Chapter 2 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

The guilt, shame and disgust associated with her heritage were a con­stant in Nico’s life, an unsettling commonality for many descend­ants of the Nazi era. She was arguably attempting to separate her personal beliefs from those imposed upon her as an impressionable child, as social currents changed post-World War II. However, no matter how valiant her desire to break from her origins may have been, the ramifications of the violence witnessed by Nico in early life cannot be forgotten.

The brutality and genocide of the Nazi regime began less than a month after Nico’s birth. On 9 November 1938, forty-eight hours of horrific attacks began on Jews throughout areas of Germany where the Nazis had already installed strongholds. The event is now remembered as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass – a reference to the shattered windows and large shards of glass strewn across the streets after many Jewish-owned establishments were destroyed during the two days of carnage. Bloodthirsty rioters attacked Jewish homes, hospitals and school buildings with sledge­hammers, destroying 267 places of worship throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland – including the synagogue in Cologne.

Located just a hundred metres away from Meister Gerhard Strasse, where the infant Nico and her mother were living at the time, the holy building was burned to the ground like others of its ilk that appalling night. In total, over seven thousand Jewish businesses were either wrecked or damaged. The official death toll from the first night alone was estimated to be ninety-one Jews, with many historians placing the figure much higher. By the end of the atrocity, more than thirty thousand Jewish men had been arrested and sent to the newly constructed concentration camps. In retro­spect, the Night of Broken Glass marked the very public beginning of Nazi Germany’s overarching racial policies and was the start of Hitler’s Final Solution and the Holocaust.

While the Jewish community tried to come to terms with the devastation, Cologne kicked off its annual carnival. The Närrische Jahreszeit – which translates as the foolish, crazy or fifth season – commences every 11 November at 11.11 a.m. and 1938 was no exception. Carnival was celebrated by bars suspending their clos­ing time for the duration of the festival, while a massive parade caroused through the streets of the city, featuring people dressed up in colourful costumes. Though families, homes and livelihoods had just been destroyed and innocents taken to the death camps, that year Nazi Germany revelled in its annual shenanigans, partying drunkenly into the early hours of the morning.

The young Päffgen family spent the first eighteen months of Christa’s life living at Luxemburger Strasse 26, in Cologne. The onset of World War II forced Willi – barely twenty years old him­self – to join the German army, or Wehrmacht. Nico recalled her mother receiving a package of fancy underwear and dates from Willi in 1942. The next communication was far grimmer, bringing the macabre news of Willi’s fate. According to Grete’s sister Helma Wolff, née Schulz, ‘My sister was notified by the Wehrmacht that he [Willi] was killed in action. But he wasn’t dead. He was injured, but alive.’

In the summer of 2000, Helma was interviewed by Christian Biadacz, who kindly agreed to share with me these previously unpublished recollections. Her memories provide crucial insights into the lives of both her sister and her niece. Before her own death in 2015, at 101 years of age, Helma never clarified how she knew that Willi was not killed instantly on the battlefield. His actual fate has never been confirmed, the void of uncertainty allowing for vari­ous renditions of his demise to be circulated. One story speculated that Willi was shot to death by his commanding officer in 1942 after a bullet from the gun of a French sniper entered his brain, while another vaguely claims he suffered head injuries that proved fatal. Helma went on to say, ‘We assume they [the Nazis] killed him. That was common practice under Hitler, wasn’t it? Any man who wasn’t fit to serve was useless.’

Nico often repeated these family anecdotes, still enraged almost half a century later at the death of her ‘dear father’ at the hands of the ‘German Pigs’. She firmly believed – or at least needed to believe – that her father was a victim of, not a participant in, the Nazi regime. In her personal notes, Nico continuously had Willi as a sympathizer, a heroic rescuer – not a murderer – of those persecuted during World War II. Though never given the opportunity to know her father as anything more than a ghost, Nico wrote that she felt they were ‘very much alike’. Helma confirms this, saying, ‘He was an adventurer. He had no roots. Sometimes I see him in Christa. She looks like her father.’

With Willi removed from their life, Grete found herself a ­single parent to young Christa. According to her Meldekarte, she had Christa placed at the Kinderheim Sülz orphanage for seven months, starting on 15 May 1940 and ending shortly before Christmas, on 7 December. A likely reason for her doing so could have been the dire financial circumstances the young mother surely found herself in. In its own brochure, the institution, founded in 1917, sounds like a cross between an Aryan finishing school and an idyllic coun­try club, with its 40,000 square metres of facilities, including an eight-room school, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a garden and a pigsty. For the boys, the educational goal was to learn a ‘respect­able’ trade; for the girls, it was to acquire domestic skills in order to prepare them for the profession of domestic helper and their later inevitable role of housewife.

When Nico was there, Kinderheim Sülz was the biggest orphan­age in Europe, housing up to a thousand children at once. The orphanage’s director, Friedrich Tillmann, was a deeply Catholic member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and attempted to instil his pious values into all of his charges. He had an apartment on the orphanage’s premises and was an office man­ager for the Zentraldienststelle T4 in Berlin. This was a Nazi cover organization that organized and registered the systematic killing of approximately 216,000 people they considered ‘unworthy of life’. This included prisoners, ‘degenerates’, dissidents and people with congenital, cognitive and physical disabilities. As manager of the group, Tillmann’s duties included inspecting the Vergasungsanstalten – gas chambers – used in the concentration camps.

Photographs taken of Kinderheim Sülz during the years that Nico was there showcase Nazi pride. One image features a large group of boys, ranging from toddlers to teenagers, all proudly standing straight in their well-pressed Nazi uniforms. Another black-and-white frame captures young kids, again in military apparel, standing at attention and looking to the left at an out-of-shot authority fig­ure. A panoramic portrait of the entire grand complex prominently features two large Third Reich flags.

The orphanage was destroyed by bombs in 1944, several years after Nico left. Though it was later rebuilt, the facility was perman­ently closed in 2009, under a dark shadow of the documented, systematic mistreatment of its vulnerable residents, stretching back to Nico’s time there. An investigation into the establishment included interviews with 150 former inhabitants. A shocking 120 of them recalled horrifying instances of abuse, rape and violence committed by the priests and nuns upon the children housed at the orphanage.

The only other acknowledgement of her time there is in a line Nico included in her diary. She writes: ‘My mother came to see me every Sunday, when she was not at the factory making weapons.’ In an interview, Graham Dowdall, who played in Nico’s band the Faction in the 1980s, remembered her saying ‘something about a factory in Berlin’ – corroboration of the line in the diary. The com­pany Nico was referring to could be Deutz AG, an engine manu­facturer based not far from Kinderheim Sülz in Porz, Cologne.1 During World War II, it was ordered by the Nazis to produce artil­lery, making it a likely place for Grete to work during the months she was separated from her child, as she attempted to eke out a living, impossible though it may have seemed at the time.2