Never forgetting the absurdities of fascism

‘Classics Revisited’ revisits a publication from a previous century from a present-day perspective, to show how much, or how little, has changed.

Salomon Perel (1925 – 2023) was a German Jew who survived the Holocaust in the most implausible way imaginable: by hiding his Jewish identity, joining a Wehrmacht unit on the Eastern front, and then enrolling in a boarding school run by the Hitler Youth. Decades later, he told his story in this book. There is an English translation too, as well as a movie based on it.

Perel was born in Peine, Lower Saxony, in 1925. The Perels were originally from Russia, but emigrated after the October Revolution, as part of a larger wave. They open a small business in Peine, which soon thrives, and Salomon, his two older brothers and his younger sister spend an untroubled childhood there. “At the time, our German neighbours were not hostile towards us”, he recalls. The only resentment the family experiences comes from the already settled Jewish population, who are not keen on Ostjuden, the recent, much poorer newcomers from the East.

Things do not immediately change in 1933. Salomon’s father is convinced that “that crazy guy” will be gone within a few weeks – not an unreasonable assumption, given the pace at which the Weimar Republic was burning through Reich Chancellors. (Hitler’s immediate predecessor, Kurt von Schleicher, had lasted less than two months.)

The Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 mark a turning point. The noose begins to tighten. The Perels emigrate again, this time to Łódź, Poland, which young Salomon is not happy about. The Nazi regime may not see him as a German, but Salomon himself very much does, and so do his peers in the new city, who initially reject him. Just as he masters the Polish language and gains a foothold, the regime the Perels were trying to get away from catches up with them. Łódź becomes Litzmannstadt (after the Nazi politician Karl Litzmann), and the city’s Jewish population is forced into a Ghetto.

The Perel parents urge their children to flee to the Soviet-occupied part of Poland, which they promptly do. They get separated along the way, and Salomon ends up in an orphanage in the former East of Poland, which has just become the West of the Soviet Union. It is not exactly a welcoming environment either, especially when they find out that he is the son of business owners, and thus part of the (petit) bourgeoisie. But he gets a respite of relative safety. Until Operation Barbarossa turns the entire region into a hellscape, and Salomon has to flee again.

He tries to outrun the advancing Wehrmacht, but this time, there is no escaping them. As he is captured, he rapidly destroys his papers, and, following a sudden intuition, he makes up a new identity on the spot. He tells his captors that he is a Volksdeutscher (ethnic German) from Lithuania, orphaned at a young age, with no papers, and no known surviving relatives. He obviously cannot call himself “Salomon”, so he adopts the inoffensive name “Josef”, and the Jewish-sounding “Perel” becomes “Perjell”. Incredibly, they believe him, and he stays with the unit as a translator.

He faces a few practical difficulties in his new surroundings. For a start, he has to hide the fact that he is circumcised, which is not as easy as it sounds under the circumstances, because they do not exactly get single room accommodation at the Hilton Hotel. He also has to be careful not to say the wrong thing.

Nonetheless – in a way, he settles in. He is by far the youngest “member” of the unit, and the soldiers develop a certain affection for him. “Josef” soon becomes “Jupp” (an informal shortened version), and “Jupp” becomes something like a mascot for the troop.

On his part, it is not all an act. At first, Perel describes his position as that of an infiltrator (albeit an involuntary one) among enemies. But his relationship with the men around him changes. It becomes complicated, and conflicted. He likes them individually, but hates them in the abstract. Or, in his own words, describing his departure:

“I had to leave behind the men that I had closely attached myself to. Due to their warm-hearted nature which they displayed towards me, I had learned to like them, but inwardly I hated and feared them, because they were Wehrmacht soldiers, and they were committing crimes.” [Translations KN]

He later remains in contact with them by letter:

“I wanted to receive news from them, to find out who had fallen on the battlefield. I felt a strong need to remain, in some way, in contact with these men, even though they should have been my mortal enemies; we had been bound together by the threads of a shared fate. […] I hated this regime and utterly rejected it, but I retained my affection for these men.”

Since Perel is still a minor, he cannot stay at the front. He is sent to a Hitler Youth boarding school in Braunschweig, Lower Saxony, which happens to be just around the corner from his original hometown. (Although he cannot tell anyone about that, and he certainly cannot visit people who might remember him from his previous life.)

To the extent that that is possible under the circumstances, he has a good start at the school. Many of the boys admire him, because they see him as a minor war veteran. He stands out with his black hair, but people put that down to his semi-exotic status as an “East Baltic German”. 

Like in the army before, he initially feels like an involuntary infiltrator on enemy territory, but it does not stay that way. He settles in, and makes unlikely friendships. Ironically, one of most fanatical Nazis he meets, Otto, becomes one of his closest friends.

He now has to learn Nazi propaganda at school, which does not leave him entirely unaffected:

“I, too, felt myself gradually becoming entangled in the snares of this depraved “science,” at least in some aspects. It made sense to me that a superior people had a right to supremacy [...]

The fact that I indulged in this ideology aroused neither doubt nor surprise in me. Salomon increasingly faded from Jupp’s memory.”

As the tables turn at the front, the regime’s war propaganda continues to insist that the Endsieg (final victory) is guaranteed. Until very late in the day, Salomon/Jupp believes it too:

“The changed circumstances didn’t unsettle me either. I was deeply entangled in this world imposed upon me, and things had completely numbed my mind. My consciousness was so clouded that no ray of reality penetrated it. I continued to feel like “one of them.””

It all comes crashing down in April 1945, when Braunschweig area is occupied by American troops. His school is closed down, the Hitler Youth dissolved, and their insignia confiscated. Perel feels relief, but no sense of triumph:

“I had left the vanquished, but I was not one of the victors. A bitter, unique situation.”

It is only at this point that he finds out about the Holocaust. He enquires about the whereabouts of his family, and learns that his parents and his sister did not survive. His brothers, however, have, and he is reunited with them in the end.

Ich war Hitlerjunge Salomon can be read at multiple levels: as a historical eyewitness account, as a case study in human psychology under extreme conditions, or as a case study on how people behave under totalitarian regimes, among others. It is not supposed to be a political book per se, but Perel’s story, in and of itself, highlights some of the absurdities of fascist ideology, and of totalitarian collectivism more broadly. In a “blind test”, neither the Wehrmacht nor the Hitler Youth see Salomon as in any way different from the rest of them, readily accepting him as one of their own. The most fanatical Nazis Salomon meets are the ones who like him the most; the only person who ever suspects that he is not what he claims to be is a woman who is not at all on board with Nazi ideology.

In the 1990s, a much older Salomon Perel went on lecture tours through Germany. He spoke at my school in 1995, which is how I got my copy of Ich war Hitlerjunge Salomon: it must have been the first book on the Third Reich I ever read (or certainly the first one I ever read voluntary, as opposed to a school assignment). I stumbled across it again at my parents’ house just over the Christmas break, 30 years later.

Had I rediscovered it a little earlier than that, it would probably not have occurred to me to review it for the IEA blog, because I would have seen it as a purely historical account without much contemporary relevance. But at a time when some social media influencers are openly toying with fascist ideology, sometimes gaining hundreds of thousands of followers on that basis, there is a lot to be said for revisiting accounts like this one.