Out of the Smoke Page 4

  He smiled and then continued, speaking softly and with great emotion now. “A recent study of priesthood leadership in the two missions that now serve Germany reveals that currently every district presidency is now fully filled by native members of the Church.” He raised his voice and continued as that sent murmurs rippling through the room. “And next year, ninety-seven percent of our branches will have fully native branch presidencies. Ninety-seven!”

  President Borkhardt turned and pulled President Schlesinger up to stand beside him as a barely restrained roar exploded in the hall. The two linked arms and President Borkhardt spoke over the noise, “And the two of us stand here before you as living proof of that statistic.”

  Chapter Notes

  Though there are records in the Church’s archives that contain detailed information on individual branches and districts in the German missions during the time described in this chapter, I chose not to use them. Because this is historical fiction, if I use the names of actual people, then I feel compelled to describe what they actually did or said. So President Borkhardt and President Schlesinger are fictional characters, as is the location of where the Munich Branch was located at that time. The district president speaking to the Munich Branch is not based on an actual event. However, the facts he gives here and the trends he describes are all accurate.

  Two names found in this chapter were actual persons. President Oliver H. Budge presided over the German-Austrian Mission from 1930 to 1934. Elder John A. Widtsoe was an Apostle at that time and presided over the European Mission from 1927 to 1933 (see Mormons and Germany, 127, 239).

  Elder Widtsoe did send out a letter to all mission presidents giving them encouragement and counsel. The mission presidents were asked to share that with their local units.

  Because of the significance of Europe to the Church, it was common for members of the Quorum of the Twelve to preside over the European Mission, which had numerous other missions under its jurisdiction. Remarkably, six of them went on to become Presidents of the Church (Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff, Joseph F. Smith, Heber J. Grant, David O. McKay, and Ezra Taft Benson) (see Truth Shall Prevail, 443).

  Under the direction of Elder Widtsoe, the Church did participate in the “Dresden National Hygiene Exposition” held in 1930. The figures of its success are found in Mormonism in Germany, 83.

  June 19, 1932, 11:47 a.m.—Eckhardt Home, Hohenzollernstrasse 81, Schwabing District, Munich

  When the telephone rang, Hans didn’t look up, though he swore under his breath. I finally get some time for myself and the telephone rings? Didn’t they know this was Sunday? But on the fourth ring, he sighed, swore again—this time aloud—and laid his paper aside. He went into the living room and picked up the handset. “Allo.”

  “Ja,” said a feminine voice. “This is the operator calling. I have a collect call for this number from a Fräulein Alisa Eckhardt. Will you accept charges?”

  “Ja, ja!” Hans blurted. “Of course.”

  There was a click followed by the operator’s voice. “You may go ahead now.” Then another click.

  “Lisa!”

  “Guten Morgen, Vati!”

  “And good morning to you, mein Liebchen. How are you?”

  “Fine. Wunderbar, actually. I am having the best time, Papa. How is everything there? How are things looking for the election?”

  Pleased that she would ask, Hans nodded. “Very good. Excellent, actually. There’s still a month to go, but right now it looks like we might actually double the number of seats we have in Parliament once again. Which would finally give us a majority in the Reichstag.”

  “Really!” Alisa cried. “That’s wonderful, Papa.”

  “We’ll see,” he said modestly. “I have a lot of people helping me. Our party membership is up around six million now, and that will help tremendously.”

  “By the way,” Lisa said, “I saw Miki the other day. She told me that Uncle Rudi and Aunt Anna are talking about moving to America. Is that true?”

  “And Wolfie and Paula too,” Hans grumbled.

  “No, Papa! They can’t do that, can they?”

  “I wasn’t there when they told your mother and Oma after church last week. It won’t be easy, but with your Uncle Wolfie’s connection in the Ministry of the Interior, I think they’ll get their papers approved.” He snorted softly in disgust. “You can thank the Mormons for that. They want you all to go to Utah. I tried to talk to Wolfie about it the other day, but we just ended up yelling at each other.”

  “It’s not the Church, Papa,” Lisa chided. “You know that the Church is asking its members to stay in their home countries and build up the Church here. There must be something else. Miki says it’s because Rudi has such strong feelings against the Nazi Party and wants to get away before they come to power. She says her parents are furious about it too.”

  That was no surprise. In the fall of 1923, right in the midst of the hyper-inflation, Hans’s father, who was rapidly sinking into ­senility, was flim-flammed into signing over his dairy farm to a shyster estate agent, who paid him an exorbitant amount of money. Unfortunately, with the hyper-inflation, when he spent that money a few days later, it was barely enough to buy himself a used suit. The family had been devastated. Hans’s three older sisters and their husbands had taken over the dairy farm by this time, and it was their livelihood.

  But Hitler had heard about it somehow. The next day Adolf brought Hans the deed for the farm and mentioned that the agent had mysteriously “moved” to Austria and wouldn’t bother them anymore. Not ever! The family was so grateful that all three ­couples joined the Nazi Party. Anna, who was closest to Hans in age, and her husband, Rudi, had moved to Munich not long after that and left the farm to the others. Rudi and Anna quickly became disenchanted with the party and withdrew their membership. But to Hans’s surprise, Ilse and Karl and Heidi and Klaus had embraced the party enthusiastically. They were now almost more committed to it than Hans himself. He quickly explained all of this to Lisa.

  “But then Rudi and Anna joined the Mormons,” Hans continued, “and now they want absolutely nothing to do with the party. Anna thinks it’s horrible to pull children from their homes and send them to camp. I think they want to go to America to make sure that doesn’t happen if Hitler comes to power.”

  “Oh,” Lisa said. That made sense. “But why Aunt Paula and Uncle Wolfie? Bruno is eighteen now and too old to start in the program.”

  “Their situation is a little more complicated. Though I disagree with them, I think Wolfie’s reasons are more justified. With Uncle Wolfie being pretty high up in the Ministry of the Interior here in Bavaria, the minister of his department, who’s from the Catholic Center Party, didn’t like the idea of having any Nazis in his upper leadership. Plus, if Adolf comes to power and is made chancellor, which he almost certainly will be sooner or later, then he’ll get to pick his own cabinet.”

  “And Uncle Wolfie and his boss will both be out of a job.”

  “Yes. Very likely. So going to America, where his politics won’t matter, is attractive to them. I’m trying to talk them out of it, but we’ll just have to wait and see. But enough of that. Tell me how you’re liking camp.” Hans glanced up at the clock. “Your mother is going to be really disappointed she missed you. They all left for church over an hour ago.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation and then Lisa said, “Oh, that’s right. It is Sunday, isn’t it?” It came out lamely, and Hans realized that Lisa knew exactly what day and time it was and that she had called now because she knew her mother would not be home.

  But he decided not to question her about it. “So tell me, Liebchen. How are things going? Do you like it? How is the food? Do you sleep in tents or barracks? Are you—”

  Her laugh cut him off. “Papa, Papa. Take a breath and I’ll tell you all about it. But I only get ten minutes, so I must hurry. There’s so much t
o tell.”

  “Then don’t waste a minute.”

  “Well,” she began. “The others that are here from our family were all waiting when I arrived at the train station. Onkel Karl and Tante Ilse were there with Margarette. And Onkel Klaus and Tante Heidi were there with Gerhardt and Miki. So I got a chance to have lunch with them before we loaded on the autobuses for camp.”

  “Gerhardt? I thought he was also too old for the Hitlerjugend.”

  “Nein. He is a platoon leader now, a very important position. But this will be his last year. When he turns twenty-one in the fall he will either join the army or the Sturmabteilung.”

  Hans grunted. “Let’s hope it’s the army. Those storm troopers are a bunch of hard-drinking thugs and brawlers.”

  “Uh . . . Miki says that he’s leaning toward the S.A. They’ve promised to make him a sergeant within two years. And she says that he loves the brawling. In the boys’ camps, they actually have them fight each other because it toughens them up and prepares them for the army. Miki proudly told me that Gerhardt’s one of the best. That’s why he was made platoon leader. You should see him, Vati. He’s got a bad scar his face and several on his arms. And his one ear looks like a rugby player’s.”

  Hans said nothing. He had, of course, seen Gerhardt’s facial scar at family gatherings. He wore it like a badge of honor. Which Hans understood. In a way, the scars on his own face, given him by a rebel Freikorps thug many years ago now, was the same for him. But it bothered him a little that Miki was proud of Gerhardt’s reputation. From the time Miki was little, Hans had developed a very close bond with his dark-haired, brown-eyed, strikingly beautiful niece. “And Miki is happy with that? That surprises me a little.”

  “Uh . . . it surprised me a little too, to be honest.”

  “Oh?”

  “Ja. She has a boyfriend from Murnau am Staffelsee. They met last year in camp and saw each other during the year. Now they’re pretty thick.”

  “Thick? That was her word?”

  She laughed. “No, Papa. That’s my word. I went over to see her the other night. The older girls are in a different part of camp than we are. She was out back of their tent with this guy—Rolf something or other—and didn’t see me coming.” Lisa cleared her throat, wishing she hadn’t said anything. “They looked like they were trying to swallow each other’s tongues. I think that’s pretty thick,” she added dryly. Then she felt guilty for sharing this with her father. “She is seventeen and a half now, and very popular with the boys.”

  Hans grunted but was otherwise silent for several seconds. “And how is Margarette?”

  “She’s great! She is a senior counselor for the younger girls, and because we’re cousins, they put me in her tent. I really like her. We’re becoming close friends.”

  “Wunderbar. And are you liking camp?”

  “Oh, yes, Papa. It’s the most wonderful thing. The camp is beautiful. We have our own lake here, and we go canoeing and swimming. Our schedule is very regimented but filled with exciting things. We are up at 5:30 every morning. We have an hour of PE before breakfast.”

  “PE?”

  ‘Physical exercise. Sit-ups, deep-knee bends, pushups, jumping jacks—that sort of thing. At first I hated it, but I can tell it’s making a difference so I don’t mind. Then we go to class for half a day. The boys—whose camp is about a half a mile away from ours—study politics, philosophy, history, and racial theory. We get a little of that too, but not as much as the boys. They teach us about being good mothers for the Fatherland and having lots of babies. They say our main responsibilities are defined by the three Ks.”

  “Of course,” Hans said. “Kinder. Kirche. Küche.”

  “I don’t mind the children and the church, but I’ll never learn to be at home in the kitchen like Mama and Oma.”

  Hans smiled. “I’m pretty sure your mother didn’t cook like that when she was twelve.”

  “But like I said, we are being taught some of what the boys get too. Like racial purity. We’re learning about the superiority of the Aryan peoples, of course, and how they are responsible for virtually every advancement in science, religion, the arts, mathematics, and so on. Which is pretty amazing, and it makes me so proud to be Aryan. They really stress the dangers of intermarrying with inferior races and ethnic groups. They say that because we women are the ones who conceive and carry the children, we must make sure to not have any intimate relations with inferior peoples. We are the guardians of racial purity.”

  “You’d better not even be thinking about having intimate relations with anyone. Not until you’re married.”

  “Papa!”

  He had clearly shocked her, and that pleased him. She was still his little innocent. “Do they talk about the Jews?” he asked, deciding to change the subject.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “They are the main group we are warned to stay clear of, especially in marriage, but they also warn us about other groups that can weaken the purity of our posterity, like any Slavic peoples, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people with mental handicaps.”

  “And they’re teaching that to you younger girls as well? That seems a little premature.”

  “Yes. In that class we have everyone from ten-year-olds to eighteen-­year-olds. Oh, and here’s what makes me laugh. On Monday, some kind of a doctor came to our class with an assistant. They took all kinds of measurements to make sure that we were not from inferior stock.”

  “What kind of measurements?”

  “Well, first they measured our heads with—uh . . . I don’t know what they call them. Onkel Ernst has a pair in his toolbox at the garage.”

  “Calipers?”

  “Ja, ja! But bigger ones. The doctor was quite put out with us because when he started measuring our heads, we giggled so hard that the calipers would slip off. Oh, and they also made a record of how many bumps we have on our heads.”

  “It’s called phrenology,” Hans muttered in disgust.

  “Ja, ja. That’s what they called it. Do you really think they can determine what kind of mothers we will be from the bumps on our heads?”

  “Not in a million years,” he snorted. Then he caught himself. “But, Lisa, don’t you be saying things like that to them. Some of my colleagues in the party are absolutely convinced that the shape of the skull, or the bumps on your head, or the size of your nose, or the shape of your eyes, or how fat your lips are, are all indicators of ‘racial purity.’ Which is ridiculous. But you must remember not to contradict your leaders!”

  He waited for her response, but none came. “So then, after classes what happens?”

  “Oh,” Lisa cried, “that’s the best part, Vati. All afternoon we do lots of physical things outdoors. We go hiking, we play Fussball. We have our own Fussball pitch in a small stadium with benches for people to watch. Just like we see in Munich, only smaller. And guess what else? Next week, they’re going to let the boys play the girls.”

  “And what position do you play?”

  “Striker.”

  “And the best one of the team, right?”

  Lisa laughed. “Ja! Of course. Look who taught me.”

  Hans chortled, delighted with her answer.

  “Yesterday we had a class on archery and one on first aid. We also go on marches and sing marching songs as we go. The boys are already being taught how to shoot guns and ride horses. We begged Margarette to ask the camp director if we can learn to shoot guns too.”

  Hans harrumphed. “Just so you know, in the army you don’t call them guns. It’s a rifle or a pistol, never a gun.”

  To his surprise, that impressed her. “That’s what Margarette said too, Papa.” She took a quick breath. “I love it here, Papa. I’m making so many friends. Thank you for letting me come.”

  Then she remembered something. “Be sure and tell Mutti that I do miss going to church on Sundays. But th
at’s only for the summer.”

  “I will tell her that,” Hans chuckled, amused that she hadn’t thought of this “sacrifice” earlier in her report. “But try really hard to call again tonight, Lisa. Your mother and grandmother still have a lot of concerns. When they hear how you are doing, that will make them feel much better. Uh . . . but I probably wouldn’t say anything about Miki, okay?”

  Lisa hooted softly. “I’m not six anymore, Papa. I get it.”

  Suddenly a woman’s voice barked something in the background. Lisa said something back that Hans didn’t make out, but then she was back with him. She took a quick breath. “I’ve only got a few more minutes, and there’s something . . . um . . . I need to talk to you about before I hang up.”

  Something in her voice made the hair at the back of his neck prickle. “Go ahead.”

  “Uh . . . some boys came over to our camp last evening and asked some of us to go on a hike with them. We did, and it was a lot of fun, but . . . um . . .”

  Hans nearly yelled into the phone. “What, Lisa?”

  “When we stopped for a rest, one boy took me off on a little side trail and. . . .”

  “What happened? How old a boy? Tell me!”

  “He’s sixteen.” Silence for a moment, and then her words came out in rush. “He tried to get fresh with me, Vati. I thought he was a nice boy. He was very good looking and. . . .”

  “And what?” From Lisa’s voice Hans could tell she was near tears, which made him fume all the more. But he forced himself to speak gently. “Tell me, Lisa. What happened?”

  “While the others were all sitting around talking, he said he wanted to show me something. So I went with him into the forest a short way from where we were. And . . . and when we were alone, he put his arm around me. That surprised me, but it felt nice so I didn’t resist. Then he asked if he could kiss me. I told him no, that I didn’t want to be kissed.”

  There was a long moment of silence. Hans wanted to yell at her to continue, but he bit it back.