I – Obituary
This story starts with how she died – or how her death was announced.
In the summer of 2016, I was heading back to Salzburg (and eventually London) after a conference in Lubiana. Owing to a bungled attempt at reading the schedule, I ended up on the regular instead of the express, and found myself deposited in Krainburg with half an hour to kill until the next train to Salzburg Central. One thing I always make a point of doing when I’m in the Reich is grabbing as many newspapers as I can. The German perspective is... unique. This time, there wasn’t much in the way of propaganda and obfuscation. It’d been a slow week. I passed by the sports and weather, and just as I was about to toss the paper into the rubbish bin, I came across the obituary page. In amongst the usual elderly hausfrauen and Party functionaries, I spotted a young face. A woman, perhaps 25 years old or so. The entry beneath her photograph was insultingly short.
OGefr. Katharina Liesl Kirschner, 17. Mai 1990–21. Juli 2016. Geboren in Aßling. Getötet im Osten.
But those last three words spoke volumes.
Getötet im Osten. Killed in the East.
The official line, of course, is that there is no war in the East. Having some acquaintances professionally interested in that sort of thing, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of at least partially agreeing with the Reich. Things are certainly much quieter now than they were 10 or 20 years ago (to say nothing of the 1940s) – if you can call an annual KIA rate averaging 5000 a year over the course of this century quiet. It’s certainly neither quiet nor peaceful for those like Liesl Kirschner.
I kept the paper with me and studied it as the train left Krainburg. By sheer chance, the route went through Aßling (at which stop I resisted the temptation to get off and look around). By the time it rumbled through Villach some three quarters of an hour later, I had the idea for this article. Now, six months later, I give it to you.
II – Lineage
Programs like My Little Frau might exaggerate the situation, but the Reich revolves around lineage and genealogy to an extent Westerners can hardly comprehend. There is, of course, the DRL which categorizes every Reich citizen by crude racial characteristics. Dr. Schneider from My Little Frau is a common enough figure in reality; a few Reichsmarks under the table can usually get all but the most ‘un-Aryan’ child into the right category nowadays. “
Ich bin so nordisch wie Hitler!” is a popular saying among the Reich youth of the day.
Liesl, per her Wehrpass, was categorized as Predominantly Nordic with Minor East Baltic characteristics. I’ve come across classified RKFDV (
Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums, the German office in charge of internal colonization and welcoming ‘home’ foreigners of German ancestry) documents that suggest something like one in three Germans in the southern and eastern gaue fall into that particular category. This might seem like so much pseudo-scientific nonsense, and it is, but it is relevant to Liesl’s story.
Liesl’s father, Philipp Kirschner, was on service in the East when she was born. Her mother, born Katrin Pfeffer, was a widower at 21 and remarried (not legally required but strongly encouraged) two years later. Thus, Liesl had two younger brothers and one sister, as well as a half brother and half sister from her mother’s first marriage. Philipp and Katrin are a train driver and cook, both good, honest völkisch occupations. Going back a generation or two, the picture becomes more complicated.
(n.b. Neither Herr nor Frau Kirschner would comment on this portion of the article, for reasons that will soon become understandable.)
Liesl’s paternal family tree is straightforward. Philipp’s parents were bakers who came of age after the war, and parish records show Kirschners and Hofers living in Aßling going back to the late 18th century.
The maternal side of things is more complicated.
Per records I was able to gain access to, Katrin Pfeffer (b. 1964) is the daughter of Heinrich Pfeffer (1930-1998) and Anna Schmid (1936-2008). Heinrich Pfeffer served in the Luftwaffe until 1955, then returned to the resort town of Veldes along with his new bride from the town of Rann in neighboring Untersteiermark. When I attempted to trace Anna Schmid’s own birth certificate to find out her parents’ names, I was utterly without success. As far as I can tell, no Anna Schmid was born in Rann between 1925 and German annexation in 1941.
I did, however find an Ana Kovač of Slovenian ethnicity, born July 26, 1936. No date of death was listed, and the Rann town authorities (after sufficient persuasion was provided) would only reveal her file had been closed in 1942, the same year her parents died (reasons unspecified).
If the reader is perplexed by all this, I apologize.
What happened to Ana Kovač is clear to me – she was adopted (before or after being orphaned; I’ve come across examples of both) and deemed German instead of Slavic by some RKFDV bureaucrat. A family with a surname of the same meaning (Kovač being the Slovenian equivalent of Schmid) was even located to place her with. Hundreds of thousands of Slavs in Yugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the USSR endured the same fate – kinder than the alternatives, but still a cruelty of monumental proportions.