The Boy Who Went to War (23 page)

The boom of cannon and artillery grew steadily louder. ‘The fighter-bombers are bombarding the forest and the tank barrages. Our village is becoming the main fighting zone, the front line.'

As the Allies approached the apple orchards that surrounded Eutingen, the local Nazi leaders quietly fled their posts. There was no longer any leadership.

All the bridges into Eutingen had by now been blown up – a sad sight to local eyes – but still there was no sign of Allied forces.

Shortly after dawn on 11 April, Max was awoken by a cry from his landlord.

‘Open the doors! They are coming!'

Max quickly obeyed and stood on the pavement with Mrs Heidigger, his neighbour, who was convinced that the Americans were about to arrive. However, to the great consternation of everyone in Eutingen, the troops marching up Hauptstrasse were Moroccan – allies of the French and widely reported to be brutal and poorly disciplined.

The occupying forces immediately began house-to-house searches. A Moroccan burst into the Webers' apartment, demanding: ‘Soldier? Gun? Pistol?'

A group of them occupied the town hall and issued their first order: ‘All radios, cameras and binoculars are to be brought to the church, along with any weapons.' It was a taste of things to come.

 

Wolfram's sister, Gunhild, was lying in bed when the Moroccan troops reached Eutingen. A soldier suddenly burst into her room, gun in hand. Gunhild was terrified, for the Moroccans were said to have raped many German girls when occupying other villages. She let out a piercing scream:
Raus! Get out!
The man was so startled that he ran straight back downstairs.

The other Moroccan soldiers who had pushed their way into the villa were rather less intimidated, surging into the kitchen to begin a careful search of the cupboards and larder, while on the lookout for any German soldiers who might have taken shelter in the house. Finding nothing untoward on the ground floor, they demanded access to the cellar.

Marie Charlotte reluctantly led them downstairs and watched in dismay as they rifled through her various store boxes and alcoves. Her dismay turned to alarm when she saw the thoroughness of their search: they were turning everything inside out and upside down. She knew that the family friend, Kurt Weber, had hidden his German uniform down there. If the Moroccans discovered this and realised that he was a deserter, they would shoot him on the spot.

Her anxiety grew as the Moroccans approached the alcove where the uniform was hidden. They were emptying everything as they searched for items to loot and were certain to find it within the next few minutes.

Suddenly (until her dying day she was never able to explain how), she began talking to them in French – an almost fluent stream of words and phrases that she had not used since her childhood in Alsace. The men were so taken aback, and so charmed to speak with someone who knew their own language, that they promptly abandoned their search and traipsed back upstairs.

Wolfram's father had anticipated that their house would be searched by the victorious Allies and had taken the precaution some days earlier of hiding his valuable Leica camera. He had placed it in the nesting box of his most aggressive female falcon, which had recently laid eggs and was very protective of her nest, allowing no one except Erwin near it. When one of the Moroccans peered into the cage, curious to see what was inside, the falcon hissed and flapped her wings in preparation for attack. The soldier rapidly beat a retreat.

 

It became apparent to the Aïchele family that the Moroccan forces were in no hurry to move on from Eutingen. Pforzheim had not yet been captured, for the Nazi leader, Hans Knab, was determined to defend the ruined town and thereby stall the Allied advance. While a tense waiting game was played out in the valley below, many of the Eutingen houses became lodgings for the occupying Moroccans.

The Webers had eight soldiers billeted in their ground-floor apartment. The men killed all the family's chickens and rabbits, and threw them on the kitchen table, demanding that Frau Weber cook them. Max was disgusted by their slovenliness – it was so different to what he was used to in Germany. The garden had been reduced to chaos, littered with feathers from the chickens, the skins of rabbits and the intestines of all the animals, as well as boxes and tins of American provisions.

His daughter, Sigrid, was concerned that the soldiers would find the jars of oil that the family had buried in the garden. Max was rather more worried about the safety of his pretty teenage daughter. He persuaded her to disguise herself as an old lady, dressing in old-fashioned clothes and swathing herself in a headscarf.

Sigrid's younger sister, Doris, fearful that the Moroccans would kill and eat her pet rabbit, hid it in a big trunk in the kitchen, leaving the lid propped ajar with a wooden spoon. Whenever the Moroccans came into the kitchen, she would remove the wooden spoon and quietly close the box. Her ploy worked: they never realised it was there.

The Moroccan troops were poorly disciplined and became particularly unruly whenever they laid their hands on alcohol. They kept petitioning Max Weber for schnapps, but he told them that he did not have any. When they eventually found some elsewhere, they were soon completely drunk, going on the rampage and smashing all the shop windows in the village. A textile shop stood opposite the Webers' apartment; the Moroccans broke all the glass and took all the cloth that was red, white and blue, hanging it from the electric wires all down the street.

After four tense days, the Moroccan troops left abruptly and were replaced by Tunisian soldiers under the leadership of French officers. The new arrivals were better equipped than the Moroccans, with black tea, biscuits, mustard, sugar and bottles of wine from the Rhineland, and had no need to pillage for their food. They also had smoked ham and bacon, which they fried in the Webers' kitchen.

The French officers took their meals in the family dining room and, as they ate, they told Max about the extermination camps. They talked of the cruelties of the SS in France and of the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, where, they said, they had found 700 French, Ukrainians, Russians, Poles and Jews lying on the ground, either dead and dying.

They also told him that the SS had been locking prisoners into ovens and gassing them to death. Max had difficulty crediting such stories, writing in his diary, ‘Everything they said to me seemed unbelievable.'

The occupation of Eutingen became increasingly chaotic with every passing day. Troops came and left – Moroccan, French and Tunisian – although no one seemed in overall control. Finally, one afternoon, all of the occupying forces suddenly packed up and left. No one knew what was going on and rumours spread quickly.

Max was appalled to see German soldiers move back into the village, lining up around the town hall and arming themselves with hand grenades, but they quickly melted away when yet more Moroccans arrived. These new troops were jumpy and clearly expecting trouble. A burst of gunfire sent the Weber family scuttling into their cellar. When they emerged, they saw that the Moroccans were using two of their neighbours as human shields, making Mrs Morlock and Mr Keller walk in front of them, although it was not clear why. As the troops passed, they smashed all the windows and doors that remained unbroken.

Just a few hours later, the inhabitants of Eutingen faced yet another unwelcome surprise. Trucks of angry French soldiers began pouring into the village. An officer banged on the Webers' front door and shouted: ‘Come on! Come out!'

He told Max that German civilians had shot at his troops, so the French were now going to have their revenge. ‘In two hours,' he said, ‘your town hall will be burned.'

Max was deeply alarmed, as his apartment stood next to the town hall and was likely to be consumed too. He hurriedly began to stow precious items in the cellar while his neighbours unrolled their hoses to spray the walls and roof with water.

When one of the French soldiers saw them doing this, he shouted hysterically: ‘You didn't see my village burn. Here, everything –
everything
– must burn.'

Young Doris Weber was terrified. ‘
Alles muss brennen! Alles muss brennen!
' The words rang in her ears.

The French were indeed intending to burn the whole of Eutingen, but their plan was stopped in its tracks in a most unexpected fashion. For several years, the village had played host to a dozen or so French prisoners of war. They worked on local farms during the day and had been well treated by the Eutingen locals, forging a close relationship with several of those who spoke French. Now, learning that the village was to be burned, they remonstrated with their compatriots and begged them to reconsider.

Their intervention had the desired effect: the French soldiers agreed not to burn people's homes although they insisted on torching the village offices, because they stood as a symbol of Nazi officialdom.

They threw hand grenades into the building and it quickly caught fire. The Weber family was extremely fortunate that the wind was blowing a stiff easterly, which carried the flames away from their apartment. A few of the French troops, annoyed by this, threatened the assembled villagers, telling them that they would execute fifty inhabitants for every shot fired at them. ‘A terrible day,' wrote Max. ‘The worst.'

The air of uncertainty struck great fear into everyone in Eutingen. With unconfirmed reports of shootings and revenge killings in nearby villages, most people stayed firmly indoors. The Webers, like the Aïcheles, were praying for the arrival of the Americans, who were rumoured to be very close to Pforzheim.

 

The sound of the Allied artillery grew louder with every hour that passed. Soon, it was coming from just behind the Rodi house. Young Frithjof could hear four distant booms as each of the battery's guns were fired, followed by a long
ssssccchhh
sound as the shells traced through the sky. It was the second week of April and a new wave of Allied forces were approaching Pforzheim from the north.

They could have taken the town without a fight if the battle-weary German troops on the ground had got their way. Most wanted to lay down their arms or retreat southwards to the Black Forest, but the town's leader, Hans Knab, refused to countenance any retreat. He wanted what was left of Pforzheim to be defended at all costs.

The Allies stalled for time, besieging the town for a further ten days but declining to fight their way into the ruins. The French sent in very low-flying aircraft, which flew round and round, all day long. Frithjof watched them circle the town from the vantage point of the family's vegetable plot. Whenever the pilots saw troops, they would pass on the coordinates to the artillery, with instructions to bombard them.

On one occasion, the planes began firing on the ground as they circled the hilltop on which stood the Rodi house. Frithjof's grandmother, who had been sitting outside in the sunshine, was unable to make a quick retreat into the cellar on account of her crippled foot. When young Frithjof walked into the dining room once the all-clear had sounded, he was surprised to see both his grandmother and his aunt huddled under the table. It was a sight to remember: two normally composed and dignified ladies lying on the floor in terror. He knew, at that moment, that the old orderly world had come crashing down.

After a week of Allied bombardment, Hans Knab realised that further resistance was futile, as well as likely to lead to his capture. Throwing in the towel, he fled Pforzheim, taking with him all of the town's senior Nazi officials. Shortly before leaving, he ordered the destruction of the electricity generating plant – only recently repaired after the February bombing – as well as all of the town's surviving gas and water supply lines.

In giving this order, he was putting into effect Hitler's Decree on Demolitions on Reich Territory, the so-called Nero Decree, in which the German army was ordered to destroy all surviving infrastructure as it retreated eastwards.

‘All military transport and communication facilities, industrial establishments and supply depots, as well as anything else of value within Reich territory, which could in any way be used by the enemy immediately or within the foreseeable future for the prosecution of the war, will be destroyed.'

Thirty miles away in Stuttgart, Max Rodi had also received this order. He was specifically charged with destroying all the bakery ovens in the city – an act of vandalism that he refused to undertake. Indeed, he was so incensed by the Nero Decree that he summoned the men under his charge, informing them that he was abandoning his post and returning to his home and family in Pforzheim. He added that they were free to do whatever they wanted; he was no longer their commanding officer.

Pforzheimers were as appalled as Max Rodi when they learned of the Nero Decree and were disgusted to discover that Hans Knab had left orders for it to be carried out to the letter. A small group remonstrated with the staff sergeant in charge of the operation and eventually persuaded him to refrain from such senseless waste. However, it was too late to save the town's remaining bridges from being blown up. Only the iron railway bridge was saved by quick-thinking inhabitants who pulled the fuses from the explosive devices and threw them into the River Enz.

The flight of Knab and his cortège left a power vacuum in Pforzheim. For a few hours there was no one in charge. Then, soon after they had fled, the sounds of different weaponry could be heard. Allied tanks could be seen circling around the Rodi family house and moving towards the town.

Martha Luise panicked when she saw the tanks. Her second daughter, Gisela, had only just gone into Pforzheim in an attempt to find some desperately needed food for the family. Now, fearful for her safety, she ran down the hill to fetch her and bring her home. Having done so, when the two women attempted to get back to the house, they found their path blocked by a German soldier.