Armageddon (97 page)

The family lived in unbroken fear through the weeks that followed. They were conscripted to work as forced labourers on a farm. The women never undressed, nor went anywhere alone. Once, they were all herded into a barn, and assumed that they were going to be shot. Instead, as part of a clumsy programme of de-Nazification, they were compelled to watch a Soviet propaganda film with Hitler and his colleagues played by comic actors: “We were meant to laugh, to see how ridiculous they were, but we simply sat frozen with fear.”

Nineteen-year-old Helga Braunschweig sat in a cellar with her mother and some twenty other women in a village just outside Berlin through the long, terrifying days of the battle. When at last the shooting died, they emerged thankfully from their refuge, to find Russians outside, eagerly shaking hands and saying: “War finished!” Then soldiers began to set up their cry of “
Uri! Uri!
” The German women were bemused, and at first disbelieving. Then they bowed to the inevitable, and surrendered their watches and jewellery. The Russians’ mood became visibly less inhibited and more dangerous. The German woman retreated to their cellar. The older ones urged the younger to dirty their faces and even to smear them with egg yolk. Then a Russian officer entered, and pointed to several Germans in succession: “You! And you! And you!” Helga’s mother pleaded with the Russian: “Leave my daughter. Take me.” She was ignored. The girl was a virgin, for although she and her boyfriend Wolfgang had often passionately kissed they had never made love. Now, she unwillingly obeyed the Russian’s instructions to follow him upstairs, strip and get on the bed. “I thought I had no choice.”

The women in their hamlet had supposed that they would be safe if they stuck together. Discovering their mistake, one family killed themselves. By contrast, a committed Nazi among the women now sought favour by offering herself to the conquerors. Helga observed of those days: “What happened in the huge city of Berlin was somehow anonymous. But in our little community, everything seemed somehow so horribly personal.” After the first Russian incursion, Helga and her mother hid in the attic of a house for ten days. “Red soldiers during the first weeks of their occupation raped every woman and girl between the ages of twelve and sixty,” a British PoW liberated in Pomerania testified. “That sounds exaggerated, but it is the simple truth. The only exceptions were girls who managed to remain in hiding in the woods, or who had the presence of mind to feign . . . some infectious disease.”

The grotesque comedies precipitated by the Red Army’s addiction to alcohol continued even now. On the night of 2 May, the Russian commandant of Lodz became drunk and ordered the city’s sirens to be switched on to celebrate the fall of Berlin. This caused panic. Anti-aircraft gunners opened fire, believing there was an air raid, which in turn provoked a flight of civilians. Russian soldiers manning roadblocks saw cars and civilians hastening towards them and supposed themselves under attack. They began shooting, killing and wounding dozens of people. The NKVD arrested the commandant.

Many Russians found in the service of the Wehrmacht were summarily dispatched. “Vlassov’s men were kicked to death on the spot,” said Gennady Ivanov. “In general, we tried to persuade men not to kill prisoners, but it was very hard. We were living an existence in which people’s lives had absolutely no value. All that seemed important was to stay alive and look after oneself.” A day or two before the end, Valentin Krulik was ordered to take twenty-five men to accept the surrender of a large body of Germans waiting in their trucks down the road. When he reached the column, he was alarmed to find himself among so many fully armed enemy soldiers. He gestured the German column to follow him into the Russian lines and walked ahead of them until they reached a field headquarters. “What’s in the trucks?” an officer demanded. “Germans,” answered the lieutenant. “Then get them out of the vehicles, and take them 500 metres into the fields.” Krulik never asked what happened to the prisoners, but he guessed.

There were anguished protests from German communists that when they joyfully revealed themselves to their Soviet deliverers they were treated no better than Nazis. Yelena Kogan, the NKVD interpreter in Berlin, saw a man standing with his pregnant wife shouting: “Hooray! The filthy fascists have been smashed by the workers!” His Soviet listeners responded scathingly: “Where were all you German workers when Germany invaded Russia?” Vasily Filimonenko felt no trace of pity for the Germans. “Let us not kid ourselves—they had attacked our country. They deserved everything they got.” The son of dirt-poor, illiterate peasants from a village near Novgorod, he had fought for four long years. His seventeen-year-old sister Evdokia had died as a nurse at Stalingrad. He was outraged, much later, when Germany was allowed to build a war memorial in Russia, “on land steeped in our blood. It is not a matter of vengeance, but of justice, the memory of the devastating pain of our country. For the sake of all our people who died, the war crimes of Germany can never be forgiven.”

Yelena Kogan said: “What the Red Army did in Germany was the darkest stain on its record in the war.” As the first revelations of Russian behaviour, of the reign of terror sweeping the east, began to seep through to the Western allies, many American and British soldiers were baffled. Since 1941, they had been urged to think so warmly of their ally “Uncle Joe.” Captain David Fraser wrote cynically: “The British people were surprised and shocked at that time to discover that many European peoples regarded the Soviet regime and the Red Army with a horror and alarm greater than that previously aroused by Nazi Germany. Any sympathy with the victims of the Bolsheviks . . . smacked of incipient leniency to the Germans.”

Dorothea Goesse, wife of an Austrian officer of the Wehrmacht’s Cossacks, stood in the middle of the border town of Klagenfurt and watched the British Army march in. Then, from the opposite direction, she saw approaching a column of Yugoslav communist partisans: “They looked like Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves.” She remembered what her father had said, long ago in September 1939: “A terrible time is coming.” Almost six years later, it had arrived. “For us,” said Dorothea Goesse, whose family had occupied the same castle for 300 years, “a world was drowning.”

H
ITLER
’
S DEATH
ensured that the end would soon come, but did not itself terminate the dying. At no single moment did every corner of the German, Czech, Dutch, Scandinavian, Baltic and Yugoslav battlefields fall silent. Rather, the struggle stuttered to an end in one corner of Europe after another during the first two weeks of May, as one by one Hitler’s commanders succumbed to the inevitable. Even as some Russian soldiers, victorious in Berlin, were addressing themselves to the fruits of victory, elsewhere they were obliged to fight fiercely, not against an enemy aspiring to victory, but against Germans preferring death to Soviet captivity. A total of 3,404,950 of Hitler’s soldiers were disarmed following the final surrender. Most of these men, it may be assumed, were still offering at least nominal resistance to the Allies after the fall of Berlin.

On the evening of 1 May, from his headquarters at Plön in north Germany, Grand-Admiral Karl Dönitz announced on German radio the death of Hitler and his own appointment as the Führer’s designated successor:

German men and women, soldiers of the German armed forces! Our Führer, Adolf Hitler, has fallen. In deepest grief and respect the German people bow. He early recognized the frightful danger of Bolshevism and dedicated his being to this struggle. At the end of this, his struggle, and his unswerving life’s path, stands his hero’s death in the capital of the German Reich. His life was a unique service for Germany. His mission in the battle against the Bolshevist storm-flood is valid for Europe and the entire civilized world. The Führer has appointed me as his successor. In consciousness of the responsibility, I take over the leadership of the German
Volk
at this fateful hour.

An element of black farce was thus introduced to a tragedy. Instead of seizing the opportunity to offer an immediate capitulation and save thousands of lives, Dönitz’s mockery of a government permitted the killing to go on for a further week. The admiral sought negotiations with the Western allies, while striving to sustain resistance to the Russians. Capital sentences for desertion and mutiny continued to be carried out. On the Eastern Front, men fought on, unable to perceive any way to stop.

“I did not mourn Hitler,” said Captain Karl Godau of 10th SS Panzer, “but we felt that his death meant the end of everything. We simply could not imagine what might happen next. After all the threats that the Allies had made against Germany, one could not believe that anything good would follow.” Maria Brauwers of Jünkerath, however, grieved when she heard of Hitler’s passing: “I knew nothing about the Holocaust. But I remembered that the Führer had done many good things before the war, especially for those of us who were young.”

Corporal Helmut Fromm, a sixteen-year-old soldier from Heidelberg, shared the agony of the encircled Ninth Army in the fields and forests south of Berlin after the city had fallen and Hitler was dead. In their thousands, some in organized bodies and others alone, they trudged westwards, like some gigantic armed football crowd dispersing after a match, fighting Russians wherever they met them. The roads and surrounding countryside were jammed with fugitives, constantly attacked by Soviet aircraft. Sharing their misery were scores of thousands of civilian refugees of both sexes and all ages, clutching pitiful possessions. The remains of Fromm’s unit was commanded by a young Luftwaffe lieutenant, and included two women in army uniform. As they reached a ride in a forest, they suddenly saw two Soviet tanks, which fired at them. “Quick!” said their officer. “Run across while they’re reloading!” One of the women stopped dead in the midst of the ride, staring “like a paralysed rabbit” at the T-34 before her. “Run, you silly bitch!” shouted the officer. He raced out and dragged her into the trees. On and on they marched. No one thought of fighting, only of reaching the American lines. Yet when they reached Halle and found Russians, they felt that all hope was gone. Darkness was coming on. Shells were falling all around them. Fromm saw a Russian infantryman shooting down on them from a church tower, and fired a futile burst at the man from his machine-pistol: “It seemed that the world was coming to an end.”

He joined several men sheltering behind a slow-moving Tiger. There was a heavy explosion. Stunned, Fromm reached for his Schmeisser and found it plastered with the intestines of his neighbour. He threw away the gun in revulsion. They laid a groaning teenager on the hull of a tank and plunged on into the woods. The Tiger tracks rolled impassively over men lying wounded in its path. Fromm was surprised how unaffected he was by their plight. He felt drained of all sentiment save the urge to survive. He abandoned the sluggish tank to follow an officer whom he saw studying a map by torchlight, because such a man seemed likely to know where he was going. There were soldiers milling everywhere. Suddenly, a shadow loomed ahead in the darkness. A dozen guns were raised. The faceless figure said: “If you start shooting at me, you’re all dead, but if you stick to this path, you’ll get through.”

Early in the morning, however, they found themselves under fire again. Fromm had picked up another weapon, but buried himself as deep as he could behind a log pile. “Don’t be so feeble,” said an SS man scornfully. “Get up where you’ve got a field of fire.” The boy’s gun was jammed with sand. He hurled it aside. At last they moved on, sleep-walking. As night came again, they reached a village. “We’ll get through if we run,” said an SS man who proved to have a mutual friend with Fromm in Heidelberg. There was a nightmare moment when one German ran into a huge Russian emerging from a cottage. Both men exclaimed in shock and fled in opposite directions. Next morning, as Fromm rested exhausted by the roadside, he saw a VW
Schwimmwagen
race by, bearing a Luftwaffe general adorned with decorations. The boy felt fiercely angry: here was one of the leaders who had brought them all to this, riding in a car while soldiers walked. It was too much. He clambered to his feet and staggered on, almost comatose.

Many Allied soldiers found it confusing to spend the last days of the war fighting children. A British Bren-gunner firing into a house defended by Hitler Jugend trained his weapon on a side door from which it was plain that, sooner or later, the cornered defenders would try to escape. A few minutes later, a figure dashed out. After a burst of Bren fire, the German fell writhing and screaming in the midst of the street. As the British soldier pressed the trigger again, he glimpsed the face of a young boy, who slumped in death. “His features have been printed on my mind ever since,” said the infantryman. “I have always asked myself: if I hadn’t fired the second burst, might that boy have lived to grow into a decent man?”

“The fourteen-year-olds were very dangerous, because they possessed no sense of adult behaviour,” said Major Bill Deedes. “They might produce a grenade they had hidden, and throw it after being taken prisoner.” Private Walter Brown and his platoon of the U.S. 90th Division were sickened to find that they had shot ten of a group of fifteen German boys firing on them from a mountainside near the Czech border: “we felt like butchers, and yet those bullets would have killed us as dead as those of any SS soldier.” A young captive tossed a “potato masher” grenade at the colonel of the Scots Greys on 2 May. The British officer shot him with his pistol. “The rules of war got very fractured in the last phase—we lost three officers to these child soldiers,” said Deedes. “Until then, the courtesies had still obtained. But we ceased to extend them to the Hitler Jugend. I became almost more nervous and jumpy than I had been in Normandy. Here one was facing the odd German who would just stay and pick off a couple of one’s men not as part of any military plan or organized defence, but on his own initiative. The war became much less formalized and organized, and in some ways more dangerous as a result.”