Nigel Cawthorne (14 page)
Authors: Japanese Reaping the Whirlwind: Personal Accounts of the German,Italian Experiences of WW II
GöTTERDäMMERUNG
: THE DEVASTATION OF THE HOMELAND
‘In the last moment, by a miracle as it were, the Germans managed to stop the onslaught of their enemies at the very borders of their Reich …’ said Colonel Guethner Reichhelm. But it was a mere hiatus. The
Wehrmacht’s
stiffened resistance merely postponed the inevitable. As early as 23 December 1944, it was clear that the Ardennes offensive had failed. The Germans attacked again in the east on 12 January 1945. But in tanks alone they were outnumbered seven to one and on 20 January Soviet soldiers set foot on German soil. The V-1 and V-2 failed to be the war-winning weapons that had been promised. Now Colonel Reichhelm and his comrades had to face up to reality:
It could be foreseen that, as soon as spring 1945, Germany was to break down, if something extraordinary did not happen. But the German soldier went on fighting. He did no more cherish any ideal, but, in most cases, he seemed to have still a certain remainder of faith in Hitler. The point, however, that mattered most was this: the German soldier fought because he had nothing more to lose and because he was looking for his last chance. Already, by autumn 1944, there was scarcely a German family that had not lost one of their dearest relatives or that had not been bombed out and lost everything they had.
In Romania, Herbert Winckelmann could see only one possible salvation:
To me, only a political event – a change of government – could save us from catastrophe. But this had been an undiscussible subject due to the Nazis among us who still had the power to terrorize us even up to the last day. As a soldier, I fulfilled my duties just as my comrades did, convinced that one had to defend and save our country from Communism …
Our army commander, General Schoerner, aware that we would not cross the American lines overnight, abandoned his command post and fled into Austria to avoid becoming a prisoner of the Russians. This was the man, or better Hitler’s lackey, who had just days before ordered soldiers to be hanged for having tried to reach the American lines on their own. It was disgusting to watch how the Third Reich died. None of its leaders came to the foxholes to defend it to the last man as they had promised. They all abandoned their posts and fled, afraid of being held responsible, or cowardly died by suicide.
Winckelmann observed the collapse of morale:
Some, unable to come to terms with the disastrous situation, broke and committed suicide. One example was Lieutenant Stolz, a squadron commander in his early 20s. He was the youngest lieutenant in our regiment and had grown up through the ranks of the Hitler Youth. He had been a good soldier as well as a comrade with a promising future. But he had been blinded by Hitlerism and now what he had believed in had fallen apart. In his desperation, he shot himself.
Eduard Bodenmüller was the commander of a Panzer Mk V Panther tank in Poland when the final German counterattack stalled in March 1945. His crew were repairing a track when Russian ordinance started raining down:
Our driver, radioman and loader dived underneath the tank. I and my gunner got inside the turret. The crescendo of exploding shells rose to such an intensity that it was obvious that we were now deluged with shells [rockets] from a ‘Stalin Organ’. Suddenly another terrific crash and our 49-ton tank shook violently. Either we had received a direct hit or a bomb had landed a few metres from us … The enemy fire died down and it struck me as odd that we had not yet heard from our comrades under our tank. Then, suddenly a weak voice from outside cried out: ‘Help! Help! We’re wounded.’ I grabbed the first-aid kit and box and with one leap I was behind the tank next to my wounded loader.
I took my knife and cut open the back of his tattered and blood-soaked jacket. Shocked, I saw a wound 150mm long, very deep. With every breath he took, blood came gushing out. My gunner came with all the wash-cloths he could find in the tank. I stuffed several of these into the wound to help slow down the loss of blood. We looked at him and knew that he had only minutes to live.
Paule stayed with him and calmed him, saying he had only been hit by a small shell fragment. I began to look for the others. Two pairs of feet stuck out from under the tank. I grabbed one pair, but to my horror I saw that it was only the lower half of my radioman’s body. I had the urge to throw up, but overcame it. I crawled under the wagon, grabbed onto a meaty, bloody mass and pulled the completely mutilated body out. There was nothing I could do.
His driver was also dead, ‘split in half from his head to his pelvis’.
When Bodenmüller radioed his commander, he was told to remove the radio equipment and destroy his tank. He and Paule, the gunner, decided to disobey orders and held off the Russians until a tank recovery vehicle turned up. On the way back to base, he spotted Lieutenant Grosse and his crew bailing out of a mechanized assault gun that was now on fire.
I ran over quickly to see if I could extinguish the burning vehicle … Once I had gotten within a few metres of the assault gun, I noticed that only the camouflage netting, draped over the top of the vehicle, was on fire. Other than that there was nothing wrong with the vehicle. I took the fire extinguisher and put out the still smouldering netting. Then I climbed into the driver’s seat, started the motor and drove at top speed following the route the recovery vehicle had taken … My commander charged
Leutnant
Grosse with cowardice before the enemy and ordered him court-martialled. The rest of the crew was sent to a penal company. Then he turned to me and said that I too ought to be court-martialled for failing to follow his orders.
Instead Bodenmüller was awarded the Iron Cross First Class, promoted, and granted five days’ leave in the Divisional R&R area.
I did not accept the latter offer and instead I requested that the maintenance section repair my tank and that I be given new crew members so that I could return as soon as possible back to action.
A day and a half later Bodenmüller was back in the thick of it. Meanwhile, the Fatherland was bracing itself for the final onslaught. This was witnessed by World War I veteran Wilhelm von Grolmann. In May 1943, he had been appointed ‘president’ of police in Leipzig, the proud home of the
Panzerfaust
anti-tank weapon, and director of air defence. At the time, the former Nazi stormtrooper claimed that there was very little ‘crime and venereal disease’ in the city, although some of the 80,000 ‘foreign workers’ in the city had formed themselves into ‘burglary gangs’.
The smallest and, at the same time, the most important defence unit in the civil air defence was the house block, which might be compared to an infantry regiment. The children, old men, and women in the house block must be systematically trained to take prompt and courageous action, to treat injured persons and, especially, to handle incendiary bombs. Sufficient supplies of water and sand must be available in every house. Air-raid shelters with emergency exits, openings in the wall between neighbouring houses and attics cleared of potential fire hazards are obvious measures. Children who can run up and down stairs quickly and who know every corner of the house from their games have prevented many catastrophes by throwing burning incendiary bombs out in the street and by putting out smouldering fires. If several smaller fires are allowed to develop, there is danger of an area conflagration, and several such large-scale blazes may cause a fire storm. Once this happens, the situation is hopeless. Those who manage to escape death by burning or by being crushed under the masses of debris, simply asphyxiate.
His job was further hampered by the fact that Leipzig had only one waterworks. So if a water main was hit, the water system would fail citywide. Allied bombing raids also knocked out the electricity and telephone systems across the city. Grolmann’s fire crews were sent to Hamburg in July and August 1943, when the RAF began the tactic of intense area bombing, which created fire storms.
Anyone who has had a leading part to play in air defence operations, or who has been employed in any way after an air raid, will undoubtedly wish that no nation will ever again have to experience the consequences of war. After the return of my reinforcements from Hamburg in August 1943, the commander of the fire-fighting police gave me a report of his experience; I interrupted him with the exclamation: ‘For God’s sake, what kind of a war is this.’ Still under the impression of what he had gone through, he spoke with bitterness, ‘General, this is not war – this is sheer madness.’
Although Grolmann was a committed Nazi, he dated the beginning of the end to 18 October 1944, with the call-up of the
Volkssturm
, or national militia, which included all men between the ages of 16 and 60.
For an officer who loves his country it is a difficult decision to admit that a war so successfully begun can no longer be carried to a favourable conclusion. The call-up of the
Volkssturm
brought me to full awareness of this fact. What madness it was to mobilize untrained cripples, old men and callow youngsters as a last bulwark against fresh armies provided with the most modern equipment, and to entrust the command of these forces to Party agencies operating under
Wehrmacht
regulations.
Grolmann saw that the increasingly intense and systematic Allied air raids would inevitably weaken German resistance.
This period saw the issuance of countless new ordinances and directives by the top-level agencies, most of which were patent nonsense, since they were out of touch with reality. Contact between the government and the country and people had been lost … I remember receiving confidential instructions from Himmler in December 1944 to the effect that the units and organizations controlled by him should not become too deeply involved in matters concerning the
Volkssturm
because it had become an instrument of power of Bormann, that is for the top man of the Party, and the SS had no interest in it. Nevertheless, he implied that the
Volkssturm
would become the factor determining German victory.
In February 1945, Grolmann took charge of fire-fighting in nearby Dresden, as the merciless bombing of that city had put all municipal agencies out of action. Worse was to come.
When Russian armies reached German territory, a mass flight from east to west began for which neither urban nor rural authorities were prepared; the suffering endured by these refugees is indescribable. Party agencies in charge of caring for the population after air raids were flooded with requests for aid and bogged down completely. I assumed this task for the city of Leipzig on my own initiative and … I entrusted my fiancée, who was working with the Red Cross, with the practical execution of our plans. In unwearying day and night work she succeeded in giving thousands of miserable people a feeling of being cared for again …
However, their material conditions improved little.
US air bases moving nearer and nearer made rail and highway transportation very difficult. Food supplies from eastern areas stopped entirely and food could be obtained from other regions only in very limited quantities. Almost all males who were halfway fit even were drafted and sent to the eastern front with whatever weapons were available. The police had to release all men born after 1896 to the armed forces … The power of resistance gradually collapsed.
Other Nazi fanatics could not face the inevitable and there were calls for the establishment of ‘
Wehrwolf
’, a guerrilla organization that would continue the struggle against the occupying forces by terrorist action.
The beginning of the final phase of the collapse started with the call for the formation of the
Wehrwolf
. I heard it on the radio during the
Wehrmacht
communiqué on Good Friday, 30 March 1945. I regarded this as wholly wrong, since it was bound to give the enemy an opportunity to employ every means he deemed fit, even against the civilian population, in an attempt to protect his own troops. In clear recognition of the consequences for a city of such illegal combat I immediately ordered the criminal police to observe whether activation of partisan units had been planned or was already underway.
As it was, the resources of the civil authorities were stretched to their limits, as Grolmann described:
Prisoners in the endangered eastern regions were moved to the west and almost always without prior notice in a state of complete exhaustion and near starvation after their stay in various prisons or concentration camps. Food was no longer sufficient, especially as the large ration depot in Gotha had been disbanded on 31 March … On the second day of the Easter celebrations, the public prosecutor of Leipzig telephoned and asked for my help, stating that between 40 and 60 persons legally sentenced to death had arrived at his office. He had orders to execute them without delay. Since he did not have the facilities for this purpose, he asked me to place an execution detail at his disposal. I refused and asked the Wehrmacht commander to back me up, which he did.
In Nazi Germany such insubordination had an inevitable consequence:
On 1 April I was suddenly relieved of my post as chief of the criminal police. It was taken over by the Gestapo, whose leader thereupon received the glorious title of ‘Commander of the Security Police’. This agency, however, did not last long. Around 10 April, the Gestapo left the city ingloriously under the cover of night, after it had shot a goodly number of the prisoners entrusted to its keeping … Chaos prevailed everywhere. In addition, there were orders from top headquarters that no city or town was to fall into enemy hands without having been defended, and that any subordinate was obliged to shoot his superior on the spot if the latter manifested a defeatist attitude in word or deed. Moreover, responsible officers were branded as cowards and their families made subject to arrest if they surrendered a town or position no matter how hopeless defence might be. Thus responsible leaders, already weighed down by other worries, became prey to feelings of mistrust and insecurity. One could not be frank with one’s own subordinates, and much less with other agencies, nor was it possible to make the preparations called for by an objective appraisal of the true situation. This was my position from 6 April on, when US troops had advanced as far as Gotha, about 150 kilometres from Leipzig.