Between the Wars

Growing Up in the Third Reich. Chapter 3 of Who Was WM? Investigating a Televisionary: The Life and Work of Wolfgang Menge

7 min readApr 28, 2024

This fake photo–created with ChatGPT–shows a street in the city of Hamburg in 1938, the morning after the so-called “ Crystal Night”. A mother and her son stand in front of a destroyed shoe store

April 10, 1924

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin dies in early January 1924. His successor, Josef Stalin, orders the first “purges” in the Russian Communist Party. In Munich, the high treason trial against Adolf Hitler and his co-conspirators for the previous year’s failed putsch of November 9 opens. 1,580 households in Germany own a radio. In the US, the number has reached already 12 million. In February, Calvin Coolidge becomes the first president of the United States to give a radio address, and the British magazine Radio Times publishes an article based on experiments by John Logie Baird, a pioneer of mechanical television, reporting that the breakthrough of the new image medium is imminent.

In March, the 1440-year-old Islamic caliphate comes to an end in Turkey. Kemal Atatürk pursues the modernization of the state according to the Western model. Plagued by inflation, Germany prints the last paper banknotes worth five trillion marks. On April 1, Adolf Hitler receives a five-year sentence for aiding and abetting high treason. It is an April Fools’ joke. He will be released before Christmas. Elections are held in Italy on April 6. The fascists, led by Benito Mussolini, win a two-thirds majority.

Wolfgang is born into this world on April 10, 1924, in Berlin, the capital of the first German democracy. He is his parents’ second child. His mother, Golditza, née Schorr, is 26 years old and of Jewish origin. Like Elias Canetti, she was born in the Bulgarian village of Rustschuk, now Russe. Her parents are relatively wealthy. Golditza receives her education at boarding schools in Constantinople and Bucharest. After the First World War, she becomes a Romanian civil servant and accompanies a consignment of goods from Wallachia to Berlin. A framed document that Wolfgang hung up in his living room bears witness to this business trip. In Berlin, Golditza met the merchant Otto Menge and fell in love.

What We (Want to) Know About the Past

Decades later, a distant relative writes a description of the family situation. Golditza’s older sister Rosa and her parents had also moved to Germany: Rosa and her husband, the Bucharest-born lawyer Virgiliu Mosseano, resided “from 1923 to 28 in Berlin, Woldenbergerstrasse in Prenzlauer Berg. The Schorr in-laws also lived there with them. Mr. Schorr was a cantor in the Jewish community at Oranienburger Tor.”

When Wolfgang is born, his father is 31 years old. Otto Menge trades in automatic scales. Politics tears his side of the family apart. Otto’s brother Karl is an early member of the NSDAP, an “old fighter,” as they called them after the Nazi takeover. Family rumors say that as city manager of the “Free State of Brunswick,” he played a role in the naturalization of the Austrian Adolf Hitler in 1932. Otto Menge, however, was not a Nazi. He would stand by his wife throughout the Third Reich.

In 1926, his parents move with Wolfgang and his two-year-old brother Werner from Berlin to Dresden, then Braunschweig and finally Hamburg. Werner dies of polio before starting school. Wolfgang hardly remembers him. In 1935, when he is eleven, his parents have a third child, his sister Marianne.

“That past,” says Wolfgang back then, in 1987, on Sylt, “is one of those things. I think a lot is made up afterward. What did I know and when? What did I only find out later?”

“But you knew that your mother …?”

“Sure, but when? Like all Germans, I probably didn’t want to admit it.” He remains silent. “That may well have been the case.”

Growing Up in the Third Reich

In 1938, just fourteen years old, Wolfgang was desperate to join the Hitler Youth. But his parents wouldn’t let him.

“I was never allowed to do anything that required proof of Aryan origin.”

“Didn’t your mother have to wear a star?”

“Maybe yes, maybe not. I just don’t remember. She obviously wasn’t registered because my parents kept moving, five times in Hamburg alone, probably until they found a police station where someone was sitting who said, okay … There were so many strange stories. The father of Wolfgang Ebert …

“The Zeit journalist?”

“He is that, too. But he’s also a literary writer. His father was a composer. After 1933, he was no longer allowed to work for Ufa. So he just worked somewhere else. And his mother remained unharmed. She was even reported to the police once because, even though she was wearing her Jewish star, she had cut in line at the grocery store. Since I know the mother, I can imagine that. And she was reported by Mrs. Boelling …”

“Related to the ex-government press officer?”

“Yes, his mother. Mrs. Boelling was also Jewish. She was sent to Auschwitz afterward. But she survived.”

“Did you experience any antisemitic rejection?”

“No, not that I know of. On the other hand, I was never tempted to find anything particularly appealing. From that, I conclude that I was discouraged by my parents because, of course, they lived in constant fear, which I later understood. The only question is whether I knew all that back then?”

“What was it like at school?”

“I always wondered why I didn’t have any friends in class. The others did their homework together. I was on my own. My mother explained that to me once when I was older. But otherwise … Well, I know my parents didn’t have much money, and I suddenly got some new shoes. I had to go somewhere in Hamburg where the shop windows were broken.”

“After the so-called Crystal Night?”

“Nice name, isn’t it?” Wolfgang purses his lips. “I didn’t understand all that until I was a certain age. Before I became a soldier. I once asked about our relatives and was told they were no longer there.” He fixes his feet. “Well, we didn’t have much to do with our relatives anyway. I had only one cousin I liked …”

Jazz and Banned Books

WM graduates from school in the first months of the war. He begins an apprenticeship in commerce and frequents bars that play jazz music more or less secretly. His friends call him “Bubi”. He is particularly close with Hammerich “Hannibal” Oetzmann, who is one year older, and Bernd Hering, who is the same age as WM. What they have in common is that they are ‘against it.’

Both childhood friends will have a lasting influence on his life. Bernd Hering, who studies painting and works as an art teacher after the war, has a remarkable talent for forging official documents. In the days of the German capitulation, WM will fall back on this talent. And with Hannibal, a car dealer in later life, he makes Great Britain so unsafe in 1948 that they are both arrested.

For WM, a young man of almost military age, the early 1940s are a time of eerie stagnation. There is still little sense of the war in Hamburg. The long wait for his draft notice begins. It can arrive in the mail any day. During these months, WM develops his love of literature.

“A friend’s father went to sea and always brought back banned books, for example, Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday.”

He remained a tireless reader throughout his life. Novels and non-fiction books form the basis of his work in the audiovisual media. Decades later, a mutual friend, the literary scholar Barbara Naumann, would visit Wolfgang’s private library. She not only finds more works by Stefan Zweig. She marvels at the breadth and depth of his literary interests, “his autodidactic skill, knowledge, and taste in finding relevant readings.”

Also formative for WM’s artistic development, not just for his radio work in the 1950s, was the development of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ taste in music: in the early years of the war, the whole family listens to the — banned — radio station “Gustav-Siegfried-Eins,” “not least because of the music.”

Operation Gomorrha

“How was it,” I ask Wolfgang decades later, “that you were drafted even though your mother was Jewish?”

“Many so-called ‘Mischlinge of the first-degree,’ or ‘M 1’, were soldiers in special units. The Nazis made a big difference whether your mother or father was Jewish.”

“It is hard to imagine your existence as a discriminated ‘M 1’ …”

Wolfgang nods as if he feels the same way. He doesn’t attempt an answer.

“A lot about the past we know from other people’s stories, parents or grandparents …” I follow up.

“I’ve never asked.” He hesitates. “I once reread my old field post letters. Now I know what is in them, of course. But that’s something I’m not. Not anymore. I explain it to myself by being naive back then, a dreamer.”

The forced recruitment into the Reich Labor Service, coming in 1941, is to tear him away from the deceptive tranquility of Hamburg. A few months of labor service are followed by basic military training. In early 1943, WM’s unit is deployed to Poland.

This fake photo—created with ChatGPT—shows Hamburg during Operation Gomorrah in the summer of 1943

In the summer of this year, British Royal Air Force bombers appear in the skies over Hamburg for the first time. Operation Gomorrah. Entire parts of the city are destroyed. Over 30,000 people die in a single night. And there are many nights. However, the success the Allies hope for does not materialize. There is still no resistance rising among the population against the Nazi regime and its widely known crimes.