The Boy Who Went to War (14 page)

Two weeks after this grim intelligent, the Aïchele and Rodi families switched on their radios in order to listen to a second broadcast that was to be made by Goebbels himself. Delivered live, before a huge audience in Berlin's Sports Palace, the much heralded speech was intended to be a triumphant call to arms for the German nation. Goebbels told his wildly enthusiastic audience that the time had come for total war.

‘Do you believe with the Führer and with us in the final total victory of German arms?…Are you determined to follow the Führer through thick and thin in the struggle for victory and put up with the heaviest personal burdens?' His rhetorical questions were met with frenzied cries of ‘Yes! Yes!' and loud chants of ‘Sieg Heil'.

A large part of Goebbels' speech was devoted to his favourite theme – the treachery of and danger posed by the Jews. It was they, he claimed, who had been responsible for the defeat at Stalingrad and they were also working hard to ensure the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany. ‘Jewry represents an infectious phenomenon which is contagious,' he said. ‘Germany…has no intention of bowing to this threat, but means to counter it and, if necessary, with the most complete and radical
exterm—
' At this point, Goebbels paused momentarily and corrected himself: ‘
elimination
of Jewry'.

Goebbels' barbaric sentiments were heard with weary resignation by the Aïcheles and the Rodis. There was nothing new in his vicious anti-Semitism: he had been expressing such views for years. Nor did the two families take any notice of his slip of the tongue. Indeed, no one in Pforzheim who listened to his speech on that February evening had any notion of the fact that Goebbels had meant to say ‘extermination', not ‘elimination'. Even his Sports Palace audience had failed to heed the slip; tellingly, they responded to his words with cries of ‘
Out
with the Jews', not ‘
Death
to the Jews'.

Nor did anyone in Pforzheim know that Goebbels' ‘radical' policy was already under way – that Jews were already being exterminated in vast numbers. No one, that is, until Max and Martha Luise Rodi received an unexpected visit from a distant cousin. Albrecht Scholl pitched up at their front door at some point in the early months of 1943, having just returned from a tour of duty in occupied Poland. In the privacy of Max's study, he poured out a chilling tale of brutality and death.

Albrecht had been posted to Poland at some point in 1942. He was an officer in charge of bookkeeping, a purser who had been sent to serve in the East. It is impossible to know how he found out what was going on. It is most unlikely that a purser in the regular army would ever have been admitted to a death camp; he must surely have taken his account from an eyewitness – someone who had seen it happen.

The camp that he was told about may well have been Treblinka, sixty miles to the north-east of Warsaw, which had opened its gates on 24 July 1942. In the first six months of operation, some 700,000 Jews had been murdered here – a number that was to rise still higher in the early months of 1943.

The killings had become a dreary routine for the SS guards in charge of this and the other five camps in occupied Poland. Victims were pulled from the arriving freight trains, segregated according to gender and then ordered to strip naked.

The fittest were taken to one side to serve as workers; the rest were led straight to the gas chambers. ‘On their way to their doom, they were pushed and beaten with rifle butts…dogs were set upon them, barking, biting and tearing at them.' So wrote Yankel Wiernik, one of the Jews forced to work as a labourer in Treblinka. ‘The chamber was filled, the motor turned on and connected with the inflow pipes and within 25 minutes at the most, all lay dead, or – to be more accurate – were standing up dead.'

The information that Albrecht Scholl passed on to Max Rodi was sketchy and incomplete. Whilst he certainly did not know the name of the extermination camp, he was shocked to the core by the fact that the Nazi regime had consecrated itself to mass murder.

Max and Martha Luise were also profoundly shaken by what they had heard. They had long known of the political camps like Dachau, where Communists, Socialists and Jews were imprisoned and sometimes killed. They were also aware of the transportation of Jews from all over Europe. Indeed, people were told quite openly that these deported Jews were being held in labour camps and would soon be able to build new lives in the occupied lands. It therefore came as a thunderbolt for the Rodis to discover that they were actually being massacred.

They still had no idea of the scale of the extermination programme and undoubtedly did not know about the existence of the gas chambers. It was not until the end of the war that the family learned about other camps, such as Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

Shortly after Albrecht's visit to the Rodi house, Peter and his sister were called into their father's study and saw immediately that something was wrong. With a grave expression, Max said that he had a matter of great importance to tell them.

Although he spared his children whatever grim details he might have gleaned from Albrecht, he wanted his two eldest to be aware that the Nazi regime was committing murder on a grand scale in the lands of the conquered; that Jews were secretly being killed in their thousands.

It was too dangerous for Max to inform his neighbours, friends or even other close members of the family. Such subjects were strictly taboo – and for good reason. Whoever they told would want to know from whom they heard it. If the implicated person was denounced, he or she would end up in Dachau.

The consequence of this culture of secrecy was that everyone kept their mouths shut. Even the Nazis had a slogan: ‘The enemy is listening.'

For reasons that remain unclear, Albrecht Scholl was demoted in rank after his tour of duty in Poland. Soon afterwards he was sent to the battlefront, where he was killed.

He had been told terrible things that had left him deeply, profoundly shaken. The assumption in the Rodi family was that he had chosen his own death.

 

Wolfram spent five months at the Marienbad sanatorium. The doctors prescribed rest, food and exercise. There was to be no early return to the battlefront.

At the beginning of February, his father paid him a surprise visit; a whole year had passed since he had last seen his son. ‘I stood in Wolfram's room where two other comrades were lying,' he wrote in a letter to his wife. ‘Wolfram was lying in his bed with a cold pack over his chest and he had a wonderful massive smile on his face when he saw me…he doesn't look bad, but you can see that he's just come out of a really serious illness.'

Wolfram proved a popular patient and kept the nurses amused by doing impersonations of Hitler. The laundry lady, who was fanatically pro-Hitler, was moved to tears by these performances, closing her eyes and imagining that the Führer was talking to her personally. However, the soldiers, whose battlefield sufferings had turned them vehemently against the Nazi regime, just laughed, all thinking it a huge joke.

As the time for convalescence rapidly ran out, Wolfram knew he would be discharged before the summer. ‘The doctor cannot stand it when men are healthy but remain in hospital,' he wrote.

The day for his release came soon enough. In mid-May, he was sent back to Pforzheim. Eight weeks later, after an unexpectedly long leave of absence, he received his call-up papers. He was sent away for training, first to Strasbourg and then to Münsingen. Nine months had passed since he had first contracted diptheria.

The new recruits were divided into groups when they arrived. The better-educated were to be trained as
funkers
or wireless operators. All the rest were to be taught how to use guns.

As there were not enough
funkers
, the officer in charge asked for one more volunteer. Wolfram put up his hand and was accepted immediately.

The
funker
's role was to transmit and decipher messages between the officers and their troops. Having been sorted into teams of two, the trainees began the slow process of learning Morse code. Wolfram was paired with Erwin Miggel, a mild-mannered Viennese organist with no interest whatsoever in the war. Their opposite team consisted of Lang and Ritzy, who shared similar sentiments.

For Wolfram, it was like being back among family. Werner Lang came from Oberammergau and his uncle had been Wolfram's tutor.

The two lads found they had friends in common and they enjoyed spending their evenings remembering happier times. Together with Miggel and Ritzy, they would sneak off to alehouses whenever possible, or race up the meadows behind the camp in order to catch a glimpse of the distant Alpine panorama. They could just make out the Zugspitze and Hörnle, the very mountains that Wolfram had climbed when he was in Oberammergau.

The greatest annoyance was their training commander, known to everyone as Lieutenant W. A petty tyrant, he did his utmost to humiliate the men under his charge, making them crawl through muddy puddles at the beginning of each day. Then, when their uniforms were sodden and they were soaked to the skin, he would send them to their Morse lessons.

Lieutenant W was a diehard Nazi. He used to insist that the trainees should report their parents to the Gestapo if they did anything that was ideologically unsound. He also punished his recruits for minor misdemeanours, like not saluting him correctly, and would frequently withhold food as a penalty.

He would eventually get his come-uppance. Accused of mistreating the men under his command and found guilty, he was severely disciplined. ‘He's been given two years in prison and demoted to a simple soldier,' wrote Wolfram in a gleeful letter to his parents.

It was during his training that Wolfram received news from Franz Bader, one of the men with whom he had travelled to the Crimea. Bader's letter was a litany of suffering. Soon after Wolfram had collapsed with diphtheria, all of his comrades had been drafted into the army and sent across the River Donetz to join the rearguard battle for Stalingrad.

‘So many killed,' wrote Wolfram to his parents. ‘And lots of my comrades died.' In fact, he later discovered that the only one known to have survived, apart from himself, was Franz Bader. He had managed to get out alive because his feet froze and he was semi-paralysed. In terrible pain, he had crawled to an army infirmary where he was treated for severe frostbite before being sent to fight on the Italian front.

As Christmas approached, Wolfram felt increasingly depressed. Food was scarce and morale lower than ever.

‘The shit starts again,' he wrote to his parents. ‘In all the pubs and inns, all the food is eaten up by six…the Italians soldiers here eat raw potatoes and think it tastes nice!' These new recruits, with their impish, tramontane features, fascinated Wolfram. ‘They've got such interesting faces,' he wrote, ‘and some of them have these huge beards, like the old Tyroleans with their felt hats and capes…they look like shepherds in the baroque cribs.'

Christmas left him in a deep gloom. ‘It's degenerated into one big drinking session,' he wrote. ‘Then, when the soldiers are completely drunk, they all sing stupid songs. There is absolutely nothing here to do with the Christian feast. They don't care at all.'

His spirits were temporarily lifted by a hike into the hills high above the training camp. In the sharp winter air, he once again glimpsed the Bavarian Alps, their soaring crags now powdered with snow.

One day, the youths were woken by sudden activity, followed by the announcement that a new regiment was being formed – in fact, an entire infantry division. The 77th was to be assembled from several undermanned infantry regiments, along with an artillery battalion, a signal battalion and a divisional supply unit.

Wolfram and his friends were to be a part of this new division, serving in the 1021st Grenadier Regiment under the command of Colonel Rudolf Bacherer, a tight-lipped Nazi with a balding head and piercing eyes.

He came from Pforzheim and Wolfram had been at school with his son, but the connection stopped there. Bacherer was a loyal servant of the Führer, an ideological Nazi who looked forward with relish to the battles ahead.

Just a few weeks after Bacherer's appointment, Wolfram was told that they were on the move. ‘On Saturday, we're leaving this place,' he wrote in a note to his parents. ‘But I've no idea where we're going.'

Wolfram's sister, Gunhild, could not stop shivering. In the autumn of 1943, the family's dwindling supplies of coal finally ran out. Erwin was unable to buy any more and, as the first blast of a Schwarzwald winter slammed into their exposed hilltop, the villa turned almost arctic.

Gunhild's bedroom, in the eaves of the house, was so cold that she would cry herself to sleep. As the mercury dipped far below freezing, all the windows iced up on the inside.

An additional source of misery to Gunhild was the family's meagre diet, which grew less appetising with every month that passed. Feeding a family in wartime required a considerable degree of household planning and organisation, skills that did not come easily to Marie Charlotte. She did her best to prepare dishes that provided some nourishment but Gunhild quickly tired of the same monotonous meals in which potatoes were the principal ingredient.

She started mixing yeast with stale breadcrumbs and water – a staple in times of hardship. This would then be blended into a paste so that it could be spread on toast. It was supposed to taste like meat; in fact, it tasted of yeast and stale bread.

Household management became more problematic still when the family found themselves playing host to an endless stream of strangers left homeless by the RAF's relentless bombing raids of German towns and cities.

‘Uncle Walter wrote from Lubeck,' recorded Marie Charlotte in one of her many letters to Wolfram. ‘He tells us that in the last raid there were 3,000 dead, 3,000 wounded and 30,000 left without homes.'

Many of these homeless were despatched into the countryside to be lodged with families whose houses were still intact. The Eutingen villa played host to a constant ebb and flow of temporary lodgers – single women, families, children and old men. Sometimes they stayed for just a few weeks; at other times, they would remain for a month or more. Gunhild knew better than to complain, yet it was nevertheless disconcerting to share the family home with complete strangers.

One morning, a whole new busload of homeless people were brought to Eutingen and assembled in the school playground. Everyone in the village was told to go and pick a family that could be lodged in their homes.

Marie Charlotte, busy with household chores, sent her sixteen-year-old daughter down to the lower village in order to make the choice. When Gunhild arrived at the school gates she found a crowd of refugees, all in need of shelter. Clueless as to which ones to pick, she eventually selected a mother with three children because she was impressed with the way the little ones said
mutti
.

The arrival of these temporary lodgers coincided with that of a new home help. Sigrid Weber lived in the lower village of Eutingen and her parents were close friends of the Aïcheles. When she turned sixteen and had to do her compulsory
Pflicht-jahr
or Duty Year Service, the two families conspired to arrange for her to spend that time being a maid in the Eutingen villa.

It was an arrangement that suited both sets of parents. Marie Charlotte would have someone she already knew to help with the numerous domestic chores, while the Weber family would be able to keep their daughter close to home. The only person who was not particularly happy was Sigrid herself. For much of her childhood she had been best friends with Gunhild; now, suddenly, she found herself a domestic servant in her old friend's household.

It was still bitterly cold and the house's size made it difficult to keep clean. Sigrid was constantly being told to sweep the floor and clean up but it remained a hopeless mess. The new lodgers and their young children contributed to the chaos. The kitchen was filthy from overuse and there was always a pile of greasy crockery in the sink.

Sigrid soon found herself entangled in a fraught relationship with Marie Charlotte. The tensions were due, in part, to the hunger and extreme cold, but they were also fuelled by Marie Charlotte, who had been living under immense stress for many months.

She was suffering, perhaps, from acute depression – and with good reason. Her two sons were both at war; she herself was being monitored by the Gestapo; and the greatest joys in her life – reading, art and music – were now firmly controlled by the Nazi regime.

Sigrid was constantly intrigued and often exasperated by Wolfram's parents. She had always known them to be eccentric but now that she was living under their roof, she realised they were completely different to all the other Germans she had ever met.

It was as if they were living in a fairy-tale world – in their own private castle, in a land that was completely divorced from reality. Sigrid was left with the impression that refined conversation and music were all that mattered – that intellectual exchange and culture were far more important than food and drink. Indeed, it was as if they did not care about what was taking place in the wider world. They certainly never spoke of politics or war, although these were taboo subjects for everyone.

Yet war constantly intruded on them, especially as a growing number of their circle lost their loved ones in battle. The most recent to die was Rolf Elsässer, whose parents were close friends of both the Aïchele and Rodi families.

His religious memorial service had to be conducted in secret because of the ban on the Christian Community. ‘Even though it wasn't in a church,' wrote Marie Charlotte, ‘it was very beautiful and solemn. The Rodi children and the Elsässers played music very beautifully and [then] they read the gospel of the Resurrection.'

Young Rolf had always told his family that he did not expect to come back from the front. ‘He'd prepared his young wife and his brothers,' wrote Marie Charlotte, ‘who all managed to contain their grief. It was much more moving than if they'd been in hysterics.'

In Eutingen, as in Pforzheim, public morale had by now dipped to its lowest ebb since the conflict began. By the winter of 1943 most people had realised that Germany was going to lose.

Hitler knew from his experiences of the First World War how important it was to keep up public spirits. Cinemas, theatres and concert halls remained open and virtuoso musicians were spared war service so that they could entertain those with loved ones at the front.

Marie Charlotte's spirits were temporarily lifted by an evening of opera at the Pforzheim concert hall. The renowned tenor, Wolfgang Windgassen, was making his debut as Don Alvero in Verdi's
La forza del destino
. His bravura performance electrified the Pforzheim audience; Windgassen was the heart-throb of thousands of young local girls. When he emerged to greet his swooning fans at the end of the concert, Gunhild was among them. She was presented to him and even got close enough to touch him, a rare and exciting privilege.

Wolfram's parents continued to visit close friends in these troubled times, but no amount of entertainment could disguise the fact that the war was going from bad to worse. The humiliating annihilation of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad had been the first cruel blow. The only consolation was the saving of General von Kleist's forces in the Caucasus, which had been able to cross the Don and reach safety before they too became trapped.

There had been more grim news throughout the course of 1943. In July, the Germans had launched their much vaunted offensive against the Kursk salient. It proved a catastrophe; the largest tank battle in history ended with the German army losing a staggering 2,900 tanks. By early autumn, Soviet forces had advanced into the Ukraine and driven the German army back to the River Dnieper.

The Allies, meanwhile, were taking advantage of their victories in North Africa, launching a seaborne invasion of Sicily in July 1943. The island was in their hands by mid-August, by which time Mussolini had been dismissed from power and promptly arrested. Within weeks of the victory in Sicily, the Allied Fifth Army was landing 170,000 men at Salerno, just to the south of Naples. With rumours of an impending Allied landing in northern France, where coastal defences were still not completed, Hitler looked increasingly vulnerable on every front except the home one.

 

As they boarded the train at Münsingen station, Wolfram and his comrades still had no idea where they might be sent. Some thought they were heading for the Ukraine. Others said they were off to Italy. All the speculation proved in vain; their destination remained so secret that even their commanders did not know.

The journey seemed to last a lifetime. The lads would sleep, then be jostled awake, then fall asleep again, and still they were on the move. At one point, one of Wolfram's friends peered out through the window and thought he recognised the Paris skyline. However, the train rattled on through the night and it was only when it finally came to a halt in Bayeux that they realised they had been posted to Normandy.

The men were told to walk to Caen, some twenty miles to the south-west. On their arrival, weary and footsore, Wolfram and his comrades were told to continue on towards Audrieu, a little village that lay a few miles from Caen.

They blinked in disbelief when they finally arrived there. Chateau Audrieu, their billet, was an elegant manor built in the formal classicism of pre-revolutionary France. The Livry-Levels, hereditary chatelaines since the early eighteenth century, had made few changes to its unstudied grace.

In the dim light of its oak-panelled salons, there were enough antiques to have kept Wolfram occupied for days, but the house was so dark that he could snatch only brief glimpses of the ancient trunks and settles, and portraits of the family's Louis Quatorze armigers – chevaliers of impeccable pedigree – remained as incorporeal as ghosts.

The German officers got to stay in the chateau while Wolfram and his fellow
funkers
were lodged in the outhouses, surrounded by acres of formal gardens, parterres, fountains, topiary, orchards, meadows and woodland.

As winter gave way to an early spring, they were sent on training exercises into the nearby woods and coppices, with constant reminders of the need to be absolute masters of their machines. Men's lives would depend on the speed with which they could transmit messages on the battlefield.

They were woken at three in the morning in order to prepare their horses. The animals had to be harnessed to a cart that carried their Morse machine – a clunking great piece of equipment that was far too heavy to be transported by hand. The men themselves packed everything else they needed into rucksacks: weaponry, cooking equipment and a
zeltbahn
– cleverly designed triangular structures that could be put together and made into a tent.

The Morse excursions took them through many picturesque farming communities. As the dawn sun broke through the woodland, and they sent and received messages, they were hotly trailed by infantry. These foot soldiers would fire blanks at them so that they could experience what it was like to be operating the machine in the heat of battle.

Once the exercise was finally over, the men made their way back to the chateau in their own time, often stopping at the farmhouses to try to buy eggs, milk and butter. A few of the farmers expressed their displeasure at the sight of German soldiers training on their land, but most were friendly, especially towards Germans who spoke a smattering of French. Wolfram's team-mate, Miggel, asked one farmlady: ‘
Avezvous du lait?
' She emitted a peal of gay laughter, placed her hands on her withered bosom and told him that her cows had milk but that hers had dried up years ago.

On one occasion, Wolfram went with one team member into a village store in St Come-de-Fresne. The shopkeeper shook her head sadly, saying, ‘So young,' to the lad that was accompanying Wolfram. She asked his age and, taking pity on him, gave him a little bag of sweets.

One morning, the men peered out of the window of their billet to see a band of exotic new arrivals shuffling up the chateau's long driveway: volunteers from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan who had been drafted in to help Wolfram and his comrades transport their unwieldy Morse machines.

Wolfram stared in amazement. Here was a band worthy of the Golden Horde – Tartar and Mongol warriors with tapering eyes and wispy beards. Seven centuries earlier, they would have arrived on horseback, wielding arced bows and damascene scimitars. Now, they were armed with more familiar weaponry, automatic Lugers, yet their Far Eastern appearance lent a touch of foreignness to a quintessentially French backdrop.

‘Turkmen!' wrote Wolfram to his parents. ‘There's
nothing
European about them.'

These Asiatic soldiers, who had yoked themselves to the German war machine out of their hatred for Stalin, brought a renewed sense of adventure to the training exercises. Wolfram was bemused by their lack of knowledge about the war. ‘They're taking part in this conflict even though they have absolutely no idea what it's about. Nor do they have any clue as to which country they're in and they certainly couldn't point to it on a map.'

 

The arrival of warm weather injected a note of optimism into the men's lives. ‘Now we have such lovely spring mornings,' wrote Wolfram, ‘and the bird chorus in the morning is just like at home. On the lawn beyond the chateau, the daffodils are beginning to bloom. At long last, spring is really coming.'

At the beginning of April, Wolfram's spirits were raised still further by a visit to Caen. It was market day and the town was packed with farmers peddling their local produce, prompting memories of the distant days of peace. ‘There's still lots to buy here. And there's such a lovely, joyful life in the streets and loads of civilians everywhere. It reminds one of the times that haven't existed in Germany for so many years.'

He was staggered by the variety of items on sale in the shops, quite unlike the empty shelves of Pforzheim, and decided to send things back to his parents. ‘I've bought you 250g of cocoa powder…I also bought myself two woollen socks, which I'll send you to keep for me. When I next go into town, I want to buy some angora wool which you can get here. And when I've saved up enough, I'll get myself a big rucksack. I saw a fantastic one in a shop window for 1,350 French francs.'