Germany
Paddy’s first experience of overt Nazi power
Nazi Parade in Goch, Westphalia, 1933,
“The town was hung with National Socialist flags and the window of an outfitter’s shop next door held a display of Party equipment: swastika arm-bands, daggers for the Hitler Youth, blouses for Hitler Maidens and brown shirts for grown-up S.A. men; swastika button-holes were arranged in a pattern which read Heil Hitler and an androgynous wax-dummy with a pearly smile was dressed up in the full uniform of a Sturmabteilungsmann. I could identify the faces in some of the photographs on show; the talk of fellow-gazers revealed the names of the others. ‘Look, there’s Roehm,’ someone said, pointing to the leader of the S.A. clasping the hand which was to purge him next June, ‘shaking hands with the Führer!’ Baldur von Schirach was taking the salute from a parade of Hitlerjugend; Goebbels sat at his desk; and Goering appeared in S.A. costume; in a white uniform; in voluminous leather shorts; nursing a lion cub; in tails and a white tie; and in a fur collar and plumed hunting hat, aiming a sporting gun. But those of Hitler as a bare-headed Brownshirt, or in a belted mackintosh or a double-breasted uniform and peaked cap or patting the head of a flaxen-plaited and gap-toothed little girl offering him a bunch of daisies, outnumbered the others. ‘Ein sehr schöner Mann!’ a woman said. Her companion agreed with a sigh and added that he had wonderful eyes. The crunch of measured footfalls and the rhythm of a marching song sounded in a side street. Led by a standard-bearer, a column of the S.A. marched into the square. The song that kept time to their tread, ‘Volk, ans Gewehr!’1 – often within earshot during the following weeks – was succeeded by the truculent beat of the Horst Wessel Lied: once heard, never forgotten;” “A Time of Gifts” Chapter 2, ‘Up the Rhine’
Goch as it is today
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