gave me. I know you are brave, braver than I am, and you must live because you have a child to think of, and I am sure that you will bear the struggle far better than I could.”
The household came alive. Doctors arrived but could do nothing.
The next day an official of the foreign office called Fromm to convey his sorrow and an oblique message. “Frau Bella,” he said, “I am deeply shocked. I know how terrible your loss is. Frau von Huhn died of pneumonia.”
“Nonsense!” Fromm snapped. “Who told you that? She committed—”
“Frau Bella, please understand, our friend had pneumonia. Further explanations are undesirable. In your interest, as well.”
MOST GUESTS HAD FOUND the ball to be a lovely diversion. “We all had a really good time,” wrote Louis Lochner in a letter to his daughter at school in America, “and the party was a jolly one.” Ambassador Dodd, predictably, had a different assessment: “The dinner was a bore, though the company present might under other circumstances have been most informing.”
One result was unexpected. Instead of embittered estrangement between Dodd and Papen, there grew instead a warm and lasting association. “From that day on,” Sigrid Schultz observed, “Papen himself cultivated the friendship of Ambassador Dodd with the greatest assiduity.” Papen’s behavior toward Schultz also improved. He seemed to have decided, she wrote, that “it was better to display his Sunday manners toward me.” This, she found, was typical of a certain kind of German. “Whenever they come up against someone who will not stand for their arrogance, they climb down from their perch and behave,” she wrote. “They respect character when they meet it, and if more people had shown firmness to Hitler’s handyman Papen and his acolytes in small every day contacts, as well as in big affairs of state, the Nazi growth could have been slowed up.”
RUMOR SPREAD ABOUT THE true cause of Poulette’s death. After the funeral, Fromm was accompanied home by a good friend to whom she felt a daughterly bond—“Mammi” von Carnap, wife of a former chamberlain to the kaiser and long an excellent source of information for Fromm’s column. Although loyal to the old Germany, the Carnaps were sympathetic to Hitler and his campaign to restore the nation’s strength.
Mammi seemed to have something on her mind. After a few moments, she said, “Bellachen, we are all so shocked that the new regulations should have this effect!”
Fromm was startled. “But Mammi,” Fromm said, “don’t you realize? This is only the beginning. This thing will turn against all of you who helped to create it.”
Mammi ignored the remark. “Frau von Neurath advises you to hurry up and get baptized,” she said. “They are very anxious at the foreign office to avoid a second
Fromm found this astonishing—that someone could be so ignorant of the new realities of Germany as to think that mere baptism could restore one’s status as an Aryan.
“Poor old fool!” Fromm wrote in her diary.
CHAPTER 27
O Tannenbaum
It was almost Christmas. The winter sun, when it shone at all, climbed only partway into the southern sky and cast evening shadows at midday. Frigid winds came in off the plains. “Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold,” wrote Christopher Isherwood, describing the winters he experienced during his tenure in 1930s Berlin: “It is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the ironwork of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.”
The gloom was leavened somewhat by the play of lights on wet streets—sidewalk lamps, storefronts, headlights, the warmly lit interiors of countless streetcars—and by the city’s habitual embrace of Christmas. Candles appeared in every window and large trees lit with electric lights graced squares and parks and the busiest street corners, reflecting a passion for the season that even the Storm Troopers could not suppress and in fact used to their financial advantage. The SA monopolized the sale of Christmas trees, selling them from rail yards, ostensibly for the benefit of the Winterhilfe—literally, Winter Help—the SA’s charity for the poor and jobless, widely believed by cynical Berliners to fund the Storm Troopers’ parties and banquets, which had become legendary for their opulence, their debauchery, and the volume of champagne consumed. Troopers went door-to-door carrying red donation boxes. Donors received little badges to pin on their clothing to show they had given money, and they made sure to wear them, thereby putting oblique pressure on those brave or foolhardy souls who failed to contribute.
Another American ran afoul of the government, due to a false denunciation by “persons who had a grudge against him,” according to a consulate report. It was the kind of moment that decades hence would become a repeated motif in films about the Nazi era.
At about four thirty in the morning on Tuesday, December 12, 1933, an American citizen named Erwin Wollstein stood on a train platform in Breslau waiting for a train to Oppeln in Upper Silesia, where he planned to conduct some business. He was leaving so early because he hoped to return later that same day. In Breslau he shared an apartment with his father, who was a German citizen.
Two men in suits approached and called him by name. They identified themselves as officers of the Gestapo and asked him to accompany them to a police post located in the train station.
“I was ordered to remove my overcoat, coat, shoes, spats, collar and necktie,” Wollstein wrote in an affidavit. The agents then searched him and his belongings. This took nearly half an hour. They found his passport and quizzed him on his citizenship. He confirmed that he was an American citizen and asked that they notify the American consulate in Breslau of his arrest.
The agents then took him by car to the Breslau Central Police Station, where he was placed in a cell. He was given “a frugal breakfast.” He remained in his cell for the next nine hours. In the meantime, his father was arrested and their apartment searched. The Gestapo confiscated personal and business correspondence and other documents, including two expired and canceled American passports.
At five fifteen that afternoon the two Gestapo agents took Wollstein upstairs and at last read him the charges filed against him, citing denunciations by three people whom Wollstein knew: his landlady, a second woman, and a male servant who cleaned the apartment. His landlady, Miss Bleicher, had charged that two months earlier he had said, “All Germans are dogs.” His servant, Richard Kuhne, charged that Wollstein had declared that if another world war occurred, he would join the fight against Germany. The third, a Miss Strausz, charged that Wollstein had loaned her husband “a communistic book.” The book, as it happened, was
Wollstein spent the night in jail. The next morning he was permitted to confront his denouncers face-to-face. He accused them of having lied. Now, unprotected by the veil of anonymity, the witnesses wavered. “The witnesses themselves appeared to be confused and not sure of their ground,” Wollstein recalled in his affidavit.
Meanwhile, the U.S. consul in Breslau reported the arrest to the consulate in Berlin. Vice Consul Raymond Geist in turn complained to Gestapo chief Rudolf Diels and requested a full report on Wollstein’s arrest. That evening, Diels telephoned and told Geist that on his orders Wollstein would be released.
Back in Breslau, the two Gestapo men ordered Wollstein to sign a statement declaring that he would never “be an enemy to the German State.” The document included a magnanimous offer: that if he ever felt his safety endangered, he could report for arrest under protective custody.
He was released.
MARTHA ASSIGNED HERSELF the task of trimming the family tree, an enormous fir placed in the ballroom on the second floor of the house. She enlisted the help of Boris, Bill, butler Fritz, the family chauffeur, and various friends who stopped by to help. She resolved to have a tree that was entirely white and silver and so bought silver balls, silver tinsel, a large silver star, and white candles, eschewing electric lights for the more traditional and infinitely more lethal approach. “In those days,” she wrote, “it was heresy to think of electric lights for a tree.” She
