Exorcising Hitler (66 page)

14
 For this and the following account of the mission see Biddiscombe,
The Last Nazis
, pp. 129ff., and Whiting,
SS Werewolf
, pp. 7ff.

15
 According to Whiting,
SS Werewolf
, as above.

16
New York Times
, 29 March 1945: ‘Non-Nazi Mayor of Aachen Killed By 3 German Chutists in Uniform’;
The Times
, 29 March 1945: ‘Aachen Burgomaster Murdered: Shot by Three Germans’.

17
 See
New York Times
, 4 April 1945 (the wire had been sent four days earlier but was marked ‘Delayed’, presumably due to censorship): ‘Nazis Tell Rhine They Will Return’.

18
 Goebbels,
Tagebücher
, Bd 5, p. 2164.

19
 Ibid., p. 2170.

20
 See Whiting,
SS Werewolf
, pp. 157–62, and Biddiscombe,
The Last Nazis
, pp. 131f.

21
   Ibid., p. 167n.

22
   Biddiscombe,
Werwolf!
, pp. 153f.

3 THE GREAT TREK

1
 Andreas Kossert,
Kalte Heimat: Die Geschichte der deutschen Vertriebenen nach 1945
, pp. 39f.

2
 Ruprecht von Butler, quoted in Joachim Käppner,
Die Familie der Generäle: Eine deutsche Geschichte
, pp. 226f. And for the further remark.

3
 Quoted in Antony Beevor,
Berlin: The Downfall 1945
, p. 34.

4
 Quoted in Norman M. Naimark,
The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949
, p. 78.

5
 Mawdsley,
Thunder in the East
, p. 216.

6
 Ibid., pp. 216f.

7
 Naimark,
The Russians in Germany
, p. 72 and for the following.

8
 Ibid., p. 74.

9
 Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
Prussian Nights
, translated by Robert Conquest, p. 7.

10
 See his obituary in the
New York Times
, 20 June 1997: ‘Lev Kopelev, Soviet Writer in Prison 10 Years, Dies at 85’. Kopelev died in Cologne, Germany, where he had lived since being exiled from the Soviet Union for dissident activities – which included writing about his experiences in occupied Germany – in the early 1970s.

11
 For the story of Wanda Schultz (later Hoffman) see Ingeborg Jacobs,
Freiwild: Das Schicksal deutscher Frauen 1945
, pp. 83ff.

12
 Kossert,
Kalte Heimat
, p. 40.

13
 Naimark,
The Russians in Germany
, pp. 90f.

14
 ‘Wenn du’s nicht aushältst, dann geh in die Alle’. See Jacobs,
Freiwild
, p. 53.

15
 Ibid., pp. 57ff.

16
 Full text available at
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/
dec939.asp
along with other documents relating to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and its consequences.

17
 Alfred M. de Zayas,
Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans
(revised edition 1979), pp. 40f.

18
 Ibid., p. 50.

19
 To be exact, 9,955,000, according to the detailed tables in Kossert,
Kalte Heimat
, pp. 22f.

20
 Quoted in Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse,
Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City
, p. 380.

21
 See most recently Giles Milton,
Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922. The Destruction of Islam’s City of Tolerance
, and for a concise account of the catastrophe, Norman M. Naimark,
Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe
, pp. 44ff.

22
 Giles Milton,
Paradise Lost
, p. 315.

23
 Quoted in ibid., p. 326.

24
 Ibid., p. 311.

25
 See Denny,
The Fall of Hitler’s Fortress City
, pp. 202f. Gustloff was German by nationality but resident in Switzerland. The ship itself had been converted for military use as a barracks ship and was painted naval grey.

26
 For a potted biography of Hanke, see Davies and Moorhouse,
Microcosm
, pp. 373f.

27
 Quoted in Knopp,
Die grosse Flucht
. This estimate is based on a saying that ‘ten died for each metre of runway’, and the runway was 1,300 metres, so is more likely to be a figure of speech than a figure of fact, but there can be no doubt that thousands of German civilians died in this and other unspeakable horrors inflicted on them by their own leaders.

28
 For a biography of Hanke see Karl Höffkes,
Hitlers Politische Generale: Die Gauleiter des Dritten Reiches
, pp. 120ff.

29
 Knopp,
Die grosse Flucht
.

30
 Ulrich Frodien,
Bleib übrig: Eine Kriegsjugend in Deutschland
, p. 124, for their encounter with the barricade and for the drama at the railway station, pp. 143ff.

31
 Davies and Moorhouse,
Microcosm
, p. 408.

32
 See Müller, ed.,
Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg
. . .
Band 10, Zweiter Halbband
, pp. 336f.

33
 Figures in Hans-Werner Mihan,
Die Nacht von Potsdam: Der Luftangriffbritischer Bomber vom 14. April 1945, Dokumentation und Erlebnisberichte
, p. 119.

34
 De Zayas,
Nemesis at Potsdam
, p. 87.

35
 Müller, ed.,
Das Deutsche Reich, Band 10, Zweiter Halbband
, pp. 347.

36
 See Davies and Moorhouse,
Microcosm
, p. 416; for Breslau specifically and in detail, de Zayas,
Nemesis at Potsdam
, p. 88.

37
 See Helmut Schnatz,
Der Luftangriff auf Swinemünde: Dokumentation einer Tragödie
, p. 138, for the author’s final analysis of numbers killed, and in general the chapter Teil VI: ‘Rezeption und Bewertung des Angriffs’, pp. 87–138, for its masterly exercise in demythologisation. The attack by 661 American bombers was proportionately one of the heaviest of the war in terms of tonnage dropped. It was carried out at the specific request of the Soviet High Command, whose own aircraft were busy with the ground support role to which they were in any case more suited.

38
 Davies and Moorhouse,
Microcosm
, p. 408 and p. 413.

39
 Ibid., p. 420.

40
 Ibid., p. 424.

41
 Testimony of Zdena Nemcova, cited in
Europe’s Forgotten War Crime
, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 9 February 2004, details available at the BBC website:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3466233.stm
.

42
 Knopp,
Die grosse Flucht
, p. 369.

43
 Dr Anton Sum quoted in ibid., p. 368.

44
 Müller, ed.,
Das Deutsche Reich, Band 10
,
Zweiter, Halbband
, p. 622.

45
 See the account in ibid., p. 625.

46
 Ibid.

47
 Ibid.

48
 See Ota Filip, ‘Die Stillen Toten unterm Klee bei Pohrlitz: Auf den Spuren des Brünner Todesmarsches’, in
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
, 30 May 1990; and Knopp,
Die grosse Flucht
, pp. 392f.

49
 Knopp,
Die Grosse Flucht
, p. 393.

50
 Ibid., p. 395.

51
 Letter, ‘Future of Minorities in Czechoslovakia’ to
The Times
, 14 June 1945, from Wenzel Jaksch, Eugen de Witte and Franz Katz, members of the last freely elected Czechoslovak Parliament. Jaksch, a Social Democrat, later settled in West Germany, where he became prominent in the Sudeten German Expellees’ Organisation and was a Social Democrat member of the Bundestag in Bonn. In the last free elections in Czechoslovakia in 1935, Konrad Henlein’s proto-Nazi Sudeten German Party (SdP) received 60 per cent of the German vote. By 1938, the Sudeten-German Social Democratic Party, once the largest of the German parties, had shrunk into near-insignificance. All other Sudeten-German parties then merged with the SdP, whose leader then became Gauleiter of the Sudetenland after the Munich Agreement awarded the area to Germany. That in 1945 the Czechs regarded all Sudeten Germans as Nazis was unjust, but under the circumstances not entirely surprising.