After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (32 page)

Organisation was chaotic. ‘We had no idea of who the Displaced Persons were, how many of them we were dealing with and where they went afterwards,’ Finlayson acknowledged. ‘They tended to sort themselves out by nationality and eventually housing blocks were allocated on that basis. They knew where accommodation could be had and where the food was supplied. It was one meal a day – whatever was available. There was no way of checking who had eaten or for that matter who had eaten twice.’

Kathryn Hulme remembered the displaced persons camp at Wildflecken. ‘In this camp,’ Hulme wrote, ‘our UNRRA team learned what it really meant to be displaced, to have been removed – abruptly and totally – from your homeland, not by the hand of God but by a human conqueror.’ Virtually everyone in the camp was Polish, and 1,428 of them were under twelve years old.

Displaced persons – who had often endured terrible hardship in an alien environment – suffered a range of emotional and psychological problems. These had been hard to anticipate, as an UNRRA report acknowledged:

‘Implicit in our planning for care and control was the assumption that these individuals would be tractable, grateful and powerless after their domination under German slave labour policies,’ the report began. ‘They were none of these things. Their intractability took the form of what was repeatedly referred to by officers in contact with them as “Liberation Complex”. This involved revenge, hunger and exaltation.’

This was a state of mind without any inhibition. Captain John MacAuslan encountered recently freed Russians at Neustadt. ‘They were looting and burning the town – it was chaos.’ The report continued: ‘These qualities combined to make DPs, when newly liberated, a problem as to behaviour and conduct, as well as for care, feeding, disinfection, registration and repatriation.’

Marta Korwin, a Polish social worker attached to one team, said of the DPs she had encountered:

During their captivity, in conditions that were always extremely hard, and often sordid and horrible, they would counterbalance this reality by calling up daydreams of a past life. They became almost certain that the moment they were liberated they would find themselves in the same happy, beautiful world that they had known before the war. All past difficulties would be forgotten, freedom would take them back to a place where nothing had ever gone wrong.

But when liberation came, these people would be herded into camps and confronted by a reality that showed them ‘the ruin that had overtaken the world in the war years, that their hopes for a better future had been destroyed – and gave them time to reflect on it’. Korwin noticed that for many, destroying things became a way of expressing their rage at what had happened to them: ‘Russians, especially, took special pleasure in ruining things and breaking them. On the first morning I went through part of the factory [adjoining the displaced persons’ assembly centre] filled with expensive machinery and was shocked when I saw a number of Russians smashing with meticulous precision one machine after another.’

And yet, Korwin asked, ‘could anyone be surprised by the licence found in the camps, the escape into unruly behaviour, drink or sex?’ She added: ‘Fear of the future and the desire for revenge were the underlying factors responsible for most of the unbalanced behaviour in the Displaced Persons that we encountered.’ Korwin became aware of their fragile state of mind, that they had to be handled very carefully if their cooperation was required, for example in keeping their living quarters clean. ‘It took much more time to convince people that things should be done in a certain way,’ she said, ‘but if we persisted, with sensitivity, it was worth the effort – we found we were working with friendly and helpful human beings again.’

UNRRA was venturing into uncharted territory – with a host of issues thrown up by an entirely novel situation. And yet there was real optimism nonetheless. British relief worker Francesca Wilson, on her way to Germany, said: ‘It began to dawn on me what a great experiment UNRRA was – the first international body to try and do something concrete and constructive.’

A remarkable example of the urge to do something ‘concrete and constructive’ was found in Allied efforts to relieve famine in the Netherlands. By early April 1945 the 1st Canadian Army, part of Field Marshal Montgomery’s 21st Army Group, had pushed the German occupiers under General Johannes Blaskowitz back into western Holland. These forces were now cut off from the rest of the Wehrmacht but their position could be strongly defended and flooding used as a weapon against the Allies.

On 9 April the British war cabinet focused on the famine in Holland. It was agreed it would be too dangerous to send the army into the western part of the country still held by the Germans – the fighting would only create further chaos and hardship. But they could not simply stand by while this tragedy was played out; 21 million people stood on the brink of starvation and many of them were already dying of hunger.

Field Marshal Montgomery – in the midst of his military build-up to cross the Rhine – had nevertheless allocated two divisions for feeding the Dutch people. He was also stockpiling rations for airborne food drops. The initial plan was to approach the German administration in Holland headed by Reich Commissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart, via Switzerland, and see whether food could be brought in via the Red Cross. Winston Churchill commented bluntly: ‘if they refuse, we shall hold all German troops left in Holland responsible for this’.

On 16 April Seyss-Inquart responded. He made it clear that German forces would defend themselves as long as their government remained in place. And he added that if they were attacked, they were quite prepared to blow up the dykes and flood the land between themselves and the Allied forces. But Seyss-Inquart also made it clear that the administration was interested in allowing the Red Cross to bring in food, and also in pursuing a possible ceasefire or truce to enable this to happen. Seyss-Inquart was a devoted Nazi now looking to save his own skin through separate negotiations with the Allies. But his proposal could save lives.

Churchill and the Combined Chiefs of Staff now brought in the Americans and the Russians. It was not an easy decision to allow a truce, yet all parties agreed that negotiations should continue – and at the end of April a deal was hammered out. The Allies would halt military operations in occupied Holland. In return, the Germans would open up the country to immediate food convoys by land, sea and air. To his great credit, General Eisenhower began the airdrops immediately. The British drops were codenamed Operation Manna; the American, Operation Chowhound.

These were two very different names – one emotionally engaged but invoking a higher cause, the other seeking to disengage from horror through humour. On 25 April 1945 Denis Thompson was in the rear gun turret of a Lancaster when his RAF unit, 170 Squadron, was sent to bomb the Berchtesgaden. Now he was involved in Operation Manna, dropping food supplies to the Dutch in the German-occupied zone of Holland. Denis and his fellow crewmen dropped off supplies over Vlaardingen:

‘People were waving and shouting. The nurses were lying on the sloping roof of the hospital, waving and cheering us as we flew over. We were only about 600 feet in the air, and supplies were dropped in crates with no parachutes. People ran to gather the food – I was really worried a crate would land on their heads.’

Between the end of April and 7 May British aircraft flew 3,928 sorties over Holland, delivering a total of 6,680 tons of food. The Americans flew a further 2,268 sorties, delivering another 4,000 tons.

It was an extraordinary experience for British and American bomber crews used to unleashing weapons of destruction as part of the Allied war strategy. They now knew that they were saving lives instead of ending them. Bob Upcott of RAF 115th Squadron recalled: ‘All our bombers were flying at low altitude so as not to damage the food parcels. On one of our Manna missions we flew over a hospital on our way back from the drop zone. We saw a nurse there unfold the largest Union Jack we had ever seen. It was a remarkable gesture – and a brave one. German soldiers looked on in bemusement.’

Peace was signed in Holland on 5 May. A day later, Captain Tom Stafford of the US 87th Infantry Division helped bring about a mass surrender of Wehrmacht and SS troops in south-west Germany, close to the border with Czechoslovakia. Stafford remembered casually drinking wine on the veranda of a beautiful house used as a divisional headquarters while German generals debated the protocol of surrender. One was unhappy to be negotiating with a young American captain. ‘I have been fighting this war since D-Day,’ Stafford said. ‘I have been a German officer for 30 years,’ the opposing major general replied. Both American and Russian troops were now in Czechoslovakia and Stafford pointed out that if the surrender was given immediately the Germans could avoid being captured by the Red Army. That carried the argument.

Colonel Jerry Tax of the US 71st Infantry Division would never forget the surrender that occurred in Wels in Austria:

‘Drifting down into the town’s great square, on foot, on hands and knees, came former inmates of Gunskirchen Camp,’ Tax recalled.

The news of our coming had reached the camp that morning – and all those who could move were en route to gaze upon their liberators. No more than one in a hundred walked upright; dozens were dragged into town on carts and others shuffled along, leaning on sticks, makeshift crutches and each other. Their garments came out of a wild costumier’s hallucination: tattered uniforms that had been worn twenty-four hours a day for three or four years to wrappings of rags. None, obviously, had been washed in all that time. Lice and vermin of every sort crawled over their misshapen, emaciated bodies.

The hands that clutched at what scraps of food and candy we distributed – until we had no more – were skin and bone and blue-black nail. Skin and bone, filthy rags and vermin, row on row, endless, filling the square. And not a sound. Not one human sound came from these thousands of throats. Perhaps they hadn’t the strength to speak, even in gratitude. Perhaps words of thanks were long-forgotten – forgotten under the lash and the pistol butt, the abysmal degradation.

It would be fine and thrilling to say that despite their pitiful condition, despite their rags, the years of torture, abject slavery and starvation, hope and joy shone from the eyes of these men. But it wasn’t so. To be sure, their eyes were far from blank – but there was no joy or hope in them. These were not the eyes of men set free. Perhaps the gigantic, impossible fact of liberation was just too big, too miraculous to grasp. Perhaps, in their incredibly weakened physical condition, it was too big a shock to be assimilated. Whatever the reason, they were simply broken, beaten men – row upon row of them.

And in their eyes you read the story of the past four or five years. You didn’t have to stare in helpless fascination at one of these walking skeletons to learn what systematic starvation can do to a man’s body. From the depth of his soul that hunger came to you, from his eyes – blinding, insatiable hunger. Would it ever leave them?

For hours it seemed that we stared out on this sea of human misery. There was little that we could say and less we could do after all our food, candy and cigarettes were gone. But suddenly, we began to feel that something was happening out of our sight. The crowd before us had started to move towards one side of the square. And then, faintly at first, we heard the rhythmic step of marching soldiers echoing on the cobblestones. From one of the side streets leading into the square a column of German troops appeared and began filing into it. They were, we supposed, the garrisons who had surrendered earlier in the day. As they came in, they lined up in regular ranks in the space so recently left vacant, hundreds upon hundreds of them.

On one side of the square, in a neat, orderly formation, stood the would-be Herrenvolk. Their smart grey uniforms were pressed; chubby pink cheeks and an occasional paunch left no doubt they had fed well on their loot and what they could extract from the slave labour of their farms. In their eyes was still the arrogance of the conqueror.

Facing them, in disorder, in indescribable disarray, standing up in oxcarts, lying on their bellies, leaning on each other, were the free men of Russia, France, Poland and the Balkans … a heterogeneous collection of skin, bone and filth. About twenty yards separated the two groups – twenty yards and the whole world. And the square was as still as a tomb.

For half an hour – that dragged on interminably – the two groups stood there, immobile. Not a voice was raised, not a fist shaken – not a stir. Our Military Police were busy arranging for the Germans to be taken into captivity. That was all.

And yet I could have sworn something was taking place out there. I climbed out of the truck and walked slowly through the crowd. Was it my imagination? Was it wishful thinking? To this day I cannot answer these questions. But I saw, or thought I saw in those eyes, the faintest glimmer of what I had vainly looked for before. Perhaps the shock was wearing off. As they looked upon the Germans, waiting to be led away, a huge, impossible truth seemed to be dawning in their consciousness.

They had survived and to some extent would recover. The well-fed Germans had suffered a moral defeat and desolation from which there would be no return.

‘Within another hour the square was empty. The Germans had been taken away. Every wheeled vehicle within miles had been commandeered to take the sick and starving ex-prisoners to places where they could be fed and cared for.’

Compassion had awoken. ‘And that night – for the first time in the war – I began to sense the spirit of a new Europe coming into being.’

8

Rheims

7
May
1945