Armageddon (90 page)

In the path of Konev’s armies, sixteen-year-old Corporal Helmut Fromm from Heidelberg was playing “Indians.” He manned a periscope in his unit’s positions beside a sniper, occasionally raising a helmet on a stick above the parapet to draw Russian fire. A sniper needed a counter-signature on his scorecard, to qualify for the special leave granted to a man who achieved at least twenty confirmed kills. Once, to relieve the monotony, they put a round just in front of a horse, which bolted. Another time, they took a long shot at a cycling Russian who fell off, scrambled to his feet and ran away carrying the bicycle. If it sounds fantastic to imagine German soldiers behaving so childishly in the days before the last stand of Hitler’s Reich, consider their age: many of these “men” were indeed children, who laughed at the things children laughed at. They were adult only in their candidacy for death.

On 5 April, Victor Klemperer sat in the darkness of a train to Munich, listening to the conversation of his fellow travellers. One young man said that his own father, who had believed passionately in victory, now no longer did so. “Only Bolshevism and international Jewry are the victors,” grumbled the passenger. A young woman whose husband was fighting in Breslau announced that she still trusted the Führer, and believed that victory would come.

A delegation of diplomats from the Japanese embassy in Berlin visited von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, demanding to know what steps he proposed to take for their safety. They received scant satisfaction. The British intercepted a signal to Tokyo from the Japanese minister in Lisbon, setting out a somewhat ambitious diplomatic plan for his country: “It is my belief that the only means by which Japan, confronted as she is by the present unparalleled national crisis, can bring about a turn for the better in her fortunes is by a radical re-orientation of her policy towards the USSR. The collapse of the German army is now unmistakably only a matter of time.” The minister suggested that Japan should seek a bilateral treaty with Stalin.

Captain Walter Schaefer-Kuhnert of 9th Panzer Division spent the last days of his war supporting a Volksgrenadier unit—“hopeless people,” he observed, with professional contempt. One morning in his captured jeep he found himself driving in the middle of a massive column of American armour. “My God,” he thought, “we haven’t got that many tanks in our entire army.” His driver accelerated away, and they saw astonished GI faces staring after their field-grey uniforms. Finally, the Germans abandoned the vehicle and found a path on foot back to their battery. “It was rubbish to say that we fought to the end because of fear of the SS,” he said. “We did so because fighting men understand that they must stick together.” Even in the extremities of March and April, the gunner officer felt proud of the fact that some men who had been allowed home on leave as far afield as Silesia returned to the unit for its final battles.

The Russians had encircled the synthetic-oil plant in Silesia where sixteen-year-old Hans Moser had served with a flak battery back at the end of January. Moser and his young comrades watched while NCOs blew up their guns. A huge baulk of timber flew high into the air, landing almost on the top of the teenager, who thought his last hour had come. They were then given three minutes in which to pack a ration-bag and waterbottle apiece and marched away through driving snow towards the distant train station. Men and boys soon started falling out in the freezing cold. Moser suffered frostbite. In Niesse, a baker’s wife allowed him to put his feet in her stove to thaw out. “Are the Russians coming?” she asked fearfully. “No, no,” said the boy stoutly, because he could not face telling her the truth. He trudged onwards. By the wayside, he saw a neat fence beside a churchyard, with a notice proclaiming: “Joseph Eichendorff is buried here.” The great nineteenth-century lyrical poet was one of Moser’s idols. The teenager yearned to make a pilgrimage to the grave. But he did not dare to linger.

One icy night, he and his dwindling body of young companions encountered a terrible vision. A column of shrunken men in striped clothes came past, escorted by SS men with lanterns and dogs. “Who are these people?” he asked a guard. “Jews and gangsters,” said the man tersely. Later, they heard shots, and came upon some of the prisoners lying dead by the road, falling snow already thick upon their bodies. For hours afterwards, they found themselves passing the corpses of prisoners and refugees, many of them old people. One dead face haunted his sleep for months afterwards, a tall man who had been shot in the back of the neck. The bullet had forced open his jaws. The man stared vacantly upwards, eyes and mouth wide open. Once, the gunners saw two elderly German civilians towing on their sled a concentration-camp prisoner who had collapsed. One of the young Luftwaffe men asked the couple roughly: “Why are you bothering to help this gangster?” Moser said nothing, and indeed felt nothing: “We were immersed in our own worries. We just wanted to get home.”

As they crossed into Czechoslovakia, the tension, even hatred, among local people was palpable: “The Czechs were stirring.” Military police patrols questioned every male traveller constantly, searching out deserters. Their party possessed only a single written movement order to cover them all, so they clung together. At Prague, they found a train westwards. At last, after weeks on the road, he reached home in Nuremberg. When the Russians overran his position, Moser had been officially reported “missing.” Now, when he banged the knocker of the family house clad in his white snow smock, his mother opened the door and screamed. She thought he was a ghost.

Even elite units such as the Grossdeutschland were no longer willing to fight. Captain Mackert, one of its battalion commanders, described his shock when men began to flee under Soviet attack even when he drew his pistol upon them: “All my attempts to keep the company together failed . . . The men would rather be shot than stay in their positions.” Mackert was left only with one NCO, two wireless-operators and a runner. He never saw his soldiers again.

It is an extraordinary reflection of the fashion in which weapons and ammunition continued to the end to reach some units—and especially the favoured SS—that as late as 13 April at Wiener Neustadt 1st SS Panzer received a delivery of ten new Mark IV tanks. The division’s paper strength before its final battles was 10,552 men. Yet its morale was no better than that of the Grossdeutschland. “The atmosphere was truly hopeless,” said Werner Sternebeck, “the issue of orders sluggish, inconsistent and lacking conviction . . . We were facing our last battle, and with our 17 Panzer IVs and Panzer Vs, we could only delay the impending collapse.”

At the makeshift hospital in the school of a small town in Schleswig-Holstein where sixteen-year-old Melany Borck worked as a nurse, the last days were awful. There were few doctors. The men were riddled with lice. Those with families in eastern Germany were desperate for news of them, of which there was none. Drugs had run out. They were reduced to boiling birch-bark to make a primitive antiseptic. Melany administered anaesthetic by holding an ether pad over a man’s mouth. Once, in her pathetic ignorance, she overdid the process so that a patient remained unconscious for eight hours. Beyond the casualties laid in rows on straw palliasses in the classrooms and corridors, others remained in bunks on the hospital train which had brought them, because there was nowhere else. At the beginning, the girl had found working at the hospital rewarding. For the first time in her life, she was treated as an adult rather than as a child. But when she found herself reliving the last battle for Pillau through the fevered nightmares of a dying man whose hand she held, the memory haunted her. Even after many months on the wards, she still found it hard to look upon shattered limbs, the ruins of so much youth.

“We’re retreating again,” Corporal Helmut Fromm of Ninth Army wrote in his diary on 19 April, on the road thirty-five miles south-east of Berlin in front of Konev’s tanks, “nobody knows where to. The columns of men stumble along these dusty roads, horses dragging our grenade-launchers. The infantry pulled back past us while we were still in action. Our tanks are on the same road . . . Just now at least there is no air attack, but shells are falling right and left. I am filthier than any pig, we’ve nothing hot to eat, I’m smoking my last cigarette. How long can this go on?”

Piotr Tareczynski, a thirty-two-year-old Polish gunner officer, crossed the Oder with his PoW column in darkness, over a bridge being prepared for demolition. Stettin, some fifteen miles northwards, was being bombed. “The flares being dropped by aircraft made it look as if a pink blanket was suspended above the city.” Next day, as they passed among prosperous farms, he pondered the likely fate of their inhabitants: “The time for settling accounts was approaching fast. Nemesis was at their door. Those farmers still viewed us as enemies, though we were hardly able to walk. They were afraid of us. To them, we were living proof of Germany’s crimes against humanity.” There were many belated deaths from Allied strafing. The neighbouring column of PoWs to that of British airman Trevor Peacock was attacked by RAF Typhoons, whose rockets and cannon inflicted some eighty casualties. Lieutenant Philip Dark, a British naval officer captured at St. Nazaire, watched in impotent horror as RAF Tempests swept down on his group. “One’s nerves, after those three years, were in a poor state. It had been a cotton-wool existence. I noticed a body lying flat in the ditch as I upped and ran . . . I thought ‘You silly bloody fools!’ Being shot up by one’s own boys, what irony!”

In the last weeks, there was a belated rush of killings in the concentration camps. Some enemies of the Third Reich seemed in danger of surviving its demise, and the Nazis hastened to eliminate them. At Dachau on 9 April, Johann Georg Elser, the communist who had tried to assassinate Hitler in November 1939, was executed. At Flossenburg the same day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Admiral Canaris and his Chief-of-Staff General Hans Oster were hanged, likewise Hans von Dohnanyi in Sachsenhausen. Thus too died many less famous names.

Never had the contrast been more brutally drawn between the experience of the Eastern and Western Fronts. As the last act of the battle for Germany approached, the American and British armies were advancing against only spasmodic resistance, suffering few casualties, knowing that their task was all but completed. Even after the shocking confrontation with the reality of the concentration camps, most of Eisenhower’s soldiers had no thought for vengeance. They were preoccupied with their own survival, and with going home. The Western allies were ending the war as they had begun it, with anger in the hearts only of individuals with special reason to harbour it. Most men felt some pity for the vanquished. They succumbed to passion only when confronted with the most conspicuously impenitent or murderous Nazis.

Yet in the east, six million Russian soldiers were preparing for the day of triumph and retribution which they had been promised for so long. Their victory was not in doubt, but they now faced some of the Second World War’s most savage encounters upon the battlefield. In the east, the last act was among the most terrible, as the Russians faced Germans ready to fight with the fanaticism of despair, amid a society collapsing into hysteria. Adolf Hitler had led one of the most educated and cultured societies on earth to a moral, political and military abyss. He now sought to ensure that as many as possible of his own people accompanied him over the brink.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“The Earth Will Shake as We Leave the Scene”

THE ABYSS

E
VEN AS THE
Americans and British were advancing eastwards in April, and while Zhukov and Konev marshalled their forces on the Oder, elsewhere Soviet armies were fighting gigantic battles along almost a thousand miles of front. In the west, Germans were surrendering. In the east they were dying in their tens of thousands. The testimony of Wehrmacht soldiers who survived the war is unrepresentative of the experience of Hitler’s forces fighting the Russians in the last weeks, because so many such men perished. The fate of some units, especially those of the Waffen SS, is lost in fire and smoke, because no witnesses remained to record their destruction. Significant numbers of young soldiers, children of the Third Reich, betrayed no interest in surviving its collapse. Any temptation to applaud their courage is undone by an understanding of its futility, and of the depravity of the mindset which it reflected.

Hitler himself was indifferent, of course, and consumed by self-pity. “If the war should be lost,” he said in one of the most notorious of all his utterances, “then the nation, too, will be lost . . . There is no need to consider the basic requirements that a people needs in order to live a primitive life. On the contrary, it is better to destroy such things, for this nation will have proved itself the weaker and the future will belong exclusively to the stronger Eastern nation. Those who remain alive after the battles are over are in any case only inferior persons, since the best have fallen.” The Third Reich had always been in love with death. Now, its passion would achieve a final consummation.

Major Karl-Günther von Hase’s father, Paul, commandant of Berlin, had been hanged for his part in the July bomb plot. His son was recalled from Italy for interrogation. Although he established his innocence, he was discharged from the General Staff, and sent in mid-January 1945 to serve as operations officer of one of Hitler’s designated fortresses, Schneidemühl in East Pomerania. Von Hase saw no dilemma in continuing to fight, despite his family’s purgatory at Hitler’s hands: “I was a professional—I had to do my duty. Obviously the war was lost, but there was an obligation to defend Germany, and a clear distinction between fighting the Russians and the Western allies. German behaviour in 1945 reflected a determination not to repeat the experience of 1918, when the German army was not defeated, but gave up.”

As von Hase drove through the snow to his new posting, a black cat crossed the road. He found nothing in the “fortress” to discourage superstition. Its commander was an able regular officer a few years older than himself, Colonel Remlinger. Yet the garrison was pitifully weak. Beyond a few regular Wehrmacht troops, Schneidemühl was manned by 6,000 Volkssturm, the teenagers of an NCO cadet school and a few self-propelled guns from a local artillery school. There were no tanks. The entire civilian population of the town was recruited to dig defences. They were swiftly encircled by the Russians, and lost their airstrip at the beginning of February. Thereafter, they received only a few air-drops. Repeated requests to be permitted to break out were rejected. The garrison of Schneidemühl soon found itself some thirty miles behind the front.