In many ways 1933 marks a watershed for Traudl, who is now thirteen. First, Hitler’s advent to power is celebrated as a great event at her school, and Traudl herself sees it as a sign of change and economic prosperity soon to come. Pictures of the crowds of indigent, somehow sinister men with scowling faces loafing around Sendlinger-Tor-Platz are still alarmingly present to her mind’s eye. The unemployed, she was told. Well, all that’s about to change…
Second, Max Humps turns up again in 1933. As he supported the Party in its early struggles and has won the Blood Order, someone wangles him a job in the NSDAP administration. His daughter does not know exactly what job it is, nor is she interested; it is a long time since she has felt close to her father. She does visit him at his office in Barer Strasse in 1934 or 1935 –just once, because her mother is not keen for her to be in touch with him. Number 15 Barer Strasse houses the ‘Reich Management Organization’, the head office of the ‘National Socialist Factory Cell’, as well as the ‘War Victims Head Office’ and the ‘National Health Head Office’. At this time the SA headquarters is in the Marienbad and Union hotels, both of them also in Barer Strasse.
Max Humps tries to win Traudl over with sweets and similar proofs of affection, but she keeps her distance and nurses her grudge against her father. The divorce came through in December 1932◦– in his absence◦– and Traudl could not help noticing that her mother felt the humiliation of the case keenly. Max Humps had shown few scruples and a remarkable amount of imagination in laying the blame for their separation on his wife. General Maximilian Zottmann considered it socially intolerable for his daughter to be◦– in the context of the marital laws of the time◦– the guilty party in a divorce, so she had to agree to a shabby compromise, offering to give up any claim to maintenance if her husband would take all the blame himself. She was therefore dependent on her father’s charity, and as she was represented in court by a Jewish lawyer she had worse cards to play than Max, holder of the Blood Order. It seemed likely that the judge in their case had National Socialist sympathies or anyway was in a great hurry to conform◦– the NSDAP had been the strongest political power in the country since the end of July 1932, at least for most of the time.
In any case, the verdict reinforces Hildegard Humps’s belief that ‘that man Hitler’ destroyed her marriage as early as 1923. She frequently expresses this opinion after he has come to power, which annoys young Traudl. Traudl thinks her mother’s views are simplistic, she stands up for ‘the Führer’, and has teenage day-dreams of saving his life some day. Fame through self-sacrifice! Once she actually sees him in person during these years, when he is being driven in his car to the ‘Brown House’ in Brienner Strasse, the Munich headquarters of the Nazi Party – she remembers what an exciting feeling that was. The girl, now around fifteen, gains the simple idea that the Führer must be a very great man from this sighting of him. She feels proud of Germany and the German people, and is impressed by the elevating idea of the ‘national community’◦– ‘One for all and all for one.’ As soon as the national anthem strikes up tears of emotion come into her eyes. She is given no political education at school or at home, either now or later. The teachers at the Luisenlyzeum maintain a low profile; Traudl does not have to write school compositions full of propaganda like those required by zealous teachers at many other schools. It is true that there is discussion of the Nuremberg Laws, and concepts such as the ‘Jewish question’, ‘racial hygiene’ and ‘racial disgrace’ are approached as if they were facts. The pupils absorb them in the same spirit. Traudl accepts the idea of Bolshevism as the greatest enemy of the civilized world, threatening ruin to morality and culture, as a terrifying but incontrovertible fact. The nationalist writings encouraged by the Nazis do not reach her; she has popular stories for teenage girls on her bedside table, and later on novellas by Storm or Agnes Günther’s bestseller Die Heilige und ihr Narr [The Saint and her Fool].
At home no one discusses either National Socialism or any other ideology. Traudl’s mother still bears Hitler a personal grudge, but she is not interested in his political measures. A small picture of Prince Regent Luitpold stands on Traudl’s grandfather’s desk, inscribed with a personal greeting on the general’s sixtieth birthday and dated 1912, a memento of the old days. Of better days? Maximilian Zottmann does not actually say so; he recognizes whatever authority is in government, and like most ‘ordinary Germans’ he does not consider the National Socialist system any real threat. He belongs to a magazine subscription service: the only journal he reads is Der deutsche Jäger [The German Huntsman], and books mean nothing to him. The Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten [Munich Latest News] comes into the household daily so that no one need miss an instalment of the serial story. The family listens to request concerts on the radio, and in the evening they sit round the table, with an opera libretto in front of them, wearing headphones and listening to the performance broadcast direct from the opera house over the phone lines. Grandfather loses his temper whenever a phone call for one of the girls interrupts the transmission.
But above all, 1933 is a year of great importance to Traudl Junge because she discovers her passion for dancing. Through her sister Inge she also meets the Klopfer sisters, Erika and Lore, girls of ‘good family’. Their father is a lawyer and they live in a very grand apartment in Arcisstrasse, with the domestic staff proper to their station in life. The Klopfers’ mother encourages her children, whom she describes as ‘rather molly-coddled’, to be friends with the robust Inge, and when she enrols the girls at the Lola Fasbender Children’s School of Dance, principally to learn good posture and graceful movement, she also pays for Inge to take the course. Inge’s outstanding talent is obvious. During these dancing lessons Traudl presses her nose flat against the glass door so as not to miss anything. When the teacher takes pity on her and invites her to join in, she feels as if the gates of Paradise are opening to her, and begins to discover the joys of rhythmic gymnastics for herself.
Traudl and Inge do not realize that Erika and Lore are Jewish until 1936, when the two sisters emigrate to New York. This may have been because their friends didn’t know it themselves. Their parents had them baptized as Protestants, says Erika Stone, née Klopfer. Religion is in the heart, their mother used to say. She is lukewarm about her children’s enthusiasm ‘for the pomp and circumstance of Nazi mass propaganda, the marching and the songs’, but she does not tell the girls about their Jewish roots and the danger threatening Jews in Germany until just before they leave, when the sisters are sad to say goodbye.