In Europe

lived in a chic neighbour-hood, close to the Tiergarten, and high-ranking officers always came to visit. We also took a lot of walks together, my father and I. I would lead him around Berlin, along the former Siegesallee with all those busts of the German rulers, and he would deliver whole history lectures. My father always said: “My boy, I certainly hope you never become a merchant.” What he meant was: a non-official. He considered serving the state the finest thing a man could do, either as an officer or as a senior civil servant. All other professions, in which money was the only object, he considered second-rate.
    ‘When I was about thirteen, there were two boys I played with all the time. One day, one of them, the son of a hospital watchman, came over wearing a brown shirt. It had an insignia on it, a setting sun. He said: “I've joined the Hitler Youth.” He started talking about everything, about Hitler and about the trips they took in a truck outside the city on Sundays. He said I should come along sometime. So one Sunday morning I climbed on that truck as well. There were about fifty other boys, all of them wearing caps, broad belts and brown shirts.
    ‘Along the way they sang songs, the truck stopped at a café where they drank schnapps and beer, people told filthy jokes and shouted: “
Juda, verrecke!
” All rude, working-class youth, in other words, all unemployed, with nothing to do. For them it was a real experience, a trip like that. It wasn't my kind of thing, though. That, in what must have been 1931, was my first contact with the Nazis.
    ‘Meanwhile, a lot of the refined Jewish families in our surroundings began leaving the country, discreetly. Our class at the gymnasium startedoff in 1929 with thirty boys. I'd estimate that about half of them came from Jewish families; but to be honest, we didn't really think in such terms. When I took my final exams in 1935, there were only eight boys left in the class.
    ‘I met a few of my old classmates half a century later, in 1988, when the school had its 300th anniversary. It was nice to see them again. But still. I had been decorated in the Second World War, I had been a member of Field Marshal Rommel's staff, and of course they all knew that. I could feel the question in the air: “How could you have been a part of that?” Fifty years of tragic history, it formed a barrier between us that we tried to bridge, but it was no use.
    ‘I was eighteen in 1936, the year of the Berlin Olympics, and I felt grand. Such a bond between the peoples, so much common interest. That's how I felt about it. The next year I went to the
Kriegsschule
in Munich. So I became an officer, perhaps because that was the only thing that meant anything to my father.
    ‘Because of his work for the general staff, he was very well informed about everything. “This half-baked painter, my goodness, that's going to be a lot of trouble for all of us,” I heard him mumble quite often. I didn't see it that way, I was wildly enthusiastic. I took part in the invasion of the Sudetenland with our Berlin armoured division. That was no war, that was only a festive march. People were waving flags everywhere, we received an enthusiastic reception, and we thought: Hitler is slowly but surely taking Versailles apart. The march into the Rhineland went the same way. As young officers, we realised that Hitler was playing a game of high stakes, but he did it rather skilfully.
    ‘The older officers were much more cautious. In summer 1939, when we were stationed in Pomerania and rumour had it that things would be starting in Poland soon, they were pretty sombre. “This fellow is dragging us into a new world war,” they said. “This is going to go all wrong.” That was the mood we were in as we advanced to within ten kilometres of the border. Then orders came to withdraw to thirty kilometres, and all the older officers started drinking in relief: “Thank God, there's not going to be a war after all. Hitler's done it again.” That was the point at which Hitler had given the British another forty-eight hours to meet his final ultimatum, but of course we didn't know that then.
    ‘In those days, please forgive me for saying this, there was only one thought that occupied me: dear God, please don't be so cruel to my father as to let his only son die at war. The idea of a messenger coming to my parents’ door with the news “Your son has been killed in action”, that frightened me more than