Exorcising Hitler (21 page)

A temporary and part-time soldier Herr Plönissen might have been, but he was technically in the armed forces and subject to orders. So it was that, with the Americans reportedly already over the Rhine at Remagen and threatening to sweep down from the north on to the eastern suburbs of Koblenz, rumours spread that the fortress garrison was about to be ordered to leave and move east into the Westerwald, where it would join the other fighting units. This was the moment of decision, and the dentist in uniform made it.

Using a night pass he had been granted for carrying out emergency dental work, Herr Plönissen absented himself from the fortress as the troops were mustering and headed home. With the family’s collusion, he hid in a garden house in the grounds of their rented villa. A patriotic man who had done his duty in 1914–18 and 1939–40, he nonetheless had no intention of dying pointlessly miles from home. Sure enough, the Gestapo came looking for him. They were fobbed off by stories of night-time emergencies, but shortly after this Plönissen relocated to the house of an old friend, the local doctor, which had an old cellar with a separate entrance. There he was hidden behind some piles of blankets to wait out the end.

As this drama played out, young Egon – who had already himself spent a night in the fortress for a story involving filching chicken feed for the family’s hens from a source on military property – watched with anxious interest as boys little older than himself continued to be sacrificed in aid of the Führer’s fantasy of driving the enemy back on to the west side of the Rhine.

Egon clearly remembers being out on the road by the fortress during those days and seeing half a dozen young Luftwaffe auxiliaries, no older than sixteen or so, being led by an elderly
Feldwebel
. They passed Egon slowly, hauling a light 2cm anti-aircraft gun. He followed them and saw them take up position in a local beauty spot, the Mühlental. Even at his age, he knew that a gun like that would stand no chance against American tanks.
If
it ever got to confront them.

In fact, a few hours later, an American spotter plane buzzed overhead, checking out the new arrivals. A short time after it returned to the American-occupied bank of the river, the enemy’s heavy artillery opened up. Shells crashed into the Mühlental.

Within seconds, boom, one hit the entire defensive position. Wiped out every single one of those boys. And their little gun. And their
Feldwebel
. It was a tragedy.
²⁷

Although the fighting for the Rhine crossing at Koblenz had been vicious and spread over several weeks, once the front line had moved east and the city settled into the routine of occupation, things ran decently enough.

Of course, there were frictions. When Egon Plönissen’s father wanted to retrieve his dental equipment from the room in the Ehrenbreitstein fortress where it had been kept during the last months of the war, he was politely but firmly told that everything in the fortress, now occupied by the American garrison, was property of the United States by right of conquest. So, without his equipment, he could not practise. There was nothing to be done, it seemed, until at the beginning of July news came from Egon’s pretty female cousin, whose employment as a secretary to the Americans at the fortress was not entirely unconnected with her good looks. The US Army would soon be pulling out from here, she revealed, as from elsewhere in the districts that had already been earmarked for the French Zone of Occupation.

The deal arrived at between the French and the Americans regarding the handover arrangements was a very precise one. We are leaving on the evening of 14–15 July, the Americans told the German dentist, and the French will be moving into the fortress to take charge of it at two in the morning. You, Herr Plönissen, have those few hours, in the middle of the night, to let yourself in and spirit away your valuable dental equipment, before it passes into the sphere of influence of the French government and therefore, mostly likely, out of your hands for ever.

On the evening of 14–15 July, Herr Plönissen, his family and friends were waiting outside the fortress with a large flatbed cart pulled by two horses. The moment the Americans left, they moved quickly into the fortress, and the next couple of hours were a storm of activity, with everyone involved in dismantling the equipment and getting it on to the cart. Helped by the fact that the French arrived a little late, they succeeded in stripping it all out and getting it away from the fortress precincts before the fatal hour struck.

Within days, Herr Plönissen had refurnished his practice room and was open for business once more – not least when it came to those senior members of the new French military administration who were prepared to pay for highly skilled German dental treatment.

Of course, even dentists’ and doctors’ families would not have things easy in the occupation years that followed, but overwhelmingly they would survive. This was more than could be said for those ordinary Germans who had no contacts with the occupiers, no professions whose valuable services could be bartered for, and no connections with the class that had long been sneered at by urban sophisticates, in Germany as elsewhere, but who would for the foreseeable future hold the key to life and death, survival or starvation: the nation’s farmers.

All this lay in the future, however. For now, Germans as a whole faced the worst time. The time when they were totally at the conquerors’ mercy, and would find that the quality of such mercy was strained very, very thin.

5

Through Conquerors’ Eyes

It would not be an exaggeration to say that in 1945, a great many – in some countries most – Allied nationals clearly hated the Germans.

If we are to believe the opinion polls of the time, between spring 1943 and February 1945 (when Dresden and several other major German cities were bombed to near-destruction) the number of British citizens who identified themselves as either hating or having no sympathy for Germans increased from 43 to 54 per cent.

In America, the number of respondents believing the Germans to be inherently warlike rose from 23 per cent in February 1942 to 37 per cent in December 1944. Thirty per cent consulted in a January 1944 poll for
Fortune
magazine were in favour of completely breaking the Reich up into smaller states.
¹

A letter writer to a British newspaper, identifying himself as a Church of England vicar, spoke for many when he proclaimed:

The first step is to recognise the German character is essentially brutal and understands only force. For fifteen hundred years the Hun, to give him his proper title, has been a menace to his neighbours . . . and one is driven to the conclusion that God will Himself intervene and by some natural calamity obliterate such parts of Germany as may render her for ever afterwards impotent to be a menace to the world.
²

The wartime broadcasts of the vehemently anti-German Foreign Office mandarin Lord Vansittart, and the publication of his book,
Black Record
, had done much to implant such ideas in the consciousness of the British public. However, the continuing V-weapon attacks on London, which killed relatively few but were deeply feared and loathed, and which ended only when the last launch base was overrun by the Allies at the very end of March 1945, also contributed to the growing bitterness and war-weariness of the civilian population.

After all, it had been obvious for a long time that the war was lost for Germany. Seen from across the Channel, the German population as a whole seemed nevertheless to be set on continuing the fight. The British public, naive about the methods that the Nazi dictatorship could and did use to pressure its people to conform, assumed that this continuation implied near-universal assent and even support. Then came the additional shock of stories about concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau (the news about Auschwitz took somewhat longer to filter through properly), which were discovered by the advancing Anglo-American forces during the spring advance into the German heartland. The now-undeniable horrors of such places were extensively reported in newspapers and shown in grisly detail in newsreels as the war drew to an end.

The diarist Mollie Panter-Downes wrote about this hardening of public attitudes:

Millions of comfortable families, too kind and lazy . . . to make the effort to believe what they had conveniently looked upon as a newspaper propaganda stunt, now believe the horrifying, irrefutable evidence that even blurred printing on poor wartime paper has made all too clear. The shock to the public has been enormous, and lots of hitherto moderate people are wondering uncomfortably whether they will agree, after all, with Lord Vansittart’s ruthless views on a hard peace.
³

The highest-circulation conservative newspaper of the time, the
Daily Express
, showed the concentration camp photographs in Trafalgar Square on 1 May at an outdoor exhibition entitled
Seeing Is Believing
, as well as (more comprehensively) at the newspaper’s reading room in Regent Street. A visitor to the latter told a reporter: ‘After seeing the exhibition I feel we ought to shoot every German. There’s not a good one amongst them.’

This ruthless and undifferentiated attitude towards the defeated enemy extended from bottom to top. At the Tehran Conference of the ‘Big Three’ in 1943, Stalin had suggested shooting 50,000 senior German officers out of hand. Churchill was repelled by that perhaps only semi-serious suggestion,
⁴
but enthusiastically supported the idea of summary execution without trial of major Nazi leaders and war criminals. He dropped the idea only reluctantly in the spring of 1945 under pressure from the Americans, who by then had decided that international war crimes trials were the only decent solution to the problem.
⁵
As for the Russians, their feelings were extreme and thoroughly understandable, though many of their atrocious actions after they entered Germany could not, and still cannot, be excused.

General Eisenhower, the C-in-C of the Allied Expeditionary Force in the west, though himself of German descent, had, it seems, also come to loathe not just the obvious perpetrators but the German nation as a whole. In fact, he had expressed a degree of distrust even before America entered the war. In a letter to his brother in September 1939, shortly after the German invasion of Poland, he had written:

It does not seem possible that people who call themselves intelligent could . . . give absolute power to a power-drunk egocentric . . . one of the criminally insane . . . the absolute ruler of eighty-nine million people.
⁶

And much later, after the initial swift advance through France, the Allies were all but halted and the struggle settled into a costly war of attrition. It was then that he wrote to his wife, Mamie, the words about the hatred he felt for the Germans that would become much quoted after the war, though usually out of context. The sentences in which his declaration of loathing was embedded were written during the catastrophic Arnhem operation in September 1944 (‘A bridge too far’) and read, in full:

You have seen in the papers that two days ago we launched a big airborne attack. Every time I have to order another big battle I wonder how the people at home can be so complacent about finishing off the job we have here. There is still a lot of suffering to go through. God, I hate the Germans!
⁷

It was an expression, in other words, more of angry despair at the enemy’s stubborn persistence, and the needless deaths it was causing, than of crude tribal hatred.

As in Britain, the spectrum of feeling about the Germans in the American military and government, and probably also among the general public in the USA, ran from vengeful and downright racist to resentful but fair-minded. Nonetheless, even among the latter group there was scarcely anyone who felt that the Germans should be treated as a ‘liberated’ people on a level with the French, the Dutch, the Poles or the Yugoslavs.

The same was not – oddly, perhaps – true when it came to the Austrians. German-speaking, enthusiastic citizens of the Third Reich for the most part since the
Anschluss
of March 1938, and – notoriously – counting Adolf Hitler himself among their number, they could and did claim the status of an oppressed people. As the Russians advanced, and the Nazi authorities retreated, numerous armed separatists appeared in the towns and cities of the so-called
Ostmark
, wearing armbands in the horizontal red-white-red of the old Austrian national flag, and claimed to be restoring the country’s freedom. Whereas in Germany, all government was legally abolished by the Allies, in Austria, although the country was occupied and divided into four zones (and the capital, Vienna, into four sectors, like Berlin), from the outset it had a government of sorts, with a Chancellor and ministers.