Out of the Dark

By Richard Whitten Barnes

A golden boy grows to manhood throughout the height and downfall of Nazi Germany. How will his fierce loyalty to The Thousand-Year Reich be tempered by his odyssey through these formative years?

Erich Jäger has it all. From the time he began school in 1933 Berlin he was tall, athletic, and popular, a natural leader. Erich rises through the youth programs of the Nazi government; the Jungvolk and, later, the Hitlerjugend.

Events come to a head in 1943 when Erich turns eighteen and is awarded the choice to serve in a volunteer SS Panzer Division. His service takes him to the hedgerows of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, and the oil fields of Hungary. Wounded and left for dead in his last battle, he finds a way to make it back to the people he loves, and to a new realization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781613094266

Book preview

One

1933

First memories are hard to distinguish between what was truly experienced and events one has merely repeatedly heard about since those nascent years. But since the time I was seven, I have a clear memory of the year 1933—probably due to two indelibly fixed images.

We had moved from Cologne to Berlin when the government took control of Luft Hanse AG where my father worked as a pilot. The company was being renamed Deutsche Lufthansa.

On that first day in the capital, we were taken on a short tour en route to our new apartment. I clearly recall being impressed with the ride down Unter den Linden, the huge poster of the Führer, the Brandenburg Gate, and the destroyed building they told me had been the Reichstag.

I asked, What happened, Papa?

A fire, was his terse response.

I mean, how did it—

No one knows, he said, seeming to wish the topic to end.

Our driver, who was in a uniform with a swastika armband opined, They got the dirty Red, and he’ll hang!

One can’t be sure, my father quietly said, and I saw my mother place a cautionary hand on his arm.

The driver looked up at his mirror. It’s true! I heard Herr Göring say it!

Who is Herr Göring? I wondered aloud.

Quiet, Erich, my father said.

The driver responded. Oho! He’s the famous fighter pilot from the Great War, young man, and now in charge of the police called the Gestapo. He knows everything, so be a good boy. You don’t want him after you!

My father is a pilot, too, I began, but Pappas’s vise grip in my arm cut me off.

The driver only nodded and conversation ceased for the duration of the trip to our new home.

THE NEW APARTMENT WAS in the northern part of the city. It was large enough for my younger sister Käte and me to have separate rooms. Our building was on a boulevard in a prosperous neighborhood where, opposite, fashionable shops lined the street.

For a boy who had spent his entire life playing in open fields, my new environment was strange. Two paces from the curb led to a heavy door that opened into a tiled vestibule. Rows of brass mailboxes lined one wall. Another door, accessed only with a key, led to carpeted stairs. The stairway smelled like the mothballs Mutti would use to store our winter things. Our apartment was on the third of four floors. Where would I go to play?

I remember spending a lot of time that first year playing in my bedroom. It was from my bedroom window that I had my first encounter with overt anti-Semitism. At that age, I had heard talk outside of my family about the Jews being, somehow, not to be trusted, but what I saw from my window was more pronounced. Young men dressed in brown shirts and caps were painting shop windows with the word Jude and star symbols. Others were preventing entry into the shops.

These men, to my mind, were people of authority. No one was stopping them. Perhaps what I had heard about the Jews was true. This was the adult world sanctioning anti-Semitism and I had no reason to question it.

A week later, the same people and others in civilian clothes were throwing papers and books onto a large fire that had been built in the center of the boulevard. I saw a similar fire on the next block. When I asked my parents about it, the subject was changed. Undeterred, I found out later the books were about or written by Jews.

KÄTE WAS A YEAR TO the month younger than I. In Cologne, we had lived near the airfield, in a rural setting well away from the city. We were inseparable. It was a paradise for us with a nearby pond fed by a brook and a copse of trees that was a forest to us. We, however, had few other children to play with and the days were spent making up adventures.

She was like a twin brother, willing to climb trees and skip stones in the pond. That is not to say we were alike in other respects. Käte seemed to have a different, less obvious way of looking at things, analyzing possibilities, whereas I tended to jump to conclusions. She would take chances, but only after thoughtful consideration of the outcome. In Berlin, we were assigned to separate schools, and while we still shared confidences, our separate bedrooms muted the influence each of us had on the other.

My recollections of school in those first months in Berlin are also clear. Foremost in my memory is that of my new teacher, Herr Maurer. Until this time, I had had only two teachers, both women, who maintained discipline while still allowing an easy dialogue with their young charges. Herr Maurer was a radical change for me.

He was not a tall person, rather plump, black hair slicked down on his scalp, round black-rimmed spectacles, and every day the same black-frocked coat over suspenders and a not-so-white shirt. He had a deep, resonant voice that belied his mundane appearance. While less than imposing, he maintained an atmosphere of respect approaching fear in this class of seven-year-olds. I accepted every word he uttered as gospel.

Maurer taught by rote. Rarely would he recognize a raised hand unless he had specifically addressed a student. We were lectured on arithmetic, geography, and history—the latter being highly seasoned with the abuses Germany had suffered by the allied powers since the 1918 armistice and the promise of the New Reich.

It was in this class that I was introduced to the concept of the purity and superiority of the Aryan race. My mop of blonde hair made me a favorite of Herr Maurer. It was easy for me to accept his ideas as truth. I was a good student and rarely bore the brunt of his inevitable scolding for a wrong answer.

Here is where I first noticed some of the older boys wearing the smart-looking uniforms of the Deutsches Jungvolk. The previous year in Cologne, such uniforms were unknown in our small suburban school. I was impressed! I wanted one of those peaked military caps, the shiny belt buckle, neckerchief, and leather shoulder strap.

Surprisingly, my parents were not as enthusiastic as I. Other similar organizations had been recently banned by the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbitepartei (NSDAP, or Nazi) party, and they thought it unfair that I could not join the Boy Scouts as my father had. It turned out I wasn’t old enough in any event. But it was September, and in four months I would reach the required age of eight.

Herr Maurer was a zealous Nazi. A photograph of Herr Hitler—we had been instructed to begin referring to him only as Führer—was prominently displayed over the blackboard behind his desk. Each morning we stood and with arms upraised in the Hitlergruß, we pledged our fealty to Adolf Hitler.

Maurer had a way of injecting National Socialist ideas into almost every subject. He politicized the learning of the new handwriting style, saying the old script was a throwback to the days of the Weimar Republic and insisted we dispense with any of the old letterings in anything we wrote. He could be instructing us on something as sterile as arithmetic and have the session devolve into a rant on the current depression and how the American Wall Street Jews caused it.

It was in this school that I became aware of the tendency of my peers to follow my lead. Perhaps the fact that I was tall for my age and smart in my schoolwork gave me a mien of leadership. Whatever the reason, I accepted the role, one I never thought to relinquish.

At home, it was a completely different story. I have said that I revered my father; a hero in my young eyes. He, like the famous Göring, had been a Fliegertruppen fighter pilot in the war. He rarely talked about his experiences, but my mother would let me look at his Iron Crosses (Grades I and II) and his Friedrich Order Star which she told me was for exceptional bravery.

Mutti had been an amateur athlete as a young woman growing up in Hannover where her future husband’s squadron, or Jagdstaffel, was disbanded in 1918. She was more demonstrative of her affection than Papa, but also a no-nonsense disciplinarian. I never put anything past her.

Käte, while a half head shorter and smaller, was in no way my inferior at home or elsewhere. She knew me well and was quick to put straight whatever nonsense I might utter or do. I never resented that trait but admired and respected her opinion from my earliest memory.

Perhaps these three strong personalities I encountered at home influenced my own as well. This, plus the adjustment of moving from our bucolic life near Cologne to a Berlin apartment and a new school resulted in 1933 being a pivotal year in forming who I would become in later life.

Two

1934

Iknow it was early in the year because I was still playing with my Christmas toys. At school, Herr Maurer’s eyes glistened as he told about the sentencing and execution of Mannus Vander Lubbe, the man who burned the Reichstag. Another boy raised his hand and asked what he meant by execution. Maurer took some pleasure in explaining that the man had been beheaded.

That night I asked my father about the execution. He seemed more concerned with the subsequent laws he claimed were being imposed on all German citizens. I couldn’t see why he was upset. There was no impact in the least on my young life having to do with new laws and I asked why he was so angry.

Today you are not so free as you were yesterday, he said and left the room.

IN FEBRUARY I TURNED eight years old. If I was worried about how to go about joining the Jungvolk (JV) I needn’t have been. The local troop was privy to the birthdates of our school’s students. I was approached by a young man in civilian clothes who gave me an envelope to take home. It contained a letter for my parents to sign allowing me to take part in JV activities, including overnight trips supervised by responsible adults.

The paper created some concern for my parents for reasons I couldn’t understand. I overheard their hushed voices and my father’s occasional outburst. It’s not mandatory! he’d said, followed by more hushed talk. Nevertheless, I was thrilled when the signed letter was back in the envelope and given to me to return the following morning.

FOR A BOY WHOSE EXPERIENCE was playing with hardly anyone but his sister, I took to the JV effortlessly. I liked the structure offered by the organized activities. The troop was made up of units called Jungzugs, each comprised of four Jungenschafts of ten boys. Older boys were our leaders, imposing discipline in everything the troop did. Immediately, I aspired to be one of those boys.

We met after school each Wednesday, and on most weekends there would be a scheduled field trip—a hike to a park or even to a patriotic location in the city. As the weather moderated, we would be taken on hikes in the countryside. We were drilled on how to march and stand in formation. Calisthenics was stressed. A good German must be physically fit.

The meetings included suggested topics furnished by the JV organization, always about National Socialism and what it was achieving for Germany. I knew what they were telling us was true because I could see signs of it. There was new construction in Berlin. New roads. The Führer had wisely created a workforce for these projects that my father admitted to have been a wise decision.

I found that membership in the organization was conditional. Full status was achieved after a trial period during which it was determined that we were healthy, that is free from any mental or physical abnormalities or that there were no rumors of Jewish blood in our family. A mischling, a child with any trace of Semitic blood, would be quickly rejected. It wasn’t until April 20, the Führer’s birthday, that a large convocation was held when new conscripts of JV and Hitlerjungend were officially installed.

I enjoyed wearing my uniform for the meeting days that followed. It was exciting for me to learn about the world other than the rote Herr Maurer would drill into us. The older boys seemed to be infinitely wise, expanding our knowledge of the glory of the Nazi cause and the perfection of the Aryan race. We learned patriotic songs, mostly honoring the Führer. Often a much older boy from the Hitlerjugend, or HJ as we referred to them, would instruct us. The HJ boy wore a uniform much like ours with the added accessory of a dagger at his belt emblazoned with a shield and swastika on the handle. I wondered if the day would come that I might wear one.

The weeks flew by. I recall two events of that summer. The first because my parents made such a fuss about it. Apparently, the SA—we children knew them only as The Brown Shirts—had been put out of existence. Why they were so alarmed eluded me. It was only years later I learned most of their leaders had been killed the previous night.

In as much as I could understand, the other event was more relevant. Most children had grown up revering Germany’s war hero, General von Hindenburg who had been elected president of our country. I came home from school to learn he had died.

Mutti was deeply saddened, and I was told to stay inside for the rest of the day. When Papa came home that night, the mood in the apartment remained bleak. In contrast, at school the next day, Herr Maurer was demonstrative in his excitement for the Führer’s prospects now that Hindenburg was dead. He assured us that now there was nothing to stop Germany and the Nazi Party from achieving ultimate glory.

An immediate effect of the Führer gaining sole control of the government was felt by our family. In the employ of the government, my father was considered a civil servant. The Führer ordered all military and government employees to swear to a new oath. Papa had no trouble swearing fealty to his country, but this one required his loyalty to a person: Adolf Hitler. He stormed around the house for a few days, but in the end, he had no choice.

I saw little of him for the rest of that year. The big 1934 Nuremberg Rally required my father’s services to ferry dignitaries back and forth for the duration of the rally and beyond.

On Christmas day, we children were told we would be moving yet again. This time near Potsdam where the government had provided us a house.

Three

1935

Ludwigsfelde, Brandenburg

The move, it turned out, was a happy occurrence. Papa’s new job would be at the Daimler-Benz plant there as a pilot for their executives and other NSDAP business.

Our state-owned apartment in Berlin had been furnished, so it was good to see our stored furniture from the house in Cologne waiting for us at our new home. It was in one of the better neighborhoods of town, having been requisitioned by the Reich for our use. It was a fine brick house with a large fenced-in yard in back that faced an open field leading down to a brook.

Benz was one of Germany’s largest companies. Their home office was in Stuttgart, but the Ludwigsfelde plant was an important one, manufacturing rifle barrels. Like all young boys, I knew the make and model of every car in Europe, much less Germany. When it happened that my father drove home with a 1934 Mercedes D290 Cabriolet, I was thrilled. The company executives did not want to be delivered to and from the airport in our old family car, so this was ours to drive.

That summer, Papa took us all in a small airplane to Hannover to see our grandparents, Oma and Opa Edelmann. I remembered them from a previous visit, and we loved our week there. They had a farm with three cows, chickens, and a wonderful pig that we played with like a dog. They doted on us and we reciprocated. Somehow, we had never found time to return.

In the fall, Käte and I were assigned new schools. Against the wishes of my mother, I wore my Jungsvolk (JV) uniform to school on the first day. This won me a good deal of respect from my new classmates, but a private dressing down from my homeroom (and mathematics) teacher, Frau Müller.

You are allowed, Erich, to wear your trappings on meeting day, she said. but I hope you will make an effort to conform to our dress norm in future.

I could not