Melita Maschmann
Melita Maschmann was born in Germany in 1918. She was introduced to the ideas of Adolf Hitler by her mother's dressmaker, who had been convinced by his promise to help the working-class. (1)
"For as long as I had known her she had worn an embossed metal swastika under the lapel of her coat. That day she wore it openly for the first time and her dark eyes shone as she talked of Hitler's victory." When she told her mother about this she replied that she "thought it presumptuous for uneducated people to concern themselves with politics". (2)
Maschmann's wealthy parents were members of the conservative German National Party. (3) However, on 1st March, 1933, Maschmann decided to join the League of German Girls (BDM). However, because she did not want to upset her parents she decided to try and keep it a secret. Like other members she was ordered to read Mein Kampf but she never finished the book. She argued that the BDM gave her a sense of purpose and belonging. Maschmann admitted that "she devoted herself to it night and day, to the neglect of her schooling and the distress of her parents". (4)
Maschmann became a supporter of the Nazi Party. She was highly critical of her parents for not seeing the reasons why Hitler provided the best hope for Germany: "The desperate struggle to save democracy, which was then being fought out, was not recognized or appreciated by my parents. We never heard the grownups do anything but curse about the chaotic squabbling of this parliament. Ultimately one came to understand that things ran so wild there because the Germans had splintered into a senseless multiplicity of parties, which had their knives into one another quite literally. As I remember it, hardly a day seems to have passed when my mother did not read out a news item from the morning paper about some political murder." (5)
Melita Maschmann: Nazi Party Activist
Maschmann supported Hitler because of his promise to bring an end to unemployment. The number of registered unemployed in Germany had increased from 1.6 million in October 1929 to 6.12 million in February 1932. Since these figures did not include the "invisible" unregistered unemployed, it has been estimated that the true figure was 7.6 million. "Thirty-three per cent of the workforce were without jobs. Taking into account dependants, perhaps twenty-three million people were affected by unemployment." (6)
Maschmann later explained that she considered unemployment to be the most serious problem facing Germany: "Part of the misery about which the adults complained daily was unemployment. One could have no conception of what it mean for four, five or even six million people to have no work. Berlin had four million inhabitants…Imagine all the families living in Berlin having scarcely enough dry bread to satisfy their hunger... I believed the National Socialists when they promised to do away with unemployment… I believed them when they said they would reunite the German nation, which had split into more than forty political parties, and overcome the consequences of the dictated peace of Versailles." (7)
The father of her best friend, Marianne Schweitzer, was Jewish. Marianne believed that she joined the BDM because of her relationship with her parents: "Melita was quick, articulate, and gregarious - a joiner. She was bored at home with her conventional and conservative parents, and joining the Nazis was a way for her to rebel against them. I came from a more progressive, artistic family, and I was more of a loner, a listener and observer. We were both idealistic... who wanted to make the world better, except that she wanted to improve the German Nazi world while I wanted to improve all of mankind." (8)
Trude Mohr, the leader of the League of German Girls. In a speech soon after taking control of the organization she argued: "We need a generation of girls which is healthy in body and mind, sure and decisive, proudly and confidently going forward, one which assumes its place in everyday life with poise and discernment, one free of sentimental and rapturous emotions, and which, for precisely this reason, in sharply defined femininity, would be the comrade of a man, because she does not regard him as some sort of idol but rather as a companion! Such girls will then, by necessity, carry the values of National Socialism into the next generation as the mental bulwark of our people." (9)
Conflict with Parents
All girls in the BDM were told to dedicate themselves to comradeship, service and physical fitness for motherhood. In parades they wore navy blue skirts, white blouses, brown jackets and twin pigtails. (10) Parents complained about the time their children were forced to spend outside the home in activities organized by the BDM and the Hitler Youth. Its leader, Baldur von Schirach, argued "that the Hitler Youth has called up its children to the community of National Socialist youth so that they can give the poorest sons and daughters of our people something like a family for the first time." (11)
These arguments upset many parents. They felt that the Nazi Party was taking over control their children. Hildegard Koch constantly came into conflict with her mother over her membership of the BDM: "After all, we were the new youth; the old people just had to learn to think in the new way and it was our job to make them see the ideals of the new nationalized Germany". (12)
Members of the BDM later recalled that they welcomed the extra power they had over their parents. Hedwig Ertl recalled: "As a young person, you were taken seriously. You did things which were important... Your dependence on your parents was reduced, because all the time it was your work for the Hitler Youth that came first, and your parents came second... All the time you were kept busy and interested, and you really believed you had to change the world." (13)
Maschmann's clandestine activities in the BDM brought her into close contact with an entirely new class of "shop girls, office workers, dressmakers, and servant girls". Together they marched through the Jewish quarter in Berlin, chanting: "This is where the rich Jews live. They need a bit of waking up from their afternoon naps." (14) She criticised her middle-class school friends, who were more interested in "snobbish social events and cliquish clubs". (15)
The Nazi government encouraged the mixing of the sexes and did not disapprove of girls getting pregnant. In 1936, when approximately 100,000 members of the Hitler Youth and the BDM attended the Nuremberg Rally, 900 girls between fifteen and eighteen returned home pregnant. Apparently, the authorities failed to establish paternity in 400 of these cases. (16) Maschmann later recalled that most of the BDM members hated the orders to bear children without husbands. They agreed that "the family alone could be the place where children grow up." (17)
Lynda Maureen Willett argues that Maschmann played a key role in fighting against this "population policy" of the Schutzstaffel (SS). "Maschmann states that one of the male leaders in the Hitler Youth had presented an argument for bigamy, with racially suitable women, to ensure the numbers of babies produced... Maschmann reports that this debate also began to go on in public. Maschmann herself became involved in producing leaflets and reports against this policy." (18)
Melita Maschmann remembers the first time she witnessed a Nazi torchlight procession: "I longed to hurl myself into this current, to be submerged and borne along by it.... The crashing tread of the feet, the somber pomp of the red and black flags, the flickering light from the torches on the faces and the songs with melodies that were at once aggressive and sentimental... “I was overcome with a burning desire to belong to these people for whom it was a matter of life and death.” (19)
Anti-Semitism
In 1937 Maschmann was contacted by the Gestapo to spy on the family of her friend, Marianne Schweitzer, whose brothers had been active in the German Communist Party. When she refused, she claimed she was "harrassed daily and finally my National Socialist convictions were called into question". Maschmann was told that the family were involved in the German Resistance against Hitler. She eventually agreed to spy on the group and provided information about secret meetings that were taking place in her house. (20) As a result of information provided by Maschmann, a contingent of Gestapo men entered and searched the Schweitzers’ house. There was no secret meeting, but Marianne’s older sister was arrested for conspiracy to commit high treason and was sent to a concentration camp. Her mother was also arrested, but she was later released. (21)
The number of Jews emigrating increased after the passing of the Nuremberg Laws on Citizenship and Race in 1935. Under this new law Jews could no longer be citizens of Germany. It was also made illegal for Jews to marry Aryans. The pressure on Jews to leave Germany intensified. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich organized a new programme designed to encourage Jews to emigrate. This began with Crystal Night, that took took place on 9th-10th November, 1938. Presented as a spontaneous reaction of the German people to the news that the German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, had been murdered by Herschel Grynszpan, a young Jewish refugee in Paris, the whole event was in fact organized by the NSDAP. Over 7,500 Jewish shops were destroyed and 400 synagogues were burnt down. Ninety-one Jews were killed and an estimated 20,000 were sent to concentration camps. (22)
Maschmann was in Berlin that night and "had to pick her way through pieces of broken glass and furniture scattered all over the street". Maschmann asked a policeman what had happened. The policeman’s reply was “In this street they’re almost all Jews.” When he was questioned further he added: “Last night the National Soul boiled over.” She now decided that the "Jews are the enemies of the new Germany. Last night they had a taste of what that means." (23) Despite these comments Maschmann later claimed that, "like many of her upper-middle-class friends, she discounted the violence and anti-semitism of the National Socialist as passing excesses which would soon disappear". (24)
Maschmann later wrote a letter to Marianne Schweitzer: "The anti-semitism of my parents was part of their outlook which was taken for granted... One was friendly with individual Jews whom one liked, just as one was friendly as a Protestant with individual Catholics. But while it occurred to nobody to be ideologically hostile to the Catholics, one was, utterly, to the Jews... In preaching that all the misery of the nations was due to the Jews or that the Jewish spirit was seditious and Jewish blood impure... And when I heard that the Jews were being driven from the professions and homes and imprisoned in ghettos, the points switched automatically in my mind to steer me round the thought that such a fate could overtake you." (25)
Second World War
In 1939 all young women up to the age of twenty-five had to compete a year of Labour Service before being allowed to take up paid employment. Nine out of ten young women were sent to farms where they lived in barrack-like accommodation under close supervision. It was seen as the female parallel to compulsory military service, aimed at producing a trained labour force in the event of war. It was also a source of cheap labour as the girls received only pocket money rather than wages. (26)
Melita Maschmann did her Labour Service in rural East Prussia. She later recalled that she found the whole experience uplifting: "Our camp community was a model in miniature of what I imagined the National Community... Never before or since have I known such a good community, even where the composition was more homogeneous in every respect. Amongst us there were peasant girls, students, factory girls, hairdressers, schoolgirls, office workers and so on... The knowledge that this model of a National Community had affected me such intense happiness gave birth to an optimism to which I clung obstinately until 1945." (27)
After leaving school Maschmann began work for the League of German Girls helping produce press leaflets and propaganda materials. She also worked as a free-lance journalist. In 1940 she volunteered to work for the Hitler Youth in occupied Poland. Her biographer, Lynda Maureen Willett, points out that "while in Poland Maschmann refused to become involved in hoarding goods obtained from the Polish black market... Maschmann felt certain any committed National Socialist could continue on without material comforts and consumer goods." (28)
In 1943 Maschmann returned to Berlin to work as an editor in the publication department of the League of German Girls (BDM). In September 1944 her parents "were killed in a night bombing attack by the British which destroyed seventy-eight per cent of my mother’s home town and killed twelve to fifteen thousand people… so far as I know, I was the only person to emerge alive from a cellar in which some thirty people, including my parents, were either suffocated or burned to death." (29) Soon after their deaths a local BDM leader told Maschmann that she was "unstable".
When the Red Army was advancing towards in Berlin in 1945, the BDM leader, Jutta Rüdiger Rüdiger instructed members to learn to use pistols for self-defence. (30) According to Lynda Maureen Willett: "She was regularly risking her life by taking trips to the very frontlines of east Berlin with groups of children from the Hitler Youth, who would sing to the German soldiers to encourage them to fight on against the Russians. Maschmann was also fitting out evacuated houses on the eastern front of Berlin for the soldiers to use as temporary housing." (31)
Maschmann claims “I had gone into the war prepared to die, and this I was still ready to do." (32) She attended Werwolf training by the Schutzstaffel (SS). Werwolf was a plan to create a resistance force which would operate behind enemy lines as the Allies advanced through Germany. They were told to fight in uniform and, if captured, to claim the rights of prisoners of war. (33)
Melita Maschmann was arrested by American troops in 1945 and was forced to complete a mandatory de-Nazification course. She was released in 1948. (34) However, according to her own account, imprisonment did nothing to help decrease her commitment to National Socialism. "I undertook to look after the most prominent of the political prisoners, who was still in the men’s camp there. I had meanwhile obtained a job as a reporter on a daily paper… at least for the time being my employers were not to be told about my political past." (35)
Account Rendered
In 1948 Maschmann wrote a letter to her old school friend, Marianne Schweitzer. "I have often continued my conversation with you, awake and in dreams, but I have never tried to write any of it down. Now, today, I feel impelled to do so. I was prompted to this by a trivial incident. A woman spoke to me in the street and the way she held her head suddenly reminded me quite strikingly of you. But what is the real reason which made me sit down and write to you as soon as I came in? Perhaps in the intervening years I have, without being aware of it, prepared an account within me which must be presented." (36)
Maschmann decided to write an account of life in Nazi Germany. She showed the manuscript to Schweitzer before Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self was published in 1963 (an English translation appeared the following year). (37) It is written in the form of a book-length letter to Schweitzer. In a letter to Hannah Arendt she expressed her desire to help former Nazi colleagues reflect on their actions, and to help others "better understand" why people like her had been drawn to Adolf Hitler. She told Schweitzer: "Even the element of fate in a person’s life does not dispose of individual guilt, I know that. What I hope, dare to hope, is that you might be able to understand - not excuse - the wrong and even evil steps which I took and which I must report, and that such an understanding might form the basis for a lasting dialogue." (38)
In Germany, the book went through eight editions and was studied in schools. Historians of the Nazi period, including Claudia Koonz (Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics - 1987), Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust - 1997), Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History - 2001), Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany - 2001) and Richard Evans (The Third Reich in Power - 2005), have used the book as a primary source.
Melita Maschmann died in Germany in 2010, after suffering for over a decade from Alzheimer’s. She never married and had no children. Maschmann's life was portrayed in the documentary Teenage (2013) where she was played by Ivy Blackshire. (39)
Primary Sources
(1) Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self (1964) page 15
Part of the misery about which the adults complained daily was unemployment. One could have no conception of what it mean for four, five or even six million people to have no work. Berlin had four million inhabitants…Imagine all the families living in Berlin having scarcely enough dry bread to satisfy their hunger.... I believed the National Socialists when they promised to do away with unemployment… I believed them when they said they would reunite the German nation, which had split into more than forty political parties, and overcome the consequences of the dictated peace of Versailles.
(2) Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self (1964) page 15
The desperate struggle to save democracy, which was then being fought out, was not recognized or appreciated by my parents. We never heard the grownups do anything but curse about the chaotic squabbling of this parliament. Ultimately one came to understand that things ran so wild there because the Germans had splintered into a senseless multiplicity of parties, which had their knives into one another quite literally. As I remember it, hardly a day seems to have passed when my mother did not read out a news item from the morning paper about some political murder.
(3) Marianne Schweitzer, The New Yorker (29th May, 2013)
Melita was quick, articulate, and gregarious - a joiner. She was bored at home with her conventional and conservative parents, and joining the Nazis was a way for her to rebel against them. I came from a more progressive, artistic family, and I was more of a loner, a listener and observer.
We were both idealistic Weltverbesserer who wanted to make the world better, except that she wanted to improve the German Nazi world while I wanted to improve all of mankind. Gradually, these discussions erupted into serious conflict. Melita joined the B.D.M., the Hitler youth organization for girls, and became what I call a hundred-and-fifty-per-cent Nazi. I was horrified. She persuaded me to attend meetings where Hitler would speak; her intent was to have me convert. I told her in no uncertain terms that he sounded like a hysterical fanatic and that I couldn’t understand how an educated, highly intelligent person like her could possibly be impressed by him. She told me that I was not able to appreciate his greatness because I had Jewish blood.
(4) Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self (1964)
I longed to hurl myself into this current, to be submerged and borne along by it.... The crashing tread of the feet, the somber pomp of the red and black flags, the flickering light from the torches on the faces and the songs with melodies that were at once aggressive and sentimental... “I was overcome with a burning desire to belong to these people for whom it was a matter of life and death.
(5) Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self (1964)
Our camp community was a model in miniature of what I imagined the National Community... Never before or since have I known such a good community, even where the composition was more homogeneous in every respect. Amongst us there were peasant girls, students, factory girls, hairdressers, schoolgirls, office workers and so on... The knowledge that this model of a National Community had affected me such intense happiness gave birth to an optimism to which I clung obstinately until 1945.
(6) Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self (1964)
In September 1944 my parents died in a night bombing attack by the British which destroyed seventy-eight per cent of my mother’s home town and killed twelve to fifteen thousand people… so far as I know, I was the only person to
emerge alive from a cellar in which some thirty people, including my parents, were either suffocated or burned to death.
(7) Lynda Maureen Willett, Women Under National Socialism: The Case Study of Melita Maschmann (2012)
Maschmann’s memoir discusses the SS campaign for bigamy to be allowed to ensure there were enough “racially pure” Germans to carry on after WWII. Maschmann openly admits that she played a key role in fighting against this “population policy” of the SS. Maschmann states that one of the male leaders in the Hitler Youth had presented
an argument for bigamy, with racially suitable women, to ensure the numbers of babies produced provide compensation for the losses the German nation was undergoing while fighting the war. Maschmann writes of how she was aware of a similar idea circulating around the SS, but states “so far as I know there was not a single one of the senior BDM leaders in our office who did not reject it absolutely.”Maschmann reports that this debate also began to go on in public. Maschmann herself became involved in producing leaflets and reports against this policy and writes “They contained a rejection by the women’s youth leadership for the tendencies within the SS towards a ‘population policy."
Maschmann may have had a subordinate role within National Socialism solely because of her gender, but clearly she still had a voice within National Socialism. Maschmann also reports on how this public debate seems to have influenced people with regard to German women. Maschmann writes of her arrest in 1945 and interrogation by the American forces. The American questioning Maschmann stated "But the women’s Labour Service was only set up so that every work maiden should present the Fuhrer with an SS man’s child. These camps were just whorehouses.”
(8) Helen Epstein, The New Yorker (29th May, 2013)
In Germany, the book went through eight editions (the last in 1987) and was added to high-school reading lists in some school districts. It became part of Germany’s private, public, and scholarly debates over its own history. Historians of the Nazi period - Daniel Goldhagen and Claudia Koonz, among others - used “Account Rendered” as a primary source. Women’s studies researchers tried to discover in it the mentality of a female perpetrator. Students of memoir used the text to showcase the vagaries of personal narrative; sociologists looked for a relation between the literary work and the cultural setting from which it arose. Some readers questioned Maschmann’s reliability as a narrator, her motivation, and whether or not she was representative of ordinary Germans. They theorized about the Jewish friend to whom the memoir is addressed: Was she a construct, a composite, or a reality?
(9) Joe Winkler, Jerusalem Post (6th May, 2013)
This was, by all accounts, one of the first and most popular accounts of a former Nazi accounting for her past, and it was definitely the first by a woman. The book is written in the form of letters to a Jewish friend, which adds a layer to the complexity of the project. How do you apologize to a close Jewish friend for being a Nazi? Can it sound like anything but lame rationalizations?
Maschmann is acutely aware that her friend might view her project as self-justifying, but writes, ‘Even the element of fate in a person’s life does not dispose of individual guilt, I know that. What I hope, dare to hope, is that you might be able to understand - not excuse - the wrong and even evil steps which I took and which I must report, and that such an understanding might form the basis for a lasting dialogue.
If only it were that simple. For years after the book’s initial publication, it was unclear if Maschmann was actually writing to a real childhood friend, or if she was using a construct. Maschmann moved to India and adopted a Hindu name, so she could not be reached for comment. But it emerged over time that, indeed, Maschmann was attempting to reach out to a real friend, Marianne Schweitzer...
At ninety-five, Schweitzer is an impressively sharp, brisk, and busy woman, who attends a weekly yoga class and still volunteers at the San Diego Museum of Man. She told us that in the spring of 1933, when she had just turned fifteen and was failing Latin and math, her mother had her transferred to a new high school, where Melita became her best friend. They did their homework together, discussed literature and exchanged confidences.
They also spent much of their time discussing the politics of the day, but the relationship began to fray when Maschmann entered the Hitler Youth and tried to convert Schweitzer to Nazism. These letters of apology take on an even deeper personal quality. Maschmann, as she confesses in her memoir, actually spied on the Schweitzer family for the Gestapo, resulting in the arrest of both Schweitzer’s sister and mother.