In Europe (82 page)

THE MONUMENT AT TORGAU IS COATED IN GREYISH -GREEN. IT SHOWS
Soviet soldiers being welcomed by joyful German women bearing flowers, cheering men and children, and above that in big letters stand the words ‘RUHM DEM SOWJETVOLK, DANK FÜR SEINE BEFREIUNGSTAT’. It is one of those DDR plaques that should immediately be put under the protective care of UNESCO, as a classic monument to the lie. Phill Sinott and his countless American comrades have been skilfully edited from the snapshot of history, and no one wants to be reminded of that screaming from across the river. For in the real Torgau of 1945, the cheerful German mothers were gang-raped by their Soviet liberators, and in the cities their children were pulverised by the thousand in the firestorms of British and American bombardments. That was the real end of the war, the retaliation, the fire and the shame, the intense humiliation about which only half a century later can cautious mention be made in Germany.

The retaliation came in all varieties. One variety came largely from the Soviet soldiers. When they entered East Prussia in January, their propaganda officers hung up huge banners: ‘Soldier, you are now entering the lair of the fascist beast!’ The village of Nemmersdorf (now Mayakovskoya) was taken by the 2nd Red Army Guard, a few days later German troops launched a counteroffensive and entered the town again. They found bodies everywhere: refugees crushed under tanks, children shot in their gardens, raped women nailed to barn doors. The cameras rolled, the images were shown all over Germany: this is what happens when the Russians come in.

Some two million German women were raped during that period, most of them several times. The Red Army leadership was fully aware
of what was happening, but did nothing to stop it. Half a century later, in the state archives of the Russian Federation, Antony Beevor found a great many NKVD documents describing ‘negative phenomena’ and ‘immoral acts’, as rapes were called in Soviet jargon. Women who had been raped were regularly reported to have committed suicide afterwards, sometimes even entire families took their own lives. Russian girls who had been deported to Germany were referred to as ‘German dolls’. A memorandum drafted on 29 March, 1945 contains a description of how Soviet officers and soldiers all along the front entered the dormitories of newly liberated Soviet women and committed ‘organised mass rapes’. The report cites a woman by the name of Klavdia Malashtshenko: ‘It was very bad under the Germans. But now our fortunes are worse. This is no liberation. They treat us terribly. They do terrible things to us.’

The ‘Russian fury’ prompted a huge, panicked migration. The roads witnessed scenes identical to those during the German campaigns of conquest into Poland and beyond, but now in the other direction: from east to west. From mid-January 1945, millions of Germans began fleeing from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, on foot, with prams and horse-drawn carts, in the snow at temperatures of twenty below zero, and later by ship and train as well. By mid-February, more than eight million Germans – mostly women and children, for the men were still at the front – were on their way west. On the afternoon of 30 January, the enormous holiday cruiser
Wilhelm Gustloff
, run by Kraft durch Freude, set sail onto the Baltic, packed with somewhere between 6–10,000 refugees, including some 4,000 children. In the middle of the ice-cold night that followed, the ship was struck by a torpedo from a Soviet submarine. About 1,300 evacuees made it into lifeboats or were rescued by navy vessels that came to the scene. Thousands were trapped below deck when the water rushed in. The
Wilhelm Gustloff
went down with a ‘final collective scream’, a catastrophe many times greater in scope than that of the
Titanic
, which became known in wider circles due to the work of the writer Günter Grass more than half a century afterwards.

One week later, the hospital ship
Steuben
was torpedoed; 4,000 were killed. Around 150 refugee ships in all were sent to the bottom in this way, including the
Goya
– with 7,000 refugees and 175 survivors – and
the
Cap Arconda
: 5,000 passengers, mostly refugees who had been ‘evacuated’ on Himmler's orders from Fossenbürg and other concentration camps, and 150 survivors.

Every day in winter 1945, 40–50,000 new refugees arrived at Friedrichstrasse Station in Berlin. An eyewitness described the arrival of a packed refugee train in the town of Stolp: ‘Hundreds and hundreds of bodies squeezed together, stiff from the cold, barely able to stand up and climb off the train.’ Stiff little bundles were unloaded from the freight cars: children who had frozen to death. ‘Amid the silence, the screams of a mother who did not want to relinquish what she had already lost.’

All those refugees found themselves in the midst of a new battle, the round-the-clock storm of death and destruction that had moved in on Germany from the west. In May 1942 Cologne became the first target of a
Tausenbombernacht
, as the victims called them. But Berlin was the favoured objective, it was ‘the evil capital’ and the lair of ‘the Huns’, and also – with its immense tank, artillery and airplane factories – the true industrial and administrative heart of the Reich. In autumn 1943 the leader of British Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris, decided to focus all attention on the German capital. The actual wording of the memorandum sent by ‘Bomber’ Harris to his commander-in-chief was:’ We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF will come in on it. It will cost between us 4–500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war.’ Churchill was impressed.

A week after Harris sent his memorandum, on the night of 18 November, 1943, the city was bombarded by an airborne fleet of almost 450 bombers. The operation was repeated a few days later, but now with 750 planes. Entire neighbourhoods were in flames, 2,000 people were killed. And as the winter progressed the bombings became more massive; in the end, fleets of 1,000-plus bombers were pummelling the city each night. Berlin lay at the limit of their operating radius, and the risks were huge. The Lancasters had to carry so much weight in bombs and fuel that they could scarcely take off. At full throttle they would charge down the runway, airborne only in the last few metres. Fifteen minutes later, when they finally reached cruising altitude, the engines were glowing hot. Countless planes went down in aerial combat or collisions, their crews falling to their death or burned alive. One in every sixteen planes
did not come back. Until late 1944, the average crew member had a one-in-four chance of surviving the mandatory ‘tour’ of thirty flying missions. Of the 125,000 RAF pilots, gunners, navigators and bombardiers, more than 55,000 – almost half – were killed. Starting in spring 1944 the Americans joined in as well, with their enormous four-prop Boeing B17s, the Flying Fortresses, and Boeing B24s, the Liberators. From that moment the German capital knew no rest: the British bombed by night, the Americans by day.

On 23 November, 1943, Käthe Kollwitz's house on Weissenburger Strasse was hit squarely by a British bomb. The big parlour with the oval dining table, the enormous tiled heater, the drawings on the walls, more than half a century of family life: nothing was left. On 26 February, 1944, old Alexanderplatz went up in a sea of flames and exploding ‘block-busters’. By that point more than 1.5 million citizens of Berlin had been
ausgebombt
. In the end, seventy per cent of the city would be reduced to rubble.

Almost every city in Germany received its share of punishment from Bomber Harris. Ninety-five per cent of the glorious medieval centre of Cologne was destroyed. In Hamburg, on 28 July, 1943, the first firestorm was created. People ran down the street like living torches; almost 40,000 people suffocated in the burning cyclone or were roasted alive in bomb shelters that quickly became as hot as ovens. Almost all the old cities along the Rhine were bombed flat: Emmerich, Rees, Xanten, Wesel, Koblenz, Mainz, Worms, twenty-three of them in a row. In Nuremberg, on 2 January, 1945, a thousand years of history were destroyed in the space of fifty-three minutes. The castle, three churches full of art treasures and at least 2,000 medieval houses went up in flames.

A sixteen-year-old medical student, summoned to help collect the bodies in Wuppertal, wrote that some of the victims looked ‘very peaceful’, having suffocated in the ensuing vacuum.‘Others were completely burned. The charred corpses were only about fifty centimetres long. We put them in zinc tubs and washbasins. A washbasin held three corpses, a bath seven or eight.’

Ernst Jünger had business to attend to in burning Hanover on 16 December, 1944. ‘The streets were covered with piles of rubble and loose debris, and with the wrecks of cars and trams. The city was a mass of
people, running wildly back and forth like a scene from some oriental disaster. I saw a woman walk past: clear tears ran from her face like rain. I also saw people lugging lovely old pieces of furniture, now covered in mortar. An elegant gentleman, grey at the temples, was pushing along a cart containing a rococo cabinet.’ Jünger also wrote of a huge attack on Misburg that killed more than forty young female Luftwaffe clerks. ‘The force of the blast had torn all the clothes and underwear off their bodies, leaving them completely naked. A farmer who had helped to gather their bodies was completely shaken: “All such big, lovely girls, and heavy as lead!”’

The story of the sinking of the
Wilhelm Gustloff
has since been described by Grass and others, but what happened to the survivors afterwards is almost unknown. Some 900 were put ashore at the port of Swinemünde (now świnoujście). Many of the women – some of them girls no older than eleven – were speechless from the traumas they had suffered. They had been raped, and after that the mothers had been forced to watch their children drown. Some of them begged the German naval cadets to shoot them. Along with thousands of other refugees, they were housed in abandoned holiday resorts along the beach. The harbour and the sea before them were full of even more refugee ships.

The target the Americans might have been going for, the V-1 and V-2 installations at Peenemünde, had been moved to mountains in the Harz long before. Still, on the afternoon of 12 March, 1945, the area was bombarded by more than a thousand planes. The refugee ships in the harbour were adrift and burning, or had already disappeared under water, along with all those who thought they had found safe shelter in them.

According to official figures, this ‘Swinemünde massacre’ claimed 23,000 lives, but the presence of so many unregistered refugees could bring the real figure to twice that. No mention of this is made in American military annals; the bombardment is listed only as an ‘attack on railway yards’.

Jünger reports that an Allied pilot was shot down close to the village where he lived. A Dutch refugee attacked the pilot with an axe, and a farmer passing with his wagon was able to save the man only by risking his own life. But many other pilots were less fortunate: during the final year of the war, some hundred Allied pilots were lynched by Germans.

During the German bombardments of England, 60,000 civilians were killed, 90,000 were badly wounded and another 150,000 were injured. The Allied raids of Germany claimed eight times that number, around half a million victims, including 75,000 children. Almost 800,000 people were badly wounded. Seven million Germans were left homeless, and a fifth of all the country's houses were destroyed.

The effect of the bombings on the German war industry, however, was far less severe. Albert Speer estimated the total loss of production in 1943 at no more than nine per cent, a decrease for which the country could compensate. During later interrogations, he said he found the Allied tactic ‘incomprehensible’: why hadn't they attacked the country's basic industry (steel and oil) and transportation network? Now, despite the enormous fires, the industrial capacity of a city like Berlin remained almost intact until the final months of the war. It was only the Americans who finally began to focus systematically on oil refineries and other vital parts of the German war machine.‘The British left us with deep and bleeding wounds,’ Marshal Erhard Milch said after the war. ‘But the Americans stabbed us in the heart.’

This disproportion between industrial damage and civilian casualties was no accident. It was a conscious policy. Even before the war began, the British had developed the tactic of ‘strategic bombardment’, a method of eliminating the enemy by destroying his centres of population. The bombardments of Germany were therefore not a reaction to the German bombings of London, Coventry and other British cities, but part of a strategy that had been drafted long before that. Coventry was not an immediate cause, merely a justification.

Generals, as the old saw goes, always tend to win the war that's over, and this was no different in 1939–45. The losing strategists of the First World War, the Russians and Germans, looked back on the struggle as a missed opportunity. They had ‘almost’ won, and with bigger and better-equipped armies the same large-scale attacks would, in their eyes, succeed this time.

The victors, the French, British and Americans, remembered 1914–18 primarily as an unparalleled massacre of their own young people, a repetition of which was to be avoided at all costs. Hence the bold campaign in Germany in May 1940 and the similar Russian strategy in spring 1945.
And hence, too, the French Maginot Line and Eisenhower's caution. Hence too the enormous investment by the British – almost a quarter of their entire war budget – in the ‘strategic bombardments’.

So arose the Allied variation on the war's ‘radicalisation’. In the eyes of Harris and others, German citizens were not merely hapless souls who accidentally got in the way, but were in fact their principal target. Their strategy of ‘moral bombing’ assumed that the death of as many German civilians as possible would shorten the war, because it would cause morale on the home front to collapse much more quickly.

It should not be forgotten, as the British military historian John Terraine puts it, that the term ‘moral’ in a bombing directive means the reality of ‘blowing men, women and children to bits’. In the archives, Terraine came across a memorandum from RAF Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal in which he detailed the ‘production possibilities’ for his superiors. Within the next two years, he boasted in November 1942, he would be able to drop almost 250,000 tons of bombs on Germany, destroying 6 million houses and a corresponding number of industrial installations, killing 900,000 Germans, badly wounding a million and leaving 25 million homeless. Terraine: ‘What is one to think of the calm proposal, set down in a quiet office, to kill 900,000 civilians and seriously injure a million more? One thing emerges, with absolute clarity: this was a prescription for massacre, nothing more nor less.’