Armageddon (80 page)

Only fifteen men of Baum’s liberating column returned safely to the Allied lines, along with twenty-five Hammelburg prisoners who made their own way across country. The remainder were killed or captured. Lieutenant Robert Harrison of the 101st Airborne, one of the Hammelburg PoWs who had been captured in the Bulge, set out to walk to the American lines. Back before D-Day, Harrison had endeared himself to his men when their pay did not come through. He advanced them $35 apiece out of his own pocket to tide them over. Many were killed before they could repay him. Now, Harrison covered fifty-eight miles before reaching a river, where Germans guarded the bridge. He tried to swim across and was shot in the water. It was just a month before the end of the war.

It is extraordinary that Patton was never subjected to disciplinary action for this act of egomania unmitigated by any possible military advantage. “I feel terrible,” the general wrote to his wife on 6 April, “I tried hard to save him [John Waters] and I may be the cause of his death.” When he heard that his son-in-law had been badly wounded as a result of his initiative, he burst into tears. He attempted to impose blanket censorship on the raid, but inevitably the story leaked to the press. Marshall, in Washington, was outraged. Eisenhower excused Patton: “[He] is a problem child, but he is a great fighting leader in pursuit and exploitation.” True enough, yet Patton’s Hammelburg action seems far less excusable than the “slapping incidents” in Sicily, for which he had been dismissed from his command. The episode must be cited in any assessment of Patton’s claims to greatness. It is impossible to imagine any other senior participant in the Allied campaign committing such a selfish, murderous folly or being pardoned for the loss of life which it incurred. At a moment when all Europe was on its knees, when Germany was a maelstrom of suffering humanity, an Allied army commander committed an act which argued that he cared only for his own.

THE DAMNED

W
ESTERN PRISONERS
often caught sight of Russian PoWs in neighbouring compounds. German guards distributed Red Cross parcels and sometimes a thin gruel of humanity among the British and Americans, while presiding over unspeakable excesses to Russians a few hundred yards away. The Germans acknowledged the Western allies as fellow inhabitants of the same planet. They denied this privilege to Stalin’s people. An American PoW at Thjorn was appalled to watch through the wire as Russian amputees shuffled through thick snow with the stumps of their legs bound with sacking. Thousands died there, as in every Russian camp conducted by the Nazis. They were buried in a common grave beyond the gates. “Every day a sort of tumbril rattled past outside the entrance with its load of naked bodies which were tipped unceremoniously into a hole.” A Russian described how, when a man died during the night, they tried to prop him up in his bed until after
Appel
, so that the living might draw his rations. In Stalag XIB, Corporal Denis Thomas watched a German guard stroll over to a Russian boiling potatoes in the neighbouring compound and casually kick his mess-tin into the dirt.

Every American and British prisoner knew that he could consider himself fortunate compared with the Russians. In the course of the war over 5.7 million Red Army soldiers were captured by the Germans, of whom 3.3 million—58 per cent—died. Around 600,000 were summarily killed on or near the battlefield. The balance died in the camps of Germany and Poland. The saga of one of these men, Mikhail Petrovich Devyataev, is among the most extraordinary of the Second World War. Devyataev was the thirteenth child of a Moldovian blacksmith. His family suffered harrowing privations in the Civil War and its aftermath. In his childhood, an aeroplane made a forced landing near his home. From that moment, he was determined to become a fighter pilot, and in 1941 he did so: “I fell in love with flying and everything about it.” He was twenty-seven and had flown some 200 sorties when one day in July 1944 his Yak-7 was jumped by German FW-190s. He lost consciousness as he parachuted from his stricken aircraft and woke to find a German soldier standing over him. His leg was broken, and he had been badly burned. He spent some months in the primitive hospital of his PoW camp, and retained a lasting gratitude to British prisoners in the next compound, who were generous with food and even found a few drugs for him. En route to a new camp near Königsberg at the end of 1944, he exchanged identities with a dead Red Army soldier, because Soviet pilots were subject to exceptionally brutal German treatment. At the beginning of 1945, he was shipped to Peenemünde, the island on the Baltic coast where Hitler’s “wonder weapons” were developed and tested.

His destination was a slave-labour camp. Here, with an icy wind blowing off the sea, some 4,000 Russians were employed repairing runways and clearing unexploded British bombs in conditions of pitiless brutality. All the prisoners were starving by inches. None had ever escaped. They were beaten constantly, often fatally. One man who tried to swim to freedom was brought back and torn to pieces by guard dogs in front of the prisoners. Devyataev saw a bailed-out British bomber crewman killed by the dogs in a lake where his parachute fell. Most of the work gangs were sooner or later blown up by bombs they were moving. The crematorium fires never cooled.

By the beginning of February 1945, the Germans were in a visibly dangerous mood. Devyataev concluded that the prisoners had no hope of surviving the war if they stayed where they were. They would either starve or be shot. He told the nine other men in his gang that they must escape. “How?” they demanded. “I’ll fly you out,” he said. It took some days to convince them that he could do it, for they knew nothing of his credentials as a pilot. At last, in the early-morning darkness of 8 February, as their gang worked on the runway, Ivan Krivonogov struck their guard a savage, fatal blow with his crowbar. Petyor Kutergun hastily stripped off the man’s uniform and himself put it on. The camp dogs, which they feared desperately, had recently been taken away for training to attack tanks with explosive charges. Their absence made escape seem marginally easier. The work gang, apparently escorted by a guard, stumbled a mile down the airstrip to the commandant’s personal Heinkel. They opened the rear door and scrambled into the fuselage. Devyataev found and opened the battery box. It was empty. He slumped in despair.

It took them an agonizing quarter of an hour to find a battery trolley and connect it. More precious minutes slipped away before the pilot was able to start the engines. Daylight had come. The Russian now had to taxi past a line of other aircraft, on which German mechanics were already working. He tore off his striped jacket, thinking that the sight of a pilot half-naked in mid-winter would alert the Germans less readily than a man in the grimly familiar garb of a prisoner. The Luftwaffe men indeed gazed curiously at the Heinkel’s cockpit, but did not intervene. Devyataev was struggling with the unfamiliar controls. He got Krivonogov to sit beside him, pushing buttons and pulling levers at his direction. The other eight men huddled in the fuselage. The plane swung on to the runway. The pilot gunned the engines and released the brakes. As they lifted into the sky, they began to croak the words of the “Internationale.” They lurched rather than flew through the sky. Devyataev, who had never flown a twin-engined aircraft, could not discover how to raise the undercarriage. They were scarcely in the air before he put the plane into a steep, almost fatal dive. He weighed only ninety pounds and lacked the strength to handle the flap lever. The entire cluster of desperate men threw their weight on to it, just in time to make the plane pull out of the dive. After an hour airborne north-eastwards over the Baltic, they turned over the coast and saw great columns of fugitives fleeing before the Red Army. Flak streaked up at them, slightly damaging a wing.

Devyataev was desperately cold, and got Krivonogov to pull his striped coat back over his shoulders: “My whole being was concentrated upon flying the plane.” They followed the coast northwards. He risked losing height, and suddenly saw a bridge. There were Russian soldiers on it. He brought the plane in to land amid renewed firing from the ground. As the Heinkel touched the frozen snow, the undercarriage collapsed. They thrashed through the mush to a halt. A jumbled mass of bodies was thrown forward into the cockpit by the impact. But all were alive and uninjured. They scrambled clumsily out of the aircraft, walked a few yards in their wooden clogs, then found themselves so weak that they were obliged to clamber back into the fuselage. They had no idea where they were. After thirty minutes, a wary Russian cavalry patrol arrived from Sixty-first Army. The escapers explained themselves to the incredulous soldiers: “You got away from a rocket centre?” For some hours, they were treated as miracle men. Their rescuers hastened to feed, clothe and congratulate them.

Then the NKVD arrived. The prisoners were questioned relentlessly, hour upon hour and then day after day. At last, the interrogators gave their verdict: “What you claim to have done is completely impossible. This is obviously a German plot.” The nine other men of Devyataev’s work gang were fed for a few weeks, than drafted to penal battalions. Five died in the last weeks of the war, advancing into German minefields at the crossing of the Oder. The pilot himself spent the next year in solitary confinement. Once, he was escorted to Peenemünde, to retell his story on the captured rocket site. Then he was sent back to his cell. He was told nothing of VE-Day when it came, and on 20 May was shipped to the former Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen near Berlin. A year later, following the testimony of captured Germans and Soviet survivors of the slave-labour camp, the NKVD grudgingly conceded that there might be something in Devyataev’s story. He was released and demobilized. With his papers stamped as a former PoW, however, it was months before he could find work of any kind. He endured a life of grinding poverty: “Even friends with whom I had been at school turned their backs on me . . . the sun began to shine for me again only when Stalin died.” In 1957, the truth of his astounding exploit was at last officially recognized. Mikhail Devyataev was made a Hero of the Soviet Union.

M
ANY
J
EWS,
before they were shipped to concentration camps, passed months or years imprisoned and half starved within the ghettos of their own native cities. “Boredom is usually associated with the idle rich,” wrote Jerzy Herszburg laconically, about his time in the Lodz ghetto, “it also existed in the ghetto and even in the camps.” In July 1944, he and his fellow inmates were assembled for shipment to Auschwitz. “It may be difficult to comprehend . . . but the gathering of the Jews took place in an almost friendly atmosphere.” They had all been enormously heartened by the Allied landing in Normandy. They believed that the war must end soon. Jewish police marshalled their charges at the station with carefully labelled suitcases. Only a few inmates mistrusted the atmosphere of goodwill, hid themselves—and survived. Herszburg, a sixteen-year-old, argued afterwards that at least the ghastly delusions of the passengers lent a spurious optimism to their last days. His own uncle, who had shown great kindness to him in the ghetto, rode the train to Auschwitz “in peace and hope.”

Arrival at the camp shattered the fantasy. Their luggage was abandoned by the tracks, never to be seen again. The Kapos—“trusties” recruited from among prisoners—herded them into the camp, where more than half were gassed immediately. Once heads had been shaved, the survivors, who retained only their own belts and shoes, laughed nervously at each other about the dramatic change in their appearances. Their first hours were spent “in a strange mixture of very long waits and sudden bursts of activity.” Herszburg was among those sent to the nearby camp at Birkenau, thrown into a barracks among a thousand prisoners in transit to either work camps or gas chambers Throughout his time in the camp, he suffered desperately from loneliness. Eventually he made a few friends. But, one by one, they died.

In his progress through the Nazi concentration-camp system during the ten months that followed, it is striking that Herszburg thought Auschwitz–Birkenau nowhere near as bad as some of its rivals, such as Belsen. “We remained reasonably clean. It was not a working camp. We grew suntanned, and did not suffer from lack of sleep. I was seldom hit, and seldom spoken to. I once saw the body of a man who had electrocuted himself hanging on the wire, but there were few suicides—we were far too preoccupied with trying to survive. I saw no hangings or shootings. I never saw anyone die.” This was part of the demented genius of the Birkenau system: the inmates were maintained in a state of docility, because death took place beyond their vision. Yet every inmate knew the meaning of the “selections” which took place early in the morning or late at night. Sometimes, men were chosen on the basis of visible health, once by passing them under a horizontal bar: those who touched it lived, those too short or too stooped died. Sometimes the men selected chose to delude themselves that they were leaving Birkenau to work in Germany, though in reality they died. On other occasions, men were indeed sent to labour camps. After a selection, “we seemed able to erase it from our minds . . . and to carry on in the usual camp routine.” Herszburg saw no examples of mental breakdown, “perhaps because we were not called upon to make any decisions.”

After ten weeks in Birkenau, he was sent with a work detail to Brunswick. The journey, which provoked a brief spasm of hope, lasted two days. On arrival, however, this proved the worst camp in which he lived. The prisoners worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, in an auto factory. Many died of starvation. “Some experts on concentration camps assure me that I must have had a very strong will to live. Simply because I did not die, I have some difficulty in proving them wrong. In spite of their knowledge, I feel that their theory . . . is wrong—I was at my lowest then.” He noted that most of those who survived were short and stocky like himself. The only skills which he identified in himself was those of “absolute obedience to our masters and the ability to go without food for fairly long periods of time.” The only relief, the only glimmer of hope, in these cruel days came with the air raids: “The sound of sirens always filled me with joy, as it did all other prisoners . . . The brave pilots . . . probably never realised how much hope and joy they gave us in the winter of 1944.”