Cruel World (74 page)
Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
You could hear them getting closer and closer all the time. By the sound of it huge bomber formations were circling over Hamburg, flying in from all directions. The entire sky was lit with hundreds of flares,… which glistened brightly as they slowly made their way to the ground. Amid this, the roaring and rumbling, the whizzing and whistling of the falling bombs passing through the air seemed never to end. I ran out of my shelter and headed home. The city was an inferno because of the unbearable heat … getting to the river and swimming was the only [route]…. Up above the sky had turned a deep red.… People were running crazily back and forth … slapping themselves with towels … some were already lying totally still on the street.
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German records estimated that, in all, 41,800 people died instantly in these raids and that 37,800 more were injured, of whom many probably died subsequently.
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Uwe Köster was in the midst of it. He could not get to his post at first, and when he did, his duties were grim indeed:
My mother, my sister and I went down the stairs but could get no further … we huddled in a small corner for the entire attack, two hours, standing up. We couldn’t go into the street.… It was literally hailing fire bombs, incendiaries with phosphorus canisters.… Afterwards we were called in to clear the streets. We cleared out the corpses, sometimes the burned bodies of people in cellars.… We stacked the bodies
in 30 to 35 layers on top of each other. We stacked them all, and if you went by two or three days later you could only go with cellophane over your eyes because everything was smoky. The air was absolutely still. We didn’t have any sun at all for three or four days; it was completely dark out.… The corpses were beyond identification. We would dig entire families out of their basements … they were completely mummified, burned and melted together by the heat.
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Hamburg was only the beginning. A few months later the Associated Press reported from Sweden that “haggard, red eyed arrivals from Berlin, many of whom still were wearing clothes singed as they walked through streets walled by fire,” were describing “almost unbelievable destruction wrought by … intensive RAF assaults,” destruction that included the Sportpalast, the site from which Goebbels had made his total war announcement. The witnesses said that “much of the city simply no longer exists.” Local firefighters had been “unable to cope” with the fires and “trucks crowded with firemen from neighboring cities were seen entering Berlin.”
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For nearly two more years similar scenes would take place, most terribly in Dresden, until the majority of Germany’s cities had become deserts of rubble and hundreds of thousands of people had succumbed to the horrible types of death that the Nazis had so wantonly visited upon their victims:
We had hardly been in Cologne for two weeks. On September 27, 1944, I wanted to take my two small children, who were three and six … to the insurance company in the city to apply for the orphan’s pension, since my husband had been killed at the front.… A kindergarten teacher who knew me and the children, saw us and said “Don’t take the children into the city. There could be another air raid; they’re safer here.” I gave in and traveled to the city alone.… The air raid warning sounded while I was sitting in a streetcar.… All I could think about was my children. As soon as the all clear sounded I ran frantically back to … look for them.… I saw other children but I couldn’t find my own two.… Later that afternoon I heard that a whole group of people had been buried in a house … including children from the kindergarten.… My two children were pulled out dead. You could hardly see any injuries on them … I was in a state of total shock … I wanted to scream “You Nazis, you murderers!” A neighbor, who had only been released from a concentration camp a few days before grabbed my arm and pulled me aside. He said, “Do you want to get yourself arrested too?”
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The fear of arrest for any protest was very real. By 1942 many German university students had, in the course of their Labor Service duties and draft obligations, seen the terrible things happening on the Eastern Front and much more, and they were determined to resist in some way. Among these were a small group of Munich university students known as the White Rose.
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The members of this little ring printed up leaflets and managed to distribute them by mail across the south of Germany. But their passion overcame their caution when two of the principals, Hans and Sophie Scholl, decided to scatter leaflets from a balcony in the atrium of the University of Munich on February 18, 1943. Retribution was swift. By 5:00 p.m. on February 22, Hans, Sophie, and another colleague had been executed by guillotine after a brief show trial. Their work was carried on after their deaths by a few others, among them Hans Leipelt, who was a
Mischlinge
of the first degree—that is, he had two Jewish grandparents but was not a practicing Jew. Leipelt had been allowed to serve in the Wehrmacht early in the war, but by the fall of 1940 he had been given a “dishonorable” discharge and been publicly stripped of his insignia and decorations, which included the Iron Cross. A year later he was dismissed from the university; in 1942, his Jewish grandmother was sent to Theresienstadt, where she perished. He and other students at the University of Hamburg who were associated with this “flash quickly extinguished by the ubiquitous Gestapo and general fear” would also be systematically killed.
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On July 20, 1944, there would be a far bigger flash. On that day Colonel Claus Schenck Graf von Stauffenberg, part of an extensive plot, planted a bomb in the conference room where Hitler was being briefed on the Eastern Front situation. The Führer survived, but the conspirators did not. More than 5,000 people were arrested and some 200 were executed in short order. The retribution did not end with those directly involved, but was extended even to their grandchildren. The Gestapo was very thorough about tracking down these small relatives. The widow of Claus von Stauffenberg was arrested and sent with her six-month-old baby to a hospital in Potsdam. Her other children, aged four, six, eight, and ten, as well as two cousins, seven and five, were taken away to a Nazi Welfare Agency children’s home at Bad Sachsa in the Harz Mountains. The grandchildren of Ulrich Goerdeler, another conspirator, nine months and three years old, went there too, along with several others.
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Some were harder to find. Twenty-five-year-old Fey von Hassell, daughter of the conspirator Ulrich von Hassell, the former German ambassador to Italy, had married an Italian.
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In July 1944, she was living in her husband’s
villa near Venice with her two sons, Corrado and Roberto, aged four and two. Here she was arrested in August, briefly taken to an Italian jail, and then allowed to go home under house arrest. This was not too bad, but in late September she was informed that she and her children were to be taken to Germany and had twenty-four hours to prepare. Distraught family retainers stayed up all night knitting sweaters for the children, and the local cobbler made them shoes. To this day, Corrado remembers the arrival of the big black car that picked them up at 4:00 a.m., as “it was the first time I had ever been out after dark.”
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All three were taken first to a prison in Innsbruck and later to a hotel. The following day Fey was told that she had to go to the prison for questioning, and that the boys were to be sent, “temporarily,” to “a good children’s home.” Corrado, immediately afraid, “kept asking” if his mother was going away, but she was powerless:
Two SS “nurses” arrived, both large blond women without the slightest hint of gentleness. They inquired about the children’s habits but made no effort to be friendly with them. With the calmness that comes from icy fear, I put on their little coats and told Corradino as calmly as I could, “Mama will follow you very soon, but first you will go for a nice walk.” Robertino thought this was a wonderful idea and confidently took the nurse’s hand. But Corradino suddenly gave way to wild panic, flinging himself backward and howling crazily. He tried desperately to escape from the SS woman … tearing at the hand she had clamped around his little wrist.… I had to stand there like a statue, listening to Corradino’s wails growing fainter and fainter as he and Robertino were pulled down the stairs.
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The two tiny blond boys were taken to a children’s home outside Innsbruck, their names were changed to Vorhof, and they vanished into Himmler’s reservoir of “good blood” along with the other small children related to the conspirators. Their parents and older family members, all from highly distinguished German families, were rounded up and until the end of the war would be moved from one prison to another, along with other VIP prisoners such as Léon Blum, the former Premier of France. The prisons ranged from very nice hotels to Buchenwald, Stutthof, and Dachau. Treatment of this “privileged” group, though harsh, was, for motives known only to the SS (who perhaps hoped to use them as barter for Germans held by the Allies), marginally better than that of other concentration camp inmates. For the prisoners themselves who survived
typhus, hunger, and cold, as for so many other inmates, the worst torture was not knowing the fate of their children.
Undeterred by the many indicators that victory was no longer possible, in June 1943 the Nazi leadership had given orders to proceed with the organization of an SS–Hitler Youth combat division. Boys of seventeen and eighteen were to be recruited from a variety of sources, including the special War Preparation Camps (WEL). These camps were by now a major source of supply to the SS, which could not take boys through the regular draft. The WEL camps included within them youths from all the Nordic occupied countries, as well as
Volksdeutsche
from the East. Kept carefully segregated according to ethnic origin, they were trained by hardened SS veterans with little empathy for teenagers,
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who, as had been the case in the KLV evacuation camps, were left to run their own societies and correct one another. Brutality and all kinds of abuse were frequent. In one camp, boys who broke the unwritten rules had their heads shaved and a description of the offense painted on their bare scalps. When there were suicides, the leadership, apparently unconcerned, left the burial of the victims to their peers.
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Officers and NCOs for the Hitler Youth division would be provided from former HJ leaders in the Wehrmacht and remnants of the tough SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler division, which had been decimated in the USSR. Training was to take place in occupied Belgium, where, by August, 10,000 boys had been assembled, many of them well below the stipulated age and most unclear about what their future duties would be. There was a battalion of Dutch recruits who thought they were headed for the Eastern Front. Boys who had signed up for the aviation and naval programs of the Hitler Youth now suddenly found themselves in what was to be a Waffen-SS Panzer division. It was not very spiffy at first: there were not enough uniforms or weapons, much less tanks. But the officers, who introduced less-Prussian training methods and encouraged informality, were effective. The boys got superior food plus extra candy instead of the normal ration of cigarettes, which, to their chagrin, they were deemed too young to smoke. It was all very folksy and much like a big school outing: company commanders were even encouraged to keep in touch with the families of the teenaged recruits. By the spring of 1944, the division, now formally called the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend, was performing impressively in maneuvers. Hitler had high hopes for the young soldiers. In July 1943, Himmler had told the Führer that the average age of two other SS divisions, including officers, was eighteen. Hitler thought this was fine, noting approvingly that battle reports showed that “the youngsters who come from the HJ are fanatical fighters … some only sixteen years old fight more fanatically than their older comrades.”
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The boys would not let Hitler down. Sent into battle the morning after D-Day, they would continue to perform well through the long summer of 1944. Amazing the Allied commanders with their ferocity and refusal to surrender, they fought all across Normandy, where, under the grim black gravestones of the German military cemeteries, most of the original 10,000 boys now lie. In September, when the division retreated into Germany, its roster had been reduced to a reported 600.
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Wounded and decorated young Germans attend a ceremony honoring fallen colleagues
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(photo credit 14.2)
In October 1944, Hitler created a home guard known as the Volkssturm.
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All men aged sixteen to sixty were required to register, but as Germany was engulfed, the lower age limit dropped dramatically. Some recruits were so young when called up that their mothers had to take them
to the barracks. A boy of eight who had destroyed an American tank with a Panzerfaust (the German version of the bazooka) was found in an Allied POW enclosure after the war. Much of this “third wave” of the Volkssturm was created by simply mobilizing existing Land Service and Hitler Youth formations, which, of course, had long since been working on military projects. Among them were some 180 boys who were involved in the defense of the bridge at Remagen. Flak helper Heinz Schwartz, sixteen, who lived in a nearby village, was stationed at the eastern end. For days he had been watching exhausted Wehrmacht troops retreating across the span. On March 7, 1945, when American troops appeared on the far bank, he and other teenagers were ordered to destroy their ammunition and leave. Soon the bridge came under fire, and Heinz, wanting to see it blow up, hid in a railroad tunnel to await the big moment. But the bridge was not destroyed, and the young warrior barely managed to get out of the tunnel and “run home to my mother as fast as I could” before the Americans arrived.
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