Armageddon (79 page)

Lindsey and his companions readily measured the fluctuations of the war by the behaviour of their captors. The Germans enjoyed a burst of elation in December, during the Ardennes offensive. This was supplanted two months later by a newfound eagerness to make Allied friends. A guard took Lindsey’s little work gang into a Munich café and bought his charges a beer. The man plainly realized how soon he would be changing places with them. There was a last spasm of German jubilation when news came of President Roosevelt’s death, which some guards, like their Führer, deluded themselves would precipitate the break-up of the Grand Alliance. To the end, their captors strove to maintain their authority. On 3 April, Lindsey was sentenced to thirty days’ punishment for stealing a Red Cross parcel. A German officer told the American that he would be court-martialled as soon as the war was over.

Early in 1945, as the Russians began to sweep across the territory of the Greater Reich, Hitler entertained the notion of murdering all PoWs before they could be liberated. He was enraged by reports of German soldiers surrendering in large numbers to the Western allies. This, he said, was “the fault of that stupid Geneva Convention. We must scrap the idiotic thing.” He argued that, if the Nazis killed their own prisoners, such action would put a stop to the Allies’ humane treatment of Germans who surrendered, and thus destroy any incentive for his soldiers to betray their duty. Jodl and Guderian with difficulty dissuaded Hitler from this course. Yet the Nazi leadership remained determined not to allow Allied captives to be liberated. Göring pointed out to Hitler at a conference on 27 January that 10,000 Allied aircrew were held captive at Sagan, in the path of the Red Army. It had been suggested that these men should merely be left to the Russians. The Luftwaffe’s chief strongly objected to making the Allies a present of 10,000 trained airmen. “They must leave,” agreed Hitler, “even if they march on foot. Anyone who runs away will be shot. That must be done by all means.” Göring said jovially: “Take off their trousers and shoes, so they can’t walk in the snow.”

Hundreds of thousands of prisoners found it hard enough to walk in the snow even when they retained their trousers and shoes. Not only from Sagan, but from scores of camps throughout the eastern Reich, during the first weeks of 1945 the inmates were herded forth on marches westward that continued for weeks and even months, inflicting terrible suffering. Dragging their pitiful possessions, escorted by guards in little better case than themselves, they trudged through the thick snows amid unending columns of refugees already clogging the roads. Almost every route westward from Poland was crowded with suffering humanity, together with their abandoned possessions. At least 750,000 concentration-camp prisoners were driven west. More than a third died. Many were simply shot out of hand by guards impatient with the difficulties of moving exhausted and starving skeletons barefoot in deep snow. Others perished from hunger or exposure, others again from air attack—Allied pilots were often unable to distinguish between columns of enemy soldiers, refugees and prisoners on the roads of Germany flashing beneath their wings.

Military prisoners suffered less than concentration-camp inmates during these marches. Yet the last months of the war provided the worst experience of their captivity. One morning early in January 1945, Private Tom Barker’s camp was alerted to move. The young British soldier walked for the last time to the farm of the Otto family, where he had worked for three years. They, too, were preparing to flee from the Russians. Frau Otto was holding Laura the mare while Hugo shod her, in readiness to pull their cart. Their daughter Gerda was baking bread: “To the other children, it was all an exciting joke, but Gerda was old enough to realise that this was a tragedy, and it showed in her face.” Barker gave her his accordion. She offered him two loaves of bread and a piece of bacon. He borrowed the family sledge, in the hope that the prisoners would be able to use it to take with them some of the remarkable accumulation of possessions they had assembled since 1941.

We now had to say goodbye. You may think it strange that goodbyes between what were supposed to be enemies should be difficult, but difficult it was. I had long since become . . . one of the family. I wanted to hug them all, but because of everything I hesitated to do so, something I always regretted. I could still remember the agonies of the refugees in Belgium and France in 1940. I knew that, for these people, conditions would be almost unbearable, in the depths of a bitter winter.

And so the young British soldier and the German fugitives parted, to play their separate roles in the vast trek west, through months in which Barker suffered experiences far more dreadful than anything he had known during his three years in Poland.

American airman Richard Burt was among those who began to march in February from Stalag IVB. The prisoners were soon desperately hungry. They received their best break when RAF fighters strafed the column. Cannon fire killed the horses of their ration-wagon. The starving prisoners butchered the animals and enjoyed their first solid meal for weeks. Otherwise, they picked and boiled dandelion leaves, crushed grain and made soup. They journeyed across eastern Europe for three terrible months, scavenging every mile of the way. Burt was grateful for his own boy-scout training—“Some of the city boys found it very tough.” They never washed, and were all riddled with lice and ticks: “I felt ashamed of myself for falling into such a sick state. We were weak, wet, hungry, and not much seemed to matter most of the time.” The very act of walking became intolerable. They hated especially the hard cobbled streets of towns. No one knew what happened to many men who fell by the wayside in snowstorms or collapsed later from exhaustion or starvation. None had any thought of escape so close to the end of the war. Indeed, they feared being left behind by their columns, finding themselves at the mercy of a hostile population. The prisoners were taunted and cursed by many German communities through which they passed, and even stoned by children urged on by their parents. “We seemed most likely to be killed when they found out that we were
Americanisch Luftwaffe,
” wrote Burt. When the prisoners finally met Allied troops in May, like most of his comrades Burt was obliged to spend a week in hospital before being fit even for a transit camp.

Bill Bampton, a private of the East Surreys captured in 1940, started marching with his column from Stalag XXB near Danzig on 24 January. They had some discussion about hiding in the woods to await the Russians, “but I preferred to stay with the crowd, a decision I later regretted.” There were 500 of them, British and French, with intense animosity between the nationalities. The Polish civilians among whom their course first lay were kind, but the cold was deadly: “With our sled, I could not help thinking of Scott’s expedition to the Pole.” They slept mostly in farm buildings.

A crisis came when it was found that some men had pilfered tinned meat from the column’s stocks. The commandant paraded all 500 men, and announced that unless the culprits confessed there would be no further issues of Red Cross parcels. There was a long silence. Then some prisoners urged the guilty to own up: “Be British! Show you’ve got British guts!” A few reluctantly stepped forward, some of whom denounced their fellow culprits. The mood of desperation intensified every day. Bampton was shocked to find his comrades stealing bread from each other’s packs: “A shameful happening . . . I couldn’t help noting another lesson in human nature. The British people are pleasant in pleasant circumstances, but otherwise . . .” He wrote in his diary: “I hate the way our boys behave, rushing and pushing and completely forgetting that they are British soldiers.” He was disgusted by the spectacle of men fighting for possession of Red Cross parcels: “a shocking affair! Talk about wild animals.”

Dr. Helmut Hugel, a German petroleum engineer and enthusiastic Nazi, was walking down a road behind the front when he overtook a column of American prisoners being hastily herded beyond reach of liberation. He was horrified to hear a guard shout: “Anyone who cannot go on will be shot!” Hugel wrote in his diary: “We thought this an empty threat, but soon we saw in the road ditch some prisoners who had indeed been killed. What sort of propaganda could the Americans make out of this, if they find them?”

In the last week of January, the inmates of Oflag LXIV began their own march westward, away from the distant sound of Soviet artillery fire. The prisoners were led by Colonel Paul Goode, a regimental commander captured in Normandy, who had run his camp with iron discipline. Goode was accompanied by his runner, Private Jerome Alexis. On their first day, the Americans covered twelve miles. The elderly guards were in such poor shape that the prisoners sometimes carried their rifles. They soon found themselves suffering dysentery from the local water. One morning, almost all the Germans disappeared. The German commandant, Colonel Schneider, formally surrendered himself to Colonel Goode, who sent a patrol in search of the Russians. Before this could return, however, some of the guards reappeared, accompanied by a detachment of Latvian SS. Colonel Schneider was reinstated. The prisoners’ march continued. They moved westward, pitifully slowly among the mob of refugees. Alexis thought, however, that the American PoWs were treated better than those in British columns they met, among whom guards were using rifle butts ruthlessly. When some Russian prisoners attempted to beg cigarettes from the GIs, they were shot.

Four straggling British prisoners joined the Americans. One of them was a Scot who played the bagpipes. Colonel Goode appointed the soldier and his music to lead their column. To the prisoners’ delight, a shipment of Red Cross parcels appeared. They crossed the Oder among the refugees on a ferry near Swinemünde on 28 February, and were then taken by train—how extraordinary that the Germans could still find rolling stock for such a purpose, at such a time—to Oflag XIIIB at Hammelburg. Thirteen hundred of them had set out from Poland. Just 400 prisoners arrived at Hammelburg. Most of the rest survived, but languished as stragglers up and down Germany.

Colonel Goode was appalled by the dejection and collapse of discipline he found in the new camp: “There was filth everywhere, the men were dirty and unkempt. An atmosphere of utter demoralization was easily discerned.” Goode seethed, and sought to take a grip. “Slowly, things began to shape up as the colonel tried to instil a measure of self-esteem in the men once more,” wrote his orderly. “He pointed out that becoming a prisoner-of-war was not a dishonourable thing, unless there had been cowardice, or a deliberate attempt to seek capture.” But Goode could not produce food, because the Germans professed to have none.

On 26 March, the prisoners heard a rumour that American forces were approaching. What followed was one of the most extraordinary tragic farces of the north-west Europe campaign. At noon next day, the Hammelburg prisoners heard gunfire. A Sherman tank opened fire on the guard towers. The Germans responded. The guards fired warning shots towards the prisoners, who fled into their huts. Shermans killed some Yugoslav prisoners, whom they mistook for Germans. Suddenly three American PoWs including Colonel John Knight Waters, Goode’s executive officer, walked forward carrying a white flag. They had been sent to negotiate with the American force by the camp commandant. A nervous guard raised a rifle and fired, wounding Waters. There was then an outburst of shooting from both American liberators and Germans. The wounded colonel was carried to the sickbay. Soon afterwards, the camp gates opened. Soldiers of Third Army poured in, mounted on jeeps and half-tracks. Colonel Goode conferred with the senior officers of the liberating force, Captain Abraham Baum and Major Alex Stiller, who identified himself as an aide of General Patton. Stiller said that he was accompanying the column “as an observer.”

Baum said that he lacked the vehicles to take away all 1,291 U.S. prisoners, but would carry as many as he could. The story behind the arrival of his column defies belief. Hammelburg lay some thirty-six miles beyond the Allied front, in country still defended by elements of three German divisions. Baum had been dispatched on the personal orders of Patton, against the strong objections of the responsible corps and divisional commanders. Patton told them: “I’ll replace every man and vehicle you lose.” “Task Force Baum” started out with 294 men in sixteen tanks, twenty-seven half-tracks and assorted support vehicles. Colonel John Waters, Goode’s executive officer, was Patton’s son-in-law. The Third Army commander afterwards claimed he had no reliable knowledge that Waters was at Hammelburg, that he merely wished to liberate American prisoners known to be confined there. There is overwhelming evidence that Patton lied. The sole objective of the Hammelburg raid was the liberation of his own daughter’s husband.

Baum’s column set out in darkness to return to the Allied lines, every vehicle jammed with PoWs. Jerome Alexis rode on the hull of the third Sherman in the column. They passed some German soldiers without being challenged, and began to congratulate themselves. Thirty minutes down the road, however, they met their first opposition—German infantrymen with a faust who inflicted minor damage on a Sherman. This was enough to convince Baum that he faced a battle. He halted the column and conferred again with Goode. He explained that he could not fight with the PoWs aboard. There were no weapons for them and no space. To the prisoners’ bitter chagrin, most were now marched back to the camp. They were soon followed by a thickening stream of wounded and stragglers from Baum’s column, which found itself locked in combat with German forces. The Hammelburg infirmary filled to overflowing, its medical supplies exhausted. At 1500 next afternoon, the Germans marched all the unwounded prisoners down to the rail station and evacuated them to Stalag Luft III, which had been transferred from Sagan to Nuremberg. They were finally liberated at Moosburg on 29 April, after the U.S. 14th Armored Division fought a brief firefight with their guards. Colonel Waters and eighty other wounded prisoners remained at Hammelburg until they were freed on 6 April. Patton then dispatched his personal doctor and two Piper Cub aircraft to fly his son-in-law to hospital in Frankfurt. Both Baum and Major Stiller, who survived their battle with the Germans but themselves became prisoners, were deeply embittered. They did not become less so when Patton paid a personal visit to Baum’s bedside after his liberation, to present the hapless officer with a Distinguished Service Cross.