The Boy Who Went to War (8 page)

The verdict – and sentence – had far reaching implications for everyone in Nazi Germany. ‘By the failure to participate in parades, celebrations and other events,' declared the court, ‘an employee intentionally places himself outside the national community.'

These words constituted a warning shot to families like the Aïcheles. Non-participation had become a criminal act that would result in punishment. Opting out was no longer an alternative: the Nazi state required everyone to be active participants in the new ideology.

Everyone opposed to the Nazis still had their own little way of protesting. The Rodi family, like the Aïcheles, had also managed to avoid hanging out a swastika. When one of their neighbours warned them that they would find themselves in serious trouble if they did not do so in future, they bought the smallest one possible – so tiny that it was scarcely visible.

The Gestapo was by now acting increasingly intrusively, with frequent house-to-house visits by officers intent on enforcing the new rules, as they had been doing ever since Heinrich Himmler had become the organisation's head in 1934. In the three years since then, the scale of its network and the level of its efficiency had expanded enormously. So had the budget of its Berlin headquarters – rising from 1 million Reichsmarks in the early years of Nazi rule to 40 million by 1937.

The expansion was necessary if the Gestapo was to have any hope of enforcing the draconian new laws that tightened the Nazis' grip over the lives of ordinary Germans. The Malicious Gossip Law was one of the most notorious. It stated that ‘malicious rabble-rousing remarks or those indicating a base mentality' about the Nazi Party or any of its leaders would swiftly lead to imprisonment. The law enabled the Gestapo to arrest people on suspicion of having uttered even the vaguest mutterings of dissatisfaction with the regime. Letters were opened and phones tapped; denunciations by informers and block leaders led to speedy arrests.

For four years, Wolfram's parents had managed to retain considerable privacy in the confines of their own home, but this was starting to change. The incident with the flag had been the first indication that the authorities now meant business. Soon afterwards, the Gestapo paid a second visit to the house. Wolfram's mother happened to glance out of the kitchen window one morning to see two uniformed officers standing at the garden gate.

Their visit, although unwelcome, did not come as a total surprise. Marie Charlotte had been warned by friends in the village that the local authorities were intending to redouble their efforts to destroy unsuitable literature. The Pforzheim book burning in 1933 had been merely the opening salvo in a sustained campaign against ‘dirt and shame' books. The list now included works by Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Bertholt Brecht, Stefan Zweig and Ernest Hemingway, along with many others.

Marie Charlotte greeted the officers politely and told them that she had already cleansed her shelves of ‘dirt and shame'. She proudly pointed to a little box full of books that she was intending to destroy and even invited the men inside to look through her bookshelves, just in case there were any titles that she might have missed. What the officers did not know – although they might have guessed – was that Marie Charlotte had already removed all her favourites and hidden them from prying eyes.

She had packed them all into special crates and tucked them into a tiny underfloor space beneath the dining-room table. There was no way she was going to hand over books by writers such as her beloved Thomas Mann.

She was nevertheless depressed at the thought that her most esteemed authors had been condemned to a secret hideaway under the floorboards. It suddenly dawned on her that the family's private life was rapidly becoming a secret one. It would not be long before even secret lives were to be forbidden by the state.

Wolfram remained a source of intrigue to his parents' friends. He was at ease in the company of adults, who would chat with him as if he were a grown-up rather than a boy of thirteen. Among those who found him engaging company was Dr Hillenbrandt, a physician friend of Wolfram's father. Hillenbrandt had previously travelled in Africa, where he had assembled an extraordinary collection of oddities and objets d'art, including hundreds of old and rare African masks. Now that he was back in Swabia, he became a self-taught expert on the local folk art.

In Wolfram, he found a fellow enthusiast. On Saturday afternoons, the two of them would drive through the countryside around Pforzheim, visiting farmsteads in search of homespun
volkskunst
or folk art. They would knock on doors of old farmsteads and manors – anywhere, indeed, that held the promise of treasures within.

They would frequently be invited into these rambling homesteads for a draught of cider or a pitcher of fresh milk. It was perennially dark inside, for the only light came from the undersized windows whose hand-blown glass distorted trees into monsters and turned faces to jelly. In the corner of the kitchen, under a carved crucifix, a tallow candle would send out a dim flicker.

Stout oak trestles, Renaissance trunks and iron-bound strongboxes represented the inherited possessions that spanned a score of generations or more. Handed down from father to son since the chaotic time of the Thirty Years War, they seemed in the imagination of the young Wolfram like precious relics.

A few of the richer farms housed veritable masterpieces of folk art. There would be a principal room – used only on high days and holidays – in which every inch of wall, from wainscot to ceiling, was painted with picaresque murals dating from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Such hidden wonders opened a tantalising window on to peasant life more than 300 years earlier. In a mural in one house, a Swabian burgher swaggered around in stiff, buttoned doublet and lace-fringed pantaloons; in another, a cheery huntsman chased a stag through a bucolic forest clearing.

When Dr Hillenbrandt found particularly choice pieces he would offer to buy them. They were not for his personal collection: he was involved in the establishment of a folk museum in Stuttgart. Furniture that he acquired was carefully dismantled and transported to this new museum where it was restored and exhibited.

These tours into the countryside provided a rich artistic education for Wolfram – and a timely one at that. They also represented a voyage into a Germanic past that was to be swept away for ever in the aftermath of the Third Reich. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, people enthusiastically jettisoned everything that was associated with the days of old.

 

Wolfram's father was making his way to the little train station in Eutingen on Monday, 9 July 1937, when he caught sight of an unsettling headline in Pforzheim's newspaper. ‘The New Way for German Art,' it said. ‘The Führer Inaugurates the House of German Art as a Place for True Creative Action.'

Erwin bought the paper and read it during the short ride into Pforzheim. The article described how German art was to be given a radical new makeover by the Nazi regime. The ‘degenerate' art of old was to be replaced by one that celebrated the triumphant greatness of the German spirit. There were to be two exhibitions held concurrently in Munich. One was to showcase all the finest examples of the new ‘Nazi' art. The other was to display the outcasts and degenerates of the contemporary art scene.

Erwin was not only appalled by what he read but deeply disturbed by the idea that the state should decide on what constituted acceptable art. At a stroke, all of the pencil sketches he had made during the First World War – depicting shattered landscapes and ruined villages – had become defeatist in the eyes of the Nazis. His more recent paintings, of songbirds and barn owls, were less contentious. Yet it seemed extraordinary that neither he nor his friends were any longer at liberty to choose the subject matter, the style or even the colours that they wished to use for their paintings.

Hitler held inflexible opinions on degenerate art, giving them public expression in an address to the House of German Art in Munich, some ten days after the Pforzheim article was published.

He expressed his contempt for art that was filled with ‘misformed cripples and cretins, women who inspire only disgust, men who are more like wild beasts, [and] children who, were they alive, must be regarded as under God's curse'. Mocking the paintings of both Impressionists and Expressionists, he continued: ‘There are men who on principle feel meadows to be blue, the heavens green, clouds sulphur-yellow.'

This, he declared, was degenerate art, which, he claimed, was so damaging to the national character that those who produced such paintings should be arrested, tried and jailed.

The dictatorship expected more than mere conformity from German artists. Joseph Goebbels, in his capacity of Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, had set out his vision for the arts within days of the Nazis coming to power.

‘It is not enough for people to be more or less reconciled to our regime [or] to be persuaded to adopt a neutral attitude towards us,' he said. ‘Rather, we want to work on people until they have capitulated to us, until they grasp ideologically what is happening in Germany today.'

Among the group of locally based artists who would be persecuted by the new order was a sculptor named Otto Baum – a future tutor to Wolfram. Baum was Professor of Art at the Stuttgart Academy and much fêted as a sculptor in the years before Hitler became chancellor.

His fortunes were to change dramatically once the Nazis seized power. His works did not find favour with them and he was sacked from his post at the Stuttgart Academy.

There was worse to come. Baum's works were selected for inclusion in the Munich exhibition of degenerate art, turning him in an instant from celebrated sculptor into artistic pariah. His sole consolation was the fact that his sculptures were exhibited alongside more famous ‘degenerates' such as Otto Dix and Max Beckmann.

By this point, he was struggling to make ends meet. He managed to earn a little money by making locks, a skill he had learned from his father. Not only was it scarcely enough to pay the bills but it left him with plenty of spare time in which to reflect on the swiftness of his fall from grace. Within a few short years of Nazi rule, he had been flung on to the breadline. He survived financially only because he was given a helping hand by loyal artist friends in the local community.

Baum still produced his abstract sculptures but he did so in absolute secrecy, aware that he faced several years in a concentration camp if caught. Having made them in the dead of night he would bury them in the garden, hoping that the day would dawn when he could dig them up.

 

There were times when it seemed that the only news was bad news. ‘
An alle Parteigenossen!
' was the decree issued on Monday, 4 April 1938. ‘
Der Führer hat das deutsche Volk aufgerufen
.' (‘To all party members…the Führer has summoned the German people.') It was issued by Arthur Barth, leader of Pforzheim's Nazi Party, and it affected everyone who lived in Pforzheim and its environs. In six days, there was to be a plebiscite on whether or not Austria should be unified with the German Reich.

‘Hitler wants this to be the biggest success in the history of voting,' declared Herr Barth's decree. He insisted that everyone, young and old, go to the ballot booth and cast their vote in favour of unification.

Hitler had sent his troops into Austria some three weeks earlier to enforce his demand that political power be handed over to the Austrian Nazi Party – as it had been. Now, there was to be a plebiscite to confirm the political revolution that had already taken place.

Hitler was determined to win with an overwhelming majority. To help ensure victory on the Austrian side of the border, he despatched the SS into the country and ordered them to round up Communists, Social Democrats and Jews – anyone, in fact, who might organise opposition.

It was a similar story inside the frontiers of the German Reich. On the day of the vote, brownshirts paraded through the streets of Pforzheim, knocking on doors and forcing people to go to the polling stations. Those who refused to vote were beaten or arrested.

The vote was not just about union with Austria; it was also coupled to a vote of confidence in Adolf Hitler. This was a most devious ploy on the part of the Nazi Party since it meant that anyone voting ‘no' in the plebiscite would be doing so in defiance of Hitler and would therefore expose themselves to the risk of prosecution for treason. With rumours about ballot papers being marked so that voters could be identified, there was incentive enough to vote ‘yes'.

Knowing he was set to win a resounding victory, Hitler intended it to be celebrated in towns and villages across Germany. The inhabitants of Pforzheim were given little choice in the matter. Arthur Barth laid down exactly what was expected:

1. All houses and windows to be decorated with fir branches, flags and posters acquired from specific shops by Friday.
   
2. By 9 April, all windows to be illuminated with little red lamps bought from the same shops.
   
3. From Saturday, all radio sets are to be placed on windowsills so that everything can be heard in the streets.
   
4. In all inns and restaurants…all portraits of the Führer are to be decorated with greenery.
   

Such a decree was an extraordinary intrusion into individual lives, yet it was by no means unusual. Wolfram's parents were growing used to being told how to behave. On this occasion, as in the past, they greeted such strictures with complete indifference and were fortunate that no Gestapo officer happened to notice their passive hilltop protest. However, in Pforzheim itself, the news provoked far stronger reactions.

Hannelore Schottgen's mother was outraged about this manipulation of the populace instigated by Hitler. ‘Of course, he's got his fingers in it again,' she said to her teenage daughter. ‘On their own, the Austrians don't want to join us. Is this guy never going to leave people alone?'

Hers was a lone voice. When the result of the plebiscite was announced – and people were told that 99 per cent of the electorate had voted yes – there was an outbreak of patriotic fervour in Pforzheim, as elsewhere. There were parties, singing and dancing in the streets, with everyone shouting: ‘
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!
'

When Wolfram's sister, Gunhild, took a trip into town that afternoon, she noticed many of the older women wearing dirndles, the Austrian national costume, in honour of the occasion.

Those with cars headed for the Austrian border in order to join the excitement. In young Hannelore's eyes, it seemed as if there was an extraordinary outburst of support for the Führer. Whatever people's views, there was overwhelming praise for him.

The incorporation of Austria into the German Reich was indeed a personal triumph for Hitler. When, shortly afterwards, Hannelore's parents organised a social evening, her father said to his friends: ‘You see, we are now one big nation – and without any war. Now Hitler's going to solve all other problems as well.'

One of those present at the soirée responded: ‘I hope you're right, Eugen. I've got two boys and war would be terrible.'

 

The autumn of that year brought leaden skies and heavy rain to Pforzheim. It also brought a major change to Wolfram's life. Just a few months earlier he had turned fourteen, the age at which he could leave school. He jumped at the opportunity to quit full-time education, begging his parents to allow him to leave behind the travails of the classroom.

When Erwin asked him what he wanted to do with his life, he heard the answer he was expecting. Over the last few years, Wolfram had developed a deepening passion for gothic woodcarving. He drew particular inspiration from the work of the medieval master craftsman, Tilman Riemenschneider, who could capture human emotions with absolute precision, wielding his chisel like an artist's paintbrush. In the elongated fingers of his apostles, the aquiline noses of his saints and the long tresses of his prophets and bishops, Wolfram found a tender expression of piety and finesse.

Wolfram had carved his first sculpture at the age of six. Now, he told his father that he intended to make sculpting his profession. Erwin scoffed at the notion, not because he thought it ridiculous but because he feared that Wolfram would be unable to make a living. He suggested that he should first learn a trade, to have something to fall back on.

Wolfram was sent to lodge with an eccentric aunt in Stuttgart, where a position had become available for an apprentice carpenter. The hours were long and Wolfram had nothing in common with the rough types with whom he was working. Homesick, he soon returned to Pforzheim where he found employment in the workshop of a wood manufacturer.

That autumn, it seemed to Wolfram's parents as if Germany was tipping inexorably towards war. In October, Hitler had deliberately provoked the Sudetenland crisis, claiming a large swathe of Czech territory that was inhabited by ethnic Germans and describing it as his last territorial ambition. Britain's prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, was by now sufficiently alarmed by Hitler's bellicose behaviour to fly to Munich and attempt to broker a deal directly with the Führer.

Hitler was contemptuous of Britain's premier with his outmoded diplomacy and rolled umbrella. ‘If ever that silly old man comes interfering here again with his umbrella,' he is said to have declared, ‘I'll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach in front of the photographers.'

The ensuing Munich Agreement, which gave Hitler all of the Sudetenland, led to a flurry of anti-British propaganda in the German newspapers, expressing sentiments that were widely shared in Germany at the time.

Even friends of Wolfram's parents, who were generally open-minded and enlightened, had a stereotypical view of the British in the year prior to the outbreak of war. They laughed at the way they dressed, supposing all Englishmen to wear a top hat and carry a rolled umbrella, while clamping a newspaper under one arm.