Writer’s in cafés: Gill James at The Art of Tea, working on Girl in a Smart Uniform

The Art of Tea in Didsbury village is my sort of place. I spent a pleasant afternoon there recently as I took a day’s leave. What does a writer do on a day’s leave? Sit and write of course. Busman’s holiday or what? Read more... 

Nazi Key Figures

Adolf Eichmann 

Adolf Eichmann was in charge of the Final Solution. He had quite a difficult life as a young man and changed his job frequently. Being a member of the SS seemed to give him a purpose in life.

He had looked into deporting the German Jewish population to Madagascar but this was not viable in the end. In his defence Eichmann reported that he was merely obeying orders.  

Lebensborn

Lebensborn literally means “Spring of Life”. This programme was set by  SS leader Heinrich Himmler. It provided maternity homes for the wives of SS members but also cared for unmarried mothers and ran orphanages. However, people who used them and babies who were born there and later brought up in the orphanages had to be “biologically” fit. For approval, especially amongst the unmarried women, purity had to be traceable over three generations. Later it came to be seen as a breeding programme, though no woman was forced to have sex with a man if she didn’t want to.

It reinforced the obsession with Aryan qualities. This showed up in other places and children were constantly assessed for how Aryan they were. One of the German girls finds herself involved in measuring and assessing the shapes of the noses and ears of the children in her charge. 

The children brought up within the Lebensborn system were given a good life, full of luxury but often suffered from psychological problems afterwards.  

The Lebesnborn initiative was an attempt to create perfect babies who would turn into perfect human beings. Do we still do this?
What about farm animals and pets? 
Would single mums have been more comfortable within the Lebensborn system than they would have been in Britain at the time? 
How does that compare with our experience in the 21st Century. 
  

Land Girls

We don’t really meet any land girls in the novel, though they are there in the background in the Renate strand. There are some working on the farm when Renate ends up living. Renate and her friends end up helping on the farm and many of their activities are similar to what the land girls would have done.  German girl Gerda is a farmer’s daughter and she also experiences many similar things.  

Micky Mitchell’s gives a good account of what life was like for a land girl in her A Country at War, memoirs of a land Girl.

Women had to work the land because men were off at war. They worked hard but also seemed to have a good social life as well – dances, entertainment evening by ENSA and huge supper gatherings when farmers had helped each other.   

What sort of work do you think the land girls had to do? 

How was this different from the way the German girls may have worked?
Which jobs are a farm are easier in the 21st century?
Why was ENSA useful?
Would something like ENSA be uesful today?
Do we in fact have anything like that?      
 
 

Internment

Arguably we treated people in internment camps and prisoner of war camps better than the Nazis treated inmates of their prison camps, the concentration and death camps. However, we were still taking away human freedom and were depriving people of their normal living conditions.

Thankfully, Renate and Kathe Edler were not interned. They merely became Class B enemy aliens. Clara Lehrs was interned, with a tragic result.

Some German Jews were interned in Britain. Many of them later joined our forces.

Was it right to intern German Jews during World War II?

Can an internment camp be made humane?     

  

Indoctrination

This is quite a hard concept to understand, especially when we look at it very closely. Everyone has a right to hold beliefs and to try to persuade others of them. Sometimes though this can become very manipulative. We don’t see all that much of it in the novel, but we can assume that Renate and Kathe Edler and Clara Lehrs suffered because of it. Gisela, BDM leader, certainly understand the Nazi doctrine that the Jew is the enemy of the people.

Ghettos

We do not really see a ghetto on the novels, though we do see Clara Lehrs living in ghetto-like circumstances when she moves to Rexingen after she is forced to leave Stuttgart. She is visited in the story by fictional Hani and Frau Gödde and in real life she was visited by a certain Frau Fink who was the mother of Renate’s best friend. We do not know exactly what it was like there, but some descriptions of the more well-known ghettos and some descriptions of Rexingen give us some clues.