The Boy Who Went to War

by Giles Milton

  ‘Just rubble,’ she wrote, ‘where once there had been such beautiful grand houses. All the people in the Marktplatz, Langstrasse, Schlossberg, Leopoldstrasse and Sedansplatz – all died in their cellars, a sacrifice to the smoke and flames. In the Schlossberg, in the big cellars of the hotel restaurants, everyone died.’

  As she clambered over the ruins, she watched dazed survivors attack the rubble with picks and shovels, desperately hoping to find friends or family alive in the cellars below. A lady with a big dog, a German shepherd, was crying and telling the animal: ‘Look! Look! Your master’s lying underneath.’ And the dog was whining and trying to sniff him out.

  Marie Charlotte was deeply shaken by the number of dead. ‘Whole families have died, but there are also children without parents and parents without children…We went to see Trudel: her mother-in-law and brother-in-law have died. Frau Muller and Frau Kropt have died; her daughter at the fish shop has died. So many people have died.’

  Overwhelmed by despair, Marie Charlotte made her way up the northern hillside to Spichernstrasse, to see whether her church friends, the Rodis, were still alive. Here, at least, was some good news. The immediate family had indeed survived. Martha Luise explained to Marie Charlotte that her mother and sister had managed to clamber out of their cellar and make their way along the river to their house on the hill.

  While the two women exchanged stories of what they had seen, Max was busily writing a letter to his absent daughter, Ev-Marie. He felt the need to tell her of his experiences when he had ventured into town earlier that morning.

  ‘We went to Uncle Hermann’s in front of the Bohnenberger Castle,’ he wrote. ‘There were corpses everywhere. Almost impossible to locate the café – everything is destroyed, reduced to rubble and very hot. What happened to all the people? Can no one give us any information?’

  Max had returned briefly to the family home to fetch a pickaxe, then headed back into town to check on the house of a close friend. This building too was in ruins. ‘I tried to free one of the windows of the cellar but the stones got hotter and hotter the deeper I dug. No one could possibly be alive under there. Just to think that two weeks ago I went there with your mother and Trudel and Elizabeth for Holy Communion.’

  Giving up his search, he walked slowly towards Durlacherstrasse where he bumped into his cousin, Walter Brenner, who told him that he had lost his wife, his parents and his close family. ‘The two of us clambered over heaps of rubble and managed to get into one of the cellars where we found what was left of his family. But we didn’t stay to identify them because Walter couldn’t cope with it.’

  Everyone who visited Pforzheim that day would return home with tales of suffering and tragedy. Sigrid Weber, former home-help to the Aïcheles, had gone into town in search of her grandmother. She saw dead bodies everywhere. A terrible, bitter-sweet smell hung in the air from the burned corpses.

  The most terrible sight of all was the public air-raid shelter: everyone inside had perished. Endless shrunken and carbonated bodies had been brought out and stacked up on the pavement. Sigrid turned around and walked home to Eutingen, her clothes and hair carrying the sickly smell of charred flesh. She washed and changed as soon as she could.

  Sigrid’s father, accompanied by a few others, headed back into Pforzheim to resume the search for Sigrid’s grandmother. He dug at the area where the house had stood but unearthed nothing except for a little bag with her keys in it. Sigrid was devastated. ‘Nothing else was found. No body. Not even a bone. The whole street had disappeared. My favourite grandmother, not quite sixty, was gone without me being able to say goodbye or go to her funeral.’

  By the end of that terrible Saturday, Marie Charlotte felt as if she were trapped inside an all-encompassing nightmare, tormented by what she had seen and wondering why humans had to do such horrible things.

  ‘As I was making my way back home, I heard so many tales of horror that I couldn’t take it in any more. Then I noticed that the first tentative buds of spring were emerging into the sunshine and I suddenly felt a hidden natural force that was more powerful than any of the destruction I witnessed.

  ‘I have this strange feeling of the strength in nature. The first crocuses are in flower and are already surrounded by bees. It feels to me as if some sort of miracle is taking place – there’s a beauty that envelops these miraculous blooming flowers.’

  The burial of the dead created severe logistical difficulties for the Pforzheim authorities. The corpses needed to be interred as quickly as possible but the town did not even have a working bulldozer. One was eventually borrowed from Heilbronn, some forty-five miles away, and a mass grave was excavated.

  The scorched corpses were placed in layers and then quicklime was poured over them in order to speed up the decomposition. German soldiers in charge of the operation were given cognac to protect them from infection. There was no time for funeral arrangements. Priests of the two denominations stood there for days and days on end, blessing the dead.

  It made for a forlorn and tragic scene. The cemetery was piled high with heaps of the dead and just one official had to register them all. When people spoke to him with their hands over their noses, he told them irritably that he couldn’t spend all day with his nose covered.

  Many of the extended Rodi family lost their lives in the bombing. Among them were a great-aunt and a cousin who had decided to remain in their cellar. They were later found as tiny heaps of ashes and could be identified only by their keys. Another of the family’s cousins went to the cellar with a blanket, collected up the remains and took them to the cemetery on his handcart.

  Frithjof was putting his own handcart to good use, searching for firewood in the burned-out shells of buildings. There was no electricity or gas in the aftermath of the bombardment and his mother needed fuel because she was constantly cooking for all the homeless people that were staying with the family.

  Wolfram’s mother listened to the radio every evening in an attempt to find out news about the Allied advance. At the end of March, Marie Charlotte heard a report that American troops had fought their way into Frankfurt. A few days later, she learned that the Ruhr was completely encircled by Allied forces, trapping 325,000 German soldiers.

  ‘The Germans must stay on their feet, no matter how,’ said Goebbels in a defiant radio broadcast to the nation. ‘Just stay on their feet, and then the moral and historical superiority of the German people can manifest itself.’

  Wolfram’s parents still had their friend, Frau Weber, staying at their Eutingen villa. Now, just a few days after Goebbels’ speech, Frau Weber’s husband, conscripted into the army some months earlier, turned up unexpectedly at their front door. Attorney Kurt Weber told them that he was on leave but had decided not to rejoin his regiment. ‘What’s the point?’ he said. ‘It’s nearly the end.’

  He changed into civilian clothes lent to him by Erwin and hid the army uniform in a secret little alcove in the cellar beneath the house. He knew that if the villa were searched and the uniform found, he would be shot as a deserter. However, he also knew that the war could be over within weeks. Allied forces were advancing on every front.

  ‘Six in the morning: there was an explosion. The bridge near the sawmill was blown up. The tiles of the roofs and the windows of the grocery store, two floors below our apartment, were damaged.’ So wrote Max Weber, friend and neighbour of Wolfram’s parents, on Friday, 6 April 1945. War had at long last arrived in Eutingen.

  The explosion was not, in fact, caused by Allied troops. Local German forces had blown up the bridge in the vain hope of halting the Allied advance, an act of destruction that infuriated the village inhabitants. A group of men gathered in front of the village hall and cursed the senseless actions of the military.

  The distant boom of artillery could clearly be heard coming from the north-west, fuelling speculation that the Allied arrival was imminent. The nearby villages of Kieselbronn and Enzberg were rumoured to have been captured and it was said that Euting
en was to be the next stop for the Allies.

  Whilst most of the villages were by now desperate for them to arrive, the local Nazi functionaries remained bellicose. One of them, Herr Issel, kept driving to nearby Dillstein to receive new orders and harboured vainglorious dreams of halting the Allied advance in the fields around his village.

  To this end, he instructed all local boys born in 1930, and now aged fifteen, to assemble at the village offices. When none of them answered the call to arms, Issel was obliged to order a house-to-house search of Eutingen and the neighbouring area. He managed to gather forty-six young lads but forty of them slipped away before they could be deployed and only six were actually sent to the front.

  On the evening of 6 April, Max Weber glanced out of his window and was surprised by what he saw. From the church tower opposite his house and from the town hall, white flags, as the sign of surrender, could be seen fluttering in the breeze. He hoped – prayed – that the waiting game was almost over, but just a few minutes after the flags’ appearance, German soldiers swarmed into the main street and ordered them to be taken down immediately. Eutingen was not yet in Allied hands.

  For the next four days, the village was caught in limbo. At one point, Allied troops were said to be arriving from Kieselbronn. A few hours later, it was rumoured that German troops in the valley below had surrendered. Most of those living in Eutingen were delighted to learn that French forces had been seen entering the neighbouring village of Niefern, which lay just two miles away. However, they were dismayed to hear that German soldiers had fought back, throwing hundreds of hand grenades into local houses and causing considerable carnage before they were finally defeated. From this point on, Max and his family spent most of their time in the cellar, even sleeping there at night.

  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 the
y 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.