Not I Read Free Page A

present himself at the Karlshorst racetrack. He had been assigned to a unit building tank obstacles. He had promptly replied that it was no doubt known to the responsible department that in accordance with Paragraph 4 of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service he had been dismissed on April 7, 1933. Consequently, in accordance with the graded catalogue of measures of the law, he was required to avoid every activity. As he knew that the administration attached great importance to the proper application of its decrees, his call-up must be an error. He awaited an appropriate notification “as soon as possible.”
    The letter was pure mockery. This time, however, even my mother was in agreement. Nevertheless, years later, whenever the conversation turned to these events, her mouth still began to tremble. But the demand to defend Hitler’s Reich, which had brought her nothing but “troubles” to the lives of three members of her family, was going too far. And in taking this risk she had, as she later liked to say, “the luck of the bold.” The protecting hand, which we suspected was being held over many of my father’s rash and angry actions, spared him once more.
    It was during these anxious days that I arrived in Neustift, more than three thousand feet up, at the end of the Stubaital Valley, with Innsbruck and the glittering Nordwand peak in the background. A camp with huts had been put up in a wood behind some farms. On the night before Easter one of the farms burned to the ground; at three in the morning when the firefighting, to which our unit had hurriedly been detailed, was over, I walked with my friend Franz Franken, whom I had met in the camp again, through the brightening dawn down the valley to Innsbruck. Perhaps it had something to do with the unique charm of the landscape that I soon hated everything to do with the labor service: the crumpled overalls we had to wear in which our so-called foremen drove us into the dirt right after the clothing issue; the army bread with the disgusting margarine; the “spade care,” as it was called, in which we polished away at the shiny surfaces; and the ridiculous shouted commands of “Shoulder spade!,” “Order spade!,” or “Spade—present!”Furthermore, at this late point in the war there was nothing useful to do anymore—no dike building, no draining of swamps, no road construction—so that the never-ending drill was as much a makeshift solution as the singing of the same old songs that hadn’t changed for years about Geyer’s black troop and the tents beyond the valley. One got the impression that the leaders and subordinate leaders of the Reichsarbeitsdienst were all failed career officers who suffered from a profound inferiority complex. 1
    After a few weeks the unit was transferred from the high valley near Innsbruck to Hohenems in Vorarlberg, and one of the commanders explained that we were now moving closer to the front that would soon no doubt open up in the West. What we actually saw at the end of April—across Lake Constance—was the destruction of Friedrichshafen, which had been spared in our time there, in a nighttime firestorm. We thought of our younger classmates, whom we had left behind in the town. With the first post I received a letter from my mother, which told me that my father had been called up to the army. Quite without the caution which she usually displayed, she added that with the help of the Wehrmacht someone had evidently wanted to save him from the clutches of a “higher authority.” Because at almost sixty no one is ordered up to “active service,” asit’s called, but at most to the Volkssturm. 2 “But then, what applies to us?”
    My mother had included with her lines a school report by Dr. Hermann or one of his underlings. “Father read it before he left,” she wrote, “but he thought you should see it, too.” It had been written by one of the officials at the boarding school in preparation for