The Boy Who Went to War by Giles Milton

been worth the effort.
    It was Herr Becher, the pastor at their church, who later informed her about the various lunacies that Rust wished to inflict on Germany. His most eccentric idea was the rolling eight-day week with six days of study, one day of youth activities and then a rest day. It meant that the calendar was forever catching up with itself – an unworkable system that was abandoned shortly after being instituted.
    As time wore on, Rust’s ideas became increasingly disturbing. He purged most educational institutions of their Jewish teachers and also directed the sinister research centre that used prisoners for medical experiments. There were many, even among the Nazi elite, who considered Rust to be mentally unstable.
    How much Herr Becher knew about the detail of Rust’s policies is unclear, but one thing is certain. By the end of an evening in Becher’s company, Wolfram’s mother had lost her enthusiasm for knowing senior members of the Nazi hierarchy.
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    The long summer of 1936 was gloriously warm. Schönes wetter were the words on everyone’s lips that year. In the fields around Eutingen, the wheat had been bleached to the colour of straw and harvest time looked set to be weeks in advance of normal years.
    This was an event that Wolfram looked forward to enormously. Ever since the Nazis had come to power, harvest festivals across Germany had become magnificent spectacles, in homage to the days of yore. Party officials instructed farmers to make floats pulled by oxen and each one would demonstrate an element of the farmer’s skill – whether threshing, winnowing, or pressing juice-filled fruit.
    Everyone was encouraged to wear national costume. The party urged citizens to look into their wardrobes and dig out clothes that had not been worn for a generation or more. It all made for a wonderfully colourful spectacle.
    Wolfram, who loved the costumes of old Germany, spent many hours poring over pictures of jackets and lederhosen from Bavaria, comparing them with clothes from Swabia, the Palatinate and elsewhere. He quickly became an expert on such costumes and could identify different folk styles from every corner of Germany.
    When he learned of a competition in which entrants had to match traditional costumes with traditional houses, he rose to the challenge. Many thousands entered the competition but he managed to clinch first prize: a lovely, hand-embroidered tablecloth. Having expected the entrants to be housewives, the organisers had not entertained the possibility of the winner being a twelve-year-old schoolboy.
    There were other distractions that summer. In distant Berlin, the Olympic Games had opened to wild acclaim. Most foreign visitors were unaware that all the anti-Jewish signs had been temporarily removed from the city streets. Nor did they know of the arrest and internment of gypsies living in the environs of Berlin. Yet there were numerous tell-tale signs to suggest that this was to be an Olympiad unlike any other. Hitler was determined to demonstrate the superiority of the Germanic race: in the German national team, only Aryans were allowed to compete.
    The Olympic Games received scant attention from the Aïchele family. Wolfram cared little for sport, preferring, instead, to go on long walks with Uncle Walter, traipsing along dusty paths and swigging home-pressed apple juice. Their walks took them far from Eutingen: to the village of Kieselbronn and the forbidding Cistercian abbey of Maulbronn.
    On one of these country walks, Walter and Wolfram paused for a jug of apple juice in a wayside tavern. A local farmer greeted Walter and asked him what he thought of Hitler’s speech on the previous evening. It was a leading question: the farmer clearly expected him to praise it. As Walter could not bring himself to do so, playing the fool, he used his idiosyncratic humour to dodge the question.
    â€˜ Whose speech? ’ he said. ‘ Hitler’s? No, sorry,