Destined to Witness by Hans Massaquoi

Author:Hans Massaquoi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061856600
Publisher: HarperCollins

TOTAL WAR

My dorm at the school on von Essenstrasse was sparsely furnished with a dozen or so steel bunks and as many lockers. Seated around a table in the middle of the room and listening intently to a small radio were five old-timers, typical Hamburg blue-collar types. Their advanced age had put them beyond the reach of the military draft; nevertheless, they worked in a variety of menial jobs around the city.

After eyeing me suspiciously in the beginning, they soon accepted me as one of them. To my continual amusement and entertainment, they turned out to be the most contentious bunch of people I had ever met. From the moment we got up in the wee hours of morning until the 10 P.M. lights out, they bickered and argued. Their perpetual quibbling notwithstanding, they were firmly united in their shared contempt of Hitler and the Nazi regime, a contempt they vented freely without regard for their safety. Their most scathing sarcasm they reserved for the daily radio reports from the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), the military headquarters, which informed the German people of the progress of Hitler’s war. Disagreeing openly with everything the announcer said, they delighted in predicting that the Schweinehund Hitler and his fellow Schweinehunde would soon reap their just reward in front of an Allied firing squad.

Those words were music to my ears, but, remembering my close call with Reingruber, the treacherous journeyman from my apprentice days, I thought it wise not to contribute to their seditious discussions. I also made sure never to take sides in any of their numerous arguments.

On July 20, 1944, our dorm’s radio crackled with the most sensational news of the war—a group of German army officers had tried to assassinate Hitler in a bomb plot at his Rastenburg headquarters. Miraculously, the Führer had escaped with minor injuries.

My dormmates could hardly contain their disappointment. They cursed and some of them threw themselves across their bunks in a show of mock despair over the fact that “the Schweinehund had gotten away.” As more and more details of the failed plot and the identity of the main conspirator, Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg, were released, that sentiment was echoed among many workers throughout the Hamburg area, although with considerably more restraint.

My dormmates consoled themselves with the hope that another plot was just around the corner and that the next time, the plotters would not fail. I wasn’t so sure. The swift and exceedingly brutal retribution against the plotters and their families seemed to me too strong a deterrent against another attempt to end the dictator’s life.

The immediately noticeable effect of the failed coup was an order from the Führer’s headquarters that all members of the Wehrmacht adopt the outstretched-arm Heil Hitler salute, previously used only by units of the Waffen-SS. The order was undoubtedly meant as a constant and grim reminder to the army, which had supplied the plotters, of who was boss.

With fighting morale sinking rapidly both at home and on the front,

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