Armageddon (37 page)
The deaths of some five million Germans, as well as those of millions more of their enemies and captives, may be blamed as much upon such “men of honour” as von Rundstedt, who continued to support Hitler and to direct his armies, as upon the Nazi leadership. He appeared a caricature of the aloof, unemotional, aristocratic Prussian General Staff officer. In the 1944–45 campaign, von Rundstedt was granted little latitude by Hitler. The field-marshal remarked acidly that he was permitted only to post the guards outside his own headquarters. Yet he continued to show outstanding gifts as a commander, directing the defence of western Germany against overwhelming forces, his Führer’s interventions foremost among them. There was nothing to love in von Rundstedt, but his professional skills commanded the respect of his subordinates and his enemies.
Militarily, Germany’s generals in the winter of 1944 could not escape a fatal conundrum. Even if Hitler’s decisions were demented and his refusal to sanction retreats condemned hundreds of thousands of men to die, what alternative strategy could be deemed rational, except surrender? Phased withdrawals to shorten the front and save troops from encirclement, which senior commanders constantly advocated, were militarily logical but offered no realistic prospect of changing the outcome of the war. The Allies profited at least as much as the Wehrmacht by every German withdrawal from a salient or abandonment of a beleaguered “fortress.” Guderian, von Rundstedt, Model and their disgraced comrades such as von Manstein knew that any course of action could only delay the inevitable. It is hardly surprising that a substantial number of senior officers in the final months suffered nervous collapses or shot themselves. The strain of presiding over carnage which could not save Germany, but which merely deferred the day of reckoning for the Nazi leadership, proved unbearable for many officers, save the most brutally insensitive such as Schörner. Most of the military leaders who continued to serve Hitler to the end justified themselves by pleading that they were pursuing the salvation of the German people from Soviet vengeance. Yet such claims can hardly explain the ingenuity and determination with which they also defended the Western Front.
The German Army, with its perverted vision of honour, failed the German people, and the world, by maintaining its loyalty to Hitler. For the rest of their lives, senior soldiers cited their oath of loyalty to Hitler to justify their continued participation in the war. Even after 1945, many German veterans refused to see that a pledge of allegiance to a man who had created an illegal tyranny could possess no conceivable legitimacy. More pragmatically, the Army’s leaders seized upon the Soviet threat to justify fighting on, when any rational analysis demonstrated that the war must be ended at any price. Continued resistance to the Russians made sense only if this was coupled with swift admittance of the Western allies to Germany. The American historian Omer Bartov, in his merciless analysis of the wartime Wehrmacht, argues that its behaviour was dictated by a far closer attachment to Nazi ideology than most of its officers acknowledged, then or later. “Even officers with little reason to be enamoured with Hitler and his regime often shared many of Hitler’s prejudices,” he writes. Bartov argues that many German commanders shared Hitler’s fantasies of conquest and grandeur, racial genocide and Germanic world rule, along with his obsessive loathing of communists and Jews. He overstates his case, but there is something in it.
Hitler’s generals, whether SS officers or old Prussian aristocrats, allowed themselves to lapse into fulfilling their duties in a moral vacuum. They abandoned coherent thought about the future and merely performed the immediate military functions that were so familiar to them. The old cliché about the robotic mentality of the German soldier is ill founded. On the battlefield, the Wehrmacht displayed much greater tactical imagination and energy than its opponents. But Germany’s generals in the last months of the war indeed behaved as automatons, amid the whims and obsessions of their monstrous master. Most turned against Hitler not because they acknowledged that he was evil, but because they realized that he was losing the war.
Many of Germany’s wartime soldiers became brutalized. It is untrue that mass killings were carried out only by members of the SS. On the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht was often involved in the slaughter of civilians and prisoners. Its men had been subjected throughout their childhood and youth to conditioning of an extraordinary intensity, especially about the sub-human status of Jews and Slavs. The Potsdam Military History Institute’s monumental history of the 1939–45 experience demonstrates conclusively the complicity of the Wehrmacht in the Barbarossa plan, which required the starvation of millions of Ukrainians not as an accident of war but as a specific military objective, to enable the diversion of Ukrainian wheat to feed Germany.
Germany’s soldiers perceived themselves as a vastly more civilized people than their Soviet enemies. In everyday matters such as table manners, so they were. Some Western allied officers, especially after the war, allowed themselves to be deluded by German social courtesy, and sometimes by prisoners’ impressive command of the English language, into respecting German combatants not only as skilful adversaries, but as men not unlike themselves. British fighter pilots, for instance, hastened to embrace Luftwaffe counterparts such as Galland and Knoke as fellow “knights of the air.” Such sentimentality ignored the fact that these men were dedicated Nazis, who had eagerly supported Hitler’s crimes. Likewise, many officers and men of the Wehrmacht were complicit in actions and policies, especially towards partisans, which placed them beyond the pale of civilization, and betrayed the very values they professed to be upholding against the Soviets.
Most of the courageous Germans who had dared to oppose Hitler were now dead or in cells awaiting execution, where their grace and dignity did more to redeem the German people in the eyes of posterity than anything achieved by the Wehrmacht on the battlefield. “A remarkable year is drawing to a close for me,” Helmuth von Moltke wrote in December to his wife Freya from Tegel, where he lay imprisoned for his role in the Resistance to Hitler.
I spent it predominantly among people who were being prepared for a violent death, and many of them have suffered it meanwhile . . . With all these people I lived in the same house, took part in their fate, listened when they were taken away for interrogations, or when they were removed altogether, talked with almost all of them about their affairs, and saw how they coped with it all . . . here at Tegel, already about ten of my group have been executed. . . . These violent killings eventually became such an everyday matter that I accepted the disappearance of individuals sadly but as a natural event. And now I tell myself, it is my turn.
A total of 5,764 people were executed in 1944 for their alleged roles in the German Resistance, and a further 5,684 in 1945. Of these, barely 100 were directly implicated in the July plot. Von Moltke concluded his last letter before the Nazis hanged him: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hell in the Hürtgen
FIGHTING IN THE FOREST
T
HOUSANDS OF
Americans were now fighting inside the borders of Germany. Sir Alan Brooke wrote in his diary, on beholding the wreckage of Aachen: “It was a relief to see at last German houses demolished instead of French, Italian, Belgian and British!” The occupiers were somewhat bemused by their first encounters with Hitler’s people in their own homes. German civilians of both sexes seemed without humility about their responsibility for the predicament in which they now found themselves. Civil Affairs, a large military bureaucracy whose personnel possessed varying degress of competence, enthusiasm and integrity, followed in the wake of the armies to assume supervision of the vanquished German people. Near Hürtgen, the U.S. 30th Division Civil Affairs officer was summoned to the mansion of a Luftwaffe colonel’s wife, one Frau von Reventlow, who complained bitterly about intrusions upon her privacy by refugees. The American suggested that, since Germany had started the war, it seemed not unreasonable that she, like other Germans, should accept some responsibility towards the refugees caused by it.
Only the Russians possessed clear policies for the lands they occupied. Among the Americans and British, from the humblest footsoldier to the greatest statesmen, deep uncertainties persisted, about whether to treat Germany as a nation of criminals, a threat to world peace that must be permanently emasculated, as U.S. treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau urged; or whether to adopt Churchill’s view, that one could not indict a whole people. The British prime minister preferred to leave great decisions about how to deal with the Germans until after they had been defeated, when the passions of war had abated: “It is a mistake to try to write out on little pieces of paper what the vast emotions of an outraged and quivering world will be either immediately after the struggle is over or when the inevitable cold fit follows the hot,” he wrote to Eden, his foreign secretary.
Among the Allied forces entering Hitler’s dominions, there was an instinctive indifference to German property, reflected in everything from bombing policy to looting. “One advantage of being in Germany is that one can liberate any article which he needs,” Staff-Sergeant Harold Fennema of the 66th Signals Battalion wrote to his wife in Wisconsin. “Since you spoke of wanting a sewing machine, there are lots of them to be liberated here. Washing machines are a little harder to liberate, but we have hopes of getting one soon.” American and British soldiers faced strict injunctions about “non-fraternization” with the enemy. GIs were subject to a fine of $65 for breaking the rules. Soldiers puzzled over how this whimsical figure was determined. In any event, the regulations were heeded more in the breach than in the observance. Many soldiers displayed pity, and even kindness, to individual German civilians. Had it been otherwise, the values for which the war was being fought would have been lost.
A significant number of U.S. soldiers appointed to Civil Affairs were themselves former refugees, picked for their language skills. Corporal Werner Kleeman had been born in Bavaria twenty-five years earlier. A Jew, he spent some months in Dachau concentration camp before achieving the extraordinary good fortune of a passport to England, and thence to America. He found life very tough as an infantry trainee: “Most NCOs were hill-billies who thought Jews wore horns. They had never seen a Jew. They liked to say: ‘Latrine duty for the refugee!’ ” But then Kleeman was posted to Civil Affairs on the strength of his knowledge of German. He cherished the sensation that he was taking a small personal part in the destruction of Hitler’s empire. The former refugee once found himself interrogating a shot-down Luftwaffe pilot who hailed from a Bavarian village three miles from his own. Yet sometimes Kleeman’s American superiors expected more than he could deliver. Colonel Charles Lanham, the flamboyant officer commanding the 22nd Infantry, told the interpreter one day: “Now we’re in Germany, the velvet gloves come off. These cows on the roads are getting in the way of my vehicles.” Kleeman wondered if the colonel expected him to harangue the cows in German.
One of his colleagues was Sergeant J. D. Salinger. “In those days, he was very normal,” Kleeman said of the novelist, “except that he would never let anybody read his letters home, and always forged the signature of a censoring officer.” Sometimes Salinger would say: “Let’s go look up Papa.” They would head for the press camp where Ernest Hemingway was ensconced, asserting that he was hiding from his wife, Martha Gellhorn. Both Hemingways were serving as war correspondents. Jim Gavin of the 82nd Airborne somehow found leisure to conduct a brief affair with Ms. Gellhorn, which involved playing a lot of gin rummy in bed. Salinger and Kleeman admired Ernest Hemingway’s unflinching enthusiasm for getting up front. The novelist had formed a close friendship with Colonel Lanham of the 22nd Infantry, a moody, self-consciously heroic figure who was by no means displeased to find himself the object of Hemingway’s admiration in print. Lanham, who “led from the front, even to the point of foolhardiness,” was now to find himself and his regiment, along with a substantial part of the U.S. First Army, plunged into fighting more painful than any which they had known since Normandy.
“T
HE STAGNATION OF
the war weighs heavily,” the Dresden Jewish academic Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary on 2 November. “Another winter, that is a dreadful thought.” So it seemed also to the Allied generals. At Eisenhower’s strategic planning conference in Brussels on 18 October 1944, it was acknowledged that the British would be unable to launch a major thrust into Germany before winter. Montgomery’s hopes of spearheading a breakthrough had died at Arnhem and on the Scheldt. If there was now to be a dramatic advance, it would have to be achieved by Bradley’s men. It was agreed that Hodges’s First Army should push towards Cologne, while Ninth Army attacked on the left, between Hodges and the British. Patton’s Third Army was placed lowest in the queue for support and supply. Alan Brooke wrote gloomily in his diary on 8 November: “I do not like the layout of the coming offensive, and doubt whether we [will] even reach the Rhine, it is highly improbable that we should cross over before the end of the year.” Brooke had become so desperate to see a land force commander appointed in place of Eisenhower, “[who] is detached and by himself with his lady chauffeur on the golf links at Rheims,” that the sharp, brusque Ulsterman now favoured giving the job to Bradley, with Montgomery commanding all Allied troops north of the Ardennes, and Patton doing the same job in the south. “[Eisenhower]
quite
incapable of understanding real strategy . . . Among other things discovered that Ike now does not hope to cross the Rhine before May!!!” Such was the gloom of some Allied commanders after their euphoric visions two months earlier.