The Fall of Berlin 1945 (25 page)

The speed of Patton's advance had an unintended side-effect. The SS, in many cases aided by the local Volkssturm, carried out a number of massacres of concentration camp prisoners and forced labourers. At the Thekla factory, which manufactured aircraft wings three kilometres north-east of Leipzig, 300 prisoners were forced into an isolated building by the SS and Volkssturm auxiliaries. All windows were fastened, then the SS threw in incendiary bombs. Those who managed to break out of the building were machine-gunned. Three Frenchmen survived. Over 100 allied prisoners - mainly French political prisoners - were executed in the courtyard of Leipzig prison. And a column of 6,500 women of many nationalities from the HASAG group of factories two kilometres north-east of Leipzig were marched towards Dresden. Allied air reconnaissance sighted them along their route. Prisoners too weak to march had been shot by SS guards and rolled into the ditch beside the road. Striped blue and white concentration camp garments 'marked the route and the Calvary of these unfortunate women'.

In southern Germany, meanwhile, General Devers's Sixth Army Group - consisting of General Patch's Seventh Army and the French First Army under General de Lattre de Tassigny - was pushing across the Black Forest. Its left flank advanced into Swabia. After the capture of Karlsruhe, they moved towards Stuttgart. Eisenhower, still concerned about an Alpine Fortress, wanted the two armies to head south-eastwards for the area of Salzburg and meet up with Soviet forces in the Danube valley.

German civilians used to gaze in amazement at American troops. GIs sprawled in jeeps, smoking or chewing gum, bore no resemblance to the German image of a soldier. Their olive-painted vehicles, even their tanks, were labelled with girls' names. But some soldierly habits proved universal. Wehrmacht troops when retreating had looted shamelessly, and now the liberators had arrived.

Looting by Allied forces appears to have begun even before the German frontier was crossed. 'On the basis of findings made,' an American report on the Ardennes stated, 'it may unequivocally be stated that pillage of Belgian civilian property by US troops did in fact take place on a considerable scale.' There had apparently been a good deal of safe-blowing with explosives. As US forces advanced into central and southern Germany, American military police erected signs at the entry to villages, 'No speeding, no looting, no fraternizing', but they had little effect on all counts.

Further north, an officer with the Scots Guards, and later a judge, wrote that the codename for the crossing of the Rhine, Operation Plunder, was most appropriate. He described how the smashed windows of shops provided 'a looter's paradise'. 'There was not very much one could do beyond restricting loot to small articles. The tanks came off best as they could carry everything from typewriters to wireless sets . . . I was cursing my platoon for looting rather than house clearing when I discovered that I was wearing two pairs of captured binoculars myself!' Those acting independently, such as SAS teams, were able to be far more ambitious. One officer commented that 'Monty was very stuffy about looting'. Field Marshal Alexander had apparently been 'much more relaxed'. In one or two cases, some very fine jewellery was taken from German country houses at gunpoint in escapades which might even have shocked the legendary Raffles. One SAS troop later discovered a hoard of paintings accumulated by Göring's wife. The squadron commander insisted on having first pick himself, then let his officers make their choice. The canvases were removed from their stretchers, rolled up and slid into the mortar tubes.

Attitudes to the war varied between armies. Idealistic Americans and Canadians felt that they had a duty to rescue the old world, then return home as soon as possible. Their more cynical comrades took a close business interest in the black market. French regular officers in particular were focused on revenge for the humiliations of 1940 and on restoring national pride. In the British Army, however, a newly arrived officer might believe that he had come to take part in 'a life and death struggle for democracy and the freedom of the world', but found instead that the war was 'treated more as an incident in regimental history against a reasonably sporting opponent'. Nothing, needless to say, could have been further from the Russian view.

The sudden American advance in the centre aroused a mixture of suspicion and moral outrage in the Kremlin. The Soviet leadership, having complained so frequently of the Western Allies' slowness in starting a second front, was now appalled by the idea that they might reach Berlin first. The reality of Allied air power, with German troops fearing Typhoons and Mustangs far more than Shturmoviks, was completely overlooked in Moscow, perhaps deliberately. Stalin, never one to seek natural explanations, found it hard to swallow the fact that the Germans were bound to prefer to surrender to the Western Allies rather than to the Soviet Union, which promised and practised revenge on a huge scale.

'American tankists are enjoying excursions in the picturesque Harz mountains,' Ilya Ehrenburg wrote in
Krasnaya Zvezda
. The Germans were surrendering, he joked bitterly, 'with fanatical persistence'. They were behaving towards Americans, he claimed, as if they belonged to 'some neutral state'. The phrase which incensed Averell Harrirnan the most was his comment that the Americans were 'conquering with cameras'.

Stalin, perhaps judging others by himself, suspected that the Western Allies, hoping to reach Berlin first, would be tempted into a deal with Nazi factions. He seized on the contacts between Allen Dulles in Berne and SS-Obergruppenführer Wolff about a surrender in Italy as evidence of their double-dealing. Dulles had in fact also been contacted by a representative of Kaltenbrunner, who said that the SS wanted to launch a coup against the Nazi Party and the SS diehards who wished to continue the war. When this was done, the SS could 'arrange for an orderly transfer of administrative functions to the western powers'.

Kaltenbrunner's man also talked of opening the Western Front to the Americans and British, while German troops there were switched to the east — the exact scenario that Stalin feared. Stalin fortunately did not learn of this until later, but he had heard that American and British airborne forces were ready to drop on Berlin if Nazi power suddenly collapsed. Indeed, the 101st Airborne Division had been allocated Tempelhof aerodrome as their dropping zone, the 82nd Airborne would drop on Gatow airfield and the British on Oranienburg, but ever since the decision to halt on the Elbe the whole operation was in abeyance. In any case, such contingency plans had nothing to do with any peace-feelers from the Germans. Since their declaration at the Casablanca conference insisting on Germany's unconditional surrender, neither Roosevelt nor even Churchill had seriously considered any backstairs deal with Nazi leaders.

All of Roosevelt and Eisenhower's optimism in February and March that they could win Stalin's trust was proved to be misplaced during the first week of April. As already mentioned, Eisenhower, in his controversial message to Stalin of 28 March, had given a detailed and accurate outline of his plans yet received nothing in return. In fact, on 1 April, Stalin had deliberately duped him when he said that Berlin had lost its former strategic importance. At that time, Stalin claimed that the Soviet offensive would probably come in the second half of May (instead of the middle of April), that the Red Army would concentrate its attack further south to meet up with him, and that only 'secondary forces' would be sent against Berlin.

Eisenhower, unaware that he had been tricked, curtly informed Montgomery that Berlin had become 'nothing but a geographical location'. He also continued, with General Marshall's strong support, to reject Churchill's arguments that the Americans and British 'should shake hands with the Russians as far to the east as possible'. He simply could not accept Churchill's point that Berlin, while it remained under the German flag, was bound to be 'the most decisive point in Germany'. Eisenhower obstinately believed that the Leipzig-Dresden axis, splitting Germany in two, was more important, and he was convinced that Stalin thought so too.

Eisenhower also refused to be influenced by Stalin's trickery over Poland. Churchill's worst fears were proved correct when sixteen leaders of Polish democratic parties who had been invited to confer with Zhukov under cover of a safe-conduct were arrested at the end of March by the NKVD and bundled off to Moscow. Yet even though Eisenhower had fallen for his lies, Stalin was far from relaxed. Perhaps he believed, with true Stalinian paranoia, that Eisenhower might be playing a double bluff. In any case, he was clearly determined to make the Americans feel guilty. In an aggressive signal to Roosevelt on 7 April, Stalin again made much of the German overtures through Dulles in Switzerland. He also emphasized that the Red Army was facing far more German divisions than the Western Allies. '[The Germans] continue to fight savagely against the Russians for some unknown junction in Czechoslovakia which they need as much as a dead man needs poultices,' Stalin wrote to the President, 'but [they] surrender without any resistance such important towns in central Germany as Osnabruck, Mannheim and Kassel. Don't you agree that such behaviour is more than strange and incomprehensible?'

Ironically, Hitler's ill-judged decision to keep the Sixth SS Panzer Army down near Vienna when Berlin was being threatened seemed to support the theory of the Alpine Fortress. SHAEF's joint intelligence committee acknowledged on 10 April that 'there is no evidence to show that the strategy of the German high command is being conducted with a view to occupying eventually the so-called National Redoubt' But they then went on to say that the objective of the Redoubt was to dra the war into the next winter, in the hope that the Western Allies and the Soviet Union would fall out among themselves. Yet the same dav another report should have put paid to this extraordinarily deep-rooted idea. 'The interrogation of various German generals and senior officers recently captured reveals that none of them had heard of the National Redoubt. All of them consider such a plan to be "ridiculous and inapplicable".'

Neither Stalin nor Churchill realized that the American President was in no condition to read their telegrams, let alone answer them himself. On Good Friday, 30 March, Roosevelt had been taken down by train to Warm Springs, Georgia. It was his last journey alive. He had been carried to the waiting limousine barely conscious. Those who saw him were deeply shocked by his state. In less than two weeks Roosevelt would be dead and Harry Truman, his Vice-President, would become the next President of the United States.

On 11 April, the Americans reached Magdeburg. The next day they crossed the Elbe south of Dessau. Plans were drawn up on the projection that they could reach Berlin within forty-eight hours. This was not an improbable estimate. There were few SS units left on the western side of the capital.

On the same day, Germans were shaken by the ferocity of a French government radio station broadcasting from Cologne. '
Deutschland, dein Lebensraum ist jetzt dein Sterbensraum
' - 'Germany, your room to live is now your room to die.' It was the sort of remark which they would have expected of Ilya Ehrenburg.

Ehrenburg, on that day, published his last and most controversial article of the war in
Krasnaya Zvezda
. It was entitled '
Khvatit
' or 'Enough'. 'Germany is dying miserably, without pathos or dignity,' he wrote. 'Let us remember the pompous parades, the Sportpalast in Berlin, where Hitler used to roar that he was going to conquer the world. Where is he now? In what hole? He has led Germany to a precipice, and now he prefers not to show himself.' As far as Ehrenburg was concerned, 'Germany does not exist; there is only a colossal gang.'

This was the same article in which Ehrenburg bitterly compared German resistance in the east and the surrenders in the west. He evoked 'the terrible wounds of Russia' which the Western Allies did not want to know about. He then mentioned the handful of German atrocities in France, such as the massacre of Oradour. 'There are four such villages in France. And how many are there in Belorussia? Let me remind you about villages in the region of Leningrad . . .'

Ehrenburg's inflammatory rhetoric often did not accord with his own views. In his article, he implicitly condoned looting - 'Well, German women are losing fur coats and spoons that had been stolen' - when in Red Army parlance looting often implicitly included rape. Yet he had recently lectured officers at the Frunze military academy, criticizing Red Army looting and destruction in East Prussia and blaming it on the troops' 'extremely low' level of culture. His only reference to rape, however, was to say that Soviet soldiers 'were not refusing "the compliments" of German women'. Abakumov, the head of SMERSH, reported Ehrenburg's 'incorrect opinions' to Stalin, who regarded them as 'politically harmful'. This, combined with the similar report on East Prussia by Count von Einsiedel of the NKVD-controlled National Committee for a Free Germany, set in motion a train of events and discussions which triggered a major reappraisal of Soviet policy.

The tone and content of Ehrenburg's article on 12 April were no more bloodthirsty than previous diatribes, but to the writer's shock it was attacked from on high to signal a change in the Party line. An embittered Ehrenburg later recognized that his role as the scourge of the Germans made him the obvious symbolic sacrifice in the circumstances. The Soviet leadership, rather late in the day, had finally realized that the horror inspired by the Red Army's onslaught on the civilian population was increasing enemy resistance and would complicate the post-war Soviet occupation of Germany. In Ehrenburg's words, they wanted to undermine the enemy's will to fight on 'by promising immunity to the rank and file of those who had carried out Hitler's orders'. On 14 April, Georgy Aleksandrov, the main ideologist on the central commmittee and the chief of Soviet propaganda, replied in
Pravda
with an article entitled 'Comrade Ehrenburg Oversimplifies'. In a conspicuously important piece, which had no doubt been checked by Stalin if not virtually dictated by him, Aleksandrov rejected Ehrenburg's explanation of rapid surrender in the west and his depiction of Germany as 'only a colossal gang'. While some German officers 'fight for the cannibal regime, others throw bombs at Hitler and his clique [the July plotters] or persuade Germans to put down their weapons [General von Seydlitz and the League of German Officers]. The Gestapo hunt for opponents of the regime, and the appeals to Germans to denounce them proved that not all Germans were the same. It was the Nazi government which was desperate to call upon the idea of national unity. The very intensity of the appeals for national unity in fact proved how little unity there was.' Aleksandrov also quoted Stalin's remark, 'Hitlers come and go but Germany and the German people remain' - a slogan first coined as early as 23 February 1942 but only really used in 1945.