The Boy Who Went to War (10 page)

Unbeknown to the Aïchele family – and to almost all other Germans – the Polish attack had been an elaborate deception. One hundred and fifty inmates from a German concentration camp had been dressed in Polish military uniform and forced to stage a mock assault on the transmitter in the frontier town of Gleiwitz on the night of 31 August 1939.

This gave the German war machine the excuse to go on the offensive. Bombers and fighters screamed into action, attacking air bases, road and rail communications, and munition dumps. Dive-bombers were sent to strafe columns of Polish troops; soon after, motorised infantry and artillery launched the first blitzkrieg ground offensive of the Second World War. Speed was the operating tactic of the German army whose intention was to strike with such rapidity that the enemy would be completely overwhelmed.

On that opening day of the campaign, Hitler made a speech to the Reichstag that was broadcast on the wireless. It was listened to with nervous anticipation by both the Aïchele and Rodi families.

‘My whole life has been nothing but a struggle for my people, for their revival, for Germany,' said the Führer. ‘This struggle has been fought continually under the banner of faith in this nation. There is one word which I have never learned: capitulation.'

 

The outbreak of war came as a thunderbolt to many Pforzheimers who had hitherto supported Hitler. Hannelore Schottgen's father was speechless, having really believed that Hitler did not want military action. Hannelore herself was upset all day; war had finally arrived – the big thing that everyone had been talking about.

Yet many also felt that German pride could at long last be restored. Goebbels' propaganda machine used every possible means to whip up a sense of patriotism in those initial days. And there was a great sympathy for the army, especially after its defeat in the First World War.

In the Rodi family, there was a feeling that something ought to be done. On the first weekend that Max Rodi had leave, he suggested that the family protect themselves in some way and got the two boys to dig a defensive trench in the garden as a protection against air raids.

Frithjof and Peter set to work with pickaxes and shovels; the trench grew longer and deeper with every hour that passed. Then it started to rain and the mud in the bottom turned into a swamp. When their father returned to his regiment on the following day, a neighbour came round to inspect the work. He told the boys it was ridiculous, so they filled it in.

Their mother, Martha Luise, also felt that the grave situation required some sort of response. She bought a large map of Poland, pinned it to the dining-room wall and then made lots of little flags – each one representing a division of troops – so that she could monitor the campaign. The family followed the battles closely and always listened to the daily news bulletins.

Crouched around the wireless, they would absorb each fresh despatch from the front line. The bulletins always began with music by Liszt, followed by interminable speeches by Hitler, riddled with references to treachery, betrayal and the ultimate victory of German arms.

Max Rodi was disgusted by the Führer's ranting monologues. In one speech, Hitler claimed to have destroyed nothing in Germany. Max exploded and shouted out: ‘
Nothing!
What about the synagogues?'

Everyone in Pforzheim was stunned by the opening days of the military campaign in Poland. Hitler's gamble had proved a spectacular success. Wolfram's mother tuned in to the state radio each evening to hear that the German army was sweeping all before it. Warsaw had been heavily bombed by a formation of forty planes and many other Polish towns were also subjected to heavy raids. The Nazi regime's bellicose policy had, it seemed, been triumphantly vindicated.

Marie Charlotte, concerned that the news on German radio might not be trustworthy, tuned in to a Swiss channel, even though it was strictly illegal, only to find that the broadcasts were remarkably similar to what was being reported on German radio. Hitler's military invasion of Poland had indeed turned into a spectacular rout. On 6 September, Krakow fell to the German army. Less than two weeks later, Hitler himself addressed a triumphant crowd in Danzig. By the end of the month, Warsaw had fallen and 140,000 Polish troops were taken into captivity.

The good news was tempered by bad. Britain's declaration of war on Germany, two days after the invasion of Poland, came as extremely unwelcome tidings to Wolfram's parents, as to all their Pforzheim friends. It even alarmed senior figures in the Nazi hierarchy. When Goering was informed of it, his initial reaction was one of panic: ‘If we lose this war,' he said, ‘then God help us!'

Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry was undaunted by Chamberlain's defiant stand. Fully forty-eight hours before Britain had declared war on Germany, the ministry had already issued a confidential press directive to all newspapers editors in the country, informing them how to react in the event of such an outcome.

It read: ‘Britain is the true aggressor in the world…It is clear that the British mediation was merely hypocritical and that the British government never intended to produce a settlement.' It went on to instruct editors how they should report the news of a British declaration of war.

Pforzheim's two newspapers took Goebbels' advice to heart on the morning of 4 September. Both contained long articles about the insolence and treachery of erstwhile friends. ‘England Betrays Europe,' was the headline in Marie Charlotte's paper. ‘The British hypocrisy has come to a head.'

The talk was bullish and defiant: the British people, said the
Pforzheimer Rundschau
, were going to have to pay the consequences for their warmongering leaders. ‘There is no way they can avoid the ring of iron and concrete in the West which is manned by stubborn German men who have been sent by the whole German nation to fight until the final victory.'

Pforzheimers were reminded that Germany had never sought conflict with the British. ‘England has declared war on us. She has thrown down the gauntlet. We are now picking it up and will fight against these “holier than thou” troublemakers on the banks of the Thames.'

The local Pforzheim newspapers, in common with their counterparts across Germany, only ever covered stories that had been approved by Goebbels' ministry and were quick to publicise the military successes of the Polish campaign. What they neglected to report was the fact that Hitler had ordered three SS Death's Head regiments to follow in the wake of the army, under orders to ‘incarcerate or annihilate' all enemies of Nazism, notably Poles and Jews. Reinhard Heydrich had made it quite clear what this meant: ‘The nobility, the clerics and the Jews must be killed.'

The SS began its covert operation within forty-eight hours of the invasion being launched, shooting Polish and Jewish civilians in cold blood. It was the start of a murderous six years for the inhabitants of Nazi-occupied Poland. The country was carved up, with three large districts incorporated into the German Reich. The rump, which became the General Government, was handed over to the rule of Dr Hans Frank. ‘Poland,' he said, ‘shall be treated like a colony. The Poles will become the slaves of the Greater German Empire.'

Such sentiments were not for public consumption and were certainly never broadcast. Marie Charlotte continued to tune in to Swiss radio, in the hope of receiving news that had not been manipulated by the Ministry of Propaganda. However, it proved remarkably difficult to get reliable information from the outside world, as well as extremely dangerous to pass on such intelligence to others in the local community. Wolfram's mother and father certainly did not exchange news with their neighbours, or even with close friends. People had already learned never to ask any questions and to keep quiet about everything that was taking place.

 

The outbreak of war with Britain brought few changes to the daily routine. Wolfram's father continued teaching at the art school while Wolfram himself was still working as an apprentice at the local carpentry workshop. A few of the basic foodstuffs were now rationed – among them meat, butter and cheese. Yet the rations were generous, for Hitler well remembered how rationing had sapped morale in the First World War.

For some families, rationing led to an unexpected improvement in their diet. The Rodi boys were surprised to find that they got meat twice a week. On Saturdays their mother used the meat as a basis for making soup; on Sunday they ate the meat itself. The only drawback to rationing was the fact that prices remained high. Martha Luise could not afford the generous quantities of meat that they were allowed and used to give the family's ration cards to wealthier relatives.

People quickly mastered fending for themselves in wartime. The Rodis kept their own chickens and rabbits, as well as growing their own vegetables. The Aïcheles, too, grew potatoes and cabbages in the garden below the house, where there were also lots of fruit trees. For those living in apartments, it was more difficult to supplement their rations with home-grown produce, but most had friends or relatives in the countryside who supplied them with extra milk, cheese and eggs. The worst of the hardships were still many years away; indeed, it was not until the war's end that many families faced prolonged and severe shortages.

Windows now had to be blacked out at night, on the off chance of a bombing raid. Wardens patrolled the streets of Pforzheim throughout the hours of darkness to ensure that not a glimmer of light could be seen from the air.

Hannelore Schottgen's father found it too expensive to buy curtains for the big bay window in their living room, so he brought mats home from his school and stuck them against the glass. They looked nice enough by lamplight, but proved difficult to roll up in the daytime.

In the end, the family stopped using their electric lamps in the evening, as light still filtered out into the street, and started going to bed by candlelight instead.

Such measures seemed futile to the inhabitants of Pforzheim, who felt a world away from the hostilities. Many of the youngsters were disappointed when no foreign aircraft flew over the town.

Yet there were little reminders that Germany was now at war. There was daily training for air raids, and teenage girls were shown how to apply bandages and help children into gas masks. In the Eutingen branch of the Hitler Youth, new marching songs were added to the repertoire. The children were taught songs about England and Churchill, which described him as a fat pig.

The Eutingen youngsters were also obliged to go from door to door, asking for donations to the war effort. There was no question of opting out since it was all organised by the Hitler Youth. Sigrid Weber and her sister were forever being sent out with collection tins, and would be rewarded with a badge once the tin was full.

In the early years of the war, these collections were halfhearted affairs, but would become far more serious after the 1941 invasion of Russia. People were expected to donate everything they had. If they did not, it would be confiscated anyway.

In Eutingen, this policy of enforced donation would eventually create a great deal of ill-will against the regime. People began whispering, ‘This cannot make you win a war,' but they were afraid to say such things openly.

With no bombing raids, nor even any planes flying overhead, there was a sense of unreality to the situation. The daily lives of Pforzheimers remained untouched by a conflict that was far away.

It was a feeling shared by people elsewhere in Germany. Even in Berlin, the war seemed to belong to another world. ‘No excitement, no hurrahs, no cheering, no throwing of flowers, no war fever, no war hysteria,' wrote the American journalist William Shirer. ‘There is not even any hate for the French and British, despite Hitler's various proclamations to the people.'

Wolfram's parents followed the progress of the German army with both disbelief and surprise. Poland was defeated. Then Denmark. Norway followed soon after. Finally Hitler turned on his enemies in the West, launching his spectacular invasion of Belgium, Holland and France in the spring of 1940.

Suddenly, the country woke up to the realisation that this was to be a war on a grand scale. Now, at last, military strategy was the topic of the day, as in the conversation that the ten-year-old Frithjof Rodi overheard between two of his uncles, one of whom was serving in the army.

A colonel based on the Rhine, he said that he had worked out exactly how to overrun the Maginot Line. His homespun approach, which Frithjof listened to in boyish fascination, was simply to circumvent the line. The French had concentrated all their resources on its defence. By driving to the north of it in a giant arc, the German army would render it obsolete.

This was exactly what Hitler had planned to do and it would prove a triumphant success. Once again, the German army swept all before it, entering the French capital in June 1940. At that time, Frithjof remembers sitting with his mother, listening to news on the wireless of the German triumph in Paris. When he turned to look at her, tears were rolling down her face.

He could not work out the reason for them. Was she affected by the solemnity of the occasion – the marching and the pageantry – or saddened by the thought that the French capital had been captured by forces loyal to Hitler?

 

Wolfram's thirteen-year-old sister, Gunhild, overheard a strange and sinister conversation in those early months of war that would disturb her sleep for years to come.

She was sitting in a train, listening to three adolescent girls chatting excitedly about the trip they were making to Ottensburg. All were in good humour. One of them in whispered tones spoke of the reason for their journey, which was to ‘give a child to the Führer'.

The young Gunhild was puzzled at first, but she soon realised the meaning of their words. They began giggling and saying how much they were looking forward to meeting lots of gorgeous-looking men whose babies they would have. And it was clear that they could not wait to arrive at their destination.

The teenagers were volunteers for Hitler's
lebensborn
or racial breeding programme, established in 1936. It was designed to produce pure Aryan children who would be raised as blindly loyal servants of the Third Reich.

Although their story remains a broken jigsaw, some inkling of the bizarre sexual awakening they were to experience can be gleaned from another
lebensborn
volunteer – a feisty teenager named Hildegard Trutz. In the late 1940s, Frau Trutz was questioned about the long months she spent in one of these establishments and she revealed what was expected of girls like those on the train to Ottensburg.

‘The whole place was in the charge of a professor,' she said. ‘[He was] a high-up SS doctor who examined each of us very thoroughly as soon as we had arrived. We had to make a statutory declaration that there had never been any cases of hereditary diseases, dipsomania or imbecility in our family.'

Those giggling girls, each of them no more than eighteen years of age, would have signed a declaration renouncing all claims to the children they might bear. Once these formalities were complete, they would be introduced to the SS men who had been picked for the task of impregnating them. ‘We were told to see to it that his hair and eyes corresponded exactly to ours…' recalled Hildegard Trutz. ‘When we had made our choice, we had to wait till the tenth day after the beginning of the last period, when we were again medically examined and given permission to receive the SS men in our rooms at night.'

The young Hildegard admitted to being delighted to be serving the Führer in this way. ‘I believed completely in the importance of what we were doing,' she said, ‘…[and] had no shame or inhibitions of any kind.'

She even harboured some affection for her chosen SS partner. ‘He was a sweet boy, although he hurt me a little, and I think he was actually a little stupid, but he had smashing looks.' He slept with her for three evenings in one week. ‘The other nights he had to do his duty with another girl.'

Hildegard fell pregnant soon after and eventually gave birth to a baby boy. ‘It was not an easy birth,' she said, ‘for no good German woman would think of having any artificial aids such as injections to deaden the pain, as they had in the degenerate Western democracies.'

The baby was taken from her soon after the birth and she never saw him again. She was nevertheless tempted to return the following year and have a second child, but she met and married a young SS officer in the intervening time. When she told her new husband about her
lebensborn
child, he was not particularly happy, ‘[but] he couldn't very well say anything against it,' she said, ‘seeing that I had been doing my duty to the Führer.'

The Nazi regime was soon actively recruiting intelligent young girls as potential ideological child-bearers. One day, Hannelore Schottgen was sitting in the classroom at her Pforzheim school when she and her fellow students were visited by a lady from the Woman's Union. She had come to speak about giving a child to the Führer.

The girls were told that they would be offered free board, lodging and food in a wonderful hotel or chateau, and would also be given the best care and attention.