A conflict of loyalty

What was life like in Hitler’s Germany? This question has long fascinated authors and readers alike, as books like Alone in Berlin, The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas and The Book Thief bear witness.

What was life like in Hitler’s Germany? This question has long fascinated authors and readers alike, as books like Alone in Berlin, The Boy with the Striped Pyjamas and The Book Thief bear witness. Nazi Germany, it has often been argued, was a totalitarian dictatorship. Through force, indoctrination and even common consent, such an interpretation contends, Hitler wielded total power and had complete control of the German population.

But were the tentacles of the Nazi state as strong as this understanding suggests? Were Germans simply passive pawns who submitted to the will of the regime? Wolfram: The Boy Who Went to War overturns these common assumptions about the function of the Nazi regime. It shows that there was no single uniform experience of Nazism, and that crucially, among ordinary Germans, a reservoir of opinion counter to Nazi ideology continued to exist in the Third Reich.

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Wolfram Aichele, the author’s father-in-law, was a young boy when Hitler came to power. He had an unconventional upbringing in a free-thinking artistic family, where his parents encouraged him to work things out for himself. This non-conformity and independence of mind ran entirely counter to the Nazi leadership’s desire for total control of the populace, and would see Wolfram’s parents get into trouble for failing to put up the Nazi flag on the days that the regime demanded this. Nazi rhetoric may have implied that the Party had total control, but as Wolfram’s story shows, rhetoric and reality were not the same thing. Indeed, even after membership of the Hitler Youth became compulsory for young Germans in 1936, Wolfram’s father colluded with a sympathetic doctor to secure a sick note for his son.