Maiwald experienced the Second World War as a small child. Before he was three, he had been bombed out of three homes in Cologne and fled with his mother and infant sister to Silesia. They stayed there from 1942 to 1945, when the Russians came, then fled to Dresden and were there when it was bombed, shortly after Maiwald's fifth birthday. He escaped on the last train out and says he will never forget looking out the window at the conflagration that Dresden had become. By the age of five, he had seen more burning buildings and dead bodies than most Germans see in their entire lives, Maiwald says.