The NSDAP economics department at Munich went on, but suffered changes of leader after the departure of Dr Wagener. For a short while Walter Funk, later the Reich economics minister, held the seat, and at the end of my spell in Munich it passed to Bernhard Köhler, known for his thesis Arbeit und Brot (Work and Bread). Köhler remains in my mind for his advice to me: ‘The person who defends herself, accuses herself!’ and dissuaded me from instigating an USCHLA hearing. My idea was to throw light on a slander circulating about me which was making my life in Munich hell.
The whole affair began with a telephonist hearing a surname incorrectly. The male telephonist at the Braunes Haus had misunderstood the name of a friend who had called me. Instead of Vierthaler, a pure Bavarian name, he misheard Fürtheimer, a Jewish name. Shortly before, in October 1932, I had gone on a coach excursion through the Dolomites to Venice with an older female colleague. The excursion had been arranged by a Herr Kroiss and his wife from Rosenheim. He drove the coach himself and had apparently taken a liking to me. As soon as we made a stop anywhere, Herr Kroiss and his wife would invite me to their table, ignoring my travelling companion. Herr Kroiss, who knew the route very well, was asked twice by three gentlemen in a large Mercedes where the best place was to spend the night. As fate would have it, these three gentlemen booked into the same Venice hotel as ourselves and even invited themselves to sit at our table. One of them invited me to take a trip with him in a gondola that afternoon, which I was pleased to accept, never suspecting what was in store for me as a result of my companion’s envy and feelings of being abandoned, and the telephonist’s later error at NSDAP HQ.
Back in Munich a friend, the niece of the NSDAP Reich treasury minister Franz Xaver Schwarz, surprised me with the question: ‘Christa, are you really having a relationship with a Jew?’ When I asked who had said so, she replied: ‘An SS-Führer!’ I asked her to have him present himself so that I could clear up the matter, and a couple of days later he turned up◦– I have forgotten his name◦– and asked me: ‘Do you perhaps wish to deny that you are having a relationship with the Jew Fürtheimer, and were together with him in Italy?’ My assurances and explanations availed me nothing, not even when my friend Vierthaler provided an affidavit swearing to his pure Aryan origins. A statement by Herr Kroiss that he organised his tours in such a manner that nobody could absent themselves overnight was similarly unsuccessful in putting an end to the accusations.
Bernhard Köhler, then my boss in the economics department, with whom I lodged the various affidavits told me: ‘Whoever defends herself, accuses herself!’ I did not understand the sense of this, but realised that he opposed an USCHLA hearing. Despite this proof of my manager’s confidence in me, the suspicions of the Party members smouldered and I suffered very much as a result of it.
One evening a male friend came to collect me from my small hotel. Next day the owner’s son advised me: ‘Fräulein Schroeder, be cautious!’ He said nothing else. Apparently the SS had asked the hotelier to look at my friends closely. The gentleman caller had invited me to a recital. He was a dark-eyed, black-haired attorney and apparently looked Jewish; whether he was or not I have no idea, I never asked him. In order to sweep aside all suspicions I decided to reject all future invitations, and instead took every course going at the Berlitz School and local college.
If the dyed-in-the-wool Bavarian of the early 1930s was filled with the proverbial hatred of the Prussians,[22] they also avoided me with a hurtful distrust. It was precisely this hatred of the Prussians which now changed the course my life was to take.
Once Hitler had become Reich Chancellor, NSDAP Reich treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz, chief personnel officer at the Braunes Haus, called for stenotyists to volunteer for the NSDAP Liaison Staff in Berlin. The Munich girls held back; they were not keen on Berlin. All the greater was my own readiness. I informed the Reich treasurer, and next day he told me that it had been arranged. In March 1933 I arrived in the capital.
The office block in which the NSDAP Liaison Staff was housed in Berlin was at Wilhelm-Strasse 64, diagonally opposite the Reich Chancellery. Headed by Rudolf Hess, its function was to act as the contact office between Party centres and the Reich ministers.[23] Upon my arrival I was acquainted with my duties by the elegant and robust Consul Rolf Reiner, Röhm’s adjutant in Bolivia. I would spend most of my time with the Liaison Staff although from time to time I might be required to make myself available to Hitler’s chief adjutant, SA-Gruppenführer Wilhelm Brückner in the Reich Chancellery.[24] In 1933, all Hitler had was one office and a room for his adjutants. This left him with nowhere to install a female secretary.
Whether it was the proverbially good Berlin air or the atmosphere with my more united Berlin colleagues I felt I had shed the suspicions which had weighed down so heavily on me in Munich, although I was never able to shake off completely the effects of the slander. The experience of how readily believed were those who pointed the finger of suspicion, and how easy it was to become their victim, became deeply engraved within me. After this nasty experience, I think I looked at things rather more critically and became less trusting.
Work with the Liaison Staff was for the most part very easy. Nearly all incoming mail was passed to the competent SA centre. Working for Hitler’s chief adjutant Wilhelm Brückner was far more interesting. At least every two days he would summon me by telephone to the Reich Chancellery for dictation. I would then type up his letters in the Liaison Staff and bring them back in the post-portfolio for him to sign.
Wilhelm Brückner came from Baden-Baden, his father was Silesian and his mother from the Thuringian aristocracy. He was an engineer by trade but studied economics later. After the First World War he remained in the Reichswehr as an Oberleutnant then joined Freikorps Epp, helping to put down the revolutionary council in Munich. After more study, this time as a film engineer for three years he joined the NSDAP in 1922 and the following year led the proscribed SA Regiment Munich. That earned him four and a half months in jail, and at the end of 1924 another two months for membership of a banned organisation. Subsequently he took office as the third general secretary of the Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland (Association of Germans Abroad) in Munich. At the end of 1930 he was appointed SA adjutant to Hitler although in this role he was more a personal aide in constant attendance.
22
Prussians were all those who came from northern Germany or, by extension, those people who spoke High German.
23
The liaison staff at Wilhelm-Strasse 64 in Berlin was a service office of Hitler’s deputy Hess, the actual head office was in the Führer-building on Arcis-Strasse in Munich.
24
The palace at Wilhelm-Strasse 77 built by Graf von der Schulenburg between 1738 and 1739 was bought by the Radziwill family in 1796. The Reich bought it from them in 1875. Bismarck, the first Reich Chancellor, moved in after rebuilding, and renovation work was completed in 1878. During the Weimar Republic the palace was the seat of the Reich government, and from then until 1939 further building and expansion work was always in progress, particularly after the compulsory purchase of all buildings in the Voss-Strasse in 1938. At the end of the war only ruins and rubble remained.