The Opening Page
The fighter-bombers appeared from nowhere. Wolfram and his comrades were making their way along a narrow country lane in Normandy when there was an ominous rumble in the sky to the east. They scarcely had time to look upwards before scores of Allied aircraft were upon them, screaming in low and fast towards their exposed positions. They were flying in so close to the ground that their underbellies were almost touching the treetops.
Wolfram, a wireless operator serving with the 77th German Infantry Division, looked for cover, dropped his communications equipment and flung himself into a nearby ditch, as did the hundreds of men around him, scattering in panic as they sought somewhere to hide. Schnell . . . schnell! Quick! Take cover!
There was no time to think about firing back, nor even to unharness the horses pulling the artillery. They were whinnying in panic as the first of the machine-guns burst into action from above, unleashing a hail of deadly fire.
Wolfram buried his head in his arms as the opening salvo exploded all around him. The ground shuddered and jolted as heavy weaponry thumped into the soil. It was like a giant fist punching the ground. Explosion after explosion. Thump – thump – thump. A mortar landed close by, flinging upwards a shower of mud. Machine-gun fire zipped across the country lane, twanging as it hit the metal shafts of the stalled artillery. Shrapnel and glass were sent flying through the air.The blitz of fire came to a temporary halt, bringing a few seconds of silence. Wolfram briefly lifted his head as the planes traced a circle in the sky and was appalled by the scene of destruction around him. The ground was on fire, strewn with the dead and the dying. There were bodies everywhere.
A young student artist, with a powerful visual memory, he found himself gazing on a canvas that would remain with him for ever. His comrades lay wounded and bleeding, their bodies punctured by bullets, their limbs torn to shreds by shards of metal. The horses, still harnessed to the big field guns, let out strange screams of pain from the shrapnel that had buried itself deep in their flesh. The narrow country lane, a scene of sunny calm just a few seconds earlier, had been transformed into a picture of carnage.
Picture: Above right: an Allied bombing raid.
Neither of Wolfram's parents ever joined the Nazi party. Furthermore, in 1945, Wolfram’s father was recognized by the American occupying army as being untainted by Nazism. He was therefore asked to be a 'people's court' judge during the most intense period of denazification.
J O’F: You knew they were ‘good Germans’ from the outset?
GM: Not as such. But I certainly knew that Wolfram's family were outsiders in the Third Reich. They were bohemian and free-thinking artists. His father was a freemason with many Jewish friends. His mother was a devoted member of the banned Rudolf Steiner movement. My interest in Wolfram stemmed from the fact that he was a maverick outsider in Hitler's Germany.
J O'F: Were you shocked by any of Wolfram's stories or experiences?
GM: Yes. His stories from Brest-Litovsk, for example. It was in Belorussia that (for the first time) he saw Jews wearing the yellow star. We all know this happened, but it's extremely powerful when you hear it from the mouth of your father-in-law.
Wolfram (pictured as a young boy, right) vividly described these Jews: starving, downtrodden and treated in the most degrading fashion.
I was also deeply shocked by stories of the RAF bombing of Wolfram's home town of Pforzheim. One of Wolfram's friends went to look for her grandmother after the raid. All she found was a little bag with her keys: ‘Nothing else was found. No body. Not even a bone. The whole street had disappeared. My favorite grandmother, not quite sixty, was gone without me being able to say goodbye or go to her funeral.’
J O'F: What were your own parents’ experiences of war? How did they feel about you marrying a German girl?
For my mother, Germans remained more or less the enemy and it came as a great shock to her when she finally met Wolfram and his wife, Barbara. They were friendly and full of humor and my mother suddenly had to reconcile her stereotype image of Germans with the uncomfortable reality that Wolfram and Barbara were very nice! (Pictured, left, is Wolfram's artist father, Erwin.)
J O'F: Is it possible that your father-in-law reinvented his past and his personal history, as so many people do when they've been in extreme situations?
GM: If you're asking if he closed his eyes to terrible events, well, I don't think so - and I'll tell you why. I asked him if he had been shocked by witnessing terrible ill-treatment of Jews and Soviet prisoners-of-war in Belorussia.
He said he had been shocked, of course, but he reminded me that he and his comrades were absolutely certain they were going to their deaths. ‘You have to picture the situation,’ he says. ‘There was this overriding feeling that everyone was trapped in the same terrible boat. We were not exactly on a pleasure trip ourselves and we were absolutely terrified about what the future held for us.’
J O'F: You interviewed other family members in the course of your research. How did you square the different versions?
GM: The most contentious issue was what ordinary Germans knew of the holocaust. Wolfram told me he first learned of the death camps when a POW in America. One of his friends (and childhood neighbour) also told me that she knew nothing until 1945. Even then, the stories of death camps were initially dismissed as Allied propaganda.
On the other side of the family, it was a different story. A cousin had - in circumstances that remain obscure - somehow received information to the effect that Jews were being killed on a mass scale. He didn't know any details (and certainly didn't know the name of any particular camp.) But he returned to Germany in order to alert his family that something dreadful was taking place.
The family was appalled but they kept silent. This was the reality of life in Nazi Germany. If you spoke about such things, you'd be sent to Dachau. (Pictured, right, Nazi Gauleiter Robert Wagner, greets supporters)
GM: I think not. You have to remember that many of his parents' friends were Jewish. And Wolfram's favourite uncle was passionately interested in Judaism and learned Hebrew. Indeed, he taught Hebrew to many secular Jews in order that they might be granted entry permits to British controlled Palestine. (Knowledge of the language was a requirement at the time.)
Wolfram's father found the Nazis crude anti-Semitism deeply offensive. An artist, he deplored the notion of racial conformity. He liked to celebrate the idiosyncrasies of the human race. (Pictured, left, the family house.)
J O'F: What's Wolfram's view of the British conduct of the war?
GM: I asked all the family members about the RAF bombing of Pforzheim. What, I wanted to know, did they think? To my surprise, their answers were remarkably similar. 'Well,' they said, 'that's what happens in war.'
J O'F: Really?
GM: Really. But what made them very angry - and still angers them - was when the British planes returned a few days later and machine-gunned civilians queuing for bread amidst the ruins. They felt that this was totally unreasonable.
Another thing that angers them is the fact that the occupying French army exhumed the corpses of French resistance fighters executed by the SS and made everyone in the town look at the mangled remains.
One member of the family said the general reaction was not 'how awful that these men were executed' but 'how disgraceful that the French are forcing us to see such things.'
J O'F: Did Wolfram's story remind you of any human stories in your other history books?
GM: Wolfram's story contains a common thread that runs through all my books. They are, at heart, the stories of ordinary people who find themselves caught in extraordinary situations, often through no fault of their own.
Wolfram's story is, however, somewhat different. He’s a highly idiosyncratic individual and this makes his childhood under the Third Reich - with its absolute insistence on conformity - absolutely fascinating. (Above, right, one of Wolfram's childhood pictures)
J O'F: What next?
GM: Top secret. The worst mistake any writer can make is to start talking about their new project. It's a sure sign you'll never write the book
John O'Farrell's latest book is An Utterly Exasperated History of Modern Britain: or Sixty Years of Making the Same Stupid Mistakes as Always.
Wolfram: The Boy Who Went to War was born out of an incident that might have been amusing had it not been so disquieting.
My seven-year-old daughter, Madeleine, had been set a school project to design an heraldic shield that represented the most important elements in her family background. Aware that one set of her grandparents was German, she proudly decorated her shield with the only German symbol she knew: a giant swastika.
My wife was horrified and swiftly suggested that she change it. But this left Madeleine perplexed. She was proud of her German roots and wanted to celebrate the fact in her heraldic shield. She knew nothing of the swastika’s evil associations. To her innocent eyes, it meant nothing bad.
It was this incident that led me - tentatively - to ask Wolfram about his Third Reich childhood. He seemed surprised that I was interested: after all, it was all a long time ago and it had not been the happiest time of his life.
He nevertheless began to answer my questions, remembering events with all the clarity of an eyewitness. His perception of events had been sharpened by his artistic powers of observation. His memory was a visual one and he was able transport me in an instant to the places he had been: Brest-Litovsk, the Crimea, the beaches of Normandy.
I found myself listening to a story that had moments of horror and profound darkness, but one that was also extraordinarily touching and poignant. It was to prove a revelation: I had never considered the Second World War from a German perspective.
And thus the book was born. Wolfram spoke at length about his childhood under the Third Reich, talking into my ever-turning Dictaphone. He spoke in long monologues: he has never cared for interruptions lest he loses his train of thought. Yet they were monologues from another world - one that was infinitely more sinister than I had ever imagined...
Picture (above) of Wolfram in Marienbad, recuperating from diphtheria