Love and Terror in the Third Reich

A Tale of Broken Integrity

Peter Matheson, Heinke Sommer-Matheson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532661181
  9781532661198
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532661204
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

What was it like to fall in love in Hitler's Germany? As the war tore them apart, how did young couples keep love vibrant, care for their children, and relate to the war? The earthy letters of Ernst and Lilo Sommer depict in unforgettable poignancy the collision of their personal dreams with the political and military realities of the Third Reich. Seventy years later their daughter, Heinke, reflects on this tragedy.

1

Childhood, Youth, and Marriage

Although you are far apart from one another, physically, you can still be present through letters and writing, in this way talking and opening up your heart to another.

—Martin Luther, 15391

When we think of the Third Reich what comes to mind first of all is its supermarket of horrors, its totalitarianism and nihilism, the Führer, Adolf Hitler, and his cronies. Yet this focus on the macro scene, on Nuremberg rallies, propaganda extravaganzas, on Blitzkrieg and the sadism of Auschwitz may miss the abyss of human and social tragedy that characterized the Hitler era. The subtlety and radicality of evil in the Third Reich is even more evident in the intimacy of individual and family stories, in its perversion of the love and idealism of the young. For the personal and the political walked hand in hand. Hitler, let’s remember, was seen as the infallible authority on family and womanhood as well as everything else! Domesticity as well as geopolitics was meant to be refashioned by the New Reich (Empire).

Between the strutting Gauleiters and the luftmenschen, the spectral humans of the concentration camps, lay strata upon strata of apparent ordinariness: devoted mothers and homemakers, young folk drawn into a new world of companionship and idealism, and teachers reaching out to their pupils with recorder and folk song. The evil of the Third Reich certainly lay in its brutality and ruthlessness, its trampling moral and religious values underfoot, but it was at its most perverse in its harnessing of the well-meaning for demonic outcomes. Corruptio optimi pessima (nothing worse than the seduction of the good).

Family photo albums, diaries, children’s books, and cheap editions of the centuries of German poetry and literature and song take us into the homes of ordinary people living through this time of upheaval. Ernst and Lilo lived parsimoniously, on the smell of an oily rag, but a piano was an absolute priority for them. Their culture was a rich and warm one, a very human one, though its syncretism is bewildering. Side by side on the family shelves sat the Bible, Schiller, Mein Kampf, and Rosenberg’s racist Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (Myth of the Twentieth Century), all now regarded as classics. Ernst Sommer talked of his pleasure in learning from den Alten (the old ones); he found there his spiritual sustenance, “whether it was from Jesus, Kant, Schiller or Rosenberg.”2 This is not untypical. Around the piano in countless village halls Lutheran hymns mingled with lilting folk music and the rousing marches from the Hitler Youth songbook. In winter children huddled around the stove, listening to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, Mark Twain’s yarns, and the adventures of Karl May, intertwined with heroic sagas from the Great War.3 The well-thumbed poetry books of Ernst and Lilo testify to the rich treasury of German literature stretching back to the Middle Ages. Countless poems were learnt off by heart.

The letters of Ernst and Lilo open up this world to us. The young lovers wrote to one another almost every second day, and the frequency of their letters, of their parcels and photos, documents their deep concern for every aspect of their partner’s life. We learn about their meals, their illnesses, and their family gatherings. During his military service Ernst would regularly bundle up Lilo’s previous letters, stored up to then in the saddlebag of his horse, Titus, and send them back to Lilo, so that they could read them together after the war. They often thought ahead to the postwar period.4 They were aware that the separation induced by the war, and their vastly different experiences of young motherhood and village life, on the one hand, and the privations and brutality of the Front, on the other, was changing them, driving a wedge between them, and threatening to pull them apart. The assiduous letter writing was a deliberate strategy to prevent this happening.5

Tragically, this retrospective rereading was never to take place. Yet, miraculously, the letters themselves did survive, were somehow preserved by Lilo through the utter chaos at the war’s end, which included a pell-mell flight with two small children from Pomerania to the west. For decades the letters were kept in a large brown box in a wardrobe. Lilo herself could not bear to read them until 1980. She had tried to do so many times, but it had simply been too painful. “It is so emotionally demanding, my eyes swim with tears, but I am determined to face up to this most precious time in my life. You can’t put into words what an impact, what an effect, what memories and emotions these written words generate. They document an unspeakably happy marriage and the immense love and care which surrounded me.”6

Their correspondence began in 1935, with their falling in love, followed by a long engagement, and their eventual marriage. They lived, for much of their lives, at opposite ends of Germany—hence the abundance of letters, which at first offer a vivid window onto their early married life in Wrohm, a little village in Schleswig-Holstein away up in the north of Germany; and into their very different families: his in Hamburg and various villages in Schleswig-Holstein, and hers in the east, in far-off Pomerania. They are love letters, first in peace, then in war. For them their love was special, uniquely wonderful. The world had never been anything like it! All lovers may feel this. There is, however, something quite striking about this young couple.

Ernst and Lilo Sommer were in their late twenties when war broke out. What was it like for young people like them, their lives just beginning, to be caught up in the vast political and military dramas of the Second World War? Married at long last in March 1938 after an extended engagement, they were almost immediately wrenched apart by mobilization, by the campaign in France, and then by Operation Barbarossa, the Russian campaign.

Both had been enthusiastically involved in the National Socialist youth movements and came from Christian backgrounds. The letters offer a vivid account of Ernst’s élan as a primary teacher and surprising insights into his officer training. We overhear their excitement about the successes of Hitler’s foreign policy, their pride that Germany was standing tall in the world again. Their delight in one another, in the birth and infancy of their two children, flows seamlessly into their enthusiasm for the new Germany, and their admiration of the genius of the Führer. Both were deeply affected, as countless letters testify, by the adroit symbolism of the National Socialist movement: its carefully choreographed mass gatherings, its gymnastic displays, and the drama of the raising and lowering of the flag—at dawn, at dusk, in the snow, and in wind and rain. While both of them were alert to the excesses such displays of emotion could generate, they were swept along, like millions of others, by a tide of hopefulness. A new age was at hand, and they were participants in its emergence.

From our perspective today the clouds of war were already gathering by the late 1930s, but there is scarcely a hint of this in their early letters. Hitler, they were sure, would steer the ship of state to a safe harbor. But then war did break out. Ernst left for garrison duty in coastal France, and then was posted to Russia. Bombs rained down on Lilo’s village of Wrohm, and as casualties mounted in Russia, her anxiety escalates about what she now came to see as a quite ghastly war. To the very end, though, until his death in Borki, an obscure Russian village, on the eve of his daughter’s third birthday, Ernst Sommer remained the caring spouse and father, the resolute comforter, and the confident believer in the Endsieg (final victory). Lilo, however, was left alone in 1942 with her two little children, amid the ruins of her hopes and dreams. She had eventually to cope with the death of husband, father, brother, and of virtually all her male relatives. The married life that had begun with such high hopes, personally and nation...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chronology
• Prologue
• Maps
• Chapter 1: Childhood, Youth, and Marriage
• Chapter 2: The False Sense of Peace
• Chapter 3: Why Hitler? Why National Socialism?
• The Photos
• Chapter 4: Russia
• Chapter 5: The Last Days
• Chapter 6: The Special Significance of the Letters
• Conclusion
• Afterword: A Personal Pilgrimage
• Family Tree
• Bibliography