The Boy Who Went to War

by Giles Milton

  The military airfield at Nikolaev had been deserted during the attempted relief of Stalingrad; it was to remain silent for many weeks. In the aftermath of the disaster, all available planes were diverted eastwards to transport wounded men away from the battle front.

  At the end of January 1943, to everyone’s surprise, a lone aircraft broke through the foggy skies above Nikolaev and touched down on the runway. On board was a senior-ranking German officer who needed an urgent operation on his tonsils. He had sufficient status to be able to order the plane’s diversion to Nikolaev where he knew he could have it done quickly and under anaesthetic.

  Wolfram’s doctor was prepared to perform the operation on one condition: that afterwards the officer take fifteen of the most seriously ill patients back to Germany. When this was agreed, Wolfram was selected as one of the fifteen. He was promptly handed a uniform, told to get dressed and helped to the plane on the following morning. Four hours later, they landed in Lemberg (Lvov), in the western Ukraine.

  Wolfram’s experience of Lvov was a blur of images snatched from the window of a military ambulance. Grey slush, grey streets, grey buildings – along with large numbers of seriously wounded soldiers. He spent the night in Lvov hospital, sharing a room with a soldier dying of his wounds. The man’s parents had somehow managed to travel all the way from Germany to see him in his final hours. They sat in the darkened room, talking in whispers to their son as he slipped away. To Wolfram, it seemed painfully sad.

  The man was still clinging to life on the following morning when Wolfram was taken to the station and put on a train to Dresden – a three-day journey in a carriage filled with more sick and dying soldiers.

  The winter canvas was monochrome and bleak. Ukraine and Poland were shivering under thick snow, yet the frozen landscape held none of the romance that Wolfram had sensed in Oberammergau. Here, the terrain was hostile and cold, and the scouring easterly wind had smoothed the snowscape into an icy carapace. The occasional tree, skeletal and blasted with frost, made an eerie silhouette against the gun-metal sky. Everyone, everywhere, had tales of suffering and defeat.

  On their arrival at Dresden, they were told to make their way to a makeshift infirmary. On the following morning, there was a change of plan and they were all ordered back to the station, to be put on another train.

  The men had no clue as to their final destination. They kept asking where they were going but no one seemed to have any idea. To these sick and wounded soldiers, it seemed as if the entire German army was in terminal decline.

  The train rattled on through the next day and night. Then, at dawn, as the weak winter sun rose above the horizon, they pulled into the spa town of Marienbad in the Sudetenland. After a confusing, zig-zag journey across Eastern Europe, Wolfram had at long last made it to a sanatorium. ‘This morning, at 4 a.m., I arrived,’ he wrote to his parents. ‘I met lots of people in the train who were coming back from Stalingrad.’

  These hardy survivors recounted harrowing stories of frostbite and starvation, as well as lingering deaths from jaundice and gangrene. ‘I think I’d rather not mention in this letter the things they said to me,’ he wrote. ‘They were completely exhausted, especially their nerves.’

  The defeat at Stalingrad was a disaster for the Nazi regime. Not only had the Sixth Army been wiped out but, in an added humiliation, its commander, General von Paulus, had been captured alive by the Soviet army.

  The solemn news of the defeat was broadcast as a special communiqué on 3 February 1943. ‘True to its oath of allegiance,’ began the announcement issued by Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, ‘the Sixth Army, under the exemplary leadership of Field Marshal Paulus, has been annihilated by the overwhelming superiority of enemy numbers.’ The communiqué added: ‘They died so that Germany might live.’

  Two weeks after this grim intelligent, the Aïchele and Rodi families switched on their radios in order to listen to a second broadcast that was to be made by Goebbels himself. Delivered live, before a huge audience in Berlin’s Sports Palace, the much heralded speech was intended to be a triumphant call to arms for the German nation. Goebbels told his wildly enthusiastic audience that the time had come for total war.

  ‘Do you believe with the Führer and with us in the final total victory of German arms?…Are you determined to follow the Führer through thick and thin in the struggle for victory and put up with the heaviest personal burdens?’ His rhetorical questions were met with frenzied cries of ‘Yes! Yes!’ and loud chants of ‘Sieg Heil’.

  A large part of Goebbels’ speech was devoted to his favourite theme – the treachery of and danger posed by the Jews. It was they, he claimed, who had been responsible for the defeat at Stalingrad and they were also working hard to ensure the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany. ‘Jewry represents an infectious phenomenon which is contagious,’ he said. ‘Germany…has no intention of bowing to this threat, but means to counter it and, if necessary, with the most complete and radical exterm—’ At this point, Goebbels paused momentarily and corrected himself: ‘elimination of Jewry’.

  Goebbels’ barbaric sentiments were heard with weary resignation by the Aïcheles and the Rodis. There was nothing new in his vicious anti-Semitism: he had been expressing such views for years. Nor did the two families take any notice of his slip of the tongue. Indeed, no one in Pforzheim who listened to his speech on that February evening had any notion of the fact that Goebbels had meant to say ‘extermination’, not ‘elimination’. Even his Sports Palace audience had failed to heed the slip; tellingly, they responded to his words with cries of ‘Out with the Jews’, not ‘Death to the Jews’.

  Nor did anyone in Pforzheim know that Goebbels’ ‘radical’ policy was already under way – that Jews were already being exterminated in vast numbers. No one, that is, until Max and Martha Luise Rodi received an unexpected visit from a distant cousin. Albrecht Scholl pitched up at their front door at some point in the early months of 1943, having just returned from a tour of duty in occupied Poland. In the privacy of Max’s study, he poured out a chilling tale of brutality and death.

  Albrecht had been posted to Poland at some point in 1942. He was an officer in charge of bookkeeping, a purser who had been sent to serve in the East. It is impossible to know how he found out what was going on. It is most unlikely that a purser in the regular army would ever have been admitted to a death camp; he must surely have taken his account from an eyewitness – someone who had seen it happen.

  The camp that he was told about may well have been Treblinka, sixty miles to the north-east of Warsaw, which had opened its gates on 24 July 1942. In the first six months of operation, some 700,000 Jews had been murdered here – a number that was to rise still higher in the early months of 1943.

  The killings had become a dreary routine for the SS guards in charge of this and the other five camps in occupied Poland. Victims were pulled from the arriving freight trains, segregated according to gender and then ordered to strip naked.

  The fittest were taken to one side to serve as workers; the rest were led straight to the gas chambers. ‘On their way to their doom, they were pushed and beaten with rifle butts…dogs were set upon them, barking, biting and tearing at them.’ So wrote Yankel Wiernik, one of the Jews forced to work as a labourer in Treblinka. ‘The chamber was filled, the motor turned on and connected with the inflow pipes and within 25 minutes at the most, all lay dead, or – to be more accurate – were standing up dead.’

  The information that Albrecht Scholl passed on to Max Rodi was sketchy and incomplete. Whilst he certainly did not know the name of the extermination camp, he was shocked to the core by the fact that the Nazi regime had consecrated itself to mass murder.

  Max and Martha Luise were also profoundly shaken by what they had heard. They had long known of the political camps like Dachau, where Communists, Socialists and Jews were imprisoned and sometimes killed. They were also aware of the transportation of Jews from all over Europe. Indeed, people were told quite openly that thes
e deported Jews were being held in labour camps and would soon be able to build new lives in the occupied lands. It therefore came as a thunderbolt for the Rodis to discover that they were actually being massacred.

  They still had no idea of the scale of the extermination programme and undoubtedly did not know about the existence of the gas chambers. It was not until the end of the war that the family learned about other camps, such as Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

  Shortly after Albrecht’s visit to the Rodi house, Peter and his sister were called into their father’s study and saw immediately that something was wrong. With a grave expression, Max said that he had a matter of great importance to tell them.

  Although he spared his children whatever grim details he might have gleaned from Albrecht, he wanted his two eldest to be aware that the Nazi regime was committing murder on a grand scale in the lands of the conquered; that Jews were secretly being killed in their thousands.

  It was too dangerous for Max to inform his neighbours, friends or even other close members of the family. Such subjects were strictly taboo – and for good reason. Whoever they told would want to know from whom they heard it. If the implicated person was denounced, he or she would end up in Dachau.

  The consequence of this culture of secrecy was that everyone kept their mouths shut. Even the Nazis had a slogan: ‘The enemy is listening.’

  For reasons that remain unclear, Albrecht Scholl was demoted in rank after his tour of duty in Poland. Soon afterwards he was sent to the battlefront, where he was killed.

  He had been told terrible things that had left him deeply, profoundly shaken. The assumption in the Rodi family was that he had chosen his own death.

  Wolfram spent five months at the Marienbad sanatorium. The doctors prescribed rest, food and exercise. There was to be no early return to the battlefront.

  At the beginning of February, his father paid him a surprise visit; a whole year had passed since he had last seen his son. ‘I stood in Wolfram’s room where two other comrades were lying,’ he wrote in a letter to his wife. ‘Wolfram was lying in his bed with a cold pack over his chest and he had a wonderful massive smile on his face when he saw me…he doesn’t look bad, but you can see that he’s just come out of a really serious illness.’

  Wolfram proved a popular patient and kept the nurses amused by doing impersonations of Hitler. The laundry lady, who was fanatically pro-Hitler, was moved to tears by these performances, closing her eyes and imagining that the Führer was talking to her personally. However, the soldiers, whose battlefield sufferings had turned them vehemently against the Nazi regime, just laughed, all thinking it a huge joke.

  As the time for convalescence rapidly ran out, Wolfram knew he would be discharged before the summer. ‘The doctor cannot stand it when men are healthy but remain in hospital,’ he wrote.

  The day for his release came soon enough. In mid-May, he was sent back to Pforzheim. Eight weeks later, after an unexpectedly long leave of absence, he received his call-up papers. He was sent away for training, first to Strasbourg and then to Münsingen. Nine months had passed since he had first contracted diptheria.

  The new recruits were divided into groups when they arrived. The better-educated were to be trained as funkers or wireless operators. All the rest were to be taught how to use guns.

  As there were not enough funkers, the officer in charge asked for one more volunteer. Wolfram put up his hand and was accepted immediately.

  The funker’s role was to transmit and decipher messages between the officers and their troops. Having been sorted into teams of two, the trainees began the slow process of learning Morse code. Wolfram was paired with Erwin Miggel, a mild-mannered Viennese organist with no interest whatsoever in the war. Their opposite team consisted of Lang and Ritzy, who shared similar sentiments.

  For Wolfram, it was like being back among family. Werner Lang came from Oberammergau and his uncle had been Wolfram’s tutor.

  The two lads found they had friends in common and they enjoyed spending their evenings remembering happier times. Together with Miggel and Ritzy, they would sneak off to alehouses whenever possible, or race up the meadows behind the camp in order to catch a glimpse of the distant Alpine panorama. They could just make out the Zugspitze and Hörnle, the very mountains that Wolfram had climbed when he was in Oberammergau.

  The greatest annoyance was their training commander, known to everyone as Lieutenant W. A petty tyrant, he did his utmost to humiliate the men under his charge, making them crawl through muddy puddles at the beginning of each day. Then, when their uniforms were sodden and they were soaked to the skin, he would send them to their Morse lessons.

  Lieutenant W was a diehard Nazi. He used to insist that the trainees should report their parents to the Gestapo if they did anything that was ideologically unsound. He also punished his recruits for minor misdemeanours, like not saluting him correctly, and would frequently withhold food as a penalty.

  He would eventually get his come-uppance. Accused of mistreating the men under his command and found guilty, he was severely disciplined. ‘He’s been given two years in prison and demoted to a simple soldier,’ wrote Wolfram in a gleeful letter to his parents.

  It was during his training that Wolfram received news from Franz Bader, one of the men with whom he had travelled to the Crimea. Bader’s letter was a litany of suffering. Soon after Wolfram had collapsed with diphtheria, all of his comrades had been drafted into the army and sent across the River Donetz to join the rearguard battle for Stalingrad.

  ‘So many killed,’ wrote Wolfram to his parents. ‘And lots of my comrades died.’ In fact, he later discovered that the only one known to have survived, apart from himself, was Franz Bader. He had managed to get out alive because his feet froze and he was semi-paralysed. In terrible pain, he had crawled to an army infirmary where he was treated for severe frostbite before being sent to fight on the Italian front.

  As Christmas approached, Wolfram felt increasingly depressed. Food was scarce and morale lower than ever.

  ‘The shit starts again,’ he wrote to his parents. ‘In all the pubs and inns, all the food is eaten up by six…the Italians soldiers here eat raw potatoes and think it tastes nice!’ These new recruits, with their impish, tramontane features, fascinated Wolfram. ‘They’ve got such interesting faces,’ he wrote, ‘and some of them have these huge beards, like the old Tyroleans with their felt hats and capes…they look like shepherds in the baroque cribs.’

  Christmas left him in a deep gloom. ‘It’s degenerated into one big drinking session,’ he wrote. ‘Then, when the soldiers are completely drunk, they all sing stupid songs. There is absolutely nothing here to do with the Christian feast. They don’t care at all.’

  His spirits were temporarily lifted by a hike into the hills high above the training camp. In the sharp winter air, he once again glimpsed the Bavarian Alps, their soaring crags now powdered with snow.

  One day, the youths were woken by sudden activity, followed by the announcement that a new regiment was being formed – in fact, an entire infantry division. The 77th was to be assembled from several undermanned infantry regiments, along with an artillery battalion, a signal battalion and a divisional supply unit.

  Wolfram and his friends were to be a part of this new division, serving in the 1021st Grenadier Regiment under the command of Colonel Rudolf Bacherer, a tight-lipped Nazi with a balding head and piercing eyes.

  He came from Pforzheim and Wolfram had been at school with his son, but the connection stopped there. Bacherer was a loyal servant of the Führer, an ideological Nazi who looked forward with relish to the battles ahead.

  Just a few weeks after Bacherer’s appointment, Wolfram was told that they were on the move. ‘On Saturday, we’re leaving this place,’ he wrote in a note to his parents. ‘But I’ve no idea where we’re going.’

  Chapter Ten

  Surviving the Home Front

  ‘He’d prepared his young wife and his brother, who managed to contai
n their grief.’

  Wolfram’s sister, Gunhild, could not stop shivering. In the autumn of 1943, the family’s dwindling supplies of coal finally ran out. Erwin was unable to buy any more and, as the first blast of a Schwarzwald winter slammed into their exposed hilltop, the villa turned almost arctic.

  Gunhild’s bedroom, in the eaves of the house, was so cold that she would cry herself to sleep. As the mercury dipped far below freezing, all the windows iced up on the inside.

  An additional source of misery to Gunhild was the family’s meagre diet, which grew less appetising with every month that passed. Feeding a family in wartime required a considerable degree of household planning and organisation, skills that did not come easily to Marie Charlotte. She did her best to prepare dishes that provided some nourishment but Gunhild quickly tired of the same monotonous meals in which potatoes were the principal ingredient.

  She started mixing yeast with stale breadcrumbs and water – a staple in times of hardship. This would then be blended into a paste so that it could be spread on toast. It was supposed to taste like meat; in fact, it tasted of yeast and stale bread.

  Household management became more problematic still when the family found themselves playing host to an endless stream of strangers left homeless by the RAF’s relentless bombing raids of German towns and cities.

  ‘Uncle Walter wrote from Lubeck,’ recorded Marie Charlotte in one of her many letters to Wolfram. ‘He tells us that in the last raid there were 3,000 dead, 3,000 wounded and 30,000 left without homes.’

  Many of these homeless were despatched into the countryside to be lodged with families whose houses were still intact. The Eutingen villa played host to a constant ebb and flow of temporary lodgers – single women, families, children and old men. Sometimes they stayed for just a few weeks; at other times, they would remain for a month or more. Gunhild knew better than to complain, yet it was nevertheless disconcerting to share the family home with complete strangers.