I was pretending to be excited, but I felt nothing more than a sense of simmering anxiety. I was always anxious around senior Nazis.
I’d been particularly concerned for Jürgen since the rocket program moved to the site they called Mittelwerk in the wake of a British bombing raid on Peenemünde, in the summer of 1943. The move had been unimaginably complex—the entire rocketry operation shifted more than six hundred kilometers across Germany into the tunnels of a supposedly air raid–proof gypsum mine, beneath a huge hill called the Kohnstein. Jürgen and Karl and their staff were tasked with reconstructing the research program and establishing a factory to mass-produce the rockets in those mines, and they were given just a few short months to do it.
I tried to call him most days, but his phone usually went unanswered. I’d taken the children to see him several times, only to spend the entire weekend at Jürgen’s villa in the nearby town of Nordhausen, waiting for a break in his work schedule that never came. At some point, I’d started to learn more about my husband’s life through Karl, via Lydia, than from him directly.
He was busy, but that wasn’t why he avoided my calls. He was stressed, but that wasn’t why he didn’t make time to see me and the children. Jürgen was withdrawing from us, and it was time to force a confrontation.
Lydia and I approached the host at the door, and he greeted us warmly as we introduced ourselves. After checking a seating chart, he led the way to our tables.
“You’re here, Mrs. zu Schiller,” he said politely, holding out a chair for Lydia at a table near the back of the room.
“Hello, Mrs. zu Schiller,” Aldo Radtke said, smiling warmly at her from his own seat, a few chairs down from Lydia. “And Mrs. von Meyer Rhodes. Congratulations.” A decade after that dinner party at Lydia’s house, Aldo was no longer fresh-faced and anxious, but he still seemed sweet. He was a key member of Jürgen’s team, one of only a handful of colleagues who was invited to join us that evening.
“Hello, Aldo.” I smiled, nodding at him. “Thank you.”
But Lydia seemed confused. She looked from Aldo to her seat, her expression darkening when the waiter indicated I should follow him to another table.
“You are a guest of honor, Mrs. von Meyer Rhodes. You have a reserved seat at the front.”
Lydia was not a woman accustomed to sharing the spotlight, and that night, she was watching someone else bask in it. I gave her an apologetic shrug, and she forced a smile and nodded, as if permitting me to go to my own seat.
The head table was set just in front of a heavy red velvet curtain, facing the rest of the room like a bridal table. Trails of ivy hung along the front, and bright arrangements of winter flowers were set between pairs of seats—lily of the valley and pansies and coral bells. The sweet scent rising from the arrangements reminded me of Adele’s garden.
I took my seat alone, feeling awkward and on display, and finished a glass of champagne before Jürgen joined me. There were strands of silver along his hairline now, new lines around his eyes, and his tuxedo hung on his gaunt frame. Every time I’d seen him that year, he looked more beaten down. Now, as he sat and shuffled his chair closer to the table, there was barely disguised distress in his gaze.
“What is it?” I whispered.
He turned toward me and whispered heavily, “I’ve been invited to join the SS.” I pulled away and stared at him, forcing a smile. Invited seemed the wrong word for that sentence, because it suggested there was an option to decline. “Karl too.”
But Otto took the seat beside me then, and Helene soon took the seat on his other side. We exchanged pleasantries as my heart raced, and my stomach churned so much I couldn’t tolerate more than a bite or two of the elaborate meal.
Was this just a ceremonial appointment—a uniform and title, and that was it? Or would Jürgen be forced to participate in still more activities that went against his values? He obviously knew enough to be worried, but he was so much better at playing the game than I was. He laughed and he joked and sipped champagne and ate his food as if he hadn’t a care in the world. But I saw the strain in the lines around his lips and the tense set of his shoulders. I heard the brittleness beneath his chuckles.
I felt the sweat on his palm when I reached to take his hand. Jürgen was scared, and that was more than enough to make me scared too.
The proceedings began in earnest after the dessert plates were cleared. Otto was honored first—called to a podium in the corner of the room by another senior SS official, who gushed praise at his commitment to the Nazi cause and his “genius” oversight of the rocket program, then slipped a red, blue, and white ribbon over his head. The Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes sat heavy and bold at his collarbone. The Knight’s Cross was the highest award in all of Nazi Germany—rarely offered, highly revered. As Otto returned to his seat, the lights dimmed. The heavy velvet curtain behind us drew back. Those of us at the head table awkwardly shuffled around to face a large window overlooking a moonlit lawn.