Caging Skies

by Christine Leunens

What spoiled the atmosphere most were the pirates who began turning up everywhere, and the more we talked about how much we didn’t fear them, the more we really did. There were the Roving Dudes from Essen, the Navajos from Cologne and the Kettelbach Pirates, gangs our age proclaiming eternal war on the Hitler Youth. It was unsettling as they moved about the Reich at will and even infiltrated the war zones.

We learned about eugenics and the sterilization of what the Americans called “human junk,” which had been practiced in thirty-something states of the United States as far back as 1907.

Distinguished professors of leading American universities had proven that the tendency to poverty, alcoholism and low-class lives was genetic.

I kept reading and came to the part concerning the unfortunate necessity to rid the community of its burdens, which included the mentally and physically handicapped, and, among the latter, the invalid veterans of 1914–18, which stupefied me. At least 200,000 biological outcasts had been killed, and a new process of carbon monoxide gas was under development. I read the paragraph over three times. It only mentioned the veterans of the Great War, not those who’d been wounded fighting for the Führer’s cause in our time. But would it be extended to us later on?