Battleship Bismarck (66 page)

Generalleutnant Hans von Ravenstein, captured in Libya while commanding the 21st Panzer Division, was held in great esteem by both Germans and Canadians as camp leader at Grande Ligne, Quebec. (Photograph courtesy of Franz Schad.)

On 29 August, the day after Schmitt’s speech, there was a general sports day in camp. Everyone had to take part; it was not to be a championship competition since participation was all that mattered—a good thing. I refused to give in to a fleeting impulse, born of the bitterness of the past days, not to turn out. Nothing would have been more wrongheaded. I did all the required exercises, even if doing so was still a little like being under glass. It rapidly became clear that on the whole Schnitt’s words had purified the atmosphere and helped restore camp discipline to what it should be. How many
hard feelings remained on an individual level after all the turbulence was something that would become evident, eventually.

And it did. Difficulties were placed against my continuing membership in the law class. A few in attendance wished to expel a “politically unreliable.” As the pressure continued to mount, I considered the situation from all angles and discussed it with a few friends. From the very beginning, Seeburg supported my inclination to continue, and the attitude of our dean was decisive. “Give in to the pressure,” I said to myself, “only because I hold politically sound opinions? I won’t think of it.” On 5 September, the beginning of our sixth semester, I appeared in the lecture hall as usual. In an atmosphere of icy rejection and, to counter it, of defiance, I took my customary place. The lecture began. Many more lectures began. And time overtook the rest. It carted my difficulties away. Already we were not far distant from the dissolution of the Bowmanville camp and our transfer to another part of Canada.

And otherwise? Some men with whom I had become personally close over the years showed themselves unwilling to be seen with me and sealed themselves off. Some friends became only “friends.” I must and could live with that.

In the outside world our defeat at Stalingrad and the collapse of our U-boat war already lay more than a year—and the Allied invasion of Normandy a few months—in the past. In the Soviet Union our armies appeared to be flowing back to the frontiers of the Reich almost without a halt. Whenever the decisive turning point of the war had actually occurred, for a long time now it had not taken a prophet, even behind barbed wire, to foresee our defeat. And for how long now I had gone to bed and gotten up with the vision of an apocalypse—the consummation of the German catastrophe that was taking place before our eyes: the mere military course of events, the quaking of the decaying Reich under the blows administered by the world coalition, the desparate mobilization of imaginary reserves provided their own depressing commentary. The tension often drove me outdoors, for it became increasingly difficult to bear all this in silence.

“You, too, certainly see,” I said at the end of 1944 to someone who could hold his tongue, “that the moment for an attempt to save diplomatically whatever of Germany can be saved, to enter into negotiations, has long since passed. But the ‘Führer’ will not negotiate; besides, who would negotiate with him? The only thing that matters to him is the prolongation of his rule, a prolongation of days, hours—
what it costs in life and material values is immaterial to him. And if at the time of his exit, nothing is left of Germany except ashes, he can’t imagine anything finer. You remember his speech of 8 November 1943—just seven months ago?”

My companion did not know of it. “Well now,” I continued, “in his traditional speech on the anniversary of his Putsch in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich he said something, I heard it over the radio or read it in the press at the time, that immediately caught my attention. ‘I would not be sorry if the German people go under, for in that case it would have deserved nothing better.’ He is living out this resolution now,” I went on, “the battlefronts tell it to you—yes, whoever surrenders himself to that charlatan doesn’t need his own supply of cynicism.”

Degrading, insulting attacks by Hitler on his German listeners were nothing new, nor did they disturb them, but, to the contrary, increased the exultation of the masses. Thus Hitler could make such pronouncements without risk to himself and apparently delighted in doing so. He said something similar—I learned of it later, however—to the
Reichleiter
and
Gauleiter
at the Wolf’s Lair in August 1944—that if the German people should be defeated in this struggle, then it has been too weak, has failed its test before history, and would therefore be destined for nothing other than destruction. With only slightly different words he had expressed himself to a foreigner as early as the setback outside Moscow in November 1941, saying that he would shed no tears for the German people.

True, in order to understand that Hitler thought this way, it is not at all necessary to know of such remarks. They were clearly evident in his policy. At the end of 1944, with the “rubbing out” of Germany that Hitler had so publicly accepted before our eyes, I now thought that even our enemies might have something more merciful in mind for us.

But how did millions unflinchingly allow themselves to be led senselessly to the slaughterhouse by one single individual? If I viewed the years 1933 to 1944 as a whole, they taught me something. State philosophers and historians long ago crystallized that something into historical experience. And I don’t know who ever expressed it more clearly than the French parliamentarian and author Etienne La Boétie more than four hundred years ago in his treatise
On Voluntary Servitude:
“It is the people themselves who mistreat themselves through their tyrants, they are the helper’s helpers of the thieves who rob them, and they encourage the murderer who kills them; they are
traitors to their own cause.” In twentieth-century Germany nothing had changed.

Others in the camp showed perplexity, naturally. One said: “We must become still more fanatical, more Japanese than the Japanese.” He was thinking of the kamikazes and had a very fixed look in his eye. Another: “Well now, the retreat in Russia, to me it appears to be nothing more than the reaction to the action—billiard balls roll back on rebounding. It certainly looks bad at the moment, but that’s exactly why we have the ‘Führer.’ I believe in him.” Nothing could have been falser than the suggestion that even a billiard ball could roll back to its starting point. Everyone was permitted his sort of consolation.

*
Hitler’s East Prussian military headquarters

†
Lieutenant General

*
Globke, Hans, state attorney, born 1898. From 1929 to 1945 in the Reich Ministry of the Interior. As a ministerial councillor and expert advisor on questions of nationality, among other things he collaborated on the edition of a commentary on the Nuremberg Racial Laws (1935). From 1953 to 1963 under Konrad Adenauer he headed the administration of the Federal Chancellor’s Office, initially as ministerial director and then as state secretary. On account of his activity in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, he was attacked with increasing sharpness. (Brockhaus 1969)

Oberländer, Theodor, political economist and politician, born 1905. In the NSDAP since 1933, from 1939 to 1945 he was Reich Leader of the “League of the German East.” From 1953 to 1960 he was Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees, and Disabled Veterans. In 1960 he retired from ministerial office because the accusation was made that as a member of the “Nightingale” unit he had participated in the shooting of Jews and Poles. In 1960 Oberländer was juridically rehabilitated. (Quoted from Brockhaus 1971)

Author’s comment: Both Globke and Oberländer were too deeply intertwined with and had held places of too much prominence under the criminal National Socialist system to have been again employed in high positions without a thorough investigation of their unsavory past. Their occupation of high offices in the postwar years remains for me the perfect example of the deplorable lack of political hygiene since the Adenauer period.

†
An untranslatable pun on the name of Field Marshal Rommel and the verb
rummeln
(to rumble or jolt), signifying “In Africa, Rommel shook things up.”

43    Whites, Grays, and Blacks

The turn of the year 1944–45 was accompanied by the first rumors of imminent transfer and the dissolution of the Bowmanville camp. One heard of the “categorization” of prisoners of war on the basis of their political attitude—read, attitude towards National Socialism—according to the Canadians’ knowledge, estimation, or suspicion of it. The majority were assigned to Group B, the so-called “grays,” which signified the average fellow-travelers. Group C would consist of the “blacks,” the seemingly fanatical, incorrigible Nazis, and Group A of the “whites,” the so-called anti-Nazis and democrats. Where the Canadians found the criteria for categorizing individuals, we did not know. The course of previous interrogations, the tenor of letters, the observations of guards and perhaps also winks from one or another German must have been the basis for it.

At the beginning of February 1945 matters had progressed so far that 162 officers, the obvious “blacks,” were transferred to the See-bee camp in Alberta. The “blacks” in the far west, the “grays” in the midwest, and the “whites” in the eastern part of the country—such was roughly the geographical distribution. That some—in individual cases very serious—errors were made in categorization will be no surprise. Our “grays,” 187 in number, were transferred to Wainwright in the midwest at the beginning of April and the remainder, the “whites,” 174 officers and other ranks, myself among them, to the Grande Ligne camp in the Province of Quebec. At noon, while we were waiting for our train at the Bowmanville station, the news arrived
of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I have never forgotten that day.

As our captivity would indeed continue, I left Bowmanville with mixed feelings. On the positive side was the time spent there that would be useful in so many respects in later life. I really had not wasted my time there. The facilities and living conditions of this camp, even outwardly so beautiful, I also felt to be positive. So far as all that was concerned, henceforth with each new camp—and there would still be some—a progressive deterioration in quality was to be expected. But in the final analysis that was only natural. When I thought of the misery and want in the homeland in April 1945, my comfortable life put me to shame. On the other hand, in the past months an almost unbearable psychological pressure had weighed on me. A “pause for breath” would be welcome. Certainly, my comrades were fundamentally pleasant and decent, and as members of the military profession we had very much in common. But patriotism is not the same for everyone. And so far that is concerned, Germany remains a difficult Fatherland.

That many years later I would have the opportunity to recall before a public forum in Bowmanville my days as a prisoner of war there—that certainly lay beyond all imagining upon departing from the station in April 1945. The Rotary Club of Bowmanville invited me—consul general in Toronto since April 1968—to be its guest speaker for World Understanding Week in November of that year. The resulting press coverage was detailed and positive. From hated enemy to respected NATO ally, what a way we had traveled since then. We had also received the spiritual equipment for it in the Bowmanville. No, there was really nothing to complain of in this camp.

And what had the Canadians themselves to say about the background of our “categorization”? How did the Germans behind barbed wire strike them as political beings? The Canadian archives, recently opened to the public, do not reveal much quantitatively, but nevertheless they cast a ray of light. And since they indicate typical phenomena, I will quote a few, not just from the Bowmanville camp.