Armageddon (88 page)

Even before they reached the concentration camps, men of the liberating armies were disgusted by their encounters with foreign prisoners of the Nazis, human skeletons scavenging across the countryside of Germany. “The countryfolk and their houses and farms are well cared for,” wrote a British officer. “Only their slaves look miserably underfed and clothed.” An escaped Canadian pilot approached 2nd Fife & Forfar Yeomanry one day, carrying a slave labourer he had met, who was dressed in two sacks and so weak that he could only mutter: “
Polski
.” British medics could not get food into him. The man lay moaning on a stretcher until he was placed in an ambulance. This was already occupied by a captured German officer who had lost a foot. The German spat upon the Pole. The British dumped the German in a ditch.

Outside the town of Büdingen near Frankfurt, a handful of SS mounted a last-ditch resistance, quickly suppressed by the Americans. The local Nazi officials fled. The grandfather of Helmut Lott, a teenage evacuee living in the town, returned home bearing a Party official’s brown tunic and breeches as mementoes. His grandmother took one look and threw the uniform on the fire, demanding of her husband: “Are you crazy?” There was shelling during the night, which caused the fearful inhabitants to spend the night in their cellars. Next morning, however, a large crowd turned out on the streets to greet their occupiers respectfully. “Everybody was wearing their Sunday best, to demonstrate the whiteness of their consciences,” observed Lott drily. The first vehicle that appeared in the main street, however, was not a tank but a red sports car full of laughing GIs. The people of Büdingen found this ridiculous, and faintly humiliating. “We thought: what is this?” said Lott. “These people are supposed to be occupying us, but they look as if they are on an excursion to the seaside.”

In their turn, the Allies were bewildered by German behaviour. The whole nation seemed in denial of any responsibility for the war, and for the crimes of the Nazis. “The attitude of civilians was really rather typical of the master race,” observed a report by the 2nd Battalion, Warwickshire Regiment. “They seemed to expect us to treat them in the politest possible manner. You would think from their behaviour that they had won this war. They only started to show any respect at all when we made it clear that we meant business.” Some Americans were likewise bewildered to find that the Germans in towns they seized, while not hostile, were resentful of Allied interference in their normal lives. Even while firing continued, some enemy civilians voiced protests. “It sure makes you feel silly,” observed Lieutenant Darrigo of Novotan Heights, Connecticut, “crouching or dashing around trying to get a shot at a sniper, while a civilian peddles by on his bike and a woman and child just tag along watching.”

Private Denis Christian of 6 Commando was bemused to be reprimanded by the owner of the house in which he was billeted for failing to clean the bath. His unit’s German interpreter subjected the British to a lecture about “how Germany had only lost the war because it lacked oil.” A teenage girl whom 13 Para met in Graven not only spoke good English, but assured them severely that the Wehrmacht would soon retake the area. The Führer would then punish the Allies for daring to invade the fatherland. The English soldiers respected the girl’s courage, but were horrified by the depth of Nazi indoctrination which the encounter revealed. The battalion’s colonel, Peter Luard, announced flatly that the battalion would take no SS prisoners. When two Waffen SS indeed fell into their hands, an officer simply took them behind a tank and shot them. “With hindsight, it seemed very shocking,” said Lieutenant Peter Downward. “Yet the SS were so truculent.”

“A woman of a house in which I was billeted entered the room, looked at the wreckage and burst into tears with the words ‘
Es ist alles kaputt und es war so schön
,’ ” Captain David Chudleigh reported to his division headquarters early in April, in disgust rather than sympathy.

Even after I had carefully explained to her what the war was all about, and that what she was suffering was little in comparison with what she and her kind had inflicted on the world for more than five years, the only reaction was a flood of tears. I do not believe her horizons were any broader for my efforts. A few minutes later this woman pointed out the body of a German soldier lying in the garden, and asked me to take it away and bury it, but not in her garden. Considering that she was a woman (of a sort), her indifference to the fate of one of her countrymen was astonishing. A long-term educational programme is obviously needed here.

Sergeant Robert Brookshire of the 609th Tank Destroyer Battalion was riding in a jeep flagged down by a tearful German woman waving a handkerchief. She was a teacher and told the soldiers desperately: “Some of my pupils, young boys, are up this hill in a cabin, armed with rifles, and have vowed that they will fire at Americans until they are killed. Will you please not shoot them, but come with me and try to convince them to surrender?” Between them, the German teacher and the American NCO induced the sheepish fourteen-year-olds to file out of the building without their weapons. Brookshire was always a reluctant killer. About the same time, he suddenly found himself confronted by six Germans. He froze, thinking his end had come. Then the Germans laid down their weapons. “Why didn’t you kill them?” asked a buddy. Brookshire said: “Because I somehow knew that if I did, I’d never see my young daughter again.”

As the U.S. 743rd Tank Battalion was mopping up near Lemgo, it came upon a German general outside a large house, at the head of 500 men, “lined up at attention, guns piled in one part of the courtyard, equipment piled neatly in another.” The American unit suffered its last fatal casualty of the war in the battle for Magdeburg on 17 April. A faust hit a Sherman turret, killing the gunner and wounding the commander and loader. It was fired by a German woman. Aschaffenburg earned a reputation as one of very few towns—Hameln was another—where local civilians fought energetically against Third Army. “There was some of the hardest fighting of the war in that town,” recorded an American officer. “Hitler had said that every man, woman and child should fight . . . this town was the only place where that was really carried out. Everybody fought the Americans.” In the ruins of Aschaffenburg, men of XV Corps found the bodies of boys of twelve and thirteen, who had chosen to die fighting for their Führer.

In Friesoythe on 12 April, it was reported that the commanding officer of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders of Canada had been shot in the back by a civilian. The Canadian divisional commander, Christopher Vokes, was already angered by other incidents in which civilians had fired upon his men. He ordered the entire town bulldozed in retribution. Only when this process had been completed was it learned that in reality the Argylls’ colonel had been killed by a German soldier with a Schmeisser.

The 21st Army Group faced spasms of hard fighting. Second Fife & Forfar Yeomanry fought one of hundreds of similar tiny actions on 5 April, at Glissen. Lieutenant Frank Fuller was leading the battalion, and as they approached the town could see little sign of enemy defences. “No washing,” his operator reported laconically over the radio. Then they spotted enemy infantry in ditches. The tanks pulled off the road, making way for the infantry to move forward. A faust hit Fuller’s tank. The young officer bailed out. He was promptly hit by machine-gun fire, as was his gunner. His shaken wireless-operator came on the air and announced that he was remaining in the turret. The rest of the crew were dead. After an hour of fighting, the surviving Germans raised their hands. They proved to be very young members of 12th SS Panzer, who were taken to the rear. The British always hated the Hitler Jugend Division. “Fanaticism is nasty,” said Captain “Dim” Robbins. “They were absolute sods—incredibly arrogant, even as prisoners,” in the words of Corporal Patrick Hennessy. On this occasion, however, a British officer observed bitterly that the young prisoners were “blubbering.” Their action had changed nothing, save to delay the advance an hour or so and to kill a young officer and three men. A comrade noticed Fuller’s body, “just recognizable,” lying in a ditch as he drove past. He remembered that the lieutenant was newly married.

Two days later, Major William Steel-Brownlie drove his tank round the corner of a German village at 30 m.p.h., to ram full-tilt a large chest-of-drawers which a German family was struggling to remove from a burning house. “Clothing and underwear were caught up and whirled round in the tracks.” His machine-gunner hosed a handful of German defenders fleeing the scene: “Was it cruel to batter retreating troops? There was always the thought that they might be reorganized and waiting for us next day or the day after, as well as thoughts about Frank Fuller and many like him. Not far away was another family rescuing furniture from their burning home, but in the circumstances one’s reaction was simply: so what?”

“Once we got into Germany, we could do anything, knock down anything,” said Captain David Fraser. “There were very few inhibitions. We were told: ‘If you need to burn a village—burn it.’ ” On 12 April, the British director of military intelligence reported on the mood of civilians in the path of the armies: “Germans are becoming increasingly bitter at bombing of targets of negligible military value, and caution us against appointment of Jewish burgomeisters which [they say] is a pyschological mistake and which militates against co-operation of German civilian population.”

As the advance gathered pace, at last for some men exhilaration overcame fear. Charles Farrell, a Scots Guards squadron commander, thought as he drove his Sherman across Germany of Christopher Marlowe’s line: “Is it not passing brave to be a king and ride in triumph through Persepolis?” At Rathau on the Aller, the CO of 5th Royal Tanks advanced on foot to take a cautious look into the town before his tanks moved in. He encountered one of his own officers, a huge Welshman named John Gwilliam who later captained his country’s rugby team, “carrying a small German soldier by the scruff of his neck, not unlike a cat with a mouse.” The colonel said: “Why not shoot him?” Gwilliam replied in his mighty Welsh voice: “Oh no, sir.
Much
too small.”

A British tank officer glimpsed some tiny figures beside a wood half a mile away, from which a German half-track had just emerged. He fired a few rounds of high explosive from his gun, then followed up with a long burst of Besa machine-gun fire. Trees caught fire. He saw survivors start to move towards the tanks, hands held high. “To my horror, they were civilians,” wrote William Steel-Brownlie, “followed by a horse and cart on which were piled all kinds of household goods. They were children, a boy and a girl, holding hands and running as hard as they could over the rough ploughed earth. They came right up to the tank, looked up at me, and the small boy said in English: ‘You have killed my father.’ There was nothing I could say.”

On 14 April, the Canadians at last secured the Dutch town of Arnhem, which had caused such bitter grief to the Allies six months earlier. But First Canadian Army was still making slow headway against the German opposition among the bleakly familiar rivers and canals of Holland. Montgomery, pushing north-eastwards to cut off Denmark from the Russians, was suddenly urged by SHAEF to hasten. On 8 April, the British XII Corps got into a fight around Lüneburg which persisted for four days. Ritchie’s men finally reached the Elbe on 19 April, and Hamburg only on the 23rd. They gazed in awe at the vast port city, reduced to rubble by Allied bombing. After a series of bitter actions, XXX Corps finally secured Bremen on the 26th. Eisenhower offered no congratulations to 21st Army Group. He believed, surely rightly, that the British did not try very hard in this last phase of the campaign. “In Germany it was a swan—a slow swan,” said Lieutenant Roy Dixon. “Nobody wanted to get killed at the last minute, so nobody wanted to take any unnecessary risks.” Bill Deedes said: “War is a very fatiguing experience. It works relentlessly upon the nervous system. By the end, we were all incredibly tired. In Hanover, I found that I no longer had the energy to discipline my soldiers for getting drunk.”

On the evening of 14 April, the British approached the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. Guards hung out white sheets from their towers in surrender. Belsen’s prisoners saw, and rejoiced as they watched the night sky lit by artillery fire. Viktor Mamontov, the eighteen-year-old from Leningrad who had survived two years in some of the most terrible camps in Germany, believed himself to be dying. He was now among those who stumbled out of the barracks in ecstasy. The guards on the watchtowers opened fire on the prisoners. Mamontov fell, hit in the leg. When he saw the Germans fire again and again upon wounded men who moved, he lay motionless. He remained where he had been hit hour after hour: “Until the very last moment, I thought I would die.” At last next morning the British tanks came. For hours, the prisoners had to tend each other, until medical teams arrived. Those who could still walk smashed open the food store. Mamontov contracted typhus, and spent the next six months in hospital. He lost all his hair, and weighed just eighty-seven pounds. He was disgusted that the British executed only seven of Belsen’s German staff.

America’s legendary broadcaster Ed Murrow contrasted the healthy, well-fed Germans he saw ploughing the nearby fields with the human skeletons of Buchenwald liberated by the U.S. Third Army. He described the heaped corpses, the paralysis of the near-dead. “I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it,” said the great reporter. “For most of it I have no words.” R. W. Thompson of the
Sunday Times
wrote from Belsen: “When you gaze upon the human body distorted beyond recognition, and come to the point where there is literally no difference between the living and the dead, you are beyond shocking because you are beyond normal standards.” At Dachau, in an outburst of spontaneous rage the American liberators summarily executed twenty-one guards, including seventeen SS.

The British buried 23,000 bodies on the site of Belsen, and evacuated a further 28,900 people, of whom 2,006 were already dead. One of the doctors who went to the camp in British uniform was by birth a German Jew. This man, Dr. A. R. Horwell, wrote to his wife: “The phrase ‘that’s what we are fighting for’ never had so deep meaning for me . . .” Horwell watched each mass grave being filled in, and a sign placed on it “Grave No. 8 1000 bodies. 30 April 1945.” A few days later, in a British officers’ mess, he was deeply moved to find himself among a group “where there is no sign of discrimination, and where the Jewish padres were the most honoured guests. It made me realise it again: it
was
worthwhile to be in this war, it
is
an honour and distinction to wear this uniform.” His wife had expressed her fears for his safety among the German people. He responded: “darling love, I must restrain myself, for fear to become too emotional. I can’t help it, darling; it is a great thing to be back here after all these years—and after all these immense sufferings inflicted upon us and our people, to be here with the victorious army . . . I am very happy tonight, and sad at the same time. Happy, because I have survived, one of the few to see this day; and sad, because I am of the few—so few.” “At Belsen, I felt a curious elation,” said Dr. David Tibbs. “Looking at all these terrible things, I thought: ‘Here is the justification for this war, for all the lives we have lost, for everything we’ve been through.’ ”