After the Reich (81 page)

On 22 July 1946 Hans Johnert learned that America no longer possessed prisoners of war. They had all been put out on loan. Soon after his ‘repatriation’ he was moved to Pont d’Ain, near Bourg-en-Bresse. The Germans were used to provide labour for the local community. They worked on the farms and in the quarries. They served different masters, some of whom were kind, some not. On 9 December Frenchmen dressed as Germans threw grenades at the POWs, killing two of them and injuring many more. Johnert was sent home in the spring of 1947.
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Another, anonymous prisoner also found himself handed over to the French by the Americans. He was originally taken to a tent camp outside the Breton city of Rennes where the prisoners slept on the wet earth. The Americans were particularly trigger-happy and one man was killed simply for running to pick up a cigarette butt thrown down by a guard. Any prisoner found guilty of theft was buried up to his neck in a hole in the ground. Those who tried to run were confined for thirty days. ‘Vae victis,’ concludes the prisoner - ‘woe to the vanquished’.
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On 24 June 1945 the prisoner in Rennes learned that the French were due to take over the camp. Despite the rough way they had been handled by the Americans it was not a pleasant thought - ‘the modern slave-trade’ he called it. If anything, the French were even quicker on the draw than the Americans. Soon after they took control of the camp they shot three Germans, two in the head: ‘Buy combs, you lot, there are lousy times ahead!’ Shooting continued to be a frequent occurrence at night. Poor provision meant that people died of hunger too. Two men starved to death in the huts, but the prisoner added that about twenty died daily in the camp sickbay. ‘Die. Who would ever learn about it - who would believe it? The dead tell no tales.’ This death rate would tally with the known figures for France in 1945.
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One evening a drunken guard fired into a group of prisoners. He missed the Germans but hit a black American guard outside the perimeter, killing him outright. Red wine was responsible for the guards hurling salvoes of stones at the prisoners to shouts of ‘Vive la France!’, ‘Vive de Gaulle!’ and ‘boches!’ At least one of the guards was from Alsace. The Germans inflicted revenge on him by using the insulting word
Wackes
behind his back.
^ds
On 8 August another eight men died of hunger in the sickbay. On the other hand most of the starving men were in the huts, not in the sickbay. When the Red Cross parcels arrived that August the men were as happy as children. The arrival of food, however, failed to prevent ten more men dying on the 22nd. One of the prisoner’s friends cut his wrists when the guard discovered the tell-tale blood-group tattoo in his armpit. Meanwhile, the scandal of the camps had reached the French press: reporters were comparing them to Buchenwald. In the
Figaro
a writer acknowledged that the Germans had committed terrible crimes but ‘these horrors should not become the theme of a sports competition in which we endeavour to outdo the Nazis . . . We have to judge the enemy, but we have a duty not to resemble him.’
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The prisoner volunteered for a work detail that took him off to defuse mines around the Breton coast - in blatant violation of the Geneva Convention - but he was happy to do anything to escape from the misery of the camp, and possibly get something better to eat. As he was signed up there was a new spate of robbery, this time by both guards and civilians. The men were beaten and kicked and they lost their watches, rings, shoes, even their trousers.
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Belgium

Britain and America donated over 60,000 of their POWs to the Belgians. One German soldier who ended up in a camp near Mons in the south of the country had been captured in the South Tyrol. At the airport he was robbed by an American soldier. Travelling through Germany he was able to toss out a letter on Günzburg Station. A nod from the station master told him that he would deal with it. In Mannheim they came across some soldiers who had been shipped up from Lake Constance. ‘They reported that the
Franzmann
[army slang for a Frenchman] was taking everything away.’
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The Americans left them in Erbisoeuil camp with 30,000 others. Before they quit their charges, the GIs robbed them of their wristwatches. What they failed to take, the Belgians grabbed, adding that they would have it back on their release: ‘These people were the worst we had met up to now.’ The prisoners were registered. When they produced their pay-books, the Belgians were astonished to learn that they were not SS men, but that did not prevent them from stealing the prisoner’s pen, money and clothes. Once the Germans were admitted to the camp it became clear that the guards wanted to see them as the perpetrators of brutal acts in concentration camps: ‘You did this too in concentration camps . . .’ they said. When the men tried to leave their huts to urinate or defecate, the guards shouted at them, ‘You German pigs, do it inside, that’s how it was in the KZ!’ When one of them chanced it, he was shot at. They got round the problem by urinating through the window.
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The prisoner could not understand why they had been sent to the camp: ‘The Belgian people don’t want us at all, and they are frightened of unemployment and are threatening to go on strike.’
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The prisoner was put to work in the mines. The work was only for the
Landser -
the officers were exempted. The Belgian prime minister, Achille van Acher, had given him some hope by affirming that the men would be sent home in the spring of 1947. It was not just the work which was gruelling, it was the occasional letters from home which painted a disturbing picture of the life of their dear ones. They heard about the rapes in the Russian Zone, the theft of all their belongings and the penury of their families, and the desperation to get home meant there were frequent attempts to escape. There were, however, advantages to living in the British or Soviet Zones. It is not hard to see that the experience with the Americans had made the prisoner bitter: ‘In the English [
sic
] or Russian Zones the women receive a little support at least, but with the Yanks and their complete democracy, everyone has to get on with their life as best they can.’
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The official statistics for deaths in custody in the Benelux lands are 450 in Belgium, 210 in Holland and 15 in Luxembourg.
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The Russian Camps.

The Russians seemingly made no distinction between a POW and a civilian, and both were liable to arrest and to be shipped to the Soviet Union to work, or to rot in camps. On 29 June 1945 the Soviet Union was said to have between four and five million Germans within its borders, helping rebuild its cities.
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The imprisonment of German and other Axis POWs in Russia was marked by an element of callous chaos. Huge numbers of Germans went east - not just soldiers, but non-military men aged between sixteen and sixty, including scientists and technicians. Records attesting to their identity were inadequate, and whether they lived or died was clearly a matter of supreme indifference to the Soviet authorities. As it happened, 1,094,250 soldiers perished, half of them before April 1945.
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Sometimes it was the vast majority: of the 90,000 soldiers taken prisoner at Stalingrad, only 5,000 returned home. By 1950 numbers had considerably decreased. At the beginning of that year there were still 46,841 POWs in Russia; by its end the number had sunk to 28,711.
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It was roughly the same figure as those who had been put on trial for war crimes. They had all received twenty-five years.

On 31 May 1945, Margret Boveri made a list of her journalist colleagues whom she knew to have been arrested by the Russians: Molkenthin, who was not a Party member but had joined the SS to protect his back, and was a harmless reporter; Scharp, who had been forced to join the Party in Prague in 1939; Sprang, a real Nazi; Wirths, a known anti-Nazi, but the Russians refused to believe him because he was assistant editor of
Das Reich
; John Brech, economics editor of the same paper, an anti-Nazi, but who had been forced to join the Party in 1938; a lot of people from the DNB (Deutsche Nachrichten Büro, the official press agency), including anti-Nazis; Seibert from the
Völkische Beobachter
. All the others fled in good time. The ones who were really important had naturally vanished without trace, but the Russians were too foolish to know that. The treatment of the smaller fry was not too bad. The food was decent, and the interrogations polite; only the living conditions were bad. The bankers she knew came out after two or three weeks. Three girls from the Foreign Office were locked up for three days, during which they were beaten and had their hair pulled. They could not tell the Russians where the bigwigs were. Then they were dismissed. Even men and women who had been involved in the July Plot were arrested and interrogated in this way.

Things got worse when the prisoners were marched off into captivity. Some managed to escape. The Russians reacted by arresting the same number in the next village so that they delivered the correct number of internees as listed on the paperwork. Their flats and furniture were requisitioned. Unimportant prisoners taken in Poland might eventually turn up in the Russian Zone. Libussa von Krockow’s stepfather Jesko von Puttkamer, who had done no more than lead the local Volksturm in the Second World War, had last been heard of in prison in Danzig. In the spring of 1947 his family received a message that he was in a POW camp in Leipzig. Libussa knew the way over the green border and made her way to Leipzig. She found the camp in a suburb of the city, and spoke to a prisoner through the barbed wire. She went back later that evening with a crowbar. By dawn he was free.
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The Soviet authorities were as wont to arrest monarchists as Nazis. Hermine of Reuss, the Kaiser’s second wife, might have been described as both. She had flirted with the Nazis before the Second World War and damaged the reputation of her husband’s family in the process. After the Kaiser’s death in 1941 she had withdrawn to her Schloss Saabor in Thuringia. At the end of the war she had sought refuge near by with her sister, Princess Ida zu Stolberg-Rossla. The Duke of Brunswick, who was married to the Kaiser’s daughter, Victoria Louise, went to Thuringia to warn her about the Russians. She replied that Thuringia was under American occupation and that she had no reason to move. She remained obstinate when the duke told her, ‘Just think who you are; you must not fall into Russian hands.’ She replied, ‘I have no reason to reproach myself. I shall stay here.’ She was not warned of the American withdrawal in July, and soon the Russians arrived to take her into custody. After a long period in which there was no news, she re-emerged in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, where she remained under house arrest in a building on the edge of the town. She died in August 1947 of a heart attack brought on by ‘uncertainty and profound mental suffering’.
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The Russians were keen to get their hands on all the leading army commanders who had operated in their territory, whether they had been party to the atrocities or not. One who is credited with having been a humane general was Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist. He had been dismissed from his command by Hitler at the same time as Erich von Manstein. They were clever officers, but not National Socialists.
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Kleist retired to his Silesian estate, moving to Bavaria at the approach of the Red Army. There he was arrested by the Americans, who handed him over to the Yugoslavs in 1946 - Kleist had performed an important role in the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941.The former army commander was incarcerated in no fewer than twenty seven prisons in nine years. The Yugoslavs tried him and sentenced him to fifteen years as a war criminal. After two years he was extradited to Russia, where he was charged - with heavy irony - with having ‘alienated through mildness and kindness the population of the Soviet Union’. In March 1954 he reached the end of his Calvary at Vladimir camp, where he was finally allowed to make contact with his family. He died in October that year of ‘general arteriosclerosis and hypertension’.
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Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, defeated at Stalingrad, had the doubtful honour of being among the 5,000 or so of his troops to return to Germany, but that did not occur until November 1954, when he had already served eleven years. His treatment was not bad. He was kept under house arrest in Moscow, and once he began to co-operate with the Soviet authorities after 20 July 1944 he was accorded some privileges. He gave evidence for the prosecution at Nuremberg, but even on his release he was not allowed to join his family in the West and died of motor-neuron disease in Dresden in 1957.

If life was tough for German POWs in Russian camps, one or two of them could claim that the Soviet authorities preserved their lives. SS-BRIGADEF ührer Wilhelm Mohnke, who led the defence of the government quarter in Berlin in April 1945 and was taken prisoner on 2 May, was wanted by the Western Allies for ordering the execution of unarmed POWs. Had he fallen into British or American hands he would almost certainly have been hanged. As it was he was released from Soviet custody in 1955, when the Anglo-Americans were no longer interested in pursuing German war criminals, and died in his bed forty-six years later.
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Mohnke’s ten years in captivity were a curate’s egg. They began with a remarkable meal in the Belle Alliance Strasse of Berlin. After they surrendered, he and twelve other SS officers were taken to a four-storey building and invited to a proper Russian feast complete with caviar and vodka. The Germans failed to tuck in with a gusto equal to the Russians. At 10.30 p.m. the dinner came to an end and the Germans were locked up. The next day Mohnke and Rattenhuber of the SD, Hitler’s pilot Baur and his chief bodyguard Günsche were taken to a transit camp for high-ranking German officers in Strausberg. On 9 May they were moved again - this time to Russia.
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