The Boy Who Went to War (12 page)

 

Wolfram was increasingly concerned about what the immediate future held in store for him. Just a few days after his medical, he received his call-up papers, which told him to make his way to a training camp at Niederbayern, a few miles to the north of Munich.

The girls on his wood-sculpting course decided to give the young lads a joyous send-off, decorating sleighs with spruce branches and hurtling across the snow-covered Ettal valley. This good-humoured farewell did little to allay the anxiety and anger felt by Wolfram and his friends. Wolfram was particularly furious at being called up. For years he had dreamed of being a sculptor. Now, the war had become an indefinite interruption to his studies.

Life in the Niederbayern camp was physically exhausting. Gun training and enforced marches left him close to collapse each evening. Worse still, he was perpetually hungry as all available foodstuffs were now being diverted to soldiers at the front. ‘Food is far more important for me than money,' he wrote in a letter to his parents. ‘Please send me something to spread on bread – jam, honey – or some other food or some ration cards.'

The daily routine was punishing. The men in charge of the military training programme were petty tyrants who delighted in treating the fresh recruits harshly. Wolfram and his comrades were woken at six: there was no breakfast. Having wolfed down whatever scraps they had managed to save from the night before, they spent the morning being instructed on gun maintenance and target practice, something at which Wolfram excelled.

The importance of physical fitness was stressed again and again. They were told that they could hope to survive the Russian front only if they were in peak physical condition.

‘I won't easily forget last Thursday,' wrote Wolfram in a letter to his parents. ‘We had to do a walk of nearly thirty-five kilometres.' Winter had been dispelled in an instant by a burst of spring sunshine and suddenly it was insufferably hot – ‘a real burning heat'.

An already difficult hike was made agonising by the fact that none of the men had been issued with any socks. After thirty kilometres, Wolfram could go no further: he, along with several other men, collapsed from pain and exhaustion.

‘As of yesterday,' he wrote, ‘I'm lying in bed in the infirmary. On both my feet they've cut open my blisters and drained them. The sores are really bad – the size of my entire foot.' For the next seven days he was unable to stand, but as soon as the blisters were partially healed he was sent back into training.

There was usually a brief break for lunch at midday – a one-pot meal, which was never enough for these growing teenagers. After this then they had four hours of marching and drilling in the afternoon. In the evening they would get half a loaf of bread, a bit of margarine, and some cheese and sausage. That had to be enough for the evening and the following morning.

After a few days in camp, Wolfram was feeling homesick and miserable. His most abiding memory of those eight weeks at Niederbayern was the lack of comradeship. It was the loneliest time of his entire life. In normal circumstances, he would have been recruited with friends from his own town or village. Having signed up with local farm lads from Bavaria and elsewhere in Germany, he had absolutely nothing in common with them.

As the end of May approached, Wolfram's time at the camp was fast coming to an end. All that remained was to find out where he would be posted. He longed to be drafted into the Alpine service, for he had a passion for mountains and had loved his hikes into the Bavarian Alps. ‘If only I could at least see the Alps from a distance,' he wrote to his parents. ‘How happy I'd be if I got to see the mountains again.'

It was not to be. At the beginning of June 1942, he learned that he was being sent to the East. The military situation there was critical and manpower in short supply. In the previous December, the Soviet army had regained a foothold on the Kerch peninsula, landing a large number of troops at Feodosiya. Sevastopol, too, was holding out against the German besiegers. Hitler decreed that the Crimea needed to be reconquered with immediate effect. Youngsters from the Reich Labour Service were to be sent to provide technical support, working alongside the army, in what was likely to be a prolonged military campaign. To the eastern front Wolfram must go.

 

Marie Charlotte was distraught when she heard this news, although she tried to put a brave face on it. ‘In this day and age,' she wrote in a letter to her son, ‘you have to take things as they come and try to see the positive side.' She was trying to remain upbeat, even though knowledge of his imminent departure to the East had dealt her a terrible blow.

‘For me,' she wrote, ‘in all experiences, I've recognised some sort of guidance and sense as to why things happened, including the painful things. You must remember that I shall still be thinking of you, even when you're abroad. Of course, I would love you to be spared anything unpleasant and difficult, but we have to remember that these things may contribute to making a stronger person out of you.'

Her advice was personal, heartfelt and born out of her Christian beliefs. She said that Germany was caught in a tremendous battle between good and evil. Although she did not mention Hitler by name, she was clearly referring to him as the diabolical figure who was leading Germany to ruin. ‘Everyone has to remain strong in this day and age – in this fight between good spirits and bad.'

The bad spirits had certainly got the upper hand in the state of Baden. In Pforzheim, Karlsruhe and elsewhere, there were no longer any Jews left, except for the
mischlinge
(the half-Jews and quarter-Jews), plus those living a hidden existence in attics and cellars. Yet their absence did not stop the relentless anti-Semitism that was still being taught in universities and schools.

Frithjof Rodi was at school one day, being taught about the creation of the world. The teacher said that God was very tired after making Adam and Eve but that He still had a little lump of clay left over. He tried to make a third figure but it was extremely ugly and so He threw it violently into the corner. This made its nose crooked and its legs all bandy.

The children listened to the story wide-eyed, never having heard this particular version of the creation. The teacher then told them how this crippled and misshapen creature slowly came alive and started creeping towards God. God was appalled and said to it: ‘Go to hell, you Jew!'

Once the teacher had finished with his story, he made all the children write it out in their neatest handwriting.

It was not just religion that was permeated with ideology. Science, too, was a target for the Nazis. They could do little to alter the chemistry and physics curriculum, but biology became an easy vehicle for anti-Semitism. In Hannelore Schottgen's class, race was the principal subject, focusing on the hierarchy of races. At the very top was the Aryan race: Nordic, tall, blond with blue eyes, a noble character, faithful, hard-working and the brightest part of the German population. Next down the scale were the Slavs, along with Latin and Mediterranean types. All other peoples of the world – especially those who were black or Jewish – were considered completely degenerate.

At playtimes, Hannelore and her friends would talk excitededly about how close they were to the proper race, although they were sorely disappointed when they worked out that hardly anyone turned out to be pure Nordic. The tall ones were dark, the blonde ones were little and the sole fair-haired girl who was tall had a crooked nose.

Hannelore felt uncomfortable in these biology lessons, largely because the teacher herself was uncomfortable, teaching the new curriculum without any enthusiasm while doing her best to keep a distance from it. Hannelore and her friends, aware that she did not agree with what she was having to teach, decided not to ask any difficult questions because they liked her.

History was also overlaid with racial theory. At school, Frithjof learned that the Germanic race, with its blond hair and blue eyes, had destroyed the Roman Empire. Back at home, he and his brother used to joke about the fact that Hitler did not look at all Aryan.

This was true enough, but he was nevertheless portrayed as the embodiment, indeed the fulfilment, of Germanic destiny. In history lessons, teachers reproached the medieval kings of Germany for travelling to Rome for their coronations instead of using their energies to colonise the East. Only Otto the Great was singled out as an exception because he had expanded eastwards and fought the Slavs.

While Frithjof and his classmates were being instructed in anti-Semitism, his older brother, Peter, discovered that his full-time education was about to be abruptly interrupted. In April 1942, to his mother's great distress, he returned home with news that he had been drafted into the
heimatflak
or home defence. He was just sixteen years of age but, in these times of total war, even schoolboys were required to offer their lives to the service of the Fatherland.

Peter's job – and that of the other boys in his class – was to shoot down any enemy planes that happened to pass over Pforzheim. He was given a uniform and some basic training in how the guns were to be fired. Russian ones that had been captured at the front, they required three or four people to fire them. His task was to get the gun to the correct elevation.

The boys were woefully under-trained and their weapons were far from accurate. They had to be able to see the plane in order to shoot at it. Peter never had the opportunity to put his training into action. Indeed, he rarely saw any planes passing overhead.

His other friends were less fortunate. One was sent to Peenemunde on the Baltic coast, where Hitler's secret rocket programme was being developed. This was a regular target for the Royal Air Force, whose bombing raids were often heavy and sustained. His friend's group shot down many planes. One day he was given leave to go home because the family house had burned down in a raid. While he was away, his group received a direct hit and they were all killed.

Peter hated his time in the
heimatflak
. He still had to go to school each morning; then, after lunch, he changed into his military uniform and reported for duty. Worst of all, he was no longer allowed to live at home. He and his comrades shared cramped accommodation in barracks on the edge of town.

The food was not bad because it was being brought to Germany from the occupied countries. They had plentiful supplies of cheese and butter, which had been stolen from Denmark.

Personal hygiene, however, was non-existent. They were allowed home once a week and Peter was always desperate for a bath, but the family tub was kept permanently full of cold water, in case of fire.

Wolfram and his fellow conscripts were to travel to the Crimea by train, a circuitous journey that would take them through the heart of German-occupied Ukraine. In different times and different circumstances, such a voyage would have been a fabulous adventure into the unknown for a group of wide-eyed young lads. As their destination was a war zone, the outcome was one of deep uncertainty.

They were to pass through many towns that had been brutally subjugated by the army and the SS, among them Brest-Litovsk, Kiev and Mariupol, before arriving at Dzhankoy on the Crimean peninsula. The 1,700-mile journey would take four weeks. For Wolfram, it seemed like four years.

Although the men were not aware of it at the time, they were unwitting pioneers in one of Hitler's more disquieting projects: to empty the Crimean peninsula of Slavs and transform it into a summer playground for the Germanic race.

‘For us Germans,' he said in one speech, ‘it will be our Riviera.' He planned to build a spectacular autobahn that would stretch from Berlin to Sevastopol, entertaining visions of smiling German families climbing into their Volkswagen cars and driving southwards to the sun. He intended to call this new colony Gothenland. ‘In the Eastern territories,' he said proudly, ‘I shall replace Slav geographical titles by German names.'

For Wolfram and his comrades, their own voyage southwards fell dismally short of Hitler's rose-tinted vision. They were loaded on to overcrowded transport trains, forty men to a wagon. Each carriage was divided into narrow, boxed-off compartments, with boards, above and below, that created just enough space for ten men to sleep. It was like going to bed in a coffin.

The atmosphere in the enclosed carriage was fuggy and claustrophobic and it stank of stale sweat and unwashed clothes. There were no windows – just a narrow slit through which the inquisitive or bored could peer out on to the fleckled smudge of passing fields and forest.

The worst aspect of the journey was going to the toilet. The men had to suspend themselves over the gap between rattling carriages and, with the aid of a friend to anchor them, do their business on to the tracks below. As there was no toilet paper, they used the straw that covered the floor or, once they reached the Ukraine, the local banknotes, which were completely worthless.

Each of the conscripts had his own manner of dealing with the pangs of homesickness. Some told stories of happy childhoods. Others spoke with feigned bravado about the dangers that lay ahead. Wolfram spent his daytime hours in a trance, peering out through the letter-box slit that was his only link with the outside world.

‘Brown cows in the fields, lots of houses, green meadows, a few hills, some windmills and derelict villages which from a distance looked quite nice to paint.' Such were his impressions in a letter he wrote to his parents.

There was a darker side to this idyllic picture – one that Wolfram was not able to include in the letter for fear of censorship. Alongside his memories of tumbledown villages and tidy potagers came the first hazy awareness of the more sinister reality that was overtaking these conquered lands.

He got his first shock as the train drew to a halt at the bleak frontier town of Brest-Litovsk, just a few miles inside Belorussia. A large number of Jewish women, all wearing yellow stars, were cleaning dirt from between the tracks. They were in a pitiful condition – their sallow faces and famished frames a visible testimony to long months of hunger and harsh treatment.

Wolfram, upset by what he saw, tried to speak with a group of girls, but no sooner had they begun to answer his questions than the bark of a German sentry echoed across the tracks.
Verboten! Verboten!
They were forbidden from communicating further.

Wolfram's eye was drawn to another group of Jews engaged in a desperate brawl over empty food tins that had been thrown out of the train windows by the German soldiers. They were wiping the insides of the tins with their fingers in the hope of finding some nourishment.

Wolfram and his comrades made their way from the station into town, where they became witness to a picture of human misery. Brest-Litovsk had been all but destroyed when the German army had attacked the Soviet garrison in the previous summer, subjecting defenders and civilians alike to a lethal combination of mortars and flame-throwers. The liquid fire was particularly devastating. The few survivors from the citadel emerged with stories of a heat so intense that it melted bricks and liquefied steel girders.

The siege was only the opening chapter in a long saga of suffering and abuse. The newly installed German overlords were treating the enforced labourers, many of them Jews, with ruthless severity.

The most brutal guards were the ethnic Germans who had lived in Brest-Litovsk for generations. To Wolfram, it was as if they were unleashing centuries of repressed hatred on those whose lives they now held in their hands.

He was no less horrified to see how they behaved towards their Soviet prisoners of war. A group of captives was in the process of digging a trench through the centre of town, overseen by their vengeful guards. Wolfram was rooted to the spot, watching an old man throw shovelfuls of earth up from the trench. Each time he paused to catch his breath, the guard smashed him across the head with a spade.

Although Wolfram did not know it at the time, these prisoners of war were actually among the most fortunate of the hundreds of thousands captured by the German army. When Minsk had been taken, some 300,000 Soviet troops were taken prisoner. When Bryansk and Vyazma were seized, the Germans netted a further 650,000 men. Most were starved to death, murdered in cold blood or imprisoned without shelter in the cruel months of midwinter.

The inhumanity that Wolfram witnessed in Brest-Litovsk was but a pale reflection of the atrocities being carried out in the surrounding towns and villages. In the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Soviet Russia, four
einsatzgruppen
or paramilitary task forces had moved in with orders to execute small groups of Jews and partisans working behind their front line. By the autumn of 1941, these paramilitary groups were organising mass executions of the local Jewish population. The death toll had already topped 750,000 by the time Wolfram arrived in Brest-Litovsk.

The slaughter had been ordered by Hitler and Himmler, who made it clear that it was to be undertaken with a ruthlessness exceeding that of all previous killings. ‘Even the child in the cradle must be trampled down like a poisonous toad,' said Himmler. ‘We are living in an epoch of iron, during which it is necessary to sweep with iron-made brooms.'

Secrecy was imperative. Hitler issued numerous directives on the importance of ensuring that the butchery remained covert and hidden. ‘We are not to publicise our objectives to the world,' he told his SS chiefs.

 

Wolfram witnessed scenes of barbaric treatment meted out to Jews in Brest-Litovsk. Although he knew all too well that vile things happened in war, neither he nor any of his comrades had any notion of the scale of the executions being carried out behind the scenes.

Even if they had known, they could do little, given their own unhappy predicament. There was an overriding feeling that everyone was trapped in the same terrible boat. Wolfram and the others lived in constant terror of what the future held for them.

They knew nothing of the
einsatzgruppen
death squads and were equally ignorant of the ethnic cleansing that was sweeping through the area around Brest-Litovsk. Not until after the war did Wolfram first learn of the mass murder of Jews, partisans and Soviet prisoners of war.

The ignorance of these young conscripts is not entirely surprising, given that deception was a key ingredient in the Nazi extermination programme. The gas vans used to kill some 350,000 Jews in the Soviet lands looked innocuous enough as they drove through the countryside.

The SS officer in charge of one such fleet of death vehicles, August Becker, ordered them to be made to look like mobile homes so as not to arouse suspicion: ‘[they were] disguised as house trailers, by having a single window shutter fixed to each side of the small vans and, on the large ones, two shutters, such as one often sees on farmhouses in the country.'

This folksy exterior belied the gruesome fate that awaited those within. The exhaust pipe was vented up through the floor of the rear cabin, enabling sixty people to be killed by poisoning and asphyxiation in each short ride to the mass grave.

The full horror of the outrages being visited upon the occupied territories was to remain unknown until 1946, when a small number of those who committed them were put on trial at Nuremberg. It was during the cross-examination of Otto Ohlendorf, head of Einsatzgruppe D, that the extraordinary level of planning and secrecy surrounding the policy of extermination was finally revealed. Ohlendorf spoke with precision, detachment and astuteness, proudly admitting that the 500 soldiers under his command had liquidated 90,000 men, women and children. He showed no remorse or regret, except when he spoke of his own men. His fear, throughout the killing process, was that they might become emotionally exhausted by conducting mass murder in secret and on a daily basis.

 

The train shunted slowly out of the sidings of Brest-Litovsk and began to push deep into Belorussia. There was a detectable change in the landscape as they headed southwards: at first, the fields were studded with coppices, which gradually merged into woods. Suddenly, one morning Wolfram awoke to find that the woods had thickened into forests whose giant spruce trees were wilder and darker than anything he had seen in the Schwarzwald.

‘Vast forests and wild meadows,' he wrote in a letter to his parents. ‘Houses made of wood with straw on the roof, or wooden slates.' This was a land that had yet to be touched by Stalin's plans for a modern agro-industry.

In one forest clearing Wolfram glimpsed his first Orthodox church. Its characteristic onion dome had a certain similarity to the Bavarian baroque, but its glittering cusp, topped by the double-barred crucifix of Eastern Christendom, signalled that they were now far from home.

Most of the churches in Belorussia and the Ukraine had been forcibly closed by Stalin some years earlier. One of the first actions of the invading German army had been to reopen them, earning them much gratitude from the pious faithful. Now, on Sundays and on feast days, the bells clanged in the crisp morning air and the faithful trooped to their re-established parishes.

Every railway junction and every siding was crowded with truckloads of soldiers being transported eastwards towards Stalingrad: Romanians, Italians, Spaniards and Hungarians, as well as large numbers of Germans. The Italians yelled anti-Stalin slogans, while the Spanish volunteers sang and shouted, but the Hungarians and Romanians, more wary of their German allies, went past in silence.

At one point the train skirted the outer suburbs of Kursk, which had become a key tactical position of the German front line. The men were left in no doubt that they were close to the front when mortars started exploding all around them.

The train looped back into the Ukraine and Wolfram took comfort in a renewed familiarity with the landscape. In places, it looked like rural Swabia. ‘Ukraine is beautiful,' he wrote in a letter. ‘Really thick black earth, cornfields and sunflower fields everywhere. Sometimes we saw villages which I liked very much – lovely clean-looking whitewashed houses with big thatched roofs.'

The weather changed dramatically as they headed southwards towards Dnepropetrovsk and Mariupol. The cool spring breezes faded in an instant: now, summer arrived in a pulsating furnace of heat. It was stiflingly hot in the airless train compartment.

As Wolfram and his comrades neared Dzhankoi, on the Crimean peninsula, they caught their first glimpse of the distant Caucasus mountains, their silver-white backbone picked out like a bright line of chalk by the blinding August sunshine.

The men were by now so hungry and exhausted that the heat and brightness started to play tricks with their eyes. When they saw the most beautiful silhouette of a city, they all got excited, trying to work out which one it could be, but then, in a flash, it disappeared and they realised that the entire city had been a mirage.

Just a few hours after this enticing vision, the train pulled into a siding on a bleak area of steppe some distance to the north of Feodosia. After a journey lasting more than four weeks, they had at long last arrived at their destination.

Feodosia had until recently been a handsome Black Sea resort – a place of
fin-de-siècle
villas and luxurious sanatoria frequented by fat-bellied apparatchiks of the Soviet Communist Party. In the course of three successive battles, the town had been besieged, lost and then finally recaptured by the German army, suffering such severe damage each time that its once-elegant waterfront, all stucco and pillars, now lay in ruins.

Wolfram assumed he and his comrades would be billeted inside the town. Instead, they were transferred northwards to a remote spot within striking distance of the Sea of Azov.

His first impression was of dryness and heat; he had never been anywhere so hot. ‘Sand and more sand,' he wrote in a letter to his parents. ‘And no trees anywhere. It's really, really scorching; and the sea is nowhere near as beautiful as the North Sea. It's mostly calm – there are no shadows anywhere.'

He dreamed of the mountains above Oberammergau. ‘I'd give anything to be on a big cold glacier,' he wrote. ‘A waterfall or green meadows with fruit trees. I'd prefer that to the whole of the sea.'

The men's tented encampment was close to the military airfield – a desolate spot with no sign of the customary German efficiency. The camp itself was a blighted wasteland, its ditches and open sewers awash with fluvial waste. Swarms of flies spread disease and infection. Wolfram and his comrades had almost constant diarrhoea.

‘There are a few people living here,' he wrote, ‘but I don't know how. Nothing grows. We're close to a Ukrainian village. The houses are built of mud and the people are very poor. They spend the whole day lying on mattresses outside their house.' Wolfram had little contact with the locals, with the exception of the Tartars, who were friendly towards the Germans because of their hatred of Stalin.