by Giles Milton
Wolfram’s parents followed the progress of the German army with both disbelief and surprise. Poland was defeated. Then Denmark. Norway followed soon after. Finally Hitler turned on his enemies in the West, launching his spectacular invasion of Belgium, Holland and France in the spring of 1940.
Suddenly, the country woke up to the realisation that this was to be a war on a grand scale. Now, at last, military strategy was the topic of the day, as in the conversation that the ten-year-old Frithjof Rodi overheard between two of his uncles, one of whom was serving in the army.
A colonel based on the Rhine, he said that he had worked out exactly how to overrun the Maginot Line. His homespun approach, which Frithjof listened to in boyish fascination, was simply to circumvent the line. The French had concentrated all their resources on its defence. By driving to the north of it in a giant arc, the German army would render it obsolete.
This was exactly what Hitler had planned to do and it would prove a triumphant success. Once again, the German army swept all before it, entering the French capital in June 1940. At that time, Frithjof remembers sitting with his mother, listening to news on the wireless of the German triumph in Paris. When he turned to look at her, tears were rolling down her face.
He could not work out the reason for them. Was she affected by the solemnity of the occasion – the marching and the pageantry – or saddened by the thought that the French capital had been captured by forces loyal to Hitler?
Wolfram’s thirteen-year-old sister, Gunhild, overheard a strange and sinister conversation in those early months of war that would disturb her sleep for years to come.
She was sitting in a train, listening to three adolescent girls chatting excitedly about the trip they were making to Ottensburg. All were in good humour. One of them in whispered tones spoke of the reason for their journey, which was to ‘give a child to the Führer’.
The young Gunhild was puzzled at first, but she soon realised the meaning of their words. They began giggling and saying how much they were looking forward to meeting lots of gorgeous-looking men whose babies they would have. And it was clear that they could not wait to arrive at their destination.
The teenagers were volunteers for Hitler’s lebensborn or racial breeding programme, established in 1936. It was designed to produce pure Aryan children who would be raised as blindly loyal servants of the Third Reich.
Although their story remains a broken jigsaw, some inkling of the bizarre sexual awakening they were to experience can be gleaned from another lebensborn volunteer – a feisty teenager named Hildegard Trutz. In the late 1940s, Frau Trutz was questioned about the long months she spent in one of these establishments and she revealed what was expected of girls like those on the train to Ottensburg.
‘The whole place was in the charge of a professor,’ she said. ‘[He was] a high-up SS doctor who examined each of us very thoroughly as soon as we had arrived. We had to make a statutory declaration that there had never been any cases of hereditary diseases, dipsomania or imbecility in our family.’
Those giggling girls, each of them no more than eighteen years of age, would have signed a declaration renouncing all claims to the children they might bear. Once these formalities were complete, they would be introduced to the SS men who had been picked for the task of impregnating them. ‘We were told to see to it that his hair and eyes corresponded exactly to ours…’ recalled Hildegard Trutz. ‘When we had made our choice, we had to wait till the tenth day after the beginning of the last period, when we were again medically examined and given permission to receive the SS men in our rooms at night.’
The young Hildegard admitted to being delighted to be serving the Führer in this way. ‘I believed completely in the importance of what we were doing,’ she said, ‘…[and] had no shame or inhibitions of any kind.’
She even harboured some affection for her chosen SS partner. ‘He was a sweet boy, although he hurt me a little, and I think he was actually a little stupid, but he had smashing looks.’ He slept with her for three evenings in one week. ‘The other nights he had to do his duty with another girl.’
Hildegard fell pregnant soon after and eventually gave birth to a baby boy. ‘It was not an easy birth,’ she said, ‘for no good German woman would think of having any artificial aids such as injections to deaden the pain, as they had in the degenerate Western democracies.’
The baby was taken from her soon after the birth and she never saw him again. She was nevertheless tempted to return the following year and have a second child, but she met and married a young SS officer in the intervening time. When she told her new husband about her lebensborn child, he was not particularly happy, ‘[but] he couldn’t very well say anything against it,’ she said, ‘seeing that I had been doing my duty to the Führer.’
The Nazi regime was soon actively recruiting intelligent young girls as potential ideological child-bearers. One day, Hannelore Schottgen was sitting in the classroom at her Pforzheim school when she and her fellow students were visited by a lady from the Woman’s Union. She had come to speak about giving a child to the Führer.
The girls were told that they would be offered free board, lodging and food in a wonderful hotel or chateau, and would also be given the best care and attention.
This visit prompted a vigorous debate among Hannelore and her teenage friends. Some said it was immoral to have a child that would be separated at birth from its parents. Others argued that war demanded huge sacrifices. All were very confused. For years, they had been brought up with the vision of good, clean-living girls belonging to the League of German Maidens: with the picture of virtuous German mothers (with blonde plaits) surrounded by happy children. Now they were being told to give birth to babies outside wedlock who would be brought up without a family.
Eventually one of Hannelore’s friends, who was against the lebensborn programme, spoke for the majority. ‘At the end of the day,’ she said, ‘we’ve got to keep our menschenwürde – our human dignity.’ Hannelore agreed. It was the first time the words ‘human dignity’ had meant something to her, rather than being an empty expression.
Her sentiment was shared by all the other girls in that Pforzheim classroom – even those who supported Hitler. No girl from her class gave a child to the Führer.
The Nazi propaganda machine stopped at nothing when it came to manipulating news, but there were some stories, particularly local ones, that could not be hidden. One of these, which occurred in Pforzheim on 22 October 1940, concerned a local doctor, Rudolf Kuppenheim, and his wife.
Dr Kuppenheim had been the chief physician at Pforzheim maternity hospital for more than forty years, in which he had assisted in the births of some 19,000 babies. He was a respected figure in the town – much loved and widely known.
Among his circle of acquaintances was Wolfram’s father. Both had belonged to the same freemasonry lodge and had met at numerous discussion evenings. It was how Erwin had got to know so many of Pforzheim’s cultivated people, many of them Jews like Dr Kuppenheim.
Although the Reuchlin Masonic lodge had been closed in 1933, its former members made an effort to keep in touch with each other over the years that followed.
Dr Kuppenheim’s troubles had begun some months after the closure of the lodge. At the beginning of April 1933, his Jewish background had required him to take early retirement from his job at the maternity hospital. He was still allowed to practise privately, in recognition of his distinguished military record in the First World War. In 1938, even this right was withdrawn. Pforzheim’s Nazi authorities informed him that he was no longer allowed to work on account of his Jewishness.
Yet Kuppenheim was not a practising Jew. Indeed, he had not practised the creed of his birth for many decades. An enthusiastic convert to Protestantism, he had become a parish councillor of his local church in Pforzheim.
Kuppenheim and his wife, Lily, had no intention of leaving their home town. Although they had been deprived of an income and both their sons had emigrated to
America, they vowed to remain in Pforzheim and wait for the Nazi menace to burn itself out.
On the morning of 22 October 1940, they were woken by two SA men ringing their doorbell to tell them that they were to be transported out of Germany, along with the rest of Pforzheim’s remaining 195 Jews. They had two hours to pack a few belongings: one suitcase, one blanket, a little food and 100 Deutschmarks.
When Dr Kuppenheim asked the reason for their transportation, he was given no answer, although he must surely have known that the future looked bleak. The SA officials were extremely menacing, promising to return in two hours, then moving on to the next Jewish house on the list.
It was at this point that Doctor Kuppenheim and his wife took a momentous decision. They had no intention of being transported. The doctor laid out all his medals from the First World War, including the Iron Cross, First Class, then he and his wife swallowed capsules of poison.
When the SA returned later that morning, both of them were already in a deep coma. They were taken to hospital but the damage done to their vital organs was so serious that nothing could be done to save them. They died on the following day.
The news came as a great shock to Wolfram’s father, for he had been on friendly terms with Kuppenheim for years and held him in high esteem. As the tale of their joint suicide spread through the town, there was widespread dismay. Their deaths seemed to symbolise the terrible injustice of Nazi anti-Semitism. Kuppenheim had brought so many new lives into existence. Now, his own had been taken.
A grim fate awaited the rest of Pforzheim’s Jews that October morning. ‘It is essential that Jews are properly treated at the time of their arrest,’ read the directive handed out to those in charge of rounding them up. This, however, was only to avoid any protests from the local population. Twenty members of the Maier family were arrested; nine from the Dreifuss clan and eight of the Reutlingers. There was no respect for age or sex; among those taken was Gustav Aron, eighty-five years old, and Blondine Emsheimer, who was eighty-eight. Everyone was subjected to the same brusque treatment.
Seven or eight Gestapo came to the house of Kathe Schulz, one of the families on the list to be deported. ‘Get ready!’ said the guards. ‘In two hours you’ll be taken to France.’
Kathe Schulz herself was be to be spared transportation for she was a mischling or half-Jew, but her father, Hellmuth, was arrested and taken to Pforzheim’s freight station, the point of embarkation. Kathe, desperate to see him one last time, made her way to the station. After much wrangling with the Gestapo, she was allowed to speak with her father for a few snatched minutes. Then he and the rest of Pforzheim’s Jews began a three-day journey to Camp Gurs, a bleak internment camp in the Pyrenees.
Once again, Robert Wagner had shown himself to be a ruthless exponent of anti-Semitism. The deportation of Pforzheim’s Jewish population, along with Baden’s other 7,000 Jews, occurred fully fifteen months before the Wannsee Conference that determined the extermination of all Jews living under Nazi rule.
Most Pforzheimers were only dimly aware of this process for several years earlier the town’s Jewish community had been confined to a ghetto, well concealed from sight. ‘The deportation of the Jews was carried out smoothly and without incident,’ wrote Reinhard Heydrich in his report on the day’s events. ‘The population was hardly aware of the action taking place.’
Wolfram heard nothing more of the deportees once they had been taken away. No one asked any questions about them. It was the last people heard of them until after the war.
Nevertheless, news, of sorts, reached the Rodi family. Max Rodi had somehow heard that the deportees were being kept in barracks without any glass in the windows and was outraged.
Glassless windows were the least of their troubles. The prefabricated shacks were flimsy and freezing in winter, and the roofs leaked every time it rained. The inmates slept on straw, for there were no beds, and the food rations meagre.
‘The barracks were very primitive,’ wrote Herr Schulz, one of the few to survive Camp Gurs. ‘[There were] no windows and just a few air vents. When it rained or was cold, these had to be closed so there was darkness all the time.’
The food rations went from bad to worse during the winter months: 200 grams of bread per day, a bowl of watery soup and peas once every four weeks. Some 1,200 Jews died from malnourishment and dysentery. Of the 195 Pforzheimers deported to Gurs, 45 died of starvation. A further 78 were later killed in Auschwitz and 17 in other extermination camps. Only 55 would survive to the end of the Third Reich.
An equally uncertain future awaited their half-Jewish relatives who had been allowed to remain in Pforzheim. Forty were immediately categorised as ‘non Aryans’. Their property was confiscated and a raft of discriminatory legislation was introduced, in which they were forbidden to use trams or bikes and prohibited from owning typewriters, cameras and radios, among many other things.
By December 1941, they were required to display a yellow star outside their homes, as well as having a yellow star sewn on to their clothes. Most were too scared to go out at all, which perhaps explains why Wolfram never saw anyone in the street wearing a yellow star.
He had left Pforzheim by this time and returned only sporadically to visit his parents. Now seventeen, he was inching closer to his dream of becoming a sculptor. After years of hoping, he had finally been accepted on a specialist wood-carving course in the Bavarian village of Oberammergau.
Chapter Seven
Training for Victory
‘You won’t be rejoicing for much longer’.
The little village looked at its most alluring in the icy winter months. The gabled homesteads and taverns wore a thick quilt of snow, and icicles dangled like frozen scabbards from the eaves of the church.
The winter of 1941 was bitterly cold. In the empty forests that surrounded the village and on the lonely slopes of Mount Ettal, the snow glowed a dull steely-blue. Locals shivered when they ventured into the marketplace and hoicked up their collars against the boreal blast; no one had ever known it so cold.
Wolfram had arrived in Oberammergau three months earlier to learn the ancient craft of Bavarian woodcarving. The village had been famous for its sculptors ever since the eighteenth century when local craftsmen idled away the long winter months with chisel and adze in hand. In the winking candlelight of their country farmsteads, they performed alchemy on wood, transforming chunks of rough linden into puckish cherubs and wizened prophets.
Wolfram had until now been captivated by the sober gothic sculptures of medieval Germany but he was dazzled by the sheer flamboyance of Oberammergau’s parish church. Angels arched their gilded feathers into the upper nave and pug-cheeked cherubs blasted their cornets at the shimmering high altar. The interior of St Peter and St Paul was a riot of rococo frescoes and trompe l’oeil trickeries.
The village was no less picturesque than the church. Oberammergau’s façades were adorned with painted murals of prophets and patriarchs whose rich paunches and billowing gowns represented a cultural nod towards the worldly prince-bishops of Salzburg rather than the first-century martyrs of the Holy Land.
Wolfram, spellbound by what he saw, had never been happier in all his life. It felt as if this was where he was meant to be all along. The wooden sculptures that he found here, and the quality of the craftsmanship, could not have been further away from the kitsch imitations of later years.
The local population in and around Oberammergau was conservative in outlook and had supported Hitler enthusiastically for some time. More than 40 per cent of Bavarians had voted for the Nazis in the election of March 1933. Yet the realities of Nazism seemed less visible here than elsewhere. None of the students in Wolfram’s class showed any relish for the politics of National Socialism. And although Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden lay less than seventy miles away, it might have belonged to another world. The only reminder that Germany was a country in conflict came from Schloss Linderhof – one of King Ludwig II’s private fantasy palace
s. As Wolfram and his friends passed it, they noticed that its windows were boarded up and its entrance padlocked. Wartime had forced the closure of one of Bavaria’s most famous attractions.
Wolfram should have registered for the Hitler Youth as soon as he arrived, but as no one actually ordered him to join, he decided to chance his luck by evading it completely. It was some months before the director of the school called all his students together to inform them that membership of the Hitler Youth was compulsory. Although he must have known that Wolfram was the only one not to have registered, he refrained from saying so. Wolfram reluctantly signed up, only to find that it was nowhere near as bad as he had feared. The man in charge of his age group had no interest whatsoever in Nazi ideology and left them to their own devices.
On Sundays, when there were no woodworking classes and no Hitler Youth, Wolfram and his friends would put on their hobnailed boots and gaiters, and take themselves off on mountain hikes into the high Wetterstein, over whose ice-topped crowns trailed wispy skeins of high-altitude cloud. With rosy cheeks and dripping noses, they would await the moment when the late-afternoon sun burst through the clouds, to reveal a new marvel. Wolfram had spent many days poring over maps and had worked out that there was a gap in the mountains through which you should be able to see the Dolomites, even though they lay more than one hundred miles to the south. To his great delight he was correct. On clear days, these distant peaks would nudge their gaudy pink summits into the sky.
In other moments of free time, Wolfram would head for the great Benedictine kloster of Ettal. This twelve-cornered abbey – another glittering pile of whimsical baroque – was also a functioning monastery – Wolfram loved to hear the rich liturgical chanting, the verse and echoed refrain that was sung from the daily psaltery. As the late-afternoon twilight spilled across the valley, and the winter solstice announced an even deeper chill, the choral voices of a dozen or more monks could be heard pouring forth into the darkness.