by Giles Milton
Wolfram had no idea that one of the Nazi regime’s most outspoken critics, the Jesuit priest Rupert Mayer, was then being held under house arrest in the vaulted cloisters. The authorities wanted to kill Father Mayer but, worried that his death would make him a martyr to the faithful, they chose instead to incarcerate him in Ettal, where no one would ever see him.
Wolfram was under no illusions that he would be called into the Reich Labour Service when he turned eighteen. Yet the summons to report for a medical examination in February 1942 – the first inevitable step into the military – still came as a shock. The wording of the letter was brusque and official, signalling a dramatic transformation to his life. For months he had spent his days learning to wield his chisel with skill. Now, his woodcarving course was to come to an abrupt end.
Two of his Oberammergau friends managed to dodge the call-up. One suffered from asthma attacks and was pronounced too sickly to be drafted. The other had contrived to give himself blood poisoning by inhaling fumes from toxic metal and was sent to the local infirmary. The rest of Wolfram’s comrades had their medical and were given certificates declaring them fit and well.
They all went for a beer afterwards. Some of the crowd made the best of the situation and pretended to be proud to be a part of the military. However, a couple of men in the tavern, who had already experienced the horrors of the front, introduced a note of sober reality to their celebrations, bluntly telling the lads: ‘You won’t be rejoicing for much longer.’
There was good reason for pessimism: the war on the Russian front was going from bad to worse. Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union – spectacularly successful in the opening months – had faltered and failed as the mercury dipped to twenty below zero. Soldiers, many of them reluctant conscripts, began to ask themselves whether they would ever see their loved ones again.
It had been so very different at the beginning of the campaign. The German army had crossed the Soviet frontier at dawn on 22 June 1941 – the greatest land invasion in the history of warfare. Three million men, 3,300 tanks and virtually all the artillery units in the Wehrmaht were involved. The goal of the campaign was as ambitious as the size of the army: the conquest of the immense European slab of the Soviet Union.
Three army groups had thrust their way into Soviet territory on that bright summer’s morning. Army Group North was to head for the Baltic areas of northern Russia and capture the great city of Leningrad. Army Group Centre was to advance towards Smolensk and Moscow, seizing the heartland of western Russia. Army Group South was to target the agricultural land of the Ukraine, capturing Kiev before wheeling sharply south-east towards the rich oilfields of the Caucasus. ‘When [Operation] Barbarossa commences,’ said Hitler, ‘the world will hold its breath and make no comment.’
His confident predictions of a swift victory seemed prophetic. In the opening days of the campaign almost 4,000 Soviet aircraft were destroyed. By the end of the first week, advance units of the Germany army were one third of the way to Moscow. Vilnius fell on 24 June; Minsk was taken a few days later. By September, the siege of Leningrad was already under way.
Nevertheless, senior army commanders on the ground soon realised that Hitler had completely misjudged the strength of the Russian defence. ‘The whole situation makes it increasingly plain that we have underestimated the Russian colossus,’ noted General Fritz Halder just a few weeks after the invasion was launched. He had been told to expect 200 Russian divisions in defence of the motherland. In reality, there were almost double that number and they clung to every inch of Russian territory with a tenacity that took the German army completely by surprise.
‘If we smash a dozen of them,’ wrote Halder, ‘the Russians simply put up another dozen. The time factor favours them as they are near their own resources, whereas we are moving further and further away from ours. And so our troops, sprawled over an immense front line, without any depth, are subjected to the enemy’s incessant attacks.’
In spite of these difficulties, the German offensive achieved some spectacular successes. Kiev was captured in September and the Crimea was cut off from southern Russia. The German army had also reached the northern suburbs of Moscow and looked set to snap up Stalin’s capital before the New Year.
However, it was at this moment of near-triumph that winter arrived in earnest, with freezing blizzards and biting winds sweeping in from the eastern steppe. While Wolfram and his friends were enjoying wintry hikes in the countryside around Oberammergau, the poorly provisioned troops outside Moscow were suffering from the effects of severe frostbite.
German casualties had topped half a million in the opening months of the campaign. Now, that figure rose dramatically. In one twenty-four-hour period in December 1941, 14,000 German soldiers had frostbitten limbs amputated. Many of them would be dead within a few days.
It became increasingly obvious that conscripts drawn from Germany’s youth would be needed to make up the shortfall in manpower. By the time Wolfram was called into service in 1942, there was little doubt that he would be despatched to the eastern front.
‘We’ve spent days without potatoes,’ wrote Wolfram’s mother in a letter to her son. ‘We’ve got the ration coupons to buy them but there are none available.’
In her kitchen in Eutingen, Marie Charlotte was trying to prepare lunch. In times of war and ever-stricter rationing, it was hard to conjure an appetising meal. Bread, pickled vegetables and bottled fruit formed the basis of their daily diet.
It had been some months since she had last seen her church friend, Martha Luise Rodi. The Christian Community, where they used to meet each weekend, had been forced by the city’s Nazi authorities to shut its doors permanently the previous June. The order had come in the wake of Rudolf Hess’s bizarre flight to Scotland in the spring of 1941 – a solo peace mission on the part of Hitler’s deputy whose true aims and purpose have never been satisfactorily explained.
Hess was declared persona non grata by the Nazi regime and all of his personal interests – which included mysticism, astronomy and homeopathic medicine – became tainted by association. Although he had never adhered to Steiner’s philosophy, he was deemed to be sufficiently close to his ideas to warrant the closure and destruction of Germany’s remaining Steiner churches. ‘The end,’ wrote Goebbels at the time, ‘of occultism.’
Marie Charlotte visited her Pforzheim parish to find that it had been ransacked by overzealous officers from the Gestapo and stripped of all its furniture.
‘You already know where I went on Tuesday,’ she wrote. ‘It was so upsetting to go there and see it again. On the previous day, the last pieces of furniture had been roughly removed.’ Her only consolation was that Herr Becher, their now-unemployed pastor, had been given some work by a member of the Community.
As the campaign in Russia lurched from crisis to crisis, both Marie Charlotte and Martha Luise prayed for a speedy end to the conflict. Both had sons who would soon be conscripted to the battlefront and both of them hoped against hope that the invasion of Russia would be completed – or defeated – before their sons had to take their turn on the front line.
Martha Luise had one reason to be thankful in these difficult times. Her husband, Max, had been relieved of military duties within a few months of being drafted into the army and posted to Alsace, some sixty miles away, to teach German to the local Alsatian schoolchildren.
Max soon forged a close relationship with the villagers, in part because he spoke good French. When they learned that he had five children, they took pity on him, giving him cheese and smoked sausages to take home to the family each weekend.
When Martha Luise, a perfectionist, was not busy with the housework, she and her daughters spent their time wrapping scores of parcels for cousins and nephews who had been drafted into the army and were now fighting for their lives on the eastern front.
Martha Luise had almost a dozen young soldiers to whom she sent parcels and wrote letters. The family also sent food and warm clothes to these m
en when they realised that Hitler had taken no precautions in equipping his forces for the Russian winter.
As the first blast of winter arrived in Pforzheim – and news from the front became increasingly hard to obtain – the Rodi family speculated on how their cousins were faring out on the Russian steppe. The whole nation was now being asked to knit woollen clothing for the troops. Even eleven-year-old Frithjof learned to knit. Meanwhile, everyone whispered to themselves that Hitler should have profited from Napoleon’s failures in 1812.
No one dared to speak of such things in public, but there was a growing feeling among Pforzheimers that Hitler had committed a grave blunder in invading Russia. These fears were to sharpen still further in the second week of December, when Germany found itself at war with the United States.
Frithjof looked forward with boyish enthusiasm to the occasional visits from the officer-cousins fighting on the Russian front, whom he admired greatly. They came in their military uniforms, bringing back dramatic stories of tank battles and hand-to-hand fighting in blizzards and snowdrifts. Such things made a deep impression on a young boy. He and his older brother always wanted to know whether or not they had been awarded the Iron Cross and whether it was first or merely second class.
Wolfram was increasingly concerned about what the immediate future held in store for him. Just a few days after his medical, he received his call-up papers, which told him to make his way to a training camp at Niederbayern, a few miles to the north of Munich.
The girls on his wood-sculpting course decided to give the young lads a joyous send-off, decorating sleighs with spruce branches and hurtling across the snow-covered Ettal valley. This good-humoured farewell did little to allay the anxiety and anger felt by Wolfram and his friends. Wolfram was particularly furious at being called up. For years he had dreamed of being a sculptor. Now, the war had become an indefinite interruption to his studies.
Life in the Niederbayern camp was physically exhausting. Gun training and enforced marches left him close to collapse each evening. Worse still, he was perpetually hungry as all available foodstuffs were now being diverted to soldiers at the front. ‘Food is far more important for me than money,’ he wrote in a letter to his parents. ‘Please send me something to spread on bread – jam, honey – or some other food or some ration cards.’
The daily routine was punishing. The men in charge of the military training programme were petty tyrants who delighted in treating the fresh recruits harshly. Wolfram and his comrades were woken at six: there was no breakfast. Having wolfed down whatever scraps they had managed to save from the night before, they spent the morning being instructed on gun maintenance and target practice, something at which Wolfram excelled.
The importance of physical fitness was stressed again and again. They were told that they could hope to survive the Russian front only if they were in peak physical condition.
‘I won’t easily forget last Thursday,’ wrote Wolfram in a letter to his parents. ‘We had to do a walk of nearly thirty-five kilometres.’ Winter had been dispelled in an instant by a burst of spring sunshine and suddenly it was insufferably hot – ‘a real burning heat’.
An already difficult hike was made agonising by the fact that none of the men had been issued with any socks. After thirty kilometres, Wolfram could go no further: he, along with several other men, collapsed from pain and exhaustion.
‘As of yesterday,’ he wrote, ‘I’m lying in bed in the infirmary. On both my feet they’ve cut open my blisters and drained them. The sores are really bad – the size of my entire foot.’ For the next seven days he was unable to stand, but as soon as the blisters were partially healed he was sent back into training.
There was usually a brief break for lunch at midday – a one-pot meal, which was never enough for these growing teenagers. After this then they had four hours of marching and drilling in the afternoon. In the evening they would get half a loaf of bread, a bit of margarine, and some cheese and sausage. That had to be enough for the evening and the following morning.
After a few days in camp, Wolfram was feeling homesick and miserable. His most abiding memory of those eight weeks at Niederbayern was the lack of comradeship. It was the loneliest time of his entire life. In normal circumstances, he would have been recruited with friends from his own town or village. Having signed up with local farm lads from Bavaria and elsewhere in Germany, he had absolutely nothing in common with them.
As the end of May approached, Wolfram’s time at the camp was fast coming to an end. All that remained was to find out where he would be posted. He longed to be drafted into the Alpine service, for he had a passion for mountains and had loved his hikes into the Bavarian Alps. ‘If only I could at least see the Alps from a distance,’ he wrote to his parents. ‘How happy I’d be if I got to see the mountains again.’
It was not to be. At the beginning of June 1942, he learned that he was being sent to the East. The military situation there was critical and manpower in short supply. In the previous December, the Soviet army had regained a foothold on the Kerch peninsula, landing a large number of troops at Feodosiya. Sevastopol, too, was holding out against the German besiegers. Hitler decreed that the Crimea needed to be reconquered with immediate effect. Youngsters from the Reich Labour Service were to be sent to provide technical support, working alongside the army, in what was likely to be a prolonged military campaign. To the eastern front Wolfram must go.
Marie Charlotte was distraught when she heard this news, although she tried to put a brave face on it. ‘In this day and age,’ she wrote in a letter to her son, ‘you have to take things as they come and try to see the positive side.’ She was trying to remain upbeat, even though knowledge of his imminent departure to the East had dealt her a terrible blow.
‘For me,’ she wrote, ‘in all experiences, I’ve recognised some sort of guidance and sense as to why things happened, including the painful things. You must remember that I shall still be thinking of you, even when you’re abroad. Of course, I would love you to be spared anything unpleasant and difficult, but we have to remember that these things may contribute to making a stronger person out of you.’
Her advice was personal, heartfelt and born out of her Christian beliefs. She said that Germany was caught in a tremendous battle between good and evil. Although she did not mention Hitler by name, she was clearly referring to him as the diabolical figure who was leading Germany to ruin. ‘Everyone has to remain strong in this day and age – in this fight between good spirits and bad.’
The bad spirits had certainly got the upper hand in the state of Baden. In Pforzheim, Karlsruhe and elsewhere, there were no longer any Jews left, except for the mischlinge (the half-Jews and quarter-Jews), plus those living a hidden existence in attics and cellars. Yet their absence did not stop the relentless anti-Semitism that was still being taught in universities and schools.
Frithjof Rodi was at school one day, being taught about the creation of the world. The teacher said that God was very tired after making Adam and Eve but that He still had a little lump of clay left over. He tried to make a third figure but it was extremely ugly and so He threw it violently into the corner. This made its nose crooked and its legs all bandy.
The children listened to the story wide-eyed, never having heard this particular version of the creation. The teacher then told them how this crippled and misshapen creature slowly came alive and started creeping towards God. God was appalled and said to it: ‘Go to hell, you Jew!’
Once the teacher had finished with his story, he made all the children write it out in their neatest handwriting.
It was not just religion that was permeated with ideology. Science, too, was a target for the Nazis. They could do little to alter the chemistry and physics curriculum, but biology became an easy vehicle for anti-Semitism. In Hannelore Schottgen’s class, race was the principal subject, focusing on the hierarchy of races. At the very top was the Aryan race: Nordic, tall, blond with blue eyes, a noble character, faithful, ha
rd-working and the brightest part of the German population. Next down the scale were the Slavs, along with Latin and Mediterranean types. All other peoples of the world – especially those who were black or Jewish – were considered completely degenerate.
At playtimes, Hannelore and her friends would talk excitededly about how close they were to the proper race, although they were sorely disappointed when they worked out that hardly anyone turned out to be pure Nordic. The tall ones were dark, the blonde ones were little and the sole fair-haired girl who was tall had a crooked nose.
Hannelore felt uncomfortable in these biology lessons, largely because the teacher herself was uncomfortable, teaching the new curriculum without any enthusiasm while doing her best to keep a distance from it. Hannelore and her friends, aware that she did not agree with what she was having to teach, decided not to ask any difficult questions because they liked her.
History was also overlaid with racial theory. At school, Frithjof learned that the Germanic race, with its blond hair and blue eyes, had destroyed the Roman Empire. Back at home, he and his brother used to joke about the fact that Hitler did not look at all Aryan.
This was true enough, but he was nevertheless portrayed as the embodiment, indeed the fulfilment, of Germanic destiny. In history lessons, teachers reproached the medieval kings of Germany for travelling to Rome for their coronations instead of using their energies to colonise the East. Only Otto the Great was singled out as an exception because he had expanded eastwards and fought the Slavs.
While Frithjof and his classmates were being instructed in anti-Semitism, his older brother, Peter, discovered that his full-time education was about to be abruptly interrupted. In April 1942, to his mother’s great distress, he returned home with news that he had been drafted into the heimatflak or home defence. He was just sixteen years of age but, in these times of total war, even schoolboys were required to offer their lives to the service of the Fatherland.
