by Giles Milton
Wolfram’s experiences over the previous few days had convinced him that the war was lost. The meagre resources of the Third Reich were no match for the equipment and manpower of the Allied forces. He had been astonished by the quantity of weaponry. The Americans seemed to have endless supplies of everything, whether planes, guns or ammunition.
The Germans, by contrast, did not even have enough food to eat. The men would sneak into abandoned farms and carry off whatever they could find. They often took the crates of butter and cream that were awaiting transportation to Paris, cutting off great slabs of butter and wrapping it in cabbage leaves to keep it fresh.
Wolfram had been told by his commanding officers that he and his comrades were free to help themselves to supplies from uninhabited French houses, but they were under strict orders to take only the least valuable items in such houses. Although they could take a spoon if they needed one, if there was a choice between a cheap spoon and a silver one, they were to take the former. An unusual gesture in times of war, it was most certainly not the norm in the German army.
Wolfram was to spend five long weeks in the southern part of the Cotentin peninsula, continuously in retreat and never sure as to his exact location. The men had no maps and no equipment. They could only ever work out their whereabouts by entering abandoned farmhouses and looking for the PTT (post, telegraph, telephone) calendars distributed free to every house in France. These calendars had maps of the local area printed on them and gave the men some clue as to their position.
On 24 July, Wolfram and his comrades were stopped on the road by a senior German officer who ordered them to gather around him as he had an important announcement to make. With an impassive face, he informed them that an attempt had been made on Hitler’s life. Four days earlier, Count Claus von Stauffenberg had tried to kill the Führer during a meeting at his Wolf’s Lair headquarters in Rastenburg.
The bomb had detonated at 12.40, exactly as planned, and had ripped through the room, killing and wounding many of those present. Hitler, however, was not among the dead.
The officer told the men this news in brief and then went on his way without another word. No one who was with Wolfram dared to say anything. Indeed, no one spoke at all for several hours, although one of the men later muttered to Wolfram and a few trusted confidants: ‘See, it’s the beginning of the end.’
Colonel Bacherer was working hard to re-form the 77th Infantry Division in order to strike back at the Americans. It was proving a forlorn task. The men were now scattered over a wide area of countryside and were constantly being forced southwards, first to La Haye-du-Puits, then to Périers and Coutances. Just a few months earlier, Wolfram had been entranced by this picturesque market town. Now, its medieval centre was a heap of debris. ‘Only the gothic cathedral stands,’ he wrote. ‘Everywhere there’s a picture of sadness and destruction.’
The bombing raids grew in intensity with every day that passed. On one occasion, Wolfram looked up to see the sky black with Allied planes. They were probably heading for St Lô, which was completely annihilated at exactly this time. Wolfram was suddenly struck by the thought that in the weeks since invasionstag he had seen only four German aircraft.
Most families in the region had fled their homes to escape the fighting, but there were the occasional incongruous discoveries. Wolfram and his men broke into one house that was very close to the front line. In the dining room, they found the table already laid in expectation of the owners’ imminent liberation.
The family sheepishly emerged from the kitchen. Although unpleasantly startled to find themselves confronted by German soldiers, rather than American ones, they were courteous and friendly to these unwanted guests. Wolfram chatted with them and they gave him some cider to drink. In the near distance, he could hear the clanging of church bells – a clear signal that the Americans had already liberated the villages just to the north.
By the end of July the Germans had been pushed back to Avranches and Wolfram once again glimpsed Mont St Michel in the distance. ‘Don’t be surprised by this writing paper,’ he wrote to his parents. ‘It lives in the same earthen hole as me. And don’t be surprised if you don’t get any more news – it would be hardly unusual given the circumstances. I’ll write as often as I can but I’m at the front where anything can happen.’
He ended his letter in cryptic fashion: ‘How often have I already been led. I’ve had someone taking me by the hand and showing me the way, just as Tobias was led by the angel in the Botticelli painting.’ It was, perhaps, his idiosyncratic way of informing his parents that he was preparing to let himself be led northwards. He had decided it was time to surrender to the Americans. There was no point in continuing. Without his Morse equipment, he was useless and could do nothing. Now, he just wanted to get away from it all.
There had been an unpleasant incident two days earlier that had helped him make up his mind. One of his conscripted comrades was being admonished by the staff sergeant as they stood close to the American front line. The sergeant was bawling at the lad, telling him he was useless and a good-for-nothing wimp.
It was as he said these words that the conscript received a direct hit in the chest. He stood rooted to the spot for a second before slumping to the ground. It was difficult for the men to absorb what had happened. One minute he was standing there being shouted at; seconds later, he was dead – hit by a stray bullet. Even the sergeant felt terrible. The man had died at the very moment that he was being told he was useless.
Surrendering to the Americans was a perilous business. Wolfram knew that he would be executed if he was caught by one of his own officers. There was also the danger that he would be killed by those to whom he was trying to surrender. There were numerous stories of trigger-happy GIs shooting men who had offered themselves up as prisoners.
The next morning was Sunday, 30 July. Wolfram heard church bells again, which could only mean that the Americans were very close. Then he heard the rumble of American tanks: they were driving along the main road just a few hundred metres from his position.
He and his comrades were exhausted after weeks on the move. They were also dispirited. No one wanted to carry on, especially the Austrian soldiers. They were all saying: ‘What’s the point? It’s going to be over soon.’
When the men came to a farmhouse later that day, they knocked on the door and asked the owner if they could sleep there for the night. The Frenchwoman told them that they could use her barn on condition that they got rid of their guns. The men dismantled them and buried them. It was a dangerous thing to do; discarding weaponry was tantamount to desertion.
The next morning was clear and dazzlingly beautiful. Wolfram and his comrades were ravenously hungry and wondered how they could get their hands on food. They spoke with the farm lady, who told them there were several well-provisioned Americans in the next village who were guarding a small group of prisoners.
The men begged her to go and tell them that they wanted to surrender, but she refused to get involved. They spent the rest of the day pondering what to do. By the time evening fell, they were all so famished that they decided to give themselves up just so that they could eat.
They made their way over to the village, catching the American soldiers completely off guard. The Germans could have easily overwhelmed them but no one could see the point. Instead, Wolfram and his colleagues simply walked up to them and asked whether they could surrender. The Americans were friendly and kind. After frisking the men and reassuring themselves that they had no weapons, they gave them cartons of cigarettes and a little food.
As Wolfram and his friends joined the other prisoners sitting on the ground, there was a moment of comedy that broke the tension. All heads turned towards the main street of the village where a lone Turkmen serving with the German army could be seen emerging from a house. With his Mongol eyes and wispy moustache, he looked as if he had just arrived from the Central Asian steppe. Yet he was dressed from head to foot in traditional Normandy costume and wa
s trying to pass himself off as a French civilian.
The Americans all burst out laughing, as did Wolfram and his comrades. ‘You,’ said the Americans, ‘are not French!’ And they took the Turkmen prisoner.
Chapter Twelve
Prisoner at Last
‘How dare you…how dare you complain!’
Marie Charlotte had no idea that Wolfram had been captured. Each morning, long before dawn, she would creep up to the attic and secretly tune in to the BBC to listen to the long lists of German soldiers that had been taken prisoner by Allied forces. The names were read out in random order, starting at 4 a.m. She would sit there for several hours in the hope of hearing that of her son, although she never did, even after Wolfram was in safe American hands.
In the summer of 1944, a new family of homeless people – from the north of Germany – were installed in the attic of the Eutingen villa. At the same time, Marie Charlotte agreed to house the furniture of their friends, the public attorney, Kurt Weber, and his wife.
The Webers, who lived close to the centre of Pforzheim, feared that the town would at some point come under attack, which would place, their house and all their belongings at risk. As a precaution, they carried all their antique tables, chairs, wardrobes and escritoires up the High Path and stored them in the largest salon of the Aïchele villa.
Marie Charlotte spent much of her time in the garden, tending her vegetable plot and listening to the monotonous drone of British planes high above. Although they passed overhead almost every day, they nevertheless attracted the attention of Eutingen villagers. People would cast nervous glances at the sky and hope that they were heading elsewhere.
One bright August morning in 1944, a small group of villagers was chatting in Hauptstrasse, the main street in the village, when a fleet of RAF bombers was sighted in the cloudless heavens, returning to their home bases after a daylight raid on the nearby city of Stuttgart. As they crossed directly over the Eutingen hillside, one of the planes got into serious trouble.
Among those who had gathered in the street was fifteen-year-old Werner Rothfuss. He saw a brilliant flash as one of the planes dramatically exploded in the air.
He and the others scuttled into a nearby cellar as the plane fell to earth in a shower of burning metal. Then, when the skies were once again quiet, they emerged blinking in the sunshine to see where the wreckage had landed.
Young Werner was the first on the scene and found the twisted metal at the northern end of the village. It was a British four-engine bomber, whose debris was scattered across a number of gardens. He dashed back to alert all those who had seen the plane come down.
Doris Weber, sister to Sigrid, had been playing down by the river at the time of the crash and saw nothing. It was not until she walked back up the street towards the centre of the village, that she realised something was wrong. She caught sight of a large gathering of people on Hauptstrasse, in front of the village offices next to her family’s house.
There was great excitement among the crowd and it did not take long for her to discover why. One of the British pilots had miraculously survived and had been brought as a prisoner to the Eutingen offices. He was badly injured and in considerable pain, suffering from a broken leg and severe concussion.
Doris did not get to see the pilot, but young Werner was whisked inside the building. His father was head of the local Red Cross and he needed his son’s help in translating from German into English.
Werner was led into a ground-floor room, level with the street, where the pilot was being held. He was lying in a corner, his leg resting on a wooden splint.
Werner translated all the questions in the ensuing interrogation. He asked how many engines the plane had and how many crew were on board. The airman told him that it had four engines and seven crew, at which point someone said: ‘Good, then we have them all.’
Werner’s father was in the process of bandaging the man’s crippled leg when there was sudden commotion in the hallway outside. Several men entered the room, one of whom rushed at the Englishman and demanded roughly: ‘Does your leg hurt?’
The pilot answered: ‘Yes, it’s broken.’
The man in question was Julius Zorn, a senior functionary in the local Nazi Party and an infamous troublemaker. Angered by the mere fact of the pilot’s survival, Zorn clutched him by the throat while uttering threats and abuse.
Werner’s father was extremely disquieted by Zorn’s behaviour. Unable to stop him and sensing that something terrible was about to happen, he told his son that they should go, even though it meant abandoning the pilot. ‘Come, let’s get out of here,’ he said. ‘Such things have nothing to do with us.’ The two of them left as hurriedly as they had arrived.
The crowd outside had by now dispersed, having been ordered by the local authorities to return to their houses. The sunlit street was completely deserted. An uneasy calm had descended on the village. The only sound came from the rustle of the trees and the distant barking of a dog.
Doris Weber was sitting in the kitchen, whose a window overlooked the village offices, when the silence was suddenly broken by a piercing, high-pitched scream, coming from the adjacent courtyard. She was shocked and terrified by it. It stopped as abruptly as it began and the village once again lapsed into silence. Doris could not forget the scream that kept ringing in her ears.
It was some hours before she learned what had happened to the rescued airman. She was peering out of the kitchen window when she noticed a long wooden box in the yard behind the wall. She asked a lot of questions until finally one of the neighbours saw no point in concealing the truth any longer: ‘The pilot is dead. That’s his body in the box.’ The scream had been his death cry, the very moment of his murder.
The story was hushed up by the local authorities and the villagers knew better than to talk about it in public. Yet there were whispered conversations in many Eutingen homes that night as people came to terms with the fact that a cold-blooded murder had taken place on their very doorstep. It provoked widespread revulsion, even though the pilot was British.
Four years were to pass before news of the murder spectacularly resurfaced. British military officials got to hear of the incident and alerted the Hamburg tribunal that was in the process of investigating war crimes.
Werner Rothfuss and his father were suddenly summoned to Hamburg as witnesses. Among the interrogated was Julius Zorn, the former Nazi official whose fiefdom had included Eutingen. Werner immediately recognised him as the man who had bent over the pilot.
The trial was due to begin on the following morning but when the witnesses assembled in the courtroom one person was missing. The judge called for silence: he had an important announcement to make.
He told the assembled crowd that Julius Zorn had killed himself. He had committed suicide by slashing his wrists.
While unsavoury events were unfolding in the village of Eutingen, Wolfram was experiencing his first hours as a prisoner of war. These were to prove even more dangerous than when he was serving as a funker. As he and his comrades were marched northwards by their American guards, they found themselves walking along a country lane just a few metres from the German front line. The next thing they knew, dozens of fighter-bombers were flying overheard and blitzing the German positions with heavy machine-gun fire.
The gunfire and explosions brought back disturbing memories of the carnage that Wolfram had experienced six weeks earlier on the road to Le Vretot. One of the Turkmen travelling with him was so petrified by the noise of the shooting that he panicked and rushed into the field in order to pray. Those prayers were to be his last. He was immediately gunned down from the sky and killed.
The prisoners pressed on northwards and soon reached the market town of Ducy, captured by the Americans just a few days earlier. Four years of German occupation, followed by sudden liberation, had sparked a spontaneous outpouring of joy. The local inhabitants were all completely drunk. They were singing patriotic songs and dancing in the street but as soon
as they saw the procession of German prisoners they started shouting insults and hurling stones. The prisoners might have been lynched on the spot, had it not been for the presence of the American soldiers who protected them from the mob.
The ranks of prisoners swelled as they shuffled their way northwards until there were several hundred of them. Some miles to the north of Ducy they were picked up by a fleet of army vehicles and driven towards Utah Beach, where a makeshift prison camp had been established in the scrubland behind the dunes.
It was a bleak and windswept spot: there were no tents, nor even any blankets. The detritus of war lay all around – crippled tanks, mangled artillery, discarded guns and reams of barbed wire. The men were herded into a large, fenced-off area guarded by American soldiers that would serve as their home for the next six days.
They were divided up according to nationality. The Germans were told to assemble on one side and the Georgians, Turkmen and Azerbaijanis on the other.
As dusk fell, the Americans began to distribute food boxes to the prisoners. The German soldiers immediately formed themselves into an orderly queue and awaited their turn. The Asiatics, however, began arguing and jostling, and it was not long before a scrap broke out.
As punches were thrown and insults hurled, the fight developed into a near riot. Some of the stronger prisoners walked away in triumph with several boxes of food tucked under their arms. Those who were left empty-handed could expect a long and hungry night.
As the German soldiers watched in incredulity, Wolfram heard one of the Turkmen calling his name. It was Babei, who had been in charge of their horses while their unit was on the road. He was standing by the fence, clutching a blanket that he had somehow managed to get hold of.
