Armageddon (99 page)

Lieutenant Gennady Ivanov was in Rostock with his tank battalion when the radio operators picked up news of the German surrender. He emptied his captured Mauser into the air. Many crews leaped into the tanks, started up and drove the few hundred yards to the sea to fire a triumphant salvo from their guns. Ivanov’s crew carried 100 per cent alcohol diluted with water in one of their external fuel tanks, and broached this stock at once. His friend Kazak dressed himself in a top hat and dress suit, and careered through the lines on a motorbike. “We got so drunk that if the Germans had any fight left in them, they could have wiped out the whole brigade,” said Ivanov happily. His men noted with contempt the terrified servility of the local civilians, who bowed even to private soldiers. Now, Germans seemed to possess only two words in their vocabulary—“
Kamerad!
” and “
Gut!
” Civilians of all ages and both sexes raised their hands in the air reflexively at the very sight of a Russian soldier.

Inge Stolten, a Düsseldorf housewife evacuated to Thuringia, smashed the family radio in despair when she heard the news of Germany’s surrender. She had been an ardent Nazi all her adult life. She saw this moment as the end of all her dreams. She was an educated woman who spoke good English and French. Yet she sincerely believed that the Americans would kill all Germans when they arrived.

At the farm in Saxony where eleven-year-old Jutta Dietze was an evacuee, the child burst into tears when she heard that Germany had surrendered. “We were so indoctrinated that we had never considered any possible ending of the war except victory. I thought: this is the end of Germany. We’ll never be allowed to sing our German folk songs again. We shall never again be allowed to be proud of being Germans.” In a cell in Moscow’s Butykri prison, Major Karl-Günther von Hase heard the fireworks exploding outside. “
Hitler kaputt!
” said his guards tersely. He sat down on his palliasse, put his head in his hands and sobbed: “I thought of all the comrades I had lost in the war. I felt only an overwhelming sadness about what had happened to Germany.” He spent three years in Russian captivity before he was able to return to formalize the marriage ceremony to his fiancée Renate which had been solemnized by proxy during the siege of Schneidemühl in February 1945.

Eleonore von Joest, who had escaped from East Prussia, exulted: “Now life begins!” she thought. Then she and her family began to ask each other: “Who else is left alive?” Lieutenant Vladimir Gormin, with 3rd Ukrainian Front, saluted his commanding officer and reported solemnly: “Colonel, the war is over.” The colonel, a much older man whose son had died in the war, leaned forward and kissed the lieutenant three times. By evening, their soldiers were tossing officers skywards in blankets, beginning an orgy of drinking that left no man sober for three days.

In Pomerania, Waltraut Ptack and her family were ordered by Russian soldiers, most of them very drunk, to ring the local church bells, and indeed to keep ringing them for many hours: “We did not mind doing this, because for us, too, it was a happy day. But it did not prove a happy day for many of the German women there.”

“I suppose I should feel elated,” Lieutenant Christopher Cross of 2nd Ox & Bucks wrote to his parents, “but I feel tired and disgusted, and I can’t get the smell of Germans out of my mouth and nose, no matter how much I clean my teeth. Disgust, contempt and a little pity mix ill. What now, I wonder?”

Lieutenant Hans-Otto Polluhmer, former signals officer of 10th SS Panzer, heard the news with his comrades in a prison camp in Oklahoma. Some men expressed delirious joy. Others succumbed to despondency: “Everything we had fought for seemed to have been in vain.” Several prisoners killed themselves. Polluhmer had heard the news of Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, as the family listened to the radio on his tenth birthday. His father had said: “My boy, this is the finest birthday present you could have.” Now, Polluhmer learned that his parents had been found dead in their flat near Potsdam. He never knew whether they died at the hands of the Russians or destroyed themselves.

Those who had most cause to rejoice were the liberated peoples of Europe. “Every day seemed a festival day to us,” said Theodore Wempe, a Dutch Resistance worker in Apeldoorn. In a little town outside Amsterdam, twenty-year-old Bob Stompas saw a Jew burst from the hiding place he had occupied for four years, and stand in the midst of the street crying to the sky: “I’m alive! I’m alive!”

I
N THE ENTIRE
north-west Europe campaign since June 1944, American forces had lost 109,820 men killed and 356,660 wounded. Eisenhower’s British, Canadian and Polish formations reported total casualties of 42,180 men killed, 131,420 wounded. These figures contrasted with the Red Army’s losses on the Eastern Front between October 1944 and May 1945 alone of 319,000 killed, well over half a million dead since D-Day in June 1944. Field-Marshal Keitel observed ingratiatingly to his Soviet captors: “Germany and Russia have suffered the greatest losses in the war, while the Western allies have suffered very little.” Yet the “big picture” masks the extraordinary weight of casualties that fell upon the footsoldiers. At the end of the campaign, the U.S. 2nd Infantry Regiment, with an established strength of 3,000 men, calculated that since D-Day it had sustained 3,745 battle and 3,677 non-battle casualties. Some 714 of its men had been killed, 2,736 wounded, 215 missing, and eighty were known to be prisoners. The U.S. 4th Infantry Division lost a total of 4,834 men killed between June 1944 and May 1945, more than 100 per cent of its rifle strength. Private Len Stokes of the 7th Somersets found that just five men of the 120-strong infantry company with which he had landed in Normandy in June 1944 remained in its ranks on VE-Day. The company had lost 105 men killed or wounded in Normandy; twenty-four in Belgium and Holland; eighty-seven in Germany—about 180 per cent of its strength.

I
T IS UNREMARKABLE
that Hitler and other senior Nazis chose suicide in the face of defeat. It seems more noteworthy that so many senior officers and ordinary Germans also killed themselves. There is no German cultural tradition of suicide as a response to military failure, of the kind familiar in Japan. No significant number of Germans took their own lives in the face of their nation’s earlier defeat in 1918. In the whole of the First World War, sixty-three German generals died on active service, while 103 died of other causes. In the Second World War, twenty-two generals were executed by Hitler. Another 963 died or were posted missing on active service. An astonishing 110 killed themselves. Model, we know, took the view that “it is unthinkable for a field-marshal to allow himself to be captured.” Rommel felt obliged to accept poison to spare his family from the consequences of Hitler’s belief in his treachery. British troops of 13 Para briefly occupied an elderly German general’s magnificent castle. They confiscated all his personal weapons except a pistol. When the Russians took over, they smashed everything—family paintings, heirlooms, furniture. The general used his remaining weapon to shoot himself. The burgomaster of Leipzig, together with his wife and daughter, the city treasurer, his wife and daughter and four Volkssturm men all killed themselves in various offices of the city hall, with poison or pistols. The burgomaster’s body was found slumped, his glazed and empty eyes staring upwards at a portrait of Hitler on the wall. Major-General Georg Majewiski, commanding the German garrison in Pilsen, surrendered to the U.S. Third Army in a brief ceremony, which he concluded by shooting himself in front of his staff and an American officer of 16th Armored Division.

The most common cause of self-destruction appears to have been despair, an unheroic desire to escape from acknowledgement of Germany’s defeat and its consequences. The young mayor of Barth appeared at the gates of a local PoW camp. He sought the assistance of its American and British prisoners to have Barth declared an open town and spare it from destruction. When they protested their impotence, the mayor returned home and hanged himself alongside his wife. There were many cases such as that of General von Bothmer, who shot himself after being stripped of his rank and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for failing to hold Bonn. Some officials chose to die because they anticipated retribution for their crimes in the name of the Nazis. A significant number of people decided that the passing of Hitler’s Reich signalled the end of life as they knew it, or wished to know it. Thousands of civilians killed themselves in fear of the Red Army, or after suffering early experience of its behaviour.

A schoolteacher told the girls of her class two days before the fall of Berlin: “If a Russian soldier violates you, then remains nothing but death.” Ruth Andreas-Friedrich commented in her diary on 6 May that more than half of this woman’s students had taken their teacher at her word, often by drowning themselves in the nearest body of water. “They kill themselves by the hundreds. The phrase ‘honour lost, everything lost’ had been the words of a distraught father who presses a rope into the hand of his daughter who has been violated twelve times. Obediently she goes and hangs herself at the nearest window transom.” Sexual violation was, perhaps, the most comprehensible reason for self-destruction. No one has ever reliably quantified the suicides in Germany in 1945, but these certainly ran into many tens of thousands. In every city occupied by the victors, corpses hung from the rafters, or lay slumped where poison had done its business with them.

Everywhere, surviving servants of the Third Reich were striving to rid themselves of the trappings of allegiance, which now placed them in mortal peril. An SS general arrived at a
Schloss
which harboured two Englishwomen married to Germans. “My dears,” he said apologetically, “excuse this dreadful uniform,” and hastened to discard it. The leader of the Belgian SS, Léon Degrelle, demanded a U-boat to escape to Spain or Japan. Degrelle did not get his submarine, but he was successful in escaping vengeance. Dönitz, at Kriegsmarine headquarters in Flensburg, provided SS men with naval uniforms, in accordance with Heinrich Himmler’s last advice to his personal followers, “to dive for cover in the Wehrmacht.” Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, was given an order on 6 May posting him to Naval Headquarters on the island of Sylt, disguised and equipped with the papers of boatswain’s mate Franz Lang. Dönitz’s behaviour during his brief, grotesque masquerade as the last Führer makes a mockery of delusions that he was a mere naval officer who fell into bad company. He was fortunate to escape the gallows at Nuremberg.

In some cases, Germans themselves exposed senior Nazi officials. Martin Mutschmann, gauleiter of Saxony, was brought forth from the house in Annebourg where he had been hiding, after an informer denounced him. The local burgomaster marched the Nazi official through the streets in his underpants, then displayed his captive before the war memorial in the town square, before surrendering him to the Russians. The gauleiter survived a half-hearted attempt to slash his own wrists.

On 7 May, in the ruins of Dresden, the inhabitants heard firing to the north-west. A deputation from the local hospital called upon Emil Bergander. They begged him to destroy the alcohol stocks at his distillery: “If the Russians get at them, they’ll do vile things.” Bergander said: “They’ll do even more vile things if they find we’ve deliberately got rid of it.” He compromised, by selling off stock at the gates at rock-bottom prices. He said with passionate determination to his son: “We and the factory have survived the bombing. Now we are going to survive the Russians.” That night, the two stood on the roof of the building, watching the few remaining houses of Neustadt, on the opposite side of the river, burning fiercely. There was a series of thunderous explosions as the Wehrmacht demolished the bridges. “The Russians will be here tomorrow,” said his father resignedly.

The eighth of May was a beautiful day, which began with a flight of Stormoviks making low passes over the city. The Berganders went to the distillery with Anna, their Russian maid, in readiness to act as interpreter. They heard engines, and expected tanks. Instead, anticlimactically, a single Russian soldier plodded up the road. When he reached them, he levelled his sub-machine-gun. Anna, who was from Smolensk, started explaining to him what the distillery was. “Have a drink,” she said encouragingly. Soon afterwards, another truckload of Russians arriving, firing their weapons exuberantly in the air. They all packed into the distillery office, exchanging toasts. The courtyard became crowded with Italian prisoners and Russian slave labourers who had heard of the arrival of Soviet troops. Soon the Russians were very drunk. The Germans remained uneasily sober. A Russian crashed his truck into a wall after indulging in their hospitality, whence the vehicle had to be rescued by a T-34. Finally, a young lieutenant arrived in a jeep to take formal possession of the distillery. The Berganders’ alcoholic diplomacy had achieved its objective. While there were many Soviet atrocities elsewhere in Dresden, there were none in their corner of the city. For a brief time at least, a strange harmony reigned, uncharacteristic of eastern Germany under the Red Army.

If conditions in western Germany and Austria were nothing like as unhappy as those in the east, the chaos seemed desperate enough to those in its midst. Millions of people were clogging every road: Allied soldiers doing their business; liberated prisoners seeking refuge or vengeance; German soldiers struggling to get to their homes; refugees fleeing the Russians. Daily scenes of horror were enacted in the American and British zones, even if these lacked the formal sanction granted to mayhem by the Red Army. The rampage of east European ex-prisoners dismayed many Allied soldiers. “I don’t think there is a girl left over 14 who hasn’t been raped on some of the farms round here,” a British officer, a Jew born in Germany, wrote to his wife. “One surely has not too much sympathy with the German people; but
this
sort of punishment—well, as Colonel Bird expressed it, is so
untidy
.” Ron Graydon and some of his fellow PoWs liberated by the Red Army from a camp at Mühlberg were bewildered to find German women beseeching them to accept their sexual services, simply to save themselves from their Russian occupiers.