I came across this expression, drawn from the glossary of pretentiousness, on the Internet. On the Web site where contemporary reports were posted in their original wording, salutes were not “given” with the raised right hand, in the manner customary at the time and borrowed from the Italian Fascists; no, on all the railroad platforms and at all the observances, people gathered to “present” the final salute; and for that reason at the site www.blutzeuge.de the dead man was memorialized not only with quotations from the Führers speech and descriptions of the service in Schwerins festival hall, but also with the German salute, “presented” from that newest dimension known as cyberspace. Only then could the Comrades of Schwerin move on to mention Beethoven's Eroica symphony, struck up by the local orchestra
Yet a carping voice chimed in to challenge this fatuous nonsense being disseminated to the entire world A chatter corrected the report in the Völkischer Beobachter that a Wehrmacht detachment had saluted the war hero Wilhelm Gustloff; he pointed out that because of his weak lungs the honoree had not qualified to participate in the Great War, to demonstrate his courage at the front, and to earn an Iron Cross, whether first or second class
He seemed pedantic, this lone adversary disrupting the virtual solemnities He also pointed out that in his speech Mecklenburgs Gauleiter Hildebrandt had failed to mention the “nationalist-Bolshevist influence” Gregor Strasser had exercised over the martyr One might have expected that the Gauleiter, a onetime farmhand who had hated the big landowners since childhood and had therefore hoped that after the Führers seizure of power the gentry's estates would be systematically dismantled, would use the occasion to salvage the murdered Strassers honor, at least by implication This was the general tenor of the chatters kvetching He had a comeback for everything, which gave rise to wrangling in the chat room.
Back on the Web site, the funeral procession got under way, untroubled by the possible outcome of the debate The scene was brought to life by pictures In variable weather it wound its way from the festival hall down Gutenbergstrasse and Wismarsche Strasse, then by way of Totendamm and along Wallstrasse to the crematorium. Mounted on a gun carriage, the coffin traversed the distance of four kilometers, passing through an aisle of honor, until it was unloaded, to the roll of drums, for the purpose of incineration, and, after receiving a pastor's blessing, was slid down a shaft into the flames. A command rang out, and the flags were dipped on either side of the vanishing coffin Columns of soldiers standing at attention struck up Uhland's song about the dead comrade and extended their right arms to present the very last salute The Wehrmacht detachment again fired salvos in honor of a combat veteran who, as has already been brought to light, did not experience trench warfare, and thus was spared all the shelling, or, as Ernst Junger dubbed it in his eponymous war diary, the “hail of steel “ Ah, if only he had been at Verdun, and had bit the dust in a shell crater when the time was right'
Having grown up in the town of the seven lakes, I know the spot where the urn was later buried in a concrete foundation on the southern shore of Lake Schwerin On top was placed a four-meter-high piece of granite, whose chiseled cuneiform inscription waxed eloquent. Together with the gravestones of other early members of the movement, it formed the memorial grove around a hall of honor built for the occasion I don't recall, but I'm sure Mother knows exactly when in the postwar period they cleared away everything that might have reminded the townspeople of the martyr — and not only on orders from the Soviet occupying power. But my networked nemesis insisted that a new monument should be erected in the same location; he persisted in calling Schwerin the “Wilhelm Gustloff city.”
All past, gone with the wind! Who still recalls the name of the leader of the German Labor Front? Along with Hitler, those whom people mention nowadays as all-powerful are Goebbels, Goring, Hess. On a television quiz show, if questions came up about Himmler or Eichmann, some contestants might have heard of them, but most would draw a total historical blank, and with a little smirk the perky quizmaster would tally up the loss of so-and-so many thousands in prize money.
But who today, besides my Webmaster, bouncing around in the Net, knows anything about Robert Ley? Yet it was he who dissolved all the labor unions right after the takeover, emptied their coffers, dispatched squads to confiscate everything at their headquarters, and forced all their members, who numbered in the millions, to join the German Labor Front. It was he, this moon face with a cowlick, who had the inspiration to require all state employees, then all teachers and pupils, and finally the workers in all industries to use “Heil Hitler” as their daily greeting. And it was he who came up with the idea of organizing the way workers and white-collar employees spent their holidays. He provided inexpensive trips to the Bavarian Alps and the Erzgebirge, to the North Sea and Baltic coasts, and, last but not least, ocean cruises of shorter or longer duration — all under the motto of “Strength through Joy.”
Clearly a man who got things done, for all these measures were carried out with lightning speed and without delay, while other things were happening at the same time and the concentration camps were filling, batch after batch. Early in '34 Ley chartered the passenger ship Monte Olivia and the four-thousand-ton steamer Dresden for his planned Strength through Joy fleet. Together these ships could accommodate just about three thousand passengers. But the Dresden was on only its eighth ocean cruise, intended to put the beauty of the Norwegian fjords on display again, when it encountered an underwater granite ledge in the Karmsund that tore a thirty-meter gash in the ship's hull, whereupon the Dresden began to sink. Although all the passengers were saved, except for two women who died of heart failure, the loss of the ship threatened to scuttle the entire Strength through Joy project.
But Ley would have none of that. A week later he chartered four more passenger ships and now had at his disposal a fleet capable of expansion; over the following year it would handle 135,000 vacationers, most of them taking five-day cruises to Norway, but soon some could also book Atlantic journeys to the favored destination of Madeira. It cost only forty reichsmarks to achieve joy through strength, plus ten for a special excursion train to the Hamburg harbor.
As a journalist leafing through the source materials available to me, I asked myself: How did this state, legitimized by a questionable enabling act and the sole political party left in existence, manage within such a short time to induce all the workers and salaried employees organized into the German Labor Front not only not to protest but even to cooperate, and soon to engage in mass rejoicing on command? Partial credit can go to the activities of the Nazi organization Strength through Joy, about which many survivors of those years continued to rave in private; Mother even did so openly: “Suddenly everything was changing. My papa — he was only a carpenters helper and didn't really believe in anything anymore — he just couldn't say enough about that KDF ship. See, that was the first chance he ever had in his whole life to go on a trip with my mama…”
Here I should mention that Mother has always had this tendency to speak her mind too loudly and at just the wrong moment. She either rejects things or hangs on to them for dear life. When she heard in March '53 that Stalin had died — I was eight and in bed with tonsillitis, German measles, or measles — she lit candles in our kitchen and cried her eyes out. I never saw her cry that way again. Years later, when Ulbricht was forced off the stage, I heard that she mocked his successor as “that roofer.” Although a declared antifascist, she bewailed the destruction in the early '50s of the monument to Wilhelm Gustloff, cursing the “scum” who had desecrated the grave. Later, when we in the West were experiencing terrorism, I gathered from one of her messages smuggled from Schwerin that she believed “Baadermeinhof,” whom she pictured as one person, had fallen in the fight against fascism. It remained impossible to tell whose side she would take in any given situation. When Jenny heard about Mothers apodictic statements, she just smiled: “That's always been Tullas way. She says things other people don't wish to hear. Of course she sometimes exaggerates just a bit…” To give another example, at a meeting of her collective, Mother apparently once declared in front of all her comrades that she was “Stalin's last faithful follower,” and in the next breath held up the classless KDF society as the model for every true Communist.