The Boy Who Went to War Read online

  Wolfram was indeed spellbound by his visit to Tiefenbronn; he had never imagined that such extraordinary artworks existed on his doorstep. No sooner had he returned home than he equipped himself with a block of wood, some chisels and an adze. Already harbouring vague dreams of one day becoming a master craftsman, he spent all his spare time trying to reproduce the exquisite visions he had seen in Tiefenbronn.

  Wolfram and his siblings were too young to have realised that a political revolution had taken place in Berlin. The village school in Eutingen was unaffected by the change in leadership and the only time that Wolfram encountered Nazi brownshirts was when he accompanied his mother on shopping expeditions to Pforzheim.

  Nevertheless, Hitler’s inner circle was now hoping to capitalise on the general optimism that surrounded his appointment to the chancellorship. ‘Wild frenzy of enthusiasm,’ wrote Joseph Goebbels in his diary on the night of the Berlin parade. ‘Prepare the election campaign.’

  A national election had indeed been one of Hitler’s preconditions for accepting the post of chancellor. Now, the date was set for 5 March. In the Aïchele household, there was a sudden flurry of excitement. Their cleaning lady, Frau Lehman, was a hardline Communist who had long expressed her desire to emigrate to Soviet Russia. Lacking money and resources, she had resigned herself to another year or two in rural Eutingen. Her great hope was that the German Communist Party, led by Ernst Thälmann, would win scores of seats in the forthcoming election.

  She was passionately devoted to the cause. ‘Vote Thälmann, Herr Aïchele,’ she would say to Wolfram’s father. ‘All artists vote for Thälmann.’

  There was some truth in this: many artists did indeed favour the Communists, but in this particular election, all who supported Thälmann were to find themselves unexpectedly deprived of the vote.

  Hitler had never hidden his deep aversion to the Communists. ‘Never, never will I stray from the task of stamping out Marxism,’ he told supporters at an election rally. ‘There can be only one victor: either Marxism or the German people.’

  He soon found the pretext for crushing the rival ideology in quite spectacular fashion. On 27 February 1933, the Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, set fire to the parliament building in Berlin. It was a lone act but a particularly destructive one. ‘The Reichstag in Flames’ was the headline in Erwin’s Pforzheim newspaper on the following morning.

  Hitler had rushed to the scene, forced his way into the burning building and stared into the sea of flames, seemingly mesmerised by the blaze. ‘There will be no more mercy now,’ he shouted to those who were with him. ‘Anyone who stands in our way will be butchered. The German people won’t have any understanding for leniency. Every Communist functionary will be shot where he is found…’

  Four thousand Communists were indeed arrested, including most of the Reichstag deputies. Hitler then introduced a decree that suspended civil liberties and prevented any Communist candidate from standing in any future election. Overnight, the Aïcheles’ cleaning lady was disenfranchised.

  In putting his signature to the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State, Hitler was signing the death warrant of the old republic. It placed potentially draconian restrictions on personal liberty and the right of free assembly. It also permitted the state’s intrusion into all postal and telephonic communications.

  Although Hitler had produced no evidence of a Communist revolution, in one bold stroke he had taken control of the state. In a radio address on the morning after the Reichstag fire, Goering appealed to the entire German nation to vote in the election that was now only four days away.

  They did so in their millions: at 88 per cent, voter turn-out was unprecedented. Yet even in an atmosphere of violence and intimidation, the Nazis still failed to win an overall majority.

  In the last election for many years to come, almost six out of every ten Germans voted against Hitler.

  Wolfram’s ninth birthday fell just a few weeks after the election. When he was given money by his parents, he knew exactly how he was going to spend it. In his first moment of free time, he cycled down into Pforzheim and went to the Bögel bookshop, which specialised in art books.

  He had first visited the shop when he was six, dragging his mother inside so that he could look at the titles on display in the window. Two volumes had particularly caught his young eye. One had on the cover a reproduction of Andrei Rublev’s famous icon of the Holy Trinity. The other displayed a Van Gogh painting of a man leading a donkey.

  The bookshop’s owner had been bemused and somewhat startled when the young Wolfram asked whether he could look at these books, but ever since, the boy had been one of the shop’s most loyal customers. Each fortnight, he would cycle into town in order to plan his next purchase, paid for with his pocket money.

  He usually headed straight to the shelves containing books on gothic art, but on the occasion of his ninth birthday his eye had been drawn to a more enticing prize. It was a large and expensive hardback about Pieter Bruegel and as Wolfram flicked through the pages he knew that this was what he wanted to buy.

  Nervously he took it to the counter and asked the price. The shop’s owner smiled sadly: it was 35 Reichsmarks – far beyond the budget of a small boy, even one with birthday money. Wolfram reluctantly put it back on the shelf, vowing to himself that one day, when he was rich, he would buy it. (Another twenty-five years would pass before he finally bought the book in a second-hand bookshop in Paris.)

  He returned home to Eutingen wiser about the value of money but nonetheless disappointed. He was consoled by his father, who contacted all his artist friends and found that one of them, Professor Hillenbrandt, owned a copy of that very edition. He then arranged for Wolfram to visit the doctor’s house in order to study the pictures.

  That spring was warm and sunny and the villa in Eutingen was looking at its best. The newly planted wisteria flowered for the first time, its mauve blooms hanging down in clusters like scented pendulums, and on the trellised ironwork, miniature buds of unripe grapes dangled in jewel-like bunches.

  Marie Charlotte prided herself on the riotous patchwork of pinks, reds and violets that spilled from the beds and borders. Each morning she would cut a dozen or more stems and arrange them into artful bunches for display in the entrance hall. She had studied botany and knew the names of all the flowers – both their common monikers and their Latin titles: hyacinthus and xeranthemum and all the different varieties of tulipia.

  The somnolent pace of life in Eutingen belied the dramatic transformation that was taking place in provincial towns across the state of Baden. At dawn on 6 March 1933, just hours after the votes had been counted in the national election, local Nazi leaders raised the swastika on scores of public buildings in Pforzheim. Twenty-four hours later came the announcement that Robert Heinrich Wagner, a fanatical anti-Semite, had been appointed Reich commissar for Baden.

  Politicians of the left and centre parties were horrified by Wagner’s appointment and immediately lodged a complaint with the German Supreme Court in Berlin, but the court deemed itself powerless to overrule Hitler’s choice.

  Wagner travelled by train to the large industrial town of Karlsruhe, some twenty miles to the north-west of Pforzheim, to make a public address to a crowd of 3,000 enthusiastic SA and SS men. They roared their approval when Wagner, with great fanfare, unfurled an enormous swastika from the windows of his new ministry building. He then assumed full police powers over his new fiefdom and began an immediate purge of all the officers who were not sympathetic to the Nazi cause.

  The Baden state government reacted by resigning en masse – a calculated political manoeuvre that would force the election of a new government. Ministers confidently predicted that they would increase their authority at the expense of the Nazis.

  Their plan spectacularly backfired. Wagner used the crisis to seize control of the regional government, claiming key ministerial posts. Less than seventy-two hours after the election results had b
een announced, he was master of both Baden’s government and police force.

  With his piercing eyes and blond hair, Wagner looked the very epitome of a loyal Nazi. He had, indeed, been an early and fanatical convert to Nazism. In the spring of 1925, he had secured Hitler’s permission to establish the Nazi Party in Baden; by the autumn of that year, he was already touring towns and villages, giving virulently racist speeches about the Jews. He saw Judaism as a disease – ‘the source of all ills of its host nation’ – and argued that serious diseases required radical cures.

  Now that he was in a position of authority, his ruthlessness came to the fore. Socialist and Communist deputies were arrested, left-leaning newspapers were banned, and three penal camps were established. Pforzheim felt the full brunt of his ire: two of the town’s papers, the Freie Presse and the Pforzheimer Morgenblatt, were shut down. The local mayor and other councillors were sacked. Two of the prominent Jewish members of the Chamber of Commerce were forced to resign.

  Wagner also ordered a boycott of Jewish shops and encouraged demonstrations outside the homes and businesses of prominent Jews. These were small-minded and often unpleasant. On the evening of 1 April 1933, uniformed members of the SA pushed their way into the large Pforzheim department store, Schocken, and told shoppers to leave. Later that evening, they stuck posters on to the windows of the town’s larger stores. ‘Closed! Gone to Palestine!’

  On the following morning, those same SA men reappeared and formed ranks outside the other big Jewish stores – the shoe shop, Edox, and the clothes shops Globus and Dreifus. In the Marktplatz, or main square, they also blocked access to Knopf, Kruger and Wolff & Kahn. Their placards declared, ‘Those who still buy Jewish goods are good-for-nothings and traitors!’

  Wagner announced with considerable relish that the state would soon pass laws to punish the Jews: ‘Jewish influence in business and public life will be relentlessly cut back.’

  He quickly put this into effect in his own fiefdom. All Jewish doctors and dentists were excluded from Baden’s social security system, which meant that their patients were no longer entitled to reimbursement for prescription drugs. Jewish lawyers were prohibited from even entering the courthouse – a fast track to financial ruin.

  The momentous political transformation of Baden – and of Germany – had its first direct effect on the Aïchele household within a few weeks of Hitler becoming chancellor. Wolfram’s father was brought news that Pforzheim’s freemasonry lodge, of which he had been a member for many years, was to be closed. Its membership was forbidden from gathering and the lodge itself was to cease functioning.

  The regime further announced that all masons who had not left their lodges in January 1933 were to banned from ever joining the Nazi Party – a stricture that Wolfram’s father exploited to the full. Over the coming years, whenever he was quizzed as to why he, a state employee, had not joined the party, he answered that had failed to leave his Masonic lodge in time and was therefore not eligible to become a member.

  Such an argument was not without danger. Former freemasons found themselves increasingly targeted by the Nazi regime; by 1935, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Security Police, was calling them ‘the most implacable enemies of the German race’.

  The changes to the political situation in Baden had another direct effect on Erwin. For years, he had made a steady income from his illustrations for a well-known hunting magazine. Now, without any warning, his contract with the magazine was abruptly terminated. Within days, the publication had disappeared from the news-stands.

  Erwin did not have to wait long to discover the reason why the magazine had been banned. The publisher was a prominent Jewish businessman and Goering had ordered its publication to be suspended.

  This only served to increase Erwin’s hatred of all Nazi politicians. He started referring to them as a disgusting bunch who meddled in other people’s lives.

  In the new Germany there was no possibility for redress and no avenue for complaint. The regime had already warned that anyone who challenged its decisions would be severely, ruthlessly punished.

  Chapter Three

  A Visit from the Führer

  ‘So many people…his car could advance only at walking pace.’

  The young Wolfram was fidgeting in his seat in Pforzheim’s picture house. It was spring 1934, and an exciting new film was about to be screened.

  The audience in the auditorium was small, for the movie was not to everyone’s taste. Wolfram, however, was desperate to see it and had spent the previous two days begging his parents to accompany him.

  At long last the curtains went up and the title flickered on to the screen: Man of Aran by Robert Flaherty. It was a documentary chronicling the hardships of daily life in the remote Aran Islands.

  Wolfram was fascinated from the opening scene. The seascapes of western Ireland and the rich local folk traditions left a deep impression on him. The lives of these people seemed so strange and exotic: it was as if they hailed from another planet. Wolfram stored the images in his mind to use them in his pictures.

  A short time after watching the film, he found his own home playing host to a colourful stranger. One morning, his father and an artist friend named Herr Siebert were wandering through Pforzheim when they were struck by an odd-looking tramp slouched on a bench. He had a most quixotic face, craggy and angular, and Herr Siebert expressed a desire to paint him. When the tramp agreed to pose as a model, Erwin suggested that he come and stay in Eutingen for a few days.

  Wolfram was a little surprised when his father arrived home with the tramp and even more taken aback when he was given the guest room. He suspected that such a thing would never have happened, were it not for the fact that his mother was away at the time.

  Yet it was a gesture typical of Erwin. He cared little for what friends and neighbours might think, nor, for that matter, was he in the slightest bit bothered about other people’s opinions, political or otherwise. What mattered for him, above and beyond everything else, was whether individuals looked interesting; whether their unusual faces or unexpected expressions appealed to his artistic eye. The racial conformity of Nazism left him completely cold – indeed, it was a complete anathema to his artistic sensibilities.

  Adolf Hitler had been chancellor for less than five months when a dramatic event occurred in central Pforzheim. Throughout the morning and afternoon of 17 June, adolescent members of the Hitler Youth had been combing libraries, bookshops and houses, including those of their own parents, in search of literature deemed unsuitable by the Nazi regime. Now, as darkness fell, the mountain of books was to be ceremoniously burned in the Marktplatz.

  The exercise had, according to the local newspaper, been a triumph. ‘The collection of “dirt and shame” was such a huge success,’ said the Pforzheimer Anzeiger, ‘that the Hitler Youth had to use lorries belonging to the municipal authorities [to transport all the books].’

  Not for the first time, the Nazis had turned to the German youth in order to implement their policies. ‘Our young people have been given a mission,’ continued the newspaper, ‘and they have showed themselves worthy of the task…now, the whole nation must be convinced of the necessity of the fight against un-German writing.’

  Wolfram did not see the book burning, nor, indeed, did his parents. They certainly would have had no desire to witness such an act. Ever since the introduction of the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State in early 1933, many of Marie Charlotte’s favourite authors, including Thomas Mann, had been condemned. The new legislation placed strict controls over the publishing industry and gave the Gestapo virtually unlimited powers to confiscate literature considered undesirable. ‘Printed matter whose content is calculated to endanger public order,’ read the decree, ‘can be confiscated by the police.’

  The great pyre was to be lit at exactly nine o’clock in the evening on Saturday, 17 June. Although it started pouring with rain just as the crowds began to assemble, this did nothing t
o diminish the pageantry of the occasion. The youth leaders marched into the Marktplatz in military formation and were met by city officials, including the head of the town’s police force. A local brigade leader named Schenkel then made a speech in which he heaped praise upon Pforzheim’s youth.

  ‘Their mission,’ he told the crowd, ‘was full of honour and proved that the National Socialist Party was right in putting its trust in the young generation.’ As his address came to an end, one of the Nazi dignitaries ceremoniously placed Erich Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, on the very top of the pyre.

  ‘The flames ate deep into the pile of books…the buildings around the Marktplatz were lit in a ghostly way and the onlookers were bathed in a red glow.’ And then – hesitant at first, but then much louder – a cry went up from the crowd.

  ‘A chorus of voices began chanting an incantation – “undeutsche schrift verbrenne! – Burn, un-German writing, burn!”’ As the mob continued to shout, a Communist flag was thrown on to the top of the pyre.

  ‘The difficult times went up with the flames,’ wrote the journalist covering the story. ‘New life, new writing, new faith will blossom from the ashes.’

  Wolfram’s parents became aware that Hitler had introduced an element of fear into every aspect of daily life within weeks of his becoming chancellor. Just a short time earlier, Erwin had spoken quite openly of his contempt for the Nazis, especially when in the company of Herr Becher, the urbane clergyman from the family’s parish. Now, however, whenever the two men spoke of the dangers that Hitler posed, Becher would get up from his chair and close the dining-room door so that Clara, the Aïcheles’ new maid, could not eavesdrop.