Armageddon (101 page)
clinging precariously to the boxcars of the slow-moving trains, a bag of personal effects in their spare hands. Where were they going? Where were their families? Where was their home? Most were quiet, grim, sullen, in shock. Many had been wounded in some manner, and had staggered from hospital beds in fear of the Russians. Despite their civilian clothes, it was plain that most were former soldiers, in fear for their lives. Others appeared to have been allied or Axis civilians forced into service with the German army. Others again were merely German civilians, moving westwards as fast as possible.
The Soviets supervised these vast migrations of population in predictably pitiless fashion. An NKVD report described thousands of Germans leaving Czechoslovakia every day after the war’s end. German nationals were evicted from their houses at fifteen minutes’ notice, permitted to take with them only five marks and none of their household possessions, in pursuit of the policy agreed between the Allies, of relocating minorities to their “natural national homes.” The commanding officer of the Red Army’s 28th Czech Rifle Regiment evicted every ethnic German in his area on his own initiative. “I hate them all,” he said laconically. The NKVD complained that such unilateral action was compounding the administrative problems of occupation: “As a result, we have tens of thousands of starving and begging Germans on the move. Typhoid and other infectious diseases are rife. There are many cases of suicide.” One local commandant registered seventy-one suicides in a single day. Colonel-General Hesleni, commanding the Third Hungarian Army, which fought against the Russians to the end, slashed his wrists with a fragment of glass from the window pane of his cell, leaving a terse note: “I have killed myself because of my health. With a stomach like mine, I could never survive imprisonment.”
Throughout their advance across Germany, the Americans and British were relieved to encounter negligible resistance from “werewolf” units, which had been so prominent a feature of Nazi propaganda since the winter of 1944. Beyond the assassination of the Allied-appointed burgomaster of Aachen, there was no significant hostile activity behind the Western Front. In the east, however, it was another story. For weeks after the German surrender, the NKVD continued to report incidents of sniping at Red soldiers, mostly by boys of sixteen and seventeen. This plainly reflected their greater hatred of the Russians, however futile.
Some SS fanatics believed, probably rightly, that only death awaited them in the hands of the Red Army. They fought on for weeks after VE-Day. Men of Gennady Klimenko’s division were attacked by SS troops while driving through a Hungarian forest as late as 20 May. “Our men had dropped their guard,” said Klimenko. “Quite a lot of people were killed like that, after it was all supposed to be over.”
And then there were the camps. Polish officer Piotr Tareczynski finished the war with his PoW contingent alongside concentration-camp prisoners at Sandbostel.
At first they mobbed us, hoping for food. Finding that we had none, they drifted away. Most sat in the sun and seemed to doze. Several toppled to one side, and were obviously dead. We had to remove several hundred of their corpses. We were surprised, not shocked. One’s mind only registered whatever we saw without much emotion or even horror. By that time we had heard of concentration camps, and had some vague idea they were extermination centres. On seeing one in real life, one’s reaction was: “So—this is what it looks like.”
Tareczynski spoke with the detachment of a man whose sensibilities had been dulled by six years of his own sufferings. The soldiers of liberating armies were shocked beyond reason by the Nazis’ vast monuments to human savagery and tragedy, which scarred Germany from end to end.
When Zinaida Mikhailova saw the first Soviet soldiers walk into her compound at Ravensbrück, she and some of the other Russian women burst into tears and tried to embrace them. The Red Army men pushed away the ragged skeletons in revulsion. Zinaida had been in the camp for three years. Some of her fellow inmates were catatonic. “Quite a few simply could not understand the meaning of liberation at all,” she said. “Our minds were not very well.” Twenty-three thousand women survived. At Ravensbrück alone, some 115,000 prisoners had died during the previous two years, including Anne Frank and the British agent Violette Szabo.
When Veta Kogakevich was liberated by the Red Army from her camp in Poland, she believed herself to be about seven years old. She was sent to an orphanage in Novgorod, where she was presented with a birthday, arbitrarily selected as 28 October. It was twenty years before she was able to discover any clues about her own background, since all documentation about her origins in Belorussia had been destroyed. She was the youngest survivor of her camp.
The U.S. 82nd Airborne Division liberated Jerzy Herszburg’s concentration camp at Wöbbelin on 2 May. “We felt too exhausted to celebrate in any jubilant way,” he observed, but one of his friends fulfilled an old, old promise, to kiss the feet of the first Allied soldier he saw. Afterwards, said Herszburg, as they strove to come to terms with the miracle of their own survival and the nightmare they had experienced, “I believed that we were fortunate that there were no psychologists or social workers with us, to help sort out our problems.”
Lieutenant Dorothy Beavers was one of a U.S. Army medical team dispatched to Ebensee. “Nothing had prepared us for the camps,” she said. To their amazement, many of the inmates spoke English. These were highly educated Hungarian Jewish girls, reduced by lice and starvation to the last waystation before death. When a photographer from
Life
magazine appeared, one of them ran away into a field. “Look at me,” she sobbed to Dorothy. “I’m twenty years old, and no man will ever want me now.” It was Edith Gabor. Many of her fellow prisoners were suffering from tuberculosis, and all had ulcers. As the nurses gently bathed them and treated their hurts, Dorothy Beavers was astonished to hear them describing pre-war trips to London, visits to the British Museum. “We discussed Shakespeare, Dante, Beethoven—and the food we’d prepare for the Jewish holidays.” The nurse spent six weeks at Ebensee, administering plasma to men and women at the last extremities of life, carefully weaning them on to a liquid diet. “It was the greatest shock of my life, to see hay ladders jammed with bodies. It got to us all. After two weeks, we were just sitting around staring into space.” Medical teams began to arrive at the camp, to take away their own nationals. An Italian doctor turned up one day and asked: “Any Italians here?” “Yeah, one guy,” came back the answer, “but he’s dying.” “If he is going to die,” said the doctor passionately, “he is going to die with us.”
Edith Gabor was photographed at Ebensee by
Life
. She met Clark Gable, though she was made to promise that she would not say who he was, for fear of causing a riot among the other prisoners. Many months later, she went home to Budapest. She found her family’s apartment in the hands of hostile strangers who demanded, “Who are you?,” then closed the door on her for ever. The Gabors had lost everything, including the lives of most of the family. By a miracle, Edith discovered her eight-year-old brother Georg living as a scavenger on the streets nearby. She learned that their mother had been shot soon after Edith was deported to Ravensbrück.
As Staff-Sergeant Henry Kissinger, serving with the U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps, processed concentration-camp prisoners, he was taken aback to find a Pole spitting in his face: “Why do you care for the Jews first?” the man demanded savagely. When the Germans ran the camp, this man said, the place of Jews—at the bottom of a hierarchy in which professional criminals commanded the summit—had been properly recognized.
Most Germans, of course, declared passionately that they had known nothing of the existence of the camps. Yet even when the revelation was forced upon them, Allied soldiers noted the local civilians’ apparent indifference. A British supervising officer expressed disgust that German civilians conscripted to bury the dead “displayed no emotion at all—the denial, the absence of any sense of collective responsibility, shocked us all.” This young man, Cliff Pettit, wrote home to his parents about the German burial parties for their victims: “They do it with as little concern as if they were sweeping up their own homes and burying old tins.”
Nikolai Maslennikov was unable to grasp the fact of liberation when Soviet tanks rolled into Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 19 April. “For the last six weeks, I was scarcely able to walk, or even to move. In the final days, I simply felt a huge indifference. I was waiting to die. Nothing seemed to matter any more.” He spent six months in hospital before returning to Leningrad, where he found that his parents were dead, as was his girlfriend Lena.
“Sometimes we despaired for these men,” wrote Brenda McBryde, one of the nurses who cared for liberated prisoners. “What future was there for them? No one knew where their families were, and they themselves seemed to have forgotten that they ever had wives or children. They only cared for the food trolley. Every other instinct or emotion had been suppressed except the will to survive.”
Among the Germans, children found it as hard as adults to adjust to their new circumstances. One night the farmer with whom Jutta Dietze and her family lodged as evacuees invited some American soldiers to share their supper. A local boy came in, to collect the children for labour duty. “
Heil Hitler!
” he said mechanically as he came through the door. The Americans laughed indulgently. Yet a few weeks later the Americans departed, and the Russians came. Some Mongolian soldiers strode into the kitchen and observed a photograph of Jutta’s father in Wehrmacht uniform, which they had been careless enough to keep on the dresser. “Nazi! Nazi!” the Russians shouted angrily at the frightened children. The family sought to mollify the occupiers by assuring them that their father was nobody important. In justice to their new masters, though the Germans found the Russians very dirty, they behaved much less badly than everyone had feared. Brutality was not universal, once the heat of battle had cooled.
At last, soldiers’ minds began to turn from fighting to the fulfilment of desires which had been in abeyance. Twenty-two-year-old Private Harold Lindstrom from Alexandria, Minnesota, decided to deal with a matter that had played on his mind for many months. He was a virgin. Deeply fearful of disease, he walked to a park, where he met a girl walking a dachshund: “She was a slim brunette, kind of pretty and neatly dressed, wearing a plain dress and knee-high white stockings.” He said hello, and she gave him a big smile. He asked nervously: “Zig zig?” She took his hand, led him confidently into a park shelter, and unzipped his trousers. The process was quickly over. He pulled out an almost full packet of Lucky Strikes and was on the point of handing them over when he changed his mind. “Somehow, I just couldn’t be too nice to her as she was a German, our enemy.” He gave her only the three cigarettes which he had been told was the correct tariff. She said “Zank you” and disappeared.
Private Henry Williams, a New Yorker with the 273rd Field Artillery, learned that near his billet was living a local celebrity, Frau Winifried Wagner, granddaughter of the composer. Off-duty one afternoon, Williams knocked on the door of her little chalet at Oberwarmensteinach. A robust forty-year-old welcomed him in perfect English, and solicited his assistance in preventing the requisitioning of her home and car. The GI explained that he was merely sightseeing. Without embarrassment, Frau Wagner indulged him in some reminiscences: “You know, Mr. Williams, the Führer used to come every year to our festival. He did love Wagner’s music so much. Poor dear Führer. It soothed him just to be with us. The children adored him. By the way, how is my dear friend Henry Ford?” While Private Williams was indulging one bizarre cultural pilgrimage, Soviet Lieutenant Gennady Klimenko was engaged upon another. He strolled through the great city cemetery of Vienna, marvelling at the famous names on the tombstones. At the devastated opera house, he was solemnly shown to the door of Goebbels’s box, which he opened to gaze upon a bomb-blasted void.
Victor Klemperer, for whom the end of the war signalled deliverance after twelve years of mortal danger among the Nazis, was surprised by how soon the miseries of peace began to cause him almost as much distress as those of war. “What good is all awareness of the peril we have come through?” he pondered on 13 May.
You may put on the light, you may watch the never-ending fly-past without a care, there is no Gestapo for you to fear, you once again have the same rights—no, probably more rights than those around you—what good is it all? Unpleasantnesses are more bothersome than the nearness of death, and the unpleasantnesses are piling up now and our powers of resistance and patience are very much shaken. The terrible heat, the great plague of mosquitoes on top of that. The lack of anything to drink—now even the inn has run out of coffee. The lack of underwear, the unspeakable primitiveness of everything that has to do with eating: plate, bowl, cup, spoon, knife, partly (or mostly) completely absent . . . I know it all sounds funny, one could also say presumptuous, after everything we had to put up with before; these are no more than everyday calamities. But as such they simply do torment one very greatly.
Ten million German soldiers had become prisoners in the hands of the Allies. In mid-May 1945, the NKVD reported that they were holding 1,464,803 Germans, including ninety-three generals, in camps within Germany alone, in addition to millions more who had already been shipped east. The Allies were spared one difficulty: there was no lack of available prison accommodation ready to house those who had built it. At one of the host of camps throughout Russia to which Stalin was dispatching his captives, the commandant invited his 150 guards to take turns hitting Germans. Russian civilians who passed the compounds retained sufficient hot anger to shout abuse at the prisoners for many months. Ibragim Dominov, a guard from Kazan in Tartary, sometimes talked to the Germans. When they told him about their homes, their cattle, their pigs, he said: “You must have been fascists, to have owned so much.” The most wretched, hopeless, despairing inmates were Cossacks, denied even the privilege of being permitted to sing on the way to labour in the coal mines. Each year that followed, the prisoners were told: “You could be released next year.” They never were.
