Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

9 Ibid., pp. 127f. And, especially if the putative sex lives of the squad are of interest, Charles Whiting, SS Werewolf: The Story of the Nazi Resistance Movement – written in racy thriller style with suspiciously comprehensive dialogue, but based in part on interviews with surviving participants during the 1960s – pp. 103ff.

  10 Biddiscombe, The Last Nazis, p. 129.

  11 New York Times, 11 February 1945: ‘Hitler Youth Learns of American Justice’.

  12 See Richard Matthias Müller, ed., Der Krieg, der nicht Sterben Wollte: Monschau 1945, especially ch. 7, ‘Ardennenschlacht’ by Joseph C. Doherty, pp. 243ff.

  13 New York Times, 16 February 1945: ‘German Girl Vows Vengeance on U.S.’. See also Henke, Die Amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands, pp. 167ff. Maria Bierganz’s later reflections date from 1983, when she wrote a memoir of her experiences, and are also found in Henke.

  14 For this and the following account of the mission see Biddiscombe, The Last Nazis, pp. 129ff., and Whiting, SS Werewolf, pp. 7ff.

  15 According to Whiting, SS Werewolf, as above.

  16 New York Times, 29 March 1945: ‘Non-Nazi Mayor of Aachen Killed By 3 German Chutists in Uniform’; The Times, 29 March 1945: ‘Aachen Burgomaster Murdered: Shot by Three Germans’.

  17 See New York Times, 4 April 1945 (the wire had been sent four days earlier but was marked ‘Delayed’, presumably due to censorship): ‘Nazis Tell Rhine They Will Return’.

  18 Goebbels, Tagebücher, Bd 5, p. 2164.

  19 Ibid., p. 2170.

  20 See Whiting, SS Werewolf, pp. 157–62, and Biddiscombe, The Last Nazis, pp. 131f.

  21 Ibid., p. 167n.

  22 Biddiscombe, Werwolf!, pp. 153f.

  3 THE GREAT TREK

  1 Andreas Kossert, Kalte Heimat: Die Geschichte der deutschen Vertriebenen nach 1945, pp. 39f.

  2 Ruprecht von Butler, quoted in Joachim Käppner, Die Familie der Generäle: Eine deutsche Geschichte, pp. 226f. And for the further remark.

  3 Quoted in Antony Beevor, Berlin: The Downfall 1945, p. 34.

  4 Quoted in Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949, p. 78.

  5 Mawdsley, Thunder in the East, p. 216.

  6 Ibid., pp. 216f.

  7 Naimark, The Russians in Germany, p. 72 and for the following.

  8 Ibid., p. 74.

  9 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Prussian Nights, translated by Robert Conquest, p. 7.

  10 See his obituary in the New York Times, 20 June 1997: ‘Lev Kopelev, Soviet Writer in Prison 10 Years, Dies at 85’. Kopelev died in Cologne, Germany, where he had lived since being exiled from the Soviet Union for dissident activities – which included writing about his experiences in occupied Germany – in the early 1970s.

  11 For the story of Wanda Schultz (later Hoffman) see Ingeborg Jacobs, Freiwild: Das Schicksal deutscher Frauen 1945, pp. 83ff.

  12 Kossert, Kalte Heimat, p. 40.

  13 Naimark, The Russians in Germany, pp. 90f.

  14 ‘Wenn du’s nicht aushältst, dann geh in die Alle’. See Jacobs, Freiwild, p. 53.

  15 Ibid., pp. 57ff.

  16 Full text available at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/

  dec939.asp along with other documents relating to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and its consequences.

  17 Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans (revised edition 1979), pp. 40f.

  18 Ibid., p. 50.

  19 To be exact, 9,955,000, according to the detailed tables in Kossert, Kalte Heimat, pp. 22f.

  20 Quoted in Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City, p. 380.

  21 See most recently Giles Milton, Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922. The Destruction of Islam’s City of Tolerance, and for a concise account of the catastrophe, Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe, pp. 44ff.

  22 Giles Milton, Paradise Lost, p. 315.

  23 Quoted in ibid., p. 326.

  24 Ibid., p. 311.

  25 See Denny, The Fall of Hitler’s Fortress City, pp. 202f. Gustloff was German by nationality but resident in Switzerland. The ship itself had been converted for military use as a barracks ship and was painted naval grey.

  26 For a potted biography of Hanke, see Davies and Moorhouse, Microcosm, pp. 373f.

  27 Quoted in Knopp, Die grosse Flucht. This estimate is based on a saying that ‘ten died for each metre of runway’, and the runway was 1,300 metres, so is more likely to be a figure of speech than a figure of fact, but there can be no doubt that thousands of German civilians died in this and other unspeakable horrors inflicted on them by their own leaders.

  28 For a biography of Hanke see Karl Höffkes, Hitlers Politische Generale: Die Gauleiter des Dritten Reiches, pp. 120ff.

  29 Knopp, Die grosse Flucht.

  30 Ulrich Frodien, Bleib übrig: Eine Kriegsjugend in Deutschland, p. 124, for their encounter with the barricade and for the drama at the railway station, pp. 143ff.

  31 Davies and Moorhouse, Microcosm, p. 408.

  32 See Müller, ed., Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg . . . Band 10, Zweiter Halbband, pp. 336f.

  33 Figures in Hans-Werner Mihan, Die Nacht von Potsdam: Der Luftangriffbritischer Bomber vom 14. April 1945, Dokumentation und Erlebnisberichte, p. 119.

  34 De Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. 87.

  35 Müller, ed., Das Deutsche Reich, Band 10, Zweiter Halbband, pp. 347.

  36 See Davies and Moorhouse, Microcosm, p. 416; for Breslau specifically and in detail, de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. 88.

  37 See Helmut Schnatz, Der Luftangriff auf Swinemünde: Dokumentation einer Tragödie, p. 138, for the author’s final analysis of numbers killed, and in general the chapter Teil VI: ‘Rezeption und Bewertung des Angriffs’, pp. 87–138, for its masterly exercise in demythologisation. The attack by 661 American bombers was proportionately one of the heaviest of the war in terms of tonnage dropped. It was carried out at the specific request of the Soviet High Command, whose own aircraft were busy with the ground support role to which they were in any case more suited.

  38 Davies and Moorhouse, Microcosm, p. 408 and p. 413.

  39 Ibid., p. 420.

  40 Ibid., p. 424.

  41 Testimony of Zdena Nemcova, cited in Europe’s Forgotten War Crime, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 9 February 2004, details available at the BBC website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3466233.stm.

  42 Knopp, Die grosse Flucht, p. 369.

  43 Dr Anton Sum quoted in ibid., p. 368.

  44 Müller, ed., Das Deutsche Reich, Band 10, Zweiter, Halbband, p. 622.

  45 See the account in ibid., p. 625.

  46 Ibid.

  47 Ibid.

  48 See Ota Filip, ‘Die Stillen Toten unterm Klee bei Pohrlitz: Auf den Spuren des Brünner Todesmarsches’, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 30 May 1990; and Knopp, Die grosse Flucht, pp. 392f.

  49 Knopp, Die Grosse Flucht, p. 393.

  50 Ibid., p. 395.

  51 Letter, ‘Future of Minorities in Czechoslovakia’ to The Times, 14 June 1945, from Wenzel Jaksch, Eugen de Witte and Franz Katz, members of the last freely elected Czechoslovak Parliament. Jaksch, a Social Democrat, later settled in West Germany, where he became prominent in the Sudeten German Expellees’ Organisation and was a Social Democrat member of the Bundestag in Bonn. In the last free elections in Czechoslovakia in 1935, Konrad Henlein’s proto-Nazi Sudeten German Party (SdP) received 60 per cent of the German vote. By 1938, the Sudeten-German Social Democratic Party, once the largest of the German parties, had shrunk into near-insignificance. All other Sudeten-German parties then merged with the SdP, whose leader then became Gauleiter of the Sudetenland after the Munich Agreement awarded the area to Germany. That in 1945 the Czechs regarded all Sudeten Germans as Nazis was unjust, but under the circumstances not entirely surprising.

  52 Quoted in The Times, 7 August 1945, ‘Germans in East Europe: Many Expulsions’.


  53 New York Times, 13 November 1946, Anne O’Hare McCormick, ‘Problem of Places for Refugees’.

  54 Müller, ed., Das Deutsche Reich, Band 10, Zweiter Halbband, p. 622.

  55 Ibid., p. 624. These comments are likely to represent a matter-of-fact professional observation rather than an expression of human sympathy. During his long career, Serov was involved in the state-instituted Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s, in the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn, the deportation of thousands from the Baltic states, the wartime displacement of Crimean Tatars and many other Stalinist atrocities, climaxing in the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.

  4 ZERO HOUR

  1 Frodien, Bleib übrig, p. 175.

  2 Ibid., p. 179.

  3 Ibid., pp. 232ff.

  4 Ibid., p. 181.

  5 Interview with Joachim Trenkner, Berlin, 24 March 2008.

  6 Interview with Egon Plönissen, Koblenz, 12 June 2009.

  7 See Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries: An Operational Reference Book 1939–1945, p. 615.

  8 Helmut Nassen, Tagebuch des Helmut Nassen vom 6.3.45 bis 30.4.45, Dr H. Schnatz, ed. (typescript, reproduced with permission of Dr Schnatz and Herr Nassen).

  9 Ibid.

  10 Ibid.

  11 For details of these and later events in Penzberg see Biddiscombe, The Last Nazis, pp. 168ff. except where otherwise indicated.

  12 Biographical details for Giesler in Höffkes, Hitlers politische Generale, pp. 87ff.

  13 Ibid., p. 89. Hitler would commit suicide the next day. Accounts of Giesler’s suicide vary, but he may have attempted to kill himself at least twice, and after the second (a botched pistol shot to the temple) to have lingered for some days before expiring on the last day of the war in a military hospital near Berchtesgaden.

  14 Earl F. Ziemke, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany, pp. 257f.

  15 See Henke, Die Amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands, p. 968.

  16 Müller, ed., Das Deutsche Reich, Band 10, Zweiter Halbband, p. 320.

  17 Ziemke, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany, pp. 262f.

  18 Ulbricht’s explanation quoted by a member of the group, Wolfgang Leonhard, in an interview published sixty years later, in Der Spiegel, no. 16, 2005 (8 April 2005): ‘Zurück in die Zukunft’. Leonhard, brought up in the Soviet Union as the child of German communist émigrés, became disillusioned and eventually fled to the West.

  19 For a thorough outlining of the political chess game surrounding the withdrawal plans, see Henke, Die Amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands, pp. 716ff.

  20 Müller, ed., Das Deutsche Reich, Band 10, Zweiter Halbband, p. 324.

  21 See Henke, Die Amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands, p. 719.

  22 Ziemke, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany, pp. 265–7. And for the following details of the Wendenschloss meeting.

  23 Henke, Die Amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands, p. 724.

  24 Ziemke, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany, p. 267.

  25 For this and the following see interview with Joachim Trenkner.

  26 Interview with Egon Plönissen.

  27 Ibid.

  5 THROUGH CONQUERORS’ EYES

  1 These figures cited in Jeffry K. Olick, In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943–1945, pp. 42f.

  2 Quoted in Maureen Waller, London 1945: Life in the Debris of War, p. 112.

  3 Quoted in ibid., p. 113. And for the following.

  4 Olick, In the House of the Hangman, p. 71.

  5 Ibid., p. 106.

  6 Günter Bischof and Stephen E. Ambrose, eds, Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts against Falsehood, p. 30.

  7 Cited in ibid., p. 25n.

  8 George Clare, Berlin Days, 1946–1947, p. 210.

  9 Frodien, Bleib übrig, p. 204.

  10 See Ziemke’s remarks in The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany, pp. 88f.

  11 Ibid., p. 90.

  12 Text of JCS 1067 (Directive to Commander-in-Chief of United States Forces of Occupation Regarding the Military Government of Germany) in Department of State: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945, vol. 3, European Advisory Commission; Austria; Germany, pp. 484ff.

  13 Signed memorandum from Henry Morgenthau to President Roosevelt n.d. but before 4 September 1944 in: President’s Secretary File (PSF) Safe Files: German Diplomatic Files 1944 (January–September), Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum Website; version date 2009.

  14 Memorandum from Henry J. Stimson to President Roosevelt, 5 September 1944 in: President’s Secretary File (PSF) Safe Files: German Diplomatic Files 1944 (Jan.–Sept.), Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum Website; version date 2009. And for the following.

  15 See Cordell Hull’s Memorandum for the President (Presented by the Secretary in person to the President on 1 October 1944) dated 29 September 1944 in: President’s Secretary File (PSF) Safe Files: German Diplomatic Files 1944 (Jan.–Sept.), Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum Website; version date 2009.

  16 Olick, In the House of the Hangman, p. 31.

  17 Michael Beschloss, The Conquerors, p. 173.

  18 Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1940–1965, p. 200.

  19 Ibid., p. 131.

  20 Olick, In the House of the Hangman, pp. 31f.

  21 Cited ibid., p. 32.

  22 Time magazine, 2 July 1945: ‘Leave Your Helmet On’.

  23 Pocket Guide to Germany: copy in the author’s possession. Also available in facsimile in English and as a German/English parallel text with commentary by Hg. Sven Felix Kellerhof.

  24 Henke, Die Amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands, p. 194.

  25 See John Willoughby, ‘The Sexual Behaviour of American GIs during the Early Years of the Occupation of Germany’, in Journal of Military History, vol. 62 (January 1998), p. 170.

  26 ‘German Girls: US Army Boycott Fails to Stop GIs from Fraternizing with Them’, in Life, 23 July 1945, no. 35.

  27 Time magazine, 30 July 1945: ‘Ban Lifted’. And for the following.

  28 Facts in the article at DW-World.de http://www6.dw-world.de/en/2099.php: ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’.

  29 Point (15) in Montgomery’s ‘Notes on the Present Situation no.2’ 6 July 1945, a letter to his Corps Commanders and Control Council Heads of Divisions. In Montgomery’s papers in the Imperial Museum and also quoted extensively in Christopher Knowle of London University’s highly informative blog on aspects of the British occupation of Germany, http://howitreallywas

  .typepad.com/, entry for 14 March 2009: Field-Marshal Montgomery and the fraternisation ban.

  30 Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, War Diaries 1939–1945, p. 682, 10 April 1945.

  31 Volker Koop, Besetzt: Britische Besatzungspolitik in Deutschland, pp. 157f.

  32 Account by Lieutenant Christopher Leefe, quoted in Douglas Botting, In the Ruins of the Reich, p. 257.

  33 Colin MacInnes, To the Victors the Spoils, p. 189.

  34 Ibid., pp. 183f.

  35 Botting, In the Ruins of the Reich, pp. 47f. And for the following.

  36 MacInnes, To the Victors the Spoils, p. 55.

  37 Letter of 17 May 1945, in Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg, On the Other Side: Letters to My Children from Germany 1940–46, p. 140.

  38 Jacobs, Freiwild, p. 154.

  39 Cited in Paul Steege, Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin 1946–1949, pp. 23f.

  40 Account by Pastor Dr Karl-Ludwig Hoch, then aged fifteen, resident at Löschwitz, taped interview with FT on 30 October 2001 (in author’s possession).

  41 Interview with Götz Bergander, Berlin, 25 March 2008.

  42 Interview with Lothar Löwe, Berlin, 25 March 2008.

  43 Jacobs, Freiwild, p. 170.

  44 See Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall, 13 August 1961–9 November 1989, p. 34.

  45 Time magazine, 9 July 1945, ‘Foreign News: What Is to Be Done?’

  46
Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, translated from the German by Phillip Boehm, p. 140.

  47 Wladimir Gelfand, Deutschland-Tagebuch 1945–1946: Aufzeichnungen eines Rotarmisten (Ausgewählt und kommentiert von Elke Schersjanoi) (translated from Russian to German by Anja Lutter and Hartmut Schröder), p. 79f.

  48 Gelfand, pp. 61f. And for the following.

  49 Ibid., pp. 200ff.

  50 Naimark, The Russians in Germany, p. 92.

  51 See Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War, p. 709.

  52 Quoted in Volker Koop, Besetzt: Französische Besatzungspolitik in Deutschland, pp. 40f. And for the Sindelfingen outrages.

  53 Ibid., p. 46.

  54 Ibid., p. 47.

  55 See Perry Biddiscombe, ‘Dangerous Liaisons: Occupation Zones of Germany and Austria, 1945–1948’, in Journal of Social History, vol. 34, no. 3 (Spring 2001), p. 618, n.56.

  56 See J. Robert Lilly, Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe during World War II, p. 161. For the numbers of convictions, ibid., p. 117.

  6 HUNGER

  1 Quoted in Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, p. 280. See also by the same author, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44. The wartime experience still rankles in Greece – see the remarks by Greek Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos in February 2010 in response to what he saw as a lack of generosity in modern Germany’s attitude towards Greece’s economic difficulties. ‘They [the Nazis],’ Pangalos claimed, ‘took away the Greek gold that was in the Bank of Greece, they took away the Greek money and they never gave it back.’

  2 Secretariat’s report of the meeting quoted in Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, p. 479. And for the following quotes from Backe and Himmler.

  3 Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus, p. 198.

  4 Ibid., p. 197.

  5 Goebbels diary entry 24.5.1942, quoted in Christian Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord, p. 213.

  6 Ibid., p. 241.

  7 Markus Roth, Herrenmenschen: Die deutschen Kreishauptleute im besetzten Polen – Karrierewege, Herrschaftspraxis und Nachkriegsgeschichte, pp. 166f.

  8 See Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord, especially pp. 191f., p. 197, pp. 219–21, pp. 237–40.