Armageddon (73 page)

Twenty-two-year-old Katharina Minniger spent seven days in the cellar of her family home in the village of Hausbach as battle raged around it. A Wehrmacht Nebelwerfer battery was deployed close by, provoking fierce counter-fire and air attack from the Americans. In a lull, Katharina ventured out to ask an officer what was happening, and realized that the end was close. The mortar teams were packing to go. A soldier who had been billeted in the Minniger house bade her a wistful farewell. The soldiers could not hitch up one tube, and abandoned it in their garden. Infantrymen began to trickle through the village towards the rear, some wounded, some sobbing, some riding horses. Many were terrified boys. Bizarrely, the civilians found themselves trying to calm the soldiers’ fears. Katharina’s elder sister Maria played draughts with one teenager in their cellar. Shell-severed telephone lines lay strewn across the road. The American bombardment began again. Dragging a wounded man with her, Katharina returned to the cellar.

They lay there through the night, listening to intermittent shelling and screaming. Then she heard a noise above, and went cautiously to investigate, thinking that it was the Americans. Two ashen-faced young soldiers, who had been billeted in the house, were begging sanctuary. “It’s been terrible up here,” said one, “as bad as I’ve ever seen. There’s not much left.” They all went underground again, and huddled shaking with terror. A few hours later, on 21 March, the Americans came. The soldiers filed upstairs clutching a white flag and were marched off to captivity. Every window in the Minniger house was shattered by blast, but the structure survived. Katharina received permission to feed the stock. The Minnigers’ cow survived, but the fields were littered with dead animals and dead men. Other civilians emerged from their refuges to shuffle about in shocked silence. The stench of death was terrible, and most people held pads over their noses and mouths. The nearby woods which they loved so well were blackened and stripped of leaf, many trees torn to stumps. Katharina was horrified to see fragments of a man hanging from a branch. A headless soldier hung over the fence outside their home. Yet her chief emotion was an overwhelming surge of relief.

In the middle of February, retreating German troops seeped through the little village of Dorweiler, a few miles east of the Moselle near the Luxembourg border. Twenty-two-year-old Hildegarde Platten watched them fearfully—“They were in a terrible state, a gun painfully towed by a single ox.” Since 1940, life in the village had been miserably dreary, with all the young men away and social life suspended. Her father had always predicted that the war would “end in tears.” Fugitives came to the village from bombed cities, desperate to barter their remaining possessions for food, or to find sanctuary. It was a poor district, and Hildegarde was the only child of a smallholder with a few cows, pigs, chickens and an ox plough for his three small fields. One morning, a retreating soldier said: “We’re pulling out. You’d better go and hide in the woods.” At first, they were reluctant to leave their stock, and sat in the cellar as desultory shells began to fall from American guns six miles away, on the far side of the Moselle. Devout Catholics, they prayed constantly. At last, they followed most of their neighbours to a nearby slate quarry, where they took refuge through the nights, returning at daybreak to milk the cows. One morning Hildegarde got home to find every window broken. Dough which she had left to settle on the kitchen sill was strewn with splintered glass. Another day, she discovered a terrified sixteen-year-old German deserter cowering in the cellar. As she returned to the quarry, she suffered the unnerving experience of being shelled by a battery directed by a Piper Cub overhead. She hid in a crater, because someone had told her that the same place was never hit twice.

Then came a morning when a villager came to the quarry and announced “The Amis are here.” They made their way cautiously into the village, led by a man bearing a white flag. There was no firing, but they found a hive of American activity. Tents were being pitched, soldiers were washing and cooking. In her own house, she was shocked to find a GI frying eggs with the family’s cherished silver cake-knife. Another was wearing her favourite shawl. “That’s mine,” she said. “No,” the man replied easily, “it’s mine.” Her father said wearily: “These are only the first. There will be many more. Say nothing.” Then he sat down outside and burst into tears. “So this is what my whole life has been for,” he exclaimed brokenly, “losing everything.”

When the Americans left, they had wilfully damaged nothing, though they removed all the family’s portable valuables, especially cameras and watches. The villagers of Dorweiler learned to count their blessings, however. At least there had been no battle among their homes. At nearby Bucholz, a group of Waffen SS fought to the bitter end, defending roadblocks on both sides. At Beltheim, one officer and a handful of men held out until American gunfire obliterated every building around them. “Ridiculous . . . ridiculous,” said Hildegarde Platten. Yet when she and her parents heard afterwards about what had happened in the east, the family recognized its good fortune.

S
OME
A
LLIED SOLDIERS
were merely bemused by their first encounters with German civilians. Others recoiled. Soon after Dai Evans and men of 53rd (Welsh) Division occupied billets in a house, “the farmer went into a spiel we were to hear so often in the months to come: how he had hated the Hitler regime; how he had never agreed with the Nazis. He even hinted that he and his wife had been in danger due to their outspoken animosity towards the local Nazi officials. We soon learned to treat such statements in the way we treated those of the French who bragged of their activities with the Resistance.”

The Allies strove to find means by which their soldiers might distinguish Nazis from the rest of the civilian population. A notable example of the perils of enlisting psychologists in the service of armies may be found in an intelligence circular sent to all British commands, summarizing identifiable Nazi traits: “undue acceptance of parental authority, with a resultant docility to those above and an expected right to dominate those below; exaggerated awkwardness or shame on the subject of tender relations between parents and children . . . the over-valuation of male friendship and masculinity associated with a social depreciation of the female sex . . . a marked unconscious tendency to read one’s own traits or impulses into the actions of others, to seek scapegoats.”

At the age of twenty-one, Staff-Sergeant Henry Kissinger of the U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps found himself running the city of Krefeld, rounding up Gestapo agents and Nazi officials. Although he himself had grown up in Germany, “this was the one period of my life when I felt completely American. I even thought I had lost my accent.” Yet he cherished a fierce determination not to allow himself to be angry with the Germans: “I felt that I had seen what it was like to be discriminated against. It seemed wrong to go back and do to the Germans what they had just done to us.”

Almost all German attempts to deploy “werewolf” groups, to wage guerrilla war behind the lines against the Western allies, failed miserably. Ten-year-old Jutta Dietze and her schoolmates in Saxony were instructed not to approach a certain local wood, because werewolves were digging in there, but when the time came and the Americans arrived, there was no resistance. It was the same across much of Germany. Helmut Lott, a fifteen-year-old junior Hitler Youth leader in Griessen, near Frankfurt, was mobilized for the Volkssturm in January. He was initially excited by the promise of a chance to fire live ammunition, and became even more so when he found that he was an instructor for his eighty-strong group, which included his own grandfather. Reality proved disappointing. They possessed only dummy fausts, a single MG42, and two machine-pistols. “For the first time, I sensed the absurdity of what we were doing.” His father, an infantry captain who was also a Nazi Party member, was taken to hospital suffering from wounds he had received in Courland. When the boy went to visit him, proud in his uniform, and described the preparations to resist the Allied armies, his father exploded: “Now I really believe the war is lost!” he said. “This is ridiculous. Stay as far away from it as you can.” The boy was deeply shocked: “I still thought we could win.” His Volkssturm unit was never mobilized, for there were no weapons to arm the men, “and I doubt whether they would have obeyed a call-up anyway.” The boy was only grateful that he and his family survived unscathed when the Americans came.

Almost the only visible success for werewolves was the assassination of the American-appointed mayor of Aachen on Palm Sunday 1945. Other isolated attempts were made: on 16 March Dr. Alfred Meyer, gauleiter of Westphalia, appealed to the local SA commander for “a few selected personnel of 17 and over . . . fanatical Nazis who will not hesitate to make the supreme sacrifice, to offer their lives. Absolute secrecy [is necessary] even to their immediate families. I expect every district leader to designate three men who fulfil the above specification. The selected men should be equipped with clothing which can stand abuse, strong shoes, one change of underwear, eating and cooking utensils, food coupons and identity cards.
Heil Hitler!
” There is no evidence of any response to this appeal. The guerrilla concept was alien to the German military tradition. Only a few teenagers fulfilled Berlin’s hopes. Peter Carrington of Guards Armoured once took over a farmhouse for his squadron headquarters and relegated its German occupants to the cellar. On waking next morning, “I was dismayed to look out of the window and see the German son of the house attempting to fix a charge to my jeep. I decided to commit an atrocity. I gave the family five minutes to clear out, told my sergeant-major to pour ten gallons of petrol on the house, and put a match to it.” Carrington, epitome of English aristocratic good nature, recalled bathetically, but without evident regret: “The fire went out.”

As the German armies fell back mile by mile and day by day, one of Captain Karl Godau’s gunners in 10th SS Panzer, a gloomy Westphalian, observed: “I’m going to end up defending the rabbit hutch at the end of my garden.” A relative of Heinrich Himmler serving at a corps headquarters in the west continued to proclaim noisily: “Those who weaken must be broken!” But his commander eventually found these protestations intolerable, and had the officer transferred. During the last months, even in a crack regiment such as the Grossdeutschland, morale became perilously fragile. Lieutenant Tony Saurma’s loader jumped down from their tank during an action, supposedly to clear their gun. Once on the ground, he mysteriously disappeared. The crew heard a Russian propaganda loudspeaker urging seductively: “Come this way, comrade—this way to freedom.” Saurma assumed that the loader had seized the opportunity to desert. His troop sergeant, a Mecklenburger, often teased him: “Aren’t you afraid of dying?” Saurma said afterwards: “When a soldier had time to think, he began to brood about home, even to think of killing himself. I always tried to keep my men busy, so that they did not have the opportunity to brood. I kept talking to them. Sometimes one felt that their nerve had gone. Some would talk about shooting themselves.”

In the frenzied movements of those last months, tanks of the Grossdeutschland once found themselves engaging the Russians from the railway flatcars on which they had been brought to the battlefield. At night, when the tanks leaguered to rearm and perform maintenance, the crews now had to provide their own local defence, for they lacked panzergrenadiers to do the job for them. Rations shrank. They found themselves obliged to eat the army-issue cheese which everyone detested, because there was little else. Some days, there was only bread.

Once, after Saurma’s troop had spent a night on a serious drinking binge, he sensed them to be on the edge of mutiny. “For God’s sake, let’s end this,” they said. The young officer gathered his tank crews together and harangued them: “You were born—some time you’re going to die,” he said. “In between, there is a parabola of life, which has its good moments and its bad ones. You must not think of yourselves, but of others who depend on you. You can’t just give up.” Heaven knows what Saurma’s men thought of these lofty sentiments, but they fought on. Between 15 January and 22 April 1945, his division suffered an astounding 16,988 casualties, 170 per cent of its strength. In the three years of its existence, the Grossdeutschland lost 50,000 men and 1,500 officers.

“Most German soldiers realize the hopelessness of their country’s predicament,” observed a Soviet intelligence report on 2 March, “but a few still express faith in victory. There is no sign of a collapse in enemy morale. Germans still fight with dogged persistence and unbroken discipline, and some prisoners express their pride about this. A captured company commander said: ‘We must hold to the last man.’ A soldier named Viktor Schubert said: ‘The war will end this year, and we shall win it.’ ” It is hard to deny bemused respect to Germans capable of addressing Soviet intelligence officers in such terms in the spring of 1945.

The Ardennes was the last large-scale armoured battle Hitler’s armies fought on the Western Front. Thereafter, the Wehrmacht was obliged to fight a campaign against the Americans and British which was overwhelmingly dependent upon footsoldiers with hand-held anti-tank weapons. There was no further scope for grand strategy, because Germany possessed no more choices about how or where to fight. A few officers were already discreetly telling their men to go home, and more did so with every week that passed. Commanders instructed to fight to the last round frequently interpreted this as meaning the last artillery shell. Even where tubes and ammunition still existed, lack of trained personnel and prime movers critically hampered the deployment of heavy guns. Units overwhelmingly composed of untrained replacements lacked the tactical skills to mount counter-attacks. So incompetent were some novice armoured crews that, when they collected new tanks direct from the factories, they frequently ditched or crashed them on the road to the front.