The German War (88 page)

American progress in the south was even swifter. The bridges over the Main at Aschaffenburg and Frankfurt were taken on 25 and 26 March, allowing the forces that had just crossed the Upper and Middle Rhine to link up. During the previous two weeks, Model had used up precious artillery and armour trying to regain control of the Remagen bridgehead. Here Hodges’ US 1st Army began its breakout on 25 March. But, instead of attacking northwards into the powerful Ruhr defences established by Model, the Americans went for a wide encirclement, driving eastwards. By the end of the second day, they had broken through the German lines and were racing towards the river Lahn and the cities of Giessen and Marburg.

As the news of the first crossings over the Rhine came through on 25 March, Joseph Goebbels could only note that ‘The situation in the West has entered an extraordinarily critical, ostensibly almost deadly, phase.’ In Münster the newspaperman Paulheinz Wantzen had been driven to despair when he had heard that the Americans had taken the bridge at Remagen: ‘Everyone hoped that they would halt the Americans and English; if not totally, then at least for a long time and somehow support the front. These hopes are over now.’ As he filled pages of his diary with accounts of the air raids on Münster and the surrounding towns, he felt ‘pretty shaken’ by the news of the Allied crossings. Yet, somehow, Wantzen still had the energy to record a political joke: ‘The Führer is pregnant. He is carrying Little Germany.’ It was as if the calamity of the military collapse was too great to express in any other way. In Lauterbach, Irene Guicking told Ernst that she could no longer believe in the war, even though she knew he still did and feared his reaction: ‘The British and Americans have forced their way too deep into Germany. Do you know that we all hope that there isn’t a successful counter-offensive from our side? Then we’d have total war. Not just from the air: the battle waged on German land would be much worse.’ Lauterbach lay between Giessen and Fulda: Irene could not yet know it, but the American tanks would arrive soon.
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In the small university town of Marburg, the warm weather encouraged Lisa and Wolf de Boor to dig their vegetable garden and start their spring planting. Whatever happened, they would need food, particularly as Lisa had taken in refugees and friends. When the water and electricity were knocked out in the town’s barracks, she had brewed coffee for the soldiers. A friend in the local administration reassured her that the men had neither the ammunition nor artillery to make a stand. But the couple worried most about their daughter Monika. There was no current news: the last card they received from Cottbus prison had been sent weeks earlier, on 6 February, and it was not reassuring. Reduced to skin and bones, Monika had joked that she made ‘an object for an osteological study’.

On 26 March, the Marburg garrison was sent out to meet the Americans advancing along the Lahn valley from Limburg. Lisa had already heard on the BBC that Churchill had crossed the Rhine with the British forces and that Scots pipers had given a concert on the east bank. The following day, she noticed that there were more classified adverts in the local newspaper offering English lessons. As she sat in the sunshine enjoying the first buds of spring, Lisa watched a ‘flood of vehicles, cars, bicycles, soldiers and civilians’ pour along the road from Giessen. Marburg itself felt like ‘a swarm of bees that have been roused’. That night the de Boors heard on the BBC that the Americans were beyond Giessen. In bed, they listened to the ceaseless drone of the German retreat, confident that the next day the Americans would reach them.
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On the morning of 28 March, Lisa was in the garden picking lamb’s lettuce when she heard the thudding of shells. She was so excited that, instead of taking shelter, she ran upstairs into the house to watch for the American tanks. About noon, she finally spotted them entering the town. Clutching the Stars and Stripes flag which her sister had brought her years before from America, Lisa ran down the empty streets to the Barfüssertor, joined by a Polish worker from a nearby coal merchant’s. They were the first to greet a long column of Red Cross vehicles. Calling out their few words of English as they ran across, they were joined by French prisoners of war, Italian military internees and more Poles. The Americans distributed piles of German coats, blankets and clothing to the forced labourers. Returning home, Lisa found that a column of American infantrymen and German prisoners had halted in front of her house, where she was able to provide them with food and drink. At 5 p.m., the de Boors walked through the city reading the new orders pasted to the walls, announcing the banning of all Nazi organisations, the closure of schools and the university, and, to their delight, permission to hold religious services. They could immediately start setting up a meeting room for the small Steinerian ‘Christian Community’ to which they belonged. As Lisa de Boor stepped out on to the balcony at dusk, the clouds dispersed. The moon appeared large and reddish as it rose over the dark woods to the east of Marburg. ‘This’, she wrote at the end of that momentous day, ‘is the spring full moon which is followed by Easter Sunday and the Resurrection. We know that the coming period will be hard, very hard. Yet, on this evening my heart rejoices.’
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Irene Guicking’s home town of Lauterbach was occupied by the leading tanks of the US 3rd Army on the same day, leaving Ernst, a mere 90 kilometres to the south near Bad Kissingen, on the other side of the lines. On 3 April, he took the precaution of sending Irene an early birthday letter, which he hoped would make it across to ‘the area of the other world view’. He also hoped ‘that you and the little ones are OK and you are well and in good spirits’. And he promised her, ‘I know one thing, Irene: we will both come through everything.’ The next day, certain that he was about to be either captured or killed, he managed to send one more note: ‘This will be the last letter. Please, please, stay brave. You will hear from me. It will be through the International Red Cross.’
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The sheer speed of the American breakthrough was astonishing. On 29 March, the US 1st and 3rd Armies met between Giessen and Marburg. Patton’s tanks continued their push eastwards into Thuringia, while those of Hodges turned north-east towards Paderborn to link up with Simpson’s 9th Army, which was encircling the Ruhr from the north. Despite bitter resistance from a Waffen SS unit with sixty tanks near Paderborn, the junction was rapidly made. At 3.30 p.m. on 1 April, the American tanks met at Lippstadt, closing the ring. It was Easter Sunday.
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In Braunschweig, Bochum and Hanover, people were burying their valuables in preparation for occupation even before the British and Americans crossed the Rhine. The Propaganda Ministry knew that no one believed the war could continue once the Ruhr was in Allied hands. It did not matter that much manufacture had been dispersed to other regions: it was on the coal mines and steel mills of Upper Silesia, the Saar and the Ruhr that the German war economy depended. As the American encirclement of the Ruhr tightened from the east, 400,000 German troops were pinned against the Rhine barrier they had tried to defend. They lacked the artillery and armour to break out, and conditions in the cities became increasingly violent and desperate.
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The last days of Nazi rule in this strategically vital region resembled the collapsing beehive Lisa de Boor had witnessed in Marburg. Hamm and Dortmund held out against occupation, with units of Hitler Youths fighting on till they were overwhelmed and the cities had been virtually destroyed by artillery and bombing. Bochum, Mülheim and Duisburg all surrendered, as leading industrialists joined forces with old-time trade unionists and labour activists to pressure Nazi mayors and military commanders to safeguard what was left. In Oberhausen, retreating German troops began to plunder, drinking any alcohol they could find and destroying equipment in a haphazard application of Hitler’s ‘scorched earth’ orders. Elsewhere in the Ruhr, German miners, engineers and managers quietly co-operated, often staying underground and manning pumps to prevent their pits from being flooded by the retreating Wehrmacht. At the Frederick the Great mine, eighty men turned out with hunting guns and old Belgian rifles to prevent the District Leader’s order to destroy the mine from being carried out. These men were instinctively doing the same thing as the metalworkers in Kiev in 1941, when they had hidden machinery to foil Stalin’s ‘scorched earth’ orders. In January 1945, the coal miners and steelworkers of Upper Silesia were some of the few who did not flee from the Red Army: having seen their Polish colleagues ‘Germanised’ in 1939–40, they assumed that their vital role in production would prove more important to the occupiers than their national identity. In each of these different conditions of occupation, workers and managers regarded their expertise as their most valuable asset, seeing it as a rational guarantee in the face of overwhelming military force. Only the Kievans, facing ruthless application of racist ideology, calculated wrongly.
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In 1945 there were still 7.7 million forced workers in the Reich. On 7 and 10 February, the Gestapo shot twenty-four ‘Eastern workers’ in Duisburg whom they suspected of being members of gangs, some of which had been waging running battles with the police in the semi-uninhabited shells of cities like Cologne, Essen, Düsseldorf and Duisburg. The gangs arose out of the conditions created by the renewed bomber offensive of September 1944. When barracks and workplaces were destroyed, German and also West European workers were generally given assistance and rehoused. Many of the ‘Eastern workers’ simply became vagrants or, in a minority of cases, took to petty crime or worked in the black market. As the gangs grew, they hid in abandoned scrapyards, obtained money and military weapons, sometimes co-operating with German gangs. The better-organised ones included former Red Army soldiers and inflicted heavy casualties on the Gestapo squads sent to arrest them.

From the autumn of 1944, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin delegated decisions about executions to individual Gestapo offices, further increasing local autonomy. Even before the Allies reached the west bank of the Rhine, the Gestapo began shooting the Soviet workers it held in remand. As the Allies occupied the western bank, the executions increased. In Essen, the head of the local Gestapo chose a firing squad from officers who had never participated in executions before to shoot 35 prisoners, thereby ensuring that responsibility was equally shared. On 20 March, 30 prisoners were executed near Wuppertal; 11 in Gelsenkirchen on 28 March; and the following day, 29 prisoners were shot in the bomb crater in Duisburg’s Waldfriedhof cemetery: none was accused of having done more than give shelter to gang members. Officers at the Gestapo’s head office for the eastern Ruhr at Dortmund were even more active, executing an estimated 230–240 prisoners between February and April, including members of a French theatre troupe. But the great majority of their victims were civilian workers or prisoners of war from the Soviet Union. In Dortmund, Bochum and elsewhere, as the Allied encirclement of the Ruhr tightened, the Gestapo carried out a last frantic round of executions on 7 and 8 April, hours before the secret policemen were all pulled out of their towns to gather at a high school at Hemer. Here they executed a further nine prisoners, again allotting the task of shooting them to several detectives who had only recently been transferred to the Gestapo and had yet to carry out an execution. Then they stayed at the school, watching each other lest anyone abscond, as they awaited the arrival of the Americans.
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Düsseldorf straddles the Rhine and, on 3 March, the Americans had captured the neighbourhoods on the left bank of the river, but the Wehrmacht destroyed the bridges and dug into its positions on the eastern bank. As luck would have it, Marianne Strauss, the young Jewish woman who had gone into hiding in October 1943 when her family was deported from Essen, had arrived in the city in February. The small socialist resistance group, the Bund, had decided to send her to Düsseldorf as the Allies approached the Rhine, in the hope that she would be liberated soon. Marianne had landed on the doorstep of a teacher whom she had never met before, clutching a letter of introduction. She was lucky. Hanni Ganzer unhesitatingly offered her sanctuary. After taking the western bank, US forces shelled and bombed Düsseldorf every day for the next six weeks. One by one, all the utility mains – gas, electricity and water – were cut. Having perfected her skills at ‘passing’ on the street, despite her lack of corroborating identity documents, Marianne went with Hanni to the bunker. In the overcrowded, claustrophobic concrete rooms they slept on chairs, sometimes only coming out into the acrid air, full of the dust from destroyed buildings, for an hour each day. Although most of the authorities’ coercive surveillance was targeted at deserters and gangs of foreign workers, they had not forgotten that there might be hidden Jews too. On 15 April, an army unit found a 72-year-old Jewish man: he was promptly hanged on the Oberbilker market square.
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Essen alone had over 300 camps for foreign workers, who constituted up to 70 per cent of the workforce in heavy industry. Here, ten days before the Allies crossed the Rhine, six young women escaped from the Krupp works during an air raid. They were Hungarian Jews who had been deported in the summer of 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau but, along with tens of thousands of other camp prisoners, were then selected for labour and sent back to the ‘old’ Reich and put to work at the Krupp steelworks. They were the first Jews to come to parts of Germany which had been triumphantly declared ‘free of Jews’ in 1942 and 1943. Then, on 15 March 1945, those who had survived the winter learned that they were about to be deported again, this time to the parent camp at Buchenwald. Threatened by the SS guards that they would not survive the war, the six young women fled while the streets were deserted during an air raid. They hid in the wrecked mortuary of the Jewish cemetery – and endured days without water or food. Finally, one of them found her way to the flat of Erna and Gerhard Marquardt, who had given them food at the Krupp works. Marquardt turned to an acquaintance in the SS, who lent him a spare uniform. Thus attired, the two men went unchallenged as they lugged two sacks of bread across to the six Jews hiding in the cemetery. The Marquardts found an odd assortment of people to take the women in: a work colleague, a grocer, even an SA man. Each of these helpers would have had different – and probably confused – motives, ranging from anti-Nazi sympathies and humanitarian compassion to the search for a useful excuse to cover membership of the SS and SA when the Allies arrived.
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