Exorcising Hitler (7 page)

The
New York Times
described how a ‘slight, bald anti-Nazi lawyer of about 40 years’ (his name was withheld for security reasons) was sworn in in front of an American flag, the oath being administered by Lieut Col. A. A. Carmichael of Montgomery, Alabama. ‘Have you a house?’ someone is reported to have asked the new Lord Mayor. ‘
Ja
, but a house not standing,’ Oppenhoff answered dryly before heading for his new official quarters in a city-centre cellar.
²²

As Oppenhoff took charge, however, it became clear that things were not quite as simple as the AMG training guidelines, and the bishop’s advice, had implied. Centre Party = Democracy was not quite such a clear equation. In fact, the Centre – although a pillar of the Weimar parliament and supplier of four Reich chancellors out of twelve during the pre-Hitler period – had always contained a strongly conservative, authoritarian faction.

One of the most notable members of this essentially reactionary group was Heinrich Brüning, who had been chancellor from 1930 to 1932. Ruling by presidential decree and bypassing or dismantling many of the safeguards of Weimar democracy, Brüning had thus set precedents that prepared the ground, in many significant aspects, for the advent of Hitler.

The majority of Centre deputies had, indeed, voted for the ‘enabling act’ that granted Hitler dictatorial powers in March 1933. Oppenhoff belonged to this faction too. He avoided the Nazi Party itself for various reasons, mostly religious ones, but distrusted democracy and, even when it was clear that the Nazis were finished, saw no reason for a return to anything resembling the Weimar system. Like others on the non-Nazi right, he favoured instead a Christian corporate state founded not on parliamentary representation but on appointed delegates from the country’s major social and economic groupings – something similar to the governments of Mussolini, Franco or the so-called ‘Austro-Fascists’ who had ruled in Vienna before the
Anschluss
.

Oppenhoff soon made his views apparent, attacking any criticism of his actions as the work of ‘Reds’ and demanding arrests of ‘troublemakers’. He also appointed similar conservative, authoritarian-minded officials, mostly fellow businessmen, to head departments in the city administration (including a total of twenty-two Nazis in second-tier but nevertheless key positions).
²³
Many of these individuals, who became known as the ‘Veltrup Clique’, had worked, like Oppenhoff himself, for the Johann Veltrup company, a leading local munitions manufacturer, which had made parts for tanks and for the V1s and V2s. During the winter of 1944–5, however, Oppenhoff proved himself a competent administrator – a fact that silenced many, though not all, doubters in the occupying force.

The chief American thorn in Oppenhoff’s flesh was Major John Bradford, deputy chief of Aachen AMG, and his ally Major Saul K. Padover, an Austrian-born intelligence officer and psychology graduate. Both were keen New Dealers (in civilian life, the left-leaning Padover had worked for FDR’s Secretary of the Interior) and grimly determined that all Nazis be flushed from positions of power in the new post-war Germany. In their way stood Major Hugh Jones, a former car salesman from Wisconsin with a hard-headed, socially conservative attitude to things.

To Major Jones, what worked was what mattered. To him, Oppenhoff worked. He seemed efficient and was neither a Nazi nor a communist. Moreover, the Burgomaster and his aides remained loyal throughout the few desperate days in December when it seemed that Aachen might need to be evacuated as a result of German advances during the Battle of the Bulge. It was said that during those days Oppenhoff and his officials carried rifles and steel helmets to work. There was grim talk among those at risk of the Gestapo nooses that awaited captured ‘collaborationist’ German officials. After tense negotiations, the American authorities agreed to take such individuals with them if forced to withdraw.

While Padover continued to exploit his press contacts to raise the Oppenhoff issue back in the States, Jones, for his part, stood firm and refused to dismiss the Burgomaster.

‘Where,’ the major from Wisconsin asked Padover, putting a question that would be repeated endlessly in the months and years to come, ‘would you find competent people who are not Nazis?’

Nevertheless, though Oppenhoff remained in office, Padover’s efforts to influence the press did begin to get results. Jones tried to counter this by organising a mild purge of Nazi officials, but in the end the Allied headquarters, SHAEF, felt sufficiently hard pressed to issue formal denials that the Americans had installed a post-Nazi German administration in Aachen that was shockingly anti-democratic.

The appointment of Oppenhoff nevertheless continued to be seen by many as a ‘Darlan Deal’ – as one AMG official had apparently called it. He was referring to a notorious collaborationist French admiral who, to the outrage of de Gaulle and the Free French, had been permitted to rule Allied-occupied Algeria after the ‘Torch’ landings in November 1942. François Darlan had lasted in office for a few weeks until his assassination, apparently by a Gaullist sympathiser, on Christmas Eve 1942.

And violent death would play a role in Aachen, too.

Since the early autumn of 1944, his confidence buoyed by the failure of the British attempt to seize the right bank of the Rhine at Arnhem and the consequent pause in the Allied advance into Germany, Hitler had been planning a devastating counter-attack. Despite the Reich’s dwindling resources, this offensive would, so he hoped, cut the Allies’ fragile supply lines and hurl the invaders back, first into the lowlands and then into the sea.

After an American offensive east of Aachen – preceded by the largest tactical artillery bombardment of the Second World War
²⁴
– failed to gain substantial ground, the Führer must have felt confirmed in his belief that, in defence of their own soil, Germany’s soldiers would prove unbeatable.

The fantastic scale of Hitler’s ambition even at this late stage was shown in Goebbels’ diary entry of 2 December 1944. The Propaganda Minister described Hitler’s distress at the renewed Allied bombing attacks on German cities (between May and September the German civilian population had been granted a respite while the British and American bomber fleets turned to supporting the Allies’ successful land invasion). At the same time, Goebbels expressed his and the Führer’s conviction that the planned counter-offensive would reopen the Channel ports to Germany, enabling the Reich to ‘bombard southern England and London ceaselessly from the newly-gained bases on the channel and Atlantic coasts’ with its ‘miracle weapons’, the new V2 rockets and V1 flying bombs.
²⁵

In the early planning stages, Field Marshals Rundstedt and Model both pushed for the proposed thrust through the Ardennes on the Belgium–Luxembourg border to be combined with a counter-attack more than 100 kilometres to the north that would encircle the Allied-occupied region around and including Aachen. By November, this key area was filling up with British and American units preparing for the coming thrust across the Rhine. However, the field marshals were overruled by Hitler and his aides, who saw this as a distraction from their aim of retaking the key Belgian port of Antwerp.
²⁶
So, when the operation named ‘Watch on the Rhine’ (
Wacht am Rhein
) commenced early in the morning of 16 December, fighting was confined to Belgium and Luxembourg, and there was consequently no direct test of German civilian attitudes in the areas of the country already occupied by the Allies.

The Ardennes Forest had been the route by which Hitler’s forces had successfully invaded France and the Low Countries in May 1940. Nevertheless, in December 1944 this was a weakly defended area, in many places manned by inexperienced and ‘resting’ American forces. No one expected an attack there. As Paul Fussell recollected almost sixty years later: ‘Christmas packages for the boys were arriving from home, and that old, warm American optimism was comforting all ranks.’
²⁷

Attacking on a 100-kilometre front under successful conditions of secrecy, a total of around a quarter of a million heavily mechanised German troops, well armed and supplied with scarce fuel scraped together at the cost of the Wehrmacht’s forces elsewhere, punched their way through the difficult terrain. Fully exploiting the element of surprise, locally superior in numbers to the unsuspecting enemy, and helped by heavy cloud, which initially protected their advance from the vastly superior Allied air forces, the Germans seemed once again invincible.

Even by the grimly exacting standards of front-line infantry life, American casualties were appallingly high, the worst of the European war. For a few heady days, it seemed the Wehrmacht might repeat the success it had achieved four and a half years earlier.

On Christmas Eve, the leading German Panzer spearheads came within nine kilometres of the Meuse at Dinant, halfway to Brussels. There they halted. The German motorised units were already running out of fuel, and insufficient quantities had been captured from the Allies to keep the offensive going.

In the Wehrmacht’s rear, the US 101st Airborne famously held out in the besieged town of Bastogne, tying down substantial numbers of German troops, while to the south, even more ominously, General George S. Patton’s Third Army, previously targeting the Saar industrial area, had now turned north to head off the resurgent threat. Perhaps worst of all for the Germans, on Christmas Eve, the same day that their vanguard reached the Meuse, the skies cleared over western Germany, eastern Belgium and Luxembourg. Now the Allied air forces could launch massive attacks against the German spearheads and their supply routes.

By Christmas, it was clear that Hitler’s Ardennes offensive, though it had cost the lives of 19,000 GIs, almost 50,000 wounded and 21,000 missing and taken prisoner, was doomed. From now on the best war Germany could expect to fight was a defensive one.

It was also true, however, that the Allies (mostly the American First Army) had not succeeded in advancing more than thirty kilometres into Reich territory. In fact, between September 1944 and the following February, the total area of Germany under Allied occupation did not exceed 900 square kilometres – roughly the size of Greater Berlin – with a total population of only around 60,000.
²⁸

The war was not over yet. All the country’s major industrial areas remained for now in German hands. The Reich’s armaments factories were still operating at something close to capacity, producing sufficient quantities of weapons to supply the existing armies and also to fit out and arm fifty new relatively lightly armed and less mobile divisions of ‘people’s grenadiers’ (
Volksgrenadiere
), which for all their relative weakness appreciably reinforced the German capacity for resistance. At year’s end the regime’s propagandists could (and did) boast loudly of a ‘miracle in the West’.

In the Reich’s cities, the sixth Christmas of the war was celebrated by many with a kind of tight-lipped optimism. Saxony’s Gauleiter Mutschmann, still strutting in full pomp around his undamaged capital, Dresden, could make a speech claiming that ‘This Christmas will be beautified for us by the fact that we can see our people back on the offensive’ – and Gestapo reports confirmed that a lot of ordinary civilians were naive or desperate enough to believe him.
²⁹
Nevertheless, those in the most westerly as well as the most easterly provinces already knew enough to understand that the coming months would be terrible.

In occupied Aachen, the American commanders and their men remained highly suspicious of the locals. Leaflets and brochures encouraged the troops to see potential enemies everywhere. This was not unreasonable, with the war still raging an hour’s drive to the east, and rumours spreading of ‘stay-behind’ Nazi resistance forces waiting to fall on the occupiers once they relaxed their vigilance. To most Allied soldiers, the Germans remained inhuman, ‘not like us’. In American intelligence circles, Germany was sometimes referred to as ‘Transylvania’.
³⁰

As it happens, the Nazi leadership had already created an embryonic resistance organisation, dubbed
Werwolf
. That the drawn-out end of the Second World War had long since turned into a horror movie cannot, with our hindsight, be denied, but that contemporaries on both sides acknowledged the fact at the time is, in its macabre way, remarkably interesting.

2

Hoo-Hoo-Hoo

The idea of organising guerrilla resistance to Allied advances into core German territory appears to have originated, tentatively at first, in 1943, around the time the situation on the Eastern Front showed serious signs of deterioration. By the spring of the following year, the chief of the SS Main Office (RSHA) and Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler’s main liaison man with the Eastern Front, forty-eight-year-old Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, began to take an interest in these matters. Once Berger became involved, research and discussion broadened and deepened.

This was a sensitive area of thinking and therefore top secret. After all, even considering the possibility that German forces could be driven back into the Reich – as a result of military defeat – could be interpreted as, well, defeatist. So, at first the emphasis was on historical parallels such as the Prussian
Landsturm
law of 1813
,
which had made legal provision for a partisan force to aid the army by guerrilla actions should the enemy encroach on Prussian soil. Studies were made of the resistance movements in German-occupied Europe, especially the Polish ‘Home Army’, whose role in the Warsaw Rising during the summer of 1944 attracted attention and even reluctant admiration in senior Nazi circles.
¹