One Sunday the brother of my father, Uncle Georg, wanted to bring his new fiancé to our house. When the doorbell rang, I rushed to open the door. I could still see the surprise on the face of my mother, who stood next to me.

"Welcome to our home. May I take your coat?" my mother asked the young lady. But her fiancé helped her out of the elegant fur coat. Now my mother could take a closer look at the girl. She was very pretty. Her features were dominated by two radiant eyes over a pretty nose and small lips. Her voice had a silvery tone combined with a friendly smile. Her face mirrored her emotions. "She has a face which cannot tell a lie," my mother whispered to me as they entered the living room. My mother had recently turned forty.

"I estimate Friedl is not older than twenty. Heavens! She must be at least thirty years younger than Uncle Georg," my mother figured out loud. I counted quickly: My father was fifty-four years old now, so that would make his brother fifty-six.

"I am Friedl," the girl introduced herself. While both were seated in the living room, I got several glasses of fruit juice and passed them around. After some family talk Friedl saw our grand piano and walked toward it.

"You have a Bechstein, how wonderful! May I play it?"

"Of course, go ahead. We had it tuned last week." As Friedl walked to the grand piano, my mother scrutinized her closely. She was slender with a well-proportioned figure. She was dressed in an elegant gown, and a flower decorated her hair.

"We cannot get married until Friedl is twenty-one," Uncle Georg said. " She never knew her real parents. She was raised by her foster parents, who loved her so much that they adopted her and raised her. The trouble is," he continued, "they will not consent to the wedding until she is twenty-one. Wait until you get to know her more closely. You all will fall in love with her as I did."

Friedl blushed when she heard her fiancee's words. Hiding her embarrassment she opened the piano and started playing. The conversation stopped as the sounds of a Beethoven sonata filled the air.

"She sounds like she is an accomplished pianist," I heard my mother whisper to my father. When the last cords of the sonata faded away, she began a Schubert song. A clear soft soprano voice filled the room and stopped all conversation. Every one of us was touched.

"I am sure she must have had some singing lessons," I heard my mother say.

"You see," Uncle Georg explained after she had finished her musical intermezzo, "her foster parents gave Friedl piano and voice lessons and hoped she would embark on a career as an opera singer. They were very strict with her. Of course, I will not permit her to continue her singing career after we get married next Christmas."

The whole family, with all four children present, sat down for dinner. Uncle Georg dominated the conversation with his endless funny stories. We children loved his humorous comments on the stories from his office -- he was a geologist -- or on his commentary about the present political situation around us. He was in a true sense a genuine Berliner. After dinner my mother suggested that my older sister, Gisela, play some dance records. Swing had conquered the country and both my parents had taken lessons in order to learn the modern dances.

"With such a young bride around we all should be interested in a little dance music," my mother told my older sister. Very soon Glen Miller's swing music sounded through the apartment.

"Come on, Hans Jürgen, let's dance," Friedl said to me. I had just turned fifteen. She took me by the hand and started swinging me around. At first, I stumbled a bit, but after a few swings with her strong lead we even danced some open steps as if we had danced together many times before.

"You must be very musical if you can pick up the rhythm so fast. Do you play an instrument?" Friedl asked. I could not brag much with my one year of piano lessons which I had stopped twelve months previously. I preferred to listened to Friedl's piano playing.

"Yes, I play the piano a little bit. But I prefer my accordion. However, I cannot play like you."

My mother and father had to demonstrate some new steps they had learned in their last dance lesson. The evening was filled with laughter, songs and dancing. The whole family hated to see Friedl and Uncle Georg go. He was right: We all had fallen in love with Friedl.

We were engaged in physical education and sports almost daily. Track and field, gymnastics, soccer and rowing occupied us many afternoons. The school owned twelve rowing skiffs, starting from the two-man double-paddle skiff to the twelve-man-single rowing skiff. The Havel River with its many lakes made a wonderful body of water on which to row one's heart out. Naturally the Lyceum, the girls high school in Spandau, had similar equipment. The meetings on the water became a great incentive to join the rowing club. During our Easter break we made a seven-day trip to the numerous lakes in the Mecklenburg province north of Berlin, where the lyceum crews joined us.

Until 1935 I belonged to the "VDA," an association for the support of Germans living outside the borders. We had weekend trips with camping, bicycle excursions as far as 150 miles along with a multitude of outside activities. Hitler soon dissolved the "VDA," and we were integrated into the "Hitler Youth." Basically we were engaged in the same activities except that the recreation took on more and more of a form of war games. During the night on one of the trips we were divided into two groups. Each group was spread out on the edge of the wood on the opposite sides of the dense underbrush. We had to keep 50 yards distance from each other. Each team had to try to penetrate into the area of the opposing team without being discovered.

When Hitler wanted to celebrate the first of May, our leaders gathered us together, and we traveled to the meeting place with several hundred thousand other participants. Here we had to listen to Hitler's speech. Whenever there was any special political occasion, such as the visit of Mussolini in Berlin, there was no school, but we had to stand on the streets in uniform and shout "Sieg Heil" at the sight of the Führer and Mussolini.

To get out of the activities of the Hitler Youth, I joined the equestrian corps. The corps had a loose association by name only with the Hitler Youth. We learned how to ride and take care of a horse. The old cavalry officer who was in command enjoyed chasing us around on a horse and giving us hell. On my fifteenth birthday my parents surprised me with custom-made riding breeches. It didn't take long before our teacher had us jumping and riding figures in the hippodrome.

It was in early May of 1936 when my father walked into our dining room holding a block of tickets in his hand, saying, "Here I have some season tickets for the Olympics."

With that a dream came true for me. The preparations had already started two years earlier, and only recently I had toured the Olympic stadium, which had been under construction for two years. Hitler wanted to make it the show-place of the new German Reich. It was only a 15-minute drive to the stadium. The architecture was spectacular. Hitler's architect, Speer, created a whole new complex of buildings around the stadium. An entirely new city was also being built 15 miles from the stadium, where several thousand athletes were to live during the games. Next to the Olympic Village a gigantic hall was under construction to house the "Hindenburg," Germany's new zeppelin. For over one year the zeppelin had already made monthly flights from Germany to Brazil. It had flown over the North Pole and was to make a transatlantic flight to the United States after the Olympics. All the streets of Berlin were flagged with the colors of the participating nations. Garlands decorated the streets. Berlin was ready for the great event.

The Olympics took place during our summer vacation, and I became the main beneficiary of the tickets. The swimming events fascinated me first with their events in water polo and short distance swimming, where some swimmers from Spandau had a good chance to win gold medals. The final events in track and field, however, were the highlights of the whole Olympic spectacle. I saw the dramatic 100-meter dash of Jessie Owens, who beat the English and German athletes by one-tenth of a second. He repeated his success in the 200-meter dash and again set a world record. Then came the long jump in which he also participated. The Germans claimed the favored candidate in this discipline. Their record holder was Lutz Long. When the event took place, the bright night lights were already casting a daylight brilliance in the stadium. Lutz Long jumped first and reached a world-record distance. Then Jessie Owens jumped and bettered the record by two centimeters. Now Lutz Long was on the spot. With Hitler watching he accomplished the impossible and bettered his own world record by another three centimeters. The Germans were sure he had the gold medal in his pocket. But Jessie Owens in his third jump again bettered his own record and so won the gold medal since Lutz Long had overstepped the line in his last effort. The most dramatic culmination of the Olympics had just taken place. The likable black athlete of America had won the respect and the love of all German spectators! He was wildly applauded while running the honor round in the stadium after having won three gold medals. Hitler was present in his box whenever a German was thought to have a chance of winning a gold medal. After their victories they were rushed to the box of the Führer for a handshake. This custom was ignored when Jessie Owens won his three gold medals. The crowd booed loudly. Hitler had expected that at least one German that evening would win a gold medal.

The daily cruise of the "Graf Zeppelin" over the stadium gave the Germans a great feeling of pride. Being almost ten times the length of today's blimps it made a spectacular showing. This all took place before the age of television. The sound of over 100,000 spectators in a packed stadium gives me goose bumps even today.

Our parents saw to it that we had many opportunities to go the theaters, operas and ballets. Berlin was a cultural center that attracted the best actors and musicians in Europe. At one theater performance I sat just ten rows from Hitler, who also wanted to see Schiller's play "The Robbers". When a famous outcry of one of the robbers "give me freedom" hollowed through the theater the crowd responded with a 3 minute applause and all our eyes focused on Hitler.

© Irmgard & Jürgen Otto 1993 All rights reserved