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Authors: Giles Milton

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The umbrella was the object of greatest satire. When it rained in Germany people wore long coats with hoods or simply allowed themselves to get wet. They never carried umbrellas. Wolfram's father called the English the
regenschirmbürger
– the umbrella-carrying nation, of which Chamberlain was seen as its ultimate personification.

Newspaper articles about the British changed tack in accordance with the views of the Nazi elite. So, too, did the lessons in Pforzheim's schoolrooms. For the previous four years, children had been taught that Shakespeare was a bad man who had abandoned his wife and children. Schiller, by contrast, was portrayed as loyal and ever faithful. However, when it looked as if England was growing closer to Germany, everything went into reverse and it was said that the English were really of German origin. Shakespeare was therefore almost German and it was just by chance that he happened to have lived in England and not in Germany.

As the international friction mounted – and Britain signalled her solidarity with Poland in the event of Hitler harbouring ideas of further territorial expansion – so Shakespeare once again fell out of favour. The bard had become the barometer of international diplomacy.

It was the internal politics of Germany that were about to undergo the biggest and most dramatic alteration. Tensions were evidently being deliberately stoked by Adolf Hitler and were soon to reach breaking point.

 

Shortly before eight on the morning on 10 November 1938, the young Peter Rodi was kicking his way through the centre of Pforzheim on route to school. As he turned into Goethestrasse, he immediately saw that something dramatic had taken place during the night. All around him lay a scene of vandalism and destruction. Shop windows were smashed and the pavements strewn with broken glass. In places it was so deep that it looked like drifts of crystal snow.

At one point, Peter stooped down, picked up one of the shards and popped it into his pocket. Although unsure what prompted him to keep it, he must surely have realised that something of great significance had taken place – something, indeed, that was to cause shock and revulsion right across the globe. Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, was a dramatic escalation in state-orchestrated violence against the Jews of Germany.

It all began shortly before noon on the previous day. Peter was sitting in his classroom at school when someone came in – a local official – and opened all the windows. A few minutes later, there was a sudden and violent explosion that rocked the ground.

The large city synagogue, which lay just a short distance from the school, had been the target. Although the structure was still standing, the fine masonry was seriously damaged and all the windows had been blown out. The man who had entered Peter's classroom clearly had advance knowledge of the explosion and had opened the school windows in order to preserve the glass.

Peter and his classmates were met by a disconcerting sight as they left school to go home. Someone high up on the dome of the synagogue was trying to hack off the Star of David. Unable to cut through the metal, he left it dangling at a precarious angle from the cusp of the roof.

The explosion marked the beginning of twenty-four hours of aggression directed towards Germany's Jews, sounding the alarm to all those still living in the state of Baden.

Joseph Goebbels would later present the vandalism as a spontaneous uprising of the German people against the Jews. It was no such thing. The violence was a carefully organised response to the assassination of a Nazi official in the German embassy in Paris. Local party offices across Germany were contacted by Nazi hierarchs in Berlin and ordered to prepare a wave of retaliation targeting Jewish property.

Wolfram awoke on the morning of 10 November unaware that anything untoward had occurred during the night. His sleep had not been disturbed, nor was there any visible sign of any damage having been done in Eutingen. When he arrived at his carpentry workshop, the owner was in an agitated state. In whispers, he confided to Wolfram that the sound of breaking glass had kept him awake for much of the night.

The smashing of windows and destruction of property were only a part of the story. Brownshirts had also broken into Jewish apartments in the early hours of the morning and attacked the families living there. Twenty-three Pforzheim Jews were arrested on trumped-up charges and sent to Dachau concentration camp. Many more were beaten senseless by uniformed thugs armed with batons and cudgels.

Many people in Pforzheim who had hitherto been keen supporters of Hitler were appalled by what had happened that night. Hannelore Schottgen's father could hardly look at his daughter when she asked him what he thought about it, as he was fighting back tears. Never having seen her parents so upset, she did not ask any more questions.

In Pforzheim, the ferocity had been directed primarily against property, but in surrounding towns, people themselves had been the principal target. In the nearby village of Eberstadt, the local Nazi Party leader, Adolf Frey, had acted with extreme brutality, paying a visit to one of the town's oldest Jews, a widow of eighty-one named Susanna Stern, and ordering her out of her house. When she refused to get dressed, he shot her in the head and chest. When she continued to murmur her protests, he shot her for a third time.

The case was brought to court – one of the rare cases of a Nazi activist being called to account, but Frau Stern's family were to be cheated of any justice. The elderly lady was described by the judge as a boisterous troublemaker who had provoked the attack. Frey, by contrast, aged twenty-six, was described as a ‘decent solid young man' with an excellent reputation.

All charges against him were dropped.

 

Kristallnacht was a dramatic wake-up call for Pforzheim's Jews. Many more now saw the writing on the wall. Of the 20,000 Jews who had lived in the state of Baden in 1933, some 7,000 had already left by 1938. Of the 800 still living in Pforzheim, 231 now decided to pack their bags and flee. Doctors, lawyers, physicians: many of the educated Jews decided to get out of Nazi Germany while they still had the chance.

Among them was the Rothschild family, owners of a large jewellery business in the centre of Pforzheim. They were on particularly friendly terms with Hannelore's mother and father and often invited them for social evenings at their large suburban villa. By 1938, such visits had to be made clandestinely, after dark.

On one such occasion, the Rothschilds announced that they had taken the decision to leave; they needed to get rid of all their belongings in a short space of time since Jews were forbidden from taking anything with them when they emigrated. Their beautiful old dining-room furniture and two fine portraits were bought by Hannelore's parents.

The Rothschilds were wise to get out when they did. In the months that followed Kristallnacht, all the remaining Jews of Pforzheim were moved out of their family homes and required to live in officially designated Jewish houses. The regime had decided to confine them to a ghetto that could more easily be watched and monitored by the Gestapo. There would remain until October 1940, when their fortunes were to take a sharp and terrible turn for the worse.

 

Uniformed marches through the centre of Pforzheim became increasingly commonplace as Germany drifted towards war. There was scarcely a public festival that did not involve the massed ranks of party stalwarts goose-stepping their way through Pforzheim. One particular day of festivity and national rejoicing fell on 20 April 1939, Hitler's fiftieth birthday, when the Nazi hierarchy and party officials bent over backwards to organise elaborate celebrations.

Gauleiter Robert Wagner saw the event as an opportunity to demonstrate his fanatical loyalty to the Führer. There were to be marches and parades through the streets – colourful affairs with flag-bearers and Nazi pageantry. The marchers carried vast brick-red banners that were unfurled in the stiff spring breeze. ‘In our unity and togetherness lies our strength,' read the motto on a thousand such banners.

For the Aïchele family, Hitler's birthday was an occasion to work in the garden and keep a low profile, but in the Rodi household, Peter, the eldest son, could not resist ridiculing the day's solemnities. He pinned up a postcard of Hitler in the entrance hall and decked it with a colourful garland. The postcard was the only image of Hitler in the house, sent to the family by a concerned cousin who feared that Max Rodi, a state employee, would get into severe trouble if he was discovered not to be in possession of an obligatory portrait.

On this festive day, that tiny picture with its garland of flowers was turned into an object of satire. Peter's dressed up in his Hitler Youth uniform and persuaded his sisters to do likewise before calling for his parents.

The children recited to them trite poems celebrating Hitler and also sang the Nazi songs they had been forced to learn in the Hitler Youth. Their mother, half bemused and half shocked, did not quite know how to react.

 

The long summer holidays of 1939 were overshadowed by talk of war. For weeks there had been the same daily news on the wireless. The constant refrain was that the Poles were mistreating the ethnic German minorities who lived in the border regions of Poland. Hitler, it was said, was no longer prepared to tolerate this and would soon put matters straight.

The Aïchele parents, in common with their church friends, the Rodis, were convinced that war was now only a matter of months away. Yet many people in Pforzheim continued to believe Hitler's assurance that he would avoid plunging Germany into conflict, even though the facts seemed to contradict this.

Hannelore Schottgen came down from her bedroom at the end of August to see lots of colourful cards laid out on the table. Her father told her that they were rationing cards. ‘Everyone gets the same,' he explained. ‘Food, meat, bread, soap.'

Hannelore's mother was not impressed. ‘You're not trying to tell me there's not going to be a war with such preparations,' she said to her husband and began to make her own, ready for the conflict that she felt certain was to come.

A very elegant bag made from pig's leather, which was discreet and could hold a great deal, now came into its own. Five times a day, she headed to the shops and bought sugar, rice, coffee, chocolate and other essentials.

She had to be extremely careful not to be caught stockpiling provisions. People who purchased more than was strictly necessary could be denounced for displaying a lack of confidence in the regime.

As the holidays came to an end, the news grew increasingly gloomy. Hitler was playing a dangerous game of brinksmanship in the international arena, convinced that he would get everything he wanted. He not only demanded the return to the Reich of German-speaking Danzig but he also wanted a road and rail link through the so-called ‘Polish corridor' that separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany.

Poland had no intention of acceding to these demands. Pforzheim's morning newspaper was indignant at what it believed to be Polish intransigence. ‘In the last four days, the nerves of the German people have been stretched to the limit…all of Germany has been waiting by the wireless in order to listen to the words of the Führer and the red heat of anger has inflamed their faces as they have listened to his numerous attempts to find a solution to the Danzig problem.'

The paper claimed that Hitler had bent over backwards to avoid conflict and that he had even pursued suggestions proposed by the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain. ‘But the Polish people simply laughed dismissively.'

Less than twenty-four hours after the appearance of this article, Germans heard the tidings they most feared. A peaceful solution to the crisis had not been found. Their country was once again at war.

Fifteen-year-old Wolfram was on a solo cycling tour in the Vorarlberg region of Austria and was sleeping in a rural barracks when the news broke.

The local farmer rushed into the barracks and announced to the soldiers that Germany was declaring the outbreak of hostilities. There was a stunned silence as everyone considered what it meant. The unwelcome intelligence came as a particular shock to the village youth, who were immediately conscripted. Most were dismayed by the very thought of another war and had no clue why Hitler wanted one anyway; several of them confided to Wolfram that they had thought the Polish corridor was the name of an English politician.

The next morning, Wolfram headed to the canteen for his usual breakfast of fried polenta and coffee, but there was one dramatic change. All the soldiers had left in the night, having been drafted back into the army.

The reaction to the gathering storm was very different in Innsbruck, which Wolfram visited on the following day. The people there were less pessimistic and more confident in Hitler's ability to succeed.

As Wolfram made his way back over the border into Germany, he witnessed scenes of mayhem in towns and villages as lads of fighting age sought to register themselves for the military.

Frithjof Rodi was in his bedroom when the announcement came over the radio. His father came in wearing full military uniform to say his goodbyes. As a former officer in the First World War, he had been recalled to service in the forces. He was sent to Brno in Czechoslovakia where he was charged with training artillery for the battles that were sure to come.

That morning, in the centre of Eutingen, young Doris Weber, a friend of the Aïchele family, leaned out of her apartment window and immediately realised that something of great significance was taking place. Hundreds of soldiers were marching through the village, in uniform and carrying flowers they had been given. Everyone was hanging out of their windows to watch the soldiers go by, shouting: ‘We're going to war!'

Wolfram's parents were deeply alarmed by the news. They had two possible channels for getting more information on the morning that war broke out: the state-controlled radio or the state-controlled newspapers. Both presented a very similar version of events. Polish troops were said to have started the conflict by attacking a local transmitter on the Polish–German frontier. This, according to Hitler, was the
casus belli
. Germans had the right to defend themselves.

BOOK: The Boy Who Went to War
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