"We never spoke about this again..."
" "We never spoke about this again, afterwards," my father writes in his memoirs. In April 1935, at 17 years old, he was taken in by the police. He describes how the interrogations "went on for six days. Then the friendly jailer came, unlocked my cell and said I could go. I would be picked up. In front of the police station my father's official government car was waiting. The driver brought me home."
His memoir then continues with the stark sentence: "This week was not spoken about at home at all."
Wait a minute! A teenager disappears for one week—no contact with his parents. He's held in a police arrest cell—no phone calls, no lawyer. Then he returns home. Did his parents, his brother, his sister, say nothing? No "hello, where have you been?" or "how are you after all this?" His father's car picked him up, indicating his father, a high-level administrator (similar to a county mayor or assessor), clearly knew about his son's imprisonment. his son being in prison.
There are no questions, no discussions. What are we to make of that? What is stopping them from talking, even in the privacy of the family?
What Happened
My father was at a school camp near the small town of Niebuell by the North Sea. One night at midnight, men in civilian clothes removed him from the sleeping hall and drove him to the main police building in Kiel, the state capital—a four-hour drive over narrow roads. They provided no explanations and read him no rights. His sleep was interrupted. "Interrogations were done irregularly during day and night times," he reports.
"I was alone in my cell", he writes," just a concrete floor and a bucket to use as toilet, that was it." Then he recognizes familiar sounds. The "passcode whistles" of his boy-scout group, called “Freischar - Buendische Jugend". They come from multiple directions. “I was surprised. There were quite a few of us in the arrest cells.”
The affair remains a mystery.
Sitting on the floor in his cell he remembers, earlier in the evening, a phone call from a friend of his mother’s: "Your mother wants you to know whatever happens during the coming night, you don't have to be afraid.'"
My father writes "I didn't understand it at all, and I thought, 'The old woman is crazy again.'" what did his mother know?
No answer when he comes back, the question not even asked.
My father writes "Even when I reported back to school, the director only said he didn't want to talk to me about this matter." For my father this was normal.
"Obviously, the Gestapo officers had been to my parents beforehand, and also to the school. They had forbidden them to talk to anybody. This procedure was just common then, and nobody wondered about it or objected."
The interrogators asked many questions about a "Herrman Kuegler", a leader of my father’s independent youth group. My father knew he had resisted the mandated integration of the group into the Hitler Youth.
These youth groups were not against the Nazi program per se. Their core philosophy, however, was independence from the state – "free as a bird", nature, hiking & sports. That was enough for the Nazi fanatics to go after them.
The suspicion of indecent physical contact was raised by the Gestapo, a common thread of defamation frequently used by Hitler as pretext for persecution in his own ranks. The same innuendo had been used a year earlier against the leaders of the Stormtroopers, the SA, in the “The night of the long knives” as this massacre is called in English. Hundreds of arrests, executions without any judicial process against his own followers. The leaders were accused of homosexuality and also charged with preparing a coup to overthrow Hitler, a wild combination.
The truth was a lot simpler, rivalries in the leadership were resolved with violence. Why didn’t they talk about it when he came home? Why didn’t he ask?
I have never asked my father, never asked myself, until right now. It seemed normal. His parents had gone along with the actions, they had advance warning. They now might feel forced to use these absurd rationalizations or acknowledge their fear?
I don't think it is fear, and it is not shame. It is complicated – it's restraint, I think.
It is self-censorship.
“I don’t want to embarrass you”. “I think you want to keep quiet about this." Together with caring restraint there is my own fear: "I might be wrong, expose myself, and that could be dangerous." And then, the longer the silence continues, there is regret, for not being forthright from the beginning. I will tell you my situations of self-censorship:
- Why don't I speak loudly about the support Trump gets from the Israeli government?
- Why did I not join in criticizing Biden for the lack of an orderly retreat from Afghanistan?
- Why did I not speak out with my thinking transwomen should not be allowed in the women's rowing races.
Whatever you say – so many landmines, so many taboos, no winning outcome in sight.
A last footnote: Shortly after the end of WWII my father managed to get a "certificate of Nazi-Persecution" due to his arrest. This helped him get additional food rations and more importantly, it allowed him to go to university despite having been a Navy officer. With this certificate, the door was opened to his 50-year career as a high school teacher and principal.