World War II: The Autobiography

by Jon E. Lewis

  “But at last some of them drove on with us. All of a sudden there was a crash. The truck stopped and we were thrown all over each other. Some women were lying on the floor of the truck and bleeding. Then another crash. Joachim had disappeared. So I grabbed this child and ran away. Later I met a soldier and he bandaged it. I don’t know its name. But I’m calling him Joachim. All night I walked, then a truck took me for a while, then I walked again.” She was silent. After a while she suddenly started to sob, and then she said, “I’m so tired.”

  An S.S. patrol came next morning and confiscated the house. By noon we were out in the street. We were not allowed to go back into the air-raid shelter. The people who had come on their carts could at least crawl into the straw. We went from door to door looking for a place. Many people slammed the door in our faces when they heard we were from old German territory. They called us Nazis, and blamed us for everything that had happened to Danzig. One man shouted at us: “Why did you have to take us into your Germany! We were better off before! Without the likes of you we’d still be at peace! If only the Poles would come back quickly!”

  So we were out on the street. There were Russian fighter planes. There were so many, the city had given up sounding the alarm. When it got dark we went into a hallway, put our blankets on the floor, and huddled together for the night. The cold from the stone floor got through the blanket and through our clothes. My teeth rattled and I had shivers. Later in the night a soldier came by and gave us his blanket. He said, “Don’t stay here, by to-morrow their artillery will have got the range. I bet they’ll be here in a week. Get out into a suburb, or to the coast. There are still some ships with East Prussians sailing from Pillau, and some of them stop in here . . .”

  Next day we spent in the broken trolley cars that were lined up in one place. There were many refugees there. Most of us had not eaten properly for days. Some woman pulled out a cold boiled potato, and everybody envied her. The farmers on the wagons were better off. And the people of Danzig had food, too. But we came from a different section and the shops didn’t want to sell to us on our ration tickets. Two little boys fought over a piece of bread.

  In the evening we got into the railway station and somehow found a place on a train going north to Oliva. In Oliva we found a house that was deserted. But we were awakened before morning. Russian artillery was shooting away, and from the road we heard the tramping of soldiers and of the many people who were fleeing south into Danzig. When it got light and I saw such a lot of soldiers, I thought the Russians simply couldn’t get through. But the soldiers with whom I spoke just sneered and asked me how I expected them to stop the Russian tanks – they had beautiful field guns, to be sure, but no ammunition, they couldn’t shoot their buttons, and the tanks wouldn’t stop out of respect for the orders of the stronghold commander. They said the Russians were only a mile and a half away. We were so frightened!

  We stood in our cellar door, not knowing what to do. Other refugees came along, dragging their feet.

  Then a soldier came by with a truck; he said he was driving to Neufahrwasser and would take us along. So we went. It was getting warmer and the streets were mud. Trucks blocked the road all the way. In one place, soldiers were digging trenches right next to the road. We saw many of the search commandos of the military police and the S.S. leading away soldiers they had arrested. And this constant flow of ragged people rushing past. I’ll never forget it – sometimes one of those faces comes back to me in a dream.

  We drove across the airport; there was nothing there but a few shot-up machines. Russian planes came over several times but they did not shoot. Then we got to the port. There were no ships. People said that all the Navy evacuation ships were now sailing from Gdynia. The sea looked grey. There was just a few small private cutters that had got out of the Navy confiscation order somehow or other. In front of the port commander’s place people stood in long lines. He looked at us sadly and said, “I have no more ships for you. Over there, in the barracks, there are thousands already, waiting.” Then he smiled grimly and said, “A few cutters are still sailing. But I’m afraid you can’t afford them. They charge a thousand marks a head.”

  Mother still had eight hundred marks for the three of us.

  “All I can tell you,” said the port commander, “is to wait here in camp. Perhaps you’ll be lucky . . . perhaps . . .”

  So we went into the camp. We opened the door of one of the wooden barracks. A cloud of stench came to meet us. Hundreds of people sat in there, crowded together on filthy straw piles. The washing hung from strings across the room. Women were changing their children. Others were rubbing their bare legs with some smelly frost ointment. My brother pulled Mother’s coat and said, “Please, Mummy, let’s go away from here.” But we were grateful to find room on a pile of straw next to an old, one-armed East Prussian who had come down along the Frische Nehrung.

  Near me lay a very young woman whose head was shorn almost to the skin and whose face was all covered with ugly sores. She looked terrible. Once when she got up I saw that she walked with a cane. The East Prussian told us that she had been a woman auxiliary; the Russians had caught her in Roumania in the autumn of 1944 and had taken her to a labour camp. She had escaped somehow and trekked up here. He said she was only eighteen or nineteen. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help looking at her.

  A few hours later we couldn’t stand the barracks any more and ran away. We preferred the cold. We went to the port. Mother tried to make a deal with one of the skippers. But he would not take anyone aboard for less than eight hundred marks a head. He’d rather go back empty. Mother was ready to kill him with her bare hands.

  By the time it got dark we were so cold that we went back to the barracks in spite of everything. We found just enough room to sit back to back. Next to us sat a woman whose child had just gone down with dysentery. Next morning it lay there, so little and pale.

  An Italian prisoner of war who worked on the piers told us that a small ship from Koenigsberg had arrived and was docking a little farther up the coast. The woman next to us went to take the ferry and go over there. She left the child behind with us and promised to come back and fetch us. She kept her word, too. When she came back she told us that she had met an acquaintance from Koenigsberg who for five hundred marks and her ring had promised to smuggle her and her child on the ship. He could do nothing for us, but she would not forget us. And she did not forget us. We ran away from the barracks for the second time and paid an Italian to row us over to the dock where the ship was. He looked at us sadly, and said in his poor German he would like to go home, too. On the dock we waited near the ship, and finally our “neighbour” from the barracks – she made out we were her real neighbours – persuaded her acquaintance to smuggle us aboard, too.

  Most of those on the ship were from Koenigsberg. Some of them had gone ashore and were now coming back. We walked along with them as if we belonged. Then we hid in the cold, draughty hold of the ship. We huddled close together, but still we were terribly cold. But we did not dare to move, let alone go up, for fear they would recognize us as stowaways.

  The night went by. The rumble of artillery over Danzig grew very loud. A man who had been up on deck said the sky was all red with the fires. We were so happy and grateful that we could lie in the draughty hold of the ship. But we were shaking with fear that we would be found out and put ashore.

  Then the ship pulled out, and we breathed again.

  GOTTERDAMMERUNG: HITLER PLANS THE DESTRUCTION OF GERMANY, 18 MARCH 1945

  Colonel-General Heinz Guderian, Chief of the General Staff

  At this time Speer, whose attitude towards the course of events was becoming one of increasing scepticism, came to see me. He brought me the information that Hitler intended to arrange for the destruction of all factories, water and electrical installations, railways and bridges before they should fall into enemy hands. Speer rightly pointed out that such a crazy deed must result in mass misery and death to the population of Ge
rmany on a scale never before seen in history. He asked for my help in ensuring that no such order be carried out. I readily agreed to give it him and I immediately set to work drafting an order in which I laid down the defensive lines that were to be held throughout Germany and specifically ordered that only immediately in front of these few lines might demolitions be carried out. Nothing else whatever in Germany was to be destroyed. All installations that served to feed the populace and to provide it with work were to remain untouched. On the next day I took my draft to Jodl, who had to be informed of its contents since it dealt with a matter which concerned all parts of the Armed Forces. Jodl submitted my draft to Hitler, but unfortunately not when I was present. When I saw him again on the following day, and asked him what Hitler’s reaction had been, he gave me an order of Hitler’s to read which was the exact contrary of Speer’s and my intentions.

  In order to give an example of Speer’s forthright manner of speech, I should like to quote an extract from a memorandum which he submitted to Hitler on March 18th, 1945, when he and I were trying to prevent the destruction of bridges and factories:

  It must be established that, in the event of the battles moving further into German territory, nobody is entitled to destroy industrial installations, mining installations, electrical and other utility works, communication facilities, or inland waterways. A destruction of bridges on the scale at present envisaged would do more damage to our communications network than all the air raids of the past years. Their destruction implies the elimination of all chance of survival for the German people. . . .

  We have no right, at this stage of the war, to order demolitions which would affect the future existence of the German people. If the enemy has decided to destroy this nation, which has fought with unparalleled bravery, then the enemy must bear the guilt before history for such a deed. It is our duty to leave the German nation all possible facilities which will enable that nation to re-arise at some time in the distant future.

  Hitler’s reaction to this memorandum of Speer’s, with the conclusions of which I too had identified myself, culminated in these words:

  If the war should be lost, then the nation, too, will be lost. That would be the nation’s unalterable fate. There is no need to consider the basic requirements that a people needs in order to continue to live a primitive life. On the contrary, it is better ourselves to destroy such things, for this nation will have proved itself the weaker and the future will belong exclusively to the stronger Eastern nation. Those who remain alive after the battles are over are in any case only inferior persons, since the best have fallen.

  He frequently produced shocking remarks of this sort. I have myself heard him talk in this way, and I replied to him that the German nation would live on: that, according to the laws of nature, it would live on even if the contemplated destructions were carried out: and that such destruction would simply burden that nation with new and avoidable miseries if his intentions were carried out.

  Despite all this the order for destruction was issued on March 19th and this was followed, on March 23rd, by instructions from Bormann for its implementation. The demolitions were to be the responsibility of the Gauleiters in their capacity as commissars for the defence of the Reich. The armed forces had refused to undertake this duty. Bormann had ordered that the populace of the threatened territories be transported to the interior of Germany or, if this proved impossible, be made to march there on foot. The carrying out of this order would have resulted in a catastrophe on a gigantic scale, since no measures to ensure a food supply were taken.

  The military authorities therefore combined with Speer to frustrate the implementation of this insane order. Buhle prevented the issue of explosives so that the demolitions could not be carried out. Speer visited one command post after another explaining what the consequences must be if the order were obeyed. We could not prevent all destruction, but we succeeded in considerably reducing the amount that was carried out.

  A MEETING WITH HITLER, APRIL 1945

  Gerhardt Boldt, Wehrmacht

  Hitler descended to his purpose-built bunker under Berlin’s Chancellery on 16 January and it was from there that he directed the last gasps of Nazi resistance to the flood of Anglo-American and Russian armies which now engulfed Germany itself. Boldt was a junior Wehrmacht officer seconded to the bunker HQ to prepare war maps.

  It was now four p.m. and most of those who are to take part in the conference have assembled in the ante-room. They stand or sit together in groups, talk and eat sandwiches while drinking real coffee or brandy. The Chief beckons me forward to introduce me. He is surrounded by Field-Marshal Keitel, General Jodl, Grand-Admiral Dönitz, and Bormann. Next to them are grouped their ADCs. In one corner, near a small table holding a telephone, Himmler is talking to the General of the SS Fegelein, the permanent representative of Himmler with Hitler. Fegelein is married to a sister of Eva Braun, the future wife of Hitler. His whole attitude now already displays the brazen assurance of a brother-in-law of the head of the German Reich. Kaltenbrunner, the dreaded head of the Supreme Reich Security Office, stands apart, alone and reading a document. The permanent Deputy of the Reich Press Chief with Hitler, Lorenz, makes conversation with the Standard Leader Zander, Bormann’s deputy. Reich Marshal Göring is sitting at a round table in the centre of the ante-room, together with the officers of his staff, the Generals Koller and Christians. Hitler’s chief ADC, General Burgdorf, now crosses the ante-room and disappears into the studio. Shortly afterwards he reappears in the open doorway:

  “The Führer requests your presence!” Göring leads and all the others follow behind him in their order of rank.

  Hitler stands alone in the centre of the huge room, turned towards the ante-room. They approach in their order of entry, and he greets nearly everyone by a handshake, silently, without a word of welcome. Only once in a while he asks a question, which is answered by “Yes, Führer” or “No, Führer.” I remain standing near the door and wait for the things that are bound to come. It is certainly one of the most remarkable moments of my life. General Guderian speaks with Hitler apparently concerning myself, for he looks in my direction. Guderian beckons, and I approach Hitler. Slowly, heavily stooping, he takes a few shuffling steps in my direction. He extends his right hand and looks at me with a queerly penetrating look. His handshake is weak and soft without any strength. His head is slightly wobbling. (This struck me later on even more, when I had the leisure to observe him.) His left arm hangs slackly and his hand trembles a good deal. There is an indescribable flickering glow in his eyes, creating a fearsome and totally unnatural effect. His face and the parts round his eyes give the impression of total exhaustion. All his movements are those of a senile man.

  THE BATTLE OF BERLIN: SOVIET GUNS OPEN FIRE, 20 APRIL 1945

  Colonel-General Chuikov, Eighth Guards Army

  A battery of heavy howitzers was stationed on an open grassy space beside a wood. Dark, ragged clouds were sailing across the sky. The earth seemed to doze, shivering a little from time to time from shellfire in the distance. The gun crews had already run out the howitzers, and were awaiting the command to fire. The muzzles were trained on Berlin . . . on the fortifications of Fascist Berlin – “Fire!” The heavy shells flew up, cleaving the air with a whistling sound. The path had been opened. In the morning I went up to my observation post. It was in a large five-storeyed building near the Johannisthal aerodrome. From a corner room here, where there was a jagged hole in the wall, one got a view of the southern and south-eastern parts of Berlin. Roofs, roofs without end, with here and there a break in them – the work of landmines. In the distance factory chimneys and church spires stood out. The parks and squares, in which the young leaves were already out seemed like little outbreaks of green flame. Mist lay along the streets, mingled with dust raised by the previous night’s artillery fire. In places the mist was overlaid by fat trails of black smoke, like mourning streamers. And somewhere in the center of the city ragged yellow plumes rose skywards a
s bombs exploded. The heavy bombers had already started their preliminary “working-over” of the targets for the forthcoming attack . . . Suddenly the earth shuddered and rocked under my feet. Thousands of guns announced the beginning of the storming operation.

  THE BATTLE OF BERLIN, 24 APRIL–1 MAY 1945

  Anonymous German Staff Officer

  24 April: Early morning. We are at the Tempelhof airport. Russian artillery is firing without let-up . . . We need infantry reinforcements, and we get motley emergency units. Behind the lines, civilians are still trying to get away right under the Russian artillery fire, dragging along some miserable bundle holding all they have left in the world.

  . . . The Russians burn their way into the houses with flamethrowers. The screams of the women and children are terrible.

  Three o’clock in the afternoon, and we have barely a dozen tanks and about thirty armoured cars. These are all the armoured vehicles left in the Government sector. The chain of command seems entangled. We constantly get orders from the Chancellery to send tanks to some other danger spot, and they never come back. Only General Mummert’s toughness has kept us so far from being ‘expended’. We have hardly any vehicles left to carry the wounded.

  Afternoon. Our artillery retreats to new positions. They have very little ammunition. The howling and explosions of the Stalin organs, the screaming of the wounded, the roaring of motors, and the rattle of machine-guns. Clouds of smoke, and the stench of chlorine and fire.