The Boy Who Went to War (27 page)

Among the hundreds of soldiers based in the Pforzheim barracks were two officers who made regular visits to the Webers' family home in Eutingen. Frau Weber did their washing and ironing for them and they would come to the house on most days to pick up their clean shirts and trousers.

One of them was a jazz musician from Puerto Rico who, with endearing naivety, suggested that the Webers' eldest daughter, Sigrid, accompany him back to the States. The only drawback to his plan was that he did not speak a word of German. The two of them spent hours at the table, poring over a German–English dictionary and attempting to converse.

While they improved their linguistic skills, Sigrid's father, Max, would walk along Hauptstrasse holding a long stick with a nail in one end. Whenever the Americans threw their cigarettes out their jeeps, half smoked, he would pick up the butts with his stick and make hand-rolled cigarettes with the tobacco he collected.

After years of war and misery, there was at long last a reason not only to be cheerful but to dress up. One day, Sigrid found a gigantic swastika flag and cut it up to make a red skirt, a white blouse and a black bolero out of the material – an exercise in needlecraft for which she would have been executed just a couple of years earlier.

Several of the local girls had a particular admiration for the black Americans, who brought gifts, jazz music and an enviable coolness to rural Eutingen. To Sigrid's younger sister, Doris, they seemed like exotic creatures from another planet. She asked one of them if she could touch his hair, never having seen anything quite like it in her life.

The arrival of these American troops transformed daily life in Eutingen; they were so different from the Moroccans who had preceded them. At least one local girl would fall pregnant from these exciting liaisons. Another would follow her American lover back to Honolulu.

 

Wolfram did not feel at ease in the new, post-war Germany. In 1949, the Western Allies handed over some of their powers and Konrad Adenauer became the first chancellor of the new Federal Republic. There was a sudden emphasis on wealth creation and financial success – a drive towards prosperity that held neither interest nor importance for Wolfram.

After leaving Oberammergau he signed up for three years of additional studies at the Academy of Fine Art in Stuttgart. It was while he was living in the city that his interest in Orthodoxy, first kindled as he lay dying in the Ukraine, was suddenly reignited. Back in 1942, it had been the beauty of the polyphonic music that had captivated him. Now, it was the intensity of the religious art.

The Russian parishioners in Stuttgart were surprised to find a German in their midst and were no less so when they saw the icons that Wolfram was starting to paint. They were nothing like the sentimental, nineteenth-century icons so popular in Russia. Wolfram had turned instead for inspiration to the great medieval masters like Andrei Rublev, whose work had first come to his attention in a Pforzheim bookshop when he was just six years old. This return to tradition was also taking place elsewhere in Europe – in Greece, in Serbia and among the large Russian émigré community in Paris. It would lead to an extraordinary renaissance in Orthodox iconography that endures to this day.

In 1954, Wolfram undertook a three-month pilgrimage-of-sorts through Serbia and Greece, where he visited Mount Athos. It left him hungering for a more stimulating milieu than was offered by provincial Swabia. He decided to move to Paris, where he lived as a struggling artist among an international community, many of whom were impoverished White Russians. His new-found friends were refugees and émigrés like him – displaced theologians, bohemians and artists from the aristocratic dynasties of St Petersburg and Moscow.

It was to prove a turning point in his life, for his artistic skills now began to metamorphose into a style that was uniquely his own. Far from Germany and filled with ideas, he sought inspiration in everything he had seen over the previous decade: Russian icons, Bavarian folk art, the domes and minarets of Serbia and the works of Kandinsky, Klee and other modern artists.

His first important exhibition was in his native Germany, but as his reputation grew, so his works were shown to a wider public – in Paris, New York, Zurich and other cities across Europe.

He still made occasional trips to Eutingen to see his family and it was during one of these visits that he again met Barbara Rodi, the youngest of the Rodi clan, whom he had last seen as a small girl. Now twenty-eight, she was working as a teacher in Eutingen, in the same primary school that Wolfram had once attended. Wolfram's young nephew was one of her pupils and she was often invited to eat at the Aïchele villa, having become good friends with Gunhild, Wolfram's sister.

Wolfram was captivated both by her interest in art and by her striking good looks. Barbara was no less entranced by his tales of life in bohemian Paris. Thus began a courtship that was followed, in 1964, by marriage. The couple then returned to Paris where Barbara would later give birth to a daughter, Alexandra – my wife – and a son named Benedikt. The children were half Aïchele, half Rodi: in them, two families truly became one.

Wolfram and Barbara still live in Paris, in an apartment that is filled with exquisite works of art, all of which have been created by his own hands: a
hinterglas
or glass painting of St Florian; a wooden sculpture of an angel; an icon of the prophet Elijah ascending to heaven in a ball of bright-red flame. There are also more recent works that draw the eye by their dazzling complexity of form and colour. Hanging on the wall of the salon is a semi-abstract water-colour of near-liquid luminosity, in which a sun-shot Alpine winterscape merges with a block of cobalt sky.

Wolfram, now eighty-six, still makes frequent visits to the family villa in Eutingen. Last summer, he travelled to Oberammergau and renewed contact with the ninety-year-old Werner Lang with whom he had been a Morse code operator in Normandy.

Sixty-five years after last having seen him, Wolfram was able to tell Lang the touching story of Babei, the Turkmen, with whom he had been imprisoned on Utah Beach. Babei had originally intended to give his precious blanket to ‘good Herr Lang', his commanding officer, because he had been one of the few Germans to treat the Turkmen auxiliaries with dignity and respect. When Lang was nowhere to be found, he had given it instead to Wolfram, whom he also liked.

Babei's end was not as fortunate as that of Wolfram and Lang. All the Asiatic soldiers serving with the German army were eventually repatriated to the Soviet Union, where they were either shot as traitors or died of starvation in Stalin's Siberian prison camps.

 

The Second World War brought catastrophe to every country that participated. Yet it is Nazi Germany that will carry for all time the stigma of genocide and mass murder, enthusiastically carried out by party functionaries. The War Crimes testimonies of men like Otto Ohlendorf, head of the killing squads in the Crimea, make for particularly chilling reading. One finds an intelligent and rational voice speaking with pride about murder on a truly grand scale.

There were a few Germans, of course, who lifted themselves out of the moral void and performed acts of dazzling courage. The students, Hans and Sophie Scholl, gave lead to an active, non-violent resistance, distributing anti-war leaflets at Munich University. It was short-lived. Both were arrested, convicted and swiftly beheaded, along with their fellow ‘conspirator', Christoph Probst.

There were other Germans who performed less public but no less dangerous acts of charity: sheltering friends and neighbours who were Jewish or who had fallen foul of the regime.

There were also large numbers of Germans who found themselves unwillingly ensnared in this Mephistophelian nightmare – one that was not of their making nor within their control. The Aïchele and Rodi families retained a deep attachment to Germany throughout the twelve long years of the Third Reich, but it was a very different Germany from the one that Hitler was attempting to create. Theirs was the Germany of Goethe and Schumann, Heine and Bach.

Overnight, these two families discovered that the Nazis had wrapped their beloved Fatherland in a web of darkness. They despised Hitler for what he had done and they despised his entourage, but they also, naturally enough, wanted to preserve their own lives. They had young children to protect; they were scared of the Gestapo. They did not want to end their days in Dachau.

Under the Third Reich, they had precious little room for manoeuvre, being forced to compromise their morals, their ideals and their beliefs. ‘Heil Hitler' never tripped lightly off their tongues.

‘
Meine Ruh' ist hin
,' wrote Goethe, ‘
mein Herz ist schwer
.' My peace is gone, my heart is heavy. The Aïcheles and the Rodis would have given anything to have opted out. Instead, they were impotently sucked into a regime and a war that would lead to the darkest hours of Germany's history.

Thus it was that the eighteen-year-old Wolfram, much against his will, found himself a conscripted soldier in the Wehrmacht, travelling to Russia, to Normandy, to Britain and to America.

His story is not one of heroics on the battlefield, nor is it one of courageous resistance. It is simply an account of how an idiosyncratic young artist, whose only desire was to sculpt and paint, became trapped in a nightmare not of his making.

Wolfram: The Boy Who Went to War
is a true story based on the eyewitness testimony of Wolfram Aïchele, a young German conscript serving in the Wehrmacht.

Sixty hours of recorded interviews with Wolfram – together with family letters and diaries from the time of the Third Reich – form the heart of this narrative.

Other members of the extended family were also interviewed, along with close friends and contemporaries from Pforzheim. I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to the following family members: Wolfram and Barbara Aïchele, Gunhild Aïchele, Peter Rodi and Frithjof Rodi.

Frithjof Rodi has written his own book about his childhood – an autobiographical account entitled
Das Haus auf dem Hügel: Eine Jugend am Rande des Kraters.
It shows the profound dilemma of a middle class German family that, despite its disgust with Hitler, was influenced by patriotism and conservative traditions.

I am deeply grateful to Hannelore Schottgen (née Haas) for allowing me to quote from her autobiography and for kindly inviting me to her home in Taufkirchen near Munich. Her book is called
Wie Dunkler Samt um mein Herz: Eine Jugend in Der Nazizeit.
It is only available in German: for more information, see the bibliography.

Thank you to Sigrid and Doris Weber, friends and neighbours of Wolfram's parents, for spending time and effort recounting memories of their childhood in Eutingen. They also made available their father's manuscript diary covering the final few days of the war.

Thank you also to Doug Hicks, who I interviewed by telephone on 18 January, 2009. Hicks has written his own account of the bombing of Pforzheim. This can be found at
www.contact550.theraf.co.uk/hismemoirspforzheim.htm
.

I am grateful to Wing Commander Jack Harris, RAF 550 Squadron and North Killingholme Association for putting me in touch with other veterans.

A warm word of thanks is due to Dr Christian Groh of Pforzheim Stadtarchiv: he helped me locate a vast amount of hitherto unused material including newspaper reports, Nazi decrees and records of the town's post-war American military government. Thank you to Emilio Diebold for helping me in my research at the Stadtarchiv.

Lastly, I owe a debt of gratitude to my wife, Alexandra, who translated from German into English huge piles of documents and family letters, as well as many hours of taped interviews.

Unpublished manuscripts and papers:

Aïchele,
Family Letters, 1940-1947
, (various).

Aïchele, Marie Charlotte,
Erinnerungen von Marie

Charlotte Aichele, geb. Boedicker
(family archives).

Aïchele-Rodi, Barbara,
Lettre à mes petits-enfants, de leur grand-mère Barbara Aïchele-Rodi
(family archives).

Barth, Arthur,
Ortsgruppenleiter Arthur Barth's decree on how the populace of Pforzheim is to celebrate the Anschluss with Austria
(family archives).

OMGUS,
Papers of OMGUS, Office of Military Government (USA).
These are housed in Pforzheim city archives.

Rodi, Max,
Briefe von Max Rodi an seine Tochter Evmarie
(family archives).

Rodi, Max,
Tagebuch von Max Rodi, 1945–1946
(family archives).

Rodi, Peter,
Gefangenschaft und Flucht, 1944–1946
(family archives).

Weber, Max,
Diary of Max Weber
(in German).

Published newspapers, books, articles and websites:

(i) Newspapers

The following newspapers were consulted in the Pforzheim city archives:
Das Reich, Frei Presse, Pforzheimer Anzeiger, Pforzheimer Morgenblatt, Pforzheimer Zeitung, Volkischer Beobachter.

(ii) Books, articles and websites

Badsey, Stephen,
Utah Beach
, Sutton, 2004, Stroud.

Bastable, Jonathan,
Voices from Stalingrad
, David & Charles, 2006, Newton Abbot.

Beevor, Anthony,
Stalingrad
, Viking, 1998, London.

Beevor, Anthony,
D-Day
, Viking, 2009, London.

Bielenberg, C.,
The Past is Myself
, Chatto & Windus, 1968, London.

Brandle, Gerhard,
Die jüdischen Mitbürger der Stadt Pforzheim
, 1985, Pforzheim.

Bruhus, Wibke,
My Father's Country: The Story of a German Family
, Cornerstone, 2009.

Burleigh, Michael,
The Third Reich
, Macmillan, 2000, London.

Carell, Paul,
Invasion: They're Coming,
Transworld, 1963, London.

Dimbleby, Richard,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/holocaust/5115.shtml
. Dimbleby's description of Belsen, recorded for the BBC in 1945.

Evans, Richard,
The Coming of the Third Reich,
Allen Lane, 2003, London.

Evans, Richard,
The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939
, Allen Lane, 2005, London.

Evans, Richard,
The Third Reich at War, 1939–1945
, Allen Lane, 2008, London.

Gilbert, Martin,
Second World War
, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989, London.

Grill, John Peter Horst,
The Nazi Movement in Baden, 1920-1945,
University of North Carolina Press, 1983, Chapel Hill.

Haffner, Sebastian,
Defying Hitler
, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002, London.

Hagen, Louis,
Follow my Leader
, Allan Wingate, 1951, London.

Harrison Gordon,
Cross Channel Attack: US Army in World War Two,
United States Army, 1951.

Hastings, Max,
Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy
, Michael Joseph, 1984, London.

Hunt, Irmgard,
On Hitler's Mountain: My Nazi Childhood,
Atlantic, 2006, London.

Kershaw, Ian,
Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris
, Allen Lane, 1998, London.

Kershaw, Ian,
Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis
, Allen Lane, 2000, London.

Klemperer, Victor,
I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1933–1941
, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998.

Koch, H. W.,
The Hitler Youth: Origins and Development, 1922–1945,
Macdonald & James, 1975, London.

Laharie, Claude,
Le Camp de Gurs: 1939–1945
, Infocomp, 1985, Pau.

Lower, Wendy,
Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in the Ukraine,
University of North Carolina Press, 2005, Chapel Hill.

Mann, Thomas,
Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man,
Ungar, 1983, New York.

Maschman, Melita,
Account Rendered,
Abelard-Schuman, 1965, London.

Metelmann, Henry,
A Hitler Youth,
Caliban Books, 1997, London.

Metelmann, Henry,
Through Hell for Hitler,
Patrick Stephens, 1990, Wellingborough.

Middlebrook, Martin and Everitt, Chris,
The Bomber Command War Diaries: An Operational Reference Book, 1939–1945,
Viking, 1985, London.

Mitcham, Samuel,
Retreat to the Reich: The German Defeat in France, 1944,
Stackpole Books, 2007, Mechanicsburg.

Noakes, Jeremy and Pridham, Geoffrey,
Nazism 1919–1945, (vol 1): The Rise to Power; Nazism 1919–1945 (vol 2): State, Economy and Society; Nazism 1933–1939 (vol 3): Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination;
University of Exeter, 1983–2005, Exeter. An invaluable source, these volumes contain hundreds of translated documents and decrees from the period of the Third Reich.

Rodi, Frithjof,
Das Haus auf dem Hügel. Eine Jugend am Rande des Kraters,
Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg, 2006.

Rubenstein, Joshua and Altman, Ilya,
The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories
, Indiana University Press, 2008, Indiana.

Ruppenthal, Ronald,
Utah Beach to Cherbourg,
Center of Military History, United States Army, 1990, Washington.

Schottgen, Hannelore,
Wie Dunkler Samt um mein Herz: Eine Jugend in Der Nazizeit
, Wartberg, 2003, Gleichen.

Schulte, Theo,
The German Army and Nazi Policies in Occupied Russia,
Oxford University Press, 1989, Oxford. Shirer, William,
Twentieth Century Journal: A Memoir of a Life and the Times
(3 vols), Little Brown, 1984–1990, Boston.

Smelser, Ronald and Zitelmann, Rainer,
The Nazi Elite,
Macmillan, 1993, Basingstoke.

Steelman, Danny,
German Prisoners of War in America: Oklahoma's Prisoner of War Operations During World War Two
, The Oklahoma State Historical Review, vol 4, 1983.

Stephenson, J.,
Hitler's Home Front: Wurttemberg under the Nazis,
Hamblesdon Continuum, 2006, London.

Wiernik, J.,
A Year in Treblinka
. An English translation is available at:
http://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm
.

Wood, James (ed.),
Army of the West: The Weekly Reports of German Army Group B from Normandy to the West Wall,
Stackpole Books, 2007, Mechanicsburg. Zaloga, Stephen,
D-Day 1944: Utah Beach and US Airborne Landings,
Osprey, 2002, Oxford.