The Boy Who Went to War Page 6

  Soon after this infamous case, Wagner allowed state courts to ask ‘racial experts’ like Professor von Verschuer of Frankfurt’s Institute of Heredity and Racial Hygiene whether or not someone was Jewish. In one notorious case, the Karlsruhe court ruled that a boy was a Jew ‘because he looked like a Jew’.

  A new law required all families to fill out a stammbuch or family record book with the names, dates and religion of their ancestors stretching back several generations. As people flocked to Pforzheim’s archives to check birth certificates and baptismal records, some people learned to their surprise – and often dismay – that they had Jewish antecedents.

  One of Wolfram’s distant cousins was married to a Jewish man, albeit a non-practising one with so little interest in his faith that he had never even told his wife about his erstwhile religion. It was only when she accompanied him to a family funeral in Vienna that she realised that he – and, by extension, her young daughter – had Jewish blood flowing through his veins. In danger of falling foul of the regime’s anti-Semitism, the family took great pains to conceal their Jewish origins.

  In this they were successful: their daughter’s blonde hair and classic Germanic features would later see her celebrated by the Hitler Youth as an outstanding example of Aryan purity, an irony that was lost on everyone except her parents.

  Chapter Four

  Flying the Nazi Flag

  ‘Be careful or you’ll be sent to Dachau.’

  In the winter of 1934, Wolfram’s maternal grandfather died. Two weeks later, his maternal grandmother also passed away, ostensibly of a broken heart. Yet there is a sense in which both of them had chosen the time of their passing, no longer feeling at ease in the new Germany. Marie Charlotte’s father had, in the late 1920s, been supportive of Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. As a general in the army, although a retired one, he saw the need for a strong leader, but the Rohm putsch and the brutal violence that followed had repelled him. Nazi Germany was no longer a country in which he could take any pride.

  The death of Wolfram’s grandmother, Johanna, came as a particular blow. She had nourished Wolfram’s passion for gothic art, whisking him off to Freiburg to see the sculpted masterpieces of Germany’s medieval heritage. She had also encouraged him in his drawing, aware that he had a precocious talent for draughtsmanship.

  Wolfram’s grandparents had lived in a substantial property in the village of Uffhausen, near Freiburg. Its salons and parlours were filled with an eclectic gallimaufry of antiques: high-backed Louis XIV dining chairs, rustic farmstead trunks, settles and Palatine sideboards, samovars and posnets, pitchers and goblets, and homespun folk art that dated back to the eighteenth century. Now, many of these precious heirlooms were brought to Eutingen where they lent a further splendour to the villa. In difficult times and in increasingly desperate circumstances, Marie Charlotte clung to such objects of beauty. Antiques, freshly cut flowers and classical music brought her solace in these troubled years.

  Wolfram shared his mother’s love of old things; indeed, his interest in heirlooms and antiques would develop into a passion. It had been sparked by a stay with cousins in Brunswick who owned a rambling villa. Its darkened salons were full of old oak and polished mahogany, every cabinet and bench steeped in history. Wolfram returned to Eutingen clutching at the shadows of his medieval forbears.

  When he learned that neighbours in Eutingen also had a house stuffed with rare antiques, he begged his parents to ask if he could be shown around. The two elderly ladies who lived there were a little taken aback when Wolfram’s mother enquired as to whether her eleven-year-old son could be given a guided tour. They were no less perplexed when Wolfram began examining every object with the greatest scrutiny, trying to work out when it had been made and from which part of Germany it originated.

  They assumed that their young visitor would soon tire of their inlaid tables and marquetry chests. However, Wolfram spent the better part of the afternoon in the house and later told his mother that he had scrutinised every item of furniture – and seen every room – except the toilet. When Marie Charlotte repeated this to the ladies, they invited Wolfram back for a second visit and made good the deficit.

  That summer, the summer of 1935, Wolfram’s father decided to escape the oppressive atmosphere of Pforzheim and take his two sons, together with the family’s French lodger, on a hike along the banks of the River Neckar. His daughter, Gunhild, just seven years old, was considered too young for such a trip. Erwin wanted to show the boys the castellated citadel of Bad Wimpfen, one of the most arresting sights in the whole of Baden.

  Perched atop a thundering bluff of rock, Bad Wimpfen had once been the summer pleasure palace of the mighty Hohenstaufen dynasty. Eight centuries earlier, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa had chosen this neglected backwater as his country retreat – a place for hunting and carousing with vassals from across the Holy Roman Empire.

  Wolfram was spellbound by the remnants of the citadel with its vertiginous ramparts, machicolated battlements and lofty pinnacles. No sooner had he and his brother returned home than they began re-creating Bad Wimpfen in miniature. Diminutive farmsteads and peasant hovels, held together by stone and cement, began to encroach on the lawn of the lower garden in Eutingen.

  When the weather closed in, they continued their model-making indoors, creating an entire medieval burgh out of matchboxes, cartons and old scraps of wood. As Wolfram worked on his village in the downstairs salon, he peopled it with the peasants and pilgrims whose stunted frames and bearded jowls he had glimpsed in the candlelit retables of the local churches. Tonsured abbots and buskined farm-hands, franklins, pedlars and wizened apothecaries: all were conjured to life in Wolfram’s miniature Nibelungen world.

  ‘Wolfram! Mittagessen! Lunch!’ A shout from Clara the maid ought to have broken the spell, but Wolfram was still in a trance, absorbed in his handiwork. When her call failed to summon him and his brother to the dining room, she went to fetch them and later eulogised Wolfram’s work to Herr Becher, who had come to Eutingen that very day for his luncheon with the family.

  ‘Oh, just look at those model houses! What a wonderful thing the boys have created!

  ‘Wolfram, your model village is fantastic! And so well crafted. You really must give it to the Führer for his birthday. Don’t you think so, Herr Becher?’

  Hitler was riding high in popularity by the mid-1930s. The economy was stirring at last and unemployment was steadily falling. There was a feeling among many in Pforzheim that Germany was regaining its standing in the world.

  However, not all was quite as it seemed. Propaganda and media manipulation had put a highly attractive gloss to what was actually a very modest economic recovery. Nor was the reduction in unemployment anything like as dramatic as the official figures suggested. The ostensible fall in the number of people out of work, from 6 million in 1933 to 2.5 million in 1935, belied a more complex picture.

  Short-term contracts, the exportation of the young unemployed to the countryside (part of the so-called Voluntary Labour Service) and massive financial incentives to put women back in the home all helped to distort the figures.

  Prestige projects, such as the building of autobahns, featured heavily in Nazi propaganda and gave the impression of a government working tirelessly to create new jobs. Yet the much vaunted road-building programme involved at its peak a mere 84,000 people.

  Hitler had also won many plaudits for bringing an end to the street violence of previous years. In the last days of June 1934, he had moved to crush the power of the increasingly wayward SA. Its leader, Ernst Röhm, was shot, along with his closest advisors during the Night of the Long Knives, which provided the Nazis with an opportunity to get rid of many of their chief critics. Kurt von Schleicher, Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, was shot dead by the SS, as were others considered enemies of Nazism. ‘Shoot them down…shoot…shoot at once,’ screamed Goering as he studied a list of names. Eighty-five people were executed without trial, including twelve
Reichstag deputies.

  Hitler took full responsibility for the killings, arguing that they were necessary for preserving internal security. ‘I gave the order to shoot those parties mainly responsible for this treason…’ he said. ‘Every person should know for all time that if he raises his hand to strike out at the State, certain death will be his lot.’

  Many in Pforzheim were willing to excuse Hitler for the night of reckoning, but not everyone was convinced that he was putting the country on the right track. Among the dissenters were all of the parishioners worshipping at the Aïchele’s local church – and with good reason. In November 1935, Reinhard Heydrich, director of Third Reich security, issued a decree that banned Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical movement. All property belonging to the society was confiscated and the founding of any organisation to replace it was strictly forbidden. Heydrich had acted, he said, because the Steiner movement had ‘an international outlook and has links with foreign freemasons, Jews and pacifists’.

  He criticised Steiner for promoting the individual over society, something that ran counter to the basic premise of Nazi ideology, adding: ‘It has nothing whatsoever to do with the National Socialist rules on education.’ Heydrich considered the entire network to be ‘an enemy to the state’. By implication, all former members, including Wolfram’s parents, were enemies too.

  In the early years of the Third Reich, Erwin and Marie Charlotte were able to avoid the impact of many of the regime’s harshest strictures, largely because their house stood apart from its neighbours and was surrounded by an enclosed garden. It was a very different story for their church friends, the Rodis. Still living in an apartment in the heart of Pforzheim, they came under increasing surveillance.

  For young Frithjof Rodi, the blockleiter or block leader was the worst daily irritant. He was the lowest in the Nazi hierarchy in Pforzheim but the most invidious of them all, preying on every detail of people’s lives.

  Most block leaders had about fifty households under their supervision. Their task was to provide a link between the national party and the population at large. They were also charged with promoting party ideology while spying on those living in their patch.

  To Frithjof’s eyes, they represented a constant danger, capable of denouncing people for any number of minor misdemeanours, such as not having a picture of Hitler in the house or not hanging out the swastika on appointed days.

  Those who contravened party strictures risked internment in a concentration camp, the nearest one to Pforzheim being Dachau. The threat of Dachau hung over everyone in the area as a permanent menace. Unlike the extermination camps of later years, which were kept a strict secret, the concentration camps were frequently mentioned in the press. The regime wanted the populace to know that they would be severely punished if they did not conform.

  The young Rodi children used to taunt each other with: ‘You’d better be careful or you’ll be sent to Dachau.’ They never found out what went on there, for the few inmates who were released never spoke of what had happened to them. It was too perilous to talk of such things.

  The block leader who oversaw the Rodi tenement had noticed that the family attended the Christian Community each Sunday morning. He had also discovered that Frithjof’s parents were active members of the maligned Rudolf Steiner movement. When he learned that they held weekly meetings at their apartment with local activists, he informed the Gestapo.

  The Gestapo acted immediately, approaching the owner of the flat directly below to ask whether they could plant listening devices in his ceiling. However, the tenant was an old-fashioned high-school teacher with a strict sense of moral propriety. Although not on particularly friendly terms with the Rodis, he refused to grant access to the Gestapo out of indignation at their tactics. He also warned Max Rodi of what had taken place.

  Wolfram’s parents were as hostile to the Nazi regime as Max and Martha Luise. They also shared a determination to muddle through day by day, remaining as true to their principles as they could without putting their loved ones at risk. They were fortunate to be shielded from the worst excesses of Nazism by their former Pforzheim neighbour, Herbert Kraft. He had climbed the local party hierarchy over the previous few years and now held a senior position in Karlsruhe’s Organisation I, a body charged with converting people to Nazi ideology.

  He could – indeed, should – have denounced Wolfram’s father for his continual refusal to join the party, but he retained a great affection for Erwin and went out of his way to help his old friend. When a part-time post became available at the Fine Art School in Karlsruhe, he ensured that Erwin got the job. This made Erwin extremely unpopular with some of the teachers, who complained that he had gained promotion without even being a member of the Nazi Party. Kraft silenced the critics and Erwin remained in his post.

  Kraft was a regular visitor to the Eutingen villa, in part because he had taken a fancy to Clara, the family’s maid. Wolfram used to snigger as he watched Kraft go into the kitchen and pinch her bottom. Clara loved the attention – especially as it came from a senior Nazi official – and would smile with smug satisfaction.

  Herbert Kraft’s protection brought Erwin many benefits and enabled him to retain his position as a state-employed teacher throughout the long years of the Third Reich. Kraft also shielded Erwin from overzealous block leaders. His catchphrase, repeated like a mantra to his junior staff, was: ‘If you touch Aïchele, then you’ll have big trouble from me.’

  Wolfram’s mother, in common with so many of her contemporaries, could see a side to Hitler’s Germany that was compellingly attractive. Not only had the Fatherland apparently regained some of the pride it lost in 1918 but it had a leader who seemed determined to restore the country to greatness. Whilst Marie Charlotte would never take the step that would usher her into the party fold, she nevertheless had moments of hesitation about Nazism and needed to be brought back to earth with a bump, either by her husband or by one of his friends.

  One particular such moment came in the spring of 1936, prompted by the visit to Pforzheim of a senior Nazi minister. Dr Bernhard Rust was the Minister of Science, Education and National Culture – an influential politician who had become part of Hitler’s inner circle. Marie Charlotte had read an article advertising his visit in the local paper. He was to stay at the Hotel Ruf, close to the train station, and had extended an invitation to anyone in Pforzheim who might wish to meet him.

  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.