Free The Boy Who Went to War by Giles Milton

vertiginous ramparts, machicolated battlements and lofty pinnacles. No sooner had he and his brother returned home than they began re-creating Bad Wimpfen in miniature. Diminutive farmsteads and peasant hovels, held together by stone and cement, began to encroach on the lawn of the lower garden in Eutingen.
    When the weather closed in, they continued their model-making indoors, creating an entire medieval burgh out of matchboxes, cartons and old scraps of wood. As Wolfram worked on his village in the downstairs salon, he peopled it with the peasants and pilgrims whose stunted frames and bearded jowls he had glimpsed in the candlelit retables of the local churches. Tonsured abbots and buskined farm-hands, franklins, pedlars and wizened apothecaries: all were conjured to life in Wolfram’s miniature Nibelungen world.
    â€˜ Wolfram! Mittagessen! Lunch! ’ A shout from Clara the maid ought to have broken the spell, but Wolfram was still in a trance, absorbed in his handiwork. When her call failed to summon him and his brother to the dining room, she went to fetch them and later eulogised Wolfram’s work to Herr Becher, who had come to Eutingen that very day for his luncheon with the family.
    â€˜Oh, just look at those model houses! What a wonderful thing the boys have created!
    â€˜Wolfram, your model village is fantastic! And so well crafted. You really must give it to the Führer for his birthday. Don’t you think so, Herr Becher?’
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    Hitler was riding high in popularity by the mid-1930s. The economy was stirring at last and unemployment was steadily falling. There was a feeling among many in Pforzheim that Germany was regaining its standing in the world.
    However, not all was quite as it seemed. Propaganda and media manipulation had put a highly attractive gloss to what was actually a very modest economic recovery. Nor was the reduction in unemployment anything like as dramatic as the official figures suggested. The ostensible fall in the number of people out of work, from 6 million in 1933 to 2.5 million in 1935, belied a more complex picture.
    Short-term contracts, the exportation of the young unemployed to the countryside (part of the so-called Voluntary Labour Service) and massive financial incentives to put women back in the home all helped to distort the figures.
    Prestige projects, such as the building of autobahns, featured heavily in Nazi propaganda and gave the impression of a government working tirelessly to create new jobs. Yet the much vaunted road-building programme involved at its peak a mere 84,000 people.
    Hitler had also won many plaudits for bringing an end to the street violence of previous years. In the last days of June 1934, he had moved to crush the power of the increasingly wayward SA. Its leader, Ernst Röhm, was shot, along with his closest advisors during the Night of the Long Knives, which provided the Nazis with an opportunity to get rid of many of their chief critics. Kurt von Schleicher, Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, was shot dead by the SS, as were others considered enemies of Nazism. ‘Shoot them down…shoot…shoot at once,’ screamed Goering as he studied a list of names. Eighty-five people were executed without trial, including twelve Reichstag deputies.
    Hitler took full responsibility for the killings, arguing that they were necessary for preserving internal security. ‘I gave the order to shoot those parties mainly responsible for this treason…’ he said. ‘Every person should know for all time that if he raises his hand to strike out at the State, certain death will be his lot.’
    Many in Pforzheim were willing to excuse Hitler for the night of reckoning, but not everyone was convinced that he was putting the country on the right track. Among the dissenters were all of the parishioners worshipping at the Aïchele’s local church – and with good reason. In November 1935, Reinhard Heydrich,