Flowers in the Gutter: The True Story of the Edelweiss Pirates, Teenagers Who Resisted the Nazis - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

K. R. Gaddy is a freelance writer and historian. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Bitch Magazine, Narratively, Proximity, Atlas Obscura, and OZY, among other publications. She received a Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Rubys Artist Grant for her writing and research.

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Prologue

Late 1942

Gertud Kühlem — aka Mucki

Mucki stepped out of her apartment onto narrow Boisseree Street. On Fridays, she had a standing date with her friends in the Volksgarten. Wearing leather loafers that probably needed to be replaced and white socks hanging around her ankles, Mucki made her way toward the park.

The mile between her house and the meeting spot was surrounded by destruction. Some buildings had roofs that looked like they had been removed by giants, others were just walls, or piles of brick and stone. Sides of buildings had black scorch marks streaming up around the windows. Trees with massive trunks had been snapped in half like matchsticks. Mucki was lucky the apartment where she and her mom lived still stood.

As she moved through the city, she knew at any moment a siren could go off, signaling another attack, and she’d have to duck into the nearest air-raid shelter.

In the end, though, her trip was uneventful and when she arrived, the Volksgarten was empty. Before the war, the park would have been filled with people on a late afternoon like this: a mom out walking with her kids, a couple sitting on the bank of the pond whispering to each other, little dogs prancing around on their leashes. None of that happened anymore. The park was all but deserted, and that was how Mucki and her friends liked it.

This time, the Mountain Climber, Banjo Willi, Ätz, and Jus showed up. Sometimes there were more people, sometimes fewer. Usually they talked, hung out, and sang songs—all stuff that would have been typical for bündische youth groups in the early 1930s in Germany. Lately, they’d been planning some stuff they didn’t want anyone to hear about.

“Listen up, I know what we should do next,” said the Mountain Climber. He was skinny, with sinewy arms and legs, and on hikes, he was always the first to the top of a rock, or you’d find him up in a tree somewhere. He was newer to the group, but really committed, and really trustworthy.

“And what have you been thinking about?” Mucki asked.

The Mountain Climber looked around the park to make sure no one was lingering.

“I thought that we could fill a backpack full of flyers, I’d throw it on my back, and make my way to the Cologne Central Station,” he said.

He was crazy. They all knew that the main train station in Cologne was crawling with activity. Every day, the military used the trains to ship German soldiers to battle, and to send Jews, leftists, homosexuals, and anyone else they didn’t like to a KZ—a concentration camp. Every day, supplies and food arrived, along with forced laborers from Poland or occupied territories in the East. The Mountain Climber wanted to take the flyers and make them flutter down like dead leaves in an autumn wind, to show people that there was a resistance.

“That’s a way for you to find yourself in a camp,” Mucki said. She knew this was not the plan of a person merely intent on surviving the war. She knew well that the punishment for this kind of thing could be jail, possible torture, concentration camps; her father had experienced it.

Ätz agreed with Mucki and added, “I don’t want to see my neck in the noose yet. I have a lot to live for.” Ätz was tall and scrawny too, and generally slanted his body in a way that made it seem like he didn’t really care. But right now, he cared, and he wasn’t convinced by the Mountain Climber’s plans.

“Do you think I want to play a game with my own life?” the Mountain Climber asked. “Look, we only take calculated risks, and we make the decision together. But at least hear my plan.

“I know the train station. In the middle is the big glass dome, and all around it are ladders for the workers, for when, you know, the electricity isn’t right or they have to fix some other problem. I thought that I could climb one of those ladders with the backpack and just let all of the flyers go. Two or three of you keep watch below and I come back down. You’ll all be safe. And then we get out of there.”

“You realize that’s really risky, right?” said Jus, who hadn’t said a word yet. Jus and Mucki trusted each other; they’d been friends a long time.

“But what do we have to lose?” Mucki started to change her mind. “Yeah, we could get caught. But we could have also got caught when we graffitied buildings around town. We’ve done a lot and people haven’t noticed. We need something to motivate us and something that reaches more people. I say we go for it.”

“Do we have a choice? We’re already in it pretty deep.” Ätz seemed to change his mind too. “I’m in.”

“There can’t be a worse fate than Hitler,” Banjo Willi said.

“It’ll go well,” Jus said. Sometimes, he knew exactly what to say. “So far we haven’t had any big problems; why would it be any different this time?”

The long August evening had almost come to an end, and dusk started to settle in. They hurried up and made their plan before dark, when they had to be home. They gave themselves two weeks.

Mucki took on the duty of getting the flyers. She made her way to a small street in Pesch, on the northern border of the Cologne city limits.

Jus had introduced them to a man with a small print shop in his basement. He normally printed church newsletters for Catholic congregations in the area. He knew that what they were doing was dangerous. If he got busted with the flyers, he wouldn’t get off easy. Creating the material was one of the riskier parts of the operation. He couldn’t play dumb like someone just carrying the flyers. So he had one stipulation: no one could know his name. They called him Tom.

“Hello, Mucki,” Tom said as she entered the shop. He didn’t know her real name either.

Tom printed his church bulletins in a large font so that the older readers in the congregation could easily make out the words. This was perfect for the flyers since no one would dare pick one up for fear of being carried away by the police. Even looking too long at one on the ground could be risky. People would need to be able to read the messages as they walked by.

“The flyers are under the canvas bags,” Tom said. “Goodbye.” He had said ten words to Mucki and that was all he would say. The less they knew about each other the better. The less Tom knew about the operation the better.

She grabbed the package and put it under the padding of a baby stroller she’d borrowed from a neighbor. She arranged pillows and a blanket inside the blue stroller to make it look like a child was snuggled inside. She gripped the handles as she quickly pushed it down the street.

The big wheels bounced over cobblestones and destroyed sidewalks. Her heart must have been pounding as she pushed the stroller through the outskirts of Cologne. What if someone wants to peek at the sleeping angel? What if someone questions the fact that she was eighteen with a baby? How would she cover? What would she say?

In the end, people around her didn’t pay her any attention. They had their own worries. Would another air raid come tonight? Would their rations last until the end of the week? Could they get a new coat for winter? Had their neighbor overheard that private conversation? People in Cologne were known to mind their own business, and since the beginning of the war, that was even more true.

Finally, Mucki made it to a specific pile of rubble in Cologne. To someone who didn’t know the city, that’s...