The Boy Who Went to War (18 page)

He and his comrades were exhausted after weeks on the move. They were also dispirited. No one wanted to carry on, especially the Austrian soldiers. They were all saying: ‘What's the point? It's going to be over soon.'

When the men came to a farmhouse later that day, they knocked on the door and asked the owner if they could sleep there for the night. The Frenchwoman told them that they could use her barn on condition that they got rid of their guns. The men dismantled them and buried them. It was a dangerous thing to do; discarding weaponry was tantamount to desertion.

The next morning was clear and dazzlingly beautiful. Wolfram and his comrades were ravenously hungry and wondered how they could get their hands on food. They spoke with the farm lady, who told them there were several well-provisioned Americans in the next village who were guarding a small group of prisoners.

The men begged her to go and tell them that they wanted to surrender, but she refused to get involved. They spent the rest of the day pondering what to do. By the time evening fell, they were all so famished that they decided to give themselves up just so that they could eat.

They made their way over to the village, catching the American soldiers completely off guard. The Germans could have easily overwhelmed them but no one could see the point. Instead, Wolfram and his colleagues simply walked up to them and asked whether they could surrender. The Americans were friendly and kind. After frisking the men and reassuring themselves that they had no weapons, they gave them cartons of cigarettes and a little food.

As Wolfram and his friends joined the other prisoners sitting on the ground, there was a moment of comedy that broke the tension. All heads turned towards the main street of the village where a lone Turkmen serving with the German army could be seen emerging from a house. With his Mongol eyes and wispy moustache, he looked as if he had just arrived from the Central Asian steppe. Yet he was dressed from head to foot in traditional Normandy costume and was trying to pass himself off as a French civilian.

The Americans all burst out laughing, as did Wolfram and his comrades. ‘You,' said the Americans, ‘are not French!' And they took the Turkmen prisoner.

Marie Charlotte had no idea that Wolfram had been captured. Each morning, long before dawn, she would creep up to the attic and secretly tune in to the BBC to listen to the long lists of German soldiers that had been taken prisoner by Allied forces. The names were read out in random order, starting at 4 a.m. She would sit there for several hours in the hope of hearing that of her son, although she never did, even after Wolfram was in safe American hands.

In the summer of 1944, a new family of homeless people – from the north of Germany – were installed in the attic of the Eutingen villa. At the same time, Marie Charlotte agreed to house the furniture of their friends, the public attorney, Kurt Weber, and his wife.

The Webers, who lived close to the centre of Pforzheim, feared that the town would at some point come under attack, which would place, their house and all their belongings at risk. As a precaution, they carried all their antique tables, chairs, wardrobes and escritoires up the High Path and stored them in the largest salon of the Aïchele villa.

Marie Charlotte spent much of her time in the garden, tending her vegetable plot and listening to the monotonous drone of British planes high above. Although they passed overhead almost every day, they nevertheless attracted the attention of Eutingen villagers. People would cast nervous glances at the sky and hope that they were heading elsewhere.

One bright August morning in 1944, a small group of villagers was chatting in Hauptstrasse, the main street in the village, when a fleet of RAF bombers was sighted in the cloudless heavens, returning to their home bases after a daylight raid on the nearby city of Stuttgart. As they crossed directly over the Eutingen hillside, one of the planes got into serious trouble.

Among those who had gathered in the street was fifteen-year-old Werner Rothfuss. He saw a brilliant flash as one of the planes dramatically exploded in the air.

He and the others scuttled into a nearby cellar as the plane fell to earth in a shower of burning metal. Then, when the skies were once again quiet, they emerged blinking in the sunshine to see where the wreckage had landed.

Young Werner was the first on the scene and found the twisted metal at the northern end of the village. It was a British four-engine bomber, whose debris was scattered across a number of gardens. He dashed back to alert all those who had seen the plane come down.

Doris Weber, sister to Sigrid, had been playing down by the river at the time of the crash and saw nothing. It was not until she walked back up the street towards the centre of the village, that she realised something was wrong. She caught sight of a large gathering of people on Hauptstrasse, in front of the village offices next to her family's house.

There was great excitement among the crowd and it did not take long for her to discover why. One of the British pilots had miraculously survived and had been brought as a prisoner to the Eutingen offices. He was badly injured and in considerable pain, suffering from a broken leg and severe concussion.

Doris did not get to see the pilot, but young Werner was whisked inside the building. His father was head of the local Red Cross and he needed his son's help in translating from German into English.

Werner was led into a ground-floor room, level with the street, where the pilot was being held. He was lying in a corner, his leg resting on a wooden splint.

Werner translated all the questions in the ensuing interrogation. He asked how many engines the plane had and how many crew were on board. The airman told him that it had four engines and seven crew, at which point someone said: ‘Good, then we have them all.'

Werner's father was in the process of bandaging the man's crippled leg when there was sudden commotion in the hallway outside. Several men entered the room, one of whom rushed at the Englishman and demanded roughly: ‘Does your leg hurt?'

The pilot answered: ‘Yes, it's broken.'

The man in question was Julius Zorn, a senior functionary in the local Nazi Party and an infamous troublemaker. Angered by the mere fact of the pilot's survival, Zorn clutched him by the throat while uttering threats and abuse.

Werner's father was extremely disquieted by Zorn's behaviour. Unable to stop him and sensing that something terrible was about to happen, he told his son that they should go, even though it meant abandoning the pilot. ‘Come, let's get out of here,' he said. ‘Such things have nothing to do with us.' The two of them left as hurriedly as they had arrived.

The crowd outside had by now dispersed, having been ordered by the local authorities to return to their houses. The sunlit street was completely deserted. An uneasy calm had descended on the village. The only sound came from the rustle of the trees and the distant barking of a dog.

Doris Weber was sitting in the kitchen, whose a window overlooked the village offices, when the silence was suddenly broken by a piercing, high-pitched scream, coming from the adjacent courtyard. She was shocked and terrified by it. It stopped as abruptly as it began and the village once again lapsed into silence. Doris could not forget the scream that kept ringing in her ears.

It was some hours before she learned what had happened to the rescued airman. She was peering out of the kitchen window when she noticed a long wooden box in the yard behind the wall. She asked a lot of questions until finally one of the neighbours saw no point in concealing the truth any longer: ‘The pilot is dead. That's his body in the box.' The scream had been his death cry, the very moment of his murder.

The story was hushed up by the local authorities and the villagers knew better than to talk about it in public. Yet there were whispered conversations in many Eutingen homes that night as people came to terms with the fact that a cold-blooded murder had taken place on their very doorstep. It provoked widespread revulsion, even though the pilot was British.

Four years were to pass before news of the murder spectacularly resurfaced. British military officials got to hear of the incident and alerted the Hamburg tribunal that was in the process of investigating war crimes.

Werner Rothfuss and his father were suddenly summoned to Hamburg as witnesses. Among the interrogated was Julius Zorn, the former Nazi official whose fiefdom had included Eutingen. Werner immediately recognised him as the man who had bent over the pilot.

The trial was due to begin on the following morning but when the witnesses assembled in the courtroom one person was missing. The judge called for silence: he had an important announcement to make.

He told the assembled crowd that Julius Zorn had killed himself. He had committed suicide by slashing his wrists.

 

While unsavoury events were unfolding in the village of Eutingen, Wolfram was experiencing his first hours as a prisoner of war. These were to prove even more dangerous than when he was serving as a
funker
. As he and his comrades were marched northwards by their American guards, they found themselves walking along a country lane just a few metres from the German front line. The next thing they knew, dozens of fighter-bombers were flying overheard and blitzing the German positions with heavy machine-gun fire.

The gunfire and explosions brought back disturbing memories of the carnage that Wolfram had experienced six weeks earlier on the road to Le Vretot. One of the Turkmen travelling with him was so petrified by the noise of the shooting that he panicked and rushed into the field in order to pray. Those prayers were to be his last. He was immediately gunned down from the sky and killed.

The prisoners pressed on northwards and soon reached the market town of Ducy, captured by the Americans just a few days earlier. Four years of German occupation, followed by sudden liberation, had sparked a spontaneous outpouring of joy. The local inhabitants were all completely drunk. They were singing patriotic songs and dancing in the street but as soon as they saw the procession of German prisoners they started shouting insults and hurling stones. The prisoners might have been lynched on the spot, had it not been for the presence of the American soldiers who protected them from the mob.

The ranks of prisoners swelled as they shuffled their way northwards until there were several hundred of them. Some miles to the north of Ducy they were picked up by a fleet of army vehicles and driven towards Utah Beach, where a makeshift prison camp had been established in the scrubland behind the dunes.

It was a bleak and windswept spot: there were no tents, nor even any blankets. The detritus of war lay all around – crippled tanks, mangled artillery, discarded guns and reams of barbed wire. The men were herded into a large, fenced-off area guarded by American soldiers that would serve as their home for the next six days.

They were divided up according to nationality. The Germans were told to assemble on one side and the Georgians, Turkmen and Azerbaijanis on the other.

As dusk fell, the Americans began to distribute food boxes to the prisoners. The German soldiers immediately formed themselves into an orderly queue and awaited their turn. The Asiatics, however, began arguing and jostling, and it was not long before a scrap broke out.

As punches were thrown and insults hurled, the fight developed into a near riot. Some of the stronger prisoners walked away in triumph with several boxes of food tucked under their arms. Those who were left empty-handed could expect a long and hungry night.

As the German soldiers watched in incredulity, Wolfram heard one of the Turkmen calling his name. It was Babei, who had been in charge of their horses while their unit was on the road. He was standing by the fence, clutching a blanket that he had somehow managed to get hold of.

He asked after Lang, one of Wolfram's fellow
funkers
, who had been in charge of the Turkmen and always treated them well. ‘
Lang gut
,' he said. ‘Lang's a good one.' Wolfram replied that unfortunately he had no news of Lang. Babei then threw the blanket over the fence and said in his broken German: ‘It's for you.' Wolfram was extremely touched by his generosity, aware that the Turkmen could have done with the blanket himself.

The prisoners arranged themselves on the rough ground as comfortably as they could, but there was little shelter from the wind and driving sand. Even though it was midsummer, the air grew damp and chilly as the last light faded. The men resigned themselves to a sleepless night.

It was about two in the morning when the Georgians in the adjacent camp lit a bonfire that they had made from bits of old crates. Once they had a settled blaze, they all started to sing.

The singing was quiet at first, but the sound steadily grew in crescendo as more and more of the men joined in. It was piercingly beautiful – an intricate polyphonic chant that drifted across the night, like a mournful and plaintive outpouring of all their sorrow. Wolfram could not help asking himself how the same people who had been so wild just a few hours earlier could now give voice to such haunting and complex melodies.

He remained in the camp on Utah Beach for the next six days. Each morning, the Americans asked for work volunteers, promising double rations as an incentive.

When the volunteers returned to the camp each evening, they invariably said that they had been burying decaying corpses all day, but Wolfram noticed that the last group of workers never came back. He had also observed that cargo ships arrived from England each morning with men and military hardware to be unloaded and assumed that the volunteers who did not return to camp had been taken away on the returning cargo ships. Desperate to escape from the war zone, he made it his goal to get aboard one of these vessels.

To his surprise, he found that a number of his comrades did not share his desire to get away from the battlefront. Many believed that the war was almost over and were hoping to return to their families in Germany as quickly as possible. They had no wish to end up as prisoners in England or, worse still, find themselves transported to America.

A few confessed to believing that Hitler's much vaunted wonder weapons would soon be unleashed on the Allies. If so, they wanted to be in a position to break out from their prison camp and continue the fight.

On 7 July 1944, the American guards once again called for volunteers. When the necessary number had been assembled, the rest of the men, including Wolfram, were told to make their way down to the beach. They were going to be shipped to England on the next available vessel.

Later that afternoon, they were taken to an enormous cargo boat that was being used to transport tanks and artillery from Britain to France. There were no decks inside – just a cavernous, hollow shell, like a gigantic warehouse. The guards told the men to find a space on the floor and sit down. A row of buckets at the far end of the hall would be their latrines.

The German soldiers retained a strict hierarchy of rank even in captivity, with the officers sitting in a little group by themselves. Each time the men needed to use the latrines, they had to pass these officers.

On one occasion, those answering the call of nature included a private named Goesser who had been at Wolfram's training camp in Strasbourg. Wolfram, seeing him now wearing the badge of a sergeant, assumed he must have been promoted on the battlefield.

The officers also noticed the badge as he passed and began jeering at him. ‘Congratulations!' they shouted amid peals of laughter. ‘So you're a sergeant now!'

It transpired that Goesser, hearing a rumour that the American army required work only of the lower ranks, had promoted himself by removing the badge of rank from a fallen sergeant and sewing it on to his own uniform.

The genuine officers teased him mercilessly but with good humour. One of them said: ‘Come, come over here. Have you got your papers? I've still got my stamp and I can validate your promotion.'

Goesser was embarrassed but nevertheless had his papers stamped, upon which the officers extended a general invitation to the others. ‘Hey, does anyone else want to be a sergeant? Come over here and we can sort it out!'