While Frederick was away in basic training, Charlotte, after finishing high school, believed the best way to rid herself of her parents’ rejection was to marry. She was stunning and sophisticated and relished the attention she received from men. It was only a matter of time before she was engaged. When one young man in particular, who believed in Hitler’s ideology, asked her to marry, she accepted his proposal. That her new husband was a Nazi sympathizer wasn’t necessarily an issue for Charlotte. It was a common occurrence to meet Germans who believed all the rhetoric and propaganda. But Charlotte didn’t subscribe to those beliefs herself. She was running away from loneliness, and getting married would finally put an end to a life filled with neglect from her parents. Naturally, the marriage didn’t last long, and Charlotte divorced her husband shortly after the birth of their daughter, Kristina, who would be given to Karl and Margarete to rear. “My mother was like my grandfather,” said Kristina, reflecting on her upbringing. “She wasn’t interested in the family.”13

Meanwhile, Frederick was struggling in the military. If his training was supposed to turn him into an emotionless warrior, the opposite happened. When he left for the service Frederick kept up a friendship with a classmate from art school named Kurt Wilhelm, who would later become a prominent German film director. They exchanged a lively correspondence about art and artistic freedom, and discussed a famous exhibition of “degenerate art” that was controversial at the time because it was by artists who were banned by Hitler because they were not Aryan and had decadent styles. Frederick was careful to tear Kurt’s letters into little pieces after reading them, given the subject matter, because he knew they could get him into trouble, but one was found by a sergeant who put the torn pieces together and reported Frederick. He was court-martialed and reduced in rank. He could never be an officer after that incident; his liberal ideas about art prevented that.

The term “degenerate art,” coined by the Nazis, was part of a smear campaign against modern art and artists deemed un-German, Jewish, or Communist in nature. Hitler considered degenerate art works that “insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill.” In Munich, in 1937, Adolf Ziegler, one of Hitler’s favorite painters and head of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts, organized an exhibit of “degenerate” works of art that the government seized from museums to serve as contrast to the works in the Great German Art Exhibition, a show that was taking place simultaneously. Hitler forcefully said in a speech that Germany was cracking down on cultural disintegration and shaming “the cliques of chatterboxes, dilettantes and art swindlers,” who created works that were considered unpatriotic and disrespectful of Aryan ideals.14