After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (10 page)

General Mikhail Panov, Soviet commander of the 38th Tank Brigade, wanted to take the town in quick and orderly fashion. That morning he sent out a command to all his officers:

‘We have found during our advance that some of our soldiers are still preoccupied with plundering – and such cases of profiteering show an incorrect attitude to the German population. Those involved in such breaches of discipline prevent the proper fulfilment of our combat orders. I require unreserved adherence to this directive and the improvement of discipline and orderly behaviour in all our units.’

However, Panov’s exhortation proved to be a pious hope. An SS detachment opened fire on the negotiators, killing all three, and then retreated through the town, blowing up the bridges behind it. Demmin – enclosed by the Peene river to the north and west and the Tollensee river to the south – now became a noose for the civilians (some 30,000 of them) trapped inside it. More white flags were hoisted, but as Soviet troops entered, members of the Hitler Youth opened fire on them. In retaliation, Russian soldiers doused buildings with gasoline and set part of the town alight.

Terrified civilians – inculcated with Nazi propaganda about Bolshevik atrocities – now succumbed to mass panic. A wave of suicides had begun even before the Red Army reached the town. Entire families committed suicide together, some using guns, razor blades or poison, others drowning themselves in the rivers. As Demmin began to burn, some Russian soldiers lost all control and began raping the remaining female inhabitants – provoking another spate of suicides. Others – appalled by what was happening – tried to stop the people killing themselves. By 1 May more than 900 had died in this terrible fashion.

In the aftermath, the NKVD and Soviet military police were brought in to restore order. Demmin further tarnished the Red Army’s reputation. But the Russians had been provoked, and the Wehrmacht was deliberately putting its own civilians at risk. To aid its flight to the British and American lines farther west, the 3rd Panzer Army employed delaying tactics – leaving behind diehard groups of SS fanatics or Hitler Youth, who would sacrifice themselves, buying time for their comrades to make good their escape. German inhabitants would approach the Red Army with a white flag, wanting to surrender their town without further resistance, unaware that these groups were now installing themselves in strongholds within it, ready to fight to the last.

Late on 30 April the men of Lieutenant Ivan Vasilenko’s 121st Rifle Division – part of the Soviet 70th Army – heard that the small town of Neustrelitz wished to give up peacefully. Vasilenko’s tanks led the way and as the Russian troops moved forward they saw its civilians holding out white flags, signalling a straightforward surrender. Then something else happened.

‘On the approaches to Neustrelitz we came under attack from a railway embankment,’ Vasilenko recollected. ‘We returned fire and I ordered my tanks to converge on this place of resistance. But we ran into an ambush. Two Tiger tanks were dug in at the town’s outskirts – and anti-tank guns opened up on us from a nearby fortified building. Then Hitler Youth began firing on us with their Panzerfausts. Soon one of my tanks was burning, then another …’ Vasilenko quickly ordered his remaining armour into the town centre – only to run into another German stronghold set up around the marketplace. ‘Here my own tank went up in flames,’ said Vasilenko. ‘I was carried out, wounded.’ There would be no surrender at Neustrelitz. The combat journal of the 121st Rifle Division recorded that 128 Red Army soldiers were killed taking the town.

The situation in northern Germany remained highly volatile. US Airborne chaplain Father Francis Sampson – captured by the Germans near Bastogne – was now in a POW camp outside Neubrandenburg.

‘The mere reputation of Rokossovsky’s army was enough to panic the Germans,’ Sampson related. ‘The roads were soon jammed with waggons loaded with cherished family possessions, children and old people. The Germans headed west, hoping to escape the Russians and preferring anything to falling into their hands.’

The Neubrandenburg camp guards fled and the prisoners waited cautiously for the arrival of Soviet forces. The first Red Amy troops were a model of correct behaviour, striding through the gates, all smiles, expressing sorrow for the death of President Roosevelt and thanking American POWs for equipment they had received through Lend-Lease.

But by 30 April Neubrandenburg was burning. The following day Sampson attempted to visit the town:

‘Just a few yards into the woods by the camp we came across a sight that I shall never forget. Several German girls had been raped and killed; some of them had been strung up by their feet and their throats slit.’

In Neubrandenburg itself the streets were piled with debris and most of the buildings were still burning. Bodies lay everywhere – ignored unless they were blocking the traffic.

Sampson believed this to be a failure of Red Army discipline – with Russian soldiers using arson as a weapon of retribution against the civilian population. The picture was more confused and complex. A German rearguard unit had made a last stand in the town centre and then blown up its remaining ammunition store. The destruction that Sampson witnessed was in fact caused by tank fire and artillery shelling.

Sampson and his fellow POWs had simply walked free of their camp. Others – in different camps close to the front line – were force-marched by the SS to new locations. And then there were the slave labourers. Nina Romanova had been forcibly transported from her country and made to work on a farm just outside Greifswald. She recalled:

We, the Russian labourers, were kept in three barracks, alongside Poles and Ukrainians. Each day, whatever the weather, we had to work in the surrounding fields. On 30 April we were putting in potatoes – I was carrying a large basket of them. It was warm and sunny outside. And then we saw white sheets being hung out from the landowner’s house. Suddenly some soldiers on horseback appeared. It was a reconnaissance patrol of Red Army soldiers.

‘Where are the German troops?’ they asked. We told them they had pulled back. My God! We surrounded them, kissed their boots, stirrups, stroked their horses – we were overwhelmed with relief. It was the happiest moment of my life. After this first encounter, more and more of our troops appeared: tanks, lorries, horse-drawn waggons, all rolling westwards. We stood at the edge of the road, waving to our soldiers – and cried for joy.

Australian war correspondent Omar White wrote:

A procession of liberated slaves was commonplace on every country road in Germany. They came in knots and files through the spring rain, marching in the long grass or on the shoulders of the roads. One often saw their mutilated bodies where they had trodden on mines at the approaches to culverts and bridges. But they did not delay – they were free, so they marched.

The first-comers were the farm workers. They wore the rags of all the uniforms of Europe. Some had boots, some clogs, some the gaping wrecks of shoes. Some went barefoot, even in the frost, others wrapped their feet in blanket strips and sacking. As the armies went deeper into Germany the character of the marchers began to change. Some limped and were obviously ill and half-starved. Women and children were among them.

White was struck by the German attitude towards the Slavs.

They scarcely regarded them as people at all, more as convenient farm animals. I vividly recall one old woman who came out to the commander of an American reconnaissance column and begged him to stop her Russian slave labourer from running away. Her son and husband had been taken by the Wehrmacht, she said, and without her Russian there would be no-one to do the heavy work on the farm. The Russian was carrying a bundle of clothes, and understandably, seemed fully intent on flight. The old woman had been following him along the road, remonstrating with him. The commander said something unprintable and moved the column on. When I last glimpsed this unusual pair, the woman was sitting in the ditch with her head in her hands, the Russian striding purposefully away.

The war in the east had indeed been a race war. Hitler believed the Slav to be subhuman and so did many of his followers. These views had filtered down to the German population as a whole. Countless atrocities were committed against the Russian people, and as Red Army soldiers advanced through the Ukraine and Belorussia they uncovered ghastly evidence of the Holocaust and genocide. Soviet troops liberated the first functioning extermination camp at Majdanek in Poland in July 1944 and many Red Army soldiers had subsequently toured the camp. And on 27 January 1945 the Russians had discovered Auschwitz.

Rape and robbery were committed by the Western Allies as well. It was the scale and sheer brutality of what was happening between Russian and German which defied easy comparison. War correspondent Omar White had been with General George Patton’s Third US Army as it moved through southern Germany in April 1945. He said frankly:

Even before American troops reached the big concentration camps in which death squads specialized in the murder of Jews and Slavs, and the world learned the meaning of Hitler’s promise to arrive at a ‘final solution’, the fighting men who stormed into Germany were angry and in a vengeful mood. They had found out in France and Belgium, at first hand, about Nazi atrocities. Few wavered in the conviction that the Germans they killed deserved their fate, or that the survivors had little right to human consideration. At first, the treatment of German civilians was harsh. General Eisenhower’s broadcast proclamation – ‘We come as conquerors’ – implied the right of military commanders to requisition whatever accommodation remained intact in half demolished towns. The aged, the sick, the very young, were often driven out into the ruins to fend for themselves.

I heard one idea expressed again and again: ‘The only way to teach these krauts that war doesn’t pay is to kick them about the way they kicked other people about.’ And conquest tacitly implied the right to booty. The victorious troops appropriated whatever portable enemy property they fancied: liquor and cigars, cameras, binoculars, shotguns and sporting rifles, ceremonial swords and daggers, silver ornaments and plate and fur garments. This sort of petty looting was known as ‘liberating’ or ‘souvenir-ing’. Military police looked the other way. The men felt that they were handing out rough justice – morally valid retribution – to a race whose armies had plundered Europe for nearly five years.

But after the fighting moved onto German soil there was also a good deal of rape by combat troops and those immediately following them. The incidence varied between unit and unit according to the attitude of the commanding officer. In some cases offenders were identified, tried by court martial and punished. The army legal branch was reticent, but admitted that for brutal or perverted sexual offences against German women, some soldiers had been shot. Yet I know for a fact that many women were raped by American troops and no action was taken against the culprits. In one sector a report went round that a certain very distinguished army commander had made the wisecrack: ‘Copulation without conversation does not constitute fraternization.’

The Reverend Cecil Cullingford wrote of British troops stationed near Bremen:

Our soldiers, who have now seen or know about the unspeakable horrors of Belsen and similar camps, have found hospitals of POW camps full of our own men. These are the survivors of those who were force-marched from Poland to the North Sea, in the depth of winter and without food – all who fell out of line, for whatever reason, being immediately shot. Most are without hands or feet as a result of frostbite from the march. Those who have witnessed this are not inclined to feel sentimental about the Germans.

Cullingford added starkly: ‘There is a good deal of rape going on – and those who suffer have probably well deserved it.’

‘Do you see what a complicated thing is a man’s soul?’ Stalin had remarked. It was a time of upheaval, and for some, a moral breakdown was taking place within it. Ideas and beliefs became confused. Some descended into raw anger and aggression; others maintained honour and high standards. Many were no longer in control of themselves and their commanders were in quite a few cases no longer consistent in their maintenance of discipline. When a Soviet military prosecutor observed at the beginning of May that some officers were still ignoring regulations for better treatment of civilians, Marshal Zhukov added a note to his report: ‘Anyone found behaving in this fashion must be dismissed immediately … the Red Army will suffer no further dishonour.’

Lieutenant Andrei Filin, moving through East Prussia with Marshal Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front, recalled the sunshine of 1 May and the trees in blossom. The troops were marching westwards – but soon something disturbed them. ‘I saw a German woman,’ Filin continued, ‘who ran suddenly from her house – about half a kilometre away – across a field towards us. She was crying out “Help, please help! Red Cross, Red Cross!” As far as we were able to understand, she was trying to get help for her father, whom a Russian soldier had shot and badly wounded.’ Filin and his comrades were not slow to imagine the likely scenario in which the wounding had taken place. Filin continued:

Our regimental commander had always strongly opposed any attempt to rape German women. He told us:

‘This war has lasted a long time. It would have finished much sooner if we had not behaved like wild animals in East Prussia. Now each German soldier is no longer simply defending his Führer and fatherland, but his mother and his sisters as well. And for that cause he will fight to the very last cartridge. By losing our own discipline and self-control, we are creating an enemy who will resist us to the very end.’

Our commander sent an officer from my own battalion – a Colonel Pjatov – to investigate, and as I knew a little German he asked me to come with him as an interpreter. We ran towards the house. Unfortunately, when we reached it we found that the old man was already dead. It turned out that the Russian soldier had entered their home looking for alcohol. He was given some schnapps, but then he saw a young girl in the house and wanted to rape her. The old man stepped forward in an attempt to protect his granddaughter – and got shot in the stomach.