After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (38 page)

‘Then the Christian monarchs pulled themselves together to drive back the invader. Now an Atheistic lot of Communists, Socialists and even Conservatives, all rejoice – blinded by the traitor press into the belief that it is “liberation”. Words have lost their meaning since Hitler and Stalin took over. To exchange one tyranny for another and an even worse one, is NOT liberation.’

Yet Ronald Horton, of Leek in Staffordshire, struck a very different tone in a letter to his mother. ‘The VE Day celebrations are set to go off quietly here,’ he began. He described the arrival of Russian POWs, flown into the area from liberated German camps and being held awaiting transportation home. Horton’s sympathy for the Russians was as striking as Lady Ashburnham’s deep suspicion of them. ‘Their faces are ravaged by suffering,’ he continued. ‘Last night one of them led with an accordion a fine spontaneous sing-song. It was good to see happiness in their faces after the terrible experiences they have suffered.’

Horton had set up an Anglo-Soviet Friendship Society in Leek, a wartime achievement resonating with a certain quiet heroism of its own. ‘There are few here who have given much thought to the Soviet Union until the Germans moved against her,’ he declared, ‘or realize the immense losses suffered by the Russian people.’ Horton, who gallantly set up lectures, meetings and bookstalls to better inform those around him, had earlier written – on 16 October 1941 – of the German onslaught on Moscow, when it appeared that the Russian capital might yet succumb to Hitler’s blitzkrieg invasion of the East. He related to his mother with pained indignation:

I can think of nothing but the fighting before Moscow and the lack of effective aid from our side. It looks like treachery to me. Many of those in high places want neither a Soviet nor a Nazi victory. They just want the two great armies to go on bleeding to death. The war will drag on indefinitely as a result. It is criminal, and one is furious when one thinks of the terrible sacrifices the Russians will have to make, after all they have been through, and the hopeful new society that they were building. But they will win in the end, and we over here will be put to shame.

These were extreme views, and the majority of British people, far less informed, charted their way between them – but their very extremity warned of the divide that existed in Allied opinion. In these circumstances, the second signing at Karlshorst represented a valuable compromise.

With the announcement made, Sir Montague Burton penned a letter to his son, stationed overseas. Burton’s tailoring empire had made more than a quarter of British military uniforms in the Second World War. He now looked to the future:

The unconditional surrender of Germany will soon be announced. The nightmare is almost over … Never has so much history been crowded into so few days: in fact, I do not think history has so exciting and sensational a parallel. Three important figures – two who have brought more sorrow than any other two men previously [Hitler and Mussolini] and one who has probably done more than any single individual for the survival of civilization in the hour of peril [Roosevelt] – have been moved from the world’s stage within a few weeks.

And it was the loss of Roosevelt which preoccupied Burton. He continued: ‘We are living in unprecedented times. Most people feel deeply grieved that Roosevelt was not spared to help frame the peace: his guidance and wisdom will be sadly missed.’

And then Burton wondered about the attitude of the Soviet leader: ‘There is hope that Stalin will permit Vladivostock to be used as a base to bomb Kobe and Tokyo and other Japanese towns – in that event, the war in the Far East might be over this year.’

Stalin’s continued cooperation with the West could not, however, be taken for granted. Within the Soviet Union, the surrender ceremony at Rheims was still not reported. Instead,
Izvestia
ran a long piece on the surrender at Breslau. ‘The long running, stubborn German resistance has finally been broken,’ the paper announced. ‘The garrison has raised the white flag. Eighty-two days have passed since our soldiers first surrounded Breslau … Where there was once a great, beautiful city there is now a shapeless mass of devastation … Civilians emerge from the cellars and basements. After the bitter, bloody fighting there is now peace and silence.’

Soviet war correspondent Vasily Malinin, who had covered the siege in its entirety, wrote in his diary on 7 May:

‘In the streets there is an eerie calm. At the road junctions, surrendered weapons and ammunition are piled up. Columns of German soldiers are marching out of the city. Some keep their heads lowered; others smile at every Soviet soldier they see, calling out like chattering parrots: “Hitler kaput, Breslau kaput, Krieg kaput”. Countless white flags hang from the windows. It dawns on us – the Fascists have finally surrendered.’

In Breslau, Soviet troops now took up garrison positions in the city that had defied them for so long. ‘It may sound strange,’ Soviet soldier Alexander Fedotov wrote to his mother, ‘but what I have longed for most of all over the last few months is quiet – quiet from the sound of guns and falling shells.’ The others had gone on a ‘trophy-hunt’, looking for pistols, field glasses and medals. ‘I went down to the river and for hours stared at the water running past me. And that evening, for the first time in my life, I heard the sound of nightingales singing in the bushes.’

At 5.00 p.m. on 7 May Brigadier General Robert Stack of the US 36th Infantry Division overtook a convoy of vehicles on the road near Kaufstein in Austria. It was the personal entourage of the former Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, including his wife, daughter and sister-in-law, along with his chef, valet and butler – altogether about seventy-five persons. That morning Göring had made contact with the US division through an emissary. Stack now approached him and asked whether he was willing to surrender unconditionally. The man who had for so long been Hitler’s designated successor meekly agreed.

The international tensions of this extraordinary day impacted most strongly on Czechoslovakia. Prague was caught between American troops who could have quickly reached the city but had been ordered not to out of fear of antagonising the Russians, Red Army troops who genuinely wished to liberate the city but could not yet reach it, and Wehrmacht and SS troops bent on disregarding the ceasefire and crushing the uprising, either to secure a passage westwards or simply out of defiance and spite.

In Britain, news of the Prague uprising had first been relayed with an optimistic hue. Basking in the success at Lüneburg Heath, the press first imagined that the Germans had simply surrendered and the Czechs were controlling the capital. Now very different stories were emerging. The
Daily Mail
reported: ‘In a final burst of fiendishness, SS troops in Prague are firing on helpless Czech civilians … The Wehrmacht commander does not accept what he describes as the “armistice” [the surrender signing at Rheims] and will continue to fight until he has secured a free passage out of the country.’

On the evening of 6 May the British had received decrypted ULTRA reports from the SS in Prague. ‘The tactics of terror are working and we will soon be in control of the city.’ On 7 May Churchill contacted Eisenhower directly.

‘I am hoping that your plan does not inhibit you to advance to Prague,’ the British prime minister said, ‘if you have the troops and do not meet the Russians earlier. I thought you did not mean to tie yourself down if you had the strength and the country was empty.’

However, it was now too risky for General Eisenhower to make any form of military intervention.

In the Czech capital, the rebels were clinging on to their last positions in the centre of the city. The Germans, realising the Vlasov troops were about to enter the fray, attacked at dawn in an effort to finish the insurgents off. At 5.00 a.m. they flung armoured vehicles and infantry into the Old Town Square, breaching the last barricades and breaking into the Old Town Hall itself. The Wehrmacht and the rebels traded shots on the staircases and in the corridors, while the terrified wounded, women and children huddled in the basement. The Luftwaffe joined the battle, its planes flying low over the city, strafing and bombing rebel positions. A column of thirty tanks assembled outside the SS headquarters in the Law Faculty Building to deliver the
coup de grâce
. The uprising was about to collapse.

The 1st Division of the Russian Liberation Army now made a dramatic appearance. It was equipped with artillery and anti-tank weapons – and its soldiers, realising what was at stake, immediately took the offensive against the SS. General Bunyachenko had planned his intervention with considerable skill. He sent one of his four regiments to seize the airport, to stop its planes bombing the city and prevent more reinforcements reaching the SS. Two more blocked the approach roads to Prague, from the north and south. His remaining regiment joined the rebels on the barricades and fought for control of the city centre.

Sigismund Diczbalis was one of these soldiers. ‘Our men fought with desperate fervour, street by street, house by house,’ Diczbalis said. ‘They threw themselves at the Germans.’

‘I remember a platoon of Vlasov soldiers arrived at our barricade at around 7.00am,’ Antonin Sticha recalled. ‘We were very surprised, because these “reinforcements” were wearing German uniforms, although with a distinctive arm patch. We were reassured by our commander that they were here to help us – and help us they did. They straight away pushed on past our barricade and began attacking a nearby German stronghold.’

‘We were afraid that German armour would simply roll over our position,’ Harak Bohumil added. ‘But early that morning we were reinforced with two companies of Vlasovites. They had two tanks, two self-propelled guns and a mounted machine gun. On 7 May we should have been destroyed. Instead, we were able to stop German tanks from getting through to the city from the south and even launched a counter attack.’

Fighting for Prague’s airport at Ruzne was particularly bloody. Bunyachenko’s men fought with the SS on the runways and brought up their artillery to open fire on the German planes. By evening the airport was in the Russian Liberation Army’s hands. The Germans had been driven out of the Old Town Square and the barricades reinforced.

‘Without the Vlasov forces we would not have held the city,’ said Antonin Sticha. The SS had flung more troops into the fray. But at the end of 7 May – the hardest day of fighting in the uprising – the rebel position held. General Bunyachenko and his men had saved Prague.

9

Karlshorst

8
May
1945

S
OVIET
MARSHAL
KONEV’S
1st Ukrainian Front was moving south through Germany, in the last Russian military operation of the war, pushing towards Czechoslovakia. On 8 May Karl-Ludwig Hoch wrote:

The Russians are marching into Dresden and the rule of the Bolsheviks is beginning. The Americans are on the motor highway near Chemnitz – but they are not going to come any further east. Someone has seen the first Russian soldiers. The sun comes up in a cloudless sky as though nothing were happening. In some of the neighbouring houses looting is going on. In the front garden of a draper’s shop, the owner lies dead: he had tried to stop it. Our teacher Pflugbeil’s daughter was raped and murdered. We hid many girls in the three turrets of our large house and shoved furniture in front of the entrances.

But Hoch’s own encounter with the Red Army would be rather different. ‘The first Soviet officer to find our out-of-the-way dwelling spoke to me in an almost friendly way,’ he recalled. ‘He wore the green cap of the GPU [Soviet security service]. He kept asking me: “Where is Schiller?” It is unbelievable – he turns out to be an Army Cultural Officer and he is looking for the Schiller House in Loschwitz, so he can safeguard its manuscripts. I show him the way.’

In the Baltic states, fighting was still going on in Courland:

‘On 8 May we made an adjustment to our frontline positions,’ Corporal Friedrich Kaufmann of the German 563rd Grenadier Division remembered. ‘We set up our heavy machine guns in a new emplacement and no sooner had we done this an artillery barrage opened up from the Russian side and wave after wave of their troops charged towards us.’

The Red Army was often profligate with the lives of its men. It had worked to overcome this fault but never fully succeeded in doing so. But it was ghastly to see soldiers’ lives being needlessly endangered at the war’s very end. Kaufmann described the unerring German response: ‘Our guns opened up and quickly found their range. All the Russians were killed. After a while there was another barrage from the enemy and another frontal attack, with the same predictable result.’ Three more charges followed – all of them were rebuffed in the same grim fashion. Then a Red Army officer called out to Kaufmann and his fellows, telling them that surrender negotiations were in progress. Soon this news was confirmed and all firing suddenly stopped.

‘We could scarcely believe that the war might be over,’ Kaufmann said. ‘We had been fighting in this isolated place for over six months and it was hard to believe it was all drawing to a close. And yet, Russian and German soldiers were now clambering out of their trenches, crossing into no-man’s-land and greeting each other and swapping cigarettes. Around this impromptu gathering lay the dead from the last Soviet attack, but this did not seem to dampen the bonhomie.’

Then a Russian general appeared outside Kaufmann’s command post. The Red Army considerably outnumbered the Germans on this section of the front and an entire Soviet division had been battering away against a company of Wehrmacht soldiers. The defences had held firm. But there was no one of equal rank to the unexpected visitor, so Kaufmann greeted him instead. ‘How many troops do you have here?’ he was asked. Kaufmann told him that the defenders numbered a little over a hundred. The Russian was markedly taken aback – he had expected several thousand.