The Boy Who Went to War (11 page)

This visit prompted a vigorous debate among Hannelore and her teenage friends. Some said it was immoral to have a child that would be separated at birth from its parents. Others argued that war demanded huge sacrifices. All were very confused. For years, they had been brought up with the vision of good, clean-living girls belonging to the League of German Maidens: with the picture of virtuous German mothers (with blonde plaits) surrounded by happy children. Now they were being told to give birth to babies outside wedlock who would be brought up without a family.

Eventually one of Hannelore's friends, who was against the
lebensborn
programme, spoke for the majority. ‘At the end of the day,' she said, ‘we've got to keep our
menschenwürde
– our human dignity.' Hannelore agreed. It was the first time the words ‘human dignity' had meant something to her, rather than being an empty expression.

Her sentiment was shared by all the other girls in that Pforzheim classroom – even those who supported Hitler. No girl from her class gave a child to the Führer.

 

The Nazi propaganda machine stopped at nothing when it came to manipulating news, but there were some stories, particularly local ones, that could not be hidden. One of these, which occurred in Pforzheim on 22 October 1940, concerned a local doctor, Rudolf Kuppenheim, and his wife.

Dr Kuppenheim had been the chief physician at Pforzheim maternity hospital for more than forty years, in which he had assisted in the births of some 19,000 babies. He was a respected figure in the town – much loved and widely known.

Among his circle of acquaintances was Wolfram's father. Both had belonged to the same freemasonry lodge and had met at numerous discussion evenings. It was how Erwin had got to know so many of Pforzheim's cultivated people, many of them Jews like Dr Kuppenheim.

Although the Reuchlin Masonic lodge had been closed in 1933, its former members made an effort to keep in touch with each other over the years that followed.

Dr Kuppenheim's troubles had begun some months after the closure of the lodge. At the beginning of April 1933, his Jewish background had required him to take early retirement from his job at the maternity hospital. He was still allowed to practise privately, in recognition of his distinguished military record in the First World War. In 1938, even this right was withdrawn. Pforzheim's Nazi authorities informed him that he was no longer allowed to work on account of his Jewishness.

Yet Kuppenheim was not a practising Jew. Indeed, he had not practised the creed of his birth for many decades. An enthusiastic convert to Protestantism, he had become a parish councillor of his local church in Pforzheim.

Kuppenheim and his wife, Lily, had no intention of leaving their home town. Although they had been deprived of an income and both their sons had emigrated to America, they vowed to remain in Pforzheim and wait for the Nazi menace to burn itself out.

On the morning of 22 October 1940, they were woken by two SA men ringing their doorbell to tell them that they were to be transported out of Germany, along with the rest of Pforzheim's remaining 195 Jews. They had two hours to pack a few belongings: one suitcase, one blanket, a little food and 100 Deutschmarks.

When Dr Kuppenheim asked the reason for their transportation, he was given no answer, although he must surely have known that the future looked bleak. The SA officials were extremely menacing, promising to return in two hours, then moving on to the next Jewish house on the list.

It was at this point that Doctor Kuppenheim and his wife took a momentous decision. They had no intention of being transported. The doctor laid out all his medals from the First World War, including the Iron Cross, First Class, then he and his wife swallowed capsules of poison.

When the SA returned later that morning, both of them were already in a deep coma. They were taken to hospital but the damage done to their vital organs was so serious that nothing could be done to save them. They died on the following day.

The news came as a great shock to Wolfram's father, for he had been on friendly terms with Kuppenheim for years and held him in high esteem. As the tale of their joint suicide spread through the town, there was widespread dismay. Their deaths seemed to symbolise the terrible injustice of Nazi anti-Semitism. Kuppenheim had brought so many new lives into existence. Now, his own had been taken.

A grim fate awaited the rest of Pforzheim's Jews that October morning. ‘It is essential that Jews are properly treated at the time of their arrest,' read the directive handed out to those in charge of rounding them up. This, however, was only to avoid any protests from the local population. Twenty members of the Maier family were arrested; nine from the Dreifuss clan and eight of the Reutlingers. There was no respect for age or sex; among those taken was Gustav Aron, eighty-five years old, and Blondine Emsheimer, who was eighty-eight. Everyone was subjected to the same brusque treatment.

Seven or eight Gestapo came to the house of Kathe Schulz, one of the families on the list to be deported. ‘Get ready!' said the guards. ‘In two hours you'll be taken to France.'

Kathe Schulz herself was be to be spared transportation for she was a
mischling
or half-Jew, but her father, Hellmuth, was arrested and taken to Pforzheim's freight station, the point of embarkation. Kathe, desperate to see him one last time, made her way to the station. After much wrangling with the Gestapo, she was allowed to speak with her father for a few snatched minutes. Then he and the rest of Pforzheim's Jews began a three-day journey to Camp Gurs, a bleak internment camp in the Pyrenees.

Once again, Robert Wagner had shown himself to be a ruthless exponent of anti-Semitism. The deportation of Pforzheim's Jewish population, along with Baden's other 7,000 Jews, occurred fully fifteen months before the Wannsee Conference that determined the extermination of all Jews living under Nazi rule.

Most Pforzheimers were only dimly aware of this process for several years earlier the town's Jewish community had been confined to a ghetto, well concealed from sight. ‘The deportation of the Jews was carried out smoothly and without incident,' wrote Reinhard Heydrich in his report on the day's events. ‘The population was hardly aware of the action taking place.'

Wolfram heard nothing more of the deportees once they had been taken away. No one asked any questions about them. It was the last people heard of them until after the war.

Nevertheless, news, of sorts, reached the Rodi family. Max Rodi had somehow heard that the deportees were being kept in barracks without any glass in the windows and was outraged.

Glassless windows were the least of their troubles. The prefabricated shacks were flimsy and freezing in winter, and the roofs leaked every time it rained. The inmates slept on straw, for there were no beds, and the food rations meagre.

‘The barracks were very primitive,' wrote Herr Schulz, one of the few to survive Camp Gurs. ‘[There were] no windows and just a few air vents. When it rained or was cold, these had to be closed so there was darkness all the time.'

The food rations went from bad to worse during the winter months: 200 grams of bread per day, a bowl of watery soup and peas once every four weeks. Some 1,200 Jews died from malnourishment and dysentery. Of the 195 Pforzheimers deported to Gurs, 45 died of starvation. A further 78 were later killed in Auschwitz and 17 in other extermination camps. Only 55 would survive to the end of the Third Reich.

An equally uncertain future awaited their half-Jewish relatives who had been allowed to remain in Pforzheim. Forty were immediately categorised as ‘non Aryans'. Their property was confiscated and a raft of discriminatory legislation was introduced, in which they were forbidden to use trams or bikes and prohibited from owning typewriters, cameras and radios, among many other things.

By December 1941, they were required to display a yellow star outside their homes, as well as having a yellow star sewn on to their clothes. Most were too scared to go out at all, which perhaps explains why Wolfram never saw anyone in the street wearing a yellow star.

He had left Pforzheim by this time and returned only sporadically to visit his parents. Now seventeen, he was inching closer to his dream of becoming a sculptor. After years of hoping, he had finally been accepted on a specialist wood-carving course in the Bavarian village of Oberammergau.

The little village looked at its most alluring in the icy winter months. The gabled homesteads and taverns wore a thick quilt of snow, and icicles dangled like frozen scabbards from the eaves of the church.

The winter of 1941 was bitterly cold. In the empty forests that surrounded the village and on the lonely slopes of Mount Ettal, the snow glowed a dull steely-blue. Locals shivered when they ventured into the marketplace and hoicked up their collars against the boreal blast; no one had ever known it so cold.

Wolfram had arrived in Oberammergau three months earlier to learn the ancient craft of Bavarian woodcarving. The village had been famous for its sculptors ever since the eighteenth century when local craftsmen idled away the long winter months with chisel and adze in hand. In the winking candlelight of their country farmsteads, they performed alchemy on wood, transforming chunks of rough linden into puckish cherubs and wizened prophets.

Wolfram had until now been captivated by the sober gothic sculptures of medieval Germany but he was dazzled by the sheer flamboyance of Oberammergau's parish church. Angels arched their gilded feathers into the upper nave and pug-cheeked cherubs blasted their cornets at the shimmering high altar. The interior of St Peter and St Paul was a riot of rococo frescoes and
trompe l'oeil
trickeries.

The village was no less picturesque than the church. Oberammergau's façades were adorned with painted murals of prophets and patriarchs whose rich paunches and billowing gowns represented a cultural nod towards the worldly prince-bishops of Salzburg rather than the first-century martyrs of the Holy Land.

Wolfram, spellbound by what he saw, had never been happier in all his life. It felt as if this was where he was meant to be all along. The wooden sculptures that he found here, and the quality of the craftsmanship, could not have been further away from the kitsch imitations of later years.

The local population in and around Oberammergau was conservative in outlook and had supported Hitler enthusiastically for some time. More than 40 per cent of Bavarians had voted for the Nazis in the election of March 1933. Yet the realities of Nazism seemed less visible here than elsewhere. None of the students in Wolfram's class showed any relish for the politics of National Socialism. And although Hitler's mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden lay less than seventy miles away, it might have belonged to another world. The only reminder that Germany was a country in conflict came from Schloss Linderhof – one of King Ludwig II's private fantasy palaces. As Wolfram and his friends passed it, they noticed that its windows were boarded up and its entrance padlocked. Wartime had forced the closure of one of Bavaria's most famous attractions.

Wolfram should have registered for the Hitler Youth as soon as he arrived, but as no one actually ordered him to join, he decided to chance his luck by evading it completely. It was some months before the director of the school called all his students together to inform them that membership of the Hitler Youth was compulsory. Although he must have known that Wolfram was the only one not to have registered, he refrained from saying so. Wolfram reluctantly signed up, only to find that it was nowhere near as bad as he had feared. The man in charge of his age group had no interest whatsoever in Nazi ideology and left them to their own devices.

On Sundays, when there were no woodworking classes and no Hitler Youth, Wolfram and his friends would put on their hobnailed boots and gaiters, and take themselves off on mountain hikes into the high Wetterstein, over whose ice-topped crowns trailed wispy skeins of high-altitude cloud. With rosy cheeks and dripping noses, they would await the moment when the late-afternoon sun burst through the clouds, to reveal a new marvel. Wolfram had spent many days poring over maps and had worked out that there was a gap in the mountains through which you should be able to see the Dolomites, even though they lay more than one hundred miles to the south. To his great delight he was correct. On clear days, these distant peaks would nudge their gaudy pink summits into the sky.

In other moments of free time, Wolfram would head for the great Benedictine kloster of Ettal. This twelve-cornered abbey – another glittering pile of whimsical baroque – was also a functioning monastery – Wolfram loved to hear the rich liturgical chanting, the verse and echoed refrain that was sung from the daily psaltery. As the late-afternoon twilight spilled across the valley, and the winter solstice announced an even deeper chill, the choral voices of a dozen or more monks could be heard pouring forth into the darkness.

Wolfram had no idea that one of the Nazi regime's most outspoken critics, the Jesuit priest Rupert Mayer, was then being held under house arrest in the vaulted cloisters. The authorities wanted to kill Father Mayer but, worried that his death would make him a martyr to the faithful, they chose instead to incarcerate him in Ettal, where no one would ever see him.

 

Wolfram was under no illusions that he would be called into the Reich Labour Service when he turned eighteen. Yet the summons to report for a medical examination in February 1942 – the first inevitable step into the military – still came as a shock. The wording of the letter was brusque and official, signalling a dramatic transformation to his life. For months he had spent his days learning to wield his chisel with skill. Now, his woodcarving course was to come to an abrupt end.

Two of his Oberammergau friends managed to dodge the call-up. One suffered from asthma attacks and was pronounced too sickly to be drafted. The other had contrived to give himself blood poisoning by inhaling fumes from toxic metal and was sent to the local infirmary. The rest of Wolfram's comrades had their medical and were given certificates declaring them fit and well.

They all went for a beer afterwards. Some of the crowd made the best of the situation and pretended to be proud to be a part of the military. However, a couple of men in the tavern, who had already experienced the horrors of the front, introduced a note of sober reality to their celebrations, bluntly telling the lads: ‘You won't be rejoicing for much longer.'

There was good reason for pessimism: the war on the Russian front was going from bad to worse. Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union – spectacularly successful in the opening months – had faltered and failed as the mercury dipped to twenty below zero. Soldiers, many of them reluctant conscripts, began to ask themselves whether they would ever see their loved ones again.

It had been so very different at the beginning of the campaign. The German army had crossed the Soviet frontier at dawn on 22 June 1941 – the greatest land invasion in the history of warfare. Three million men, 3,300 tanks and virtually all the artillery units in the Wehrmaht were involved. The goal of the campaign was as ambitious as the size of the army: the conquest of the immense European slab of the Soviet Union.

Three army groups had thrust their way into Soviet territory on that bright summer's morning. Army Group North was to head for the Baltic areas of northern Russia and capture the great city of Leningrad. Army Group Centre was to advance towards Smolensk and Moscow, seizing the heartland of western Russia. Army Group South was to target the agricultural land of the Ukraine, capturing Kiev before wheeling sharply south-east towards the rich oilfields of the Caucasus. ‘When [Operation] Barbarossa commences,' said Hitler, ‘the world will hold its breath and make no comment.'

His confident predictions of a swift victory seemed prophetic. In the opening days of the campaign almost 4,000 Soviet aircraft were destroyed. By the end of the first week, advance units of the Germany army were one third of the way to Moscow. Vilnius fell on 24 June; Minsk was taken a few days later. By September, the siege of Leningrad was already under way.

Nevertheless, senior army commanders on the ground soon realised that Hitler had completely misjudged the strength of the Russian defence. ‘The whole situation makes it increasingly plain that we have underestimated the Russian colossus,' noted General Fritz Halder just a few weeks after the invasion was launched. He had been told to expect 200 Russian divisions in defence of the motherland. In reality, there were almost double that number and they clung to every inch of Russian territory with a tenacity that took the German army completely by surprise.

‘If we smash a dozen of them,' wrote Halder, ‘the Russians simply put up another dozen. The time factor favours them as they are near their own resources, whereas we are moving further and further away from ours. And so our troops, sprawled over an immense front line, without any depth, are subjected to the enemy's incessant attacks.'

In spite of these difficulties, the German offensive achieved some spectacular successes. Kiev was captured in September and the Crimea was cut off from southern Russia. The German army had also reached the northern suburbs of Moscow and looked set to snap up Stalin's capital before the New Year.

However, it was at this moment of near-triumph that winter arrived in earnest, with freezing blizzards and biting winds sweeping in from the eastern steppe. While Wolfram and his friends were enjoying wintry hikes in the countryside around Oberammergau, the poorly provisioned troops outside Moscow were suffering from the effects of severe frostbite.

German casualties had topped half a million in the opening months of the campaign. Now, that figure rose dramatically. In one twenty-four-hour period in December 1941, 14,000 German soldiers had frostbitten limbs amputated. Many of them would be dead within a few days.

It became increasingly obvious that conscripts drawn from Germany's youth would be needed to make up the shortfall in manpower. By the time Wolfram was called into service in 1942, there was little doubt that he would be despatched to the eastern front.

 

‘We've spent days without potatoes,' wrote Wolfram's mother in a letter to her son. ‘We've got the ration coupons to buy them but there are none available.'

In her kitchen in Eutingen, Marie Charlotte was trying to prepare lunch. In times of war and ever-stricter rationing, it was hard to conjure an appetising meal. Bread, pickled vegetables and bottled fruit formed the basis of their daily diet.

It had been some months since she had last seen her church friend, Martha Luise Rodi. The Christian Community, where they used to meet each weekend, had been forced by the city's Nazi authorities to shut its doors permanently the previous June. The order had come in the wake of Rudolf Hess's bizarre flight to Scotland in the spring of 1941 – a solo peace mission on the part of Hitler's deputy whose true aims and purpose have never been satisfactorily explained.

Hess was declared
persona non grata
by the Nazi regime and all of his personal interests – which included mysticism, astronomy and homeopathic medicine – became tainted by association. Although he had never adhered to Steiner's philosophy, he was deemed to be sufficiently close to his ideas to warrant the closure and destruction of Germany's remaining Steiner churches. ‘The end,' wrote Goebbels at the time, ‘of occultism.'

Marie Charlotte visited her Pforzheim parish to find that it had been ransacked by overzealous officers from the Gestapo and stripped of all its furniture.

‘You already know where I went on Tuesday,' she wrote. ‘It was so upsetting to go there and see it again. On the previous day, the last pieces of furniture had been roughly removed.' Her only consolation was that Herr Becher, their now-unemployed pastor, had been given some work by a member of the Community.

As the campaign in Russia lurched from crisis to crisis, both Marie Charlotte and Martha Luise prayed for a speedy end to the conflict. Both had sons who would soon be conscripted to the battlefront and both of them hoped against hope that the invasion of Russia would be completed – or defeated – before their sons had to take their turn on the front line.

Martha Luise had one reason to be thankful in these difficult times. Her husband, Max, had been relieved of military duties within a few months of being drafted into the army and posted to Alsace, some sixty miles away, to teach German to the local Alsatian schoolchildren.

Max soon forged a close relationship with the villagers, in part because he spoke good French. When they learned that he had five children, they took pity on him, giving him cheese and smoked sausages to take home to the family each weekend.

When Martha Luise, a perfectionist, was not busy with the housework, she and her daughters spent their time wrapping scores of parcels for cousins and nephews who had been drafted into the army and were now fighting for their lives on the eastern front.

Martha Luise had almost a dozen young soldiers to whom she sent parcels and wrote letters. The family also sent food and warm clothes to these men when they realised that Hitler had taken no precautions in equipping his forces for the Russian winter.

As the first blast of winter arrived in Pforzheim – and news from the front became increasingly hard to obtain – the Rodi family speculated on how their cousins were faring out on the Russian steppe. The whole nation was now being asked to knit woollen clothing for the troops. Even eleven-year-old Frithjof learned to knit. Meanwhile, everyone whispered to themselves that Hitler should have profited from Napoleon's failures in 1812.

No one dared to speak of such things in public, but there was a growing feeling among Pforzheimers that Hitler had committed a grave blunder in invading Russia. These fears were to sharpen still further in the second week of December, when Germany found itself at war with the United States.

Frithjof looked forward with boyish enthusiasm to the occasional visits from the officer-cousins fighting on the Russian front, whom he admired greatly. They came in their military uniforms, bringing back dramatic stories of tank battles and hand-to-hand fighting in blizzards and snowdrifts. Such things made a deep impression on a young boy. He and his older brother always wanted to know whether or not they had been awarded the Iron Cross and whether it was first or merely second class.