The Boy Who Went to War (7 page)

Marie Charlotte decided to go. She had been at school with Dr Rust's wife and was keen to have news of her. However, there was another reason too. She was tickled at the idea of knowing someone so senior in the government and liked the thought of being one step away from a close associate of Hitler.

Marie Charlotte asked her husband to accompany her but was met with a gruff refusal. ‘You go if you want,' he told her, ‘but I don't want to know anything about it.'

Erwin had good reason for his reticence. It was Bernhard Rust who had ruled that teachers and students must henceforth greet each other with the Nazi salute, describing such a greeting as a visible symbol of the new Germany and adding that ‘the whole function of education is to create Nazis'.

Having been unsuccessful in persuading her husband, Marie Charlotte asked her two sons whether they would like to go. Wolfram was tempted, but only because he would miss three hours of school. However, he so hated the idea of putting on a uniform just to meet Dr Rust that he eventually declined, leaving his reluctant older brother, Reiner, to accompany his mother.

Mother and son were eventually introduced to the great man and allowed to ask a few carefully vetted questions. Marie Charlotte explained to Dr Rust that she had been at school with his wife and asked whether she was well. The Nazi politician mumbled a few pleasantries but was clearly not interested. ‘She'll be pleased that you remember her,' he told her with a feigned smile, then stood up, signalling that the audience was over. Marie Charlotte was left wondering if it had been worth the effort.

It was Herr Becher, the pastor at their church, who later informed her about the various lunacies that Rust wished to inflict on Germany. His most eccentric idea was the rolling eight-day week with six days of study, one day of youth activities and then a rest day. It meant that the calendar was forever catching up with itself – an unworkable system that was abandoned shortly after being instituted.

As time wore on, Rust's ideas became increasingly disturbing. He purged most educational institutions of their Jewish teachers and also directed the sinister research centre that used prisoners for medical experiments. There were many, even among the Nazi elite, who considered Rust to be mentally unstable.

How much Herr Becher knew about the detail of Rust's policies is unclear, but one thing is certain. By the end of an evening in Becher's company, Wolfram's mother had lost her enthusiasm for knowing senior members of the Nazi hierarchy.

 

The long summer of 1936 was gloriously warm.
Schönes wetter
were the words on everyone's lips that year. In the fields around Eutingen, the wheat had been bleached to the colour of straw and harvest time looked set to be weeks in advance of normal years.

This was an event that Wolfram looked forward to enormously. Ever since the Nazis had come to power, harvest festivals across Germany had become magnificent spectacles, in homage to the days of yore. Party officials instructed farmers to make floats pulled by oxen and each one would demonstrate an element of the farmer's skill – whether threshing, winnowing, or pressing juice-filled fruit.

Everyone was encouraged to wear national costume. The party urged citizens to look into their wardrobes and dig out clothes that had not been worn for a generation or more. It all made for a wonderfully colourful spectacle.

Wolfram, who loved the costumes of old Germany, spent many hours poring over pictures of jackets and lederhosen from Bavaria, comparing them with clothes from Swabia, the Palatinate and elsewhere. He quickly became an expert on such costumes and could identify different folk styles from every corner of Germany.

When he learned of a competition in which entrants had to match traditional costumes with traditional houses, he rose to the challenge. Many thousands entered the competition but he managed to clinch first prize: a lovely, hand-embroidered tablecloth. Having expected the entrants to be housewives, the organisers had not entertained the possibility of the winner being a twelve-year-old schoolboy.

There were other distractions that summer. In distant Berlin, the Olympic Games had opened to wild acclaim. Most foreign visitors were unaware that all the anti-Jewish signs had been temporarily removed from the city streets. Nor did they know of the arrest and internment of gypsies living in the environs of Berlin. Yet there were numerous tell-tale signs to suggest that this was to be an Olympiad unlike any other. Hitler was determined to demonstrate the superiority of the Germanic race: in the German national team, only Aryans were allowed to compete.

The Olympic Games received scant attention from the Aïchele family. Wolfram cared little for sport, preferring, instead, to go on long walks with Uncle Walter, traipsing along dusty paths and swigging home-pressed apple juice. Their walks took them far from Eutingen: to the village of Kieselbronn and the forbidding Cistercian abbey of Maulbronn.

On one of these country walks, Walter and Wolfram paused for a jug of apple juice in a wayside tavern. A local farmer greeted Walter and asked him what he thought of Hitler's speech on the previous evening. It was a leading question: the farmer clearly expected him to praise it. As Walter could not bring himself to do so, playing the fool, he used his idiosyncratic humour to dodge the question.

‘
Whose speech?
' he said. ‘
Hitler's?
No, sorry, I don't know him.'

The man was thunderstruck. ‘Hitler!' he exclaimed. ‘Surely you must know Hitler?'

‘No,' replied Walter. ‘Can't say I do. No one called Hitler has ever come round to my house.'

The man persisted. ‘But you are German?'

‘I guess I must be,' said Walter. ‘That's what it says in my passport.'

The man looked away in bewilderment, not wishing to pursue a conversation with someone so obviously deranged. Walter let out a sigh of relief: he had once more managed not to compromise his values and opinions. But the incident served as a stark warning that he lived in a land where freedom of expression was increasingly a thing of the past.

 

As the Nazi grip over daily life tightened, it became ever more difficult to avoid the strong arm of the state. The Hitler Youth was one of the most unwelcome intrusions into the lives of both the Aïchele and the Rodi families.

At the time of Hitler's appointment as chancellor, the Hitler Youth was just one among scores of organisations, with a membership of a mere 55,000. Within twelve months, virtually all other youth groups had been ‘co-ordinated' as children across Germany were automatically co-opted into the Hitler Youth.

There were still many who did not join and Wolfram was one of them. However, it soon became clear that the nonconformists would be dragged forcibly into line. Shortly before Christmas 1936, Hitler signed a decree that made the Hitler Youth an official educational institution. ‘All German young people,' he declared, ‘apart from being educated at home and at school, will be educated in the Hitler Youth, physically, intellectually and morally, in the spirit of National Socialism to serve the nation and the community.'

Wolfram was dreading his first Saturday morning at the Hitler Youth, for he loathed being told what to do. To his great surprise, the experience proved far more enjoyable than he had expected. His age group was led by a sympathetic young theology student who got the children building camps in the woods and cooking around open fires.

That first outing was also the last that he led. On the following week he was replaced by an enthusiastic apparatchik of the Nazi Party who dutifully implemented all the new directives issued by his seniors. Henceforth, Wolfram and his friends would spend their time marching, drilling and learning how to pitch and strike tents.

What particularly upset Wolfram was the fact that he no longer had time to head into the countryside on his bicycle in order to draw and paint. He complained to his father, who was so angered by these impositions that he asked his friend Dr Vögtle to write a letter excusing Wolfram from attendance on grounds of ill health.

The doctor was more than willing to oblige. Considered a crank by some in the local community, he, like Wolfram's parents, had designed his own house. He had built it with a flat roof, for which he was roundly condemned by his neighbours, who claimed that true Germanic houses never had flat roofs and attacked him for his ‘un-German' behaviour.

Dr Vögtle had a soft spot for Wolfram and celebrated the fact that he was so different from his peers. He duly wrote a letter excusing both Wolfram and his brother from the Hitler Youth on the grounds that they had weak constitutions. For the next thirty-six months, Wolfram managed to avoid going to a single meeting.

His case was far from usual. For most youngsters, opting out was not so easy. Peter Rodi, two years younger than Wolfram, was forced to join in 1936, when he was ten years old. He went twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and found it a complete waste of time. He disliked the war games and sporting activities, as well as the fact that he had to wear a uniform.

From an early age Peter had displayed a defiant streak that now developed into outright adolescent rebellion. On one occasion he helped himself to a rifle from the Hitler Youth, took it home with him and shot out all the windows of a nearby water tower, one by one. It could have landed him in serious trouble, but no one ever discovered that he was the culprit.

It was fortunate that Peter and his siblings were extremely musical. They were soon co-opted into the orchestra of the local Hitler Youth, along with their church friends and the children of other cultured people from Pforzheim. This was in fact a useful escape route for those who abhorred Nazism, shielding them from the more militaristic elements of the organisation whilst allowing them to indulge their favourite pastime.

On one occasion, the children were asked to give a concert to an assembled crowd of local Nazis, performing Haydn's ‘Emperor' Quartet – Opus 76. When they reached the famous adagio, whose music had been the setting for the German anthem ‘Deutschland über alles', there was sudden pandemonium. All the Nazis rose to their feet, clipped their heels together and stood to attention for the duration of the adagio, leaving the young musicians perplexed and not a little amused.

Although the Aïchele and Rodi children despised most elements of the Hitler Youth, many of Pforzheim's youngsters thought it was terrific fun. Hannelore Schottgen had voluntarily joined her local branch of the League of German Girls and liked the feeling of belonging to a group. The leaders told the girls not to listen to their parents or even to let the old people have any say in their lives. ‘The future,' they would say, ‘is yours.'

Hannelore's mother had initially resisted her daughter joining the League because she thought it unseemly for young girls to be marching through the streets, but eventually relented. The impressionable young Hannelore was taught that girls were to be involved in building the new Germany and should show their gratitude and love for the Führer.

On one occasion, a group of Pforzheim children was chosen to go to Nuremberg in order to see Hitler addressing a mass rally. Hannelore was desperate to be selected because she had been told that when women met Hitler they often collapsed with joy. Her neighbour's husband had been deeply moved by his own experience. He had shaken hands with the Führer and had not washed his right hand for weeks afterwards.

Hannelore was to be disappointed. When the time came for the selection process, she was told that she was not tall enough to represent the typical German youth.

 

By the summer of 1937, even a little backwater like Eutingen had fallen prey to the Nazi revolution. One of the local functionaries, an enthusiastic Nazi named August Issel, was determined to impose discipline on his diminutive fiefdom. His tenure brought changes both great and small to the daily routine of village life, and it was often the small ones that caused the greatest annoyance.

The rules on flags were among the more tiresome instances of state interference. On every public holiday and Nazi-inspired festivity, everyone in the country was required to hang out a swastika.

It soon came to the attention of Herr Issel that there was one family in Eutingen who never displayed a flag. Wolfram's parents had no desire to hoist one above their property; they had managed to flout the rules for several years by virtue of the fact that their villa lay at some distance from the centre of the village. Herr Issel was unimpressed by their lack of enthusiasm for the Nazi cause and ordered them to hang out a swastika flag like everyone else.

Although extremely unhappy about this, Wolfram's mother and father had little option but to comply. They erected an enormous wooden flagpole in the garden in order to show their goodwill, then painted it with tar to preserve the woodwork.

As they suspected, the tar remained sticky for weeks, preventing them from hoisting any flags. When the Gestapo came to check on the family and found that the swastika was still not being flown from the house, Erwin feigned indignation. Pointing proudly to the flagpole that he had erected, he declared that he could not possibly fly the flag until the tar was completely dry.

The Gestapo were not amused by his delaying tactic and ordered him to hoist the swastika immediately, even though the tar was still wet. Erwin did as he was told. It was a blustery day and the flag started flapping against the pole. Within seconds, to Erwin's great delight, the Nazi flag had become a sticky black mess of material. It remained firmly stuck to the pole from then on.

Provocative acts like this had still been possible in the early years of Nazi rule, but by 1937 they were becoming extremely dangerous. The judgment in a lawsuit in Karlsruhe's Labour Court had made it clear that such behaviour would no longer be tolerated. A man had refused to sing the anti-Semitic Horst Wessel song while at work and had been denounced by his erstwhile colleagues. Found guilty of having an ‘anti-state' attitude, he was duly convicted and immediately dismissed from his job.