UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

Walter Wolff in German helmet struts his former stuff. (Courtesy of Lester Gerencer)

Dynamite swore that was his shredded overcoat on the bush we passed that day on the trail from Pozzilli to the OP. Could be.

The other one-of-a-kind was Walter Wolff, a spare, intense young German with angular features and a high-pitched accent who’d fled Berlin with his family in the late thirties on a supposed vacation to England. “Looks like one of these Kraut kids we capture. Loves music, very opinionated, and rattles off big words in English, not always sure of their meaning. His main usefulness lies in his knowledge of the Wehrmacht and his recent training in interrogation. He admits that in his youth he fell hook, line and sinker for Party Doctrines. He has barriers to break down and a lot to put up with, but he takes it all in his stride with never-failing good humor and generally gives back better than he takes.”

It seems that Walter had been a thoroughly indoctrinated member of the Hitler Jugend, the Nazi Youth Movement, when one day he was jammed into a crowd cheering a military parade in Berlin, awaiting the passage of the beloved Führer. He’d brought his camera. Here comes the big open Daimler and Hitler himself! Walter raises his camera to snap his hero—and is clubbed to the pavement by an SS trooper, just in case it’s loaded with something instead of film. The boy’s worship turns to fear and hatred, and the Wolffs take the first chance to get out.²

In contrast to the constant rain, deepening mud, penetrating cold and finally the blizzards of the mountains, the reappearance of the famous Italian sun and the surprising