He was the last to be served. The coffee was in tall Troika mugs instead of the porcelain cups they had used after dinner. Whether it was the coffee, or Melody’s return, the tension had lifted when Serafin resumed.
‘I propose to tell you a story which until this evening has been unknown in its entirety to anyone but myself. In all our interests, I must insist that you never repeat it. Do not worry; it will not incriminate you. I am not a breaker of laws, nor do I ask others to be.
‘It takes us back more than forty years, to pre-war Nazi Germany. Dick, who majored in physical education at Berkeley, would tell you that there is a strong tradition of organised gymnastics in Germany which can be traced back at least to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the era of Johann Guts Muths and Ludwig Jahn. It was a movement that spread irresistibly through Germany and much of Europe, taking in other forms of sport as they developed. Even the First World War was not allowed to halt its progress. One of the few lasting achievements of the Weimar Republic of the post-war period was its provision of sports facilities and clubs on a scale unparalleled anywhere else in the world — facilities the Third Reich is often incorrectly credited with having provided.
‘From the beginning of what he termed his Kampf, Adolf Hitler saw that the emphasis on physical improvement in Germany was a perfect vehicle for his ambitions. The strike force of the Nazi party, the Storm Troopers, or SA, was originally formed as a gymnastic and sports association as early as 1921. One of Hitler’s first actions on coming to power in 1933 was to appoint SA Group Leader von Tschammer und Osten Reichssportsführer, with instructions to dissolve all sports associations regarded as left wing and unite the remainder in a single organization, the Reichsbund für Leibesübungen. At the same time, Baldur von Schirach was performing a similar exercise with the youth organizations, welding them into the Hitler Youth Movement. The young people of Germany were to embody that crude philosophy of racial elitism culled from the Nietzschean notion of the superman and given its expression in Alfred Rosenburg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century.’
‘The superiority of the Aryan race,’ said Valenti, not missing a chance to reinstate himself.
‘Exactly,’ said Serafin. ‘The theory that a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed people had carried the torch of civilization since primitive times and survived in Germany to found another great culture under Hitler’s leadership, a state that would become more noble even than Aryan Greece. It was a theory that conveniently placed a high priority on sports and physical development, so that the Germans were able to continue to practice their gymnastics and outdoor pursuits, but in Nazi-oriented organizations. The Youth Movement grew to a membership of almost eight million. From the age of six in the Deutsches Jungvolk, and from fourteen in the Hitler Youth, the young people took part in a strenuous program of boxing, wrestling, gymnastics, camping and soldiering that occupied their time out of school. Much of it was, of course, competitive, which appealed to the German temperament and provided a massive pyramid of achievement. The children who emerged as the finest physical specimens were taken out of the normal schools, the Gymnasien, and placed in special schools, Nationalpolitischeerziehungsanstalten, which even Germans found too much of a mouthful and contracted to Napolas. They were equipped with outstanding facilities for every kind of physical development, and usually situated beside a lake. There, these selected few were trained, physically and politically, to become the elite of Germany, the future torchbearers of the Third Reich.
‘It happened that one of these children was a girl, a pretty child of conspicuous athletic ability, who came to a Napola in Lower Saxony that took girls from the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the female branch of the Youth Movement. Let’s call her Gretchen. Even in the hand-picked community of the Napola, Gretchen showed up as a superb all-round athlete, and one morning in 1935, when she was seventeen, she was summoned to the director’s office and told that she was to join a squad of women gymnasts training for possible selection for the Olympic Games. You may imagine her excitement. The 1936 Olympic Games were scheduled for Berlin and were to be a Nazi showpiece, Hitler’s opportunity to demonstrate to the world the achievements of the Third Reich and the brilliance of his Aryan athletes.
‘The story of those Games has been told often enough, gentlemen. Let us concentrate simply on Gretchen. She was duly selected to be one of the eight women who represented Germany in the Combined Exercises team event. There were no individual gymnastic contests for women in the Olympic Games at that time, or she would probably have competed in more than one event. But gymnastics was the parade sport of the Games for the Germans, their traditional ideal of sport, and every seat was sold months ahead for the program in the Dietrich Eckart Stadium, specially built in a wooded ravine at the edge of the Olympic complex. As it was, Germany’s gymnasts dominated those Games in the men’s and women’s events, and Gretchen won a gold medal. She could not have done more for her Führer.’ Dr. Serafin paused, glancing down at his fingernails. The room was silent. If there had been any question earlier who was in control, it no longer applied.
‘But there was one service more that was required of her. As a product of the Napola and an Olympic champion, she was a flower of German womanhood, the female equivalent of one of the SS. Had she been a man, there is no doubt that she would have graduated to one of the Ordensburgen, in which selected members of the SS received further indoctrination. Her name was certainly in the card-index system of RuSHA, the SS Race and Resettlement Bureau, for one afternoon soon after the outbreak of the war she was visited by two members of the SS. They reminded her of the benefits the Reich had bestowed on her and of her obligations as one of the Frauenschaft. Then they spoke to her of the commission the Führer had given Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, to make facilities for RuSHA-approved racially pure unmarried women to bear children by similarly approved members of the SS.’
‘The human stud farms?’ said Valenti.
‘Yes. The infamous Lebensborn. In setting up this “Fount of Life” association, Himmler had issued a notice to all SS officers reminding them of their duty to set an example to all Germans by rearing a healthy family of at least four children. Those unable to perform this obligation were to sponsor “racially and hereditarily worthwhile children” instead, and Lebensborn would provide for them. The evidence eventually provided by the Nuremburg Trials established conclusively that “valuable and racially pure men” performed as so-called “conception assistants” in the service of the state.’
‘And that’s what happened to Gretchen?’ said Armitage.
‘She was driven the following weekend to a hotel in Bavaria,’ said Serafin, ‘where she was introduced to her “assistant,” a captain in the SS. Being a well-brought-up daughter of the Reich, she made no objection to what took place. As it happened, she found him reassuringly considerate and charming. They spent two nights together. During the day they skied and took meals together like any honeymoon couple. She learned that he was a former international sportsman, an expert in each of the five events comprising the modern pentathlon. She never met him again, but she heard that he was killed in the bombing of Dresden. In August 1940, she returned to Bavaria, to one of the Lebensborn’s thirteen maternity homes, at Hochland, and there gave birth to a daughter. She elected to bring the child up herself. Money was provided by the Reichsführung of the SS for the child’s upkeep until shortly before the end of the war. The little girl’s name was Trudi.