Milton - The boy who went to war : the story of a reluctant german soldier in wwii

Id rather be anywhere in the world.

Wolfram, Ukraine, 1942. Letter to his parents

It is not enough for people to be more or less reconciled to our regime, to be persuaded to adopt a neutral attitude towards us; rather, we want to work on people until they have capitulated to us.

Joseph Goebbels, 1933. Press conference.

W olfram: 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 swastikas evil associations. To her innocent eyes, it meant nothing bad.

We knew that it would be only a matter of time before Madeleine and her sisters would discover the horrors of the Third Reich. They would also soon discover all the shibboleths and stereotypes that people held about Germany.

Would they therefore choose to distance themselves from their German roots?

To do so would be sad and misplaced. Their German grandfather had an extraordinary wartime story to tell: one that overturned all the clichs.

The war and the Third Reich were rarely mentioned when I stayed with my parents-in-law at their apartment in Paris. For years after first meeting Wolfram, I had little idea about what he had done during the war. I was reticent about asking any questions. Wolfram is a deeply private person and I had no wish to intrude on that privacy.

Yet he loved to talk, especially in the evenings when dinner was finished and a bottle of rare, home-distilled kirschenwasser was brought to the table. He would speak about Swabian folk art, Byzantine icons and his footsore pilgrimage through Serbia and Kosovo in the 1950s. These were some of the subjects that had fired him with enthusiasm and inspired his life as a celebrated artist.

He talked with great intensity and dynamism vivid stories that were gilded with the rich experience of a life-times reading. One anecdote would spill into another, colourful and immediate, until the evening became a kaleidoscopic voyage into another world.

Kandinsky, the Russian hymnographer Kovalevsky and the soaring peaks of the high Wetterstein: one minute Id be standing in the glittering twilight of an Athonite monastery, the next Id find myself traipsing over the ice-bound crag of the Bavarian Zugspitze.

It was my daughters swastika incident that led me, tentatively, to ask Wolfram about his childhood during the Third Reich. 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 having been sharpened by his artistic powers of observation. With his heightened visual memory he was able to 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 was also extraordinarily touching and poignant. It proved a revelation: I had never considered the Second World War from a German perspective.

And thus, slowly, the book was born. Wolfram described at length what it was like to grow up under the Third Reich, talking into my ever-turning Dictaphone. He spoke in long monologues: he has never cared for interruptions lest he lose his train of thought. Yet they were monologues from another world one that was infinitely more sinister than I had ever imagined.

Wolfram told me how he had always dreamed of being an artist, even when he was a young boy. His artistic dreams would keep him alive on the Russian front and sustain him during his terrible months in Normandy in 1944. Scarcely had he been imprisoned by the Allies than he was able to resume his sculpting, having made an ad hoc chisel from a stolen metal bed-slat.

Life was too precious to squander in the years that followed the war. Wolfram returned from the battlefront and consecrated his life to his art. His Orthodox iconostasis, painted in the 1950s, can still be seen in the Russian church in Dsseldorf.

His more recent work semi-abstract watercolours now hang in national museums and are eagerly sought after by private collectors. Wolfram is now eighty-six and he still paints every day.

My daughters have now learned that the Third Reich committed unspeakable atrocities in the name of the Fhrer. They also know that the swastika stands as a symbol of mass murder.

However, they can take a quiet pride in their German ancestry for they have learned, too, something that they have never been taught at school: that even in times of exceptional darkness, when morality has been twisted and defaced beyond recognition, there remains a brilliant spark of humanity that can never be totally extinguished.

One of those sparks was carried by their grandfather.

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. Schnellschnell! 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.