The Second World War (124 page)

As the discussion moved on to the Balkans, Churchill produced what he called his ‘naughty’ document which later became known as the ‘percentage agreement’. It was a list of countries with a suggested division between Soviet and western Allied influence.

Romania: Russia 90%; the others 10%.

Greece: Britain (in accord with USA) 90%; Russia 10%.

Yugoslavia: 50% 50%

Hungary: 50% 50%

Bulgaria: Russia 75%; the others 25%.

Stalin gazed at the paper for some time, then increased the Soviet proportion for Bulgaria to ‘90%’, and with his famous blue pencil put a tick in the top left corner. He pushed it back across the table to Churchill. Churchill rather coyly suggested that it might be ‘
thought rather cynical
if it seemed that we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner?’ Should they not burn the paper?

‘
No, you keep it
,’ Stalin replied casually. Churchill folded it and put it in his pocket.

The prime minister invited Stalin to dinner at the British embassy, and, to the genuine surprise of Kremlin officials, he accepted. It was the first time that the Vozhd had ever visited a foreign embassy. Central Europe and the Balkans were not far from anybody’s thoughts at the dinner. During one of the courses, the guests could hear the thundering artillery salute to celebrate the capture of Szeged in Hungary. In his speech after dinner, Churchill returned to the subject of Poland: ‘
Britain went to war
to preserve Poland’s freedom and independence,’ he said. ‘The British people have a sense of moral responsibility with regard to the Polish people and their spiritual values. It is also important that Poland is a Catholic country. We cannot allow internal developments there to complicate our relations with the Vatican.’

‘
And how many divisions
does the Pope have?’ Stalin broke in. This single, now famous, interjection demonstrated that what Stalin had, he held. The Red Army’s occupation would lead automatically to the imposition of a government ‘friendly to the Soviet Union’. Astonishingly Churchill, in spite of all his visceral anti-Bolshevism, still thought that the trip had been a great success and that Stalin respected and perhaps even liked
him. His self-delusion could at times match that of Roosevelt.

Churchill, however, at least had obtained Stalin’s agreement to intervene in Greece to save it from ‘
the flood of Bolshevism
’, as he later claimed. Lieutenant General Ronald Scobie’s III Corps was put on standby to forestall any attempt by the Communist-dominated EAM-ELAS to seize power as soon as the Germans withdrew. Churchill, who was excessively well disposed towards the Greek royal family, intended to have a government in Athens which was friendly to Great Britain.

Although Field Marshal Brooke had discussed the military situation with General Aleksei Antonov of the Stavka and others, the subject of defeating the Wehrmacht had hardly come up between leaders either in Quebec or in Moscow. The Reich was under attack from both sides. To complement the Westwall, an Ostwall was ordered. In East Prussia most of the adult population, male and female, were dragooned by the Gauleiter Erich Koch and his Nazi Party officials into digging defences. The army was not consulted, and most of these earthworks were entirely useless.

On 5 October, the Red Army attacked towards Memel. It took two days before evacuation orders were issued to the civilian population, but then they were countermanded. Koch did not like the idea of evacuating civilians and Hitler supported him, because it conveyed a defeatist message to the rest of the Reich. Panic ensued and many women and children were cut off in Memel as a result. A number drowned in the River Niemen, trying to escape the burning and looted town.

On 16 October the Stavka sent General Chernyakhovsky’s 3rd Belorus-sian Front on an attack into East Prussia, between Ebenrode and Goldap. Guderian sent panzer reinforcements to the threatened front to push the Red Army back. In the wake of the Soviet retreat, an atrocity was discovered. A number of the women and girls in the village of Nemmersdorf had been raped and murdered and the bodies of some victims were supposedly found crucified on barn doors. Goebbels rushed in photographers. Brimming with righteous indignation, he was not going to miss the opportunity of showing the German people why they had to fight to the end. In the short term, it appears that his efforts were counter-productive. But when the real invasion of East Prussia began three months later, the terrible images published in the Nazi press resurfaced in people’s minds.

Even before the events at Nemmersdorf, many women were afraid of what was to come. Despite the ignorance professed in post-war years, a large part of the civilian population had a good idea of the horrors committed on the eastern front by their own side. And as the Red Army advanced on the Reich, they imagined that its revenge would be terrible. ‘
You know the Russians
really are coming in our direction,’ wrote a young mother in
September, ‘so I am not going to wait, instead I will choose to kill myself and the children.’

The announcement by Himmler on 18 October of a mass militia levy to be called the Volkssturm inspired some with a determination to resist, but it was a depressing idea for most. Their armament would be pathetic–a variety of old rifles captured from different armies early in the war, and the Panzerfaust shoulder-launched anti-tank grenades. And since all available men of military age had already been called up, the Volkssturm’s ranks would be filled with old men and young boys. It was soon known as the ‘Eintopf’ or casserole, because it consisted of ‘old meat and green vegetables’. Since the government offered no uniform apart from an armband, many doubted that they would be treated as lawful combatants, especially after the Wehrmacht’s attitude to partisans on the eastern front. Goebbels later organized a huge parade for the newsreel cameras in Berlin at which those called up had to make their oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. Veterans of the eastern front did not know whether to laugh or to cry at the spectacle.

Hitler, convinced that Patton’s Third Army posed the greatest threat, ordered that the bulk of his panzer divisions should be deployed in the Saar. Commanded by Generaloberst Hasso von Manteuffel, they made up a new Fifth Panzer Army, which cannot have been an encouraging title since the two previous ones had been destroyed. Rundstedt, guessing that the Americans would concentrate first on Aachen, sent as many infantry divisions there as he could muster.

The US First Army commanded by Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges had advanced on Aachen, with a strong sense of the fact that it was at last on German territory. Just a few hundred metres across the border it seized a nineteenth-century Gothic castle in the ‘
Bismarckian style
’, with heavy iron accoutrements and massive furniture. This belonged to the nephew of Hitler’s former commander-in-chief, Generalfeldmarschall von Brauchitsch. The Australian correspondent Godfrey Blunden described this first battle on German soil in the west. ‘
It was fought in brilliant
sunshine beneath a cloudless blue sky where the Piper Cub spotting planes hovered like kites. It was fought over very beautiful landscape, across green fields with neat hedgerows, gently wooded hills and small villages with needle-spired churches.’

But now that Model had manned the Westwall, German resistance was fierce. The Allies regretted that the supply crisis of early September had halted them just short of it. A staff officer at First Army headquarters remarked: ‘
At that time
I could have walked through it with my dog and my daughter.’ Now they found field defences dug by civilian forced labour, cottages turned into pillboxes and concrete bunkers with iron
doors. Sherman tanks were called up to deal with them, using armour-piercing ammunition. As soon as American infantry platoons had cleared a bunker with grenades and sometimes flamethrowers, they called in engineers who welded the doors shut with oxy-acetylene torches to prevent other German soldiers slipping back to reoccupy them.

On 12 October Hodges issued an ultimatum demanding unconditional surrender, otherwise the city of Aachen would be flattened by bombing and shelling. Refugees had told officers that between five and ten thousand civilians had refused to leave, despite Nazi Party orders. Hitler had decreed that the capital of Charlemagne and the German emperors should be defended to the last. Hodges’s First Army surrounded Aachen, and now the encircling troops faced fierce German counter-attacks, a situ ation which produced some misleading and rather confused comparisons to Stalingrad. The German counter-attacks were smashed with relative ease by American artillery concentrations. Many of their guns were firing German shells which they had captured in France.

German defenders included a mixture of infantry, panzergrenadiers, Luftwaffe, SS, marine infantry and Hitler Jugend volunteers. The damage to buildings was considerable, and the Rathaus or town hall was totally destroyed. With rubble and smashed glass in the streets, empty windows and trailing telephone wires, Aachen took on the
‘malevolent appearance of a defeated city
’. Fortunately, the American artillery and P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bomber pilots managed to avoid the great cathedral, as they had been ordered to.

House-to-house-fighting continued pitilessly during October. Starting at the top of a house, the Americans blasted their way through to the next building using a bazooka. It was too dangerous to try the street. The 30th Division suffered such a high rate of casualties that a replacement private who arrived at the start of the battle found himself a sergeant in charge of a platoon three weeks later.

Aachen was a prosperous, largely middle-class city. American soldiers began to search apartments with hefty furniture, portraits of Hindenburg and the Kaiser, Meerschaum pipes, ornamental beer steins and posed photographs of university duelling fraternities. But German soldiers booby-trapped building with trip wires and charges, which the Americans called ‘bundling babies’. ‘
I don’t get it
,’ said a GI angrily. ‘They know they most likely will get killed. How come they don’t give up?’ GIs threw a grenade into practically every room before they entered, because German defenders concealed themselves ready to shoot back. Several of them, having just shot an American in the back, jumped up with their arms raised to surrender, as if they were playing a child’s game. Not surprisingly, a number of prisoners were roughly handled.

On one occasion four German boys, the youngest of whom was eight, began firing with abandoned rifles at an American field-gun crew. A patrol went out to investigate the source of the shots. ‘
The American patrol leader
was so incensed with the children’s action that he slapped the eldest with his hand and afterward reported back that the boy stood at attention and took the slap as though he had been a soldier.’

The American military authorities managed to evacuate the German civilians from cellars and air-raid shelters as the fighting continued. They noticed that, after all the Nazi propaganda, they nervously eyed the black American truck drivers who took them off to a holding camp. Civilians were screened for Nazi Party members, but it was an almost impossible task. Most of them complained of the way they had been treated by the German troops defending the city, because they had refused to leave when told. Some were deserters who had managed to obtain civilian clothes. A Jeep outside Aachen was ambushed, and this raised fears following rumours of a Nazi guerrilla resistance codenamed Werwolf.

The US military authorities also found themselves struggling to cope with around 3,000 Polish and Russian forced labourers, including ‘
large blank-faced women
in old ragged skirts with kerchiefs wrapped around their heads and carrying cloth bundles’. Some of the men had already started to attack and threaten German householders with knives to obtain food and sometimes loot. They had much to avenge, but MPs rounded up between seven and eight hundred offenders and kept them in a stockade. It was a small foretaste of the complications to come with an estimated eight million displaced persons in Germany.

The Nazi regime had no intention of allowing indiscipline to reign in any form. Ever since the failed July plot, which greatly increased the power of Martin Bormann, the Nazi Party secretary, Goebbels and Himmler, Nazi ideology was increasingly imposed on the Wehrmacht. This made any subsequent attempt to remove Hitler impossible. Beyond symbols, such as replacing the military salute with the ‘German greeting’, the number of NSFOs or National Socialist leadership officers was increased. Soldiers and officers found behind the front without authorization to retreat were far more likely to be shot, and staff officers were searched by SS guards when entering Führer headquarters.

Increased repression also began in Soviet ranks. To make up for its huge losses, the Red Army was forcibly recruiting Ukrainians, Belorussians, Poles and men from the three Baltic states, which were once again under Soviet control. ‘
Lithuanians hate us
even more than Poles do,’ a Red Army soldier wrote home on 11 October, ‘and we pay them back in the same manner.’ These recently inducted soldiers were inevitably the most
likely to desert. ‘
The Special Detachment
[SMERSh] was keeping an eye on me as I was the son of a purged man,’ a sergeant explained later. ‘We had a lot of Asians in my unit, who often ran away, either to the rear or to the Germans. Once an entire group defected. After that we, the Russians, were told to keep an eye on the Uzbeks. I was a sergeant then, and the political officer told me: you will pay with your life if anyone in your section defects. They could easily have shot me. Once a Belorussian escaped. They caught him and returned him to the unit. The man from the Special Detachment said to him: if you are going to fight properly we will hush this affair up. But he escaped again and again was caught. He was hanged. Not shot, but hanged as a deserter. We were lined up in a forest ride. A truck appeared with a gallows mounted on it. The CheKa [NKVD] man read out the order: “To be executed for treason to the Motherland”. The man was hanged, and then the CheKa man also shot him.’