carte blanche to eliminate whoever it wanted with no legal accountability. Patrols would harass passersby on the slightest pretext. Building managers were now in service to the party, ready to denounce the slightest suspect behavior. Fritz remembered the day in 1937 when he had had the misfortune to pass a Nazi leader’s car on a broad Berlin avenue. The eminent figure’s chauffeur (was it Göring, he wondered?) had given him a threatening look and followed him for a while, as if to record his license plate. Fritz anxiously anticipated a summons from the Gestapo. Nothing had happened in the end, but he had slept badly for two weeks.
Even if the war was far from popular, a majority of Germans remained in favor of Hitler and thought that he “was going to come through it,” as always. How, he wondered, could millions of people see the approaching catastrophe without reacting? How could they accept the curfew and the obligatory food and clothing ration cards? Fritz told himself that it was probably already too late—military hostilities were right around the corner, and public opinion would unite behind the regime out of a patriotic reflex.
The ministry to which Fritz was returning was, worst of all, under Ribbentrop—the man who had just signed a pact with Moscow after having denounced for years “the Russians, our sworn enemies.” Fritz had never seen him but had a fairly clear idea of him. The foreign minister had earned the nickname “Ribbensnob” since he had purchased the right to put a “von” before his surname. He was one of the most mediocre leaders of the regime, known for his pathological obsequiousness toward the führer and his brutality to his subordinates. It seemed that the atmosphere in the Wilhelmstrasse offices had seriously deteriorated in the last two years. Everyone was said to be at the mercy of outbursts of anger from the minister, who insulted his interlocutors, not hesitating to call them “idiots” or “wimps.” Generally speaking, Ribbentrop—a former sparkling-wine merchant—detested most career diplomats. He wanted to make the Foreign Ministry into a “powerful National Socialist instrument at the service of the Führer,” and to do this he had taken control of the ministry by placing reliable men in the key positions. Half of the five hundred high officials in the ministry were already members of the party, and one in ten belonged to the SS.
The shock waves of events in Germany had spread as far as South Africa. In the German consulate in Cape Town, Fritz Kolbe had observed a gradual deterioration of the climate. Afrikaner nationalism seemed to have grown wings thanks to Hitler, and the atmosphere had become electric. The Afrikaners imitated fascist spectacles commemorating their own history. One evening in the fall of 1938, on leaving the consulate, Fritz had encountered a small troop of Grey Shirts, a fascist league modeled on the SA. The young men had greeted him with a Hitler salute. Fritz had pretended to have forgotten something in the building in order to avoid having to talk to them.
The militants of the Afrikaner cause, as always, had chosen the German camp out of hatred for the British. This had already taken place during the Boer War in 1899, and again in 1914. Since Hitler’s accession to power, the descendants of Dutch immigrants thought that once again the fate of the Afrikaner volk was in the hands of Germany and more or less openly praised all the victories of the Reich in Europe.
Fritz had seen all kinds at the consulate. Sometimes they had talked to him as though he were a personal representative of the führer. The most moderate of his visitors argued in favor of South African neutrality: “After all, Hitler is no threat to our interests,” he often heard. Others openly wanted an alliance with the Reich and proposed returning the colony of South-West Africa to Germany in order to seal this agreement in the name of peoples oppressed by “British imperialism.”
The worst had come when Fritz had had to organize a visit to Cape Town by an NSDAP delegation that had come from Berlin to meet with South African counterparts from the New Order (a movement founded by Oswald Pirow), who defended a “Christian nationalist” ideology based on the ideals of blood and soil. This had happened early in 1939. Fritz had been unable to get out of participating in an evening “among comrades” at the city’s German club. The reception, naturally accompanied by large quantities of German beer, had featured various songs drawn from the Nazi repertory.
Lüderitz, October 22, 1939
Lüderitz, a port of South-West Africa, was named for a tobacco merchant from Bremen who had set up a trading post there toward the end of the nineteenth century. Liners sailing to Europe called there twenty-four hours after leaving Cape Town. From the deck that morning, Fritz watched the swarm of activity on the pier: herds of sheep, horses, and the transport of freight—impressive quantities of bales of wool, rifles, agricultural equipment, cases of schnapps. Europe was distant, but German was spoken here, and the architecture as well displayed its clearly German origins.
The former colony of the Reich, half desert, had maintained majority German-speaking enclaves like Lüderitz and Swakopmund, populated by Catholic missionaries from the Rhineland, merchants from the Baltic Sea coast, and transplanted German farmers. The Nazis were naturally interested in this region, which they contemplated reconnecting to the Reich in the context of a vast colonial project. Berlin had already appointed the “shadow governors” of the future African empire. The agitation of the Afrikaners in South Africa was vigorously encouraged by certain German circles in the Südwest. Toward the mid-1930s, NSDAP cells had been set up throughout the territory. Swastika flags had been raised here and there. Leaders of the Hitler Youth had come from the Reich with the intention of training overseas imitators. Fritz knew by reputation the German consul general at Windhoek, Walter Lierau, who had arrived in 1939: he was the first diplomat of the Foreign Ministry to have been a member of the SS.
Fritz thought about his son; this was the region where little Peter was going to live during his father’s absence, with his adopted family. The child was to live with Otto and Suzi Lohff, a German couple who lived in the town of Keetmanshoop, 250 kilometers in the interior, who were soon to move to Swakopmund, very close to another port, Walvis Bay. Otto Lohff worked for the Metje and Ziegler company, one of the largest German firms in South-West Africa, importers of supplies for construction and public works. Because the local economy needed him, he had not been interned by the South African authorities.
Otto Lohff had rather nationalistic opinions, but he was not a Nazi. Fritz was especially close to Suzi (nicknamed Ui), Otto’s wife; in fact, she had become his mistress. After separating from his wife, Fritz had lived in the small boarding house in Cape Town run by Ui’s mother, Frau Kahlke. She thought of herself almost as little Peter’s grandmother. Fritz found “granny Kahlke” marvelous, knowing everything about his relationship with her daughter and never committing the slightest indiscretion in front of the deceived husband. As a result, he had forgiven her a good deal, starting with her naïve admiration of Hitler (“She has not set foot in Germany since 1914,” he said to himself, “she cannot understand what is happening”). Fritz had promised Ui that he would come for her after the war and take her to live in Germany.
For now, he returned to Berlin alone, because he wanted to spare his son the misfortunes of war and allow him to escape from privation and hunger, of which he still had terrible memories from his experience in Berlin after 1918. Nor did he have any intention of entrusting him to the schoolmasters of the Nazi regime. He knew that the Hitler Youth now called the shots in classrooms. There was no question of leaving Peter in the hands of some brigade, nor any question of seeing him forcibly enlisted in the “Reich labor force” to repair roads or cut wood in the forest.