Armageddon (35 page)

One of the few merits of Germany’s vastly shortened lines of communication was that many soldiers now received mail from home a week after it was posted, rather than a month or more, as was commonplace in the days when Hitler’s frontiers extended to the Balkans and the Crimea. Any benefit that correspondence may have rendered to men’s morale was undone, however, by the nature of the tidings which Germany’s defenders received from their loved ones. Corporal Rudolf Pauli was sent a letter by his fiancée in Hornsburg on 5 October: “Since last night, our Adelheid is pretty nervy. As soon as she hears the drone of a plane, she runs as fast as she can. Privately, I had always hoped the war would end this year, but I have now given up on that. It seems that the war will go on for ever. There will be no peace until everything is destroyed.”

Many civilians, even in areas such as East Prussia and Silesia, which now lay close to the Red Army, found it difficult to comprehend the notion that their entire world was on the verge of extinction, that the streets in which they shopped, the farms on which they milked cows, the communities in which they had lived their lives, would forever be destroyed within a matter of months. It was hard for any ordinary person to discover the truth. And what was truth, anyway? An alarming number of German people retained some hope that the Führer’s promised “wonder weapons” might yet avert defeat; that fissures among the Allies would undo Germany’s oppressors. Many Germans found it unthinkable that the Western allies, fellow citizens of a civilized universe, would allow their country to be delivered into the clutches of Stalin’s barbarian hordes. Few German civilians felt shame or guilt about what their nation had done to Europe. Instead, more than a decade of the most brilliantly orchestrated propaganda culture in history had imbued almost all, young and old, with a profound sense of grievance towards their country’s enemies and invaders, a passionate resentment against the Allied armies and air forces. Germany’s enemies were now destroying centuries of culture through bombing, while assisting the Red Army to reach the very frontiers of the Reich. As to such matters as concentration camps, Jews or even the plight of slave labourers who worked in factories within daily sight of the civilian workforce, most people shrugged that this was the regrettable order of things forced upon Germany by her persecutors.

“There was no guilt about what Germany had done in the world—or only a very little, at the very end,” observed Gotz Bergander, a Dresden teenager who became a post-war historian. “They said: ‘Who started this war? Germany was only defending itself.’ ” A collective self-pity underpinned German behaviour in the last phase of the conflict, embracing all from Adolf Hitler to the humblest civilian. Bergander, an uncommonly thoughtful young man, once observed to a friend that everywhere the Germans had gone in Europe they had been uninvited. His friend shrugged: “That’s the way war is.” Bergander said afterwards: “Everyone was convinced that we were surrounded by enemies.” He and his family listened avidly, if perilously, to the BBC. He heard the famous “black propaganda” broadcasts of the British journalist Sefton Delmer, and—far more effectively from the Allied viewpoint—Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. To young Bergander, American music possessed the status of holy writ. He thought: people who can make music like this must win the war. The cultural life which had meant so much to the Dresden teenager was being stifled month by month in the winter of 1944. Opera and ballet houses closed, as artistes were drafted for labour service. Most hotels abandoned their usual musical entertainments. Cafés still flourished, however. Piano and poetry recitals continued until a late stage.

On 3 December 1944, Hitler surprised his circle by leaving the Reich Chancellery to take tea with the Goebbels family in their home at 20 Hermann Göring Strasse. Goebbels, according to his aide Rudolf Semmler, “stood to attention with his arm stretched out as far as it would go.” The children, dressed up for the occasion in long gowns made from curtain fabric, curtsied prettily. The Führer complimented their mother on how much they had grown. He presented Frau Goebbels with a small bunch of lily-of-the-valley, explaining apologetically that this was the best he could do, since her husband had closed all Berlin’s flower shops. Semmler noticed a thermos protruding from the briefcase inscribed with a large painted white “F,” and realized that Hitler, by now terrified of poison, had brought his own refreshments. But the occasion was a great social success, and delighted the hosts. “He wouldn’t have gone to the Görings,” observed Magda Goebbels smugly. It was one of the last events of her life which gave unmingled satisfaction to this doomed, unboundedly foolish woman.

SOLDIERS

A
FTER THE FAILURE
of the July bomb plot against Hitler few officers, far less ordinary soldiers, contemplated revolt. “Most Germans realized that it was necessary to end the war—but still they did not want to lose it,” a German historian observes. “The July plot had made Hitler seem immortal. Ironically, it increased his authority rather than weakened it.” Dr. Karl-Ludwig Mahlo, a twenty-nine-year-old Luftwaffe doctor, endorsed this view: “After 20 July,” he said, “we felt that it must be Hitler’s destiny to survive. We really believed in him. Hitler did a lot for me. I had a wonderful youth. We were young, we were so much indoctrinated by propaganda, by the years of victory reports. Afterwards, people said: ‘How could you have believed in this man?’ Yet we did—totally.” Mahlo was disturbed, however, when some Luftwaffe comrades returned from a 1944 Berlin medal presentation by Hitler to report tersely: “He looks terrible.”

In the smart Grossdeutschland Division, officers and men reflected a wide political spectrum. “There were some serious Nazis—especially those who had attended the Adolf Hitler schools,” said Lieutenant Tony Saurma. But most thought little about politics, only about the survival of Germany—and of themselves. After the July plot, the commanding officer warned Saurma, son of a Silesian aristocratic family: “You blue-blooded types had better be careful now, or you’ll find yourself in trouble.” Saurma’s uncle had already been imprisoned for his alleged role in the anti-Nazi Resistance. “I think you’d better write a letter to Dr. Goebbels,” Colonel Willi Lankeit told Saurma thoughtfully. The young officer indeed wrote to the propaganda minister, who was known slightly to the Grossdeutschland’s commander, assuring him of his loyalty to Germany’s rulers.

“We retained some illusions,” said Lieutenant Rolf-Helmut Schröder of the 18th Volksgrenadiers. “We thought it impossible that the Americans would allow the Russians to sweep Europe. We thought that, when the Americans had defeated us, they would turn on the Russians. And we believed that we must do everything possible to prevent Russia from overrunning our country.” Schröder was the son of a prominent anti-Nazi retired officer, who had died in 1935. Yet he argued that even the Waffen SS were motivated by patriotism rather than ideology: “12th SS Panzer’s men were always said to have been ‘fanatical young Nazis,’ but this was not so. I knew those people. They were fighting for Germany, not for Hitler.” Luftwaffe ace Heinz Knoke was appalled by the July bomb plot: “The ordinary German fighting soldiers regard the unsuccessful revolt as treason of the most infamous kind.” Major Karl-Günther von Hase was a scion of an old Pomeranian military family. He joined the army in 1936, “believing that I could pursue a military career without thinking of politics.” He learned differently after the July plot. The Nazis hanged his father, military commandant of Berlin, as a leading participant. Yet, even after this horror, von Hase considered that it was his own duty to fight in defence of Germany to the end. He retained a deep professional respect for the Waffen SS: “We always liked to have them on our flanks, because we knew how good they were.”

The condition of the nation’s soldiers was worse than that of the civilians in one important sense. They knew more. From personal experience, the men fighting along almost 2,000 miles of front in the east, 700 miles in the west, had grown familiar with the overwhelming might of the Allied armies. All save the dedicated Nazis knew that their nation retained scant hope of military victory. Beyond this, every man who had served in the east knew what Germany had done to the Soviet Union, and what manner of enemies were the Russian people. German soldiers could anticipate the retribution that would fall upon their
Heimat,
or homeland, their own families and loved ones, if the Red Army reached them. The Allied commitment to accept nothing less than Germany’s unconditional surrender, rejecting all negotiation of terms, together with the revelation of the American Morgenthau Plan for the post-war pastoralization of Germany—reducing Hitler’s people to a nation of peasants, stripped of industrial capacity—had provided Goebbels with a propaganda feast. “The Jew Morgenthau sings the same tune as the Jews in the Kremlin,” trumpeted Berlin Radio. A characteristic German fatalism about their nation’s march to destruction persuaded most men of the Wehrmacht that there was no alternative save to fight on until they were released by death or the good fortune of Anglo-American captivity.

Wilhelm Pritz, an infantry sergeant, spent the autumn of 1944 in a military hospital in Germany, praying that he would not have to return to the Eastern Front. He had gone to Russia for the first time in April 1942, and was wounded by mortar fragments during the assault on Sebastopol. After some months in hospital, he rejoined his unit on the Volga in March 1943: “Almost everyone I knew was gone. They were very short of men.” He contracted frostbite in the trenches, which cost him another two months in hospital, followed by a spell as an instructor at an infantry training centre. In the autumn of 1943, he was sent to the Ukraine. One of four sons of a Coblenz factory worker, he had by now lost one brother killed in Russia, while a second brother was missing and would never return: “my parents prayed that I would not have to go east again.” In October 1943, he was among German forces encircled and cut off in their bridgehead on the Dnieper Bend. Pritz was manning an anti-tank gun when a Russian grenade exploded against the shield. A fragment knocked out two of his teeth. As he fled towards the river, grenade splinters wounded him in the back. His colonel, a ferocious fighter, stood raging among the carnage: “Why are you running, you miserable cowards? Where are your rifles?” The Russians clubbed the colonel to death when they overran his position.

Pritz and hundreds of others swam the Dnieper amid Russian fire, the water red with blood. On the western bank, he walked for three hours under Russian shelling among hundreds of men in similar condition, before reaching a field hospital. His wounds were not serious, and he was soon returned to duty. On 1 November, however, a Russian sniper inflicted a scalp wound which kept him in hospital until January. Then he was sent to southern Poland, for several terrible months of hand-to-hand fighting and headlong retreats, serving among men of whom he knew nothing and whose morale was at rock-bottom. On 19 August 1944, in the midst of an enemy attack Pritz raised his hand above the lip of a foxhole to seize his rifle at exactly the moment a Soviet grenade exploded near by, tearing open his arm.

A comrade used his neck scarf to make a tourniquet. Bleeding heavily, Pritz crawled away through an immense field of sunflowers, enemy machine-gun fire slashing through the blooms above his head. He hitched a ride on an ammunition truck to the battalion mess area, where some men were sitting eating goulash. He sat down shakily, and himself began to eat. Then came a storm of mortar and small-arms fire, and the Russians were upon them again. The dazed Pritz was helped on to a cart with the cooks. He preserved only shadowy memories of the hours that followed, as a great column of refugees and retreating soldiers trudged east under constant fire. At one point, German Nebelwerfers systematically blew a path through the refugees for the troops. The wounded soldier finally lost consciousness, and awoke in hospital.

When Pritz was discharged, his prayers to escape the east were answered. In October 1944, he was drafted to a heavy mortar unit confronting the Americans in the Saarland. After Russia, he found the posting “a vacation.” His experience is not unrepresentative of that of the German soldier of the period, save that he survived. He possessed no pretensions to heroism. He simply continued to obey orders, as he had learned to do since his childhood in the Hitler Youth. In the autumn of 1944, the frontiers of Germany were being defended by a few hundred thousand genuine Nazi zealots, and millions of men like Wilhelm Pritz. A veteran of twenty-two who had known horrors no man should have to see, he now yearned only for survival.

For all its ferocious discipline and draconian punishments, however, the German Army was increasingly troubled by the problem of desertion. An order of 20 November issued by 708th Division in Alsace warned that any unit which posted “missing” figures in excess of 25 per cent after a battle would be subjected to special investigation. Many Alsatians serving in the Wehrmacht seized the opportunity granted by proximity to their homes to slip away. There was a row when it was discovered that a company commander in 352nd Volksgrenadier Division had written to the families of six of his men who were missing, believed to be Allied prisoners, saying: “The Americans opposite us have been fighting fairly, they have treated German prisoners well and fed them. If your husband is a PoW, you will probably receive news of him through the Red Cross.” The division’s National Socialist political officer exploded in fury at the suggestion that captivity might prove a tolerable fate for a German soldier. “The contents of this letter will have a demoralising effect,” wrote the NSPO, “because people at home may influence soldiers in this direction. Unit commanders are held responsible for ensuring that biased information of this kind is suppressed.” An American intelligence report recorded on 5 December: “A PW of 353rd Division captured in GROSSHAU had been sentenced to death for cowardice before the enemy and . . . thought this entitled him to gratitude from our side.” In the last months of the war, there was a drastic increase in court-martial sentences on delinquent German soldiers. Beyond 15,000 recorded executions—and many more unrecorded—tens of thousands of men were dispatched to penal battalions, where the possibility of survival was no higher than in their Soviet equivalents. A total of 44,955 men were sent for trial in October 1944 alone, and many of these received long sentences at hard labour. Desertion became a very serious problem for Hitler’s forces in the last months of the war.