Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  It is not quite true to say that American patrols were the first Allied units to penetrate German territory. In the east, building on its destruction of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Centre, by July 1944 the Red Army had fought its way almost to the pre-war German border. Marshal Zhukov proposed to Stalin that he press home his advantage by advancing into East Prussia before the Germans had the chance to regroup and organise their defences. However, the Soviet dictator insisted on giving priority to the Polish and Balkan fronts. All the same, on 17 August 1944, a Soviet patrol briefly crossed the border into German territory near the East Prussian border settlement of Stallupönen, a town with a substantial Lithuanian minority. The place had been renamed ‘Erbenrode’ by the Nazis in 1938 because of sensitivities that the original sounded too ‘un-German’ (which, of course, it did).

  The revenge-hungry men of the Red Army were forced nevertheless to wait two months before mounting anything that could be called an invasion of Germany proper. On 16 October, General Cherniakhovskii’s 3rd Belorussian Army Group finally crossed the Niemen River near Goldap and moved in strength into East Prussia. The commander’s orders were to annihilate the German formations around the major towns of Insterburg and Tilsit and clear the way for an advance on the provincial capital (and second city of Prussia), Königsberg.

  After some initial successes, with several small towns falling to the ruthless Soviet assault, the German 4th Army, showing real courage and tenacity, managed to halt Cherniakhovskii and even drive him back. The thirty-eight-year-old Red Army high-flyer, the youngest commanding general in the entire war, had lost 17,000 men in the so-called ‘Goldap–Gumbinnen’ operation. He was fortunate not to be demoted like the commander of the neighbouring 2nd Belorussian Army Group, Zakharov, who had been punished for his bloody failure to establish two bridgeheads on the Narew River north-east of Warsaw.9

  Not until early in the new year would Soviet troops re-enter Germany in appreciable numbers. Meanwhile, they had given Germany and the world a terrifying foretaste of what, at least in the east, occupation would mean.

  Early on the morning of 21 October 1944, an autumn mist still hung over the rolling East Prussian landscape. Heavy armoured vehicles of the 2nd Battalion of the 25th Soviet Tank Brigade rattled forward along the main highway, heading west into East Prussia towards the major town of Gumbinnen. They had fought their way around fifty kilometres into Germany since the launch of the offensive five days earlier. Most of the native population had already fled, along with (for the moment) the defending Wehrmacht units. Nonetheless, that morning the Russians found horses and carts queuing in front of the bridge over the River Angerapp. They drove their T-34s forward over the bridge, crushing the carts, animals and humans in their path, and pushed on into the apparently deserted – and defenceless – village beyond.

  Nemmersdorf.

  Of Nemmersdorf’s 637 recorded inhabitants, most had been evacuated. But, as the Russians discovered, not all of them. The fate of those who remained was undoubtedly a terrible one, but the historical record remains so confused, the issue so besmirched by wartime political expediency, that it is hard to be sure of all the details. What seems certain is that the German forces quickly returned and made attempts to retake the village and the bridge, which were repelled.

  During German air strikes that accompanied the enemy counter-attacks, Soviet troops took cover in an improvised bunker in Nemmersdorf. This, it transpired, was already occupied by fourteen or so German civilians. After the danger from the air seemed past, a Soviet officer ordered everyone out of the bunker. It was, apparently, shortly after this that a massacre of civilians began. Some – certainly the civilians from the bunker – were shot at close range, others attacked and battered to death with gun butts or entrenching tools.

  Later in the day, the Soviet armoured units were ordered to retreat to a more easily defensible position on the eastern bank of the river. The Germans reoccupied the village and found the scene of the massacre, plus – so it was said – a sign painted by a Russian soldier and placed next to a burnt-out building: ‘Here it is now, Accursed Germany’.

  The reoccupation of Nemmersdorf – followed by a Russian withdrawal that left East Prussia in German hands for some two and a half months more – unleashed one of the great propaganda battles of the Second World War. There can be no question that the Russians committed an atrocity in Nemmersdorf (and also in neighbouring districts, though these were not concentrated upon to the same extent), and that dozens of civilians died at their hands. The furious men of the Red Army, after more than three years of seeing their own country ravaged, felt entitled, in many cases, to a terrible and ultimately unjustifiable revenge. However, the decision by Hitler’s propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels, to use the Nemmersdorf outrage as a weapon in his battle to stiffen German resistance and denigrate the Allies in the eyes of the neutral world led to severe distortions of what actually happened.

  Within days, the ‘bestial bloody deed’ was splashed over all the Nazi-controlled press and newsreels, complete with graphic pictures of the bodies. Goebbels was heavily involved in the creation of a last-ditch home guard force, composed of those previously too young, too unfit or too old to fight, to be known as the Volkssturm, and he had decided to change tactics in the propaganda war. So desperate was the situation as 1944 drew to a close that it would clearly no longer work simply to crow over victories and deny defeats. Goebbels’ new method would be to systematically terrify the German population and thereby strengthen their resolve to resist. They would perforce fight on not in confidence of final victory but in terror of defeat and massacre by Slavic ‘sub-humans’. The Propaganda Minister consequently did not shrink from showing the very worst.

  When the news of the outrages reached Berlin, Goebbels immediately decided that he would ‘make them the occasion for a major agitational effort in the press’.10 An ‘international’ war crimes commission (in fact composed almost entirely of foreign collaborators) was hastily assembled by Eberhard Taubert, one of the minister’s senior aides, and the East Prussian horror was massively publicised in Germany and the remaining occupied countries. Neutral newspapers also picked up the story.

  The corpses of the women and girls were shown in leaflets and newspapers with their dresses pulled up, as if left there after being raped (rape of all females having been established by a medical commission headed by SS leader Himmler’s personal surgeon, Karl Gebhardt). There is evidence that the women’s clothing was, in fact, rearranged by the photographic teams to establish this impression, and it seems that sequential pictures of the victims with clothing undisturbed and then disturbed exist as part of the same batch of images.11

  That a massacre took place in Nemmersdorf is undeniable. That the women captured by the Soviets were all raped seems less certain. The sole surviving eyewitness, shot and left for dead, could only confirm the murderous intent of the Russian occupiers.

  Suffering from partial disability, Gerda Meczulat lived with her seventy-one-year-old father on the western side of the river. Herr Meczulat having refused to leave along with the other villagers, he had taken refuge with his daughter in the communal bunker. Her account bore witness to the dangerous volatility that became typical of the behaviour of Russian soldiers in Germany. Initially, inside the bunker, the Russian conscripts had appeared friendly enough in their dealings with the anxious Germans – though they had, it is true, rifled through the civilians’ bags as they awaited the all-clear. It was only after an officer arrived that the atmosphere changed. Drastically and, as it turned out, fatally. The officer began barking orders in a harsh tone. The German civilians were ordered from the bunker.

  ‘When we came out,’ Fräulein Meczulat told the German authorities after Nemmersdorf was retaken, ‘soldiers were standing on both sides of the entrance with guns at the ready. I fell down, because I have been disabled since birth, was wrenched to my feet and was so overcome that I lost all awareness. When I came to my senses, I heard children screaming
and shots. Then everything went quiet.’12

  Gerda Meczulat’s would-be killer’s aim was faulty. That was why she survived and up to couple of dozen others did not.

  Within days of the massacre, fuelled by Goebbels’ press campaign, stories spread of women nailed naked to barn doors, of mass rapes and killings. Nemmersdorf became a symbol of ‘Bolshevik’ barbarism (never, of course, connected back to the routinely appalling behaviour of the worst of the German forces in occupied Russia).

  In fact, it seems that there is an element of truth in all these tales, but that – apparently like the photographs shown in the Nazi press – they were in fact collected from various atrocity sites and collated to suit the Nemmersdorf story upon which the regime had decided to concentrate. Five days later, a probably more reliable report by a Wehrmacht staff major, who led an official army investigation into all the atrocities committed on the Gumbinnen highway that day, noted that twenty-six corpses (thirteen women, eight men, five children) had been found at Nemmersdorf. Cause of death was mostly shots to the head and chest. Some of the small children had had their heads stove in with rifle butts. One woman’s breasts, it said, had been cut off after death (a detail mentioned nowhere else). There is no mention of rape in the report. However, in his description of thirteen more bodies (three men, four women, six children) found two kilometres further along the highway, where a small group of unlucky refugees had clearly been overtaken by Soviet troops, the major notes that ‘the nether parts of all the female corpses were exposed. In the case of three women, rape must be assumed.’13

  Whatever the full truth about Nemmersdorf – and even respectable sources continue to print wild exaggerations14 – there can be no doubt that it was an inexcusable war crime, the first of many to be perpetrated by Soviet troops on German soil as the war ‘came home to the Reich’. It was certainly very different from the occupation of Roetgen the previous month.

  The martyrdom of Germany’s eastern provinces had begun.

  By the end of October 1944, harried by successful German counter-attacks, the Soviets had pulled back out of East Prussia. While Goebbels’ highlighting of the Nemmersdorf massacre had undoubtedly helped recruitment for the Volkssturm, it had unleashed something close to panic among civilians in the province itself. Even during the ensuing two months’ uneasy stalemate, and despite official discouragement, a steady stream of refugees began to head west, away from the Russians.

  Hitler himself headed west. On 21 November 1944, he left his long-time headquarters in East Prussia, the Wolfsschanze, from which he had directed much of the war against Russia, never to return. With the front line less than 100 kilometres away, the Wolfsschanze had become just too risky.

  All the same, the rapid collapse of the Eastern Front in the summer of 1944 had given way, at least temporarily, to a more stable situation. As the final winter of the war closed in, Russian advances became more piecemeal. The Red Army faced the task of consolidating its lines of reinforcement, supply and communication before the next big push.

  A similar standoff had been reached in the west. After the breakout from the beachhead in July 1944, the Anglo-American forces appeared to carry all before them. The initial crossing of the German border occurred a little over three months after D-Day. Paris and then Brussels fell. After 15 August, a second landing, Operation Dragoon, on the French Mediterranean coast, rapidly pushed the Germans out of southern and south-eastern France. The Germans lost many thousands of experienced troops killed, wounded and captured. They began to fall back in a state of some disorder. There was much talk of the war being over before the end of 1944, of the Anglo-Americans’ sweeping on into the heart of Germany before Hitler had a chance to organise his resistance.

  However, in the west the Germans also rallied. Allied forces, weary after a three-month war of movement, operating at the end of long and vulnerable supply lines, came up against the natural barriers of the Rhine and the Vosges and Ardennes forests. They began once more to pay a high price for every kilometre of ground gained. When the British attempted an airborne attack across the lower Rhine at Arnhem during the third week of September, it was a heroic – and bloody – failure, the Allies’ first major setback since D-Day.

  Advances elsewhere were modest. The first major German population centre to fall was the landmark city of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle). Here Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, had been crowned eleven and a half centuries earlier, and here he and his successor were buried. Aachen lay a mere twenty kilometres north-west of Roetgen.

  General Courtney Hodges’ First Army began its efforts to surround Aachen on 1 October. In September the city’s commander, Lieutenant General von Schwerin – a sophisticated, humane officer with close connections to the 20 July plot against Hitler – had privately expressed his desire to give up this cultural jewel without a fight. He hoped thereby to preserve both Aachen and precious men and military resources that would be better employed elsewhere – but in the event, as the Americans drew near, he was replaced by the more pliable Colonel Gerhard Wilck.

  Although he later claimed to have shared many of von Schwerin’s doubts, Wilck showed little sign of this at the time. He rapidly organised a ruthless defence and called on his troops and the remaining civilians in a series of radio broadcasts to show ‘unshakeable belief in our right and our victory’ and fight to the very end.15 As a result, it would take the Americans almost three weeks of savage house-to-house fighting, until 21 October, and around 5,000 casualties on either side, to overcome the garrison’s bitter resistance. By this time the ancient cathedral city lay in ruins, scarcely recognisable, with up to 85 per cent of its buildings destroyed.16

  Hodges had rejected advice to simply push on past Aachen, preferring instead the symbolically powerful but militarily less significant gesture of siege and conquest (the fierceness of the German defence, with a hardbitten SS group at its heart, also related to Aachen’s position as the first major city threatened by the Allied advance).

  Hodges’ decision cost the Allies dear in casualties and time.17 The final fall of Aachen, moreover, provided them with a challenge – that of administering at short notice a large (if at first mostly depopulated) German town – one that would invite disaster and opportunity almost in equal measure.

  If taking Aachen had been hard, being an occupying presence in the city and its surrounding area was fairly painless.

  As in Roetgen, the locals proved remarkably accepting of their conquered status. They were even quite friendly. This was not entirely unpredictable. Before the destruction of Weimar democracy in 1933, the left bank of the Rhine had been one of the least pro-Nazi areas of the Reich, giving most of its votes to the Catholic Centre Party and only around 20 per cent to the Nazis. Moreover, as an intelligence report for the G-5 of the US First Army noted, civilians in Aachen had good reason to hate the Nazis, who had carried out the forced evacuation of the city in brutal fashion.18 Not until the spring, when the Allies reached the key Rhineland military and administrative centre of Koblenz, Prussian since 1815 and long a major fortified town, with a substantial population of Prussianised ‘soldiers and bureaucrats’, would they encounter something approaching a Nazi stronghold in western Germany.19

  What would not prove so easy, as Aachen’s new masters discovered almost immediately, was finding a solution to the problem that would dog the victors throughout their occupation of Germany: which Germans were the ‘good’ Germans, unsullied by involvement in the Nazi movement, and even if that could be established, was it possible to run the conquered country through the agency of such people alone?

  Though in October the Allies could not know it, they had most of the coming winter to explore this formidable challenge in this single locality. Until March they would be stuck on the left bank of the Rhine, and what territory they did manage to take during the rest of the winter would be appallingly hard won. The US First Army lost 21,000 men between 16 November and 16 December in the ferociously bitter battle for the Hürt
gen Forest, south of Düren.20

  During October and November, with costly fighting still raging a score or two kilometres to the east, Aachen settled down, if that is the word, under American occupation.

  From the outset, all the difficulties that were later to darken the record of the Allies in the post-war period were foreshadowed here. Keen to ensure that the small number of remaining civilians in the city be checked for political reliability, the occupation authorities gathered up most of the surviving population and shipped them off over the nearby border into Belgium, where they were housed in evacuation centres at a former Belgian army camp, the Homburg Barracks. Specially trained American army teams were detailed to interview each newly subjugated civilian individually to ascertain his or her political history.

  Much useful intelligence was, in fact, gathered. However, to undertake mass transfers of civilians to such ‘concentration camps’, as Goebbels’ propaganda machine did not hesitate to dub them (to be fair, a not entirely erroneous description in the original, literal meaning of the words), was to inflict a strain on transportation and human resources that could not be repeated ad infinitum as the Allies advanced further into Germany and captured more major towns.

  It seems that one useful piece of future good practice, learned in interrogating the Aachen civilians, was to ask a subject not if he or she was a member of the Nazi Party but whether he/she ‘had felt compelled’ to join the party. A change to this mode of questioning immediately got a much more ready response and a significant rise in the number of admissions of political guilt.21

  Within a short period, as Aacheners, innocent and guilty alike, began returning to their city, the Americans were forced to set up some kind of civilian administration for the place. Searching around for a suitable Burgomaster, the American Military Government (AMG) officer charged with this task, Leo Svoboda, took advice from the Catholic Bishop of Aachen. Catholic clergy and their flocks were significantly, though not invariably, less likely to have been pro-Nazi than their Protestant counterparts. The bishop helpfully directed Svoboda to one Franz Oppenhoff, a forty-two-year-old lawyer and businessman, who before 1933 had been a stalwart member of the Catholic Centre Party. Oppenhoff had resisted joining the Nazi Party after Hitler’s seizure of power, and by all accounts was a competent organiser. What was there to disapprove of?