The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (107 page)

GIs in one town found a father, mother, and daughter who had hanged themselves as well as the family dog. “The shame of German defeat,” their suicide note read, “is too much to bear.” Perhaps the war was too far gone even for pathos. After seeing an elderly couple weeping before their burning farmhouse, a company commander in the 2nd Infantry Division wrote, “What right had they to stand there sobbing and blaming us for this terror? What right did they and their kind have to any emotions at all?” Alfried Krupp, an industrialist whose slave factories had armed the Reich, also was said to have wept upon his arrest for war crimes; one of his 125 servants ran after him with a packed weekend bag as he was led away near Essen, as if the misunderstanding could be resolved in a day or two. In Krupp’s 260-room Villa Hügel, described by one critic as “the most hideous building in Germany,” soldiers found twenty walnut wardrobes lining a dressing room two stories high, with white wolf-skin rugs, gold gooseneck water taps spilling into a bathtub scooped from a huge block of marble, a table that could seat sixty-five diners, and a ceiling mural of a goddess astride a crescent moon, her hair pinned up with a star.

“Brilliant spring sunshine. The song of the lark, the flash of the kingfisher, the white flare of a deer running through the forest shade,” wrote R. W. Thompson, advancing on Bremen with British troops. “From behind the window curtains, faces watch us fearfully.” Osmar White described “old men leaning on sticks, snatching at their hats” in obeisance to their conquerors, and frantically denying the accusatory query,
“Liebst Du den Führer?”
No! they cried. No, I don’t love the Führer! White recorded the roadside interrogation by GIs of a passerby:

Kommen Sie hier.
Where are you going?

To my father’s house.

Why are you going?

My mother has been killed. I am going to keep house for my father.… Is it permitted? Is it not forbidden?

No. It is not forbidden as far as I know.

And yet dragons lurked. For every enemy platoon that surrendered, another fought savagely, often unto death: in April, 10,677 U.S. soldiers would be killed in action in Europe, almost as many as in June 1944. Goebbels in a radio broadcast in mid-April warned that houses displaying white flags would be considered “plague bacteria.” Other decrees urged that shirkers and capitulators be hanged with placards around their necks identifying them as cowards; placarded miscreants soon dangled from streetlamps and telephone poles across the Reich. “If we lose the war,” a Nazi official warned, “it means slavery for every German, and certain death for every party member.” A party leader in the Harz told German women in April that they would be “abducted and taken to Negro brothels.”

Some Luftwaffe pilots received training in how to ram their aircraft into Allied bombers, as well as political indoctrination on the nexus between Jews, Bolshevists, and the Western democracies. “By consciously staking your lives,” Göring told his kamikazes, “save the nation from extinction.” Few such “total commitment missions” succeeded in the air, but suicidal SS and Hitler Youth gangs were reported across the front. A Seventh Army patrol on April 14 killed several young boys carrying potato-masher grenades. “It’s a heartbreaking sight,” a reporter wrote of such juvenile soldiers. “These children’s faces have nothing childlike about them.”

Although the National Redoubt in the Alps was a brown pipe-dream, makeshift bastions here and there stoked SHAEF’s fear of a Germany bent on self-immolation. In Aschaffenburg, Bradley reported that “women and children lined the rooftops to pelt our troops with hand grenades,” while wounded veterans hobbled from their hospital beds into the firing line. In Heilbronn, on the Neckar River, already smashed by years of bombing, German officers shot down Hitler Youth detachments when they broke and ran under American mortar fire. Heilbronn held out for nine days, until April 13, and the detritus that once had been a pretty medieval town was said by an Army historian to retain “a noticeable stench all during the summer of 1945.”

“Why don’t the silly bastards give up?” asked a Coldstream Guards corporal. That enigma perplexed every Allied soldier at one moment or another. Imminent, ineluctable disaster had enhanced a perverse sense of German national cohesion, inflamed by terror, misery, and unhappy memories of the last, lost world war. Lurid propaganda—regarding Soviet atrocities in the east, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender, and those “Negro brothels”—fueled the resistance.

“Mother, you asked me when I was coming home. I don’t know,” Captain Jack Golden had written his family in Seymour, Texas, a few weeks earlier. “I don’t see any end to the war. I can’t see what the Germans hope to gain but they aren’t giving up.” Now twenty-three, a graduate of Texas A&M University, Golden had been overseas for more than two years; he had seen enough combat in North Africa and in landings at Gela and Omaha Beach to earn two Silver Stars and a Purple Heart. “I am getting a little tired and I am so nervous that I bite people’s head off at the least mishap,” he confessed in his looping cursive. The cannon company he commanded in the 16th Infantry Regiment, part of the 1st Division, had fired more than 75,000 rounds since June 6, he added. “We don’t count what went on in Africa and Sicily. That is too long ago. Seems like another war.”

In an April 3 letter from Germany, Golden expressed relief that his brother, a lieutenant in the Army Air Forces, was headed home on leave. “It will take a little worry off my mind. Every time I saw a bomber go down, I prayed it wasn’t Bill.” He continued:

There are too many German towns that we haven’t had time to fire our artillery into. I think we should fire about a thousand rounds into every town. Do them all good.… Enough. Enough.

That would be his last letter home. On Sunday, April 15, in the Harz foothills, two ambushers with machine pistols stepped from behind a house in Amelunxen onto the same road that a 16th Infantry rifle company had just cleared. They shot Captain Golden dead in his jeep. Jack’s passing would be, his family acknowledged, “the greatest trial of our lives.” In a condolence note to his parents, Secretary of War Stimson wrote, “The loss of a loved one is beyond man’s repairing.”
Enough. Enough.

*   *   *

“Half the nationalities of Europe were on the march,” wrote Alan Moorehead, “bundles on their shoulders, trudging along the ditches in order to avoid the passing military traffic.” In fact, nearly
all
the nationalities of Europe were on the march, in what one witness called “that monstrous, moving frieze of refugees.” Allied officers estimated that 4.2 million “displaced persons” from forty-seven nations trudged through 12th Army Group’s sector of Germany alone. They were among some 11 million unmoored souls wandering across central Europe in the spring of 1945.

Some were on forced marches, including Allied prisoners-of-war evacuated by their captors to camps deeper within the shrinking Reich. Darrell W. Coates, a turret gunner shot down and captured in 1942, kept a journal as he and four thousand others from Stalag 17B were prodded across Austria just ahead of Soviet forces approaching from the east.

April 9
: Most of us refused to move until they fed us. Bayonets and rifle fire quickly changed our minds.

April 11
: We were very hungry this nite and we boiled grass in the rain so that we would have something inside us.

April 14
: Rain again as usual.… Miserable as hell. Marched till after 6
P.M.

April 15
: Hurry up Patton for Christ sake.

April 19
: Get soup tonight. They must have just run a horse harness through hot water. Tastes like hell.

Others were liberated before the Germans could move them. “Everyone is yelling and jumping around,” Lieutenant Bernard Epstein, who had been captured in the Bulge, told his diary on April 12 after Ninth Army troops drove through the gates of Oflag 79, near Braunschweig. “An American officer beside me with one leg amputated is so overcome he can’t talk. He’s blowing his nose and tears are streaming down his cheeks.” Given the dearth of food and medical supplies, many were in wretched condition. “Smaller wounds were covered with toilet paper,” wrote Lieutenant June Wandrey, a Seventh Army nurse from Wisconsin. “Their brutal amputations were covered with rags.… Their bodies were covered with scratches, inflicted when they clawed at their body lice.” Some British prisoners captured at Dunkirk or in the Western Desert had been incarcerated for four years or more. “So,” one Tommy said, eyeing his liberators, “that’s what a jeep looks like.” Trucked westward to the Allied rear, the men cheered wildly at the sight of every ruined German town.

Of the shambling millions, many hundreds of thousands were slave laborers freed when factories were bombed or encampments overrun. SHAEF broadcasts in various languages by Radio Luxembourg offered instructions both to those not yet freed—“Take shelter and await the Allied armies. Form small groups of your own nationality and choose a leader”—and to those already at liberty: “Do
not
move out of your district. Wait for orders. Keep discipline.… Let your behavior be a credit to your national honor.”

Instead, starvation, revenge, indiscipline, and chaos often created what Allied officers called a “liberation complex.” SHAEF had presumed that refugees “would be tractable, grateful, and powerless after their domination for from two to five years as the objects of German slave policies.” As an Army assessment concluded, “They were none of these things.… Newly liberated persons looted, robbed, murdered, and in some cases destroyed their own shelter.” Freed laborers plundered houses in the Ruhr, burning furniture for cook fires and discarding slave rags to dress in business suits, pajamas, and evening clothes ransacked from German wardrobes. Ravenous ex-prisoners licked flour off the floor of a Farsleben bakery. In Osnabrück, “rampageous” Russian slaves died after swilling V-2 rocket fuel discovered in a storage yard. Others smashed wine barrels and liquor bottles in a Hanover cellar, drinking so heavily from a sloshing, six-inch-deep pool of alcohol on the floor that several collapsed in a stupor and drowned before U.S. MPs could close the entrance.

Thousands of refugees carried tuberculosis, diphtheria, and other contagions. As medical officers charted typhus outbreaks in the Rhine valley, roadblocks were thrown up to keep migrating eastern European hordes from advancing farther west. Pilgrims were dusted with DDT and herded into new camps, where a SHAEF sermon blared from public address loudspeakers: “Alleluia! The Lord is victorious, and the spirit of unrighteousness has been reduced to dust and ashes!”

Still the moving frieze moved on. “Some went barefoot even in the frost, others wrapped their feet in blanket strips and sacking,” wrote Osmar White.

There were farm carts, milk floats, bakers’ wagons, buggies, sometimes drawn by skinny horses but more often by teams of men and women. Once I saw an ancient steamroller, belching smoke and sparks, towing a long line of drays and carts on the Berlin–Frankfurt autobahn. These processions were amazing and ludicrous … heavily salted with suffering.

Shallow graves were “marked by a truss of straw tied on as a crosspiece.” Those were the fortunate dead; many found no grave at all. On a road in upper Bavaria, the 90th Division medical battalion described discovering bodies in sad attitudes of liberation: “One man died in the position of massaging his feet. One died taking a drink from a tire rut. He remained on his hands and knees with his face in the rut for two days.”

For the liberators, this great floodtide of misery was unnerving. “It’s too big,” an 82nd Airborne paratrooper wrote in a letter home. “Personally I don’t give a damn.… It makes you hard.” After passing four hundred Italian slave laborers swaddled in rags, Eric Sevareid took inventory of his own sentiments: “a kind of dull satisfaction, a weary incapacity for further stimulation, a desire to go home and not have to think about it anymore—and a vague wondering whether I could ever cease thinking about it as long as I lived.”

*   *   *

There was worse to see and to think about—much worse. Ohrdruf had been but the first concentration camp liberated by Western armies in the Fatherland, and it was hardly the most heinous. Others followed in short order, and new discoveries revealed the Reich’s full depravity. “If the heavens were paper and all the water in the world were ink and all the trees turned into pens,” a rabbi told a war correspondent, “you could not even then record the sufferings and horrors.”

Nordhausen was overrun by the 3rd Armored and 104th Infantry Divisions, which found what one witness described as “a charnel house” of several thousand corpses. “Men lay as they had starved, discolored and lying in indescribable human filth,” a medic reported. “One hunched-down French boy was huddled up against a dead comrade, as if to keep warm.” In nearby tunnels used to assemble V-weapons, GIs beat up a captured German scientist, then beat him up again for the benefit of a Signal Corps photographer. General Collins ordered two thousand German civilians to carry Nordhausen’s dead half a mile for burial in two dozen mass graves. “There is no greater shame for any German,” Collins told them, “than to be a citizen of this town.”

Soldiers who in years of combat had seen things no man should ever see now gawked in disbelief at the iniquities confronting them. “There was no fat on them to decompose,” Major Ralph Ingersoll wrote after viewing corpses at Landsberg. “You are repelled by the sight of your own leg, because in its shape it reminds you of one of those legs. It is a degenerating experience.” At the Wöbbelin camp near Ludwigslust, General Gavin ordered local civilians to open the mass graves of camp victims and lift the dead into wagon beds lined with evergreen boughs; they were to be reinterred in graves dug on the town square. “Each body was pulled out, handed up and wrapped in a white sheet or tablecloth,” an 82nd Airborne lieutenant wrote his sister. “We were united in a bond of shame that we had ever seen such things.” Gavin arranged for a film crew to record the proceedings, and years later he wept while watching the footage. “It was a defining moment in our lives,” a paratrooper said. “Who we were, what we believed in, and what we stood for.”