Exorcising Hitler (11 page)

Meanwhile, the Nazi propaganda machine, still running at full tilt, did all it could to exploit the propaganda value of the Oppenhoff murder. At the beginning of April, there were reports that German planes had been dropping leaflets over the Allied-occupied Rhineland, warning that the Wehrmacht would be back before long and that all ‘collaborators’ would then be held to account.
¹⁷
At the same time, Goebbels’ broadcasters set about putting ‘
Werwolf Radio
’ on the air.

Despite the assassination of Oppenhoff – which was given great prominence in the written and spoken media throughout the Nazis’ shrinking empire – it had for some time been clear, as Goebbels’ diary gloomily reported telling the Führer on 22 March, that ‘our troops in the west are not putting up a proper fight any more’.
¹⁸
Five days later, while the Propaganda Minister wrote in his diary that he was busy ‘organising in grand style the so-called “
Werwolf
Action”’, in stark contrast he also noted reports that in some parts of the western theatre of conflict ‘. . . the population are approaching the Americans bearing white flags; some of the women abase themselves to such an extent that they even greet and embrace the Americans. In the light of these circumstances, the troops don’t want to fight any more and either retreat without offering resistance or surrender themselves into enemy hands.’
¹⁹

This was the atmosphere in western Germany as the killers of Burgomaster Oppenhoff went on the run. Ilse Hirsch, Erich Morgenschweiss and the remaining guide, Heidorn, had been preparing to break camp and head for the Rhine when an anxious, panting Leitgeb appeared at their hideaway in the woods. The man who had shot Oppenhoff explained how he had become separated from Wenzel and Hennemann. They might, he said, have been killed or captured, so the group decided quickly to start the march east. Despite his poor state of health, Heidorn led them through the thick Eiffel woodland in the dead of night. By dawn the next day they were many kilometres from the scene of the crime.
²⁰

In the end it was not the vigilance of Allied patrols that caused the little group’s downfall, but the deadly legacy of recent fighting. Hiding for much of the next day in a shooting blind and pressing on again through the next night, at daylight they reached the edge of the village of Rollesbroich. As they crossed an innocuous-looking meadow, there was a powerful explosion and Leitgeb was flung into the air. Morgenschweiss bravely picked his way through the possible minefield, only to find the Austrian dead. Half his face had been blown away.

The Hitler Youth boy took Leitgeb’s papers to make identification difficult, covered the body with branches and made his way back to join the other survivors. They pressed on – only to set off a smaller trip mine, which wounded Ilse Hirsch so badly that she could not continue. It was getting dark. The other two survivors, also injured but still able to walk, were forced to leave her, hoping that she would be found next day by locals. In the early hours, she was, in fact, able to attract the attention of a passing farmer, who helped her on to his cart and took her to the town for medical attention.

Morgenschweiss made it through several hours of marching before, weakened by loss of blood, he too had to be left behind. He was also picked up by a local – a woman by the name of Frau Sülz, who prudently disposed of the boy’s gun before taking him to a nearby hospital for treatment.

Despite the state of his own health, Heidorn continued alone, following a route that led him across the flooded River Urft. Early on the morning of 1 April 1945, he reached his destination. This was a farmhouse, early twentieth century in origin but built in the style of a medieval manor, hidden in the woods near Mechernich and known as Gut (or Haus) Hombusch. It seems to have been designated as a
Werwolf
safe house (after the war, a substantial arms and weapons dump was found nearby and exploded by British Army engineers).
²¹
The house itself appeared deserted, but when Heidorn cautiously made his way into the building, he heard familiar voices. In the kitchen, two men were in conversation: it was Wenzel and Hennemann.

The three conspirators, reunited but still far behind enemy lines, set off for the Rhine a short while later. When they reached the big river, Wenzel mysteriously announced that he planned to go no further. After parting from his comrades, he made his way to a remote farm in the area, which seems also to have been recommended during their
Werwolf
training as a safe refuge. He stayed there for another four months, helping out with the work and even conducting a small dalliance with the farm maid, before announcing at the beginning of August that he was going to ‘find his uncle in Halberstadt’. Post-war investigations would reveal that he had no such relation. Wenzel was never seen again.

Heidorn and Hennemann swam the Rhine, only to be picked up by an American patrol and shipped back to an internment camp – in Aachen. They managed to convince the Allied authorities there that they were harmless and were soon released. After this they travelled east into what was now the Soviet Zone, to join their wives, who had been evacuated the previous autumn to escape the Allied bombing of western Germany.

And so ended the actions of the most notorious
Werwolf
team, its members either dead, scattered or captured. None was connected to Oppenhoff’s death until well after the war, when the British, who now controlled Aachen, reopened the case.

In fact, the Oppenhoff assassination, while it made a splash, did not represent any kind of yardstick by which to judge the Nazi guerrilla movement. The Lord Mayor’s murder had been undertaken only because of pressure from Berlin, not as a result of any local anti-collaborator groundswell. For the rest of the war, the Rhineland was as peaceful as could reasonably be expected. There were no more major acts of violence against the Allies or their appointed German officials.

In the Catholic, less pro-Nazi west of the country, the
Werwolf
movement was even feebler than elsewhere, but as the Anglo-American forces pushed further east into the centre and east central part of Germany, they found a more hostile environment in which planned and spontaneous guerrilla activity could thrive.

In another notorious case associated with
Werwolf
agitation, on 21 April two of British Field Marshal Montgomery’s liaison officers, Major Earle and Major Poston, were ambushed by a heavily armed Hitler Youth unit while driving their jeep through a rugged part of Lüneburg Heath. Only lightly armed, they were forced to ram their attackers’ machine-gun nest as a last resort. Thrown from their vehicle by the impact, they found themselves at the enemy’s mercy. Poston was promptly bayoneted, while, mysteriously, the wounded Earle was spared and transported back through enemy lines, first to a farmhouse and then to a German field hospital (where he would be rescued within twenty-four hours by advancing British troops).
²²

Sporadic acts of sabotage and violence would continue to occur in the areas occupied by the Western Allies – the stringing of wires across country roads to decapitate jeep drivers was a favourite, though rarely successful, ploy – but broadly speaking the organised
Werwolf
movement took a serious, lasting form mainly in the Soviet- and Polish-occupied areas of Silesia, East Prussia and the Czech borderlands. Here the continuing guerrilla struggle was symptomatic not just of Nazi fanaticism but of a desperate resistance against rape, massacre and forced resettlement.

East of the Elbe, the greatest population movement since the fall of the Roman Empire was under way, driven by the advance of the Red Army and their vengeful Slavic brothers, who for nearly six years had suffered under a brutal German occupation.

Vengeance is never beautiful. In what was to follow, it was ugly beyond belief.

3

The Great Trek

In early 1945, the Allies began to advance once more on all fronts. The Soviets in particular made spectacular progress. They finally took what was left of Warsaw, once Hitler’s executioners and demolition squads had finished with it, pushing through pre-war Poland and into the historic eastern provinces of Germany – lands that had formed an integral part of the Reich since the Middle Ages.

The German population fled or was subjected to rape, pillage and forced expulsion. Among these refugees was sixteen-year-old Katherina Elliger, born in Upper Silesia, a traditionally culturally diverse region close to where Poland, the Czech lands and Germany met. As the fighting came closer, she and her mother fled into a nearby corner of the Czech lands, heading by a roundabout route for the home of Katherina’s uncle, which lay in the county of Glatz (Polish Kłosko, Czech Kladsko), a short way back across the German border in Lower Silesia. She later described what they found as they journeyed through the wooded landscape:

One evening, we arrived at a farm, which lay off the beaten track in a hollow . . . We entered the spacious hallway. Lights were burning inside. Around a large, round oak table knelt six or seven people. They were quite still and made no movement. Their heads had slumped forward. When we came closer, we saw that they had been nailed to the table edge by their tongues.
¹

Afterwards, they learned that ‘hordes’ of Slavic locals had swept through the district, seeking revenge on their German neighbours. Presumably the nailing of their victims’ tongues had to do with a symbolic retaliation against the language, as well as the bodies, of the hated former ‘master race’. Katherina and her mother were warned on no account to continue towards their planned destination.

However, it was not just old local racial scores that would be settled as the Reich crumbled. After a winter of stalemate in east and west, a great Russian offensive had begun on 12 January along a front extending several hundred kilometres between the Baltic Sea and the same Bohemian forest in which the Silesian woman and her daughter had come upon the grisly banqueting scene. The Soviet forces, totalling more than two million, outnumbered the German defenders of Wehrmacht Army Group A by around five to one, with a superiority of six to one in tanks, the same in artillery and four to one in self-propelled guns.

Shortly after Warsaw fell, the Red Army began pressing forward with tremendous speed, often advancing thirty to forty kilometres a day. The great eastern German cities of Königsberg, ancient capital of East Prussia, and Breslau, capital of Silesia, soon lay encircled and under siege.

Most Germans who could flee did so. Vast columns of refugees – women, children and the old, for most adult men were either dead or away fighting – thronged the roads leading westwards into the heart of the Reich, their pathetic collections of portable belongings crammed on to wagons and handcarts. The winter weather was cruel, reaching more than twenty below zero, and would remain so until the end of March. Cold was the first great contributor to the harvest of death that would prove so rich during the year to come.

It was not just consciousness of the vast superiority of the Soviet forces in arms, equipment and numbers that spurred Stalin’s soldiers on into German territory. These troops had seen their own land devastated. There were living witnesses of the fact that at least
twenty-five million
of their compatriots of all ages and both sexes had died in battle, or by massacre, and often by deliberate starvation – all in an aggressive German war of choice executed by Hitler’s forces with scant regard for even the most basic, minimally humanising rules of conflict. As a result, the Red Army was also driven by hate, perhaps to a degree comparable to no other army in modern history.

A young Wehrmacht ensign from a prominent Silesian family, undergoing his baptism of fire with a Panzer unit in a part of the Czech lands near his own home region, recalled the horrors he witnessed in a Sudeten German village they had temporarily retaken from the enemy during these last bewildering weeks of the war:

What we found there cannot easily be described in words. Houses full of dead, hanged men, violated women, wandering half crazed through the streets, children with their bellies slit open. If I am honest, I have to say: This is one of those things of which one has suppressed the memory.
²

Nonetheless, as the young soldier – himself too young to have served on the Eastern Front in Russia itself – went on to speculate, ‘What actually must we have done over there that so many Russian soldiers behaved with such bestial rage?’

The great Nazi justification for the war against the Soviet Union had been the alleged German need for more
Lebensraum
(‘living space’), which could be gained only at the expense of the racially inferior Slavic peoples who occupied these great fertile plains to the east. When the men of the Red Army finally crossed the border into Germany in the last months of the war and saw how well the Germans actually lived in the supposedly narrow, impoverishing country that they had so urgently needed to outgrow, it caused even more fury. As one simple soldier said to his commander after examining the neat, to him impossibly prosperous-looking farmhouses of East Prussia: