Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (14 page)

SOME PARTS OF HOLLAND
were already free. The Rhine town of Arnhem, so bitterly contested in September 1944, had finally been liberated in the middle of April. Canadian troops pushing through it had discovered a ghost town, because the Germans had forced its ninety thousand inhabitants to leave immediately after the Allied withdrawal in 1944. The Germans had looted their homes as soon as they had gone, keeping the valuables for themselves and sending all the clothing back to Germany for the use of civilians bombed out of their houses.

But the Dutch had come flooding back, once there was no chance of the Germans returning. They had been overjoyed to see the Canadians, who hadn’t arrived a moment too soon. Like everyone else in Holland, the population around Arnhem had been half-starved, forced to fry tulip bulbs for food and make soup out of nettle leaves. Very few of the babies born to them in the previous twelve months had survived to see the spring. They had died of malnutrition, while their mothers had watched in despair, powerless to intervene.

Walter Cronkite, a United Press reporter who had parachuted into Arnhem in 1944, had returned to Holland with the Canadians to follow their advance. He shared the Canadians’ concern at what they saw as they pressed forward:

What little food there was, the German army took. We found the Dutch near starvation. They had been reduced to eating tulip bulbs. Their clothes hung on their gaunt forms. They looked like children in their parents’ clothing.
8

Food was so scarce that Baron Aernoud van Heemstra’s family, in their country home just outside Arnhem, had had nothing at all to eat on Christmas Day that winter. The baron’s fifteen-year-old granddaughter, Audrey Hepburn-Ruston, had been so weak from hunger that she had had trouble climbing the stairs to her room. Sick with jaundice, weighing only ninety pounds, her legs and feet swollen from edema, she had lived for months close to death, waiting, like the rest of Holland, for the Allies to arrive and bring the ordeal to an end.

Audrey Hepburn had been living with her mother in their own house in Arnhem, until the Germans evicted them. Her mother was a Dutch aristocrat, but her father was British, a descendant of James Hepburn, husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. Audrey’s parents had been Fascists before the war, living in Britain and supporting Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirt movement, even to the extent of meeting Hitler on a fact-finding trip to Germany. But their divorce had been followed by her father’s arrest and internment under British wartime regulations. Rather than stay in England and be bombed, Audrey’s mother had taken her home to Holland in order to sit out the war in a neutral country. It was a decision she had come to regret after the Germans invaded in 1940.

Audrey Hepburn had suffered badly during the war. Despite his earlier Fascist leanings, her interned father had never been a traitor to Britain. Her mother’s family were no friends of the Germans, either. The van Heemstras had Jewish blood, several generations back, and had been obliged to accommodate the Kaiser in their castle at Doorn when he sought asylum after the Great War. They had later had to sell the castle to him against their wishes.

Audrey had seen enough of the Germans during the war to last her forever. The same age as Anne Frank in Amsterdam, she had watched Jews being rounded up, many of them refugees from Germany, and transported to the holding camp at Westerbork for onward transition to Auschwitz. She had been a helpless witness as her own neighbors were herded into trucks and taken away:

I’d go to the station with my mother to take a train and I’d see cattle trucks filled with Jews … families with little children, with babies, herded into meat wagons—trains of big wooden vans with just a little slat open at the top and all those faces peering out. On the platform, soldiers herding more Jewish families with their poor little bundles and small children. They would separate them, saying “The men go there and the women go there.” Then they would take the babies and put them in another van. We did not yet know that they were going to their death. We’d been told they were going to be taken to special camps.
9

Audrey’s own uncle had been executed by the Germans, shot in reprisal for a sabotage attack by the Resistance. She herself had lived in fear of being kidnapped and taken to a military brothel, as so many other girls had been. She had indeed been picked up once by the Wehrmacht, who were looking for women to work in their kitchens, but had escaped immediately, running away and remaining hidden indoors for the next few weeks.

She had also worked for the Resistance, tripping past German sentries with messages concealed in her shoe. During Operation Market Garden, the Allies’ attempt to force a passage across the Rhine at Arnhem, she had made contact with a British paratrooper stranded in the woods and put him in touch with Resistance members in the town. With so many friendly troops around, the Dutch had assumed that liberation was at hand, only to be bitterly disappointed when the Allies withdrew and the Germans evicted them from their homes in retaliation. Audrey and her mother had gone to her grandfather’s large house at Velp, three miles from Arnhem, but others had had nowhere to go at such short notice. Audrey had watched them with horror:

I still feel sick when I remember the scenes. It was human misery at its starkest: masses of refugees on the move, some carrying their dead babies, born on the roadside, hundreds collapsing of hunger … 90,000 people looking for a place to live. We took in forty for a while, but there was literally nothing to eat, so they had to move on.
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The situation had worsened as winter arrived. Audrey’s mother advised her to drink plenty of water to make herself feel full, and to lie in bed to conserve energy. So many Dutch people had starved to death by the spring of 1945 that there weren’t enough coffins to bury them all. And then one day, in the middle of April, the moment they had all been waiting for had arrived at last:

We were in our cellar, where we’d been for weeks. Our area was being liberated practically house to house, and there was lots of shooting and shelling from over the river and constant bombing: explosions going on all night … Once in a while you’d go up and see how much of your house was left, and then you’d go back under again. Then early in the morning all of a sudden there was total silence. Everybody said, “My God, now what’s happening?” We listened for a while, and strangely enough, I thought I could hear voices and some singing—and I smelt English cigarettes.
11

Audrey and her family crept to the front door. The house was surrounded by British soldiers with guns at the ready. Audrey screamed with delight. Speaking in a gentle English voice, so different from the shouting of the Germans that they were all used to, the NCO in charge explained that they had come to collect a German radio transmitter that was stationed in the house.

“We’re sorry to disturb you,” he added.

“Go right on disturbing us,” Audrey told them cheerfully. She and her family didn’t mind a bit.

9

DACHAU

WHILE THE BRITISH WERE CLEANING
up at Belsen and the RAF dropping food over Holland, the Americans were advancing into Bavaria. After all the fighting that had gone before, they were beginning to enjoy themselves at last as German resistance crumbled and village after village surrendered to them without a fight.

Desperately short of men and equipment, the German army was in retreat all along the line. The retreat was led by the Nazis: Gauleiters and high party officials fleeing with their families and as much loot as they could carry, hoping to slip across the border into Switzerland or else hide anonymously in some country place until the danger had passed and they could reemerge after a few months with a new identity and total amnesia about the past. Nazi officials had never hesitated to throw their weight around during the good years, bullying their own people almost as much as they bullied the rest of Europe. They were a lot more subdued as they joined the columns of refugees fleeing the American advance. No longer did they hoot at everyone else to get out of the way, forcing ordinary people off the road while they roared past in their staff cars. The Nazis rarely had the fuel, for one thing. And the people might have turned on them, for another.

Many Nazis had their womenfolk with them, wives and mistresses who had done well out of the war years and were bedecked with fur and jewelry, often looted from occupied countries. Diamonds that had been swallowed by Jews just before they were taken away, to be recovered later and bartered for a few more days of life, had been swallowed again as their new owners became fugitives in their turn. Nazi wives were often fatter than other German women, because they had eaten better during the war. This had proved to be a disadvantage when the Russians came, because the Russians preferred women with flesh on them. Nazi wives were often the first to be raped, an irony not lost on other women who had had to go without while the Nazis continued to enjoy the best of whatever was available.

Resistance to the Nazis was growing apace as their regime began to collapse. Germans who had never found the courage before were finding it now as the Nazis shed their uniforms and the Americans appeared on the horizon. Some of the resisters were genuinely anti-Nazi, but others were merely fed up with the war, not impressed by rumors of a proposed last stand in the mountains around Berchtesgaden, where all Germans would be expected to fight to the death in defense of their Führer. Many were simply opportunistic, seeing which way the wind blew and hurrying to establish their anti-Nazi credentials before the war ended. It could surely do them no harm to be in charge of their town or village when the Americans arrived, demonstrating that they had overthrown the Nazis of their own accord, without help from anyone else.

Accordingly, many small towns and villages sported a prominent display of white flags when the Americans appeared, sheets and pillowcases hanging from upstairs windows as the occupants put up their hands and offered no resistance to the invaders. The Americans encouraged them by sending burgomasters ahead from villages already captured to make it clear to the inhabitants that only a mass display of white flags would save their village from destruction. With so much firepower at the Allies’ disposal, the Germans had no reason to doubt it. They swiftly got the message and surrendered without a fight.

The Americans bowled straight through if they had no reason to stop, racing from one village to the next, across some of the prettiest countryside they had ever seen. After the horrors of the Normandy bocage and winter in the Ardennes, it was good to sit at the wheel of a Jeep in the Bavarian spring, with no one shooting at them and the sun glinting off the Alps in the distance. Like the Russians in the east, the Americans kept asking themselves why the Germans had wanted to invade so many other countries, when their own was so rich and beautiful. To farm boys from Idaho and Kentucky, it made no sense at all.

The Americans were on their way to Munich. It was the last great city in southern Germany that hadn’t already fallen to them. The city was particularly important because it was the birthplace of Nazism: “the cradle of the beast,” as General Eisenhower liked to call it. At the rate they were going, the Americans were scheduled to reach the outskirts either that evening or very early next morning.

After Munich, they would continue southeast, toward Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s private retreat in the mountains near the old border with Austria. Hitler hadn’t been seen in public for weeks, so there was every chance he might be holed up in Berchtesgaden somewhere, just waiting for the Americans to come dig him out. More than one GI nursed a fantasy of being the man who did exactly that, dragging the Führer from his hiding place and parading him in front of the world’s cameras while millions cheered.

First, though, the Americans had another task. A dozen miles north of Munich lay the little town of Dachau. There was a concentration camp at Dachau, the first the Nazis had ever built. It was in a dreadful mess, according to reports reaching the front-line troops. Thousands had already died of typhus, and the remainder were due to be killed that day, executed in cold blood before the Americans could arrive to save them. The Americans knew all about Dachau and had been planning to begin relief operations in due course. But the reports of imminent mass murder galvanized them into action. They went that way at once.

They were held up by sniper fire as they advanced, then by a blown bridge over a railway line. By midmorning, however, their tanks had found other ways forward and were fast approaching Dachau, aiming to secure the town first before turning their attention to the camp on the outskirts.

The Germans in Dachau were of two minds about how to respond. Civilians in the town were all for raising the white flag, but had been threatened with severe reprisals by their newly appointed burgomaster … just before he fled. The military commander had already withdrawn his headquarters across the river, effectively surrendering half the town to the Americans.

The Americans advanced cautiously and were in the town square sometime before midday. From there, their tanks set off for the Amper Bridge that led across the river toward the camp on the outskirts.

The Germans put up a token resistance, blowing the bridge just as the first tank was about to cross. They killed several of their own troops in the process, but didn’t delay the Americans for long. The railway bridge remained intact, allowing the infantry to flood across. By early afternoon, one company of Americans was securing the town of Dachau, while another headed along the railway line toward the camp, its huts and barbed-wire fencing a kilometer away behind the trees.

The rail’s main line led to Munich, with a spur branching off toward the camp. Following it along, the Americans came to a row of rail wagons abandoned at the entrance to the camp. There were thirty-nine of them, freight cars normally used for transporting coal or cattle. Moving closer, the Americans saw to their horror that each one was packed full of dead prisoners, all in pitiful condition. Their bodies, at least five hundred in all and perhaps as many as two thousand, had been lying there for two days. Estimates on their number varied because no one had the stomach for an accurate count. A Red Cross man reckoned five hundred, but
Time
magazine’s Sidney Olson counted fifty-three bodies in one car and sixty-four in another, which suggested a lot more in total.