The Boy Who Went to War (6 page)

The article marked the beginning of a sustained assault on traditional Christian teaching that would culminate in Hitler's decree that teachers change the text of the Bible. The sentence, ‘Salvation comes from the Jews', which Jesus says to the Samaritan woman, was unacceptable in the eyes of the Nazis. Schools across Germany were instructed to delete this line from the Bible, as well as from all books of biblical history.

Young Frithjof Rodi was a pupil in his father's class on the day that this was put into effect. Max Rodi had to instruct his pupils to bring their copies of the Bible to the front of the class. Then, with his own fountain pen, he had to put a line through the offending sentence.

Max, however, could not bring himself to do this without passing comment. He got the whole class to read aloud the offending passage; this was followed by a long discussion as to what Christ meant by it. Then, when the discussion was finally over, he told the children that he had been ordered to delete it from their copies.

In Wolfram's class, the new ideology was also beginning to bite. One afternoon, there was a visit to his school by a German émigré newly arrived from the Volga. Like so many ethnic Germans, the man's family had lived there for more than two centuries. Now, in the wake of Stalin's persecution, they were flooding back to Germany.

The man brought pictures of starving and malnourished children, and told Wolfram and his classmates that the Russians were deliberately denying them food. There were endless images of corpses – entire cartloads of them – and he recounted harrowing stories of cannibalism. The photographs were so vivid that Wolfram had nightmares for weeks afterwards.

The Nazis wanted children to grow up with an intrinsic fear of Communism, but exhibiting these gruesome photographs to the pupils at the school angered many of their parents.

Wolfram's mother and grandmother were horrified when Wolfram told them what he had been shown at school that day. Both of them were already very anti-Nazi. This only served to intensify their hostility.

 

In the summer of 1934, Wolfram's father decided to take his two sons to the North Sea coast for three weeks' holiday. It was a spot that Erwin loved – the windswept island of Hallig, close to the Danish coast. The three of them lodged with a family of farmers who lived in a quirky hilltop house. The boys played at being Robinson Crusoe while Erwin spent his time painting.

No sooner were they back in Eutingen than Wolfram's favourite uncle, Walter, brought news that daily life had taken a turn for the worse in the time they had been away. Pforzheim's Jews had come under attack from the Nazi regime and were in a state of despair. Their shops were boycotted, their livelihoods put at risk. The head of the Baden Synagogue Council, a certain Dr Moses, stated that living under the new Nazi dictatorship made one feel ‘as if one is in front of a state of rubble'.

It was almost a year before the introduction of the notorious Reich Citizenship Law, yet one respectable Pforzheim family had already fallen foul of the regime. Werner Becker – son of one of the town's Protestant vicars and well known to both the Aïchele and Rodi families – had fallen in love with Margot Bloch, the Jewish daughter of a local lawyer.

The banns were published on 13 May 1935, an event that signalled an escalation in their problems. A few days later the young Becker read in a Berlin newspaper that a state functionary in Pforzheim had, for the first time since Hitler came to power, refused permission for an Aryan to marry a Jew. To his horror, Becker realised that the article was referring to him.

A couple of days later, the local Pforzheim newspaper picked up the story. Under the headline, ‘
Rassenschande
', or ‘Race Shame', it described Becker as ‘an enemy of the state and a disgusting adversary to the Nazi Party' who had sold himself to an alien race.

Each subsequent day, the newspaper carried articles that condemned him for his choice of bride while praising the state functionary who had put a stop to the marriage. That same functionary received official congratulations from the Reich Minister of Justice.

The young couple's love was only strengthened by the abuse that was daily heaped upon them. Determined to marry, and revolted by the new Germany, they fled first to Switzerland and then to Argentina.

Wolfram's parents followed the story with heavy hearts, yet this was by no means an isolated case. Indeed, it marked the beginning of a dramatic increase in state-sponsored activity against the town's Jewish population.

One day, Hannelore Schottgen accompanied her mother, Frau Haas, into the centre of town for groceries. Large groups of SA men were standing at the entrance to one of the Jewish-owned supermarkets with big posters that read: ‘Germans be careful: Don't buy in Jewish shops: The Jews bring bad luck.'

Frau Haas turned to her young daughter and said: ‘Well, don't look at them. I'm going to go shopping where I want. They can't forbid me.'

What she had not realised was that two of the men standing outside the store were taking photographs of everyone going inside. She returned home with her shopping and quite forgot the incident, but she was soon in for a rude awakening. At the cinema that evening, the main film was preceded by pictures of all the people who had shopped at the town's Jewish-owned department stores.

The photographs were shown with captions such as ‘This lady shows no shame: she still buys her provisions in Jewish-run stores,' or ‘This man is a slave to the Jews – he still shops there.'

Now it was Frau Haas's turn to be shamed. Her husband's employer phoned that very evening to tell them about the film. Although the photo was a little blurred, he said that it looked very much like Frau Haas, and warned her to be more careful in future. ‘The wife of a German educator,' he said, ‘does not buy in Jewish shops.'

From this point on, young Hannelore was sent to do the shopping on her own as the Gestapo were forbidden from taking pictures of children.

 

Among the well-known figures in the Jewish community was Wolfram's uncle, Walter, a supporter of the now-banned Communist Party. Eccentric and uncommonly erudite, he had studied theology at university with the vague thought of becoming a priest. As his fascination increased with the languages of the Middle East – Arabic and Hebrew – he changed his mind and became a specialist in the latter.

He often went to the synagogue in those early years of the 1930s, not because he was particularly religious but because he loved the ceremonies surrounding Judaism. He also had great respect for those who were earnest about their faith and practised it with conviction.

Although it was not the most auspicious of times to develop a passion for Judaism, Uncle Walter became greatly sought after in the Jewish milieu. Jews across Germany had seen the way the political wind was blowing and had decided to sell their properties, quit the country and rebuild their lives in British-controlled Palestine. Herein lay a problem. The British required potential settlers to speak Hebrew, something that was beyond the capabilities of most bourgeois Jews. Walter suddenly found himself much in demand as teacher of classical Hebrew.

One family who had taken the decision to leave was the Guggenheims, who ran an elegant hat shop in central Pforzheim. Young Hannelore Schottgen bumped into them one evening as she and her father walked past the local synagogue.

Herr Guggenheim came over and greeted them cordially, but he did not make his usual little jokes. Indeed, he was very grave as he broke the news that his family had opted to emigrate to Palestine.

Hannelore's father went very quiet. ‘But that's not possible,' he said to Herr Guggenheim. ‘You can't leave everything behind and quit your homeland because of stupid propaganda.'

Herr Guggenheim shook his head, confessing that he was scared for his family. ‘Read the newspapers,' he said.

The departure of the Guggenheims was shortly followed by an exodus of other Jewish families. The Salamons, owners of a luxury lingerie store, were the next to go. Then Doctor Weill, a well-respected Pforzheim lawyer, announced that he, too, was emigrating. This proved the last straw for Hannelore's father.

‘I can't believe that Weill also wants to leave,' he said when he heard the news. ‘I can't understand why they're all leaving.'

The Aïcheles' Jewish friends – or those with Jewish origins – were also getting out of Germany. Herr Gradenwitz, one of the pastors at their church, moved to Holland. Dr Schnurmann prepared to go after being jailed for several days in Mannheim prison. His crime was to have been spotted (and promptly denounced for) reading a book of jokes about Hitler that he had bought in Basle.

 

The number of Jews wishing to emigrate to Palestine was still small in 1934 but it was to increase dramatically in the following year, after the introduction of the Reich Citizenship Law, which was designed to safeguard the purity of German blood.

‘Marriages between Jews and citizens of Germany or kindred blood are forbidden,' declared Hitler in a landmark speech to the Reichstag. In one short sentence, Jews had become outsiders in German society.

Hitler claimed the law was necessary for the restoration of blood purity. Other clauses prohibited Jews from employing German-born domestic servants and from flying the national flag from their houses.

The legislation divided Jews into different categories: among them were full Jews;
mischlinge
or part Jews of the first degree (those with two Jewish grandparents); and part Jews of the second degree, who had one Jewish grandparent.

The reaction of Pforzheim's Jewish community to such events ranged from despair to outrage. Their difficult situation was made even worse by Gauleiter Robert Wagner, who allowed the courts to start tampering with the legal rights of Jews. The court of appeal in Karlsruhe won the dubious distinction of being the first German court to grant a divorce on racial grounds. A Heidelberg man had filed for divorce from his Jewish wife because, he said, he ‘had not known about the full concept of this race' when they were married.

Soon after this infamous case, Wagner allowed state courts to ask ‘racial experts' like Professor von Verschuer of Frankfurt's Institute of Heredity and Racial Hygiene whether or not someone was Jewish. In one notorious case, the Karlsruhe court ruled that a boy was a Jew ‘because he looked like a Jew'.

A new law required all families to fill out a
stammbuch
or family record book with the names, dates and religion of their ancestors stretching back several generations. As people flocked to Pforzheim's archives to check birth certificates and baptismal records, some people learned to their surprise – and often dismay – that they had Jewish antecedents.

One of Wolfram's distant cousins was married to a Jewish man, albeit a non-practising one with so little interest in his faith that he had never even told his wife about his erstwhile religion. It was only when she accompanied him to a family funeral in Vienna that she realised that he – and, by extension, her young daughter – had Jewish blood flowing through his veins. In danger of falling foul of the regime's anti-Semitism, the family took great pains to conceal their Jewish origins.

In this they were successful: their daughter's blonde hair and classic Germanic features would later see her celebrated by the Hitler Youth as an outstanding example of Aryan purity, an irony that was lost on everyone except her parents.

In the winter of 1934, Wolfram's maternal grandfather died. Two weeks later, his maternal grandmother also passed away, ostensibly of a broken heart. Yet there is a sense in which both of them had chosen the time of their passing, no longer feeling at ease in the new Germany. Marie Charlotte's father had, in the late 1920s, been supportive of Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor. As a general in the army, although a retired one, he saw the need for a strong leader, but the Rohm putsch and the brutal violence that followed had repelled him. Nazi Germany was no longer a country in which he could take any pride.

The death of Wolfram's grandmother, Johanna, came as a particular blow. She had nourished Wolfram's passion for gothic art, whisking him off to Freiburg to see the sculpted masterpieces of Germany's medieval heritage. She had also encouraged him in his drawing, aware that he had a precocious talent for draughtsmanship.

Wolfram's grandparents had lived in a substantial property in the village of Uffhausen, near Freiburg. Its salons and parlours were filled with an eclectic gallimaufry of antiques: high-backed Louis XIV dining chairs, rustic farmstead trunks, settles and Palatine sideboards, samovars and posnets, pitchers and goblets, and homespun folk art that dated back to the eighteenth century. Now, many of these precious heirlooms were brought to Eutingen where they lent a further splendour to the villa. In difficult times and in increasingly desperate circumstances, Marie Charlotte clung to such objects of beauty. Antiques, freshly cut flowers and classical music brought her solace in these troubled years.

Wolfram shared his mother's love of old things; indeed, his interest in heirlooms and antiques would develop into a passion. It had been sparked by a stay with cousins in Brunswick who owned a rambling villa. Its darkened salons were full of old oak and polished mahogany, every cabinet and bench steeped in history. Wolfram returned to Eutingen clutching at the shadows of his medieval forbears.

When he learned that neighbours in Eutingen also had a house stuffed with rare antiques, he begged his parents to ask if he could be shown around. The two elderly ladies who lived there were a little taken aback when Wolfram's mother enquired as to whether her eleven-year-old son could be given a guided tour. They were no less perplexed when Wolfram began examining every object with the greatest scrutiny, trying to work out when it had been made and from which part of Germany it originated.

They assumed that their young visitor would soon tire of their inlaid tables and marquetry chests. However, Wolfram spent the better part of the afternoon in the house and later told his mother that he had scrutinised every item of furniture – and seen every room – except the toilet. When Marie Charlotte repeated this to the ladies, they invited Wolfram back for a second visit and made good the deficit.

That summer, the summer of 1935, Wolfram's father decided to escape the oppressive atmosphere of Pforzheim and take his two sons, together with the family's French lodger, on a hike along the banks of the River Neckar. His daughter, Gunhild, just seven years old, was considered too young for such a trip. Erwin wanted to show the boys the castellated citadel of Bad Wimpfen, one of the most arresting sights in the whole of Baden.

Perched atop a thundering bluff of rock, Bad Wimpfen had once been the summer pleasure palace of the mighty Hohenstaufen dynasty. Eight centuries earlier, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa had chosen this neglected backwater as his country retreat – a place for hunting and carousing with vassals from across the Holy Roman Empire.

Wolfram was spellbound by the remnants of the citadel with its vertiginous ramparts, machicolated battlements and lofty pinnacles. No sooner had he and his brother returned home than they began re-creating Bad Wimpfen in miniature. Diminutive farmsteads and peasant hovels, held together by stone and cement, began to encroach on the lawn of the lower garden in Eutingen.

When the weather closed in, they continued their model-making indoors, creating an entire medieval burgh out of matchboxes, cartons and old scraps of wood. As Wolfram worked on his village in the downstairs salon, he peopled it with the peasants and pilgrims whose stunted frames and bearded jowls he had glimpsed in the candlelit retables of the local churches. Tonsured abbots and buskined farm-hands, franklins, pedlars and wizened apothecaries: all were conjured to life in Wolfram's miniature Nibelungen world.

‘
Wolfram! Mittagessen! Lunch!
' A shout from Clara the maid ought to have broken the spell, but Wolfram was still in a trance, absorbed in his handiwork. When her call failed to summon him and his brother to the dining room, she went to fetch them and later eulogised Wolfram's work to Herr Becher, who had come to Eutingen that very day for his luncheon with the family.

‘Oh, just look at those model houses! What a wonderful thing the boys have created!

‘Wolfram, your model village is fantastic! And so well crafted. You really
must
give it to the Führer for his birthday. Don't you think so, Herr Becher?'

 

Hitler was riding high in popularity by the mid-1930s. The economy was stirring at last and unemployment was steadily falling. There was a feeling among many in Pforzheim that Germany was regaining its standing in the world.

However, not all was quite as it seemed. Propaganda and media manipulation had put a highly attractive gloss to what was actually a very modest economic recovery. Nor was the reduction in unemployment anything like as dramatic as the official figures suggested. The ostensible fall in the number of people out of work, from 6 million in 1933 to 2.5 million in 1935, belied a more complex picture.

Short-term contracts, the exportation of the young unemployed to the countryside (part of the so-called Voluntary Labour Service) and massive financial incentives to put women back in the home all helped to distort the figures.

Prestige projects, such as the building of autobahns, featured heavily in Nazi propaganda and gave the impression of a government working tirelessly to create new jobs. Yet the much vaunted road-building programme involved at its peak a mere 84,000 people.

Hitler had also won many plaudits for bringing an end to the street violence of previous years. In the last days of June 1934, he had moved to crush the power of the increasingly wayward SA. Its leader, Ernst Röhm, was shot, along with his closest advisors during the Night of the Long Knives, which provided the Nazis with an opportunity to get rid of many of their chief critics. Kurt von Schleicher, Hitler's predecessor as chancellor, was shot dead by the SS, as were others considered enemies of Nazism. ‘Shoot them down…shoot…shoot at once,' screamed Goering as he studied a list of names. Eighty-five people were executed without trial, including twelve Reichstag deputies.

Hitler took full responsibility for the killings, arguing that they were necessary for preserving internal security. ‘I gave the order to shoot those parties mainly responsible for this treason…' he said. ‘Every person should know for all time that if he raises his hand to strike out at the State, certain death will be his lot.'

Many in Pforzheim were willing to excuse Hitler for the night of reckoning, but not everyone was convinced that he was putting the country on the right track. Among the dissenters were all of the parishioners worshipping at the Aïchele's local church – and with good reason. In November 1935, Reinhard Heydrich, director of Third Reich security, issued a decree that banned Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophical movement. All property belonging to the society was confiscated and the founding of any organisation to replace it was strictly forbidden. Heydrich had acted, he said, because the Steiner movement had ‘an international outlook and has links with foreign freemasons, Jews and pacifists'.

He criticised Steiner for promoting the individual over society, something that ran counter to the basic premise of Nazi ideology, adding: ‘It has nothing whatsoever to do with the National Socialist rules on education.' Heydrich considered the entire network to be ‘an enemy to the state'. By implication, all former members, including Wolfram's parents, were enemies too.

 

In the early years of the Third Reich, Erwin and Marie Charlotte were able to avoid the impact of many of the regime's harshest strictures, largely because their house stood apart from its neighbours and was surrounded by an enclosed garden. It was a very different story for their church friends, the Rodis. Still living in an apartment in the heart of Pforzheim, they came under increasing surveillance.

For young Frithjof Rodi, the
blockleiter
or block leader was the worst daily irritant. He was the lowest in the Nazi hierarchy in Pforzheim but the most invidious of them all, preying on every detail of people's lives.

Most block leaders had about fifty households under their supervision. Their task was to provide a link between the national party and the population at large. They were also charged with promoting party ideology while spying on those living in their patch.

To Frithjof's eyes, they represented a constant danger, capable of denouncing people for any number of minor misdemeanours, such as not having a picture of Hitler in the house or not hanging out the swastika on appointed days.

Those who contravened party strictures risked internment in a concentration camp, the nearest one to Pforzheim being Dachau. The threat of Dachau hung over everyone in the area as a permanent menace. Unlike the extermination camps of later years, which were kept a strict secret, the concentration camps were frequently mentioned in the press. The regime wanted the populace to know that they would be severely punished if they did not conform.

The young Rodi children used to taunt each other with: ‘You'd better be careful or you'll be sent to Dachau.' They never found out what went on there, for the few inmates who were released never spoke of what had happened to them. It was too perilous to talk of such things.

The block leader who oversaw the Rodi tenement had noticed that the family attended the Christian Community each Sunday morning. He had also discovered that Frithjof's parents were active members of the maligned Rudolf Steiner movement. When he learned that they held weekly meetings at their apartment with local activists, he informed the Gestapo.

The Gestapo acted immediately, approaching the owner of the flat directly below to ask whether they could plant listening devices in his ceiling. However, the tenant was an old-fashioned high-school teacher with a strict sense of moral propriety. Although not on particularly friendly terms with the Rodis, he refused to grant access to the Gestapo out of indignation at their tactics. He also warned Max Rodi of what had taken place.

Wolfram's parents were as hostile to the Nazi regime as Max and Martha Luise. They also shared a determination to muddle through day by day, remaining as true to their principles as they could without putting their loved ones at risk. They were fortunate to be shielded from the worst excesses of Nazism by their former Pforzheim neighbour, Herbert Kraft. He had climbed the local party hierarchy over the previous few years and now held a senior position in Karlsruhe's Organisation I, a body charged with converting people to Nazi ideology.

He could – indeed,
should
– have denounced Wolfram's father for his continual refusal to join the party, but he retained a great affection for Erwin and went out of his way to help his old friend. When a part-time post became available at the Fine Art School in Karlsruhe, he ensured that Erwin got the job. This made Erwin extremely unpopular with some of the teachers, who complained that he had gained promotion without even being a member of the Nazi Party. Kraft silenced the critics and Erwin remained in his post.

Kraft was a regular visitor to the Eutingen villa, in part because he had taken a fancy to Clara, the family's maid. Wolfram used to snigger as he watched Kraft go into the kitchen and pinch her bottom. Clara loved the attention – especially as it came from a senior Nazi official – and would smile with smug satisfaction.

Herbert Kraft's protection brought Erwin many benefits and enabled him to retain his position as a state-employed teacher throughout the long years of the Third Reich. Kraft also shielded Erwin from overzealous block leaders. His catchphrase, repeated like a mantra to his junior staff, was: ‘If you touch Aïchele, then you'll have big trouble from me.'

Wolfram's mother, in common with so many of her contemporaries, could see a side to Hitler's Germany that was compellingly attractive. Not only had the Fatherland apparently regained some of the pride it lost in 1918 but it had a leader who seemed determined to restore the country to greatness. Whilst Marie Charlotte would never take the step that would usher her into the party fold, she nevertheless had moments of hesitation about Nazism and needed to be brought back to earth with a bump, either by her husband or by one of his friends.

One particular such moment came in the spring of 1936, prompted by the visit to Pforzheim of a senior Nazi minister. Dr Bernhard Rust was the Minister of Science, Education and National Culture – an influential politician who had become part of Hitler's inner circle. Marie Charlotte had read an article advertising his visit in the local paper. He was to stay at the Hotel Ruf, close to the train station, and had extended an invitation to anyone in Pforzheim who might wish to meet him.