In the three years of this friendship Traudl hardly registers the fact that the Klopfers’ father is banned from practising his profession, while the family dismiss their domestic staff and move into a much smaller apartment in Tengstrasse. But she envies the Klopfer girls the adventure of their journey to America◦– and they envy her for her BDM uniform.
Traudl has been a member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, since about 1935. Her mother has scraped and saved from the housekeeping money to buy the brown velour ‘Alpine waistcoat’ that is part of the uniform, and when Traudl can finally wear that object of desire she is hugely proud. She is leader of a group of six girls from her class◦– they call themselves the Six Graces. They drill on the school terrace – right turn, march◦– and shout the Sieg Heil slogan. Sieg, calls Traudl. Heil, her charges shout back. Sieg!◦– Heil!◦– Sieg!◦– Heil! Not much else of the BDM activities remains in her memory, only boring ‘socials’, various events when the BDM girls formed a guard of honour: the inauguration of the first workers’ housing estate in Ramersdorf, at which she and her comrades performed folk dances; collecting for the Winter Aid organization; an excursion to Wolfratshausen complete with camp fire and tents◦– and Herta, who is leader of their unit when Traudl is sixteen or seventeen and has started attending commercial college. Herta tells the girls about the Third Reich’s ideas of art and literature, makes music with them and takes them for idyllic walks. Traudl longs to emulate her. One day, when she is visiting Herta on her own, Herta gives her a goodbye hug and kisses her on the mouth. Traudl, who has not yet developed an interest in boys, although she longs for affection, is deeply impressed by Herta’s warmth of heart.
But in 1938 she loses touch with her much admired leader, for suddenly something much more interesting is on offer: Traudl joins the ‘Faith and Beauty’ organization, a new unit within the BDM for Aryan young women of the Reich from eighteen to twenty-one years old. ‘The task of our League is to bring young women up to pass on the National Socialist faith and philosophy of life. Girls whose bodies, souls and minds are in harmony, whose physical health and well-balanced natures are incarnations of that beauty which shows that mankind is created by the Almighty,’ says Jutta Rüdiger, who became head of the BDM in 1937, describing its aims. ‘We want to train girls who are proud to think that one day they will choose to share their lives with fighting men. We want girls who believe unreservedly in Germany and the Führer, and will instil that faith into the hearts of their children. Then National Socialism and thus Germany itself will last for ever.’
As in most of the youth groups of the Third Reich, there is hardly any discussion of politics in the Faith and Beauty organization. Its activities concentrate on doing graceful gymnastics and dancing, deliberately cultivating a ‘feminine line’ so as to counter any ‘boyish’ or ‘masculine’ development. In fact this gymnastic dancing is also a way of making use of young women for the purposes of the Party and the state◦– not, of course, that anyone explicitly tells them so, and Traudl Junge herself hears about it for the first time decades after the war. Their artistic commitment is intended to bring these young girls up to be ‘part of the community’, and keep them from turning prematurely to the role of wife and mother; instead, they must continue to devote themselves to ‘the Führer, the nation and the fatherland’. Finally, Faith and Beauty will also qualify some of the rising generation of women for leadership; that is to say for posts in the BDM, the Nazi Women’s Association or the Reich Labour Service.
Traudl is not burdened with such subjects as ‘structuring your life’, or ‘political and intellectual education’, which are also a statutory part of the Faith and Beauty curriculum, or if she is then she cannot remember it now. But she is fascinated by the Third Reich’s grand cultural spectacles◦– as ‘capital of the movement’ Munich is a city of festive parades. The pomp which ushers in the Day of German Art in July 1937 and the two following years, with a procession of ‘Two Thousand Years of German Culture’ covering over three kilometres, fills her with enthusiasm, and so does the ‘Night of the Amazons’ held annually between 1936 and 1939 in Nymphenburg castle park. The Nazi concept of emotional self-presentation as a way of binding people ideologically together is working. Moreover, Traudl’s sister takes part in the supporting programme for the Day of German Art, dancing the performance of the Rape of the Sabinę Women on the stage erected by the Kleinhesseloher See in the English Garden. Traudl herself, in a minor way, participates in the cultural endeavours of the Nazis. She has a walk-on part in the ‘Night of the Amazons’, and at the age of fifteen models for the Swiss sculptor and marionette carver Walter Oberholzer, who has a commission to provide a statue for a fountain. The bronze girl throwing a ball to a faun whose mouth throws up jets of water has Traudl’s attractively shaped body, although not her face. This sculptural ensemble is exhibited in the House of German Art in 1937.
It is impossible to describe adolescents like Traudl as being clearly for or against the Third Reich, as impossible as is probably the case with the majority of the German population of the time, and certainly the young people. Although Traudl allows the aesthetics of the lavish spectaculars to intoxicate her, and enthusiastically joins in the rejoicings over the triumphs of German athletes in the Olympic Games and Hitler’s non-political successes, she finds the cruder side of party politics distasteful. The ‘extreme Nazism’ and the ‘machinations of its big shots’ strike her, so she says today, as ‘proletarian’ and ‘narrow-minded’. However, she is as far as most of her contemporaries from questioning the government on that account. She can laugh at the Hitler jokes that go the rounds, she finds Der Stürmer with its anti-Semitic caricatures strange and repellent, but she does not realize that the very lives of Jews and political opponents of the Party are threatened. There are three Jewish pupils in her class at the Lyzeum. During their time together at school◦– that is to say, up to 1936◦– these girls are treated just like the others by both teachers and pupils. If their Jewishness is mentioned at all it is only as their religious faith. Later she loses touch with the three girls. One, she hears, is emigrating with her parents, but to this day she knows nothing of the fate of the other two. At eighteen, Traudl knows hardly anything about the November 1938 pogrom and the ‘retaliation wreaked on Jewish shops, most of which had all their windows broken’, as the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten reports next day, or about the burning synagogues and the summary arrest of hundreds of Jewish men. When she and her friends hear later of these acts of Nazi brutality they do not like them, but they quell their doubts by thinking that such an event must be unique. Ultimately, it affects them as little as all the other anti-Jewish measures: the first boycott of Jewish shops decreed by the state on 1 April 1933; the notices in public places with their inscription: ‘Jews banned’; the total ‘de-Judaizing’ of the economy from early in 1939; the marking out of Jews by the yellow star after September 1941. She claims that she can remember only a single meeting with a woman wearing it◦– a fleeting impression, and she thinks no more of it. That episode shows how well repression works.
Traudl, like many young people in Germany at the time, lives a life untroubled by politics. Or so she feels, anyway, which once again confirms two facts that appear contradictory only on the surface: first the regime’s skilful tactics in building up a ‘state youth’ that would toe the line, and second the existence of areas in which ‘uninvolved’ young people like Traudl could move freely and◦– as they thought◦– entirely unobserved.