Lambs sent to the most evil slaughter

Writer Giles Milton talks to Daisy Dunn about the relative who inspired both his family’s artistic passions and the narrative of his most recent book, Wolfram: The Boy who went to War, reviewed in the Spectator last month by Hester Vaizey.

You note that the book grew out of many hours of interviews.  How long did the process take, and how did the book develop?

It was quite a long process in getting my father-in-law, Wolfram, to talk about the War. He never spoke about his time in the Third Reich and during the whole Hitler period. I always wondered what he did, but that’s not really a question you can ask your father-in-law. But when we had children and they started doing the Second World War at school he suddenly realised he had a story to tell; that he was part of the last generation of people who could give an eyewitness account.