When I was growing up in the UK in the 1970s, the Second World War was everywhere. In the newsagent, on the TV, in the toy shops and even the shoe shops, where Clarks Commandos were the footwear of choice. The war was seen as a source of intense pride. It was still regarded as Britain’s finest hour, as Churchill had called it and, well, the children of the seventies had missed out. What would we ever do that would be as important or exciting as that?
Meanwhile, my mother’s best friend was German and we spent many summers with her family. They were gracious and loving hosts, calm and helpful friends and almost aggressively pacifist. I couldn’t play spies, space battles or pirates – or anything involving guns – without a lecture on the dangers of violence. This made it impossible for me to accept the idea of an evil or warlike Germany at face value.
As I got older and learnt more, this dichotomy grew more confusing. The details of the Holocaust and the evils of the Nazi State were revealed in all their horror. Exactly how did these gentle people allow this to happen? The war revealed itself to be far more complicated than we’d been taught.
Thus began a lifelong appalled fascination, trying to unpick the realities from the stories and separate the propaganda from the unpalatable truths. This book is part of that.
This journey has taken me into the virtual archives of the Imperial War Museum, Centre for Jewish History and the United States Holocaust Museum, and through hundreds of books, websites and documentaries. This means almost everything in Orphan Monster Spy, including the fabrications and story-driven exaggerations, has some basis in fact.
While Sarah Goldstein did not exist, the idea of teenage spies, agents and soldiers is not a fanciful one. Sarah came to life as I passed a memorial mural to the agent Violette Szabo in Stockwell, London. Part of Churchill’s “secret army”, she had been just twenty-one years old when she volunteered for the Special Operations Executive. In fact, there were resistance couriers and partisan warriors across Europe who were barely in their teens, like Lucie Bruce, aged fifteen, or Freddie Oversteegen, just fourteen years old. Twelve-year-old orphan Sima used her wide blue eyes and sweet face to deflect suspicion and bluff her way through checkpoints while leading Jews out of the Minsk ghetto. All the while she had a pistol in a secret pocket so the Nazis couldn’t take her alive. In Germany, teenagers between fourteen and eighteen formed resistance groups like the Edelweißpiraten, risking violence, imprisonment and, for many of them, death at the hands of the Gestapo. There are not enough pages in this book to tell all their stories.
The Werwolf did exist, but not as an all-girl outfit. It was in fact a desperate resistance force created to cause trouble once the Allies had occupied Germany. Opinion is divided as to how organized or effective the Werwolf was, with some scholars arguing that it was just a scary story to spook the occupying troops. As I researched, I came across a photo of a young woman involved in one of the few verified actions, the grubby murder of a mayor appointed by the Allies in 1945. In her eyes, I imagined I saw a fraction of the cold fanaticism I was writing about. In those eyes, I saw the Ice Queen look back at me. She told me the rest.
Even when I created elements in the service of the story, I later discovered they often had a real-world equivalent. Sarah needed to go to an elite Nazi school – that was part of her tale from the very start – but before I had even written anything, I discovered that the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten existed and were every bit as brutal as I wanted to depict them. The Napola schools were probably better run than Rothenstadt, but there is a myth of Nazi efficiency and organization that still pervades today. The Third Reich was financial disaster, built on greed, ambition and in-fighting, propped up by theft and slave labour. Rothenstadt is the symbol of that, a place where politics and avarice meet.
For all its power, Nazi Germany’s weaknesses were often a result of its barbarity. Their nuclear weapons programme was plagued by setbacks and was later revealed to have never been a serious threat. The cream of German scientific talent had been decimated by the loss of its Jewish and left-leaning colleagues, with many going on to work for the Allies, so National Socialist Germany was, in part, destroyed by its own bigotry.
One of the scientists driven out of the country was the genius Lise Meitner. When faced with experimental data that confounded the greatest minds of her age, she could picture what no one else could. In doing so, she changed physics, chemistry and the history of the world for ever. She was, in modern parlance, a badass.
However, she was also a woman and, although a lifelong Christian, from a Jewish family. Forced to flee Germany, Meitner continued to work with her colleague Otto Hahn by mail. Her Berlin team were stumped by the data they were collecting and it was Meitner who correctly identified nuclear fission for what it was, in collaboration with her nephew, Otto Frisch.
Hahn got wind of their conclusions and published their joint work under his own name. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of Fission, omitting Meitner and Frisch’s fundamental contribution to his understanding of its workings. The least Meitner should have received was the Nobel Prize for Physics, but her nomination was blocked for partly political, partly patriarchal reasons.
It’s not a huge stretch to imagine that Professor Meitner could have overcome the remaining challenges to create a nuclear weapon. Robert J. Oppenheimer, the future head of the Manhattan Project – the Allied atomic bomb programme – heard about Meitner and Frisch’s discovery and, within a few days, drew a plan for a crude but functional nuclear device on his blackboard. Meitner’s abhorrence of the concept of nuclear weapons is not fictional, however. She refused to join the Manhattan Project and after the bombing of Hiroshima, Meitner took a five-hour walk alone. She was under no illusions about her share of the responsibility.
Hans Schäfer is fictional, but there was a rich, independent German scientist, Manfred von Ardenne, who had set up his own laboratory working on uranium fission outside Berlin.
Schäfer’s bomb would have been inefficient but it would have worked. Sarah’s “fizzle” – an explosion where the nuclear chain reaction does not become self-sustaining – would probably not have been anywhere as destructive as I’ve depicted. But anyone picking over the wreckage would have got very sick, very quickly and at the time no one would have known why.
The Captain’s description of the bombing of Guernica is based on first-hand accounts. However, his estimate of the dead and wounded, although considered accurate at the time, was too high. Most historians now agree the dead numbered “only” around 300 civilians. That was still 4% of the population. Consider 4% of London, New York or Paris, or 4% of your town or village. Take a moment to imagine what that might have felt like.
The atrocity has been eclipsed by the war that followed, but it lives on in Picasso’s painting. Picasso lived in Nazi-occupied Paris during the war and the probably apocryphal story goes that a German officer pointed to a photo of Guernica and asked him, “Did you do that?” Picasso replied, “No, you did.”
As Sarah guessed, the Poles didn’t start the war. The attack on the Gleiwitz radio station was a false-flag operation carried out by German special forces. For added reality, the SS took prisoners from Dachau concentration camp to the site and dressed them in Polish uniforms, before murdering and mutilating them. The SS called these prisoners the “canned goods”.
It’s worth noting that in the present day, Gretel would have been described as having Down syndrome, but that name didn’t exist in 1934. In fact, it wasn’t until 1961 that concerns were raised in the medical community about the scientifically dubious and long since pejorative term “mongoloid”. The World Health Organization ceased use of the term four years later.
Sarah’s mother had evidently appeared in The Threepenny Opera at some point, with Sarah recalling Kipling and Brecht’s lyrics subconsciously. The moral of Pirate Jenny’s frankly terrifying tale of contempt, exploitation and revenge, if there is one, is to always be nice to the cleaner.
I may have pushed the odd quote a month or two back and forth to fit Sarah’s journey, but the specific and disturbing details are accurately retold. Old men in Vienna forced to scrub the streets – true. Jews driven out of public life – true. Marginalized Polish communities – true. The execution of the disabled – true. Kristallnacht or the Novemberpogrome – true. Stamped passports and the Swiss refusing Jewish refugees – true. The Night of the Long Knives – true. The changes in We Girls Sing! – true. Jesse Owens humiliating the Nazis in 1936 – true. Langfeld’s lesson plan – true.
I could keep going, but I’d fill another book. By all means reach out to ask me for more details, or indeed, correct me where you think I’ve got something wrong.
While Sarah Goldstein did not exist, her world was all too real. Worse still, it lives on today in insidious ways.
One in five children in the UK are affected by their parents’ drinking. Some states in the USA still permit corporal punishment in schools and physically attacking your child can still be considered “reasonable punishment” under UK law. Children have been living in relative poverty in some of the world’s richest countries for decades, with some going to school with empty bellies and others becoming responsible for sick or disabled relatives who have no one else to turn to. The sexual abuse of children and other vulnerable people by those in positions of authority is still being institutionalized, concealed or dismissed as trivial.
People often wonder how the German people allowed the Nazis to take power. They scoff at the idea that “innocent” Germans did not speak up. At some point, people say, they would have stood up, complained and protested about all those small incremental injustices that built up until it was too late.
Right now, children care for adults, experience abuse, and go hungry. All that is required to make this stop is the will of enough people. Movements can and must start with just one person. Stand up, complain and protest.