The Boy Who Went to War

by Giles Milton

  As the vessel boomed its way into the harbour and prepared to dock, the men were assembled on deck and given standard landing forms that were normally intended for civilians. Wolfram found the questions on the form extremely strange, with things like: ‘What would you like to do in America?’ The other men were no less perplexed, having all assumed they would be enforced labourers.

  The prisoners were told that an officer would shortly be arriving to debrief them and they awaited his arrival with growing impatience, excited at the prospect of meeting their first genuine New Yorker. There was by now a real sense of anticipation; everyone felt as if he had arrived in an exotic new land. It suddenly seemed as if anything was possible.

  Five minutes passed, and then ten – and then, at long last, a whisper began spreading through the ranks. The officer had arrived, wearing an immaculate military uniform that had been carefully starched and pressed. The prisoners had not seen anyone looking so spick and span for many months. You could hear a pin drop in the silence as he walked across the deck. Everyone was waiting to hear him speak.

  The officer tapped his cane and prepared to address the men. The prisoners craned forward to catch his opening words. All were expecting a cool New Yorker speaking with an American drawl.

  No drawl was forthcoming; he did not even address them in German. ‘Jetzt heered emal alle här,’ he said in a Swabish dialect so thick that most of the men could not understand a word. ‘An schreibed uuf alles en grosbuchschdaben.’ (Now all pay attention, you need to write everything in capitals.)

  As he spoke, the assembled prisoners burst out laughing, some to the point where they had tears streaming down their faces. ‘Speak English,’ they shouted. ‘At least we’ll be able to understand you!’

  For the few Swabian prisoners, it felt like a homecoming. Wolfram was trying to work out from his dialect exactly which town the officer was from. Eventually, someone said: ‘Günsburg, it’s definitely Günsburg.’ Then everyone started whispering this information to his neighbour: Günsburg, Günsburg, Günsberg.

  When the laughter finally died down, the officer was able to explain what was about to happen. The men were going to be transported to Texas but first they would have to walk across New York to get to the station. He said that on no account were they to accept the sweets and cigarettes that people were sure to offer them.

  The men were completely baffled. Why would anyone want to give them gifts? Only later did they learn that New York had a large German population who would turn out in force to greet prisoners whenever they disembarked. They felt sorry for their fellow countrymen, aware that many of them were conscripts with no enthusiasm for Hitler’s war.

  The number of German prisoners being shipped to America had been small in the first few weeks that followed the Normandy landings, but it increased dramatically in the months that followed. By the end of August, when Wolfram arrived in New York, more than 30,000 were disembarking each month. This huge influx led to a rapid expansion of camps right across the country – in Ohio, Texas and California, as well as many other states. The number of Axis prisoners on American soil would eventually top 420,000, the vast majority of them being German.

  The friendly reception given these prisoners was Wolfram’s first surprise. His second was the train in which they were to travel. Seven weeks earlier, in Normandy, he had picked up a propaganda leaflet with the unlikely claim that soldiers would travel in Pullman carriages if ever they were prisoners in America.

  Now, he discovered that this was indeed true. He and his fellow prisoners could not believe their eyes when they saw the train. There were four plush seats in each compartment but only three prisoners. When they asked why the fourth place was kept empty, they were told it was so that they would not be too crowded.

  The food, the endless resources of America and the sense of abundance left a profound impression on men who had suffered from years of rationing and hardship. When they were served their first meal on board the train, the American guards distributed brand-new paper plates and cups. As soon as the prisoners finished eating, they tried to wipe the plates clean to use them again for the next meal.

  The Americans stared at them in bewilderment and asked them why on earth they wanted to reuse the plates. ‘They belong in the trash,’ they said. ‘You need to throw them away.’

  Wolfram and his friends expressed their surprise at such waste, only to be given a lecture on the American economy. ‘Plate manufacturers also have to make a living,’ said the officers in charge of them. ‘If you reuse the plates, they won’t need to make new ones and then they won’t have a job.’ The prisoners were amazed. It was their first contact with an entirely different way of thinking.

  The three-day train journey took them on a meandering, 1,800-mile trek through seven states. Wolfram’s previous long train journey, two years earlier, had traversed the monochrome snowscape of the Ukraine and Belarus. Here in America, the wooded glades of Pennsylvania and West Virginia glowed with the luminous reds and golden yellows of late summer.

  After a fortnight spent at a holding camp – Camp Maxey in Texas – they were on the move again, this time to Oklahoma, in the heart of the Great Plains. As Wolfram stared out of the window for hour after hour, he was struck by the vastness of the canvas, as well as its emptiness. The train rattled along through terrain without any sign of human habitation, save for the occasional ranch that was lost in the middle of nowhere.

  At last, one afternoon, a large settlement appeared in the distance, with buildings, shacks and prefabricated barracks. The men had finally arrived at Camp Gruber, a vast military training compound with a prisoner-of-war camp attached – one of thirty in the state of Oklahoma.

  The camp sprawled over 60,000 acres and provided training for infantry, field artillery and tank units. When Wolfram arrived, the 42nd Infantry Division, known as the ‘Rainbow’, was in the middle of training for combat. Within months it would be fighting inside the frontiers of the Third Reich, liberating Dachau and setting free its 30,000 inmates.

  Camp Gruber was far more comfortable than anything that the men had previously experienced. Although there were forty-five men in each dormitory, everyone had solid beds and there was a gas heating range, which they could light if they felt cold.

  The surrounding landscape suggested the frontier territory of the Wild West. The nearest settlement of any size was Muskogee, a one-horse trading settlement that was home to large numbers of Creek American Indians. The majority of the population lived in isolated farms deep in the countryside, in conditions that were basic and primitive, and years of hard physical labour had left them exceptionally tough.

  These blunt-tongued settlers were the pioneering descendants of peasants from Ireland: O’Caseys and O’Shaughnessys from Cork, Kerry and County Clare. Although the families themselves were poor, Wolfram and his fellow prisoners were constantly struck by the boundless resources of America. When they had arrived in Normandy, they had been supplied with badly made uniforms that quickly fell apart. Now, they were reclothed in American uniforms that were well sewn and made out of soft material. Indeed, the only thing that distinguished them from their American guards was the fact that their uniforms had PW stencilled on them in big white letters.

  The camp food was nourishing and served in plentiful portions. More pleasurable still to Wolfram, the camp’s library contained books that had been banned for many years in Germany, including Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger and Stefan Zweig.

  The men were told that they had been brought to Oklahoma in order to help with the harvesting of cotton, peanuts and strawberries. Wolfram was allotted to the cotton fields. Each morning he and his comrades would assemble into groups of thirty and wait at the gates of the camp for the pick-up that would drive them for an hour or more along dusty tracks to the plantations.

  Each prisoner was expected to pick 150 pounds of cotton a day – a quota that most of them had reached by early afternoon. The work was made easier by the fact that they
swiftly learned to cheat their superiors. They would distract the guard as each sack was weighed, adding heavy stones to increase the weight. Then, once the sack had been lifted off the scales, they would surreptitiously remove the stones and slip them into the next sack.

  What they had failed to realise was that the entire van was also weighed before and after it was loaded. Nor did they know that the driver was putting his own stones into each sack in order to get paid more. He quickly twigged that the men were engaged in the same trickery as he was and expressed his annoyance.

  ‘We can’t all be cheats,’ he said and suggested that they come to an agreement, whereby everyone added a pre-agreed amount of stones.

  Wolfram worked in the cotton fields until the harvest came to an end, at which point everyone started to ask themselves what they would have to do next. They were surprised that there was so little work to be done.

  The prisoners were once again divided into groups. Some worked inside the camp, cooking, cleaning or making popcorn for the camp’s cinema. Others, like Wolfram, joined a small team of civilians working in the tyre repair workshop.

  The workshop’s owner, Mr Hebel, in cowboy boots, stetson and checked shirt, might have dropped straight out of a western. Furthermore, he stank. Wolfram felt sure that he had never washed.

  The civilians working for Mr Hebel were friendly towards the prisoners and frankly expressed their delight that the war was going on for so long, as it had created a lot of work in and around Camp Gruber – work for which they were paid good money.

  To Wolfram, it was as if everyone based in the vicinity of the camp was on the make. One soldier, a sergeant from Texas, returned from his home leave with old tyres from his family’s farm machinery, swapping them for new army tyres, which he sent back to his parents.

  Other soldiers started to do the same – with the tacit approval of Mr Hebel – and it was not long before the prisoners were also involved in the scam. One of Wolfram’s comrades spent all his days sitting in the tyre workshop, removing the words US ARMY from the stolen tyres.

  Wolfram and his companions received little information about the war in those first months as prisoners. Newly arrived German soldiers brought them the occasional scrap of news but it was always many weeks out of date by the time it reached Camp Gruber.

  The men themselves rarely talked of the war and their experiences at the battlefront. Nor did they speak about politics, which was considered a taboo subject and strictly off-limits. Wolfram got along particularly well with one prisoner and had many lengthy conversations with him. Yet it was not until long after the war, when he met up with the man in Munich, that he discovered that he had been a fervent Nazi. The Third Reich had created such a culture of secrecy that men learned not to talk of their political convictions, even when imprisoned.

  The little news that Wolfram did hear from the battlefront confirmed what he had known for a long time: that Germany had lost the war and Hitler’s defeat was inevitable. Although Allied forces were having to battle for every inch of ground, they were steadily and relentlessly advancing towards his homeland. Brussels, Antwerp and Lyons had all been liberated in September, while the Allies were also driving northwards in Italy.

  October and November brought further gains: Athens, Zeebrugge, Metz and Strasbourg were all captured after a fight. The German army attempted to retake Antwerp in December, in the infamous Battle of the Bulge. Although their offensive temporarily halted the Allies, as well as causing large numbers of casualties, the American and British forces would continue their relentless push towards the German border in February 1945.

  Wolfram knew none of this at the time; indeed, the war could not have seemed more remote from Oklahoma. Although desperate to start woodcarving again, he was hindered by a lack of tools and equipment. This was remedied when, with the help of friends, he managed to prise off some of the metal slats from his bed, with which he was able to make himself a set of knives and chisels.

  He was delighted. At last, after almost three years of interruption, he was doing precisely what he most wanted to do. As Christmas approached, he began sculpting a traditional crib, just like the ones he had been trained to make in Bavaria. It was an exquisite piece of craftsmanship, carved from a thick wooden crate that had previously contained mandarins. Wolfram became known to everyone as ‘the carpenter’ and news of his talent soon came to the notice of the camp’s senior officer, a man they had nicknamed Captain Melchior.

  Wolfram risked punishment for having made his set of knives, but when Melchior saw the crib, he was taken aback by the quality of the carving. Keen to encourage the other prisoners in their skills and hobbies, he decided to stage an exhibition inside the camp. Wolfram’s crib was to win first prize in the resulting competition.

  When Mr Hebel learned of Wolfram’s talent, he asked him to make furniture for his daughter instead of repairing tyres. Wolfram had to be careful not to get caught. He always had a tyre lying next to him so that he could pick it up and pretend to be mending it if an army officer came to inspect them.

  At the beginning of December 1944, the men learned that the genial Captain Melchior was to be replaced by a different guard, a Russian Jew, whose behaviour was decidedly eccentric. In the days before Christmas, he confiscated all the cigarettes and sweets that the men had bought at the camp tuck shop. On Christmas Day, he came in, wished the prisoners a Happy Christmas and placed on the dining table everything he had confiscated, telling them it was a little present.

  No one ever went short of provisions in Camp Gruber. With prisoners working in the kitchens and having access to the store cupboards, there were constant opportunities to filch tins of food and pots of jam. The civilian workers at Camp Gruber were forever asking the prisoners to steal things for them, knowing that they would lose their jobs if found out but that the Germans would escape punishment.

  The prisoners were also paid a little money for their work, which they spent in the camp’s tuck shop on books, cigarettes and ice cream. Wolfram had never eaten so much ice cream in all his life. The men were given it almost every day. In winter they used to melt it to create a vanilla-flavoured hot drink.

  The prisoners were responsible for washing and ironing their own clothes, a chore that many of them found tiresome, until they worked out how to avoid it altogether. Several of their comrades had been given jobs working alongside civilians in the army’s clothes store. Each week, these men would allow their fellow prisoners to come and help themselves to new uniforms. They would then throw away their dirty kit and stencil the letters PW on to the new one.

  Wolfram had received no news from his parents in the six months that he had been a prisoner, nor had they heard from him. Indeed, they did not even know that he was still alive, although they had read in the Pforzheim paper that Colonel Bacherer had been captured, along with most of the men who had survived the breakout from the American beachhead.

  As winter gave way to spring, the men began to ask themselves how much longer they would be prisoners. Their guards told them that Allied forces were rapidly advancing towards the Rhine, so the war was clearly entering its final stages. As the German army inched ever closer to defeat, Wolfram spent his evenings wondering how his home town of Pforzheim was faring.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Firestorm

  ‘And then…all hell was let loose.’

  The night was as clear as glass. The moon hung low in the sky, a great silver bauble that shimmered in the icy air. Wolfram’s mother, Marie Charlotte, was far too busy in the kitchen to take any notice.

  The clock in the dining room had just chimed 7 p.m. and supper was about to be served. Family meals had lost all of their conviviality over the previous three years and daily life had become one long waiting game. Marie Charlotte had no idea when the family would be reunited and could not predict what the future held. The US Third Army had crossed the River Saar on the previous morning and was now just ninety miles from Pforzheim. On the Reich’s eastern frontier
, the Soviet army had captured Poznan. Nazi Germany was fast crumbling and although it was obvious that the end was near, it was less obvious how the victors would treat the vanquished.

  Although there was much to worry about, Marie Charlotte did her best to put on a brave face. She still had her husband, Erwin, and her beloved daughter, Gunhild. And on this particular night, she also had a friend in the house. Frau Weber – wife of the Pforzheim attorney, Kurt Weber – was staying, together with her young children. The little ones had already eaten and were safely tucked up in bed. Now, the grown-ups were preparing to dine. In the wood-panelled dining room, the table was set and the potato pie was being kept warm in its dish.

  Friday, 23 February 1945, had been more stressful than usual. Allied planes had been passing overhead for much of the afternoon and the air-raid sirens had sounded with monotonous regularity. These had been a feature of life for more than three years but they had grown increasingly menacing over the previous weeks. This particular day had been the worst in a long while. Everyone in Eutingen had spent hours at a time crouched in their cellars waiting for the sound of the all-clear. Marie Charlotte and her husband often chose to ignore the warnings. Aloof in their villa, they felt more or less secure.

  Marie Charlotte had continued with the household chores, keeping a nervous eye on the skies above. The drone of planes grew in crescendo as the adults sat down to eat, although there was no sound of bombing and it came as a huge relief that the air-raid sirens did not sound again while they were at the table. They did their best to enjoy the pie but their conversation was periodically drowned out by the noise from the sky.

  It was a few minutes after 7.30 p.m. when Erwin, who had finished eating before the others, stepped outside to get a key from his workshop in the garden. This was one of his favourite places on earth; in daytime there was a spectacular view across the wooded river valley towards Pforzheim.