The Boy Who Went to War by Giles Milton Read Free Book Online

authority at the expense of the Nazis.
    Their plan spectacularly backfired. Wagner used the crisis to seize control of the regional government, claiming key ministerial posts. Less than seventy-two hours after the election results had been announced, he was master of both Baden’s government and police force.
    With his piercing eyes and blond hair, Wagner looked the very epitome of a loyal Nazi. He had, indeed, been an early and fanatical convert to Nazism. In the spring of 1925, he had secured Hitler’s permission to establish the Nazi Party in Baden; by the autumn of that year, he was already touring towns and villages, giving virulently racist speeches about the Jews. He saw Judaism as a disease – ‘the source of all ills of its host nation’ – and argued that serious diseases required radical cures.
    Now that he was in a position of authority, his ruthlessness came to the fore. Socialist and Communist deputies were arrested, left-leaning newspapers were banned, and three penal camps were established. Pforzheim felt the full brunt of his ire: two of the town’s papers, the Freie Presse and the Pforzheimer Morgenblatt , were shut down. The local mayor and other councillors were sacked. Two of the prominent Jewish members of the Chamber of Commerce were forced to resign.
    Wagner also ordered a boycott of Jewish shops and encouraged demonstrations outside the homes and businesses of prominent Jews. These were small-minded and often unpleasant. On the evening of 1 April 1933, uniformed members of the SA pushed their way into the large Pforzheim department store, Schocken, and told shoppers to leave. Later that evening, they stuck posters on to the windows of the town’s larger stores. ‘Closed! Gone to Palestine!’
    On the following morning, those same SA men reappeared and formed ranks outside the other big Jewish stores – the shoe shop, Edox, and the clothes shops Globus and Dreifus. In the Marktplatz, or main square, they also blocked access to Knopf, Kruger and Wolff & Kahn. Their placards declared, ‘Those who still buy Jewish goods are good-for-nothings and traitors!’
    Wagner announced with considerable relish that the state would soon pass laws to punish the Jews: ‘Jewish influence in business and public life will be relentlessly cut back.’
    He quickly put this into effect in his own fiefdom. All Jewish doctors and dentists were excluded from Baden’s social security system, which meant that their patients were no longer entitled to reimbursement for prescription drugs. Jewish lawyers were prohibited from even entering the courthouse – a fast track to financial ruin.
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    The momentous political transformation of Baden – and of Germany – had its first direct effect on the Aïchele household within a few weeks of Hitler becoming chancellor. Wolfram’s father was brought news that Pforzheim’s freemasonry lodge, of which he had been a member for many years, was to be closed. Its membership was forbidden from gathering and the lodge itself was to cease functioning.
    The regime further announced that all masons who had not left their lodges in January 1933 were to banned from ever joining the Nazi Party – a stricture that Wolfram’s father exploited to the full. Over the coming years, whenever he was quizzed as to why he, a state employee, had not joined the party, he answered that had failed to leave his Masonic lodge in time and was therefore not eligible to become a member.
    Such an argument was not without danger. Former freemasons found themselves increasingly targeted by the Nazi regime; by 1935, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Security Police, was calling them ‘the most implacable enemies of the German race’.
    The changes to the political situation in Baden had another direct effect on Erwin. For years, he had made a steady income from his illustrations for a well-known hunting magazine. Now, without any