The Boy Who Went to War

by Giles Milton

  Food was a constant problem. With supply lines cut and transport bogged down in mud, there was never enough to eat. ‘With the sugar you sent me, I cooked myself a very nice apple compote’, wrote Wolfram. ‘And I also made sauté potatoes with butter.’ However, the rare additional rations that survived the journey to the Crimea were soon consumed and he was once again hungry.

  He had been in Kerch for only three days when he started to feel ill. He took himself off to a military doctor who dismissed his sore throat and temperature, accusing him of exaggerating his sickness. When his temperature rapidly developed into a fever, he became so weak that he could hardly pull himself out of bed. Even now, despite all the tell-tale signs, the medical staff still did not realise that he had contracted diphtheria.

  There was no transport to take him to the infirmary, which was situated in a nearby village. The doctors told him that he would have to make his own way there. He found himself standing in the street, trembling with weakness, burningly hot and with a high fever.

  He was most fortunate that a passing driver, a German military officer, took compassion on him, picking him up and driving him to the infirmary, which he reached just in time. His sickness had by now developed into a life-threatening condition that could be alleviated only by a huge dose of serum.

  The doctors injected him on his arrival but it made little difference. He was still in a poor state the next morning, so they gave him a second injection. Wolfram overheard the doctors talking about him as he lay there with a dangerously high temperature. ‘Look! A typical Labour Service lad. He has no idea that you come here to die.’

  One of the side effects caused by the serum injections was a temporary paralysis of the nerves. In other patients, this had triggered heart failure, but it also brought moments of temporary respite. It was during one of these that Wolfram was transferred by hospital train to Cherson in the southern Ukraine, crossing the Dneiper by boat. The first thing he saw on his arrival was a funeral procession, the first of many. In Cherson, death was ever present.

  The journey provoked an even higher fever. ‘I’m still in hospital but I’m okay,’ he wrote to his parents in October 1942. ‘That’s the way with diphtheria. Some days you’ve got high fever and feel really, really bad. And then you get a serum injection and you feel fine, although you still have to lie down for a week.’

  The Ukrainian nurses working in Cherson hospital cared little for the German soldiers under their charge. Wolfram shared a room with another conscript who was seriously ill. Whole days would pass with no one coming near them. They were brought no food – nothing. When they complained, the nurses shrugged their shoulders and said they had forgotten they were there.

  Wolfram heard nothing from the battlefront during his time in hospital and had no inkling of the clash of arms that had begun in the outskirts of Stalingrad, where troops were engaged in relentless fighting in temperatures that had already dipped well below zero. Soviet forces were still clinging to the west bank of the River Volga, despite near-constant bombing raids. ‘The whole sky was full of aircraft,’ wrote one German infantry man serving on the front line. ‘Every flak gun firing, bombs roaring down, aircraft crashing, an enormous piece of theatre.’

  ‘I haven’t got news,’ wrote Wolfram to his parents at the very moment when the battle was entering its critical phase. ‘I don’t hear or read anything of what’s going on in the world.’ Nor did he know that all of the comrades from his year group had been conscripted into the army and were on their way to the River Donetz, where they were to fight in the rearguard battle for Stalingrad.

  The military hospital in which Wolfram was confined lay directly opposite an Orthodox church. Each day, from dawn until a late dusk, he could hear the doleful chant of funerals. ‘The choir of the saints have found the fountain of life and the door of paradise…’ The voices of the basses were mirrored in reverse by the upper-octave tenors – a polyphonic chorus that transported him. ‘Such wonderful singing,’ he wrote to his parents. ‘So much more solemn than you find in the Catholic churches.’

  In his illness and depression, he had at last found something to raise his spirits. As he gazed down from his bedroom window upon the Orthodox funeral processions, he was so struck by their solemn beauty that he had a sudden urge to attend one, even though the doctors had forbidden him to leave his bed.

  ‘I’ve got a healthy heart,’ he wrote to his parents, ‘so it should be okay.’ He crept downstairs in his pyjamas and, with the help of a friend, managed to clamber over the fence into the churchyard. ‘There were a few men and women – really few – but they sang with such beauty. The priest was a very old man with a big white beard and sometimes he sang on his own. He was wearing a beautiful robe of embroidered gold and had a big high black hat.’

  As the white coffin passed, Wolfram noticed that it was decorated with delicately intertwined flower motifs with clusters of colourful blooms on the top. However, it was the low, mournful chanting that made the most lasting impression on him. ‘Such sad and nostalgic songs,’ he wrote. ‘They seem to go so well with the dark black earth. How I would have loved to come here before the war.’

  His visit to the church had lifted his soul but seriously weakened his fever-ridden body. A few days after attending the funeral, his muscles locked into rigidity and he collapsed to the floor. When he tried to move, he found that all his limbs were immobilised. ‘Now it’s happening,’ said the doctor to the nurse. ‘It’ll last a long time.’

  Wolfram was paralysed from head to foot. He could not eat, so the doctors tried to feed him through tubes pushed up his nose. When this failed to work because he was unable to swallow, they injected food directly into his gut. They now realised that the only chance of him recovering was to transport him to Germany by plane, even though this meant a hazardous train journey to the military airport in Nikolaev, some fifty miles to the north-west.

  Wolfram was by now in such a dangerous condition that he had to be accompanied to Nikolaev by a nurse, whose cheery demeanour immediately attracted the attentions of the soldiers in the next carriage. When she went off to chat with them, Wolfram overheard the men making coarse jibes about him. ‘He’ll soon have a cold arse,’ said one. What this meant was that he did not have long to live.

  While Wolfram was left on his own, he was preyed on by other men in the carriage. Someone stole his watch. He watched the man take it but was unable to move or cry out. He heard him saying to his mates: ‘Why not? He’ll be dead soon.’

  He was not surprised by their behaviour. When someone needed new trousers and came across a person who was dying, they simply clawed them off and stole them.

  Wolfram was still alive when they pulled into Nikolaev, but the journey had weakened him still further. By now he was only partly conscious and could no longer speak. ‘Herr Professor Aïchele,’ wrote the doctor in a letter to his father. ‘I am writing on behalf of your son…he himself cannot write because he is too weak. He is meant to be moved by plane but at the moment the weather is too bad. Therefore he has had to stay here, but we will look after him.’

  Just days after Wolfram’s parents received this letter, they were sitting at home when the telephone rang. It was Frau Hoch, the post lady in Eutingen, who informed Marie Charlotte that another letter had just arrived from Nikolaev. Marie Charlotte tore down to the centre of the village – she would later recall that she had never run as fast in all her life – and ripped open the envelope.

  She had hoped against hope that it would be from Wolfram, but saw immediately that it was not his handwriting. She was even more devastated when she read it. The letter had been written by a nurse, Sister Dorothea, who was caring for her son.

  It told her and her husband to brace themselves for the worst. Wolfram was going to die.

  Chapter Nine

  A Matter of Life or Death

  ‘The enemy is listening!’

  Wolfram’s mother left no account of how she coped with the anxieties of knowing th
at her nineteen-year-old son lay hundreds of miles away in the last throes of life. When, many years later, she sat down to write a memoir of her experiences, she lingered on the good things that had happened. This was part of her philosophy of life. She believed that there was a reason behind everything – that the dark wheel of fortune was not quite as fickle as the gloomy chroniclers of medieval Germany would have her believe.

  Marie Charlotte certainly had plenty to worry about in the autumn of 1942. While her youngest son was dying of diphtheria, her eldest, Reiner, had been posted to Tikhvin, a grim military base some one hundred miles to the east of Leningrad. As sleet sluiced down relentlessly on the exposed Russian marshlands, and the canvas tents dripped and leaked, Reiner wrote home of a war that could never be won.

  Wolfram’s mother also had troubles of her own. Just weeks before receiving news of Wolfram’s impending death, she had received a summons to the local Gestapo headquarters in Pforzheim. Although she had no idea what she had done wrong, and no clue as to why she was to be interrogated, she was alarmed by the mere prospect of being called in for questioning and was half sick with fear by the time she entered the building.

  The conversation that took place was to remain a mystery for some years as she was under strict orders not to reveal anything that had been discussed. It later transpired that the Gestapo had been keeping a watchful eye on the family and had assembled a substantial dossier about their dangerous eccentricities, particularly those of Marie Charlotte. They knew all the details of her attendance at meetings organised by the Steiner movement as well as of her involvement in Pforzheim’s anthroposophical society. They also had copies, faithfully transcribed by hand, of all Marie Charlotte’s prewar correspondence with the Soucrains, a French family whose son had previously been a lodger in Eutingen.

  After lengthy questioning, Marie Charlotte was warned to tread with extreme care. She was forbidden from travelling more than five miles from the Pforzheim area without prior permission from the Gestapo and told that her movements would be monitored at all times by the state police.

  Marie Charlotte feared that this was the prelude to something far worse: that the regime was preparing to punish her and her freemason husband, at a time and in a manner yet unknown, for persistently refusing to join the Nazi Party.

  The catalyst for her interrogation was almost certainly the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, director of Reich Security, in the late spring of 1942. Ever since, the state police had been ruthlessly clamping down on ‘enemies of the state’. Marie Charlotte’s membership of the Christian Community and her connections with France automatically placed her in a high-risk category.

  Other members of the parish also came under increasing harassment from the Gestapo. At the same time that Marie Charlotte was called in for interrogation, Martha Luise Rodi received an unannounced visit from two uniformed officers at their house on Spichernstrasse.

  Her eldest son, Peter, was at home when they knocked on the door. The men did not wait to be invited inside but barged their way in and brusquely informed Martha Luise that they were under orders to confiscate all her anthroposophical books – anything, indeed, that might be connected with the Rudolf Steiner movement.

  Martha Luise had never been shy to speak her mind and she saw no reason to act differently when confronted with the Gestapo. She expressed her indignation about this invasion of the family home, making very clear to them her unhappiness at their manner and behaviour. In Hitler’s Germany there was no room for manoeuvre. The officers helped themselves to the offending volumes, as well as to other books that had nothing to do with Steiner.

  Martha Luise said firmly, ‘No, those ones aren’t to be taken.’ Ignoring her, the men took two of the family’s laundry baskets, filled them with books and set off with them down the garden path. As they did so, Peter’s sister called after them: ‘No, you’re not to take those. We’ll expect them back!’ She was referring to the laundry baskets, but the men thought she was talking about the books and replied sarcastically: ‘Oh, no, I don’t think you’ll be getting these back.’

  Such events, set against a backdrop of perpetual war, were a source of constant anxiety for seven-year-old Barbara, the youngest in the Rodi clan. The regime’s first intrusion into her childhood had been the call-up of her father on the day that war broke out. Then, her brother Peter had been drafted into the heimatflak. Now, with every month that passed, life seemed to become darker and ever more disturbing.

  She started to seek refuge in books, where life was peaceful, happy and often romantic – as well as divorced from reality. She began to live more and more in a dream world, even though the war was continually intruding on those dreams, and often cried herself to sleep for no obvious reason. Her mother would pray with her each evening, asking God to protect her father and brother and all who were dear to the family.

  In distant Nikolaev, Wolfram was hovering between life and death. Paralysed and extremely weak, he kept slipping in and out of consciousness.

  The German army deemed it bad for morale for soldiers to see their comrades die, so those who had no hope of recovering were segregated from their friends shortly before the end. By mid-November 1942, the doctors, seeing Wolfram at death’s door, moved him into a room of his own. His fellow patients awaited the inevitable news.

  Two days passed and still Wolfram clung to life. His medication was continued, even though it seemed to have no effect. However, after a few more days, his broken body suddenly showed signs of responding. The doctors were surprised and expressed cautious optimism. They also took the decision to move him back on to the ward.

  By the third week of November 1942, it was clear that Wolfram had passed the most critical point of his illness. He regained full consciousness and, though extremely weak, was soon able to sit up in bed. The hospital’s chief physician was confident enough to write a letter to Wolfram’s father, voicing his belief that Wolfram was on the mend.

  ‘Herr Professor Aïchele, I am writing this on behalf of your son who sadly is not well enough to write. But he’s improving very fast and soon he’ll be in a position to write himself.’

  Wolfram had eaten nothing for weeks; now, he developed a voracious appetite and was soon attacking giant-sized portions of roast chicken and mashed potato, washed down with glasses of excellent red wine from Bordeaux. Recuperating soldiers were given all the resources that the German army could buy or steal from the occupied lands. He was also plied with lots of coffee – a rare luxury in times of war – as it was believed to stimulate the nerves.

  At the beginning of December, Wolfram was strong enough to haul himself out of bed. A few days later, he took his first tentative steps with the aid of a nurse. He managed a circuit around the bed, which seemed like a long and exhausting mountain hike.

  The doctors knew then that he would make a full recovery. ‘He’s developed quite a healthy appetite,’ wrote one of them in a letter to his parents. ‘Each day he has to take a few steps with the nurse…he’s still young and in two or three months he’ll have forgotten that he was ever ill.’

  The medical staff in Nikolaev hospital prescribed electric bath therapy that would reinvigorate his shattered nerve endings, but no such treatment was available in Nikolaev. Wolfram needed to be transferred to one of the German spa centres.

  Moving him back to Germany in wartime and in midwinter was a tall order. Hitler had ordered all available planes to be diverted to Stalingrad, where the Luftwaffe was engaged in a final, desperate mission to save General Paulus’s doomed Sixth Army.

  The countdown to catastrophe in Stalingrad had begun at the very time when Wolfram’s illness was at its most critical. A vast Soviet offensive, Operation Uranus, had crushed the Romanian Third Army, which had been protecting the northern flank of General von Paulus’s troops.

  A second offensive, from the south, had enabled the Soviets to form a ring of steel around the Sixth Army. Some 300,000 German soldiers found themselves trapped inside a pocket that
they called the kessel or cauldron. Among them were thirteen infantry battalions and three motorised divisions, along with the headquarters and entire command structure of the Sixth Army.

  Their only hope of survival was to break out while they still had fuel, ammunition and food. However, when Goering assured Hitler that the troops could be supplied from the air, the Führer responded by ordering General von Paulus to defend his positions to the death.

  Goering’s air-supply mission proved a chimera to the men on the ground. Driving blizzards, coupled with technical failure and anti-aircraft fire, caused the loss of some 500 German aircraft. The desperately needed food never arrived.

  As the Soviet army pushed home its attack, the German army’s rations were slashed to starvation levels. Jaundice, diphtheria, dysentery and typhus picked off the weakest while frostbite killed many more as they sought in vain to flee their attackers. ‘And so they streamed by,’ wrote one German soldier who was eyewitness to the catastrophe. ‘The remains of the shattered and decimated formations…with vehicles that were being slowly dragged and pushed by wounded, sick and frostbitten men. There were emaciated figures among them, muffled in coats, rags; pitiful wrecks painfully dragging themselves forwards, leaning on sticks and hobbling on frozen feet, wrapped in wisps of straw and strips of blankets.’

  When Soviet forces captured the last two airfields inside the kessel, at Pitomnik and Gumrak, the fate of the German soldiers was sealed. Even General von Paulus realised the situation was hopeless. As Soviet troops closed in on his bomb-shattered headquarters in the basement of the GUM department store, he knew the end was nigh.

  At 7.45 a.m. on the last day of January 1943, he and his staff signalled that they were surrendering. The battle for Stalingrad was over.