After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (23 page)

Montgomery was now looking to provide administrative stability. His ADC, Charles Sweeney, wrote of the chaotic conditions they were facing, and particularly those in the liberated concentration camps:

Everybody is sick of this bloody war. Europe is in a ghastly mess. There are millions of homeless, sick and wounded people, soldiers of all nationalities, lone women and children wandering the roads. Many of them are starving. I never expected victory to be glorious – except in the light of history – but the human misery in Europe is something ghastly. The concentration camps we liberate are much too awful to be described. The people in them are no longer human beings: they are animals devoid of any self-respect – cowed, tortured and starved. I never believed it possible to reduce humans to such a state. It is quite beyond the power of any reasonable thinking person to imagine these conditions …

In the process, Montgomery had usurped arrangements that Eisenhower wanted to oversee himself. On the evening of 2 May, with a German surrender in the offing, General Freddie de Guingand, Montgomery’s chief of staff, communicated with his counterpart at SHAEF, General Walter Bedell Smith. De Guingand described the situation as follows: ‘It is reported that General-Admiral Friedeburg, said to be representing Keitel, is expected at TAC Army Group HQ on 3 May. It is not known on what basis he is going to negotiate.’ The following preliminary arrangement was made:

If negotiations brought up the issue of an overall surrender of German forces, or indeed of a surrender concerning anything outside the ‘tactical area’ of 21st Army Group, SHAEF would issue instructions accordingly, and the German negotiators would meet with Eisenhower’s representatives. Substantial territorial surrenders – and Denmark was specifically mentioned – were clearly defined as outside Montgomery’s remit. Eisenhower had already decided that if it became a ‘major matter’ he wanted it dealt with by SHAEF, and he would ‘bring the Russians into it’ – in other words, he wanted the surrender of Denmark to be witnessed by the Russian representative, just as the surrender of northern Italy and parts of Austria had been earlier that day.

General Eisenhower, trusting the Russians, wanted them to be represented over Denmark. But here the attitude of the British prime minister became important. Winston Churchill remained suspicious about Soviet intentions – and feared they still might attempt to seize the country. Montgomery’s drive to the Baltic on 2 May and his occupation of Lübeck and Wismar prevented a land advance by the Red Army. But Churchill began to imagine other scenarios – a seaborne invasion or even an airdrop of Russian paratroopers.

On 3 May Guy Liddell, the director of counter-espionage at MI5, had briefed Churchill. ‘We talked quite a lot about the Russians,’ he noted in his diary. Churchill was already alarmed. ‘He thinks they are going to present us with tremendous problems,’ Liddell added, ‘and he is anxious to get ahead.’ Liddell now saw an opportune moment to press his own concerns – believing that Russia wanted to build up a big navy, and control the narrows in the Mediterranean and the Baltic. Liddell then honed in on the Baltic, referring to intercepted German intelligence – albeit more than four years old – in which Nazi foreign minister Ribbentrop recalled Molotov stating (on his last visit to Berlin) that the control of Kattegat and Skagerrak was a crucial aim of Soviet foreign policy.

Churchill responded in kind. He told Guy Liddell that he had forgotten this – and found it extremely interesting, as he had been issuing strong warnings of his own about the urgency of getting to Lübeck and controlling the Kiel Canal. Liddell concluded: ‘Churchill had done this on the basis of reports that the Germans were desperately anxious for us to seal off Denmark, as they were expecting the Russians to drop parachutists in the area.’

With this in mind, Churchill pressed Eisenhower for Denmark to be included in the tactical surrender at Lüneburg Heath. ‘Call from PM,’ Kay Summersby noted. ‘He is much disturbed over the fact that the Russians are landing in Denmark. There is supposed to be a large communist group in the country.’ The Russians were not landing in Denmark, but Eisenhower eventually agreed. Montgomery was then able to secure Denmark for his PM, ahead of any advancing Russians. The price to be paid for this was the exclusion of the Soviet Union from the surrender ceremony.

Relations between Britain and the Soviet Union had suddenly and dramatically taken a turn for the worse. On 4 May Churchill found out that the sixteen Poles he and America regarded as legitimate representatives of a more inclusive Polish government had in fact been arrested by Russia and branded as saboteurs. Two aspects of this deeply concerned Churchill: the charge of sabotage itself, which he believed was a pretext by Stalin to muzzle political opposition, and the delay in revealing what had happened (the Poles had disappeared in mid March), which made the whole thing look even more suspicious.

Robert Boothby, in San Francisco as a journalist covering the conference, recalled the moment the Western Allies learnt the news: ‘One evening [4 May], Molotov blandly told Stettinius and Eden in the corridor of our hotel that sixteen members of the Polish government in Warsaw, who had gone to Moscow at the request of the American and British governments, were all in prison. I was immediately behind them – and they were visibly shaken.’

Michael Foot was another journalist in San Francisco. According to his report, the first inkling of the arrest of the Poles came ‘almost casually’, in a throwaway remark by Molotov at the end of an otherwise cordial dinner. ‘He could hardly have caused a greater sensation,’ Foot continued, ‘if he had upset the whole table and thrown the soup into Mr Stettinius’s smiling face.’

Michael Foot was sympathetic to the Soviet Union. But he was under no illusions about the effect this news would have on right-wing opinion in Britain and America: ‘The tragedy and the enigma,’ he commented, ‘is that the Soviet Union, which certainly appeared eager to play its full part in the world organization, has handed a weapon more powerful than any they themselves could fashion to the American enemies of international collaboration.’ Even from a left-wing perspective, Foot could find no justification for the way Russia had treated the Polish emissaries.

But Russia strongly countered such criticism. The following day Churchill received a fierce telegram from Stalin. The Soviet leader made it clear that if the British and Americans refused to accept the legitimacy of the Lublin government no further negotiation on Poland would be possible. The sixteen Poles were, in Stalin’s view, linked to efforts by the Polish Resistance Army to begin a campaign of sabotage against Russian military installations. Their arrest was entirely justified. The Western Allies and the Soviet Union were now drifting far apart.

With such alarming international developments, an equitable enforcement of the surrender at Lüneburg was all-important. But something rather different was taking place. The English text of the surrender agreement signed at Montgomery’s tactical headquarters contained a crucial clause. This clearly stated: ‘All German armed forces in Holland, northern Germany, Schleswig-Holstein and in Denmark to surrender unconditionally to the Commander-in-Chief 21st Army Group.’ But after talks between the British and German sides, a German text of the surrender was produced by the Dönitz government.

The Dönitz version – which was then widely circulated by the Flensburg regime – differed in a number of respects from the English one, which was supposedly the official text. Instead of an unconditional surrender, the German announcement spoke only of an ‘agreed truce between the British and German High Commands’. The phrase in the English version referring to ‘the surrender to include all naval ships in the named areas’ was revised in the German text to imply that only operations directed against Britain were meant; not those against the Soviet Union. And finally, according to the German version, the instrument of surrender did not apply to the area between the Bay of Kiel and the German–Danish border, where the Flensburg government of Dönitz was based.

In a supporting ordinance, announcing the decision, on 5 May, Field Marshal Keitel said bluntly: ‘When we lay down our weapons in North-West Germany, Denmark and Holland, we do so because the struggle against the Western Powers has become pointless. In the East however, the struggle continues in order that we save as many Germans as possible from Sovietization and slavery.’

Gottlob Bidermann, a German soldier in Courland, remembered that the agreement with Montgomery was portrayed as a truce with the West to allow soldiers and civilians to escape the Russians. In its aftermath, evacuation from the pocket was speeded up.

This worrying state of affairs played to a deep Russian fear that Britain, America and Germany might still negotiate a partial surrender, ending hostilities in the west but allowing fighting to continue in the east. On the evening of 5 May, the Red Army had captured the town of Zobten, 30 miles south-west of Breslau. Field Marshal Schörner now organised a counter-attack and regained it. It was the last German offensive in the war. The action had no real strategic significance – Army Group Centre was retreating westwards. But it made a powerful symbolic statement: the war in the east would go on. For how long remained to be seen.

SS Lieutenant Heini Knauer described the action:

On the night of 5 May, hellish fire from our artillery and flak rained down on the completely surprised Soviets. They had no longer expected this kind of firepower from us. Then at around 6.00am the artillery fell silent and the attack of our infantry on Zobten began. It came from three sides, from the assembly areas to the south, south-east and south-west of the town. The approach road looked ghastly. The Soviets suffered high casualties. Towards 11.00 am came the report: Zobten in our hands!

Soviet lieutenant Evgenny Moniushko was inside the town: ‘We had passed through most of Zobten but when we reached its southern outskirts we were stopped by the heavy fire of the “Fritzes” who had entrenched themselves in the last houses. Then, while we were trying to drive them out, other “Fritzes” appeared, attacking on our flanks and entering the town from the east and west. Before my very eyes a heavy machine gun crew, trying to capture a German position, was destroyed by a direct hit. We received the order to pull out of the town.’

Lüneburg Heath put Field Marshal Montgomery’s prestige above the security of the Grand Alliance. General de Guingand’s notes show that Monty was fascinated by the prisoner tally. The higher it rose, the more he would eclipse others: Field Marshal Alexander in Italy; his own chief, Eisenhower, at Rheims. To enlarge his haul, German armies that should have surrendered to the Red Army – including General Hasso von Manteuffel’s 3rd Panzer Army and General Kurt von Tippelkirsch’s 21st Army – were brought into the fold. German senior commanders, army staff, officers and men mostly surrendered to the British 21st Army Group – despite the field marshal’s protestations to the contrary at Lüneburg. Montgomery was prepared to accept German forces that had been fighting against the Russians. And whatever had actually been agreed between the two sides, an unconditional surrender that was then described as a truce would inevitably create problems.

After the cessation of hostilities on the evening of 4 May British troops were supposed to hold their positions. But on the morning of 5 May their special forces took possession of the German city of Kiel, 60 miles north of the halt line. The British gained possession of the dockyards and vital Walterwerke factory (with its technology for submarine propulsion systems) – relations with Russia deteriorated further.

At the beginning of May Major Tony Hibbert had been put in command of a T-Force (Target Force) instructed to seize the dockyards and factories of Kiel ahead of the Russians. T-Forces had been created by the Allied Supreme Command in the aftermath of the Normandy landings, to ‘identify, secure, guard and exploit valuable and special information including documents, equipment and persons of interest’. T-Force units were lightly armed and highly mobile. Major Hibbert had recruited some two hundred men from 5 Kings Regiment and 30 Assault Unit, who would accompany a further fifty scientists in jeeps and armoured cars. It is unclear whether the halt order after the Lüneburg surrender was disregarded or countermanded, but at 7.00 a.m. on 5 May the convoy headed off towards Kiel at speed.

The T-Force’s own log book recorded:

The drive from Bad Segeberg onwards was most eerie. We had left all signs of battle behind – there were no direction markers at the side of the roads, no traffic or sign of any traffic, no slit trenches and perhaps worst of all no white flags. One or two German soldiers, complete with kit, were struggling down the road, otherwise there were hardly any people about. Each wood that we passed might have contained the odd German platoon or company that had not yet received the ceasefire order. Our commander’s jeep driver saw several Germans dart into the woods as we went through – this may have accounted for the erratic speed of our convoy.

The German armed guards at the barracks we passed seemed as unconcerned as we pretended to be. The roads were thronged by displaced persons who had just been freed from their camps. They waved and cheered and at times almost blocked the road in their excitement at seeing British troops.

At 10.00 a.m. the T-Force reached Kiel. It was now 60 miles into enemy territory and out of all radio contact its with own forces. The log book continued: ‘It was a very queer experience to stand in the centre of Kiel on a wet Saturday morning and direct our mere handful of troops to their various targets. The civilians stared very hard at us – but we stared even harder when we saw that German soldiers, sailors, policemen and firemen were still armed.’

One of those civilians was Margaret Engel. She recalled the moment the British entered Kiel:

‘The downtown streets were deserted when a few vehicles approached over the Holsten Bridge and into the central square. They stopped directly in front of the Old Town Hall. I was struck by one thing. The British paused in their vehicle, relaxed a bit – as if they were sight-seeing – enjoyed a cigarette, then jumped from their car, ran up the town hall steps and demanded the surrender of the city!’