Irmgard's Nazi Brother Suggests Divorce

Dearest grandchildren,

This post falls under the category of “no one really knows what goes on behind closed doors.”

I remember one domestic incident clearly. In retrospect, I realize that it was about my parents’ relationship, but I didn’t know that then. I must have been about seven years old. As was common in Germany at that time, my parents’ big bed was two twin beds pushed together. I remember the “crack” between the beds as my favorite place to nap. One day, I saw the maid separate the beds, placing a nightstand between them. My father was furious. “What will the people think?” he said, angrily. I was very bothered by it all, so I asked Mutti about it, but she just dismissed it. “I just asked them to separate the beds, that’s all. You’re getting too big now to lie on the crack.” That was good enough for me at the time, never considering that it might have to do with their marriage, or whether it was possibly a political action. As all kids do, I sometimes thought, when I felt the slightest discord between my parents, that they might get divorced because of me. But not then.

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Something else happened around 1936 that deeply affected my older brother Rainer. He kept it a secret for years, but finally told me about it after the war:

One fine Saturday morning, our mother, Irmgard, was watching Rainer as he finished a game of chess with his uncle Heinz, Mother’s younger brother. By this time, seventeen years after Irmgard and Carl’s wedding, Irmgard’s mother, Adele, and even her brother, Heinz, had come to accept the fact that Irmgard had married a Jew. But Irmgard’s spiteful father, Arthur, never accepted Carl, the Jew, as part of the family.

“Are you beating him today?” Mother asked Rainer.

(Irmgard and Rainer)

“I’m trying, but he’s got my queen!” Rainer answered, deep in thought, wrinkles running from his nose to his hair line as he concentrated.

“Could my son beat my big-hero brother?” she said. Heinz hardly noticed the sarcasm in his sister’s voice. He still didn’t like being treated as a little brother, but now that they were adults, he’d come to accept it. His mother and his sister had shaped him into the gentle and kindly man he was, even as the family would have preferred, in the interest of family image, for him to become a war hero like other members of the family. Rainer loved the way his uncle talked, with that suave smile of a pastor shaking hands with his flock. But to express a different side of his personality, Heinz liked to wear black jackboots with his smart knickers, lest somebody thought him “soft.” As a pilot in the Great War he had impressed his big sister and parents when he won two dog fights with English planes in a single week. Now that Hitler was in power, Heinz hoped to fly in the new Luftwaffe, rubbing elbows again with the flying aces, many of whom were from the nobility — even Barons and Knights.

“Look out who’s coming up on your left flank!” Heinz warned Rainer. Onkel Heinz liked to shroud his statements in military terms. He had become a decent chess player in the endless hours of sitting around mess halls, waiting for the weather to clear. Sometimes Rainer would even win, especially when Onkel Heinz let him take back a move here and there. Rainer had captured a whole row of his uncle’s chess figures, and Heinz congratulated Rainer on what he called “the goodly number of officers” he’d conquered, carefully distinguishing chess “officers” from mere chess “men.”

That day, Rainer won even without his queen, and with no moves taken back. His uncle didn’t even seem to mind losing; his mind was elsewhere.

Mother smoothed the tablecloth with both hands. “Good for you, Rainer”, she said, “but now it’s time to go handle Caesar’s war!” Rainer bowed to his uncle as any well-behaved 13-year-old would, thanked him for the game, and reluctantly but obediently withdrew to do his Latin homework in the next room. He closed the door behind him, but it did not latch.

Through the unlatched door, Rainer could hear his sister coax her brother. “So, Heinz, what’s up? It’s good to see you, but you didn’t just come here out of the blue to play chess with your nephew, did you?”

(Irmgard and her brother, Heinz.)

“What makes you think that?” Heinz said, not really expecting an answer. A long silence.

“Well … actually …”, Heinz stammered. “The Old Man brought it up the other day,” he said, referring to their father, Arthur. Heinz lowered his voice. “He thinks someone needs to talk to you.”

‘That doesn’t sound like their usual brother-sister banter,’ Rainer thought. He didn’t dare open his Latin book, instead listening intently to the hushed tones in the room next door.

“The politics…” he heard, but not much more, only a word here and there. “… the Old Man … be careful … all in danger … Jew in our family … Mama doesn’t agree …”

(Arthur Buddecke, “the Old Man” - an anti-Semite.)

This was too intriguing. Rainer very quietly stood up, careful not to move the chair, and tiptoed to the slit where the door remained just slightly open. He could not see his mother or Onkel Heinz, but he could hear them now. They were whispering.

“You know how uncertain these times are,” said Heinz, replacing substance with a cliché. “The Old Man thinks the Jews are in for a rough time, and he wants to shield you from that.”

“How can he?” she asked.

Heinz whispered something that Rainer couldn’t hear.

Now his mother raised her voice to a stage whisper. Rainer could visualize her recoiling. “You are not suggesting that I leave Carl, are you?” There was no answer, only silence as taut as a cat ready to pounce. Rainer could hear his mother gasp as though she was about to say something. “Not … even ... not even our Blockwart^[1] would dare suggest that to me, and here… my own family…!” She was fuming.

Rainer imagined Onkel Heinz shrinking away, but now that he had said it, and there was no turning back. “Think of it, sister - the children are yours and you would get your good maiden name back. You know the Old Man said the last thing we need in our family is a Jew. And leaving a Jew is so easy now! Just say so and it’s done -- no problem, no fuss.”

“You really mean divorce, don’t you?”

Instead of answering, Heinz said, “Do you know that you are now no safer than a half-Jew, just like your children? In times like these you must look out for your own neck….”

“Surely you don’t mean…?” Mother was furious. “You think having a Jewish brother-in-law in the family hurts your business and your Luftwaffe ambitions, don’t you?” She was no longer whispering.

Heinz retorted. “You know the Old Man hardly talks to you anymore because he’s so upset about having a Jew in our good family in times like these…”

“Get OUT!”

More agitated whispering followed, but Rainer could not understand, nor did he need to. He held onto the door frame with one hand. Heinz left. Rainer slowly opened the door a crack wider, not knowing what he would say. He could see his mother now, her head buried in her hands.

Rainer tip-toed back to his desk. He kept this secret festering in his soul for nine long years, sharing it with no one.

Treue is the basic “categorical imperative” of loyalty, no mater what. It was the one absolute imperative in the Buddecke family. Treu sein means to be steadfast, to be “true to thine own self,” to be true to the principles you had been taught at home: do your duty without question, do what is needed, be courteous to others, and never ever abandon those for whom you are and must be loyal - most of all your family.

The story my father tells in this excerpt is chilling.

I still have a hard time wrapping my head around this conversation between Heinz and Irmgard. Heinz tried to convince his sister to divorce her husband - someone she dearly loved – simply because he was a Jew.  The government had actively been pressuring the non-Jew in intermarried couples to divorce and encouraging the non-Jew to re-join the Volksgemeinschaft, or “Aryan community of blood.” In this case, Irmgard’s own beloved brother was doing so! This did irreparable damage to their sibling relationship, and it never fully recovered.

It was during that time that my father had a tile stove installed in the playroom. Coal briquets and coke were rarely available now and the tile stove was much easier to heat, it retained the heat longer, and heat could be concentrated it in one room. We all began to spend a great deal of time together in the one warm room of the big house – the playroom. Most living during the war took place in that one room and it made us more of a family unit than we had been before. I even remember occasional light evening meals in the playroom. Breakfast and lunch were served to the family in the dining room, but lately the dining room was too cold.

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^[1] The Party figurehead responsible for representing the NSDAP Party to people on his local city block