The Boy Who Went to War

by Giles Milton

  Everyone was encouraged to wear national costume. The party urged citizens to look into their wardrobes and dig out clothes that had not been worn for a generation or more. It all made for a wonderfully colourful spectacle.

  Wolfram, who loved the costumes of old Germany, spent many hours poring over pictures of jackets and lederhosen from Bavaria, comparing them with clothes from Swabia, the Palatinate and elsewhere. He quickly became an expert on such costumes and could identify different folk styles from every corner of Germany.

  When he learned of a competition in which entrants had to match traditional costumes with traditional houses, he rose to the challenge. Many thousands entered the competition but he managed to clinch first prize: a lovely, hand-embroidered tablecloth. Having expected the entrants to be housewives, the organisers had not entertained the possibility of the winner being a twelve-year-old schoolboy.

  There were other distractions that summer. In distant Berlin, the Olympic Games had opened to wild acclaim. Most foreign visitors were unaware that all the anti-Jewish signs had been temporarily removed from the city streets. Nor did they know of the arrest and internment of gypsies living in the environs of Berlin. Yet there were numerous tell-tale signs to suggest that this was to be an Olympiad unlike any other. Hitler was determined to demonstrate the superiority of the Germanic race: in the German national team, only Aryans were allowed to compete.

  The Olympic Games received scant attention from the Aïchele family. Wolfram cared little for sport, preferring, instead, to go on long walks with Uncle Walter, traipsing along dusty paths and swigging home-pressed apple juice. Their walks took them far from Eutingen: to the village of Kieselbronn and the forbidding Cistercian abbey of Maulbronn.

  On one of these country walks, Walter and Wolfram paused for a jug of apple juice in a wayside tavern. A local farmer greeted Walter and asked him what he thought of Hitler’s speech on the previous evening. It was a leading question: the farmer clearly expected him to praise it. As Walter could not bring himself to do so, playing the fool, he used his idiosyncratic humour to dodge the question.

  ‘Whose speech?’ he said. ‘Hitler’s? No, sorry, I don’t know him.’

  The man was thunderstruck. ‘Hitler!’ he exclaimed. ‘Surely you must know Hitler?’

  ‘No,’ replied Walter. ‘Can’t say I do. No one called Hitler has ever come round to my house.’

  The man persisted. ‘But you are German?’

  ‘I guess I must be,’ said Walter. ‘That’s what it says in my passport.’

  The man looked away in bewilderment, not wishing to pursue a conversation with someone so obviously deranged. Walter let out a sigh of relief: he had once more managed not to compromise his values and opinions. But the incident served as a stark warning that he lived in a land where freedom of expression was increasingly a thing of the past.

  As the Nazi grip over daily life tightened, it became ever more difficult to avoid the strong arm of the state. The Hitler Youth was one of the most unwelcome intrusions into the lives of both the Aïchele and the Rodi families.

  At the time of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the Hitler Youth was just one among scores of organisations, with a membership of a mere 55,000. Within twelve months, virtually all other youth groups had been ‘co-ordinated’ as children across Germany were automatically co-opted into the Hitler Youth.

  There were still many who did not join and Wolfram was one of them. However, it soon became clear that the nonconformists would be dragged forcibly into line. Shortly before Christmas 1936, Hitler signed a decree that made the Hitler Youth an official educational institution. ‘All German young people,’ he declared, ‘apart from being educated at home and at school, will be educated in the Hitler Youth, physically, intellectually and morally, in the spirit of National Socialism to serve the nation and the community.’

  Wolfram was dreading his first Saturday morning at the Hitler Youth, for he loathed being told what to do. To his great surprise, the experience proved far more enjoyable than he had expected. His age group was led by a sympathetic young theology student who got the children building camps in the woods and cooking around open fires.

  That first outing was also the last that he led. On the following week he was replaced by an enthusiastic apparatchik of the Nazi Party who dutifully implemented all the new directives issued by his seniors. Henceforth, Wolfram and his friends would spend their time marching, drilling and learning how to pitch and strike tents.

  What particularly upset Wolfram was the fact that he no longer had time to head into the countryside on his bicycle in order to draw and paint. He complained to his father, who was so angered by these impositions that he asked his friend Dr Vögtle to write a letter excusing Wolfram from attendance on grounds of ill health.

  The doctor was more than willing to oblige. Considered a crank by some in the local community, he, like Wolfram’s parents, had designed his own house. He had built it with a flat roof, for which he was roundly condemned by his neighbours, who claimed that true Germanic houses never had flat roofs and attacked him for his ‘un-German’ behaviour.

  Dr Vögtle had a soft spot for Wolfram and celebrated the fact that he was so different from his peers. He duly wrote a letter excusing both Wolfram and his brother from the Hitler Youth on the grounds that they had weak constitutions. For the next thirty-six months, Wolfram managed to avoid going to a single meeting.

  His case was far from usual. For most youngsters, opting out was not so easy. Peter Rodi, two years younger than Wolfram, was forced to join in 1936, when he was ten years old. He went twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and found it a complete waste of time. He disliked the war games and sporting activities, as well as the fact that he had to wear a uniform.

  From an early age Peter had displayed a defiant streak that now developed into outright adolescent rebellion. On one occasion he helped himself to a rifle from the Hitler Youth, took it home with him and shot out all the windows of a nearby water tower, one by one. It could have landed him in serious trouble, but no one ever discovered that he was the culprit.

  It was fortunate that Peter and his siblings were extremely musical. They were soon co-opted into the orchestra of the local Hitler Youth, along with their church friends and the children of other cultured people from Pforzheim. This was in fact a useful escape route for those who abhorred Nazism, shielding them from the more militaristic elements of the organisation whilst allowing them to indulge their favourite pastime.

  On one occasion, the children were asked to give a concert to an assembled crowd of local Nazis, performing Haydn’s ‘Emperor’ Quartet – Opus 76. When they reached the famous adagio, whose music had been the setting for the German anthem ‘Deutschland über alles’, there was sudden pandemonium. All the Nazis rose to their feet, clipped their heels together and stood to attention for the duration of the adagio, leaving the young musicians perplexed and not a little amused.

  Although the Aïchele and Rodi children despised most elements of the Hitler Youth, many of Pforzheim’s youngsters thought it was terrific fun. Hannelore Schottgen had voluntarily joined her local branch of the League of German Girls and liked the feeling of belonging to a group. The leaders told the girls not to listen to their parents or even to let the old people have any say in their lives. ‘The future,’ they would say, ‘is yours.’

  Hannelore’s mother had initially resisted her daughter joining the League because she thought it unseemly for young girls to be marching through the streets, but eventually relented. The impressionable young Hannelore was taught that girls were to be involved in building the new Germany and should show their gratitude and love for the Führer.

  On one occasion, a group of Pforzheim children was chosen to go to Nuremberg in order to see Hitler addressing a mass rally. Hannelore was desperate to be selected because she had been told that when women met Hitler they often collapsed with joy. Her neighbour’s husband had been deeply moved by his own experience. He
had shaken hands with the Führer and had not washed his right hand for weeks afterwards.

  Hannelore was to be disappointed. When the time came for the selection process, she was told that she was not tall enough to represent the typical German youth.

  By the summer of 1937, even a little backwater like Eutingen had fallen prey to the Nazi revolution. One of the local functionaries, an enthusiastic Nazi named August Issel, was determined to impose discipline on his diminutive fiefdom. His tenure brought changes both great and small to the daily routine of village life, and it was often the small ones that caused the greatest annoyance.

  The rules on flags were among the more tiresome instances of state interference. On every public holiday and Nazi-inspired festivity, everyone in the country was required to hang out a swastika.

  It soon came to the attention of Herr Issel that there was one family in Eutingen who never displayed a flag. Wolfram’s parents had no desire to hoist one above their property; they had managed to flout the rules for several years by virtue of the fact that their villa lay at some distance from the centre of the village. Herr Issel was unimpressed by their lack of enthusiasm for the Nazi cause and ordered them to hang out a swastika flag like everyone else.

  Although extremely unhappy about this, Wolfram’s mother and father had little option but to comply. They erected an enormous wooden flagpole in the garden in order to show their goodwill, then painted it with tar to preserve the woodwork.

  As they suspected, the tar remained sticky for weeks, preventing them from hoisting any flags. When the Gestapo came to check on the family and found that the swastika was still not being flown from the house, Erwin feigned indignation. Pointing proudly to the flagpole that he had erected, he declared that he could not possibly fly the flag until the tar was completely dry.

  The Gestapo were not amused by his delaying tactic and ordered him to hoist the swastika immediately, even though the tar was still wet. Erwin did as he was told. It was a blustery day and the flag started flapping against the pole. Within seconds, to Erwin’s great delight, the Nazi flag had become a sticky black mess of material. It remained firmly stuck to the pole from then on.

  Provocative acts like this had still been possible in the early years of Nazi rule, but by 1937 they were becoming extremely dangerous. The judgment in a lawsuit in Karlsruhe’s Labour Court had made it clear that such behaviour would no longer be tolerated. A man had refused to sing the anti-Semitic Horst Wessel song while at work and had been denounced by his erstwhile colleagues. Found guilty of having an ‘anti-state’ attitude, he was duly convicted and immediately dismissed from his job.

  The verdict – and sentence – had far reaching implications for everyone in Nazi Germany. ‘By the failure to participate in parades, celebrations and other events,’ declared the court, ‘an employee intentionally places himself outside the national community.’

  These words constituted a warning shot to families like the Aïcheles. Non-participation had become a criminal act that would result in punishment. Opting out was no longer an alternative: the Nazi state required everyone to be active participants in the new ideology.

  Everyone opposed to the Nazis still had their own little way of protesting. The Rodi family, like the Aïcheles, had also managed to avoid hanging out a swastika. When one of their neighbours warned them that they would find themselves in serious trouble if they did not do so in future, they bought the smallest one possible – so tiny that it was scarcely visible.

  The Gestapo was by now acting increasingly intrusively, with frequent house-to-house visits by officers intent on enforcing the new rules, as they had been doing ever since Heinrich Himmler had become the organisation’s head in 1934. In the three years since then, the scale of its network and the level of its efficiency had expanded enormously. So had the budget of its Berlin headquarters – rising from 1 million Reichsmarks in the early years of Nazi rule to 40 million by 1937.

  The expansion was necessary if the Gestapo was to have any hope of enforcing the draconian new laws that tightened the Nazis’ grip over the lives of ordinary Germans. The Malicious Gossip Law was one of the most notorious. It stated that ‘malicious rabble-rousing remarks or those indicating a base mentality’ about the Nazi Party or any of its leaders would swiftly lead to imprisonment. The law enabled the Gestapo to arrest people on suspicion of having uttered even the vaguest mutterings of dissatisfaction with the regime. Letters were opened and phones tapped; denunciations by informers and block leaders led to speedy arrests.

  For four years, Wolfram’s parents had managed to retain considerable privacy in the confines of their own home, but this was starting to change. The incident with the flag had been the first indication that the authorities now meant business. Soon afterwards, the Gestapo paid a second visit to the house. Wolfram’s mother happened to glance out of the kitchen window one morning to see two uniformed officers standing at the garden gate.

  Their visit, although unwelcome, did not come as a total surprise. Marie Charlotte had been warned by friends in the village that the local authorities were intending to redouble their efforts to destroy unsuitable literature. The Pforzheim book burning in 1933 had been merely the opening salvo in a sustained campaign against ‘dirt and shame’ books. The list now included works by Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Bertholt Brecht, Stefan Zweig and Ernest Hemingway, along with many others.

  Marie Charlotte greeted the officers politely and told them that she had already cleansed her shelves of ‘dirt and shame’. She proudly pointed to a little box full of books that she was intending to destroy and even invited the men inside to look through her bookshelves, just in case there were any titles that she might have missed. What the officers did not know – although they might have guessed – was that Marie Charlotte had already removed all her favourites and hidden them from prying eyes.

  She had packed them all into special crates and tucked them into a tiny underfloor space beneath the dining-room table. There was no way she was going to hand over books by writers such as her beloved Thomas Mann.

  She was nevertheless depressed at the thought that her most esteemed authors had been condemned to a secret hideaway under the floorboards. It suddenly dawned on her that the family’s private life was rapidly becoming a secret one. It would not be long before even secret lives were to be forbidden by the state.

  Chapter Five

  War of Words

  ‘We want to work on people until they have capitulated to us.’

  Wolfram remained a source of intrigue to his parents’ friends. He was at ease in the company of adults, who would chat with him as if he were a grown-up rather than a boy of thirteen. Among those who found him engaging company was Dr Hillenbrandt, a physician friend of Wolfram’s father. Hillenbrandt had previously travelled in Africa, where he had assembled an extraordinary collection of oddities and objets d’art, including hundreds of old and rare African masks. Now that he was back in Swabia, he became a self-taught expert on the local folk art.

  In Wolfram, he found a fellow enthusiast. On Saturday afternoons, the two of them would drive through the countryside around Pforzheim, visiting farmsteads in search of homespun volkskunst or folk art. They would knock on doors of old farmsteads and manors – anywhere, indeed, that held the promise of treasures within.

  They would frequently be invited into these rambling homesteads for a draught of cider or a pitcher of fresh milk. It was perennially dark inside, for the only light came from the undersized windows whose hand-blown glass distorted trees into monsters and turned faces to jelly. In the corner of the kitchen, under a carved crucifix, a tallow candle would send out a dim flicker.

  Stout oak trestles, Renaissance trunks and iron-bound strongboxes represented the inherited possessions that spanned a score of generations or more. Handed down from father to son since the chaotic time of the Thirty Years War, they seemed in the imagination of the young Wolfram like precious relics.

  A few of the richer
farms housed veritable masterpieces of folk art. There would be a principal room – used only on high days and holidays – in which every inch of wall, from wainscot to ceiling, was painted with picaresque murals dating from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Such hidden wonders opened a tantalising window on to peasant life more than 300 years earlier. In a mural in one house, a Swabian burgher swaggered around in stiff, buttoned doublet and lace-fringed pantaloons; in another, a cheery huntsman chased a stag through a bucolic forest clearing.

  When Dr Hillenbrandt found particularly choice pieces he would offer to buy them. They were not for his personal collection: he was involved in the establishment of a folk museum in Stuttgart. Furniture that he acquired was carefully dismantled and transported to this new museum where it was restored and exhibited.

  These tours into the countryside provided a rich artistic education for Wolfram – and a timely one at that. They also represented a voyage into a Germanic past that was to be swept away for ever in the aftermath of the Third Reich. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, people enthusiastically jettisoned everything that was associated with the days of old.

  Wolfram’s father was making his way to the little train station in Eutingen on Monday, 9 July 1937, when he caught sight of an unsettling headline in Pforzheim’s newspaper. ‘The New Way for German Art,’ it said. ‘The Führer Inaugurates the House of German Art as a Place for True Creative Action.’

  Erwin bought the paper and read it during the short ride into Pforzheim. The article described how German art was to be given a radical new makeover by the Nazi regime. The ‘degenerate’ art of old was to be replaced by one that celebrated the triumphant greatness of the German spirit. There were to be two exhibitions held concurrently in Munich. One was to showcase all the finest examples of the new ‘Nazi’ art. The other was to display the outcasts and degenerates of the contemporary art scene.