The Boy Who Went to War

by Giles Milton

  The American system was imperfect because it relied, to a large extent, on honesty. This was often in short supply in the aftermath of the war, prompting the wry comment that there seemed to be more Germans who had helped Jews than there were Jews themselves.

  One section of the questionnaire required people to declare whether they had been a member of ‘any association, society, fraternity, union, syndicate, chamber, institute, group, corporation, club or other organisation of any kind’. This caused problems for many. One of the Rodis’ neighbours was a passionate horseman. His riding club was, like all the others, transformed into a Nazi organisation, which meant that he became, by default, a member of the SS, even though he never played an active role.

  However, the Americans failed to make any distinction between active and non-active members and the man was imprisoned for two years. Such cases of injustice created a bad atmosphere in Pforzheim.

  It quickly became apparent that the majority of Germans belonged in the same category – mitläufer or passive followers. This included most teachers, who had joined the Nazi Party because it was almost impossible to retain a teaching job without being a card-carrying member. Only a small minority of these people had been committed to propagating a Nazi education.

  This led to a vigorous debate among Pforzheim’s American officials about the extent to which individuals should be penalised for finding themselves in situations beyond their control. There was a feeling that if the punishment was too harsh, it could easily backfire ‘[and] drive them either in the arms of Communism or anarchism or back to National Socialism’. And that was to be avoided at all costs.

  One solution was to entice exonerated locals into positions of public responsibility. The Americans had been in the town for only a few weeks before appointing a Pforzheimer, Adoph Katz, as acting mayor. Elections followed within nine months, bringing a degree of democracy that was deemed an essential ingredient in rebuilding the new Germany. One report concluded, ‘before democracy can work…a sound education in democratic procedure must be given to the German people.’

  A key figure in post-war Pforzheim was a dynamic young American named Nicholas Semashko. Appointed Public Safety Officer on his arrival, he proved himself so efficient that he was soon promoted to the post of director of Pforzheim’s military government, despite being just twenty-eight. He requisitioned a large villa in the leafy suburbs of Pforzheim that belonged to a close relative of the Rodi family and began to direct the town’s reconstruction with impressive vigour.

  It so happened that several paintings by Wolfram’s father hung on the villa walls. Semashko, a commercial artist by training, admired them greatly and enquired about the artist. When he heard that Erwin lived in nearby Eutingen, he paid him a visit. This was not only a great success but would prove beneficial to both parties, promoting a regular exchange of goods. Wolfram’s father would give him the occasional painting and, in return, Semashko would have flour, milk and other necessities delivered to the house.

  Semashko also lent his support to Erwin’s long-term goal of reopening the School of Decorative Arts, along with all the other educational institutions of Pforzheim. Indeed, the American was an enthusiastic advocate of a large-scale building programme that would eventually see an entire new town rise from the debris of the old – another critical step forward in the path to normalisation.

  It took three years to clear the worst of the rubble. At first, simple wooden shacks went up in front of the ruins of former stores, but by 1948 a few of Pforzheim’s larger companies had started rebuilding their offices. Private individuals, too, began reconstructing their houses with financial aid given by the state and paid for by the American Marshall Plan.

  When locals looked out of their newly glazed windows, they saw a dramatic change to the landscape. A monumental new outcrop had appeared on the skyline just outside Pforzheim.

  Rubble Hill was created from the wreckage of the destroyed city.

  The American occupation was a time of heady excitement for many in Pforzheim and Eutingen, particularly the teenage girls, a number of whom welcomed the Americans with open arms. These young men were well groomed and handsome, but, best of all, they came bearing gifts: soap, good food, biscuits, coffee and cigarettes – king-size Pall Mall.

  Among the hundreds of soldiers based in the Pforzheim barracks were two officers who made regular visits to the Webers’ family home in Eutingen. Frau Weber did their washing and ironing for them and they would come to the house on most days to pick up their clean shirts and trousers.

  One of them was a jazz musician from Puerto Rico who, with endearing naivety, suggested that the Webers’ eldest daughter, Sigrid, accompany him back to the States. The only drawback to his plan was that he did not speak a word of German. The two of them spent hours at the table, poring over a German–English dictionary and attempting to converse.

  While they improved their linguistic skills, Sigrid’s father, Max, would walk along Hauptstrasse holding a long stick with a nail in one end. Whenever the Americans threw their cigarettes out their jeeps, half smoked, he would pick up the butts with his stick and make hand-rolled cigarettes with the tobacco he collected.

  After years of war and misery, there was at long last a reason not only to be cheerful but to dress up. One day, Sigrid found a gigantic swastika flag and cut it up to make a red skirt, a white blouse and a black bolero out of the material – an exercise in needlecraft for which she would have been executed just a couple of years earlier.

  Several of the local girls had a particular admiration for the black Americans, who brought gifts, jazz music and an enviable coolness to rural Eutingen. To Sigrid’s younger sister, Doris, they seemed like exotic creatures from another planet. She asked one of them if she could touch his hair, never having seen anything quite like it in her life.

  The arrival of these American troops transformed daily life in Eutingen; they were so different from the Moroccans who had preceded them. At least one local girl would fall pregnant from these exciting liaisons. Another would follow her American lover back to Honolulu.

  Wolfram did not feel at ease in the new, post-war Germany. In 1949, the Western Allies handed over some of their powers and Konrad Adenauer became the first chancellor of the new Federal Republic. There was a sudden emphasis on wealth creation and financial success – a drive towards prosperity that held neither interest nor importance for Wolfram.

  After leaving Oberammergau he signed up for three years of additional studies at the Academy of Fine Art in Stuttgart. It was while he was living in the city that his interest in Orthodoxy, first kindled as he lay dying in the Ukraine, was suddenly reignited. Back in 1942, it had been the beauty of the polyphonic music that had captivated him. Now, it was the intensity of the religious art.

  The Russian parishioners in Stuttgart were surprised to find a German in their midst and were no less so when they saw the icons that Wolfram was starting to paint. They were nothing like the sentimental, nineteenth-century icons so popular in Russia. Wolfram had turned instead for inspiration to the great medieval masters like Andrei Rublev, whose work had first come to his attention in a Pforzheim bookshop when he was just six years old. This return to tradition was also taking place elsewhere in Europe – in Greece, in Serbia and among the large Russian émigré community in Paris. It would lead to an extraordinary renaissance in Orthodox iconography that endures to this day.

  In 1954, Wolfram undertook a three-month pilgrimage-of-sorts through Serbia and Greece, where he visited Mount Athos. It left him hungering for a more stimulating milieu than was offered by provincial Swabia. He decided to move to Paris, where he lived as a struggling artist among an international community, many of whom were impoverished White Russians. His new-found friends were refugees and émigrés like him – displaced theologians, bohemians and artists from the aristocratic dynasties of St Petersburg and Moscow.

  It was to prove a turning point in his life, for his artistic skills now began to metamor
phose into a style that was uniquely his own. Far from Germany and filled with ideas, he sought inspiration in everything he had seen over the previous decade: Russian icons, Bavarian folk art, the domes and minarets of Serbia and the works of Kandinsky, Klee and other modern artists.

  His first important exhibition was in his native Germany, but as his reputation grew, so his works were shown to a wider public – in Paris, New York, Zurich and other cities across Europe.

  He still made occasional trips to Eutingen to see his family and it was during one of these visits that he again met Barbara Rodi, the youngest of the Rodi clan, whom he had last seen as a small girl. Now twenty-eight, she was working as a teacher in Eutingen, in the same primary school that Wolfram had once attended. Wolfram’s young nephew was one of her pupils and she was often invited to eat at the Aïchele villa, having become good friends with Gunhild, Wolfram’s sister.

  Wolfram was captivated both by her interest in art and by her striking good looks. Barbara was no less entranced by his tales of life in bohemian Paris. Thus began a courtship that was followed, in 1964, by marriage. The couple then returned to Paris where Barbara would later give birth to a daughter, Alexandra – my wife – and a son named Benedikt. The children were half Aïchele, half Rodi: in them, two families truly became one.

  Wolfram and Barbara still live in Paris, in an apartment that is filled with exquisite works of art, all of which have been created by his own hands: a hinterglas or glass painting of St Florian; a wooden sculpture of an angel; an icon of the prophet Elijah ascending to heaven in a ball of bright-red flame. There are also more recent works that draw the eye by their dazzling complexity of form and colour. Hanging on the wall of the salon is a semi-abstract water-colour of near-liquid luminosity, in which a sun-shot Alpine winterscape merges with a block of cobalt sky.

  Wolfram, now eighty-six, still makes frequent visits to the family villa in Eutingen. Last summer, he travelled to Oberammergau and renewed contact with the ninety-year-old Werner Lang with whom he had been a Morse code operator in Normandy.

  Sixty-five years after last having seen him, Wolfram was able to tell Lang the touching story of Babei, the Turkmen, with whom he had been imprisoned on Utah Beach. Babei had originally intended to give his precious blanket to ‘good Herr Lang’, his commanding officer, because he had been one of the few Germans to treat the Turkmen auxiliaries with dignity and respect. When Lang was nowhere to be found, he had given it instead to Wolfram, whom he also liked.

  Babei’s end was not as fortunate as that of Wolfram and Lang. All the Asiatic soldiers serving with the German army were eventually repatriated to the Soviet Union, where they were either shot as traitors or died of starvation in Stalin’s Siberian prison camps.

  The Second World War brought catastrophe to every country that participated. Yet it is Nazi Germany that will carry for all time the stigma of genocide and mass murder, enthusiastically carried out by party functionaries. The War Crimes testimonies of men like Otto Ohlendorf, head of the killing squads in the Crimea, make for particularly chilling reading. One finds an intelligent and rational voice speaking with pride about murder on a truly grand scale.

  There were a few Germans, of course, who lifted themselves out of the moral void and performed acts of dazzling courage. The students, Hans and Sophie Scholl, gave lead to an active, non-violent resistance, distributing anti-war leaflets at Munich University. It was short-lived. Both were arrested, convicted and swiftly beheaded, along with their fellow ‘conspirator’, Christoph Probst.

  There were other Germans who performed less public but no less dangerous acts of charity: sheltering friends and neighbours who were Jewish or who had fallen foul of the regime.

  There were also large numbers of Germans who found themselves unwillingly ensnared in this Mephistophelian nightmare – one that was not of their making nor within their control. The Aïchele and Rodi families retained a deep attachment to Germany throughout the twelve long years of the Third Reich, but it was a very different Germany from the one that Hitler was attempting to create. Theirs was the Germany of Goethe and Schumann, Heine and Bach.

  Overnight, these two families discovered that the Nazis had wrapped their beloved Fatherland in a web of darkness. They despised Hitler for what he had done and they despised his entourage, but they also, naturally enough, wanted to preserve their own lives. They had young children to protect; they were scared of the Gestapo. They did not want to end their days in Dachau.

  Under the Third Reich, they had precious little room for manoeuvre, being forced to compromise their morals, their ideals and their beliefs. ‘Heil Hitler’ never tripped lightly off their tongues.

  ‘Meine Ruh’ ist hin,’ wrote Goethe, ‘mein Herz ist schwer.’ My peace is gone, my heart is heavy. The Aïcheles and the Rodis would have given anything to have opted out. Instead, they were impotently sucked into a regime and a war that would lead to the darkest hours of Germany’s history.

  Thus it was that the eighteen-year-old Wolfram, much against his will, found himself a conscripted soldier in the Wehrmacht, travelling to Russia, to Normandy, to Britain and to America.

  His story is not one of heroics on the battlefield, nor is it one of courageous resistance. It is simply an account of how an idiosyncratic young artist, whose only desire was to sculpt and paint, became trapped in a nightmare not of his making.

  Notes and Sources

  ‘You’re right to hurry up…in a few years time there won’t be any of us left.’

  Wolfram: The Boy Who Went to War is a true story based on the eyewitness testimony of Wolfram Aïchele, a young German conscript serving in the Wehrmacht.

  Sixty hours of recorded interviews with Wolfram – together with family letters and diaries from the time of the Third Reich – form the heart of this narrative.

  Other members of the extended family were also interviewed, along with close friends and contemporaries from Pforzheim. I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to the following family members: Wolfram and Barbara Aïchele, Gunhild Aïchele, Peter Rodi and Frithjof Rodi.

  Frithjof Rodi has written his own book about his childhood – an autobiographical account entitled Das Haus auf dem Hügel: Eine Jugend am Rande des Kraters. It shows the profound dilemma of a middle class German family that, despite its disgust with Hitler, was influenced by patriotism and conservative traditions.

  I am deeply grateful to Hannelore Schottgen (née Haas) for allowing me to quote from her autobiography and for kindly inviting me to her home in Taufkirchen near Munich. Her book is called Wie Dunkler Samt um mein Herz: Eine Jugend in Der Nazizeit. It is only available in German: for more information, see the bibliography.

  Thank you to Sigrid and Doris Weber, friends and neighbours of Wolfram’s parents, for spending time and effort recounting memories of their childhood in Eutingen. They also made available their father’s manuscript diary covering the final few days of the war.

  Thank you also to Doug Hicks, who I interviewed by telephone on 18 January, 2009. Hicks has written his own account of the bombing of Pforzheim. This can be found at www.contact550.theraf.co.uk/hismemoirspforzheim.htm.

  I am grateful to Wing Commander Jack Harris, RAF 550 Squadron and North Killingholme Association for putting me in touch with other veterans.

  A warm word of thanks is due to Dr Christian Groh of Pforzheim Stadtarchiv: he helped me locate a vast amount of hitherto unused material including newspaper reports, Nazi decrees and records of the town’s post-war American military government. Thank you to Emilio Diebold for helping me in my research at the Stadtarchiv.

  Lastly, I owe a debt of gratitude to my wife, Alexandra, who translated from German into English huge piles of documents and family letters, as well as many hours of taped interviews.

  Unpublished manuscripts and papers:

  Aïchele, Family Letters, 1940-1947, (various).

  Aïchele, Marie Charlotte, Erinnerungen von Marie

  Charlotte Aichele, geb. Boedicker (family
archives).

  Aïchele-Rodi, Barbara, Lettre à mes petits-enfants, de leur grand-mère Barbara Aïchele-Rodi (family archives).

  Barth, Arthur, Ortsgruppenleiter Arthur Barth’s decree on how the populace of Pforzheim is to celebrate the Anschluss with Austria (family archives).

  OMGUS, Papers of OMGUS, Office of Military Government (USA). These are housed in Pforzheim city archives.

  Rodi, Max, Briefe von Max Rodi an seine Tochter Evmarie (family archives).

  Rodi, Max, Tagebuch von Max Rodi, 1945–1946 (family archives).

  Rodi, Peter, Gefangenschaft und Flucht, 1944–1946 (family archives).

  Weber, Max, Diary of Max Weber (in German).

  Published newspapers, books, articles and websites:

  (i) Newspapers

  The following newspapers were consulted in the Pforzheim city archives: Das Reich, Frei Presse, Pforzheimer Anzeiger, Pforzheimer Morgenblatt, Pforzheimer Zeitung, Volkischer Beobachter.

  (ii) Books, articles and websites

  Badsey, Stephen, Utah Beach, Sutton, 2004, Stroud.

  Bastable, Jonathan, Voices from Stalingrad, David & Charles, 2006, Newton Abbot.

  Beevor, Anthony, Stalingrad, Viking, 1998, London.

  Beevor, Anthony, D-Day, Viking, 2009, London.

  Bielenberg, C., The Past is Myself, Chatto & Windus, 1968, London.

  Brandle, Gerhard, Die jüdischen Mitbürger der Stadt Pforzheim, 1985, Pforzheim.

  Bruhus, Wibke, My Father’s Country: The Story of a German Family, Cornerstone, 2009.

  Burleigh, Michael, The Third Reich, Macmillan, 2000, London.

  Carell, Paul, Invasion: They’re Coming, Transworld, 1963, London.

  Dimbleby, Richard, http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/holocaust/5115.shtml. Dimbleby’s description of Belsen, recorded for the BBC in 1945.

  Evans, Richard, The Coming of the Third Reich, Allen Lane, 2003, London.

  Evans, Richard, The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939, Allen Lane, 2005, London.