The German War (95 page)

Wilm Hosenfeld had been captured on 17 January 1945. In May he was sent to a camp for officers at Minsk, where he was questioned three times by NKVD interrogators over the next few months. His rank as an intelligence officer on the Staff Command of the Warsaw garrison suggested to them that he had been involved in running anti-Soviet intelligence operations; they did not believe that he had only organised sporting events and educational programmes. Held for six months in solitary confinement, his health deteriorated rapidly. When he rejoined the camp’s other 2,000 prisoners at the end of 1945, he was able to write regularly to his family. His health improved and he was moved to a new camp at Bobruisk.

His wife Annemie turned to those her husband had aided and protected, locating a former concentration camp prisoner and a Communist, Karl Hörle, who had served under her husband from December 1943 and could vouchsafe Hosenfeld’s anti-Nazi political outlook, despite his Party membership. In October 1947, Hörle drew on his position as chairman of the local ‘Union of Victims of Nazi Persecution’ to lobby the new rulers of East Germany to intercede with their Soviet patrons. It took longer to establish contact with those whom Hosenfeld had helped in Poland. In November 1950, Leon Warm-Warczy
ski, a Jew he had hidden in the Warsaw sports stadium, used a visit to the West to thank his rescuer. Astonished to find that Hosenfeld was still a prisoner, he wrote to Władysław Szpilman, who had re-established himself as a composer and pianist in post-war Warsaw. Szpilman pleaded in person with the much-feared head of the Polish secret police, Jakub Berman, only to be told that there ‘was nothing to be done, because he is with the Soviet comrades’.
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The Soviets treated Wehrmacht intelligence officers like Hosenfeld on a par with the Gestapo and SD. On 27 May 1950, the military tribunal carried out an administrative review of Hosenfeld’s case without a hearing and gave him a twenty-five-year sentence in a labour camp, mainly for his part in interrogating prisoners during the Warsaw Uprising. Hosenfeld had suffered a major stroke in July 1947 and although he received prompt medical treatment and recovered, from then on he suffered from unstable blood pressure, dizzy spells, headaches and a series of minor strokes. In August 1950, he was sent to serve his sentence in Stalingrad, where 2,000 German prisoners lived in stone huts and in bunkers dug out of the earth while they helped rebuild the city and construct the Volga–Don Canal. By June 1952, Hosenfeld’s handwriting had deteriorated so much that he could only sign his name and had to dictate the rest of his card. His final message to his wife closed reassuringly: ‘Don’t worry about me, I am OK in the circumstances. I send you all my love, all the best! Your Wilm’. Hosenfeld died of a ruptured aorta on 13 August.
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On 26 October 1950, when the new West German Parliament held a day of remembrance for the German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer asked in his official address whether ‘ever before in history millions of people have been sentenced with such chilling heartlessness to misery and misfortune?’ He was referring not to the murder of the Jews but to the fate of German prisoners in the Soviet Union, even though by this time there were only 30,000 prisoners still in Soviet captivity. Most of the 3 million taken prisoner by the Red Army during the war had already returned to Germany and Austria. Approximately 750,000 had died of illness and exhaustion: this was particularly true of the 110,000 exhausted prisoners taken at Stalingrad, of whom only 5,000 survived. When parts of the Soviet Union were gripped by famine in 1946–47, German prisoners were subjected to the same harsh conditions as the rest of the population: yet there was no retaliation for the policy of deliberate starvation which the Wehrmacht had inflicted on the 3.9 million Soviet prisoners of war it captured in 1941, and which had killed 2.8 million of them by early 1942. By the end of 1953, another 20,000 German prisoners had been released, leaving just 10,000 in the Soviet Union. But as their numbers fell, public agitation in the newly founded Federal Republic for the release of those remaining in Soviet captivity grew. Minutes of silence brought the bustle of traffic and urban life to a halt. Vigils and marches were held, while special prayers were said in churches for both the prisoners of war and the missing.
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Part of the problem was that during the final phase of the war the Wehrmacht had lost track of its own losses: by the summer of 1944, it had under-reported military deaths by 500,000. Losing whole army groups in the summer’s retreats had meant also leaving both dead and wounded behind. By December, the Wehrmacht’s internal count was a million adrift. The first four months of 1945 were even worse, with the Wehrmacht reporting that 200,000 men had died, when the reality was 1.2 million: in each of these months, on average 300,000–400,000 German soldiers had died, compared to the pre-June 1944 peak of 185,000 lost in January 1943 at Stalingrad. The result was that the Wehrmacht thought it had lost 3 million men compared to the reality of 4.8 million soldiers and 300,000 Waffen SS men. Because so many of these deaths occurred in the last phase of the war – especially in the fighting for the former eastern provinces – and because the military post had continued to function until the end of 1944, both relatives and experts thought that there were many more prisoners in Soviet custody than there were. When the Soviet Union announced at the Moscow conference of 1947 that it now only had 890,532 German prisoners of war, this came as a huge shock. It was widely assumed in Germany that there were still at least 2.5 million prisoners of war in Soviet camps. Expert opinion fuelled such sentiments: in 1947, a Hessian statistician published an estimate that an additional 700,000 prisoners of war must be in the Soviet Union, and this statistic was then taken up to confirm the lower estimate of German losses claimed by the Wehrmacht in the standard West German history.
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The same statistical error led to an exaggerated estimate of the numbers of civilians who had died in the flight and expulsion from the eastern provinces: based on demographic data, the Federal Office for Statistics estimated in 1958 that 2 million Germans had died, of whom 500,000 were soldiers: only in 1999 did it become clear that 1.4 million German soldiers from the eastern territories and provinces had died, thereby reducing the probable number of civilian deaths to 600,000. A similar process of revising the estimated death toll from Allied bombing downwards also had to wait until the 1990s, leading one reputable German historian to conclude then that 370,000–390,000 Germans and a further 40,000–50,000 forced foreign workers and prisoners of war were killed in the bombing. As with military deaths, most of these civilians had been killed in the final phase of the war.
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In the Cold War atmosphere of the 1950s the notion spread that there were secret Soviet camps where German prisoners were killed or deliberately worked to death. The emaciated faces, hollow eyes and shaven heads on the posters for films such as
Taiga
and
The Doctor of Stalingrad,
both released in 1958, or the 1961 offering
The Devil Played Balalaika,
did not depict the victims of the Nazis but German prisoners of war. As if to displace the real concentration camps in Germany, which the Americans had made some local residents visit, special travelling exhibitions were mounted so that Germans could walk up to the barbed-wire fences and the watchtowers of models of Soviet prison camps. It was German men and women who were sent to the left and to the right, German corpses that were piled in makeshift mortuaries and their gold teeth that were pulled out before the bodies were interred in a Soviet camp’s mass grave. While the tales of suffering of the prisoners of war in the 1950s or those of German expellees, carefully compiled and published in a multi-volume edition by the West German government, were widely publicised, few Germans wanted to discuss the genocide of the Jews, whose details had been silently borrowed for the tales they were now telling about their own suffering.
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On 20 November 1945, when the trial of the major war criminals opened at Nuremberg, it garnered unparalleled international publicity. That day, a mother with three small children wrote to her husband, a German officer in an American prisoner-of-war camp:

nation – however free of guilt it feels (which in any case never happens – guilt is

on both sides!) – is entitled to damn a

nation, to take away all its freedoms, just by the right of the victor. Woe to the vanquished! Neither before nor since do

feel guilty for the war and all the horrors in the concentration camps as well as the shameful deeds committed in our name. – You, Mummy, my brothers and many, many among us bear just as little guilt. That’s why I also categorically reject collective guilt!

Her one regret remained that she had not been able to walk the streets of her home town with her husband after he was promoted to the rank of general. Now a dependent evacuee mother, it would have gone a long way to compensating her for the status she had lost. But more fundamentally, she believed that ‘A nation without a military is unarmed and that means the same as being without honour.’
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Public agitation against the Nuremberg trials began in the Western occupation zones with the first signs of the conflict between the British and American side and the Soviets, which Goebbels had so confidently predicted. In the West, the running was made by the German churches. With the banning of the Nazi Party and all its mass organisations by the Allies, they had come to enjoy unrivalled public influence. Within two weeks of Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in March 1946, Catholic bishops in the West were using their freedom to attack the precepts underpinning Allied denazification and occupation policy. Cardinal Frings issued a pastoral letter in which he asserted, ‘To ascribe collective guilt to an entire people and to treat it accordingly is to usurp the powers of God.’ The Münster journalist and diarist Paulheinz Wantzen noted the steady trickle of news about the deaths of Nazi functionaries in the Allied ‘concentration camps’ where they had been ‘treated no differently from the former concentration camp inmates’. He reported that ‘among the people sympathy for the “accused” at Nuremberg is growing by the hour’. In this atmosphere of vanishing terror and abiding powerlessness, the Church was seen to stand up for German rights. On 4 July 1946, Cardinal Frings wrote directly to the Nuremberg tribunal, trivialising their task and challenging the notion that ‘someone should be considered worthy of punishment merely on account of his membership in the SA or other National Socialist organisations’. At the local level, prominent clerics like the General Vicar of Cologne argued that ‘the SA rules of manly behaviour were quite compatible with Christian philosophy and were approved by the Bishops’.
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As early as June 1945, Bishop Galen of Münster had restated his respect for the patriotic example set by German soldiers. ‘We want to deeply thank our Christian soldiers too,’ he declared, ‘those who in good conscience of doing right have risked their lives for the nation and Fatherland and who even in the hubbub of war kept their hearts and hands clean of hatred, plundering and unjust acts of violence.’ The Allies set about dismantling not just the explicitly Nazi emblems of the Third Reich but also the memorial culture of sacrificial death that had sustained it. The inscription ‘Germany must live, even if we must die’ vanished from the military cemetery at Langemarck alongside the elaborate monuments the Nazis had erected for the dead of the First World War. But the symbolism of sacrifice could not be so easily eradicated. By October 1945, Galen was reminding Catholic congregations that ‘the soldier’s death stands in honour and value next to the martyr’s death’. In February 1946, Pope Pius XII elevated Galen, Frings of Cologne and Konrad von Preysing of Berlin to the College of Cardinals, further enhancing their national and international standing. The following month, Galen, now seriously ill, was welcomed back to Münster with floral arches and garlands, like nothing the former journalist Paulheinz Wantzen had seen since visits by the Führer. Once again, the ailing cardinal preached a sermon on the sacrifices made by German soldiers. Germany’s defeat might have been the result of the ‘inner foulness’ of National Socialism, he declaimed, but the honour of its soldiers remained unbesmirched: ‘Nevertheless, what our soldiers did in loyal fulfilment of their duty will stand for ever and through all time as heroism, as loyalty and adhering to conscience which we honour and acknowledge.’
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In September 1946, Cardinal Frings became the first German to address a postwar audience in London, when he was handed the pulpit in Westminster Cathedral. Frings used the opportunity to affirm that ‘We German Catholics were not National Socialists but we love our Fatherland. We love it all the more now that it is in deepest need and we fight for the inalienable rights which it has retained.’ A few weeks later, an ecumenical delegation of British clergy, which included Bishop Bell of Chichester and the Roman Catholic Bishop of Nottingham, toured the Rhineland and Westphalia. They argued that the Allies had to support the churches’ efforts to rebuild Germany, endorsing their claim that they had ‘resisted its [the Nazi regime’s] inhumanities’. Meanwhile, Catholic and Protestant leaders, especially men like Martin Niemöller who had themselves been imprisoned by the Nazis, became much-sought-after intercessors for those convicted of war crimes.
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