Armageddon (100 page)

The Germans, wrote Alan Moorehead,

expected to be ill-treated. They had an immense sense, not of guilt, but of defeat. If a man’s shop was entered and looted by allied soldiers, he never dreamed of protesting. He expected it. And the reason for this was that he was afraid. Mortally and utterly afraid. One saw few tears. For the Germans the catastrophe had gone far beyond that point. Tears were a useless protest in front of the enormity of the shelling and the bombing. And so one was always surrounded by those set wooden faces. Sometimes our car got stuck in the mud. At a word, the Germans ran to push it out. Once a German came up to my driver and said: “The Russian prisoners of war are looting my shop. Will the English soldiers please come and see they do it in an orderly manner?”

An ashen-faced German officer at one PoW camp told the British that he and his men were getting out ahead of the Russians. He advised the prisoners to join them. The British refused, saying that the Russians were their allies. The German said: “You do not understand how brutal the Russians can be.” But only the small Polish contingent, fearing the Russians above all else, departed with the guards. Next morning, a group of wild horsemen on shaggy ponies appeared, followed by an equally disorderly mob of infantrymen. The French PoWs attacked the carefully hoarded clamps of potatoes. The British felt too stupefied by the speed of what was happening to do anything at all. Russian prisoners in the next compound broke out, slaughtered the cattle at a neighbouring farmhouse and began an orgy of looting and gorging their starved bodies. The British prisoners sent out a few patrols, and were so disturbed by the tales of chaos in the countryside that they decided it would be safer to stay where they were. Under Russian escort, almost as much captives as they had been a few days earlier, they were marched thirteen miles to a nearby town, where they were held for long, dreary, hungry weeks before being grudgingly repatriated.

When Corporal Harry Trinder was freed from his PoW camp by the Americans, he found himself pushed into a truck heading for the rear, carrying fifty German prisoners. This felt very strange, all the more so when the GI driver gave him brief instruction on the workings of the .30 calibre machine-gun mounted on the roof. He explained that Trinder must act as guard. “After about an hour, we had to stop because of an obstruction on the road. A large number of the Germans on the truck jumped down and started racing across the fields. I don’t know what I was thinking of, but I swung the cannon round and let off a continuous burst of fire until I was pulled off the gun by the Germans still on the truck. Then an American officer arrived . . . and said that I had killed or injured 15 Germans, and I was put in an escorting jeep under arrest. I explained my own history, and was released.” By contrast, Private Bill Bampton and some other liberated British prisoners were offered weapons “to take a bit of revenge if we felt like it, but we were too dazed and happy to think of that.”

Many Poles harboured implacable grudges against the Germans. Those who found themselves in Germany when peace came, as prisoners or forced labourers, possessed exceptional opportunities to avenge themselves. At Piotr Tareczynski’s PoW camp, “we were unofficially told that anyone who had any personal grievance to settle with any German could do so within a fortnight of the announcement, and would be immune from prosecution, regardless of what form his revenge took. Personally, I had no personal accounts to settle with anyone, and just wanted to be left alone.” The wife of a large estate-owner implored a British sergeant to stop the looting of cherished family possessions. The NCO replied that he could do nothing, because he was not allowed to interfere with the Poles.

Soon after Texan GI Bud Lindsey was liberated from PoW camp, he received a touching letter from an Indian soldier who had been his friend behind the wire. “The only thing which I will miss when I am away from here will be ‘my sweet American,’ ” wrote Armin Ghafur Dist, who hailed from Campbellpore in the Punjab. “When I reach my own home I will tell The Old Girl (my mother) that the American tanks brought the happiest day of my life on 29 April. Freedom! Freedom! After hard long starving nights . . . good on you America. The Gerry is
kaputt
now!” Six-year-old Klaus Fischer’s chief impression of American occupation was that everything seemed scented—the fresh coffee, even the chewing gum: “We had not
smelt
sensation for years.”

GOING HOME

S
IXTEEN-YEAR-OLD
Corporal Helmut Fromm’s odyssey westwards from Ninth Army’s Berlin encirclement continued on foot and by bicycle through the early days of May. Sometimes he travelled alone, sometimes with one of the innumerable small groups of desperate men thronging the countryside. He was among a cluster of fugitives who eventually reached the Elbe at Magdeburg to find the bridge blown and the Americans on the far side. He rode a bicycle upstream to a dam, searching for a crossing. A German military police party stopped him and demanded his medical discharge certificate. He was fortunate enough to be able to talk his way through. There was a great crowd of men at the Elbe bank. Fromm threw his bike and machine-pistol into the water. A gunner officer rowed alone in a small boat to the far bank and smartly saluted the American officer on the far side. After a few moments’ conversation, the officer shouted across: “Men! They’ll let us come over if we don’t give the Hitler salute!” Somebody said: “If the
Amis
want us to stick our fingers up our arses, we’ll do it.” On the far bank, Fromm met his first gum-chewing American. “What will happen to us?” he asked. “You’ll be going home,” said this amiable enemy. “Now quick march, friends!” They were placed in a cage guarded by black Americans, who jovially referred to the Germans as “white negroes.” The only indignity they suffered was to be pelted with stones by newly liberated Allied prisoners. Fromm made the last entry of the war in his diary: “Lord, your mercy is endless.”

The family of sixteen-year-old Hans Moser, a former Luftwaffe flak gunner, possessed the luxury of a small country home in the hills a few miles above Neumarkt in Bavaria. Late in April, they had taken refuge there, to await the end. A group of SS defended the town ferociously against the advancing Americans. Neumarkt changed hands several times, and paid the price. From the hills, the Mosers could see flames rising from the ruins. At last, the shooting stopped. Moser’s uncle Hans, the burgomaster, put on a top hat and tailcoat and went out formally to receive the Americans. The first soldiers pushed him brusquely aside. The teenage Hans had outgrown his civilian clothes. His Luftwaffe uniform was the only outfit he possessed. On the strength of it, he was thrown into a barn under guard for some days, along with a host of other uniformed stragglers and local officials. The boy proudly rejected the offer of candy from a GI: “They were the enemy. I didn’t see this as a liberation. I hated our helplessness—the fact that now these Americans could do absolutely anything they liked with us.” His mother, a committed Nazi, was deeply distressed by Germany’s defeat, but when she heard of Hitler’s death, like tens of millions of former believers, she was past caring about his fate. She asked simply: “What happens to our family now?” His father, a devout Catholic who had been badly wounded in the First World War, was merely grateful that it was over.

Captain Leopold Goesse watched his thousand-strong Cossack unit of the Wehrmacht parade near the Austrian border and proudly advance their blue-and-black Cossack standard. They swore a new oath of allegiance, in place of that which had died with Hitler, to their flag. Goesse, a young Austrian aristocrat, had never felt entirely comfortable with the Cossacks. Despite some historians’ idealization of those who were ruthlessly returned to Stalin, the murderous record of Cossacks who served the Wehrmacht in northern Italy and Yugoslavia deserves more attention than it has received. Goesse was troubled by the incidence of rape and looting in his own unit: “There were severe disciplinary problems . . . I didn’t feel like a Cossack, as some German officers did.” The knowledge of the Cossacks’ assured fate if they remained in Yugoslavia caused them to march hastily across the Austrian border in the first days of May, among a host of retreating German soldiers abandoning their weapons. They forded the river into Carinthia to escape the attentions of Bulgarian troops guarding the bridges. The Cossacks’ German officers sought out the nearest British unit and offered their surrender.

A British officer urged them to throw down their weapons and surrender to the Bulgarians—“They are our allies.” Goesse said, in the excellent English he had learned among British friends before the war—his father had attended an English public school—“I’m sorry, sir, but we know the Bulgarians better than you do.” The British officer went to talk to the Bulgarians. He returned to say: “You’re right. They’re not gentlemen. They want to shoot you all.” The Cossacks established themselves amid a ring of British tanks and military police. In the days that followed, apprehension grew among the Germans as well as the Cossacks about their likely fate. Goesse was able to exploit his position as an English-speaking liaison officer to effect an escape to his family schloss, a few hours away. He hid in its attic for some weeks, until he adopted a new role as sporting guide for British officers of the army of occupation, clad in British battledress and the protective social armour common to the European upper classes. His aide even brought home his horse Bitomka, on which his wife later learned to ride. The Goesses were able to save a few Cossacks, who escaped to their schloss and were helped to disappear, having been provided with civilian clothes: “We burned their uniforms and those beautiful Cossack hats.” The remainder of those in British hands were handed over to the Russians, and shot. Their German officers remained in Soviet captivity for a decade.

“What extraordinary people the Germans are,” mused Bill Deedes. The British officer found himself being addressed by a German colonel in a PoW cage almost as if he was a subordinate. “It seemed that the concept of defeat was right outside his reckoning.” Even now, many Germans seemed to regret only that they had lost the war. The last order of the day on 6 May from the general commanding 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division declared defiantly: “Every man of the division should look to the future with pride. If our soldiers do as much towards building a new Germany as they have done towards fighting for the old one, our nation will rise again.”

Field-Marshal Schörner, who had driven his men to resist fiercely to the end, said wistfully in captivity: “It might have been different if we had only had to deal with Britain . . .” He added, not without satisfaction: “Britain has lost its leading role in Europe. Russia now dominates Germany. Soon, she will be able to take the next step—to the Channel.” Another German officer in Soviet captivity spoke with scorn of Russian demands for reparations: “Russians tend to forget that Germany has also suffered huge damage, mostly from the British and Americans. We never took plant or material from Russia. This is simply an attempt by Russia to enrich herself at our expense.” A German general said: “Think how many roads and railways we built in the territory we occupied in Russia.” A Wehrmacht doctor suggested that Russians should reflect that “some of the destruction was the consequence of their own actions . . . the figures are meaningless—we can never pay anyway. Poor Russians! They talk as if we were living in castles in their country. Russians don’t even know what a castle looks like!” A lieutenant said: “The only damage I ever did to Russia was to slaughter a couple of pigs. I wish I had killed the whole herd!” Some captives made pitiful efforts to divide the Allies. Göring, interviewed by a Russian officer in his American prison, “whispered to his interpreter that he had something important to say, when no British or Americans were present.” They never discovered what this was.

Von Rundstedt, being driven as a captive through the ruins of Kassel, angrily reproached his escorting officer: was not he, as an American, shocked by the devastation caused by Allied bombing? Several times during their journey, reported von Rundstedt’s guardian, the rugged old veteran “broke down in tears of self-pity and rage” about the humiliations of defeat and imprisonment. The Russians reported that those members of the German high command who fell into their hands behaved in a “most defiant” manner:

They professed to be outraged that they were being isolated from the Americans and British. F-M Keitel and other generals under interrogation answered questions only briefly . . . Negotiations between General Zhukov and the Allies went well, except for the 2–3 hours delay in signing the capitulation, which was attributable to the negligence of a Foreign Ministry official, Ambassador Svirnov, who had omitted four lines from the text of the document. This was noticed by the Allies, who refused to sign the draft . . . During dinner, Keitel said that the present German government had learned its lesson from this war, and hoped that in future the German nation would display the same unity as the Soviet Union had done. He had no doubt that Germany would assume its place in the world again, and would enjoy normal relations with Russia.

General Erich von Straube, after signing the surrender of his forces in Holland to First Canadian Army, was being escorted back to the German lines by Brigadier James Roberts. After driving for some twenty minutes in silence, von Straube’s aide tapped Roberts on the shoulder and said that his commander wished to know what the brigadier had done before the war: “Were you a professional soldier?” Roberts was momentarily bemused by the question. He had indeed been a soldier for so long that his other life seemed impossibly remote. Then he realized that the German was seeking some crumb of solace for his defeat. He answered von Straube: “No, I wasn’t a regular soldier. Very few Canadians were. In civilian life I made ice cream.”

The victors embarked upon the colossal task of sorting millions of people displaced from their homes and their lives, which would continue for a decade to come. Every Allied soldier who served in Germany was awed by the tide of humanity surging among the armies now at rest. “There were thousands of men,” wrote Carl Basham, a GI from Ohio, stationed at Marburg rail station,