After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (6 page)

I went out into the corridor. I vaguely realized there were other people there too. But all I saw was the figure of Hitler. He came very slowly out of his room, stooping more than ever and stood at the open doorway shaking hands with everyone. I felt his right hand in mine. He was looking at me, but not seeing me. He seemed to be very far away. He said something to me but I didn’t hear it. I didn’t take in his last words. The moment we had been waiting for had come – but I was frozen and scarcely knew what was going on around me.

Eva Braun came over to Junge and embraced her. ‘Try to get out,’ she said. ‘You may get through.’ Shortly before 3.00 p.m. they both retired to Hitler’s living room and its heavy door closed behind them. Eva Braun took cyanide. Hitler either took cyanide or shot himself. Fifteen minutes later the two bodies were carried up the bunker stairs, laid in a bomb crater in the Reich Chancellery garden and doused in patrol. The flames rose quickly and a last Nazi salute was delivered by the small group of onlookers. Hitler’s rule over the German people had ended.

The Führer’s legacy was one of death, destruction and terrible suffering. It was a legacy brought to Europe as a whole, and increasingly visited on his own people. Allied bombing had killed more than 400,000 German civilians and injured another 800,000. Nearly 2 million homes had been destroyed and another 5 million people had been forced to evacuate. Most of the casualties had occurred in the last months of the war. The Soviet invasion of eastern Germany in January 1945 resulted in another 500,000 civilian deaths and untold misery, with hundreds of thousands fleeing westwards, away from the Red Army.

Major General Erich Dethleffsen, a former head of operations in German Army High Command, and then a prisoner of war, began a memoir in the last weeks of the war:

Only slowly, in shock, and with reluctance are we awakening from the agony of the last years and recognizing ourselves and our situation. We search for exoneration, to escape responsibility for all that led to the war, its terrible sacrifices and dreadful consequences. We believe ourselves to have been fooled, led astray or misused. We plead that we knew little or nothing of all the terrible crimes … But we are also ashamed that we let ourselves be led astray … Shame mainly finds expression at first in defiance or self-denigration, only gradually in regret. That is how it is amongst our people.

And as the war reached its terrible climax, Allied soldiers tried to make sense of what the Third Reich represented. British sergeant Trevor Greenwood of the 9th Battalion Royal Tank Regiment was in a force occupying the German town of Schüttorf. At the end of April he wrote to his wife:

The war is developing so rapidly that I hate to miss a single news broadcast … The Nazis obviously know the game is up, but it is by no means certain that fighting will cease in the immediate future. It would appear that they cannot stomach unconditional surrender to the Russians. But they may think again, and then peace in Europe would be imminent. It is the awful uncertainty which is so upsetting …

Greenwood struggled to comprehend the mentality of his opponents. ‘For our sergeants’ mess we have a large house, fully furnished, and including a well-stocked library of books,’ he related.

And that means literature by the ton eulogising the Nazi party and its leaders … Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Streicher and Ley. To see the lavishness of these works makes one gasp. I never realized propaganda could be formed on such a colossal scale … They have undertaken enormous construction schemes, from road-building to gun-making. And every industry which has assisted in the creation of this ‘new Germany’ seems to have had a staff of resident photographers on hand, recording each stage of it. These volumes have one purpose – to carefully and systematically convince the reader of the glory of the Führer and the power of his party. There is something sickeningly repetitive about them … Their owners must have become intoxicated with the sheer weight of propaganda.

As I looked through these pages I saw how the army of the Third Reich was formed … how the youth of the country was regimented through ‘working parties’ at a time when Germany was forbidden to have arms or an army. How they were taught elaborate parade discipline and ‘rifle drill’ with spades. Of enormous roads being built … the Autobahn … Of gliding schools where future pilots were trained under the guise of an innocuous ‘sport’ … And then I lifted my eyes and glanced through the window of my temporary home, and this book-world of achievement vanished. Instead, I saw a war-damaged German town – with only a few civilians about, some wheeling handcarts or bicycles, all carrying the pitiful remnants of their worldly possessions.

Beyond them was a seemingly endless procession of British army lorries, each packed solid with German prisoners. All were heading triumphantly westwards.

Amid the debris, British troops pondered how to respond to the defeated civilians. ‘These people would now like to be friendly with us,’ Greenwood mused. ‘They don’t like “non-fraternisation” [the official policy of minimal contact] … It is a stern necessity.’ In France, Belgium and Holland the British troops had been welcomed as ‘liberators’. In Germany they were ‘conquerors’. Greenwood continued:

Once across the border we cease to regard civilians as normal human beings; we have to behave towards them more as automatons than men. And that change-over, the rigid suppression of one’s normal instincts, is not easy – to ignore a friendly greeting from a child, or to refuse a cigarette to a destitute tramp, or withhold assistance to an old lady, painfully pushing a handcart overladen with personal property. But we have to face these things … It is a horrible business having to behave in this manner, but it is hardly our fault. We cannot differentiate between ‘good’ Germans and ‘bad’ ones, so we have to regard them all as potential evil-doers.

Such views were widespread among British troops. In theory, there was a distinction between ‘Nazis’ on the one hand and ordinary Germans on the other. In practice, Greenwood was not so sure. Could the Nazis alone have unleashed so much evil upon the world? ‘The German people had fought and worked for Hitler,’ he continued. ‘They knew what was going on – the persecution of the Jews, the horrors of Belsen …’ Greenwood himself had not seen any of the Nazi concentration camps, but many of his fellows had. And he was struck by something in the room they now used as an officers’ mess – previously the home of a prosperous German. It was a painting, and at first glance it seemed innocuous, pleasing even. ‘This painting is of a moorland scene – with two or three silver birches in the foreground and a background of heather in full bloom,’ Greenwood noted.

It is quite an attractive picture really, but when examined closely there is a sinister irregularity about the skyline, and when you draw close to this, you find that this irregularity is nothing but a complete concentration camp. Clearly visible are the watch-towers for machine guns, the searchlight towers for night use, the barbed-wire compound enclosing the squat wooden huts for prisoners. And set apart, are more imposing brick buildings for the staff. The meaning of the picture is puzzling. Is it a scenic work, with an incidental background, or was the artist inspired to paint the camp from the nearest vantage point he could find? The picture, an original, has now been ceremoniously destroyed by our officers.

On 30 April US troops from the 40th Combat Engineer Regiment took possession of Dachau concentration camp. Soldiers from the US 42nd and 45th Divisions had liberated it the previous day. These men had been spearheading the US 7th Army’s drive on Munich – aware that the German army might still attempt to make a stand outside the city. They were totally unprepared for what they found at Dachau. Outside the camp were thirty-nine carriages of an abandoned freight train. Inside them were hundreds of corpses. Lieutenant Colonel Felix Sparks of the 45th Division recalled:

‘Battle hardened veterans became extremely distraught. Some thirty minutes passed before I could restore order and discipline. During this time, the over 30,000 camp prisoners still alive began to grasp the significance of the events taking place. They streamed from their crowded barracks and soon were pressing up against the confining barbed wire fence. They began to shout in unison, a shout that became a chilling roar.’

Now the camp had to be cleared of the dead. Engineer Donald Jackson said: ‘We used waggons to pile up the bodies – and forced German civilians to do the loading.’

Horrors such as this made the talks in San Francisco, which had begun on 25 April, over the formation of a new world body – the United Nations – all the more important. The Soviet Union had initially been suspicious, but after the death of Roosevelt had given them their backing as a mark of respect to the late US president.

Amid a world of shifting loyalties, upheaval and displacement were those who held no clear place in either the Allied camp or that of its foe. There were those in the Baltic states who had hoped to preserve their national independence and instead had been occupied, first by the Soviet Union and then by Nazi Germany. There were those in the Ukraine who also longed for independence, and had waged war against Germans who occupied their country in 1941 and the Soviets who liberated it in 1944. There were those in Poland who detested the occupation of their country – whether by Germans or Russians. And there were those Russians who were repulsed by Stalin’s regime and hoped for a different future for their country.

In February 1945 Himmler had created an anti-Bolshevik army without the formal approval of Hitler. It was named the Vlasov Army, after the Soviet general Andrei Vlasov who commanded it. Vlasov had been one of Stalin’s most brilliant commanders, but after his capture by the Germans in the summer of 1942 he had renounced communism and offered to recruit a force of Russians opposed to the Soviet leader. At this late stage of the war this force had finally come into being – but what its fate would now be was entirely unclear. These soldiers, whatever their motivation, had joined in common cause with the arch-enemy of their state, the Wehrmacht.

On 30 April 1945 one of the recently formed Vlasov divisions was in Austria, the other in western Czechoslovakia. The future for both seemed bleak. German liaison officer Captain Arthur Mongrovius wrote that day from Linz in Austria (Hitler’s childhood home): ‘I have got to know a Russian general, Mikhail Meandrov, a well-educated and cultivated man. In the presence of an interpreter I have enjoyed with him many wide-ranging discussions about God and the world. These leave me in no doubt that many of the officers who join the Vlasov Army do so not out of opportunism or self-interest, but a real conviction that Stalin’s rule has inflicted great damage on the Russian people.’

General Meandrov was the commander of the 2nd Division of the Vlasov Army. Mongrovius was fascinated by him – and curious too. He wondered whether Meandrov was a genuine Russian patriot. At the conclusion of such a terrible war, it was difficult to gauge men’s motivations. Mongrovius related one incident:

This general shows himself as a man of compassion. When a daily transport of prisoners arrived where we were staying, Meandrov persuaded the SS guards to release the unfortunates. Half-starved, still in their convict garb, they scattered in all directions. In their pitiful state they posed a risk to others, and the fact that all passed off peacefully was due to the presence of mind of the general, who persuaded the local villagers to provide food for these hungry creatures.

This vignette, superficially pleasing, was ambiguous. A show of clemency, whether by Meandrov himself or the SS guards he apparently persuaded, could easily have been motivated by the very opportunism Mongrovius decried, in an attempt to ingratiate oneself with the Western Allies. The Vlasov Army was simply trying to survive.

And yet, some measure of patriotism was clearly there. In a different time and place, an anti-Bolshevik army of Russians would have been welcomed by the Anglo-Americans. But at the end of April 1945, with the Grand Alliance still holding firm, these ideological fellow travellers were regarded as outcasts. Mongrovius’s attention turned back to the Vlasov Army itself – loathed by Stalin and the Soviet state and a political embarrassment to the Western powers:

‘It has set all its hopes on the first, informal contacts it is making with the Americans,’ the German continued, ‘as it believes it impossible that the United States could hand over the Vlasov Army, which is wholeheartedly against Stalin’s regime, to the Soviets.’ Mongrovius paused uneasily, before concluding: ‘If it did so, the inevitable end of such a force would be to be strung up on the Kremlin Wall in Moscow’s Red Square.’

The Vlasov Army had allied itself with the Germans in the desperate hope of forging a future for its people that was different to that of a communist state. However, the power of the Wehrmacht was now collapsing. North of Berlin, makeshift German defence lines buckled as Soviet marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front swung towards the Baltic. Rokossovsky’s offensive had been launched on 26 April, and was advancing rapidly through northern Germany. Major Erich Mende of the Wehrmacht’s 102nd Infantry Division had been awarded the Knight’s Cross in January 1945 for making a stand in East Prussia that allowed more than 10,000 civilians to escape the clutches of the Red Army. Now there were simply not enough troops to hold the enemy.

‘Everything came apart on 30 April,’ Mende remembered. ‘A Soviet tank push from the south-east overtook our forces and reached the outskirts of Rostock. The main exit route was now closed to us and a mass of our infantrymen clambered aboard our remaining trucks and jeeps, as we tried to find another way out.’

Eventually Mende and his exhausted fellow soldiers reached the port of Warnemünde, only to find the remaining ships crammed full of refugees. The men stood on the quayside. And then they were joined by a sudden influx. ‘Some 500 or so emaciated people appeared, all in convict clothes. We realized that they were escapees from a nearby concentration camp.’ The two groups watched each other in uneasy silence.