The Boy Who Went to War (22 page)

‘Come on,' someone shouted. ‘Right, down the side street. We must go down
there
. You won't get through that one, you'll burn.'

A loud scream announced the arrival of yet another crowd, bringing news that all avenues of escape were now closed.

The warden with Hannelore now took a decision that was ultimately to save both their lives. He told her to cover her hands and face with her coat and make a charge through the burning street towards the river. It was their last hope of survival.

Hannelore could not longer think, but just blindly followed the shouts of the leader: ‘Come on, keep going, step by step.'

Hannelore begged him to tell her how much further it was to the river.

‘Come on, keep going,' he shouted in answer. ‘Step by step.'

They pressed on doggedly through the burning rubble until they felt a faint breath of air. At long last they had reached the river and slumped on to its bank where they were shielded from the worst of the heat. Hannelore lay on her front, placed her nose just above the water and focused on simply trying to get oxygen into her lungs.

In Eutingen, Wolfram's parents once again emerged from their cellar and stepped out into the garden, to be met by an awesome sight. ‘To our horror,' wrote Marie Charlotte in a letter, ‘we could see the entire town in flames. A gigantic black cloud of smoke was drifting along the Enz valley.' The acrid-sweet stench of burning houses, furniture and corpses hung in the air.

Although they were three miles from the epicentre, the flames were so bright that Marie Charlotte had to shield her eyes. The moon, so pristine and beautiful an hour earlier, was now hidden by a ghastly wreath of smoke. There was an unreality to the scene. ‘The sky was completely red,' she wrote. ‘Black smoke shaded the soft light of the moon and made Eutingen appear as a peaceful and sleepy little village.'

Marie Charlotte experienced a feeling of helplessness, for nothing could be done for friends down below so long as the inferno raged. ‘We felt so anxious and worried about all the people we knew who must be trapped in the flames.'

There was also a feeling of guilt that their own little world had been saved. ‘We had a deep feeling of gratefulness that we had been spared. Nothing is broken and there is no sign of any damage around the house, except for one window in the workshop which is smashed.'

As she and Erwin watched the fire sweep a path along the Enz valley, they heard a curious cracking and rumbling noise: it was the sound of buildings collapsing into themselves.

Both of them would later recall being paralysed by a sense of helplessness as they gazed across the valley below. The only practical thing to be done was to prepare the house for any survivors. ‘We stayed up very late in expectation of homeless people turning up,' wrote Marie Charlotte. ‘Finally, the doorbell rang and Ysole and Gunthe were outside, together with her fiancé, a very nice Flemish man.' They had picked their way across burning rubble and witnessed the most harrowing scenes. All three were singed and blackened with soot. ‘They were desperate to get their breath back and to quench their thirst.' After washing their blackened faces, they told Marie Charlotte and Erwin how they had managed to make their escape.

In the lower village of Eutingen, Sigrid Weber and her sisters had also emerged from their shelter, crowds of soot-covered people coming from the direction of Pforzheim, picking their way along the banks of the river.

They walked in silence, the shock of the bombing having robbed them of speech. Homeless, blackened by fire and grieving for loved ones who were still caught in the inferno, they poured into the village in search of shelter from the February chill.

 

Hannelore Schottgen remained slumped on the river bank for many hours, waiting for the fire to burn itself out. Much later that night, when the inferno was a spent force, she found her way along the bank of the river to her parents' house. Miraculously, it had been spared by the fire.

The entrance door had been ripped off, all the glass had gone from the windows, the curtains were hanging in the trees and the garden was hittered with roof tiles. However, the house was still standing. She called out for her parents but was met with a ghostly silence. No one answered.

She made her way to the Stollen, where small groups of dazed survivors were beginning to congregate. Then, unexpectedly, she experienced her second miracle of the night. Her parents were among the crowd. ‘My mother screamed when she saw me. My hair and clothes were completely black.' But she was still alive.

For Hannelore, the sight of her mother also provoked a welling-up of emotion. She collapsed out of tiredness. Someone helped her on to a chair, wiped her face and gave her something to drink. It was dawn before she would see the grim reality of what had happened to Pforzheim.

 

Thirty miles away in Stuttgart, Captain Max Rodi had been first alerted to the fact that something was seriously awry by the distant drone of aircraft. Drafted back into the reserves as an officer some months earlier, and charged with tracking the path of enemy planes, he had climbed to the top of his Stuttgart watchtower shortly before 8 p.m. As he gazed in the direction of the town that was home to his beloved wife and children, he was shocked by what he saw. A dull orange glow hung in the sky and seemed to grow in intensity with every minute that passed.

He immediately realised that the aircraft were attempting to create a firestorm in the centre of Pforzheim, just as they had done in Dresden. The distant flames were already so bright that they hit up the pall of toxic black smoke, visibly hanging in the air. As Max stood there, desperately anxious for the safety of his family, he felt a curious tingling sensation on his face and arms. It was ash. Ash was pouring from the heavens. ‘A massive rain of ashes,' he later wrote. ‘Even in Stuttgart, I got ash on me, falling from the sky.'

Soon after, he noticed that the glow in the sky had suddenly become much brighter. It was clear that a fire of cataclysmic proportions was devouring Pforzheim. He made repeated attempts to get news of his family but without success. The wires were down, the lines were dead. In desperation, he begged his commanding officer, Oberleutnant Steller, to allow him to return home. This was immediately granted.

With no vehicles available, Max climbed on to his trusty bicycle and set off on the four-and-a-half-hour ride. As he neared the town, he was met by the acrid stench of burning.

He was still some distance from Pforzheim when he came across the first survivors. They told him that the entire town had burned down and that only the outskirts were still standing. This last bit of news brought some comfort: although he feared for his extended family, there was still hope that his wife and children had survived.

He pushed on towards Pforzheim until his path was blocked by rubble. Leaving his bike in a house by the waterworks, he started walking through a biting black smoke.

There was not a single building left standing. Every house had been consumed and had collapsed in on itself. The rubble stood metres high, making it very difficult for Max to get through the blocked streets.

He was hoping to pass his mother-in-law's house on Nagoldstrasse on his way home, but it proved impossible to orientate himself in the tangle of ruins. When he arrived at what he thought was the correct place, he found that nothing was standing.

Although it was not easy to locate the right heap of rubble, he eventually managed to find the remains of what he thought to be her flat. The trapdoor to the cellar was open, suggesting that whoever had been inside had also been able to get out.

Max was by now desperate to get to his own house and check on his wife and children. In the light of both the moon and the fire, he began the slow climb up the hillside until he at long last reached the garden gate. He was greeted by a sight that brought him the greatest possible comfort. His little home was unharmed, peaceful and quiet in the moonlight.

He and Martha Luise sat up into the early hours, reliving everything they had experienced over the previous few hours. It was too awful for words. ‘You just cannot imagine it,' Martha Luise would later write in a letter to her daughter. ‘A catastrophe without name.'

Two miles away in Eutingen, Wolfram's mother was in full agreement. It was clear from a glance across the valley, which was still glowing a dull orange, that their lives would never be quite the same again.

‘The English definitely made a proper job of it,' she wrote. ‘I now know the meaning of rubbing something out.'

As the night wore on, a steady trickle of people began appearing at the Aïcheles' home. Wolfram's father lit a bonfire in the garden and dusted off an iron cauldron that was normally stored in the cellar. Marie Charlotte then began preparing food for more survivors who were sure to appear in the hours to come.

‘People have been turning up to say that they're still alive,' she recorded in a letter written on the following day. ‘And every time, you hear yet more horror stories of what happened.'

Pforzheim was still smouldering when dawn broke on the following morning. A thick veil of dust hung in the air and black smoke drifted across the valley. It was eerily silent and would remain so for days. ‘Everything is deathly quiet,' wrote Martha Luise Rodi to her absent daughter. ‘Everyone is paralysed and speechless and dumb.' The only noise to be heard was the occasional rumble of a crumbling building.

Hannelore and her parents had returned to their damaged house at some point during the early hours of the night. Utterly exhausted, they tried to snatch some sleep in the basement kitchen, which had lost its windows and patches of plaster but had otherwise survived the bombing intact.

Others, too, began to take refuge here, grateful for shelter from the winter chill. It became very cold in the small hours and everyone huddled together. From time to time, Hannelore's mother made some malt coffee or peppermint tea to keep them all warm.

As it grew light, small groups of acquaintances also began to fetch up at the house. Some had little parcels with them: something they had managed to save from their former lives. One had an old violin. Another was clutching a pair of ski boots.

At one point, a close friend, Ferdinand von der Sanden, arrived at their kitchen door. The joy of seeing him alive was quickly checked by the expression on his face. Hannelore immediately realised that something terrible had happened. ‘He looked really depressed. When we enquired after his wife, he pointed at the bag he had with him and which he had put on the kitchen floor. “What's left of her is here.”'

He showed them the ashes and remains. ‘But I recognised her.'

He was in a highly distressed state, gasping for air and trying to regain his composure. He just managed to tell them: ‘Her face and shoulders were cut off. They lay under a big beam of wood. That's probably what stopped her burning completely. It must have fallen on her.' He paused for a moment before asking them if they would accompany him to the cemetery, then collapsed in tears.

Hannelore made her way outside. In the half-light of a new dawn, she gazed across the ruined town. Almost nothing was left standing: the familiar townscape of old had been obliterated. The British Bombing Survey Unit would later calculate that 83 per cent of the town centre had been destroyed, concluding that it was ‘probably the greatest proportion in one raid during the war'.

One of the few structures left standing, alone and incongruous, was the conical spire of the Stadtkirche. Its tiles had been blown off and its windows were shattered but its internal structure of beams was intact, pointing accusingly at the sky from whence the destruction had come.

Hannelore picked her way through the smoking rubble, passing little groups of people, silent and shell-shocked, who were heading towards the ruined centre of Pforzheim. Survivors were working frantically, trying to clear paths through the debris and look for friends who might still be alive.

Many were in despair, tears streaming down their cheeks as they pulled the corpses of loved ones from the ruins. ‘On the roadside there were bodies which had been dug from the rubble, put there in order that people could identify them. Everywhere there was an awful smell of decomposition and smoke.'

Hannelore and her mother were making their way along what remained of Durlacherstrasse when they bumped into Gretel, an old family friend. ‘There were two tiny blackened corpses lying on the street like bits of burned wood. Gretel pointed to one of them and said: “That's what's left of my mother.”' As she said this, a Nazi block-leader approached and started haranguing the women for being so unpatriotic as to commiserate over their dead.

Death was everywhere on the morning of 24 February. There were carts filled with corpses; there were even people pushing wheelbarrows containing dead bodies, sometimes with an arm or a leg dangling over the side.

 

Three miles away in Eutingen, Marie Charlotte was bracing herself for what she knew was going to be the most distressing day of her life. She, like so many other of the village inhabitants, was getting ready to head down the hillside into town to find out which of her friends had survived the catastrophe.

‘A horrible sight,' she would later write in a letter to Wolfram's older brother, Reiner. ‘Climbing over rubble, walking over corpses. There is no end to the horror.'

She had tried to prepare herself for terrible scenes, yet it still came as a huge shock to see the entirety of Pforzheim in ruins.

‘Just rubble,' she wrote, ‘where once there had been such beautiful grand houses. All the people in the Marktplatz, Langstrasse, Schlossberg, Leopoldstrasse and Sedansplatz – all died in their cellars, a sacrifice to the smoke and flames. In the Schlossberg, in the big cellars of the hotel restaurants, everyone died.'

As she clambered over the ruins, she watched dazed survivors attack the rubble with picks and shovels, desperately hoping to find friends or family alive in the cellars below. A lady with a big dog, a German shepherd, was crying and telling the animal: ‘Look! Look! Your master's lying underneath.' And the dog was whining and trying to sniff him out.

Marie Charlotte was deeply shaken by the number of dead. ‘Whole families have died, but there are also children without parents and parents without children…We went to see Trudel: her mother-in-law and brother-in-law have died. Frau Muller and Frau Kropt have died; her daughter at the fish shop has died. So many people have died.'

Overwhelmed by despair, Marie Charlotte made her way up the northern hillside to Spichernstrasse, to see whether her church friends, the Rodis, were still alive. Here, at least, was some good news. The immediate family had indeed survived. Martha Luise explained to Marie Charlotte that her mother and sister had managed to clamber out of their cellar and make their way along the river to their house on the hill.

While the two women exchanged stories of what they had seen, Max was busily writing a letter to his absent daughter, Ev-Marie. He felt the need to tell her of his experiences when he had ventured into town earlier that morning.

‘We went to Uncle Hermann's in front of the Bohnenberger Castle,' he wrote. ‘There were corpses everywhere. Almost impossible to locate the café – everything is destroyed, reduced to rubble and very hot. What happened to all the people? Can no one give us any information?'

Max had returned briefly to the family home to fetch a pickaxe, then headed back into town to check on the house of a close friend. This building too was in ruins. ‘I tried to free one of the windows of the cellar but the stones got hotter and hotter the deeper I dug. No one could possibly be alive under there. Just to think that two weeks ago I went there with your mother and Trudel and Elizabeth for Holy Communion.'

Giving up his search, he walked slowly towards Durlacherstrasse where he bumped into his cousin, Walter Brenner, who told him that he had lost his wife, his parents and his close family. ‘The two of us clambered over heaps of rubble and managed to get into one of the cellars where we found what was left of his family. But we didn't stay to identify them because Walter couldn't cope with it.'

Everyone who visited Pforzheim that day would return home with tales of suffering and tragedy. Sigrid Weber, former home-help to the Aïcheles, had gone into town in search of her grandmother. She saw dead bodies everywhere. A terrible, bitter-sweet smell hung in the air from the burned corpses.

The most terrible sight of all was the public air-raid shelter: everyone inside had perished. Endless shrunken and carbonated bodies had been brought out and stacked up on the pavement. Sigrid turned around and walked home to Eutingen, her clothes and hair carrying the sickly smell of charred flesh. She washed and changed as soon as she could.

Sigrid's father, accompanied by a few others, headed back into Pforzheim to resume the search for Sigrid's grandmother. He dug at the area where the house had stood but unearthed nothing except for a little bag with her keys in it. Sigrid was devastated. ‘Nothing else was found. No body. Not even a bone. The whole street had disappeared. My favourite grandmother, not quite sixty, was gone without me being able to say goodbye or go to her funeral.'

By the end of that terrible Saturday, Marie Charlotte felt as if she were trapped inside an all-encompassing nightmare, tormented by what she had seen and wondering why humans had to do such horrible things.

‘As I was making my way back home, I heard so many tales of horror that I couldn't take it in any more. Then I noticed that the first tentative buds of spring were emerging into the sunshine and I suddenly felt a hidden natural force that was more powerful than any of the destruction I witnessed.

‘I have this strange feeling of the strength in nature. The first crocuses are in flower and are already surrounded by bees. It feels to me as if some sort of miracle is taking place – there's a beauty that envelops these miraculous blooming flowers.'

 

The burial of the dead created severe logistical difficulties for the Pforzheim authorities. The corpses needed to be interred as quickly as possible but the town did not even have a working bulldozer. One was eventually borrowed from Heilbronn, some forty-five miles away, and a mass grave was excavated.

The scorched corpses were placed in layers and then quicklime was poured over them in order to speed up the decomposition. German soldiers in charge of the operation were given cognac to protect them from infection. There was no time for funeral arrangements. Priests of the two denominations stood there for days and days on end, blessing the dead.

It made for a forlorn and tragic scene. The cemetery was piled high with heaps of the dead and just one official had to register them all. When people spoke to him with their hands over their noses, he told them irritably that
he
couldn't spend all day with his nose covered.

Many of the extended Rodi family lost their lives in the bombing. Among them were a great-aunt and a cousin who had decided to remain in their cellar. They were later found as tiny heaps of ashes and could be identified only by their keys. Another of the family's cousins went to the cellar with a blanket, collected up the remains and took them to the cemetery on his handcart.

Frithjof was putting his own handcart to good use, searching for firewood in the burned-out shells of buildings. There was no electricity or gas in the aftermath of the bombardment and his mother needed fuel because she was constantly cooking for all the homeless people that were staying with the family.

 

Wolfram's mother listened to the radio every evening in an attempt to find out news about the Allied advance. At the end of March, Marie Charlotte heard a report that American troops had fought their way into Frankfurt. A few days later, she learned that the Ruhr was completely encircled by Allied forces, trapping 325,000 German soldiers.

‘The Germans must stay on their feet, no matter how,' said Goebbels in a defiant radio broadcast to the nation. ‘Just stay on their feet, and then the moral and historical superiority of the German people can manifest itself.'

Wolfram's parents still had their friend, Frau Weber, staying at their Eutingen villa. Now, just a few days after Goebbels' speech, Frau Weber's husband, conscripted into the army some months earlier, turned up unexpectedly at their front door. Attorney Kurt Weber told them that he was on leave but had decided not to rejoin his regiment. ‘What's the point?' he said. ‘It's nearly the end.'

He changed into civilian clothes lent to him by Erwin and hid the army uniform in a secret little alcove in the cellar beneath the house. He knew that if the villa were searched and the uniform found, he would be shot as a deserter. However, he also knew that the war could be over within weeks. Allied forces were advancing on every front.

 

‘Six in the morning: there was an explosion. The bridge near the sawmill was blown up. The tiles of the roofs and the windows of the grocery store, two floors below our apartment, were damaged.' So wrote Max Weber, friend and neighbour of Wolfram's parents, on Friday, 6 April 1945. War had at long last arrived in Eutingen.

The explosion was not, in fact, caused by Allied troops. Local German forces had blown up the bridge in the vain hope of halting the Allied advance, an act of destruction that infuriated the village inhabitants. A group of men gathered in front of the village hall and cursed the senseless actions of the military.

The distant boom of artillery could clearly be heard coming from the north-west, fuelling speculation that the Allied arrival was imminent. The nearby villages of Kieselbronn and Enzberg were rumoured to have been captured and it was said that Eutingen was to be the next stop for the Allies.

Whilst most of the villages were by now desperate for them to arrive, the local Nazi functionaries remained bellicose. One of them, Herr Issel, kept driving to nearby Dillstein to receive new orders and harboured vainglorious dreams of halting the Allied advance in the fields around his village.

To this end, he instructed all local boys born in 1930, and now aged fifteen, to assemble at the village offices. When none of them answered the call to arms, Issel was obliged to order a house-to-house search of Eutingen and the neighbouring area. He managed to gather forty-six young lads but forty of them slipped away before they could be deployed and only six were actually sent to the front.

On the evening of 6 April, Max Weber glanced out of his window and was surprised by what he saw. From the church tower opposite his house and from the town hall, white flags, as the sign of surrender, could be seen fluttering in the breeze. He hoped – prayed – that the waiting game was almost over, but just a few minutes after the flags' appearance, German soldiers swarmed into the main street and ordered them to be taken down immediately. Eutingen was not yet in Allied hands.

For the next four days, the village was caught in limbo. At one point, Allied troops were said to be arriving from Kieselbronn. A few hours later, it was rumoured that German troops in the valley below had surrendered. Most of those living in Eutingen were delighted to learn that French forces had been seen entering the neighbouring village of Niefern, which lay just two miles away. However, they were dismayed to hear that German soldiers had fought back, throwing hundreds of hand grenades into local houses and causing considerable carnage before they were finally defeated. From this point on, Max and his family spent most of their time in the cellar, even sleeping there at night.