The German War (89 page)

In early April, thousands of concentration camp prisoners were sent out on forced marches across the Reich. There was virtually no chance of further exploiting their labour: most prisoners were no longer capable of work and, in any case, factories were being abandoned. Himmler’s own agenda veered between fulfilling Hitler’s demands that no prisoners should fall into enemy hands alive and using them as hostages to trade in secret peace talks with the Americans, which he hoped to start through Scandinavian intermediaries. Increasingly, such decisions fell to the local SS guards, as all semblance of central control disintegrated in areas already encircled by the Americans. On 4–5 April all the prisoners working at the underground factories at Mittelbau-Dora producing the V-2 rockets were evacuated from the western Harz. When the Americans arrived on 11 April they found 700 prisoners, too ill and emaciated to be moved, and discovered the tunnels into the Harz rock which had been dug by the prisoners in order to secure rocket production from air raids. Two days later, some 40 kilometres north of Magdeburg, a motley collection of guards, drawn from military personnel, the Hitler Youth and the Volkssturm as well as the local fire brigade, locked a thousand prisoners from Mittelbau-Dora into a barn in the village of Mieste and burned them alive. The local Nazi Party District Leader had decided that it was easier to be rid of them than to wait for the railway line to be repaired and transport them further to the camps at Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme.
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As the remaining territory of the Third Reich dwindled, the forced marches of prisoners became more pointless and murderous. Many of the guards now included older SA men, grounded air force personnel, members of the Volkssturm and the Hitler Youth. They were both inexperienced and determined to follow their instructions not to let their prisoners escape. For years, labour details of concentration camp prisoners had been an increasingly common sight in German town and cities; now the evacuation marches tore the last veil of secrecy away from their treatment. Many onlookers were shocked by the emaciated, shambling figures and the brutality of their guards, and recoiled behind closed doors in quiet horror. But feelings of compassion and guilt were less prevalent than fear. Even the prisoners’ suffering damned them. Germans told themselves, ‘What crimes they must have committed to be treated so cruelly!’ When the prisoners from Auschwitz were marched through Polish towns in Silesia in January, they were sometimes hidden and often given food and drink by sympathetic locals; but as the exhausted columns wound their way through German towns and villages in the spring of 1945, the general reaction was revulsion and fear. More people jeered, spat and threw stones at them than offered assistance. On the night of 8–9 April, local civilians helped the SS, Volkssturm, SA, local police, soldiers and Hitler Youths to hunt down and shoot over 200 prisoners who had fled into the woodland near Celle after their train was bombed.
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As the Nazi order in the Ruhr collapsed, the victims of German violence continued to fit the Nazi profile of its enemies: German deserters and communists, French prisoners of war, and, overwhelmingly, ‘Eastern’ workers. Sometimes the vague sense of threat was enough, as crowds of famished and ragged forced labourers tramped eastwards to escape the bombing. SS General Kammler, commander of the V-2 rocket site near Suttrop, decided that ‘this riffraff ought to be eliminated’ before it could commit acts of terror in Germany, after his car was held up by crowds on the road in the Sauerland. In late March, more than 200 men, women and children were killed by his ZV2 Division in three mass executions: far from posing a terrorist threat, the victims were those who had stepped forward in response to a request for labour volunteers.
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Such violence extended beyond the ranks of the army, SS, police and Gestapo. So many German men and women played active roles in the mass organisations of the Party that no sharp line can be drawn between regime and society. Even after the Gestapo withdrew from the Ruhr to the schoolrooms at Hemer, their murderous role was filled by others. In early April 1945, four ‘Eastern’ workers were seen leaving a house in Oberhausen during a bombing raid. A group of German men, on air raid watch, set off in pursuit, seizing one of the men and beating him till he confessed to having stolen some potatoes. He was then beaten again by a group of German youths, before a telephone operator took the man first to the police and then on to a Wehrmacht office where he was loaned a pistol. Harried and beaten once more by a crowd with clubs and wooden fence slats, the ‘Eastern’ worker was led out to a sports field. There, in a bomb crater, the telephone operator shot him in the stomach and the crowd continued to beat him until he died.
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On 18 April, August Töpperwien’s son, Karl Christoph, turned 17. By coincidence, that day a letter from him reached his father in the quiet Czech backwater of Petersdorf. Karl Christoph described how he and his comrades had been inducted into the Volkssturm and taken their military oaths, having undergone fourteen days’ training in a former Reich Labour Service camp. He tried to show that he was true to his father’s religious and moral standards, even if they made him feel isolated from his comrades. ‘It is not made easier for one to obtain inner peace, but that is only to the good,’ he wrote. ‘Success does not lie in our hand. But Goethe was surely right: “He who truly strives, him we can save”.’ Karl Christoph bemoaned his comrades’ irreligiosity and love of ‘Jazz – or hot nigger music’, as he called it, but felt compelled to defend their patriotism:

On the matter of the Fatherland, I believe the fact that many want to get out to the front stems from insolence and utter ignorance of what the front means. Nonetheless, a certain patriotism is present. How else to explain the exemplary deeds of the 1927 and 1928 cohorts and older.

He admitted that ‘There are some who aren’t happy to do it’, before hurriedly assuring his father: ‘I don’t have this misgiving. But all the same, it did cost me a real effort . . . Commanded by God! What more could we wish for ourselves. And our Fatherland commanded by God. Yours, Karl Christoph.’
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By now, August Töpperwien had finally ceased to trust in the Führer and his prophecies. On 15 April, as the Americans approached Solingen, he had admitted to himself that ‘The battle of arms can now only be about defeat with honour!’ For Karl Christoph’s birthday, he had sent Joseph von Eichendorff’s poem ‘The Soldier’, whose final lines promised:

And when it is darkest

[and] I am tired of the earth . . .

We will storm heaven’s gate.

Somehow the words shielded August Töpperwien from the fact that his son was about to face the danger and terror of an overwhelming and unwinnable battle.
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As the Americans approached Pforzheim in late March, Ernst Arnold and Erna Paulus continued to mourn their son Helmut, missing in action since November 1943. Erna confessed that ‘thinking of Helmut is frightful’: his sacrifice no longer made sense to her, as she and her husband finally realised that the war was irretrievably lost. ‘We want to wait here quietly and see what fate has in store for us, and not give up hope that we all meet again one day and that our beautiful house remains intact,’ she wrote to her two daughters in Heilbronn, where they continued to work in the main dressing station. She had no news from them, but the radio reported again and again that the city was being bombed.
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When Jürgen Heitmann’s Volkssturm unit was out training north of Fulda, they saw American tanks firing into their camp. The seventy boys simply ran away with the weapons they were carrying, reaching a Reich Labour Service camp at mid-afternoon on the next day. There they were plied with food and sweets, but the locals were keen for them to move on, telling them that US tanks had already reached their village. Jürgen’s company split into small units to make their way through the Thuringian forest undetected, where they passed a forced march of concentration camp prisoners. From the bodies in the ditches, he could see that the SS had been shooting stragglers and, as they passed, Jürgen witnessed another killing. Taking their food from passing Wehrmacht units and sleeping in farms, on the floors of school buildings and in the forest, Jürgen’s small unit pressed on into Thuringia for another ten days. Finally, they realised from the noise of American lorries roaring along the nearby autobahn that they had been overrun. While a major wearing a Knight’s Cross organised other groups to make a last stand, on the morning of 16 April their own leader ordered them to bury their weapons and uniforms in the woodland. Releasing the boys from their service oath, he left them to get home as best they could.
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By mid-April, two-thirds of Army Group B lacked weapons and ammunition, and troops were simply melting away into the woods and cities of the Ruhr. On 15 April, in August Töpperwien’s home town of Solingen local citizens began tearing down the tank barriers; by the following day almost all the soldiers there had obtained civilian clothes. Even the senior commander discarded his major’s uniform for an ill-fitting suit and sports cap as he abandoned his command. Walter Model avoided actually surrendering to the Americans by ordering his army to ‘dissolve’ itself on 17 April, the day Solingen fell: 317,000 men were taken prisoner, including thirty generals. Torn between common sense and proud loyalty, Model followed the course of action Hitler had wished Paulus to take at Stalingrad: he went into the woodland and shot himself. That day, the US 97th Infantry Division entered Düsseldorf. Marianne Strauss had become so used to the constant threat of being caught that it took her ten days to realise she was finally safe.
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16

Finale

On 9 April 1945 Goebbels described the Reich as a narrow band running from Norway to the Adriatic coast of northern Italy. Along the Oder front, Heinrici’s armies waited for the Soviets to renew their offensive. Entrenched in three deep defensive lines, the Germans deployed a million men, with 1,500 tanks and armoured vehicles, 10,400 artillery guns and 3,300 fighter planes. It was a formidable force, but they faced armies three times their size with over 6,000 tanks, 41,000 artillery pieces and 7,500 planes. When news came that the British and Americans had crossed the Rhine and trapped the strongest German armies in the Ruhr, the strategic value of defending the Reich at the Oder also evaporated: with no clear front line in the west, holding the Red Army at the Oder could no longer protect what was left of the Third Reich. The British pushed across the North German Plain to Hamburg and the river Elbe; the Americans and French into the Ruhr, Hesse and the south. These stark military facts greatly exacerbated the distinct local and regional character of the German defeat, as it unfolded during the final three weeks of the war in Europe.
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In the west, battles became delaying tactics, attempts to hold particular places for as long as possible or, conversely, to disengage and fight through to safety somewhere else. Army Group G under its new commander, Friedrich Schulz, tried to hold the river Main south of Aschaffenburg but, despite dogged resistance, it was soon outflanked to its east by the US 3rd Army and began a headlong retreat southwards. Heilbronn was defended for a week by Wehrmacht and Volkssturm units, whilst Karlsruhe fell without a shot. By mid-April, the American armies were already pressing eastwards into Thuringia, taking Erfurt, Weimar and Jena, and southwards into Saxony and Bavaria: Halle, Chemnitz, Leipzig, Coburg and Bayreuth all fell in quick succession. On 11 April, American troops reached the Elbe. By 16 April, Nuremberg was a battleground, with the former editor of
Der Stürmer
and Gauleiter of Franconia, Karl Holz, organising the resistance. For five days, a mixed group of German and Russian ‘volunteer’ troops held on against the American artillery barrage, even after the old city was surrounded and bombed.
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In this febrile atmosphere, in which SS troops were often the last to surrender and committed a growing number of atrocities against prisoners and German civilians, Himmler quietly tried to kickstart secret peace talks with the Americans. In February and March he met the Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross and member of the royal family, Count Folke Bernadotte, and agreed to the release of Scandinavian prisoners in the concentration camps, including a small number of Jews. On 20 April, Himmler was so desperate to find a way of approaching Eisenhower and brokering an armistice that he left Hitler’s birthday celebrations in Berlin for a meeting with Norbert Masur, the Swedish representative on the World Jewish Congress, a body whose influence and power in America the Reichsführer SS doubtless hugely overrated. Ribbentrop too became increasingly active, first proposing an anti-Bolshevik alliance to the Western powers through the German embassy in Stockholm and, when that got nowhere, telling the deputy ambassador to approach the Soviets instead. Unlike Himmler, who continued his machinations in secret, Ribbentrop sought Hitler’s sanction – and was forced to desist. Goebbels too had hoped that Hitler might make a separate peace with one side or the other and had raised this option with his Führer at regular intervals since August 1941. He was also realistic enough to shelve the idea after the fall of the Rhine. In public, he continued to encourage German hopes that Allied infighting might yet save the Reich, but he clearly no longer believed that the Nazi leadership had the power to engineer this result. Following Hitler’s lead, he refocused his own efforts on imbuing the imminent defeat with a tragic heroism which could inspire future generations. Above all, it was clear that the temptation to repeat the cowardly capitulation of November 1918 had to be resisted at all costs. While senior Nazi leaders like Göring, Speer and Himmler wanted to save what they could from total destruction, Hitler and Goebbels were not alone: there were many officers in the Wehrmacht who, though not Nazis themselves, were prepared to act out the ‘final battle’ now which they believed should have been fought in 1918.
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