Mildred gasped.
“I’m sure Dietrich is fine,” said Arvid, but the strain in his voice revealed his uncertainty.
It was not until the following day that Arvid was able to reach his cousin and find out that he was safe and unharmed—and furious. Unaware that someone in the station had switched off his microphone, he had continued for another five minutes, warning the German people not to imbue Adolf Hitler with the qualities of a religious icon.
“Dietrich is determined to get his whole message out, so he’s arranging to have it published,” Arvid told Mildred afterward. “He’s already begun work on a new essay arguing that Christians have a moral and religious obligation to defend the Jews from persecution.”
“I hope he changes a lot of minds, and quickly.”
“Dietrich isn’t alone. Others are speaking out, and we must too, before we lose our opportunity. We must uproot Hitler from his new office now, before he digs himself in too deeply.”
But all around were signs that they were running out of time. Two days later, Chancellor Hitler tightened his grip on his newfound authority by convincing President Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag and set a new general election for March 5.
Alarmed and outraged, socialists and Communists joined forces to oppose the move. Mildred and Arvid were among two hundred thousand demonstrators who gathered at the Lustgarten on the frosty night of February 7 to protest Hitler’s appointment, bearing torches, chanting slogans, singing songs of unity and peace. Shivering in the cold, Mildred was nonetheless heartened by the sheer numbers of protestors filling the plaza, people like her and Arvid and their friends who recognized the danger of the fascist surge and refused to be swept up in it. Some Brownshirts stood about in clusters on the edges of the protest, glaring malevolently, but on that night, greatly outnumbered, they refrained from their usual violence.
It was a triumphant, hopeful protest, but in the days that followed, the SA arrested thousands of political enemies, mostly Communists, dragging them off to makeshift prisons on the slightest of pretexts. By the middle of February, violence in the streets of Berlin surged as Brownshirt mobs attacked members of the Catholic Center Party and trade unionists as well as their usual targets, Communists and Social Democrats. Some politicians appealed for calm as the election approached, but many prominent officials were strangely silent.
“Everyone knows the Nazis are responsible for the violence,” Arvid said. “No reasonable person wants more of this. Surely the German people will vote Hitler and his whole party out of office.”
Mildred hoped he was right. The situation was untenable, and in the end, reason and common sense had to prevail. The March 5 election was their chance to get the political situation back on track so they could focus on the economy, on jobs, and on helping the poor.
Then, late in the evening on February 27, just as Mildred was yawning over a pile of student essays and contemplating going to bed, the wailing of a fire engine drew her and Arvid to the cupola windows. Another siren joined the first, and then another, until the cold winter night itself seemed to shriek with alarm.
Off to the northwest the horizon glowed red, and when the wind gusted, it carried the scent of burning. Arvid wanted to go out to see what was ablaze and whether Neukölln was in any danger, but Mildred would not allow it, fearing riots or worse. “Check the radio,” she urged, but the few stations still broadcasting at that hour played music as they did on any ordinary night.
Mildred and Arvid lingered near the windows, watching and listening past midnight, until the quieting of the sirens and the absence of fire trucks on Hasenheide convinced them that the fire had been contained. Exhausted, they went to bed and dropped into restless sleep.
In the morning, they learned that the source of the smoke and flame was the Reichstagsgebäude, now a smoldering ruin on the edge of the Tiergarten.
Chapter Ten
February–March 1933
Sara
The distant wail of sirens woke Sara in the early morning hours of the last day of February, but after a moment of disorientation in which the sound grew fainter and faded away, she drifted back to sleep, trusting that the unknown danger was too far off to harm her family.
When daylight broke, she learned that she could not have been more wrong.
The morning papers delivered the shocking news. While they slept, the Reichstag building had gone up in flames. Within three hours of the first alarm, firefighters had brought the fire under control and determined that the cause was indisputably arson. Without any evidence to support his claim, Hitler had blamed Communist dissidents for the blaze. He had quickly convinced the ailing President Hindenburg to issue an emergency decree granting him unprecedented powers—ostensibly to enable him to find and apprehend the culprits, but in truth to eliminate the Communists as political rivals.
By early morning, Hitler had already exploited his new authority by ordering the police to arrest more than four thousand Communists. Civil rights guaranteed by the Weimar Constitution were suspended indefinitely. Banished overnight were the rights of habeas corpus, the inviolability of residence, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom from censorship, the rights of correspondence privacy, the right to property, and the rights of assembly and association. The official definition of treason now included the production, dissemination, or possession of written material that called for strikes or other uprisings.
“We must warn Natan,” said Sara’s mother, blanching. “He’s always been too outspoken for his own good. He may unintentionally write something that was tolerated yesterday but is treasonous today.”
“Unintentionally?” echoed Sara. “I think it’s more likely he’ll do so on purpose.”
“Sara,” her father chided, with a surreptitious look that begged her not to upset her mother. To his wife he added, “I’m sure Natan is well aware of the new regulations.”
“I doubt Natan will call for an uprising, but we can’t expect him to stop writing about Nazi outrages,” said Sara. “A free press is fascism’s most dangerous opponent. That’s why Hitler wants to discredit and silence it.”
“I wouldn’t expect Natan to stop reporting the truth,” her mother replied, “only to be more circumspect.”
“Our Natan is brave but also clever,” Sara’s father said, taking his wife’s hand. “He won’t be intimidated into silence, but he won’t recklessly provoke enemies either.”
Sara thought it took very little to provoke the Nazis, but as she watched her mother fight back tears, she kept the observation to herself.
In a frenzy of activity leading up to the March 5 elections, leftist newspapers were banned, and new National Socialist newspapers and magazines filled the vacant spaces on newsstands. The Nazis tightened their control on state radio, filling the airwaves with party propaganda. With the freedoms of speech and assembly eliminated, it was a simple matter for Hitler to ban political rallies for any party but his own. Communist and Social Democrat politicians hardly dared set foot outside their own homes for fear of attack or arrest.
