The Boy Who Went to War by Giles Milton Page B

sentiments that were widely shared in Germany at the time.
    Even friends of Wolfram’s parents, who were generally open-minded and enlightened, had a stereotypical view of the British in the year prior to the outbreak of war. They laughed at the way they dressed, supposing all Englishmen to wear a top hat and carry a rolled umbrella, while clamping a newspaper under one arm.
    The umbrella was the object of greatest satire. When it rained in Germany people wore long coats with hoods or simply allowed themselves to get wet. They never carried umbrellas. Wolfram’s father called the English the regenschirmbürger – the umbrella-carrying nation, of which Chamberlain was seen as its ultimate personification.
    Newspaper articles about the British changed tack in accordance with the views of the Nazi elite. So, too, did the lessons in Pforzheim’s schoolrooms. For the previous four years, children had been taught that Shakespeare was a bad man who had abandoned his wife and children. Schiller, by contrast, was portrayed as loyal and ever faithful. However, when it looked as if England was growing closer to Germany, everything went into reverse and it was said that the English were really of German origin. Shakespeare was therefore almost German and it was just by chance that he happened to have lived in England and not in Germany.
    As the international friction mounted – and Britain signalled her solidarity with Poland in the event of Hitler harbouring ideas of further territorial expansion – so Shakespeare once again fell out of favour. The bard had become the barometer of international diplomacy.
    It was the internal politics of Germany that were about to undergo the biggest and most dramatic alteration. Tensions were evidently being deliberately stoked by Adolf Hitler and were soon to reach breaking point.
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    Shortly before eight on the morning on 10 November 1938, the young Peter Rodi was kicking his way through the centre of Pforzheim on route to school. As he turned into Goethestrasse, he immediately saw that something dramatic had taken place during the night. All around him lay a scene of vandalism and destruction. Shop windows were smashed and the pavements strewn with broken glass. In places it was so deep that it looked like drifts of crystal snow.
    At one point, Peter stooped down, picked up one of the shards and popped it into his pocket. Although unsure what prompted him to keep it, he must surely have realised that something of great significance had taken place – something, indeed, that was to cause shock and revulsion right across the globe. Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, was a dramatic escalation in state-orchestrated violence against the Jews of Germany.
    It all began shortly before noon on the previous day. Peter was sitting in his classroom at school when someone came in – a local official – and opened all the windows. A few minutes later, there was a sudden and violent explosion that rocked the ground.
    The large city synagogue, which lay just a short distance from the school, had been the target. Although the structure was still standing, the fine masonry was seriously damaged and all the windows had been blown out. The man who had entered Peter’s classroom clearly had advance knowledge of the explosion and had opened the school windows in order to preserve the glass.
    Peter and his classmates were met by a disconcerting sight as they left school to go home. Someone high up on the dome of the synagogue was trying to hack off the Star of David. Unable to cut through the metal, he left it dangling at a precarious angle from the cusp of the roof.
    The explosion marked the beginning of twenty-four hours of aggression directed towards Germany’s Jews, sounding the alarm to all those still living in the state of Baden.
    Joseph Goebbels would later present the vandalism as a spontaneous uprising of the German people against the Jews. It was no such