Wolfram: The Boy Who Went to War is Giles Milton’s seventh work of narrative non-fiction. It recounts the early life of Wolfram Aichele, a young artist whose formative years were spent under the shadow of the Third Reich.
Wolfram Aichele’s parents were deeply hostile to the Nazis. Many of their interests, including freemasonry and the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, conflicted with the politics of Nazism. Wolfram’s father, the artist Erwin Aichele, managed to avoid joining the Nazi Party. But he could do nothing to prevent his son being drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst or Reich Labour Service in 1942, the first inevitable step into the Wehrmacht.
Aichele was sent to the Ukraine and Crimea, where he contracted a life-threatening strain of diphtheria. In 1944 he was sent to Normandy in France, where he served in the 77th Infantry Division as a ‘funker’ or Morse code operator. He took part in the German army’s doomed attempt to halt American troops from breaking out of their beachhead on Utah Beach.
Wolfram Aichele survived a massive aerial bombardment in June 1944. Two months later, he surrendered to American forces and was a prisoner of war, first in England and then in America, where he was interned at Camp Gruber in Oklahoma. When he returned to Germany in 1946, he discovered that his home town, Pforzheim, had been obliterated in the Royal Air Force’s firestorm raid of 23 February 1945.
Giles Milton’s book received widespread critical acclaim for its use of original unpublished source material and its account of the lives of ordinary Germans. In America, the book is published under the title The Boy Who Went to War: The Story of a Reluctant German Soldier in World War II.
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