Armageddon (102 page)

Lieutenant Tony Saurma of the Grossdeutschland Division contrived to get himself swiftly liberated from British captivity, on the ground that he was an agricultural worker. This was a loose interpretation of his family’s possession of immense Silesian estates which were now lost for ever. Saurma hiked for days to reach his family at a country house near Augsburg. One morning, as he walked tired and dusty up a long avenue of apple trees, he saw a pony and trap coming the other way, containing two women. They were his mother and sister Dolly. “It’s Tony!” they shouted, overjoyed. Saurma’s elder brother Karl-Georg, a twenty-two-year-old officer of 6th Panzer, had been incinerated in his tank on the Moselle, leaving too few remains even to bury. Yet now one son, at least, had come home.

When Ursula Salzer escaped from Pillau on a hospital ship in March 1945, her fifty-seven-year-old father remained to serve with his Volkssturm unit. He shrugged indifferently: “It can’t be that bad. The Russians are only human beings.” When he returned from Soviet captivity three years later, Herr Salzer was unrecognizable. His teeth had been smashed with a rifle butt when he was found scavenging in the camp rubbish dump. He was suffering acute malnutrition. He said simply to his daughter: “Thank God you weren’t there. You would never have survived.”

There has been bitter criticism of the manner in which the Allies permitted many Nazis to escape justice in 1945. It is undoubtedly true that all manner of evil men were allowed to disappear into the undergrowth of post-war Europe, South America or even the United States, by neglect or wilful indulgence. But consider the circumstances: by the war’s end, most of those who had taken part were suffering from a profound moral, as well as physical and mental, exhaustion. Those who had fought in the American and British armies suffered no doubts about the virtue of their cause, yet most felt compromised by their experiences. That is the fate of all thoughtful men who take part in all wars. “Is there any place that is free from evil?” the novelist Evelyn Waugh reflected, expressing a British officer’s view of Europe in 1945. “It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war . . . Even good men thought that their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardship in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege.”

Waugh’s was an elitist vision, shared by only the most thoughtful Allied soldiers. Most American and British soldiers had simply seen a job to be done, which they were profoundly grateful now to have completed. Yet, in the course of the war, many had also come to share the novelist’s disbelief in moral absolutes. Few, if any, of Eisenhower’s soldiers were responsible for acts of wickedness remotely comparable to those of Hitler’s armies. But most had seen prisoners casually killed, towns levelled, civilians reduced to destitution in a manner which made them instinctively reluctant to pass judgement upon others, even if these wore German uniforms. The Western allies reserved their anger, and commitment to retribution, for those Germans who had been concerned in the most monstrous evils of all, the concentration-camp system and the destruction of the Jews.

Only the Russians, driven by personal suffering and Stalin’s insatiable appetite for vengeance against enemies real and imagined, sustained policies of absolute ruthlessness in all the regions of Europe which they occupied. Ironically, the NKVD showed its willingness selectively to indulge former Nazis if these were willing to assist in the subjection of their country to its new masters. Beria’s men reserved the most savage rewards for their own countrymen who had allowed themselves to be captured by the Germans, irrespective of the degree of culpability involved. Heroes who had been shot down in flames in 1944 were subjected to the same humiliations and lasting disgrace as those who had surrendered in 1941 because they lacked rifles with which to defend the motherland.

Around 1.68 million Russian prisoners were returned to the Soviet Union in 1945, out of the 4,059,000 captured by the Germans. Of these, 930,287 were liberated from camps, while the remaining 740,000 were found elsewhere, acting as slave labourers. These totals do not include men captured while serving in Hitler’s forces, many of whom were shot out of hand. By 1953, some 5,457,856 Soviet citizens had been returned to their grateful motherland—this figure includes great numbers of people who had fled west, rather than be captured in arms by the Germans. Russian historians estimate that 20 per cent of all those repatriated were either executed or given a maximum twenty-five-year sentence in the Gulag. Some three million other former prisoners served shorter sentences. An NKVD report of 26 May detailed 40,000 “Vlassov men” returned by the British, including 9,000 family members and 1,000 German personnel. Twenty-nine thousand were dispatched to work in coal mines at Prokopiezki and Kenerova, the remainder to Camp 535 for “dangerous prisoners.” None is thought to have survived.

Some of the Western sympathy extended to repatriated Russians who fought in Wehrmacht uniform seems misplaced. Appalling atrocities were carried out by Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks and men from the Baltic states under German command in northern Italy, Yugoslavia, Poland, not to mention the Soviet Union. Thousands of Ukrainians and citizens of the Baltic states who served as concentration-camp guards, and were eventually returned to Stalin, must rank low on the roster of those deserving of pity. This should be reserved for millions of other Russians, hapless captives of the Germans, often victims of the concentration camps, on their return to Soviet jurisdiction. They were subjected to the same repatriation procedures as Russians who had actively served the Nazis. Only some 20 per cent were allowed to return home. All Stalin’s citizens who survived captivity were marked for the rest of their lives as suspect persons—“socially dangerous.” Few were permitted to rise or prosper in the post-war Soviet Union.

Genrikh Naumovich survived Mauthausen concentration camp after refusing to join the Vlassov Army fighting with the Germans. He was liberated by the Americans on 5 May, his twenty-second birthday, one of 68,268 inmates who lived. Another 195,000 prisoners had died there. Naumovich spent some weeks at the end of the war driving for a Red Army division’s medical team. Remarkably, he harboured no animosity towards the German people. “The SS and Gestapo were animals. But ordinary German soldiers suffered as much as we did.” When at last Naumovich returned home, his mother fainted. She had always waited for him, but knew nothing of his fate. He was not held in an NKVD screening camp when he returned, but his papers bore the indelible mark of an ex-prisoner. He could find no work. Finally, in despair, he went to the local police chief and demanded to know how he might support himself. The man replied with a sneer: “As a prisoner of the facists, you’re lucky to be allowed to live in this city at all. You can clean shoes on the Nevsky Prospect!” Naumovich finally found work as a mechanic. “I hated Stalin. The very word made me feel sick. The Germans used to say to us: ‘We can do exactly what we like with you, because Stalin has washed his hands of you!’ Now, I believed them. All the prisoners who came home were unjustly treated. Was it their fault that in 1941 they were asked to fight without rifles? Was it their fault that the artillery ran out of shells?”

Eighteen-year-old Viktor Mamontov returned from Belsen to find that among his entire extended family only his mother, a seamstress, survived. He himself was “detained” in Belorussia for many months, constantly interrogated by the NKVD. When finally released in February 1946, he was refused a passport and could get work only on a construction site. His health never fully recovered. Many people who had endured his experience, he said, “started to hate not only the Germans, but each other. Many ex-prisoners drank themselves to death. After the war, it was very hard to live.”

Liberated in Germany by the Americans, seven-year-old Valya Brekeleva and her family of slave labourers went home to Novgorod as non-persons. “Most of the people from our village who went to Latvia survived. But most of those who were sent to Germany had died. For those of us who remained, the suspicion was always there.” Most of her family were killed by one side or the other in the course of the war. Her mother died in 1947, worn out by the struggle to keep her daughters alive. She was thirty-six. Her father completed his sentence for “political crimes” and came home from the Urals in 1951, an old man. Even after Valya had completed university and applied for work at a Kazan shipbuilders in the 1960s, when the manager saw that her papers showed her to be an ex-Nazi prisoner he said grimly: “Before we consider anything else, we have got to establish whether you have done damage to the state.”

Georgi Semenyak, who survived the ordeal on the concentration-camp barges in the Baltic, finally returned home on 5 December 1945. His parents had heard no word of him since 1941. He would have relished an opportunity to serve some time guarding German prisoners, but was discharged as unfit for further military duty. He was dismayed to learn that, as an ex-prisoner of the fascists, he was ineligible to go to university. After experiencing great difficulties, he found work as an electrician, but was discharged when his employers discovered that he was an ex-PoW. For the next forty-five years, he performed menial jobs in an industrial plant, all that were available to him, as a “person of the second sort.”

Captain Vasily Legun, a Soviet bomber pilot held prisoner by the Germans for two years, woke one morning at the work camp in Czechoslovakia where he spent his last weeks as a prisoner and found the German guards gone. He and others broke into the camp armoury, seized weapons and took over the local town, some twelve miles from Prague. When they met the Red Army, they were enlisted to round up German stragglers, which involved them in some firefights which continued until 17 May. Then he and the other prisoners were flown to join some 30,000 other former PoWs at an NKVD screening camp in the Ukraine. They endured weeks of brutal interrogation about their captivity, sometimes by day and sometimes by night, once stripped naked. “It was worse than the German camps, because we had no idea what would happen to us. We were now prisoners of the country we had fought to defend. We were all treated as traitors. The experience killed our spirit.” NKVD agents visited Legun’s apartment in Moscow. His wife had been told that he was dead, and now all his personal property and papers were removed. After four months, he was released from captivity, but his papers too contained the fatal words about his former PoW status. For many years he was unable to gain proper employment. He became a gold prospector, eking out a living in the remote northern wastelands of Russia. His Party membership was not restored until 1957.

S
IXTY YEARS ONWARDS,
any civilized person must react with horror to the human consequences of the catastrophe that befell the German people in the last months of the war. The battle for the Third Reich cost the lives of something like 400,000 Germans killed in ground fighting and by aerial bombardment in 1945 alone, together with anything up to two million who died in the flight from the east. Eight million became homeless refugees. Yet it is hard to conceive any less dreadful conclusion to the nightmare Hitler and his nation had precipitated. When the German people failed to depose their leader, when they made the choice, conscious or otherwise, to fight to the end, they condemned Germany to the fate which it suffered in the closing months of the Second World War. Japan’s surrender in August 1945, before the Allies were obliged to invade its mainland, undoubtedly spared it from death and destruction on a scale to match that which took place in Germany. It is relevant to observe that Japanese casualties from the dropping of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which precipitated that surrender, were vastly smaller than those suffered by the Germans in the struggle to defend their country, and in the flight from the invaders.

In 1918, the German government had surrendered while its armies were still fighting exclusively upon foreign soil. Ordinary Germans suffered severely from famine, and two million of the Kaiser’s soldiers had died upon the battlefield. But the physical fabric of their country remained almost untouched. The foundations of National Socialism were built upon the myth that the German Army had never been defeated, that the German people were the victims of the notorious “stab in the back” by politicians and leftist revolutionaries. To this day, many Germans decline to accept any responsibility for the horrors the First World War brought upon Europe, and blame subsequent events upon the “great injustice” done to them by the 1919 Versailles Treaty.

In 1945, by contrast, every man, woman and child in Germany was brought face-to-face with the price of Hitler, the consequences of the dreadful lunge for greatness upon which he had led his people, and which so many supported until its failure was manifest. A few noble souls, of the stamp of Adam von Trott, recognized Hitler from the outset as an absolute evil. Yet most of the July 1944 bomb plotters turned against the Nazis only when it became plain that they were leading Germany to defeat. The German officer corps bore almost as great a responsibility for Germany’s fate as their Führer. The scope of Hitler’s ambitions for world domination was matched in May 1945 by the depth of Germany’s abasement. In Russian eyes, justice was thus done. For the Western allies, who had suffered much less at the hands of the Nazis, and for whom humanity ranked higher in the scale of virtues, the spectacle of Germany’s devastation gave rise to more complex emotions. In the midst of the revelations about the concentration camps, the evidence accumulating from every corner of occupied Europe about the bestiality of the Nazi record, it seemed possible to find pity for some Germans as individuals, but very little for their society as an entity.

The nation’s fate prompted a revulsion among its people against Germany’s historic militarism which persists to this day. “I grew up in a world in which the only thing that all of us cared about was that there should be no more war,” said Anita Barsch, who as a child endured the flight from East Prussia. “I wasn’t angry—just sad. It was Germans, after all, who refused to allow us to flee in time to save ourselves.” It is possible to be appalled by the behaviour of the Soviet Union in eastern Europe, and by the excesses of the Anglo-American air bombardment, without seeing reason to transfer blame for these horrors from Hitler and those who made his European rampage possible.