The Willow Wren by Philipp Schott (free ebook reader for iphone txt) 📕

As the sixth year of war begins, Adolf Hitler’s youth stands prepared to fight resolutely and with dedication for the freedom of their lives and their future. We say to them: you must decide whether you want to be the last of an unworthy race despised by future generations, or whether you want to be part of a new time, marvellous beyond all imagination.

What I did not know then was that after the assassination attempt, Hitler purged the General Staff of over 200 top officers, mostly executing them by firing squad, including the plot leader Claus von Stauffenberg, but apparently also hanging some of them from meat hooks and allowing them to slowly die that way. The executed were not only plot supporters but also officers who were suspected of opposing Hitler’s plan for Germany to go down heroically in apocalyptic flames, fighting to the very last man. This was the Götterdämmerung, the “Twilight of the Gods,” that had become Hitler’s final fantasy. If he could not win the war — which he still did hope to do with some sort of miracle weapon like an atom bomb or by having the Allies turn on the Soviets — then he would lose it in the glorious fashion described in the last part of his favourite opera, The Ring of the Nibelung, where the old Germanic/Norse gods are vanquished in an orgy of world-ending destruction.

Even without this background information, Reichsjugendführer Axman’s speech was highly alarming. We knew enough of the war’s progress to read between the lines. Men were being consumed on the Russian front like wheat through a threshing machine. Now with the success of the D-Day invasions it was a simple math problem: more soldiers were needed, but they were dying faster than they could be replaced by men of military age. Ergo, change the definition of military age. Sixteen was now the age for mandatory enlistment, and much younger children were being accepted as volunteers. A story circulated that the Americans had captured an eight-year-old boy in Aachen who was shooting at them in uniform (presumably much too large). In any case, the sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds steadily left camp through October, including of course Felix, who was absolutely jubilant to get his chance to leave us snot-nosed weaklings behind and directly engage the Bolshevik Hordes or the Anglo-Saxon Gangsters. I can still hear him singing at the top of his lungs as he and his group of recruits marched out of camp at dawn on a crisp autumn day.

This brings me to the second day of Christmas. Theodor and I were back at camp from two days in Colditz when we heard the news that Felix had been killed. No doubt many of the other Hitler Youth recruits had been killed too, but Felix’s younger brother was still at the KLV-Lager with us and had been told by Herr Tischendorf. I thought perhaps a general announcement would be made, but there was none. Most of the boys had been sent to poorly equipped Volkssturm units — literally “people’s storm,” but the meaning was “people’s army” — on the Russian front, but Felix had been relatively fortunate. Those considered to have elite potential, or those with connections, could get assigned to the depleted 12th SS Panzer Hitlerjugend division instead. You may recall that this was the unit that had gained notoriety in Normandy for the savagery of its boy soldiers. So, it was the Gangsters, not the Hordes for Felix. He met his end trying to storm the American position on Elsenborn Ridge in eastern Belgium in the Second Battles of the Ardennes, or what in the English-speaking world is more commonly referred to as the Battle of the Bulge.

The story grew that Felix had rushed the position alone, through machine gun fire, while the others had wavered. His brother speculated that it was a selfless suicide charge with a grenade to protect his comrades. I speculated that he tripped and accidentally pulled the pin out too soon. But with uncharacteristic discretion, I kept that speculation to myself.

The camp had changed. The deployed older teens had been replaced by another wave of younger children from the increasingly uninhabitable cities. The leadership had shifted to the more mature fifteen-year-olds and a handful of elderly veterans who had been assigned to KLV-Lager Schönbach. If the lower cut-off for service had been reset to sixteen, the upper had been raised to sixty. Herr Tischendorf was just over sixty and so retained his position as titular head, but the “Felix role” was taken up by a short bald man named Hauptmann (Captain) Kohl. He walked with a distinct limp, shouted a lot and was forever telling us about his derring-do in leading various charges out of the trenches in the First World War. I immediately thought, “Der Hauptmann Kohl: sein Kopf ist hohl!” (“Captain Kohl: his head is hollow!”). It was a jaunty little rhyme that had a particularly pleasing rhythm, but I did not share it with anyone and soon stopped humming it to myself.

One of Kohl’s first acts was to implement live-fire military exercises for the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, which included Theodor. Given the increasingly dire straits the German military industry and supply services found themselves in, this meant that these exercises were conducted with eighty- and ninety-year-old rifles. The widely accepted, albeit whispered, story was that some of them were quite literally museum pieces. Nobody was visiting museums anymore anyway. This was terrifying, so terrifying. There were several injuries from backfiring and other malfunctions, but no fatalities at least. We also had to fortify the camp by digging trenches all around it and constructing tank traps out of three sharpened logs fastened to each other at right angles to create a large six-pointed object. How this would stop tanks, which could presumably just blast them out of the way with their cannons, was unclear to me, but I knew