All Hell Let Loose (86 page)

Post-war testimony shows that implementation of the Final Solution required only a modicum of patience and practice to overcome the scruples of some novice mass-murderers. On 13 July 1942, Reserve Police Battalion 101 arrived in a convoy of trucks at the Polish village of Josefów, whose inhabitants included 1,800 Jews. Mostly middle-aged reservists from Hamburg, on their arrival they were ordered to gather around their commander, fifty-three-year-old Major Wilhelm Trapp, a career policeman affectionately known to the unit as ‘Papa Trapp’. In a choking voice and with tears in his eyes, he told them they had a most unwelcome assignment, ordered at the highest level: to arrest all Jews in the village, remove to a work camp men of working age, and kill the remainder. He said this was justified by Jewish involvement with partisans, and the Jews’ instigation of the American boycott that had injured Germany. He then invited any man who felt unable to perform this unpleasant duty to step aside. Several policemen indeed declined to participate, and after the killings began their number increased. At least twenty were permitted to return to barracks.

Yet a sufficiency of others stayed to do the business: one man later recalled that his first victim vainly begged for mercy, on the grounds that he was a decorated World War I veteran. Georg Kageler, a thirty-seven-year-old tailor, killed his initial batch easily enough, but then fell into conversation with a mother and daughter from Kassel, who were destined to die next. He appealed to his platoon leader to be excused, and was sent to guard the marketplace while others did his share of shooting. Another man who quit during the slaughter explained that he became distressed by the poor marksmanship of a comrade: ‘He always aimed his gun too high, producing terrible wounds in his victims. In many cases the entire backs of victims’ heads were torn off, so that the brains sprayed all over. I simply couldn’t watch it any longer.’ One member of the battalion, Walter Zimmerman, later gave evidence: ‘In no case can I remember that anyone was forced to continue participating in the executions when he declared that he was no longer able to … There were always some comrades who found it easier to shoot Jews than did others, so that the respective commando leaders never had difficulty finding suitable shooters.’

Christopher Browning shows that during the weeks and months that followed, most of Reserve Police Battalion 101’s members overcame initial revulsion, and became hardened killers. To be sure, they resorted to alcohol to render their duties tolerable, but they performed them with a growing accession of brutality. Lt. Hartwig Gnade, for instance, degenerated from a mere murderer into a sadist: at a mass killing at Łomazy on 16 August, while he waited for 1,700 Jews to finish digging their own mass grave, he selected twenty elderly, heavily bearded Jews and made them crawl naked before him. As they did so, he screamed at his squad, ‘“Where are my non-commissioned officers? Don’t you have any clubs yet?” The NCOs went to the edge of the forest, fetched themselves clubs, and vigorously beat the Jews with them.’ By the time Battalion 101 completed its contribution to the Holocaust in November 1943, its five hundred men had shot at least 38,000 Jews, and herded a further 45,000 aboard trains for Treblinka. Browning found no evidence that any sanction was imposed upon those who refused to kill; in one of the most highly educated societies in Europe, it was easy to find men willing to murder those whom their rulers defined as state enemies, without employing duress.

Many Jews sought the help of the Almighty as killers descended upon their communities. Nineteen-year-old Ephrahim Bleichman’s uncle was shot by Polish gendarmes after fresh meat was found in his house, and his cousin Brucha was killed by scavengers who wanted her fresh bread. Young Bleichman thought: ‘If this tragedy was God’s will, nothing could be done. Yet my family … depended on God, not man to rectify the situation. I could neither abide by their philosophy, nor dispute it. The propaganda machine combined with systematic harassment cowed many of us into apathy. [They] felt powerless.’ Ephrahim took to the forest when he heard that a German deportation was imminent, and survived in hiding for many months. ‘We shared the forest with owls, snakes, wild hogs and deer. On windy nights, the tree branches made strange noises. The shadows of bushes resembled intruders ready to pounce on us. The natural movements of animals made us always worry that enemies were afoot. It took us a long time to accustom ourselves to the nights.’ By the summer of 1942, all Soviet Jews in areas under Nazi control had been killed. Thereafter, even as Germany’s military predicament worsened, the pace of slaughter quickened. There were wholesale deportations from Greece and Bulgaria in 1943. The Warsaw ghetto rising in April that year provoked intensified persecution in Poland, Holland, Belgium, France, Croatia and Slovakia.

Many great testimonies by victims of the Holocaust have been preserved, but one of the most astonishing was revealed to the world only sixty years after its author’s death. Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, daughter of a rich banker who had translated himself from the Ukrainian ghettos and pogroms to a large mansion in St Petersburg. She grew up in lonely luxury, travelling regularly with her family to France. They fled the Revolution in 1917, enduring considerable hardships before reaching Paris two years later, where her father rebuilt his fortune. Irène had been writing since she was fourteen. In 1927, she published her first novella; by the outbreak of war she was an established French literary figure, author of nine novels, one of which had been filmed, and married with two daughters. In 1940, when the Germans occupied Paris, she retreated to a rented house in the village of Issy-l’Evêque, in Saône-et-Loire. There, in the following year, she embarked upon what she intended to become a trilogy about the war, on the epic scale of
War and Peace
. She had few illusions about her own likely fate, and wrote despairingly in 1942: ‘Just let it be over – one way or the other!’ Though she had converted to Catholicism, there was no escape from the Nazi blight upon her race: on 13 July she was arrested by French police and deported to Auschwitz, to be murdered at Birkenau on 17 August. Her husband was killed shortly afterwards.

Némirovsky had completed the first two volumes of her remarkable work. Her daughters, who survived the war in hiding, miraculously preserved her manuscripts, written in a tiny script reflecting the author’s shortage of ink and paper. The girls could not bring themselves to read this sole memorial of their mother until more than half a century had passed. Then one of them, Denise, painstakingly transcribed the manuscript with the aid of a magnifying glass, and hesitantly passed it to a publisher.
Suite française
was published in France in 2004, and became a worldwide sensation. Its first volume describes the French experience of June 1940, the plight of millions of refugees. The second focuses upon the relationship between a German soldier of the occupying army and a Frenchwoman. The pathos is extraordinary, of a Jew doomed to die portraying with acute sympathy the sentiments and behaviour of those who would become her murderers. Her account of French society under occupation, its sufferings, manifestations of quiet courage and also of moral betrayal, forms one of the most remarkable literary legacies of the war. Cool, wry analysis was matched by a warm compassion, displayed as she herself awaited a death in which she knew that the French people were complicit with the Germans. Némirovsky is now recognised as one of the most remarkable witnesses of her time and of her race’s tragedy.

While a vast number of Germans were directly or indirectly acquiescent in the massacre of the Jews, a small minority displayed high courage in succouring the persecuted, at mortal risk to themselves. A young Berlin shoemaker named August Kossman, a communist, hid Irma Simon, her husband and son in his little apartment for two years. Teenager Erich Neumann’s mother, a café owner, sheltered a young Jewish family friend in Charlottenburg for five months. A Jewish fugitive named Max Krakauer compiled a list at the end of the war of all those Berliners who had assisted his long struggle to escape death, and recalled sixty-six names. Rita Knirsch’s mother sheltered a young man named Solomon Striem, a family friend, saying to her daughter, ‘Rita, you must tell nobody about this! … I cannot just turn this poor hunted man away.’ Such extraordinarily courageous people preserved a shred of the honour of German civilisation.

In 1944, when the Nazis occupied Hungary and Slovakia, it was the turn of most of their surviving 750,000 Jews to climb aboard transports, to perish in the last massive killings of the Holocaust. Thereafter, as Allied victory loomed, Jews who had survived thus far found their prospects improved: more people were willing to risk hiding them. But most of those whom Hitler had chosen as his pre-eminent victims were already dead.

On 3 November 1943, Hitler announced to his generals a strategic decision that no further reinforcements would be dispatched to the Eastern Front. He reasoned that German forces still held a wide buffer zone protecting the Reich from the Russians; he must reinforce Italy, where Anglo-American armies were established, and France, where they were certain soon to land. Yet even as he sought to address the western threats, on 14 January 1944 the Russians renewed their assaults in the north. Strategic retreat was the obvious response, because the German threat to Leningrad was no longer credible; but the Führer, after some vacillation, once more insisted that his forces should hold their positions. ‘Hitler could think only in lines, not in movements,’ sighed a German officer, Rolf-Helmut Schröder, long afterwards. ‘If he had allowed his generals to do their job, so much could have been different.’ The Russians broke through, fragmenting the German line; on 27 January, Stalin declared Leningrad officially liberated. Hitler sent Model, his favourite general, to retrieve the situation, but within a month the new commander pulled back more than a hundred miles, to prepared positions along the river Neva, Lake Peipus and Lake Pskov. Then the spring thaw imposed its usual check on operations.

Between January and March repeated Soviet thrusts made little progress. The weather imposed difficulties on all the combatants, but afflicted the Russians most, because they were attempting to advance. On 11 February, Zhukov persuaded Stalin to approve a new attempt at encirclement. This time he sought to cut off six German divisions on the west bank of the Dnieper between two Soviet bridgeheads. The manoeuvre was eventually successful, and earned Konev a marshal’s star, but on 17 February, 30,000 German troops broke out; yet again, the Wehrmacht demonstrated the ferocity with which it could respond to desperate circumstances.

Further south, through March three Ukrainian
fronts
battered their way westwards. The German commanders in their path, Kleist and Manstein, defied Berlin’s explicit injunctions by conducting major withdrawals, to save threatened formations from destruction. Hitler responded by sacking both field marshals, replacing them with Model and the brutish Ferdinand Schörner, whom he deemed to have the ruthlessness indispensable to the times. Schörner mounted a stubborn defence of the Crimea against his own judgement, but was eventually obliged to accept the inevitable: on 12 May 27,000 survivors of the garrison’s 150,000 men were evacuated by sea. The Russians had held Sevastopol for 250 days, but the Germans abandoned the fortress after defending it for only seven.

Captain Nikolai Belov wrote from the front in mid-April: ‘Everything is melting. There will be a terrible amount of mud here, and it won’t clear up till June.’ That spring, the condition of the Russian people improved a little. The Luftwaffe could spare few aircraft to bomb cities and civilians; in many places German prisoners were put to work, clearing debris. Across thousands of square miles of contested territory, soldiers and civilians picked a path between wrecked vehicles, abandoned trenches, uncleared mines and burnt-out villages. In communities clinging to the precipice of survival on a daily ration of three hundred grams of bread, local people grudged food to German PoWs, but admitted that they were good workers. The NKVD and Smersh – ‘the Soviet bacillus of mistrust’, in Catherine Merridale’s phrase – conducted a ruthless hunt for alleged traitors, collaborators and spies in areas that had been occupied by the Wehrmacht. In Chernigov, for instance, during February the bodies of four hanged traitors, one of them a woman, swung for days from a gallows in the central square.

Kiev’s inhabitants warned visitors to beware of some local girls: ‘They slept with Germans for a piece of sausage.’ A steady stream of refugees returned to the city, pushing their pathetic property on carts and wheelbarrows. Trams began to run again, some shops and cinemas reopened; water could be drawn at street hydrants, and even electricity became sporadically available. But long queues waited hours for a chance to purchase any commodity, and the streets remained uncleaned. Nazi propaganda posters, images of ‘Hitler the Liberator’, still clung to some walls. Destitution was the common condition of tens of millions of Russians: when three little street urchins approached
Pravda
correspondent Lazar Brontman on a street in Yelsk, he expected them to plead for money or food. Instead, they asked, ‘Uncle, have you got a little pencil, by any chance? At school we have nothing to write with.’ Brontman gave them a pencil. ‘They forgot even to thank me and disappeared hurriedly down the street, staring at their new acquisition, and apparently arguing about who should be its owner.’

In May 1944, 2.2 million German troops confronted the Russians; Hitler derived comfort from the fact that the enemy was still 560 miles from Berlin at the westernmost point of the front. He believed the main Soviet summer effort would come in north Ukraine, and apportioned his strength accordingly. But he was wrong: the objectives of Zhukov’s impending Operation
Bagration
, most spectacular Soviet offensive of the war, lay in the zone defended by Army Group Centre. Scheduled to commence in June, its scale reflected the enormous resources now available to the Red Army. Some 2.4 million men, 5,200 tanks and 5,300 aircraft would make an initial thrust towards Minsk; in the second phase, Second Baltic and First Ukrainian
Fronts
would punch forward on both flanks, exploiting the breakthrough.
Bagration
was hugely ambitious, but at last the Red Army’s capabilities and the Wehrmacht’s vulnerability rendered such strokes possible.

Just praise has been lavished upon the ingenuity and success of British and American deception operations in World War II, but less attention has been paid to the matching achievement of Soviet
maskirovka
, literally ‘camouflage’. This became progressively more sophisticated in 1943, and attained its zenith in deluding the enemy about the objectives of
Bagration
. Large resources were committed to building dummy tanks, guns and installations, to persuade the Germans that the main Russian thrust would come in north Ukraine, where fake roads and crossings were also created. Meanwhile, Soviet formations facing Army Group Centre maintained static defensive deployments; reinforcements moved up only by night under rigorous blackout, and until the last moment were held thirty to sixty miles behind the front. Zhukov’s intentions were revealed on a strict need-to-know basis, to only a handful of senior officers. The Germans identified 60 per cent of the Soviet forces facing Army Group Centre, but missed the vital Guards Tank Army, and supposed they would meet only 1,800 tanks and self-propelled guns, instead of the real 5,200. The Wehrmacht’s eastern intelligence chief, the highly regarded Reinhard Gehlen, was entirely misled by the Russian
maskirovka
, as skilful and significant as similar Anglo-American operations before D-Day. The collapse of Hitler’s residual illusions in the east waited only upon Russian readiness to strike.

Around the world that spring, cynicism persisted about the modest Anglo-American contribution to the struggle, compared with that of the Soviets. The Polish corps commander in Italy, Gen. Władysław Anders, wrote gloomily in mid-April: ‘The course of the war is still the same; the Red Army continues to gain victories and the British are either being defeated, as in Burma, or, together with the Americans, have stuck fast in Italy.’ The Western Allied invasion of Normandy is customarily described as the Second Front; yet in southern Europe around one-tenth of Hitler’s army, including some of its best formations, was already embattled on a mountain line south of Rome, and on the coast further north. Successive Allied attacks on German positions around Monte Cassino were characterised by lack of coordination and imagination, indeed incompetence. The sixth-century Benedictine monastery was battered into rubble; thousands of tons of bombs and shells were expended; many British, Indian, New Zealand and Polish lives were lost; but still the Germans held on.

The Anglo-American corps that landed on the coast further north at Anzio in January, in fulfilment of Churchill’s personal vision, was confined to a narrow perimeter which the Germans attacked fiercely and repeatedly. ‘So back we go to World War I,’ wrote a young officer of a Scottish regiment holding the line there. ‘Oozing thick mud. Tank hulks. The cold, God, the cold. Graves marked by a helmet, gashed with shrapnel. Shreds of barbed wire. Trees like broken fishbones …’ The routines of trench life and incessant bombardment dulled men’s senses. ‘Efficiency in general and combat efficiency in particular suffer when individuals remain too long and too constantly under the gun,’ wrote US Lt. Col. Jack Toffey. Behind the front, existence under siege became bizarrely domesticated: ‘This beachhead is the craziest place I have ever seen,’ a US signals officer wrote to his brother in New Jersey. ‘The boys have their own private horses, chickens, livestock, bicycles and everything else that the civilians left.’ Some men planted vegetable gardens.

In February, the Germans launched a massive counter-attack on the perimeter. ‘I never saw so many people killed around me before in all my life,’ said an Irish Guards corporal. An NCO, watching as swine snuffled around the bodies of the dead in no man’s land, mused bitterly, ‘Is this what we are fighting for, to be eaten by pigs?’ The Germans found the experience of Anzio as tough as did the Allies. ‘Spirits are not particularly high since 4½ years of war start to get on your nerves,’ wrote one of Kesselring’s soldiers with some understatement. Another man observed on 28 January that he had been unable to get his boots off for a week: ‘The air roars and whistles. Shells explode all around us.’ The February assault cost the Germans 5,400 casualties, and their army log reported: ‘It has become very difficult to evacuate the wounded. All ambulances, even the armoured ones, have been lost, making it necessary to use assault guns and Tiger tanks.’ Some Allied units broke, streaming in flight towards the rear – and so too did several German ones, in the face of annihilatory US and British artillery fire. The Allies expended 158,000 rounds during the February battles, ten for each one fired by the Wehrmacht.

Meanwhile further south, though the Allies were still pinned in the mountains, their foes found nothing to celebrate. The German corps commander at Cassino, Gen. Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, told an aide: ‘The rotten thing is to keep fighting and fighting and to know all along that we have lost this war … Optimism is the elixir of life for the weak.’ Von Senger, a rare and indisputable ‘good German’, soldiered on like the fine professional he was. But his men endured hell under Allied bombing and shelling, which levelled the town below as well as the monastery on the mountain. Explosions flung men about like ‘scraps of paper’. A German lieutenant described the March air attacks: ‘We could no longer see each other. All we could do was to touch and feel the next man. The blackness of night enveloped us and on our tongues was the taste of burnt earth.’ Yet as clouds of dust subsided and the Allied infantry and tanks began to advance, still the Germans fought back. Craters and rubble created by the bombing obstructed the attackers, not the defenders. ‘Unfortunately we are fighting the best soldiers in the world – what men!’ Alexander wrote ruefully to Brooke on 22 March.

The breakthrough in Italy, when it came, was too late and too incomplete to promote triumphalism: on 12 May Alexander launched his first intelligently planned attack, with Allied forces making two simultaneous thrusts. Deception persuaded Kesselring to fear a new amphibious landing behind his front, and thus to hold back his reserves. General Alphonse Juin’s men of the French Expeditionary Corps played a prominent role in overrunning the Hitler line south-west of Cassino, while Polish forces overcame the defences north of the monastery. The Americans attacked on the left, just inland from the sea. The Germans, their front broken, began a general retreat northwards. On 23 May Alexander ordered a breakout from the Anzio beachhead, besieged for four months. Many German units were reduced to one-third strength or less. ‘My heart bleeds when I look at my beautiful battalion,’ one CO wrote to his wife, ‘… see you soon, I hope, in better days.’

Operation
Diadem
, as the May offensive was codenamed, offered the Allies their only opportunity between 1943 and 1945 to achieve the comprehensive defeat of Kesselring’s armies in Italy, by cutting off their retreat. The consequences of Gen. Mark Clark’s disdain for this objective because of his obsession with gaining the personal glory of taking Rome, has passed into the legend of the war; his disobedience of orders emphasised his unfitness as an army commander. Alexander, a weak commander-in-chief, was not the man to control the anglophobic Clark, and bore significant responsibility for Allied sluggishness in exploiting
Diadem
. When Rome fell on 4 June, Kesselring withdrew to a strong new defensive position, the Gothic line, on a north-westerly axis anchored in the Apennines between La Spezia on the west coast and Pesaro on the east.

But it seems just to measure the disappointments the Allies experienced in Italy during June 1944 alongside those suffered by their armies elsewhere: the Wehrmacht displayed consistent skill and determination in escaping from encirclements on both Eastern and Western Fronts. Again and again the Russians trapped German armies, only to see them break out. If Clark had closed the Italian roads north, Kesselring’s retreating forces would probably have smashed through anyway. The failure of
Diadem
to translate tactical into strategic success was matched a few weeks later by the escape of substantial German forces through the Falaise Gap in Normandy, and by American unwillingness to cut off von Rundstedt’s withdrawal from the Bulge in January 1945.

In Italy, the Allies had to content themselves with escaping from the miseries of the winter stalemate and advancing 250 miles. Once it became clear that decisive victory in the theatre remained unattainable, to Churchill’s fury the Americans insisted upon winding down the campaign: they withdrew six US and French divisions to join the battle for France. For the last eight months of the war, in Washington’s eyes the only merit of residual Italian operations was that they engaged twenty German divisions which would otherwise have been defending the Reich against Eisenhower or Zhukov.