Exorcising Hitler (18 page)

During the regime’s dying weeks, Helmut and co. have detached themselves from the rigidly hierarchical, militarised Nazi-ruled society in which they grew up and with which they are clearly, by now, disillusioned. That does not stop them from firing a few defiant shots from their bunker entrance across the river at the Americans, who have now occupied the main city of Koblenz. Their dangerous outlaw status does, however, mean that, for all their teenage bravado, they are anxiously counting the hours until, for them, the war is over. Helmut writes: ‘Soon the Yanks will come. I’m curious to see how they behave. Soon I’ll have made it . . .’

When, on 27 March, the boys see American vehicles parked by the riverside down below them, they feel only relief. Soon they venture back down into Pfaffendorf itself:

On the bypass bridge there are two [American] guards, but we pass unhindered. When we get down in the town, some of their units are carrying out house-searches. They behave very decently, only blowing open doors when these are locked. They have captured a few more of our soldiers. Six maybe. Then I go with Lo [a friend] to the Bienhorntal [a local beauty spot where there seems to have been some kind of storehouse] and fetch a case of canned meat. I take eight for myself, hand over the others. Lo keeps all his. By then, the Yanks are finished with their searches and are assembling in front of our house, around fifty of them in number. Cars arrive, they get into them along with their six prisoners, and off they head to Ehrenbreitstein. The commander’s car even has a radio in it. That’s what I call going to war!
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Helmut and the others had coolly disobeyed the Nazi system, going against twelve years of indoctrination. They made their calculations, risked arrest and possible execution, and – like Ulrich Frodien in his escapes from Breslau and Berlin – survived until the Allies arrived, bringing, for them at least, an end to the war.

These survivors were the lucky ones. Many ended up hanging from trees and lamp posts, placards around their necks declaring them traitors. Whether it was fanatical army field police, renegade SS and Gestapo men, or self-styled
Werwolf
units, until the very last day of the war there were plenty of remnants of the disintegrating regime prepared to murder their war-weary fellow countrymen for any acts, or even attitudes, that passed as ‘defeatist’ or ‘disloyal’.

In Penzberg, a largely working-class and anti-Nazi mining town in southern Bavaria, an at first sight almost tragicomic little
coup de théâtre
occurred days before the end of the war. At dawn on 28 April 1945, the town’s pre-Hitler Social Democratic mayor, Hans Rummer, alarmed by reports that local army and Nazi Party last-ditchers were preparing to defend the town against the approaching Americans, and if necessary to destroy its mines and waterworks in order to keep them from the enemy, attempted to accelerate the process of liberation by assuming power at the head of a small group of armed supporters. In this, the daring Herr Rummer had been encouraged by a brief uprising in Munich. Anti-Nazis and Bavarian separatists, calling themselves ‘Freedom Action Bavaria’, had seized control, for a few hours, of a radio station in the Bavarian capital and broadcast calls for resistance, until the Nazi authorities restored ‘order’.

Rummer and his associates successfully managed temporarily to shut down the mine and visited a local concentration camp, where they gained the support of the inmates by promising liberation, before marching on the town hall, where a crowd of socialists and communists, eager finally to be rid of the Nazi dictatorship, had gathered. The Nazi mayor, Herr Vonwerden, was dismissed and told to leave town, leaving Rummer’s men in charge.
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With the Americans a matter of hours away – the rumble of their artillery could clearly be heard in the town – the takeover might have succeeded but for the fact that a Wehrmacht unit led by one Oberleutnant Ohm happened to be passing through, and stopped in the town square to investigate why such a large crowd had gathered. Discovering the situation, they quickly arrested Rummer and his associates, after which the punctilious Ohm drove to Munich, fifty or so kilometres to the north, for instructions, taking with him the deposed Nazi mayor.

Almost immediately they arrived, they found themselves in a meeting with none other than the Nazi Gauleiter of Upper Bavaria and ‘Reich Defence Commissar South’, forty-nine-year-old Paul Giesler, notorious for his extravagant pronouncements on the subject of fanatical resistance.
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Within less than five minutes, Ohm and Vonwerden had their orders: ‘Rummer and his people must be liquidated.’ And they were – seven failed rebels were put up against a wall and shot immediately upon the lieutenant’s return to Penzberg later that afternoon.

Typically for many Nazi firebrands during these chaotic final days, however, Giesler was not satisfied with proportionate violence, sufficient to restore immediate order. So far as he was concerned, the disease of anti-Nazism must be not merely suppressed but wholly eliminated. Sensing that Ohm, a loyalist but also a stickler for procedure, would be reluctant to do what Giesler considered necessary, the Gauleiter – astonishingly, since his capital, Munich, was also about to fall to the Americans – took the trouble to instruct one of his aides, a Brownshirt leader named Hans Zöberlein, to round up a posse, so to speak, and also head down to Penzberg. The codename for this death squad was ‘Group Hans’.

The bizarre and cruel farce that followed was, appropriately enough, staged by an artist, for Zöberlein was no ordinary thug but a radical nationalist novelist with a background in the post-First World War
Freikorps
movement. Zöberlein’s violent non-conformism had caused him to fall out of favour until talent shortages in the last months of the war caused him to be appointed as a regional defence leader and
Volkssturm
commander. His units called themselves ‘
Werwolf
Upper Bavaria’ and specialised in brutal reprisals against villages found flying white flags or in any way thought to be interfering with operations against the enemy.

A hundred or so of these desperadoes accordingly arrived, along with their maverick commander, at Penzberg town hall that evening. Zöberlein announced their intention of completing the purge begun by Ohm and Vonwerden. Local Nazis ‘assisted’ by drawing up a list of political enemies in a noisy discussion that saw more than one personal score settled under the pretext of ‘necessity’.

The flamboyant arrival of Group Hans and the ensuing debate about who to kill enabled some of the shrewder local anti-Nazis to make good their escapes, but nevertheless, once the death list had been drawn up, the killers were able to snatch three of their victims. Within a short time, all were dead, with two of them hanged from the balcony of a building next to the Penzberg town hall, the third from a tree in the main street. When a fourth eluded them, despite threats to the caretaker of his building, the group extended their operations into a neighbouring working-class suburb. Here they found themselves exchanging fire with armed residents. One of the latter, a miner, was killed, but the gun battle was enough to drive Group Hans out of the area.

Moreover, the local Wehrmacht commander, when asked to send help, refused to do so. Nonetheless, several more ‘enemies’ were hanged during the course of the night, including a heavily pregnant woman – although as the night wore on, with the ‘enemy’ now forewarned, it became harder to find victims. In one case, when a man was being hanged, the rope broke. He was shot, left for dead, but survived. Another captive bolted while under guard at the town hall, and, despite taking a bullet from his pursuers, managed to make good his escape.

Zöberlein had left before midnight. The last of his lieutenants, a fanatical former officer by the name of Bauernfeind ( literally ‘countrymen’s enemy’), pulled out of town at around dawn, still issuing bloodcurdling threats to return and finish the job. He left corpses dangling from improvised gallows around the town square in the early morning light.

So the regime that had always boasted of its success as the bringer of ‘order’, during its last weeks and days finally became what in its black heart it had always been – the agent of violence, random death and chaos.

An institutionalised sadism that had hitherto been systematically concealed, confined to Gestapo cells and the giant barbed-wire torture cages of the concentration camps, now burst into the open, revealing itself as a licence for every uniformed thug in the country to torture and murder at will. It somehow seems appropriate that on 29 April, the day after ordering the tragicomic and totally unnecessary Penzberg massacre and just hours before being forced to flee Munich ahead of the Americans, Gauleiter Giesler was appointed in Hitler’s Testament to be Reich Interior Minister in place of the disgraced Heinrich Himmler.
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The Penzberg atrocities showed two things very clearly: first, that by the last weeks of the war, those who had either never supported the Nazis or were gravely disillusioned with them were now prepared openly to rebel; and second, that, in its response, the regime revealed its degeneration into violent, vengeful brigandage.

The Third Reich had clearly forfeited any claim on the respect or loyalty of all but a minority of fanatical adherents. Most Germans shared this realisation. Whether it made them better or worse disposed towards the advancing Allies was another matter entirely. The image of the adolescent Helmut Nassen and his friend, defiantly firing off rounds at the Americans across the river while at the same time hiding from the Wehrmacht field police who would have strung these young men up as deserters provides, perhaps, a suitable illustration of the dualities at the heart of so many Germans’ response to the war’s end.

With the end of the war, Germany was deemed to have ceased to exist. This had long been agreed among the allies, and was supposedly set out in a proposed instrument of surrender painstakingly negotiated by the European Advisory Commission (EAC) in London during the latter part of the winter. However, owing to procedural errors and some last-minute changes, that detailed and binding document was still not quite ready by the time the actual military surrender occurred.

The document of surrender signed by German commanders at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in Reims on 7 May 1945, then – amidst much bad grace – the next day at Berlin-Karlshorst with the Soviets, was much more basic. It consisted of only six paragraphs, none of them more than two sentences long. This text had been put together mostly by a British G-3 colonel at SHAEF, John Counsell, in civilian life a theatrical actor-manager. He had taken a great deal of it from a report in the US forces’ newspaper, the
Stars and Stripes
, of the German surrender in northern Italy a few days earlier.
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A surrender needed to be signed, EAC or no EAC, in order to bring the fighting to an end and save further loss of Allied and German lives. The improvised text achieved that much. The world celebrated VE-Day, but even before the party was over the politicians and the political generals (among whom Eisenhower should be included) had begun to worry that, in fact, only the German armed forces had so far surrendered. Where did this leave the legal status of the German government? In November 1918, at the end of the First World War, only the politicians had signed their country’s surrender, leaving the German generals to cry ‘betrayal’. Now that the reverse was true, who knew whether the survivors of the Nazi political elite might also exploit this technically still incomplete situation for their own nefarious ends?

The Allies clearly exercised de facto
physical control of Germany. Moreover, the improvised text also contained a reference to the EAC document in preparation, binding the Germans to accept this too once it was presented to them. All the same, this was not an entirely satisfactory situation. Any possible loopholes had to be closed as quickly as possible.

The situation was all the more pressing because a body calling itself the Reich government still existed. This was headed by Hitler’s designated successor, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, and included War Production Minister Albert Speer and several other veteran ministers appointed by Hitler. This faintly ridiculous entity hung on for more than two weeks after the formal surrender, housed in a former navy torpedo school at Flensburg, a substantial port on the Baltic just a handful of miles from the Danish border. Stubbornly flying the Reich flag on its meagre collection of government buildings, its troops still patrolled the surrounding streets.

Dönitz’s government went through the motions. Its ministers and officials held meetings, squabbled over jobs and seniorities, made decisions, issued commands and even attempted to engage in dealings with the forces of General Montgomery’s British 21st Army Group, which now controlled the Flensburg area.

Perhaps the only useful thing that Dönitz and his entourage did manage to achieve in the final week of the war, after Hitler’s death, was to delay the Wehrmacht’s final surrender until millions of German soldiers and refugees had managed to reach the relative safety of the Western Allied lines – an intentional delay benefiting between 2.5 and 3 million desperate souls.
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