Cruel World (92 page)

One upper-class German woman, who had been allowed to stay in her house by two soldiers billeted there, reacted as follows to the American
GIs’ passionate feelings at the revelations of the death camps. It was not an unusual response:

In both East and West it was the children who, in the first days of the invasion, fared best at the hands of the Allied conquerors. American GIs threw bread, packages of cheese and crackers, chocolates, and cigarettes to them from their advancing tanks. The ban on American fraternization with German children, nowhere observed by the soldiers, was, of necessity, lifted at General Eisenhower’s suggestion on June 11.
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The Russians had a soft spot for children too. Even the most horrific accounts of Red Army actions are interrupted by reports of extraordinary kindnesses toward young people. To the surprise of many Hitler Youth boys, the enemy, when first encountered, did not treat them as Goebbels’s propaganda had led them to expect. Allied troops in general felt pity for the malnourished youngsters in man-sized uniforms and huge helmets, who often burst into tears when faced with capture and death. Sixteen-year-old Lothar Loewe, fighting in Berlin, was amazed when Russian soldiers,
after, predictably, taking his ring and watch, “pressed two packs of cigarettes” into his hand and then took him to a Red Army field hospital, where his wounds were treated and he was fed. For Loewe, “the image of the Soviet sub-humans I had carried with me” collapsed:

American troops, perhaps unaware that eighty or ninety HJ boys had been killed, and many more wounded, fighting against them in Nuremberg, cut off the bottoms of the oversized uniform pants the young boys were wearing and laughingly told them, “Go home to your mother.”
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Other Allied units, moving along at great speed during the combat phase, simply put the HJ boys to work. Walker Hancock, assigned to protect the cathedral at Aachen from the artillery fire still being exchanged by the armies, tracked down the HJ group that had been doing fire duty on the ancient building’s roof, and ordered them back to their posts, but this time in civilian clothes. The frightened boys, who had clearly thought they were being arrested, were instead given passes and a month’s supply of food by the U.S. Army, and proudly obeyed.
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As they moved into the fallen Reich, members of all the Allied armies collected young “mascots” without much thought about the children’s origins. American GIs, violating all regulations, successfully smuggled a nine-year-old Italian boy back to Boston, where his adoption became a cause célèbre. Other boys attached themselves to the troops in Germany, who not only dressed them in miniature uniforms, sometimes complete with sidearms, but also provided them with PX cards and plied them with cigarettes, food, and candy. The soldiers encouraged the children to pretend that they were Americans and built up their hopes of “going home” to the United States by teaching them English and coaching them on Americanisms. These deceptions were easily revealed, and the sudden demobilizations of their mentors left many of the mascots abandoned and defiant. For these “invariably … interesting and attractive” boys, who were “usually precocious, pathetically self-sufficient, bold, aggressive, and demanding, as they had been thoroughly spoiled by their units,” a special school was eventually established under the auspices of the YMCA in order to “de-mascot” them.
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Hitler Youth soldiers taken prisoner by the U.S. Army
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(photo credit 16.1)

The treatment of German child soldiers was not always so gentle. The revelation of the truth about Hitler and the regime to which they had dedicated their lives was especially devastating to those members of the HJ and BDM who had taken their indoctrination to heart. In Munich, American forces captured a group of boys aged ten to fourteen who had been ordered to defend a barricade across the Maximilian Bridge. When American tanks came into view, the boys had been too scared to fire and had been captured. The next day the terrified young prisoners were taken to Dachau. There they were marched through a silent mass of staring inmates to a train standing on a siding within the camp: “An American soldier … ordered us to open one of the freight carriages … the first thing that fell out was the skeleton of a woman. After that nothing more fell out, for the dead bodies were standing so close to one another, like
sardines, that one supported the other.” After this the boys were shown the crematorium, which was scattered with half-burned bodies. That night they could not sleep: “The impact of what we had seen was too great to be immediately digested,” one of the boys later said. “I could not help but cry.”
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Fear led many higher-level HJ members who were not captured in battle to go underground. Alfons Heck, seventeen, smitten, as we have seen, since the age of ten with adoration of Hitler, after having graduated to the Luftwaffe from Westwall construction, was suddenly returned home in March 1945 and made HJ Bannführer of his region, a job that theoretically gave him command over 6,000 girls and boys. His “troops” were largely imaginary, but Heck was ordered to deploy those he could find against American forces penetrating the Rhineland. In this command capacity, he was involved in several skirmishes and placed fellow HJ boys as young as fourteen in bunkers where, aiding the regular forces, they were to slow down American tank units with Panzerfausts. After a few weeks, he was recalled to the Luftwaffe and, hoping for flight duty, eagerly volunteered to fight to the last. His wiser commander, knowing that western Germany was about to be overrun by the Americans, assigned Heck to a useless mission that included a mandatory “furlough” in his hometown, which, as the commander had known it would be, was taken the day after the boy arrived there.

Like millions of his compatriots, Heck burned his HJ uniform, buried the Luftwaffe one, and stayed out of sight. After a time, fearful of what he might face, he finally ventured out of the house. The Americans in the town, thinking him a farm boy, paid no attention to him at all until he answered a question in English. This caused the astonished HJ leader to be appointed interpreter for the town commander. His equally surprised fellow citizens did not give him away. When the fact that he was a member of the Luftwaffe was discovered by the Americans, who still had no inkling of his HJ connection, Heck was told to give himself up as a POW. But the next town commander also found the boy’s language skills useful, and sent him to work in a field hospital. The Americans did not start serious deNazification until after the surrender, and even then, those over eighteen were investigated first. Heck was finally denounced by someone in his town and was arrested when the French took over the area in the summer of 1945. They were not so forgiving. The former HJ leader was told that he would be executed and was put in solitary confinement. The sentence was not carried out, but a military court did sentence him to two years restriction to the town, six months expulsion from school, and a month of hard
and nasty labor, which included exhuming and reburying the bodies of French POWs killed in an air raid. Heck and other HJ members were, like most Germans, forced to watch films of the liberation of the death camps that, still unable to feel anything beyond anger at their own defeat and betrayal by their leaders, they refused for a long time to believe were authentic.
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Older members of the HJ and BDM leadership were detained if they were identified, but this also did not happen immediately. BDM leader Melita Maschmann, who had been so active in Poland, now well into her twenties, fled into the Austrian mountains with a group of SS officers. She had nowhere else to go: her parents had been killed in a bombing raid. In this redoubt the renegades lived miserably in a hut, drank a lot, wallowed in self-pity, and tried to maintain the Nazi structure of their lives. They also discussed joining possible resistance operations linked to the so-called Werewolf units, which Himmler had set up in late 1944. The Allies were greatly worried by German radio propaganda about the Werewolves. A few such units, made up of teenaged operatives, were indeed mobilized and trained by the SS. The largest, Battle Group Harz, made up of 600 HJ members, including some NAPOLA students, was decimated early on by American forces. Two survivors, aged sixteen and seventeen, who managed to hide out until June 1945, were caught and executed as spies. There were sporadic murders and sabotage efforts by a few fanatic Werewolves, but after the death of Hitler they found little support from their countrymen, and soon disappeared.
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Maschmann came down from the mountains when Allied patrols began to round up her fellow renegades. She wandered around southern Germany until July 1945, when she was caught and put in a prison for high-ranking Nazi women.
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The Allies were not quite sure what to do with the families of the Nazi leaders. Few had followed Goebbels’s example when it came to their offspring. Speer had moved his wife and six children up to the Baltic coast, hoping, successfully, that they would fall into the hands of the British. Göring’s wife and daughter were arrested with him in Austria and sent at first to live in a cottage on one of his many estates. Himmler’s wife and defiant daughter, arrested in Italy, would spend many months in detention. Some of the children were alone at the end. Martin Bormann’s eldest son, also named Martin, a fifteen-year-old student at the elite Nazi school that before the war had sponsored the exchanges with American prep schools, was moved to the Tyrol with a number of other students. There, Nazi party officials gave him money and false documents and sent him off
on his own. He was taken in by a farmer who did not know who he was. Later, during the Nuremberg trials, most of the wives of the leaders were detained and interrogated. Arrangements for their children were haphazard. Edda Göring, aged seven, was first placed in an orphanage and then sent to join her mother in prison. Bormann’s wife, who had fled with her other eight children, was less fortunate: the children were left behind when she was arrested, and it was only with help from a prison chaplain that she managed to send word to a former housekeeper, who went to care for them. Mrs. Bormann never saw them again. She died in prison, after which the children were placed in foster families. Martin Jr., still in hiding on the farm, learned of this, and later of his father’s death sentence in absentia, from the newspapers. Once his identity was revealed, the boy was also interrogated by the Allies, but he could not provide them with any information about his father, who had disappeared at the fall of Berlin. After his release, young Bormann was accepted at a seminary and became a priest. By late 1946, most of the families had been freed and could go home, if they still had one. Some were allowed to live in small houses on their former properties while Allied officers were billeted in the main dwellings. Others would find more anonymous quarters. The children, who knew little of their fathers’ activities, would eventually go on to school and to varied futures, but would never be free of the world’s terrible curiosity.
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