The Boy Who Went to War

by Giles Milton

  The farmsteads and churches in his drawings were inspired by trips to his relatives in the countryside around Freiburg, but the crowds of villagers who inhabited the pictures were conjured to life in young Wolfram’s imagination – rough farmhands, hawkers and pedlars, burghers and merchants in floppy galliskins.

  The quality of the draughtmanship astonished his parents’ friends; indeed, they did not quite believe that Wolfram could have produced them without help. One of these visitors, Herr Tiehl, visited the family villa regularly to select one of Erwin’s paintings to print in the magazine he owned. When he paused one day to look at what the young Wolfram was drawing, he was taken aback by his confident technique. The illustration in question depicted a Christmas market with festive stalls and decorations, and cauldrons of steaming food. In the background were half-timbered mansions blanketed with snow.

  Herr Tiehl immediately asked whether he could print it in the Christmas issue of the magazine, paying Wolfram the princely sum of 25 Deutchsmarks.

  These childhood pictures also provide a glimpse of the village of Eutingen as it appeared to a young boy. The surrounding hillsides were covered in orchards and tidy vineyards that stretched up the slopes in orderly parallel lines.

  The centre of the village, a sleepy single street called Hauptstrasse, lay at the bottom of the hill, with a parish church and a handful of stores selling household goods, haberdashery and sweets. Here, too, was the local primary school attended by Wolfram, his brother and sister. There was also a rathaus or town hall – a grandiose description for the village offices.

  From the centre of the village, a steep path called the Hohe Steig or High Path led up to the künstler colonie or artists’ colony at the top of the hill. There were only six houses here, each encircled by large gardens. They were so off the beaten track that no one went there unless they were invited, which meant that the Eutingen hilltop could become the Aïcheles’ private domain – isolated in its own bubble from the rest of Germany.

  Over the years to come, a stream of eclectic friends, acquaintances and clients of Erwin would visit, safe in the knowledge that, once they were inside this magnificent home, conversation was free and open. Among them was Dr Schnurmann, a Jewish physician whose penchant for Hitler jokes would soon land him in hot water, and August Zorn, whose headstrong daughter would get into serious trouble after falling in love with an enforced Polish labourer. Yet another was Karl Weber, a senior public attorney, who would soon join the Nazi Party only to find himself prosecuting individuals who were good friends of the Aïcheles.

  On their visits, Dr Schaaff and his Japanese wife captivated the children with tales of miniature artwork from from Schaaff’s native land. Another visitor was a great-aunt with a huge collection of African spears and lances. Another was Dr Hillenbrandt, who had hacked through the jungles of equatorial Africa like some latter-day Livingstone.

  Wolfram loved to chat with the adults and listen to their tales, and they, bemused to find a young lad so interested in their stories, would talk to him as if he were already a grown-up. Wolfram’s parents were pleased to see their children conversing with these adult visitors. They wanted them to form their own opinions about the world.

  Among the occasional guests at the Eutingen villa was an attractive young mother and her four young children. Martha Luise Rodi was very different to most guests of the Aïcheles. The daughter of one of the influential jewellery dynasties of Pforzheim, she had been brought up in bourgeois comfort in the centre of Pforzheim.

  She might never have met Wolfram’s parents had it not been for the fact that she and her husband, Max, attended the same parish church. The Christengemeinschaft, or Christian Community of Pforzheim, was centred on the teachings of the esoteric Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who held that the spirit in human beings could be guided towards the spirit in the universe.

  The Pforzheim community was a tiny one, rarely more than thirty souls, and people knew one another well. Although Wolfram’s father refused to attend, all the other members of the two families would go to the services most Sundays. On occasions, Frau Aïchele would invite Frau Rodi and her children back to her house for coffee and cake.

  Those children were entranced by their visits to Eutingen – a little island that seemed to be adrift from the rest of the globe. Visual harmony meant everything to Wolfram’s mother; even the children’s toys were objects of beauty. And the family lit their house with candles, which in those days was deemed to be highly eccentric. Visitors were left with the impression that they were entering a very cultured atmosphere.

  The Rodi boys, Frithjof and Peter, found it difficult to get to know Wolfram, with his funny interests and strange stockings. He seemed like a child who had dropped from another planet. The two brothers wanted to play hide-and-seek and other boyish games, but the young Wolfram was keener to tell them about the gothic altarpieces he had seen while out on his bike rides.

  In the twilight years of the Weimar Republic, a shared outlook on life had already brought the Aïcheles and the Rodis into each other’s orbit. Each night, the Rodi children would drift off to sleep as their father played his beloved Schumann on the piano, while in a little village on the other side of Pforzheim, Wolfram and his siblings would listen to Bach arias on their father’s wind-up gramophone.

  As darkness closed in, both families shared the feeling that difficult times lay just around the corner. Yet no one foresaw the fact that their idyllic world, so carefree and tolerant, was about to be thrust into a brutal and terrible future.

  Chapter Two

  Enemy of the State

  ‘Anyone who stands in our way will be butchered.’

  On a sharp autumn dawn with a clear cobalt sky, Wolfram’s mother could be heard calling down the corridor, urging her young sons to put on their boots. It was a beautiful Saturday morning, the perfect weather for a hike in the countryside.

  On most days, the family would take the little lane that led downwards towards the centre of Eutingen, but on this particular morning they turned right, following the lane in a northerly direction. It curved upwards to the brow of the hill, which offered an open vista of apple orchards, meadows and gently undulating pastureland. It looked as if a great tapestry of greenery had been flung across the landscape and allowed to settle into natural bumps and vales.

  In the early 1930s, the only noise to be heard from this hilltop was the twittering of birdsong and the whisper of the wind in the trees. The E52 motorway from Karlsruhe to Stuttgart, one of Hitler’s more ambitious engineering projects, was not even on the drawing board.

  Wolfram was eight years of age when he started to accompany his mother on hikes to the nearby villages of Dürrn, Bauschlott and Ottisheim. These little farming communities seemed to belong to another century than the mechanised industries of nearby Pforzheim. In these years of economic decline (it was just two years after the Wall Street Crash) tractors and combine harvesters were still an unaffordable novelty. Wolfram recalls farmers traipsing out to the fields at harvest time accompanied by flocks of young children. The menfolk would scythe the sun-ripened corn by hand; it would then be chaffed and winnowed by their wimpled wives and adolescent daughters, just as it had been for centuries.

  A few of the more prosperous farmers used oxen to haul their wagons back from the fields, but most were too poor to afford such a luxury. They would harness their milking cows to the yoke and stir the reluctant animals to motion with a strong crack of the whip.

  Motor cars were a rare sight indeed during these walks in the countryside. Adolf Hitler’s vision of every German family having its own vehicle must have seemed like a distant pipe dream to the inhabitants of Dürrn, Bauschlott and Ottisheim.

  The massive Swabian farmsteads in these villages were a source of fascination to Wolfram. Framed from gigantic oak timbers, and held together by an elaborate jigsaw of mortise-joints and wooden pegs, they looked for all the world like upturned galleons. Their vast keels pointed upwards towards the clo
uds; their timber forecastles jutted forth at improbable angles, in defiance of gravity and logic. It was as if they had been left high and dry by the passing of some biblical flood.

  The kitchens of these farms, blackened by centuries of soot, would set off a hungry rumble in young Wolfram’s belly. Strings of smoked sausages hung from the beams and great knuckles of ham swung from the fireplace. There were jars of pickled beans, flagons of crisp Riesling and vats of fermenting sauerkraut; most of the villagers were self-sufficient in all but luxury goods.

  Wolfram was particularly fascinated by the customs and traditions of village life, and he tried to remember every detail that he had seen – every vista and every farmstead. Then, upon returning home, he would sit himself at the dining-room table and, in painstaking detail, set them down on paper.

  His passion for drawing consumed all his energies. In the classroom, he was a hapless pupil. Wolfram excelled at only one subject, handwriting, producing page after page of beautiful gothic script, but he was incapable of learning by rote the flighty poesies of Ludwig Uhland. Instead, he would stare into space and try to conjure images of the farmsteads he had seen on the previous weekend. So compulsive was his daydreaming that his teacher, Hulde Philip, despaired of his passing a single exam. She could not understand how he could spend hour after hour looking blankly at the ceiling.

  Her attitude changed one day in the winter of 1932, when she was invited to the family villa and shown some of Wolfram’s artwork. Like all the Aïcheles’ other adult visitors, she was amazed by what she saw, suddenly realising that those long hours of daydreaming had brought forth rich fruit.

  Peter and Frithjof Rodi, those occasional visitors to Eutingen, lived in an apartment in the centre of Pforzheim. Each evening, as twilight fell, they would lean out of the window to watch the political marches and processions that were becoming more and more a part of daily life.

  The Pforzheim marches were small and provincial compared with those taking place in the capital and usually did not involve more than about one hundred men from the SA. The first part of the procession consisted of pipers and drummers, followed, at the back, by the brass band. It made quite a spectacle for the two young boys, who always hoped that the band would strike up a tune as it passed underneath the family window.

  Peter, who was four years older than Frithjof, was allowed to go to bed that much later. At night, when it was completely dark, he would watch the torchlit processions making their way through the streets. One evening, he noticed that swastikas had started appearing on every building. There was a sudden emphasis on the populace coming together and uniting behind Hitler.

  Hitler’s star was indeed in the ascendant, a consequence of the profound political crisis now overtaking Germany. The Weimar Republic, which had become progressively unstable over the previous three years, seemed on the point of complete collapse.

  ‘Will Schleicher Resign?’ asked Pforzheim’s local newspaper on Saturday, 28 January 1933 – a reference to the chancellor, Kurt von Schleicher, and his increasingly untenable hold on power. ‘Hitler again in Berlin: today there will be extremely important talks at the offices of the German president.’

  This was not the first time that Adolf Hitler had urged President Hindenburg to appoint him chancellor. For months he had been arguing that his popular following was sufficiently large to justify such an appointment. However, Hindenburg had repeatedly refused to sanction such a move, arguing that he could not ‘transfer the whole authority of government to a single party’.

  Since that exchange, the political crisis had intensified. Although Hindenburg remained adamantly opposed to Hitler’s appointment, when his most trusted confidants argued in Hitler’s favour – among them the former chancellor Franz von Papen – Hindenburg reluctantly relented. On Monday, 30 January, he summoned the leader of the Nazi Party to an audience. When Hitler emerged from this meeting, he was chancellor of Germany.

  Whilst many politicians feared that Hitler would now attempt to establish a dictatorship, Franz von Papen shrugged off their concerns with a joke. ‘You are wrong,’ he told them. ‘We’ve engaged him for ourselves.’ He reminded them that the Nazis had been granted just two ministerial posts in the new government. ‘Within two months, we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeak.’

  Wolfram’s father did not share Franz von Papen’s optimism. He was appalled by the news from Berlin: it was what he had feared all along. He remained convinced that Hitler was a troublemaker who would lead Germany back to the abyss of war.

  In the first few hours of Hitler’s chancellorship, all eyes were focused on Berlin. It quickly became apparent that Hitler intended to govern Germany in a radically different fashion from his predecessors. On the very evening of his appointment, his political comrade, Joseph Goebbels, organised a spectacular torchlit parade of brownshirts and SS men. They marched with crashing feet and swastika flags – a precursor to the triumphant rallies that were to become a hallmark of the Nazi regime.

  In these days before television, Goebbels recognised the propaganda value of such torchlit parades and he ordered them to be held in towns and cities across Germany. In Pforzheim, the local office of the Nazi Party attempted to emulate the Berlin extravaganza by organising their very own nocturnal fanfare.

  Many of Wolfram’s childhood friends and contemporaries stood in the streets that night, watching in awe as uniformed men carrying flaming torches marched through the town in celebration of Hitler’s triumph. Suddenly, everyone seemed to be wearing uniform. And although the children were still too young to understand what was taking place, they could feel the renewed sense of hope and joy. People were saying that from now on things would look up.

  For many German youngsters, joining the celebrations felt like signing up for a new religion. The Nazi leadership had great expectations of them; they were being implored to join forces with the new political elite and throw their youthful energies into building a great future for Germany.

  On the morning after the election parade, a young Pforzheim schoolgirl, Hannelore Schottgen, was still drunk with enthusiasm. She and her friends greeted their teacher with ‘Heil Hitler’ when he entered the classroom. The teacher was not amused and reprimanded them. They should stop such nonsense, he said. What was taking place in Germany was not a joke.

  For those who did not support the Nazis, there was a sudden feeling of ostracism from the mainstream. The Aïchele family took no part in the Pforzheim celebrations on the evening that Hitler became chancellor; Wolfram’s parents had no desire to witness the public euphoria. Wolfram spent the hour before dinner feeding his father’s deer, as he did each day, and he also helped to carry buckets of putrid meat to the workshop in the garden, where it would be chopped into chunks, then tossed to the falcons and other birds of prey.

  In the evening breeze, a few snatches of martial music could be heard drifting towards Eutingen from the Nazi parade in the valley far below. Erwin, who did not want to listen to it, chose a Beethoven symphony from his small record collection and asked the young Wolfram to wind up the gramophone.

  For the first few weeks after the change of political leadership in Berlin, life in the Aïchele household was seemingly unaffected. Friends continued to visit the family at their Eutingen villa and the cycle of rural life remained unchanged. This was still a time when itinerant shepherds spent the chill winters wandering from farm to farm with their flocks of sheep.

  With the tentative arrival of spring, Marie Charlotte started to take Wolfram on long country walks to show him the many jewels in the countryside beyond Eutingen. One day she led him on a four-hour hike across rolling farmland to visit one of the greatest gems of medieval Swabia.

  It was close to midday when they caught a glimpse of the village of Tiefenbronn, which straddled a steep humpbacked hill, its gabled farmhouses set into the contours like a row of wonky teeth. On the crest of the hill, its spire pointing sharply to the heavens, was the goal of their artistic pilgr
image: the gothic church of St Maria Magdalena. Its unassuming exterior betrayed no inkling of the rare treasures that lay inside.

  The door opened with a clunk; mother and son stepped into the gloom. In those days there was no guardian and no entrance fee, no opening hours and no postcard stands. Tiefenbronn’s marvels had yet to be revealed to the outside world. As Wolfram’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, a spectacular array of wonders began to glitter through the shadows. Suspended at the far end of the nave was a medieval high altar of such scale and magnificence that it completely outshone the workaday architecture of the church.

  In the hands of the master carpenter, whose identity had been lost to the centuries, the carved representation of Christ’s crucifixion had been transformed into a veritable microcosm of medieval Swabian life. Peasants in coifs, maidens in homespun kirtles and impudent young shepherd lads: all had been tenderly carved from the unyielding oak. The ruddy cheeks and piercing blue eyes of John the Evangelist spoke of a Teutonic lineage; John the Baptist had the rugged air of a Swabian farmhand. The newborn lamb he was clutching might well have been born in the next-door farmyard.

  And which local maiden had inspired the figure of Mary Magdalene? Her golden tresses and carnation-pink cheeks hinted at a playful coquette; her neat wimple, at a respectable piety.

  There were other marvels to behold in the church of Tiefenbronn. Marie Charlotte led her small son over to a side altar painted by Lucas Moser, perhaps the most talented master craftsmen working in the late Middle Ages. Moser’s scenes from the life of Mary Magdalene represented one of the earliest and boldest adventures into perspective. Receding hills, silhouetted trees and a faraway shoreline: all were caught in the fading golden twilight.

  Marie Charlotte watched Wolfram’s reaction to the treasures of the church and was intrigued. No other eight-year-old boy would have spent the days that followed making faithful drawings of the gothic diptychs and polyptychs. It confirmed what she already suspected: that Wolfram was of a very different temperament to his contemporaries. He spent half his time living in another world.