The Boy Who Went to War Page 5

  Clara was indeed nosy and was forever listening in on their conversations. Believing Hitler to be a godsend for Germany, she was particularly infuriated by Becher’s strident opinions. ‘Frau Aïchele,’ she said one day to Wolfram’s mother, ‘if Herr Becher says such nasty things about Hitler one more time, I’ll leave and won’t come back.’

  There were many other subtle but disquieting changes. Goebbels had declared that the new government ‘no longer intends to leave people to their own devices’. True to his word, Nazi ideology was brought to the fore in every sphere of personal activity. The regime banned the traditional Swabish greeting, ‘Grussgott’ or ‘God be with you’, which had been used in southern Germany for centuries. Henceforth, everyone was obliged to say ‘Heil Hitler’ when they met with acquaintances in the street.

  Wolfram’s parents avoided greeting close friends in such a fashion, but it was a different matter when Erwin went to work. All state employees were obliged to used the new form of address, ‘raising their right arm…while at the same time saying out loud: Heil Hitler’.

  It became apparent that the regime intended to impose itself on the calendar too. Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor (30 January) became a holiday; the refounding of the Nazi Party (24 February) was a day of festivity; and Hitler’s birthday (20 April) was to become a time of national rejoicing.

  Particularly upsetting to Wolfram’s parents was the discovery that names of streets were being constantly changed. The principal thoroughfare in the north of Pforzheim was renamed Adolf Hitler Avenue and one of the larger high schools in the town was also named after the Führer. There was Avenue Hermann Göring (along with a Göring High School), as well as a newly renamed Goebbels School and a Horst Wessel School – the latter named in honour of the Nazi activist murdered three years earlier.

  The regime also began replacing the old religious festivals with their pagan equivalents. Just five days after the book burning, in the summer of 1933, the authorities in Pforzheim organised a big festival to celebrate the solstice. Many young lads dressed up in uniform for the occasion and prepared to join in the celebrations. So, too, did the young girls of Pforzheim. Among them was Hannelore Schottgen, who was deeply impressed by the flags, the burning torches and the military music. She was no less impressed by a dynamic young fanatic who explained to the crowd that the Führer was awakening old Germanic traditions. He added that the Nazi Party wanted to encourage people to learn about the roots of the Aryan race and the blood of their ancestors.

  A huge bonfire was then lit. The assembled youths held hands in the growing darkness and sang haunting songs about the old Germany. Young Hannelore found herself profoundly moved by the thought that at that very moment, all over Germany, young boys and girls were gathered together to celebrate their country’s rich Germanic past.

  Wolfram and his brother were not among the celebrants of the solstice. Wolfram, who detested uniforms, thought the mustard-brown colour offensive. His refusal to have anything to do with the festivities greatly pleased his parents, but his non-attendance was the exception to the rule. All the rest of the Pforzheim youth – along with boys and girls from the surrounding villages – turned out for the pagan festival.

  The newly awakened interest in Germanic traditions was matched by a corresponding adulation for Adolf Hitler. The cult of the Führer had been an integral part of Goebbels’ propaganda machine from the very beginning. By the summer of 1933, portraits of Hitler began appearing in every shop in Pforzheim: looking strict, thoughtful, smiling with children or playing with his dogs. To young Hannelore’s eyes, it was as if you could no longer walk down a street without seeing a dozen or more images of their leader.

  On Wednesday, 13 September, Hitler appeared in person in Pforzheim. The occasion for his visit was a devastating fire that had swept through the village of Oeschelbronn, just a few miles away. Hundreds of timbered houses had been consumed by the conflagration, leaving families homeless and destitute.

  Hitler arrived by plane in Karlsruhe and was met by a phalanx of local Nazi dignitaries. Among them was Robert Wagner, who led the Führer through the city to the accompanying music of a martial band. Once Hitler had greeted the adulatory crowd, his entourage set off for Pforzheim.

  ‘Thousands of schoolchildren lined his route and next to them were tens of thousands of people, all cheering the Führer and waving at him,’ recorded Karlsruhe’s local newspaper. ‘There were so many people that his car could advance only at walking pace.’

  Among the villages that Hitler passed through was Eutingen, home to the Aïcheles. All their neighbours had turned out to watch, their numbers swelled by the inhabitants of nearby villages. Soon, the hedgerows and embankments were packed with supporters, enthusiasts and the merely curious. ‘The National Socialist divisions and schoolchildren were standing in all the villages,’ reported the newspaper, ‘even though it was stormy and there had been a lot of rain.’

  There was a huge propaganda effort on the part of the local Nazi Party in Eutingen. All the schools were closed for the day and the Aïcheles, like everyone else in the village, were given details of Hitler’s schedule so that they could be outside to cheer him on.

  Wolfram was delighted to discover that there was no school; it gave him the whole day to draw and paint. Neither he nor his parents had any interest in seeing Hitler. Erwin spent the day in his workshop and Wolfram embarked on another pencil study of a medieval market town.

  Only later that evening did Erwin and Marie Charlotte learn that their absence from the cheering crowds had been noted by many people. A number of their neighbours thought their behaviour egotistical and unpatriotic.

  Erwin dismissed such nonsense with a shake of his head, taking the opportunity to remind Wolfram not to follow others like sheep.

  Christmas Eve, 1933, was a sombre affair. Wolfram and his siblings spent the morning in the garden, decorating all the tombs of the family dogs with miniature Christmas trees. Then, as evening fell, Wolfram’s mother trudged through the snow to the festive service at their church in Pforzheim.

  The parish pastor, Otto Becher, celebrated the service with as much joy as he could muster, but the little congregation was deeply troubled by subtle changes that the Nazi regime was introducing to the festive season.

  The traditional weihnacht or holy night of Christmas had been renamed rauhnacht or rough night, emphasising the pagan festival of the winter solstice. The popular devotion of St Nikolaus had also been paganised. The bishop-saint was stripped of his white-and-gold vestments and deprived of his crook. Now, he became a secular Father Christmas, a bearded man dressed in red.

  Wolfram’s parents zealously guarded their family traditions and, in the privacy of their own home, refused to change the way in which they celebrated the festive season. So, too, did their church friends, the Rodis. However, some families in Pforzheim did their best to conform to the strictures imposed by the Nazis.

  Hannelore Schottgen found Christmas that year very different from previous ones. Although houses and community halls were still decorated with Christmas tree branches, as in previous years, instead of singing carols, people listened to Beethoven and sang old songs about the solstice, along with other Germanic winter songs that had no reference to Christmas.

  Everyone was describing Hitler as a unique and very special person and there was universal agreement that God was wise indeed for having given the beloved Führer to Germany. A new phrase was on every lip that year: ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’.

  The Christian Community of Pforzheim was an early target of the Nazi regime. What particularly shocked parishioners was the coarse manner in which it occurred. For years, the town’s daily paper, Pforzheimer Anzeiger, had been a reliable source of news. Conservative in outlook, it was the favoured choice of the town’s bourgeoisie.

  No sooner was Hitler in power than the editor threw in his lot with the Nazi Party and the newspaper became a mouthpiece of the new order.

  One morn
ing, the Aïcheles and the Rodis opened their morning paper and were appalled to read a vitriolic article attacking Rudolf Steiner, upon whose philosophy their church was founded. It said that Steiner was a Jew – which was untrue – and added that he was a liar like none other. It was a decisive moment for the Rodi parents. They never again bought the Pforzheimer Anzeiger.

  The article marked the beginning of a sustained assault on traditional Christian teaching that would culminate in Hitler’s decree that teachers change the text of the Bible. The sentence, ‘Salvation comes from the Jews’, which Jesus says to the Samaritan woman, was unacceptable in the eyes of the Nazis. Schools across Germany were instructed to delete this line from the Bible, as well as from all books of biblical history.

  Young Frithjof Rodi was a pupil in his father’s class on the day that this was put into effect. Max Rodi had to instruct his pupils to bring their copies of the Bible to the front of the class. Then, with his own fountain pen, he had to put a line through the offending sentence.

  Max, however, could not bring himself to do this without passing comment. He got the whole class to read aloud the offending passage; this was followed by a long discussion as to what Christ meant by it. Then, when the discussion was finally over, he told the children that he had been ordered to delete it from their copies.

  In Wolfram’s class, the new ideology was also beginning to bite. One afternoon, there was a visit to his school by a German émigré newly arrived from the Volga. Like so many ethnic Germans, the man’s family had lived there for more than two centuries. Now, in the wake of Stalin’s persecution, they were flooding back to Germany.

  The man brought pictures of starving and malnourished children, and told Wolfram and his classmates that the Russians were deliberately denying them food. There were endless images of corpses – entire cartloads of them – and he recounted harrowing stories of cannibalism. The photographs were so vivid that Wolfram had nightmares for weeks afterwards.

  The Nazis wanted children to grow up with an intrinsic fear of Communism, but exhibiting these gruesome photographs to the pupils at the school angered many of their parents.

  Wolfram’s mother and grandmother were horrified when Wolfram told them what he had been shown at school that day. Both of them were already very anti-Nazi. This only served to intensify their hostility.

  In the summer of 1934, Wolfram’s father decided to take his two sons to the North Sea coast for three weeks’ holiday. It was a spot that Erwin loved – the windswept island of Hallig, close to the Danish coast. The three of them lodged with a family of farmers who lived in a quirky hilltop house. The boys played at being Robinson Crusoe while Erwin spent his time painting.

  No sooner were they back in Eutingen than Wolfram’s favourite uncle, Walter, brought news that daily life had taken a turn for the worse in the time they had been away. Pforzheim’s Jews had come under attack from the Nazi regime and were in a state of despair. Their shops were boycotted, their livelihoods put at risk. The head of the Baden Synagogue Council, a certain Dr Moses, stated that living under the new Nazi dictatorship made one feel ‘as if one is in front of a state of rubble’.

  It was almost a year before the introduction of the notorious Reich Citizenship Law, yet one respectable Pforzheim family had already fallen foul of the regime. Werner Becker – son of one of the town’s Protestant vicars and well known to both the Aïchele and Rodi families – had fallen in love with Margot Bloch, the Jewish daughter of a local lawyer.

  The banns were published on 13 May 1935, an event that signalled an escalation in their problems. A few days later the young Becker read in a Berlin newspaper that a state functionary in Pforzheim had, for the first time since Hitler came to power, refused permission for an Aryan to marry a Jew. To his horror, Becker realised that the article was referring to him.

  A couple of days later, the local Pforzheim newspaper picked up the story. Under the headline, ‘Rassenschande’, or ‘Race Shame’, it described Becker as ‘an enemy of the state and a disgusting adversary to the Nazi Party’ who had sold himself to an alien race.

  Each subsequent day, the newspaper carried articles that condemned him for his choice of bride while praising the state functionary who had put a stop to the marriage. That same functionary received official congratulations from the Reich Minister of Justice.

  The young couple’s love was only strengthened by the abuse that was daily heaped upon them. Determined to marry, and revolted by the new Germany, they fled first to Switzerland and then to Argentina.

  Wolfram’s parents followed the story with heavy hearts, yet this was by no means an isolated case. Indeed, it marked the beginning of a dramatic increase in state-sponsored activity against the town’s Jewish population.

  One day, Hannelore Schottgen accompanied her mother, Frau Haas, into the centre of town for groceries. Large groups of SA men were standing at the entrance to one of the Jewish-owned supermarkets with big posters that read: ‘Germans be careful: Don’t buy in Jewish shops: The Jews bring bad luck.’

  Frau Haas turned to her young daughter and said: ‘Well, don’t look at them. I’m going to go shopping where I want. They can’t forbid me.’

  What she had not realised was that two of the men standing outside the store were taking photographs of everyone going inside. She returned home with her shopping and quite forgot the incident, but she was soon in for a rude awakening. At the cinema that evening, the main film was preceded by pictures of all the people who had shopped at the town’s Jewish-owned department stores.

  The photographs were shown with captions such as ‘This lady shows no shame: she still buys her provisions in Jewish-run stores,’ or ‘This man is a slave to the Jews – he still shops there.’

  Now it was Frau Haas’s turn to be shamed. Her husband’s employer phoned that very evening to tell them about the film. Although the photo was a little blurred, he said that it looked very much like Frau Haas, and warned her to be more careful in future. ‘The wife of a German educator,’ he said, ‘does not buy in Jewish shops.’

  From this point on, young Hannelore was sent to do the shopping on her own as the Gestapo were forbidden from taking pictures of children.

  Among the well-known figures in the Jewish community was Wolfram’s uncle, Walter, a supporter of the now-banned Communist Party. Eccentric and uncommonly erudite, he had studied theology at university with the vague thought of becoming a priest. As his fascination increased with the languages of the Middle East – Arabic and Hebrew – he changed his mind and became a specialist in the latter.

  He often went to the synagogue in those early years of the 1930s, not because he was particularly religious but because he loved the ceremonies surrounding Judaism. He also had great respect for those who were earnest about their faith and practised it with conviction.

  Although it was not the most auspicious of times to develop a passion for Judaism, Uncle Walter became greatly sought after in the Jewish milieu. Jews across Germany had seen the way the political wind was blowing and had decided to sell their properties, quit the country and rebuild their lives in British-controlled Palestine. Herein lay a problem. The British required potential settlers to speak Hebrew, something that was beyond the capabilities of most bourgeois Jews. Walter suddenly found himself much in demand as teacher of classical Hebrew.

  One family who had taken the decision to leave was the Guggenheims, who ran an elegant hat shop in central Pforzheim. Young Hannelore Schottgen bumped into them one evening as she and her father walked past the local synagogue.

  Herr Guggenheim came over and greeted them cordially, but he did not make his usual little jokes. Indeed, he was very grave as he broke the news that his family had opted to emigrate to Palestine.

  Hannelore’s father went very quiet. ‘But that’s not possible,’ he said to Herr Guggenheim. ‘You can’t leave everything behind and quit your homeland because of stupid propaganda.’

  Herr Guggenheim shook his head, confessing that he
was scared for his family. ‘Read the newspapers,’ he said.

  The departure of the Guggenheims was shortly followed by an exodus of other Jewish families. The Salamons, owners of a luxury lingerie store, were the next to go. Then Doctor Weill, a well-respected Pforzheim lawyer, announced that he, too, was emigrating. This proved the last straw for Hannelore’s father.

  ‘I can’t believe that Weill also wants to leave,’ he said when he heard the news. ‘I can’t understand why they’re all leaving.’

  The Aïcheles’ Jewish friends – or those with Jewish origins – were also getting out of Germany. Herr Gradenwitz, one of the pastors at their church, moved to Holland. Dr Schnurmann prepared to go after being jailed for several days in Mannheim prison. His crime was to have been spotted (and promptly denounced for) reading a book of jokes about Hitler that he had bought in Basle.

  The number of Jews wishing to emigrate to Palestine was still small in 1934 but it was to increase dramatically in the following year, after the introduction of the Reich Citizenship Law, which was designed to safeguard the purity of German blood.

  ‘Marriages between Jews and citizens of Germany or kindred blood are forbidden,’ declared Hitler in a landmark speech to the Reichstag. In one short sentence, Jews had become outsiders in German society.

  Hitler claimed the law was necessary for the restoration of blood purity. Other clauses prohibited Jews from employing German-born domestic servants and from flying the national flag from their houses.

  The legislation divided Jews into different categories: among them were full Jews; mischlinge or part Jews of the first degree (those with two Jewish grandparents); and part Jews of the second degree, who had one Jewish grandparent.

  The reaction of Pforzheim’s Jewish community to such events ranged from despair to outrage. Their difficult situation was made even worse by Gauleiter Robert Wagner, who allowed the courts to start tampering with the legal rights of Jews. The court of appeal in Karlsruhe won the dubious distinction of being the first German court to grant a divorce on racial grounds. A Heidelberg man had filed for divorce from his Jewish wife because, he said, he ‘had not known about the full concept of this race’ when they were married.