Ellen’s confidence in Walter was not misplaced. He was drafted into the Luftwaffe, where he quickly rose to the rank of Staffelkapitän, commanding a squadron of pilots. At first, he was stationed near Berlin, so it was easy for him and Ellen to be together when he was off duty. In his longer periods of leave they repaired to special Luftwaffe holiday homes in Bavaria and Saxony. Hitler was Walter’s world; and Ellen’s life was blissful within it.
Sometimes, Klaus said, his jingoism was too much for her, such as when he returned from his first mission in France and placed the bloodied helmet of a dead French solider triumphantly on the kitchen counter. She was not going to tolerate that vile trophy in their home and threw it out. But he was with her only briefly before he was sent to Italy and then to Rommel’s army in North Africa, where he was transferred from combat operations to flying transport planes for resupplying ground forces.
In a way, Klaus said, his father would have preferred to remain in combat. Destroying enemy planes and watching them spin out of the air was indescribably exciting. But flying clunky transport aircraft was dangerous too: three times he was shot down, and three times he survived.
Recognition was swift. Walter was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class, the Iron Cross First Class, the Honour Goblet of the Luftwaffe, and then, on 27 March 1942, the German Cross in Gold, which I had seen in the leather box in Klaus’s apartment.32
Although the campaign in North Africa was heading for disaster, Walter was one of its young heroes. In December 1942, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross33 was added to his list of decorations. Three months later, Ellen told him that she was pregnant. And, on 21 July 1943, Göring promoted Walter to the rank of captain.
It had been a heady twenty-four months, the cascade of joys interrupted only by Theo’s deportation to Sachsenhausen, which Ellen had witnessed when she went to the assembly point where he had been ordered to report and, from a safe distance, watched him disappear. Through it all, she continued writing Walter love letters of undiminished freshness. As the war progressed, the shortage of paper forced her to write on toilet paper in lipstick, but though she had to be briefer she was no less ardent.
For Walter, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross and the promotion to captain didn’t just bring military glory. He was now entitled, so Klaus’s mother reported, to ask Hitler for a personal favour, through one of the Führer’s representatives.
Without a moment’s hesitation, he knew what this would be: he would request permission to marry Ellen, who was now four months pregnant. He rushed to tell his closest friends in the Luftwaffe. ‘I am going to ask the Führer for permission to marry my girl! That is all I want of him!’
‘But why do you need permission to marry?’ they asked. ‘Are you mad? Anyone can get married! Ask for something that only he can bestow!’
‘But this is something only he can bestow,’ Walter answered. And he explained that Ellen was Jewish.
The others were stunned. They had never suspected it of him – how could such a convinced Nazi choose a Jewish girl? Most dismaying to them, though, was the danger he was prepared to put himself in. ‘You’ve lost your mind, Walter! The Führer says he will grant any wish, no matter what it is. But he would never grant that one. Instead, he will have you both executed.’
Walter’s comrades would gather round him when others were out of earshot to dissuade him from this absurd idea; but his indiscretion had almost certainly been his death warrant. One of them must have ratted to higher authorities, perhaps accusing him of wider disloyalty too.
His superiors reacted with brutal speed. Walter was discharged from active service and assigned to test piloting, which was notoriously dangerous: you were trying out planes that had been rushed from design to prototype. And the loss of prestige was devastating. Instead of being transferred to a new front line or a position on Göring’s staff, Walter found himself sidelined to a role where heroic defence of country was no longer possible.
His morale had already been deteriorating before his latest promotion. Ellen had noticed that he started getting strange after the trip back from the Balkans through Croatia. The brutality he witnessed there was no longer heroic; this was savagery, delight in inhumanity, the abandonment of all rules of warfare. It broke his will – and possibly his faith in the Nazi cause.
Ironically, when Walter was promoted to captain he wasn’t only told that Hitler guaranteed to bestow on him a favour of his choosing. Göring’s grandiose certificate announcing the promotion with effect from 1 August 1943 also declared that the recipient ‘could be assured of the special protection of the Führer’.
Two weeks later, on 15 August, the prototype that Walter was ordered to fly fell out of the sky, soon after take-off from Berlin’s Schönefeld airport.
He died instantly.