The German War (85 page)

Lore Ehrich set out for the Haff from Braunsberg on 12 February with her two small children, grateful to the SA men who forced German farmers at gunpoint to take refugees on to their carts. The Haff lay within range of Soviet artillery and the Red Air Force, and so their group, like most others, aimed to cross during the long winter night. The engineers of the 4th Army had reinforced a road over the ice, but within the first half-hour on the ice the colt ambling along beside their cart broke both legs and had to be left behind. Later on one of the two carthorses fell through a hole in the ice in the dark. Trembling with fear at losing his horse – and with it the ability to pull his remaining possessions – the farmer carefully cut the horse free with an axe. By now the ice had begun to thaw and the freezing surface water was gradually rising. In the light of widely spaced torches, the slow-moving column looked like a long funeral procession. As the cold enveloped them, creeping into their limbs, Lore Ehrich kept her thoughts focused on the farmer’s broad back in front of her. The morning light revealed the wreckage of trucks and cars that had broken down, their former passengers trudging across the ice on foot. Wounded soldiers lay on top of hay wagons, exposed to the wind and snow.

After a second night out on the frozen lagoon, Lore Ehrich’s two children fell quiet, exhausted by the cold. By the time they reached the small summer resort of Kahlberg, which lay on the sandspit of the Nehrung, they were suffering from the ‘highway illness’, chronic diarrhoea. Lore Ehrich went on a hopeless tour of the port and the District Party Leader’s office, which was besieged by frustrated and frightened refugees. Tormented by thirst even more than by hunger, they did not dare drink the water for fear of typhoid. The refugees inched further along the narrow, boggy road down the sandspit, with more carts falling into holes or overturning ahead of them. The whole column had to stop continually and wait for damaged wheels to be repaired and loads to be repacked. The soldiers they passed had no bread to give them. That first day they managed no more than 4 or 5 kilometres. Their cart, with its rubber wheels, two horses and solid roof, was one of the strongest, but the farmer’s fear for his horses was palpable. As they passed more wreckage they saw old people and mothers huddled with their young children, lying beside dead horses.
¹⁴

On their right lay the military road and the tree break of evergreens that protected them from the vicious wind off the Baltic. To their left lay the glittering ice of the Haff, over which occasional artillery shells flew. At one of the many long halts on the road, they were passed by a column of thousands of Red Army prisoners. Lore Ehrich saw many of them go up to the dead horses to cut off and eat strips of raw flesh. She was terrified that they might overpower their guards and fall on the trek. The Nehrung road eventually brought her to a huge assembly camp at Stutthof, where she left the farmer. Lore realised that no one was willing to queue on her behalf for the soup and bread that was distributed and she could not leave her sick children alone. Then her luggage and her handbag, containing all her jewellery, savings books and money, were stolen. Against the odds, thanks to the successive assistance of an SS officer, a policeman and a railway official, Lore Ehrich made it to Danzig. Here, too, connections helped. Acquaintances saw their names on the arrivals list, plucked Lore and her boys from the refugee camp and looked after them until they were well enough to board a ship for Denmark three weeks later.

Until the ice began to melt at the end of February, over 600,000 refugees ventured out from Heiligenbeil and Braunsberg towards Danzig. Some 10,000–12,000 fled along the Nehrung in the other direction, heading eastwards to Neutief, where the lagoon opened on to the sea. There they had to abandon their horses, carts and most of their belongings and make the short crossing to the Samland peninsula and the port of Pillau, where the German Navy continued to rescue civilians long after Gauleiter Koch had fled by ship from there.
¹⁵

On 1 February, Liselotte Purper received a telegram to say that her husband had been wounded and was waiting for transport from Pillau. Kurt Orgel had greeted the start of the Soviet offensive with equanimity, mistaking it at first for a small, local counter-attack. Standing outside his dugout smoking his pipe as he watched the Red Air Force bomb their regimental headquarters, he exuded confidence that they could hold the Memel bridgehead. The sight of female Red Army prisoners had once again rekindled the old hope that the Soviets were finally running out of reserves. Only after the Soviet breakthrough to the coast near Elbing did Kurt Orgel admit that he had underrated the scale of the offensive and ask whether the leadership had been taken by surprise too. Even now, he found words to reassure Liselotte. The failed Ardennes offensive had at least protected Germany from simultaneous attacks from east and west, he told her – ‘I believe that could have been the end’. Now, they just had to hold on till ‘new weapons’ came, ‘and I can tell you I am delighted at the confident trust which governs the front! Despite everything!’ On 24 January, as his unit was retreating towards the East Prussian coast with the temperature falling to −13°C, Kurt was wounded in both buttocks and the right thigh.
¹⁶

On 12 February, Kurt managed to scrawl a brief note to Liselotte, telling her that, for the last week, he had been on a hospital ship off the Pomeranian coastline near the island of Rügen. The next day he was able to tell her more. Despite the dreadful transport across the Baltic, he was confident that his flesh wounds would heal in two to three months and was looking forward to spending that time with her. ‘Let’s hope all goes well. Our star has looked after us once more,’ he assured her. On 14 February, the hospital ship reached Copenhagen. Kurt admitted that during the journey his wounds had become infected and he had arrived at the naval hospital reduced to ‘skin and bones’. In Copenhagen the food ‘is quite excellent, only it’s of no use to me because I have no appetite. Instead, mostly a high fever.’ His restless mind worried that Liselotte could not visit him in Denmark when he needed her most; their reunion would have to wait until he was well enough to return to Germany.

Liselotte’s letters to him described the trouble brewing with her neighbours over who should give up a room to accommodate some of the refugees pouring in from the west; she refused to vacate Kurt’s room. On 22 February, Liselotte received his letter from Rügen and could see in the awkward scrawl how much effort it had cost him to write the few lines to her – ‘My one, my love!’ She began writing a reply. In Copenhagen, she promised, he would have the ‘calm and order’ he needed to recover. Reaching across the distance from the quiet country estate at Osterburg, she told him to concentrate on eating enough, ‘so that I don’t have to bruise myself against your hard bones in our future love-making’. Then she paused to answer the door, leaving her unfinished letter on the table. A telegram had arrived: ‘Captain Orgel died on 19.2.45 in Copenhagen.’
¹⁷

Even before she knew Kurt was dead, Liselotte had lost her customary self-confidence. She dated it back to a delayed reaction to raids on Berlin in November 1943. ‘Since then,’ she had explained to Kurt, ‘I know that everything can be shaken . . . Does harm only come to others? Why should I not be hit by bombs? Only because I do not wish it, because I am full of the greatest vitality? Did the thousands of people who were hit not have “self-confidence” too?’ Quoting Goethe ‘as saying something like, “Only he who conquers the fear of death has completely won life”’, she tried to buoy herself up; yet the fear remained. ‘Against the devilish thunder from the air,’ she confessed, ‘I feel unarmed. My self-confidence deserts me and I often stand there ashamed in front of all my friends and acquaintances, who get through terror attack on terror attack without being seriously disturbed, or hurrying to escape it. They are firmly convinced that they will emerge unscathed.’ Both the solitary, gnawing fear which Liselotte observed in herself and the matter-of-fact coping she saw in others were increasingly evident among other Berliners, both the result of their long schooling in air raids.
¹⁸

On 3 February, the capital endured its heaviest raid of the war, leaving 3,000 dead. As Ursula von Kardorff went to check on her editorial colleagues afterwards, she watched the bombed-out emerge from clouds of swirling dust. She glimpsed their grey, drawn faces and bodies bowed under the weight of their possessions in the light of the fires on Potsdamer Platz, before they disappeared again into the dust clouds. Yet, even now, there were those who repeated the old slogan: ‘“Holding out”, the most senseless of all words,’ Kardorff fumed at the end of that long day. ‘Well, they will hold out until they are all dead, there is no other salvation.’ Her fellow journalist Margret Boveri would not have agreed. With her angular features and small stature, Boveri stood out in the editorial offices for her direct gaze, sensible shoes and lack of make-up. She never went anywhere without her canvas bread bag, in which she carried her most important documents and possessions – which included that rarity, an intact light bulb. Like Kardorff, she too went to the editorial offices at Tempelhof, which
Das Reich
shared with the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung,
determined to make sure that the next issue of the paper appeared without errors and on time. Having chosen to return to Berlin ten months before, Boveri was determined to hold out and positively relished the heightened feeling of being alive, watching the air raids at night from her balcony.

According to military reports on civilian morale in the capital, Berliners were similarly divided. Two well-dressed ladies were observed on a street in Zehlendorf arguing about whether or not they had voted for the Nazis in 1933, as if this should decide their lot in the event of defeat. Some Berliners were prepared to fight to the ‘last drop of blood to stop the Russians’, while others spread pessimistic rumours that the government had failed to take up a British and American offer to sign a separate peace and join the battle against the Soviets. Still, everyone was ready to point the finger at groups of foreign workers and, even worse, foreign soldiers lounging around in public and talking loudly in foreign languages.
¹⁹

On 13, 14 and 15 February 1945, Dresden was attacked. Twenty-five thousand people died in the inferno. Victor Klemperer had spent the earlier part of 13 February delivering deportation notices to the handful of Jews in privileged mixed marriages who were still living in the city. As the full-scale alarm sounded, one of the condemned women in their cramped ‘Jews’ house’ in the city centre exclaimed bitterly, ‘If only they would smash everything up!’ Then, as the humming of the planes grew louder and the lights went out, they knelt on the cellar floor with their heads underneath the chairs. A window was blasted open, exposing the burning city and the gusts of a strong wind. Victor and Eva Klemperer were separated during the second raid, which set their house ablaze. He followed the trail of refugees clambering up through the public gardens – forbidden to Jews – towards the cooler air on the Brühl terrace. Wearing a woollen blanket over his rucksack and clutching a grey bag with his precious manuscripts and Eva’s jewellery, Klemperer spent the rest of the night watching the city centre burn. Some buildings glowed red, others silvery white. From 40 kilometres away, a small German girl was quite bewitched by ‘that theatre’, riveted by the ‘blood red’ of the sky, while ‘the city itself looked like a drop of white-hot iron. And into this light fell “Christmas trees” of all colours.’
²⁰

Victor Klemperer watched, too dazed to take it in. He accepted the gift of a napkin for his wounded face from another Dresden Jew and listened as a young Dutchman, clutching the waistband of his trousers, told his tale of escape from police custody. Further along the terrace, in the first grey light of winter dawn Victor and Eva found each other. She cut his Jewish star off with her pocket knife. Reassured that the Police Headquarters and all the Gestapo files inside it had burned and knowing what Jews with a star risked in the wake of such a raid, the couple became bombed-out Germans like everyone else. Slowly they joined the throngs of people heading for the banks of the Elbe. Chronicling his own state of shock, the inveterate diarist noted how a corpse looked just like a bundle of clothes, a severed hand like ‘a model made of wax such as one sees in barbers’ shop windows’. Later an ambulance man dispensed eye-drops, wiping the dirt out of Klemperer’s eye. The couple weathered the succeeding raids in the catacomb-like cellars of the Albertinum, where doctors operated on the wounded while soldiers and ambulance men came and went, bringing in more and more people on stretchers. Packets of sandwiches finally arrived from the National Socialist People’s Welfare. Then the lights gave out and in the candlelight the men cranked the generator, which powered the lighting and the fans, casting huge shadows on the walls. The next day, 15 February, the Klemperers joined the evacuees who were taken by truck to the Luftwaffe base at Klotzsche.

A week later, on 22 February, Lisa de Boor and her husband sat out a raid in the cellar of their house in Marburg, while she fretted about the fate of their daughter Monika. They had just heard that Monika had been moved from the prison in Cottbus to Leipzig in preparation for her trial before the People’s Court. But Monika’s case was delayed again after the presiding judge, Roland Freisler, was killed by a falling beam in his own courtroom during the 3 February raid on Berlin. Meanwhile on the Baltic front the de Boors’ son Anton had been wounded in the pelvis, stomach and thighs. After enduring two operations, he was suffering from pus and fever, exacerbated no doubt by poor sanitation and lack of antibiotics. Unlike Kurt Orgel, he would survive. The air raid on Marburg hit the station and a military hospital nearby. Many of the patients, Lisa de Boor heard, were killed as they sheltered in slit trenches. They took in an architect friend whose house had burned down in an earlier raid in Cologne and whose eldest son had been killed aged 18; the second son was reported missing in Italy and the third was now listed as missing on the western front. Meanwhile, the thunder of the guns in the west was becoming more audible.
²¹