After the Reich (82 page)

The Soviet authorities refused to extradite Mohnke or to give any information on his whereabouts. With time any pretence at co-operation in these matters broke down. One of the reasons the British tried Manstein, it is said, is because they did not wish to hand him over to the Soviets. Mohnke was taken to the Budirka Prison and finally to the Lubyanka, where he walked the gangways with Admiral Erich Raeder and Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner. In the meantime he was beaten and tortured by Soviet secret agents. Interrogations by the NKVD were no gentler than those carried out by the Americans. Baur, for example, was deprived of sleep for twenty-one nights in succession.

These were important Nazis, but there were plenty of men in Russian camps who had no particular affiliation to the regime. Heinz Pust was a typical German POW in Soviet captivity. He was taken prisoner in Czechoslovakia, as a soldier in Schörner’s vast army. On 9 May 1945 he had heard the Soviet soldiers shooting into the air. It was the first he was even aware that the Germans were losing the war, let alone surrendering. He was given papers that released him home, but he was caught hiding in the woods by partisans and locked up in a school house. He was decently treated after a local policeman decided to give the partisans a lecture on the laws of war. On 16 May he was handed over to the Red Army.

He was taken to Georgievsk in Russia with a number of Hungarian soldiers. Discipline tended to be relaxed in the camp. Sometimes you could come and go as you pleased. The food was poor and the men were always hungry. Two or three times a day there was
kasha
: gruel. They had seventeen grams of sugar and five grams of tobacco which they made up into cigarettes with old newspapers. To supplement this there was a daily ration of 300-600 grams of soggy bread and seventeen grams of fat or meat. Sometimes there was a soup made from rotten vegetables. The prisoners would strew the sugar on the bread to give themselves the illusion of eating cake. Pust’s first packet from home came in 1950 or 1951.
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Molotov stated at the Moscow Conference in March 1947 that there were 890,532 German prisoners in Russian captivity. It was a moment of terrible disappointment: only a third of Germany’s missing men were alive.
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The news broke through to Pust that all POWs would be released by the end of 1948, ‘but the year 1948 came and went without anyone in our camp noticing any acceleration’.
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Clay can’t have believed the Russians, but he could see a stick to beat the enemy with when he called for a tough stance: ‘tell the truth about Moscow’ - they have two million POWs. As he told Senator Kenneth Keating, ‘Don’t let’s be the first to get nervous in this war of nerves.’
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There were no Russian trials until 1949. Most of the important prisoners received the same tariff of twenty-five years’ hard labour. On 6 December 1949 Pust was indicted for war crimes. In Moscow he was placed in ‘investigative custody’. The men were tried in batches. It took all of fifteen to twenty minutes. They each received twenty-five years, even - it seemed - a Berlin bus driver whose main crime was to have been found wearing his uniform. Now Pust’s imprisonment took on an official status for the first time. At Rostov on the Don his head was shaved, and his picture taken along with his fingerprints.
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The generals and staff officers were exempted from work, but that did not always mean that their lives were any more pleasant and many volunteered simply in order to have something to do. They were sent to the generals’ camp at Voikova, which contained 186 senior German commanders, where they peeled potatoes, tended the garden, fed rabbits and brought in the harvest. Although officers could lead a lazy life, there was little chance of getting out. The higher the rank the less the possibility of reprieve: in 1947 officers represented 7 per cent of prisoners held; by 1949 the percentage had risen to 36.
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There was no hope of reprieve before Stalin’s death in 1953. After Chancellor Adenauer’s visit in 1955 three Russian generals appeared in the camp to break the news that the men were free. Mohnke and his comrades then had a second feast from their Soviet captors.

Pust was one of the 27,000 POWs who learned that he would not be released until 1974, but despite that cruel verdict prisoners began to be freed in more regular batches. The first to leave were the Hungarians and the Romanians, probably because their countries had now become Soviet satellites. Books became vital. A comrade in arms had given Pust a copy of
Faust Part One
, much of which he now knew by heart. Some books published by the Aufbau Verlag
^dt
appeared in the camp: German translations of Gorki and Tolstoy as well as suitable German literature: Plivier, Heinrich Mann and Arnold Zweig. The regime lasted as long as Stalin, then Pust went home.

Otto Engelbert had a different experience to Pust. He volunteered to attend the ‘Antifa’ school in Talizy - freedom at the price of ideological indoctrination. He went in November 1945. Talizy had been built as a penal colony during the First World War. The area was rich in peat, which was used to fuel the local power stations. The prisoners were assessed on their arrival, by being questioned on their positions regarding East Prussia and Silesia and what they thought about the Oder-Neisse Line. Then they went on to the next stage: history according to the Marxist dialectic. They were given courses on the reasons for Hitler’s defeat; the sources of the USSR’s victorious power; the main stages of Germany’s development to industrial capitalism (1500-1815); the foundations of capitalism; the Revolution of 1848; the creation of Prussia-Germany; reactionary Prussia and Prussian militarism; imperialism; the growth of the workers’ movement; the November Revolution etc, etc.
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When Engelbert finished his course he swore an oath to fight Hitlerism. The reward was a proper feast. A pig was slain; there was hot food, cake and tea, wine and schnapps. The intellectuals, however, were not released. Engelbert was sent back to Germany to spread the word.
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Prisons in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia

Poland was well and truly a Soviet client and retained tens of thousands of German soldiers. In the summer of 1948 Clay was concerned about this: ‘I always pushed for the return of German prisoners of war.’ His reports told him there were still 40,000 of them, more than three years after the cessation of hostilities. A paltry twenty-one had reached the American Zone that year. The German agencies involved in tracking them had informed the American commander that ‘they also believe the POWS to be receiving very bad treatment’.
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In the Neuhammer mines in Silesia, the mortality rate was 15 per cent: 5,400 dead. The Jaworzno camp claimed 1,817 military and civilian lives. The total number of deaths in the camps is given at 4,500, but the figure seems suspiciously low.
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In Warsaw the Germans rebuilt the historic centre, putting back the buildings destroyed in the Blitzkrieg of 1939 and the wide-ranging destruction of the historic heart of the city which was effected after the Warsaw Uprising. There were still 4,240 German POWs left in Poland in 1950.
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One who never returned was Gauleiter Koch, who lived to a remarkably ripe old age in a Polish prison.

There were still 600 Germans toiling in the uranium mines of the Joachimstal of Czechoslovakia in 1950 to feed the Russian A-bomb programme.
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The Czechs claimed that 1,250 POWs were killed of the 25,000 prisoners they had.
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The Yugoslavs were among the most draconian. The official figure for deaths of POWs in their custody stands at 6,215, but that number is considered ‘too low by far’. Around 80,000 would be closer to the truth.
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One of the lighter duties these prisoners had to perform was the construction and decoration of Tito’s new summer palace and later guest house on Lake Bled. A painter was called in to decorate a double-cube room on the first floor with blood-curdling scenes depicting the battles between Tito and Hitler’s forces. The German POWs played all the roles, from the slain who littered the field of battle to the Yugoslav warriors who pierced them with their bayonets.
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The final batch of 1,300 Germans was sent home in 1949.
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The Return of the Warrior

Once the POW was released, the homecoming could be bitter-sweet. Ruth Friedrich was horrified by the sight of returning German warriors in the American Sector of Berlin. ‘Oh, great God! How bad misery can be!’ The rags of the Germans contrasted with the smart uniforms of the Americans as they walked through Steglitz on 30 July 1945. Some lacked arms, others legs, they showed signs of illness and plague, they were abandoned and lost.
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The experience of returning soldiers forms the background to some of the early stories of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Heinrich Böll, and provided the theme for the play
Draussen vor der Tür
(Outside the Door) by the writer Wolfgang Borchert.

Borchert and Böll both lived through those times and spoke from experience. Borchert, an aspiring actor who had been on the Eastern Front, had been wounded and shipped home but was then obliged to return to the colours before he was truly mended. The illness he incurred from poor hospital treatment was to kill him at the age of twenty-six.
Draussen vor der Tür
was first performed on 21 November 1947, the day after his death. It was later filmed as
Liebe 1947
.

In the play, the NCO Beckmann returns from Siberia to find his wife in bed with another man. He tries to drown himself in the Elbe but the river rejects him. He becomes part of the mass of alienated German men, whose defeat and complicity in crime had rendered them rebarbative even to their own women: ‘your Germany is outside, in the rainy night, on the street’.
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Beckmann carries the responsibility for a minor massacre of his own men. He wants to rid himself of it. He goes to see his colonel, in the hope of passing the responsibility on to him. The colonel is prosperous and doesn’t want to know. Beckmann looks for his parents. They are dead. They had been Nazis and had been thrown out on the streets at the end of the war - they also are ‘outside the door’. They had preferred death to denazification. Early on he meets a lugubrious God, but he fails to find him again: ‘Where is he then, the old man who calls himself God?’ Doors are slammed in his face as he looks for work, women and humanity: ‘That is life! There is a man, and the man comes to Germany and the man freezes. He starves and he limps! He comes to Germany! He comes home, and there is his bed, occupied. A door slams, and he is left outside.’
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It is a theme Böll returns to time and again. In
Die Botschaft
(Breaking the News) a soldier takes the effects of a dead warrior back to his widow. When he arrives she is laughing with another man. He puts down the soldier’s wedding ring, watch and pay-book, and a few well-thumbed photographs. The woman has to sit down, ‘and I realised that the war would never be over so long as there was still someone bleeding from an injury it had caused’. She wants to know whether her husband died in the east. No, says the man who brings the news. “No . . . in the west, in a POW camp, there were more than a hundred thousand . . .”

“And when . . .”

“In July 1945,” I said softly.’

One difference between prisoners in British camps and those in American captivity was that the British allowed the Germans to sport insignia of rank and the Americans did not. In Böll’s story, ‘When the War Was Over’, the little literary type is busy sewing his braid back on his uniform as the soldiers head for Bonn and discharge in October 1945. The narrator recounts his treatment at the hands of the British and the Americans. He has been captured by the latter in April. The corporal asks him, ‘Hitler Youth, SA or Party?’, to which he answers, ‘No.’ The American then bawls at him and accuses his grandmother of various sexual practices that he can’t properly work out as his English isn’t good enough.

When later an English corporal asks him for papers he says he has none. He has sold his pay-book for a couple of cigarettes. The Englishman searches him and finds a diary he has kept in captivity: a hundred closely written pages made out of paper bags stapled together. In fury the corporal tosses it into the latrine. No one is supposed to know what has been going on.

16

The Trials

We had gambled, all of us, and lost: lost Germany, our country’s good repute, and a considerable measure of our own personal integrity. Here was a chance to demonstrate a little dignity, a little manliness or courage, and to make plain that after all we were charged with, we at least were not also cowards.

Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, London 1976, 14

T
he Allies’ decision to indict the Nazi leaders had a precedent. Article 227 of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles called for a trial of major German ‘war criminals’, with the Kaiser at the top of the list - who, Lloyd George proclaimed, should be hanged. It demanded the extradition of up to a thousand Germans but proved a soggy squib: neither Holland - where William II had been granted asylum - nor a largely unoccupied Germany would agree to hand over the defendants. To show willing, the Germans themselves put on a trial in Leipzig. Thirteen men were convicted, but as they were perceived as heroes in Germany they all managed to escape.
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