Free The Boy Who Went to War by Giles Milton Page A

director of Third Reich security, issued a decree that banned Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical movement. All property belonging to the society was confiscated and the founding of any organisation to replace it was strictly forbidden. Heydrich had acted, he said, because the Steiner movement had ‘an international outlook and has links with foreign freemasons, Jews and pacifists’.
    He criticised Steiner for promoting the individual over society, something that ran counter to the basic premise of Nazi ideology, adding: ‘It has nothing whatsoever to do with the National Socialist rules on education.’ Heydrich considered the entire network to be ‘an enemy to the state’. By implication, all former members, including Wolfram’s parents, were enemies too.
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    In the early years of the Third Reich, Erwin and Marie Charlotte were able to avoid the impact of many of the regime’s harshest strictures, largely because their house stood apart from its neighbours and was surrounded by an enclosed garden. It was a very different story for their church friends, the Rodis. Still living in an apartment in the heart of Pforzheim, they came under increasing surveillance.
    For young Frithjof Rodi, the blockleiter or block leader was the worst daily irritant. He was the lowest in the Nazi hierarchy in Pforzheim but the most invidious of them all, preying on every detail of people’s lives.
    Most block leaders had about fifty households under their supervision. Their task was to provide a link between the national party and the population at large. They were also charged with promoting party ideology while spying on those living in their patch.
    To Frithjof’s eyes, they represented a constant danger, capable of denouncing people for any number of minor misdemeanours, such as not having a picture of Hitler in the house or not hanging out the swastika on appointed days.
    Those who contravened party strictures risked internment in a concentration camp, the nearest one to Pforzheim being Dachau. The threat of Dachau hung over everyone in the area as a permanent menace. Unlike the extermination camps of later years, which were kept a strict secret, the concentration camps were frequently mentioned in the press. The regime wanted the populace to know that they would be severely punished if they did not conform.
    The young Rodi children used to taunt each other with: ‘You’d better be careful or you’ll be sent to Dachau.’ They never found out what went on there, for the few inmates who were released never spoke of what had happened to them. It was too perilous to talk of such things.
    The block leader who oversaw the Rodi tenement had noticed that the family attended the Christian Community each Sunday morning. He had also discovered that Frithjof’s parents were active members of the maligned Rudolf Steiner movement. When he learned that they held weekly meetings at their apartment with local activists, he informed the Gestapo.
    The Gestapo acted immediately, approaching the owner of the flat directly below to ask whether they could plant listening devices in his ceiling. However, the tenant was an old-fashioned high-school teacher with a strict sense of moral propriety. Although not on particularly friendly terms with the Rodis, he refused to grant access to the Gestapo out of indignation at their tactics. He also warned Max Rodi of what had taken place.
    Wolfram’s parents were as hostile to the Nazi regime as Max and Martha Luise. They also shared a determination to muddle through day by day, remaining as true to their principles as they could without putting their loved ones at risk. They were fortunate to be shielded from the worst excesses of Nazism by their former Pforzheim neighbour, Herbert Kraft. He had climbed the local party hierarchy over the previous few years and now held a senior position in Karlsruhe’s Organisation I, a body charged with converting