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78 D Chapter Twenty-One d problemS At School And At home At regular intervals, I came home from school with news of a frightening nature. A course called“national-political instruction”was now taught on Saturdays by Dr. Kadner, a stocky brute, who had lately been parading around the school in his yellow-brown SA uniform, complete with black boots, shoulder straps, and swastika. As far as my attendance in his classes was concerned, Dr. Kadner had reason for suspicion. Almost every other Saturday I was, according to a written excuse from my mother, stricken with some life-threatening illness , from which I miraculously recovered by Monday. I was small for my age and allegedly prone to all sorts of diseases. Weak, sickly, rebellious, and—on top of that—not a member of the Hitler Youth, the teacher asked himself? A renegade, a typical product of the notoriously decadent class, the aristocracy, a pernicious caste that, Dr. Kadner was certain, the führer would eventually want to deal with in his own way. Even though, he had to admit, there were a number of highborn people, including dukes, counts, and barons, who had proudly joined the party, the SA, and even the SS. Although the mere appearance of Dr. Kadner gave me the creeps, I had discovered a wonderful secret weapon.He had undoubtedly examined the note verifying myAryan heritage , on which my mother had stated her maiden name in all its glory.“Von Brauchitsch? Very interesting,” he remarked one day. “Do you know there is a famous general by this name?” I took the chance to enlighten him about all my illustrious ancestors.“No, no, no,” he replied, “I mean the one, who is not only the “führer’s” esteemed military advisor, but the bearer of the Golden Party emblem, the three-star general?” At that moment, I taught myself a first lesson in the art of name-dropping! “Oh, you mean my favorite Uncle Walther,” I remarked nonchalantly, causing his lower jaw to drop in awe. No need for him to know that this particular uncle was not my mother’s brother, but one of her numerous cousins, and for obvious reasons persona non grata in our house. My father tolerated no connections whatsoever between us and the man who lived only three blocks away. Not too much later,lightning of a particularly frightening nature struck close to home. A family living on our street decided to send their son, who at age fifteen had suddenly developed a severe case of epilepsy,to a reputable medical institution in western Germany,realizing they could not handle his terrible attacks at home. Believing that he was getting the best of care and treatment that might improve his condition, they instead received a letter They even Closed The Candy sTore 79 that the boy had,unfortunately,succumbed to a fatal kind of pneumonia.The inconceivable news contained the information that he had been cremated, the urn with the ashes being on the way to the family. The letter ended with “Heil Hitler” and some doctor’s signature. In 1935, the term“euthanasia”—Greek for helping the incurably ill to die in dignity— had taken a different, deadly meaning in the language of the Nazis. By the time the mass murders were publicly denounced from the pulpit by the “Westfalian Lion,” the Catholic Archbishop von Galen,long after Pastor Niemoeller’s incarceration,well over 70,000 of those classified as“unfit to live”had already died.Handicapped human beings,ranging from epileptics and people with Down syndrome to the physically crippled,from clearly recoverable to definitely incurable, were killed in cold blood, adults and children alike, in hospitals and mental institutions, some of them church-affiliated. Their murderers were doctors, nurses, deacons,and deaconesses who would,after the war,resume their positions as if nothing had happened. After the archbishop’s protest in 1940, the murders stopped, but were resumed later. Galen remained unharmed, because Hitler knew better than to touch such a highranking official of the Catholic Church, the institution he himself had never officially left. Alarmed by horrifying rumors, people tried in vain to bring their loved ones home from hospitals and mental institutions, particularly the children whom they had entrusted to recommended medical facilities. In those days, pneumonia turned out to be a very popular cause of death. Two years after our neighbors lost their son, a second case shook the neighborhood, also involving a teenager. In...

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