Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  It was all definitely over for us. Now, at last and far too late, I had really come to understand this. The much-vaunted miracle weapons and the ‘military genius’ of the Führer were nothing against this casual, relaxed stream of a thousand four-engined bombers passing over our heads. There was no more hope, Germany was finished, it was all over.1

  Nazi ideology paid little attention to the real practicalities of warfare. At the back of its assurances to the German people lay the idea that, even though the Reich and its European allies totalled at most a hundred and fifty million, and these were up against the military and economic might of two hundred million Americans, plus roughly the same number of Russians – not to mention the British and their empire – the Third Reich could not lose because Germans were inherently, biologically superior to non-Germans.

  This extreme, rigid social Darwinism simply could not cope with losing the war; it had, basically, no fallback position for that eventuality. In other words, in the view of the Nazi ideologues, it was not just that Germany would not lose the war, but that it simply could not.

  In the second week of April 1945, a pair of convalescing Wehrmacht soldiers, dressed in hospital fatigues, watched open-mouthed from the side of the road as the fit, well-fed men of the American army, with its apparently unlimited complement of shiny new tanks, guns and trucks, drove all but unopposed along the Weender Landstrasse into the university town of Göttingen, south of Hanover. For years these German soldiers had had to fight their war using patched-up weapons and vehicles, outnumbered, subjected to constant fuel shortages and supply problems. Now they saw, really saw, what they had been up against all this time.

  Soon the mass of Germans’ bewilderment turned to anger against the men who had ruled their country since 1933, and who were responsible for this fiasco. One of the wounded soldiers in Göttingen, a plain-speaking farmer’s son from now-lost East Prussia, spoke for a great many ordinary Germans and was recorded for posterity by the young man beside him, Ulrich Frodien:

  When it comes to what our high-ups were thinking, there’s only two possibilities. Either they were total idiots, who had no idea what the Ivans and the Yanks were capable of putting into the war. That’s bad enough. But the other possibility would be even worse. They knew full well, but they took the risk all the same, at our expense. They gambled our homeland on a hand of blackjack, and we stupid a***holes went along with it!2

  Göttingen is the seat of one of Germany’s most famous and prestigious universities. It was founded in 1737 by King George I of Hanover and Great Britain. This British connection lasted exactly a hundred years, until the throne was divided, because the feudal Salic Law did not allow Queen Victoria to succeed to the Hanoverian crown. Meanwhile, the town had welcomed many English-speaking luminaries, including the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and also, in his pre-Revolutionary days, the great early American polymath Benjamin Franklin.

  As it happened, Göttingen University would be the first German academic institution to be permitted to reopen, in October 1945, but in the spring and summer of that year it was the city’s closeness to the border between the designated Russian Zone of Occupation and the British Zone that was especially significant (although the Americans captured Göttingen in April 1945, two months later it was handed over to the British, as agreed the previous year). So, thousands of refugees, military and civilian, fleeing the Red Army and their German communist puppets, found their way through and spent at least some time in the place.

  Once he had recovered from the worst effects of his wounds, Ulrich Frodien spent some months using his military map-reading and scouting skills to guide westbound groups of civilians through the hilly, wooded border area to safety in the west – a pastime which, while risky, could prove very lucrative.3

  By a series of fortunate chances, young Frodien found himself belonging to a very rare category of human being in Germany during the immediate post-war period: young, male, German, more or less fully able and not detained in a prison camp. This was a crucial determinant of post-war life in the ruined Reich. With most of the able-bodied male population between sixteen and sixty-five sucked into the armed forces, and by 1945 for the most part either dead, seriously wounded or captured, German civil society, such as it was, looked overwhelmingly female and/or elderly.

  The brutally aggressive masculinism and racism that characterised the Nazi view of society had, paradoxically, brought about a situation where the ‘ideal’ Nazi male, physically powerful, relentlessly aggressive – ‘lean and slim, quick as a greyhound, tough as leather, hard as Krupp steel’, as the Führer had once described his Teutonic paragon in a speech to the Hitler Youth – had been rendered impotent. He had set out to dominate the world, as was supposedly his biological ‘right’, and had, inexplicably from the Nazi point of view, failed.

  The sloppy, materialistic Americans, the arrogant, decadent British and the hopelessly bolshevised and Jew-dominated, ‘sub-human’ Russians had triumphed in his place. This left the German woman at the mercy of these same allegedly inferior beings, while the German male, dead or injured or imprisoned, was unable to do a thing about it.

  A caricature in the Nazi press in the last months of the war showed American GIs as scruffy, feeble-minded juvenile delinquents with tommy guns, possibly addled by drugs and drink, menacing idealised blond German families whose father and protector was absent defending civilisation against the Bolshevik hordes. Of course, this desperately manufactured image of American inferiority and disorganisation was impossible to square with the fact that, when the weather cleared, German soldiers and civilians alike needed only to glance skywards, like Frodien and his comrades, to see a thousand glistening B-17s parading with impunity 15,000 feet above their heads, on their highly disciplined way to rain down fear and destruction on what was left of the Third Reich.

  The situation of Germany in the late spring of 1945 was the Nazis’ world turned upside down. German women knew it. Whatever their previous loyalties or otherwise to the Nazi Party, many reacted accordingly. Despite finger-wagging official propaganda, they took a look at the conquering enemy, aware that the vast majority of adult German males were either dead or behind barbed wire, and for the sake of themselves and their families they did exactly what they saw fit.

  During the occupation of France, censorious patriots had a phrase for the lifestyle of Frenchwomen who embarked on relationships with Germans – collaboration horizontale. Now that the Germans were no longer occupiers but the occupied, and the women of the former alleged master race had similar choices to make, the equivalent phrase was in English and it was ‘fraternisation’. Soon the invented verb ‘to frat’ became euphemistic shorthand for sexual relations between the occupiers and hundreds of thousands, even millions, of German women.

  In sophisticated cities and centres of culture, even those Germans hitherto most comfortably situated quickly realised that old hierarchies of order and privilege were no longer, at this point, relevant. In Göttingen, after the Americans took the town but before they established full control, mobs composed of women, the elderly and teenagers too young to have been called up ranged around the central area, looting shops and warehouses.

  At the town’s goods station, which American fighter bombers had seriously damaged in air strikes a few days previously, many heavily laden supply trains had been immobilised and part-destroyed, and soon a crowd of up to a thousand was engaged in unhindered pillaging of army and railway property, breaking into storage depots and, if they had not already been blown open by the earlier bombing, the goods wagons trapped in the yard sidings. Frodien, who witnessed it, wrote:

  The most interesting things were the faces of the people. These were not members of the lower classes, the scum of society or the town mob, as one likes to assume. They were there too, of course, but in ruthless competition with middle-class renegades and members of the cream of society. In my entire life, I have never again seen features so contorted in greed as there on that s
tation. Those faces revealed totally undisguised hatred and envy. Hatred of anyone who got in their way, who didn’t make space quickly enough, was too slow or even tried to push them back – that was the cardinal sin – and envy of those who had already managed to grab more than themselves, or who had managed to make off with something they had their own eye on . . .4

  There were different degrees of suffering for different Germans, as became clear within a very short time after the end of the war. Senior Nazis and war criminals, wanted for actual crimes against Allied nationals or for atrocities in the occupied countries, faced immedi­­­­ate and serious punishment. The rest were largely dependent on luck or cunning.

  Certain professions put their practitioners in a strong position to survive the transition in relative comfort. Doctors and dentists, for instance – almost half of whom had been members of the Nazi Party – were nevertheless essential to the continuing functioning of society, and could not simply be replaced by untainted amateurs (unlike, say, the legal and teaching professions, which, in the Soviet-occupied areas, were quickly purged and filled with hastily trained ‘politically reliable’ officials).

  In Thuringia, for instance, Joachim Trenkner’s father, son of a prosperous doctor and himself a general practitioner – as well as a member of the Nazi Party – found himself sought after by the Americans soon after they captured the small town in early April 1945. The US occupiers’ own medic used the facilities in Dr Trenkner’s practice. During the Americans’ temporary occupation of the town (it was due to be handed over to the Russians at the beginning of July), a friendly and cooperative relationship soon developed, which the doctor’s recent political predilections apparently did nothing to mar. Such closeness to the victors generally paid off in terms of privileges and extra rations.5

  Hundreds of kilometres to the west, in the Rhenish city of Koblenz, Egon Plönissen, the son of a local dentist, had a similar experience. Although again his father was a Nazi, and his uncle even a local precinct or chapter leader (Ortsgruppenleiter) of the party in Koblenz, it became clear, pretty soon after first the Americans and then the French occupied the town, that the Plönissen family stood little chance of suffering serious deprivation. Plönissen senior, a highly respected practitioner, rapidly became a favourite of the French occupiers, especially the civilian administrators, and he also fixed the teeth of local farmers. Both categories of patient, in one way or the other, had access to foodstuffs denied to ordinary, unconnected town-dwelling Germans.6

  The dentist’s son was only just into his teens when the Americans attacked Koblenz in March 1945. He watched the battle from the relative comfort and security of the family villa in Ehrenbreitstein, on the right bank of the Rhine. Other boys in the city, a little older than Egon and therefore liable for military service during the insane conditions of the war’s final days, faced a stark choice: volunteer for what might well be a suicidal action with the Volkssturm, or hide yourself.

  Helmut Nassen was just eighteen and, like most boys and girls in the area, had not attended school since the massive bombing of Koblenz by the British on the night of 6–7 November 1944. The attack had more or less razed the old Rhenish-Prussian administrative centre to the ground, destroying an estimated 58 per cent of the city’s buildings, including ‘nearly all of the historic courts of the ancient nobility, three old churches and the Castle of the Electors’. Fortunately, it had cost relatively few lives (104) out of a population of 90,000, thanks mostly to the city’s plentiful and well-constructed air raid shelters.7

  Like Egon, Helmut also lived on the right bank of the river, in the pleasant resort suburb of Koblenz-Pfaffendorf. As the front line neared the Rhineland, he was engaged, like all German boys of his age, in Volkssturm training, running messages between units, ditch-digging and so on. He also undertook various useful but sometimes not altogether legal activities that brought him, like many other enterprising German boys of the time, an income in the only currency by then worth having – cigarettes. Helmut had found time to get himself a girl and, with a couple of friends, to construct his own hideout in a wooded spot above the river. There they often spent nights and days, together or individually. And from there, in relative safety, they, like Egon, watched the ten-day fight for the main city of Koblenz on the other side of the Rhine.

  Helmut kept a diary. On 17 March, two days before Koblenz finally fell to the Americans, he reported almost casually: ‘Tomorrow I am supposed to report to the army at Neuhäusel. Plentiful machine-gun fire and rifle shots audible up on the Karthause hill and also further down. Fierce infantry fighting. The enemy infantry is slowly advancing . . .’8 His casualness was misleading. Helmut knew that when – or, rather, if – he reported to the Wehrmacht, it meant the end of his phoney war and the beginning of the real one. Of the next day’s events the teenager wrote:

  I overslept. The other recruits have already left. Now I’ll pack and also report for duty. Hans has already gone. More strong artillery fire on Koblenz . . . infantry fighting begun again. Enemy artillery targets the assault boat moored by the Markenbildchenweg. After about 12–15 rounds, they hit it. German flak responds only in minimal fashion. At 11.00 I receive my marching orders to Höhr-Grenzhausen plus rations. The President of Police has disappeared and I have decided not to report, but to go into hiding. I move into a cellar along with W. and Karl . . .9

  With this, young Helmut knew he was moving into the precarious, perilous shadow world of the survivor, now inhabited by so many in the bombed-out, besieged cities of Germany. Moving from cellar to cellar, grabbing food and trading goods where possible, he had to keep constantly on the watch for Wehrmacht police and Nazi officials. By failing to report for army duty, Helmut had become a deserter, at a time in the war when this automatically meant summary execution without trial.

  The pattern of the next week for Helmut and his friends, based at the ‘bunker’ in the woods above the river for most of this time, is one of sneaking around, occasionally meeting small groups of German soldiers (who show no interest in his status and, though he does not say so, may also have been deserters), cautiously dropping by the family home to pick up food and clothes, and hunting for anything else they can find to keep body and soul together. There are hens’ eggs to be found in the woods, and on one occasion a fowl is triumphantly caught, cooked and eaten. They keep on the move, hoping no one will check their papers.

  During the regime’s dying weeks, Helmut and co. have detached themselves from the rigidly hierarchical, militarised Nazi-ruled society in which they grew up and with which they are clearly, by now, disillusioned. That does not stop them from firing a few defiant shots from their bunker entrance across the river at the Americans, who have now occupied the main city of Koblenz. Their dangerous outlaw status does, however, mean that, for all their teenage bravado, they are anxiously counting the hours until, for them, the war is over. Helmut writes: ‘Soon the Yanks will come. I’m curious to see how they behave. Soon I’ll have made it . . .’

  When, on 27 March, the boys see American vehicles parked by the riverside down below them, they feel only relief. Soon they venture back down into Pfaffendorf itself:

  On the bypass bridge there are two [American] guards, but we pass unhindered. When we get down in the town, some of their units are carrying out house-searches. They behave very decently, only blowing open doors when these are locked. They have captured a few more of our soldiers. Six maybe. Then I go with Lo [a friend] to the Bienhorntal [a local beauty spot where there seems to have been some kind of storehouse] and fetch a case of canned meat. I take eight for myself, hand over the others. Lo keeps all his. By then, the Yanks are finished with their searches and are assembling in front of our house, around fifty of them in number. Cars arrive, they get into them along with their six prisoners, and off they head to Ehrenbreitstein. The commander’s car even has a radio in it. That’s what I call going to war!10

  Helmut and the others had coolly disobeyed the Nazi system, going against twelve yea
rs of indoctrination. They made their calculations, risked arrest and possible execution, and – like Ulrich Frodien in his escapes from Breslau and Berlin – survived until the Allies arrived, bringing, for them at least, an end to the war.

  These survivors were the lucky ones. Many ended up hanging from trees and lamp posts, placards around their necks declaring them traitors. Whether it was fanatical army field police, renegade SS and Gestapo men, or self-styled Werwolf units, until the very last day of the war there were plenty of remnants of the disintegrating regime prepared to murder their war-weary fellow countrymen for any acts, or even attitudes, that passed as ‘defeatist’ or ‘disloyal’.

  In Penzberg, a largely working-class and anti-Nazi mining town in southern Bavaria, an at first sight almost tragicomic little coup de théâtre occurred days before the end of the war. At dawn on 28 April 1945, the town’s pre-Hitler Social Democratic mayor, Hans Rummer, alarmed by reports that local army and Nazi Party last-ditchers were preparing to defend the town against the approaching Americans, and if necessary to destroy its mines and waterworks in order to keep them from the enemy, attempted to accelerate the process of liberation by assuming power at the head of a small group of armed supporters. In this, the daring Herr Rummer had been encouraged by a brief uprising in Munich. Anti-Nazis and Bavarian separatists, calling themselves ‘Freedom Action Bavaria’, had seized control, for a few hours, of a radio station in the Bavarian capital and broadcast calls for resistance, until the Nazi authorities restored ‘order’.