In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  Behr also remembered one of his own generals, that same autumn, openly stating: ‘Of course we must do our duty as soldiers. But our most important task is to allow the West to come in, to make sure the East doesn't advance too far.’ Such opinions, Behr said, became increasingly common among the Wehrmacht staff. ‘It sounds strange, but after the Allied catastrophe at Arnhem we became increasingly worried: what's keeping these idiots from breaking through? We all knew that the whole thing would be over soon, whatever happened, and after that autumn we didn't care about winning the war in the West. What we wanted was to defend ourselves against the Russians, that above all.’

  In December, when Hitler came up with plans for the Ardennes Offensive – its target, once again, the vital supply port of Antwerp – many of Behr's colleagues in the Wehrmacht were furious: ‘That bastard Hitler said we were going to fight the Bolsheviks, and now that the Russians are marching on Berlin he's deploying our best armoured divisions to attack the West. The idiot!’ It was a mystery to Behr too how twenty-five German divisions could ever hope to assemble without anyone on the British or American staffs realising they were planning a counteroffensive. ‘Sometimes their intelligence work was rather shoddy. There were even those on our side who tried to make contact with the Allies, to put a quick end to the war in the West. But the officer who did that, Lieutenant Colonel Krämer, returned empty-handed: the West was interested only in total surrender. Of course, all kinds of agreements with Stalin played a role in that. And I think the Western leaders knew well enough about the atrocities in the concentration camps. They weren't interested in doing business with a criminal regime.’

  Meanwhile Martha Gellhorn was criss-crossing the fronts of Europe for Collier's magazine. The townspeople of Nijmegen, she wrote, were clearly God-fearing citizens who led a quiet, provincial life. But due to a bombardment – a case of mistaken identity, by the way, on the part of the Americans – ‘the city now looks as though it had been abandoned years ago after an earthquake or a flood.’ She gave a lift to a woman who worked for the Red Cross. Her young daughter had been seriously wounded by shrapnel, her husband had been killed, her possessions were stolen by the Germans and her house lay in ruins. ‘She was a Jewess. She had returned to life as usual, in the last month.’

  Gellhorn later travelled through German border towns as well: ‘No one here is a Nazi, no one here ever was a Nazi … To see an entire people skirt responsibility is no pretty sight.’ Finally, in Torgau in late April 1945, she came across the advance guards of the Russian 58th Infantry Division, which had already moved up to the Elbe. She met a nice colonel, became acquainted with Russian drinking customs, and thought they were all fantastic. ‘We had been toasting “Treeman” for quite some time before I realised that we were drinking to the new American president; the way they pronounced it, I thought it was some pithy Russian expression for knocking back a drink.’

  The colonel suggested they take a walk, it wasn't good to become too sombre, and it was a lovely spring evening. ‘From a building came the beautiful, melancholy sound of Russian song, low and slow and mournful. In another building a young man was hanging out of the window, playing a fast and cheerful tune on his harmonica. The strangest characters were walking around: blond men and Mongols, wild-looking characters with nineteenth-century moustaches, and children not much older than sixteen. We passed a couple of burning houses that looked lovely.’ The only thing was: they could go no further than the Elbe. All permission to cross to the Soviet side was denied. ‘It's just that you people are capitalists, and we are communists,’ the colonel explained succinctly.

  Today Torgau is a provincial town like many in the former DDR: bumpy cobblestones, a half-restored centre, a hesitant pizzeria, an enormous Kaufland shopping centre at the edge of town, and around it all a ring of orchards and lush kitchen gardens. The Elbe here is not much broader than an irrigation canal; it looks as though you could wade to the other side, but in 1945 it was the divide between two continents.

  In London I had happened to run into an old American solider: Phill Sinott of the 69th Infantry Division, once a machine-gunner, now retired in San Francisco. For hours he had told me about the workaday war for the average Allied soldier: brief periods of incredible fear, a few skirmishes, then months of boredom. For him the war consisted of either ‘being bored to death or shitting your pants in fear’. There was no middle ground. At Torgau I was reminded of him again, because he had been there on that historic 25 April, 1945, when the Americans and the Soviets fell into each other's arms along the Elbe – in the middle of not only Germany, but also, as John Lukacs says,‘in the middle of European history’.

  In reality, Torgau was quite chaotic, for both armies had been in the vicinity for a long time. ‘At night in that patch of no-man's-land it was as busy as Piccadilly Circus,’ Sinott told me. ‘There were our patrols, and Russian patrols, there were Germans and refugees, it was one huge mess.’

  Only when enough photographers and journalists had been assembled could the official fraternisation at last take place, and those photographs are familiar to us all. Phill Sinott: ‘The Russians across the river had a party every day. They were always rolling these barrels around, we thought it was gasoline. Pure vodka! Every once in a while we would hear women screaming, but what could we do? That same day we liberated a prisoner-of-war camp. The American boys were skin and bones, but they didn't say a thing. All they did was touch our jeep – crazy isn't it, only our jeep. A major came out of one of the barracks, he looked terrible, but he tried to stand up straight, he saluted stiffly, then he burst into tears. So did we.’

  A few days later, from a wall along the river, Martha Gellhorn watched the Soviet troops move on. ‘The army came in like a flood; it had no special form, there were no orders given. It came and rolled over the stone quays and out onto the roads like water rising, like ants, like locusts. What was moving along there was not so much an army, but a whole world.’ Many of the soldiers were wearing medals from the Battle of Stalingrad, and the entire group had fought its way at least 4,000 kilometres to the west in the last few years, most of it on foot. The trucks were kept rolling with impromptu repairs, the countless female soldiers looked like professional boxers, the sway-backed horses were driven along as though by Ben Hur himself, there seemed to be neither order nor plan, but according to Gellhorn it was impossible ‘to describe the sense of power radiating from this chaos of soldiers and broken-down equipment’. And she thought how sorry the Germans must be that they had ever started a war with the Russians.

  Chapter FORTY-SIX

  Dresden

  THE MONUMENT AT TORGAU IS COATED IN GREYISH -GREEN. IT SHOWS Soviet soldiers being welcomed by joyful German women bearing flowers, cheering men and children, and above that in big letters stand the words ‘RUHM DEM SOWJETVOLK, DANK FÜR SEINE BEFREIUNGSTAT’. It is one of those DDR plaques that should immediately be put under the protective care of UNESCO, as a classic monument to the lie. Phill Sinott and his countless American comrades have been skilfully edited from the snapshot of history, and no one wants to be reminded of that screaming from across the river. For in the real Torgau of 1945, the cheerful German mothers were gang-raped by their Soviet liberators, and in the cities their children were pulverised by the thousand in the firestorms of British and American bombardments. That was the real end of the war, the retaliation, the fire and the shame, the intense humiliation about which only half a century later can cautious mention be made in Germany.

  The retaliation came in all varieties. One variety came largely from the Soviet soldiers. When they entered East Prussia in January, their propaganda officers hung up huge banners: ‘Soldier, you are now entering the lair of the fascist beast!’ The village of Nemmersdorf (now Mayakovskoya) was taken by the 2nd Red Army Guard, a few days later German troops launched a counteroffensive and entered the town again. They found bodies everywhere: refugees crushed under tanks, children shot in their gardens, raped women nailed to barn doors. The cam
eras rolled, the images were shown all over Germany: this is what happens when the Russians come in.

  Some two million German women were raped during that period, most of them several times. The Red Army leadership was fully aware of what was happening, but did nothing to stop it. Half a century later, in the state archives of the Russian Federation, Antony Beevor found a great many NKVD documents describing ‘negative phenomena’ and ‘immoral acts’, as rapes were called in Soviet jargon. Women who had been raped were regularly reported to have committed suicide afterwards, sometimes even entire families took their own lives. Russian girls who had been deported to Germany were referred to as ‘German dolls’. A memorandum drafted on 29 March, 1945 contains a description of how Soviet officers and soldiers all along the front entered the dormitories of newly liberated Soviet women and committed ‘organised mass rapes’. The report cites a woman by the name of Klavdia Malashtshenko: ‘It was very bad under the Germans. But now our fortunes are worse. This is no liberation. They treat us terribly. They do terrible things to us.’

  The ‘Russian fury’ prompted a huge, panicked migration. The roads witnessed scenes identical to those during the German campaigns of conquest into Poland and beyond, but now in the other direction: from east to west. From mid-January 1945, millions of Germans began fleeing from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, on foot, with prams and horse-drawn carts, in the snow at temperatures of twenty below zero, and later by ship and train as well. By mid-February, more than eight million Germans – mostly women and children, for the men were still at the front – were on their way west. On the afternoon of 30 January, the enormous holiday cruiser Wilhelm Gustloff, run by Kraft durch Freude, set sail onto the Baltic, packed with somewhere between 6–10,000 refugees, including some 4,000 children. In the middle of the ice-cold night that followed, the ship was struck by a torpedo from a Soviet submarine. About 1,300 evacuees made it into lifeboats or were rescued by navy vessels that came to the scene. Thousands were trapped below deck when the water rushed in. The Wilhelm Gustloff went down with a ‘final collective scream’, a catastrophe many times greater in scope than that of the Titanic, which became known in wider circles due to the work of the writer Günter Grass more than half a century afterwards.

  One week later, the hospital ship Steuben was torpedoed; 4,000 were killed. Around 150 refugee ships in all were sent to the bottom in this way, including the Goya – with 7,000 refugees and 175 survivors – and the Cap Arconda: 5,000 passengers, mostly refugees who had been ‘evacuated’ on Himmler's orders from Fossenbürg and other concentration camps, and 150 survivors.

  Every day in winter 1945, 40–50,000 new refugees arrived at Friedrichstrasse Station in Berlin. An eyewitness described the arrival of a packed refugee train in the town of Stolp: ‘Hundreds and hundreds of bodies squeezed together, stiff from the cold, barely able to stand up and climb off the train.’ Stiff little bundles were unloaded from the freight cars: children who had frozen to death. ‘Amid the silence, the screams of a mother who did not want to relinquish what she had already lost.’

  All those refugees found themselves in the midst of a new battle, the round-the-clock storm of death and destruction that had moved in on Germany from the west. In May 1942 Cologne became the first target of a Tausenbombernacht, as the victims called them. But Berlin was the favoured objective, it was ‘the evil capital’ and the lair of ‘the Huns’, and also – with its immense tank, artillery and airplane factories – the true industrial and administrative heart of the Reich. In autumn 1943 the leader of British Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris, decided to focus all attention on the German capital. The actual wording of the memorandum sent by ‘Bomber’ Harris to his commander-in-chief was:’ We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF will come in on it. It will cost between us 4–500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war.’ Churchill was impressed.

  A week after Harris sent his memorandum, on the night of 18 November, 1943, the city was bombarded by an airborne fleet of almost 450 bombers. The operation was repeated a few days later, but now with 750 planes. Entire neighbourhoods were in flames, 2,000 people were killed. And as the winter progressed the bombings became more massive; in the end, fleets of 1,000-plus bombers were pummelling the city each night. Berlin lay at the limit of their operating radius, and the risks were huge. The Lancasters had to carry so much weight in bombs and fuel that they could scarcely take off. At full throttle they would charge down the runway, airborne only in the last few metres. Fifteen minutes later, when they finally reached cruising altitude, the engines were glowing hot. Countless planes went down in aerial combat or collisions, their crews falling to their death or burned alive. One in every sixteen planes did not come back. Until late 1944, the average crew member had a one-in-four chance of surviving the mandatory ‘tour’ of thirty flying missions. Of the 125,000 RAF pilots, gunners, navigators and bombardiers, more than 55,000 – almost half – were killed. Starting in spring 1944 the Americans joined in as well, with their enormous four-prop Boeing B17s, the Flying Fortresses, and Boeing B24s, the Liberators. From that moment the German capital knew no rest: the British bombed by night, the Americans by day.

  On 23 November, 1943, Käthe Kollwitz's house on Weissenburger Strasse was hit squarely by a British bomb. The big parlour with the oval dining table, the enormous tiled heater, the drawings on the walls, more than half a century of family life: nothing was left. On 26 February, 1944, old Alexanderplatz went up in a sea of flames and exploding ‘block-busters’. By that point more than 1.5 million citizens of Berlin had been ausgebombt. In the end, seventy per cent of the city would be reduced to rubble.

  Almost every city in Germany received its share of punishment from Bomber Harris. Ninety-five per cent of the glorious medieval centre of Cologne was destroyed. In Hamburg, on 28 July, 1943, the first firestorm was created. People ran down the street like living torches; almost 40,000 people suffocated in the burning cyclone or were roasted alive in bomb shelters that quickly became as hot as ovens. Almost all the old cities along the Rhine were bombed flat: Emmerich, Rees, Xanten, Wesel, Koblenz, Mainz, Worms, twenty-three of them in a row. In Nuremberg, on 2 January, 1945, a thousand years of history were destroyed in the space of fifty-three minutes. The castle, three churches full of art treasures and at least 2,000 medieval houses went up in flames.

  A sixteen-year-old medical student, summoned to help collect the bodies in Wuppertal, wrote that some of the victims looked ‘very peaceful’, having suffocated in the ensuing vacuum.‘Others were completely burned. The charred corpses were only about fifty centimetres long. We put them in zinc tubs and washbasins. A washbasin held three corpses, a bath seven or eight.’

  Ernst Jünger had business to attend to in burning Hanover on 16 December, 1944. ‘The streets were covered with piles of rubble and loose debris, and with the wrecks of cars and trams. The city was a mass of people, running wildly back and forth like a scene from some oriental disaster. I saw a woman walk past: clear tears ran from her face like rain. I also saw people lugging lovely old pieces of furniture, now covered in mortar. An elegant gentleman, grey at the temples, was pushing along a cart containing a rococo cabinet.’ Jünger also wrote of a huge attack on Misburg that killed more than forty young female Luftwaffe clerks. ‘The force of the blast had torn all the clothes and underwear off their bodies, leaving them completely naked. A farmer who had helped to gather their bodies was completely shaken: “All such big, lovely girls, and heavy as lead!”’

  The story of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff has since been described by Grass and others, but what happened to the survivors afterwards is almost unknown. Some 900 were put ashore at the port of Swinemünde (now świnoujście). Many of the women – some of them girls no older than eleven – were speechless from the traumas they had suffered. They had been raped, and after that the mothers had been forced to watch their children drown. Some of them begged the German naval cadets to shoot them. Along with thousands of other refugees, they were h
oused in abandoned holiday resorts along the beach. The harbour and the sea before them were full of even more refugee ships.

  The target the Americans might have been going for, the V-1 and V-2 installations at Peenemünde, had been moved to mountains in the Harz long before. Still, on the afternoon of 12 March, 1945, the area was bombarded by more than a thousand planes. The refugee ships in the harbour were adrift and burning, or had already disappeared under water, along with all those who thought they had found safe shelter in them.

  According to official figures, this ‘Swinemünde massacre’ claimed 23,000 lives, but the presence of so many unregistered refugees could bring the real figure to twice that. No mention of this is made in American military annals; the bombardment is listed only as an ‘attack on railway yards’.

  Jünger reports that an Allied pilot was shot down close to the village where he lived. A Dutch refugee attacked the pilot with an axe, and a farmer passing with his wagon was able to save the man only by risking his own life. But many other pilots were less fortunate: during the final year of the war, some hundred Allied pilots were lynched by Germans.