The German War (86 page)

On 23 February, Ernst Arnold Paulus returned home earlier than usual from his GP practice in Pforzheim, hoping to be in time to see his two daughters off at the station. Both Elfriede and Irmgard had started studying medicine, following in his footsteps, just as he had once hoped their brother Helmut would. There had been no news of Helmut since he had been reported missing in November 1943 soon after returning to the eastern front from a spell of home leave. In the mobilisation drive of autumn 1944, Elfriede and Irmgard had both been called away from university to serve as Red Cross nurses, and were now working together in the same military hospital in Heilbronn. Their train left before their father could get to the station. It was just before the air raid began at 7.50 p.m. That coincidence saved their lives – and his. Instead of being in the centre of Pforzheim when the raid started, Dr Paulus had just driven back to their home on the outskirts of town. The attack, which came unexpectedly early, only lasted twenty-two minutes and involved 368 aircraft. As soon as the drone of the planes grew fainter, Ernst Paulus went out to man his emergency medical post in Pforzheim’s high school. As he approached the town centre, he was driven back by billowing smoke and had to change direction. When he finally reached the high school, its upper floors were on fire. Undeterred, Paulus set his first aid centre up in the basement, working through the night and the next day treating the walking wounded as they streamed in, until finally a second doctor came to relieve him.
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Ernst Paulus’s surgery had been hit, along with everyone in it, and his wife counted fourteen other doctors they knew among the dead. The fire hydrants had not functioned, leaving the fire brigade watching helplessly as the old town, with its narrow streets, family workshops and half-timbered houses, was engulfed in flames. An area measuring 3 by 1.5 square kilometres was completely destroyed. It would take many months, until beyond midsummer, to clear the rubble and remove the dead. The initial police estimates set the death toll at between 7,000 and 8,000 but the count gradually rose, reaching 17,600, about 20 per cent of the total population: it was one of the deadliest tolls inflicted on any German city.
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While Erna Paulus and the maid set about patching their torn blackout blinds and nailing up cardboard over their gaping windows, her husband held his morning open surgery at home with equipment donated by the emergency post in the high school. With no tradesmen and no shops, Pforzheim felt like a dead city. The Pauluses relied on food donated by family, friends and patients from the surrounding villages and local farms who saw to it that they received precious eggs and meat. Despite the devastating demonstration of Allied air supremacy, despite the ongoing uncertainty about Helmut’s fate, despite their worries for their second son Rudolf, who was also now serving at the front, Erna and Ernst Paulus showed no signs of defeatism. Erna busied herself mending clothes for her daughters in Heilbronn, darning the family’s stockings and socks and ironing while the electricity was on. At the end of March, they still listened to the German military bulletins keenly: when the electricity failed, they could now hear them only on their nephew’s crystal set.
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Erna Paulus’s sister, Käthe Wurster, was appalled by the news from Pforzheim, even though, as she put it, ‘Punctually every evening for weeks now we have our attack on Berlin. In between, from time to time, a major day attack. But Berlin is large,’ she explained from her leafy, south-western suburb: ‘there have been many, many raids without hitting Zehlendorf.’ That month, in the local cinema, safely located in the underground station at Onkel Toms Hütte, the audience refused to watch the newsreel before the main feature. According to an officer reporting for the Wehrmacht, ‘A number of visitors forced a change of programme through thoroughly vulgar behaviour such as stamping, whistling, bellowing etc. People wanted to see the main film . . . first. Who is still interested in the newsreel, it is all fraud, propaganda, etc.’ Their protest was not an expression of political opposition: the audience did not want the regular evening air raid to interrupt the feature film, the premiere of
The Soloist Anna Alt,
a classical music romance loosely based around the fraught relationship of Robert and Clara Schumann. When the sirens duly sounded, it was the newsreel which had to be stopped. Other cinemas found that trying to abandon their programme after long air raid interruptions precipitated ‘tumultuous scenes, in the course of which there was no shortage of blunt remarks’.
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Demand for cinema tickets remained as high as ever, despite the air raids. If anything, the bombing only made filmgoers more vociferous in asserting their sense of entitlement, especially now that the theatres had been closed since the autumn. But there were few new films to watch. One anti-British offering,
Titanic,
fell victim to the air raids. Lovingly shot on a cruise liner in the Baltic, it had been released in 1943 but was only screened in occupied France, where the depiction of the rigid class divisions, with the third-class passengers being left to drown, was intended to stiffen Anglophobia. But before it was released in Germany, Goebbels decided that the scenes of mass panic amongst the passengers trapped in the third-class decks of the sinking ship might trigger all the wrong associations in the bombed cities. The film was pulled from the schedules.
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In a more positive vein, Goebbels had commissioned by far the largest and most lavish colour film to date in response to defeats of the summer. Set during the Napoleonic conquest of Prussia, it centred on the siege of Kolberg in 1807, which was eventually taken by the French. The film celebrated the new spirit of resistance that had been born there and which led to the German ‘war of liberation’ of 1812–13. In the film, the mayor of Kolberg tells the Prussian commander, General von Gneisenau, that he ‘would rather be buried in the ruins than surrender’, and only rises from his knees once the legendary Prussian general has replied: ‘That’s what I wanted to hear from you, Nettelbeck. Now we can die together.’ The premiere was symbolically held in another German coastal ‘fortress’, the French port of La Rochelle, on 30 January 1945. Few Germans saw the film, though its central motifs of romantic patriotism had become ubiquitous, with the same lines of Theodor Körner’s Romantic poetry appearing in the film as Goebbels had quoted at the end of his ‘total war’ speech two years earlier: ‘Now let the nation arise, let the storm break!’ While the brave Pomeranian farmer in the film torched his own farmstead in order to inflict ‘scorched earth’ on the French, the German farmers now fleeing from Silesia, East Prussia and Pomerania in their hundreds of thousands had other concerns.
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The arrival of their treks in the diminished Reich led to the demise of another anti-British film. In January 1945 the Propaganda Ministry decided that ‘scenes of [Boer] refugees’, depicted in the 1941 blockbuster
Ohm Krüger,
‘for the time being fitted “into the landscape” very badly’. Yet as the Propaganda Ministry tried to keep imaginary scenes of civilian panic and mass death off the cinema screens, it busily inflated the death toll in Dresden, letting the German Foreign Office feed photographs of the destruction, including close-ups of badly burnt children, to the press in neutral Sweden. For the first time, the Germans also decided to exaggerate, rather than to minimise, the loss of life. By 17 February, the
Svenska Morgonbladet
was telling the world that ‘currently 100,000 dead are talked of’; on 25 February, the
Svenska Dagbladet
reported that, ‘according to information compiled a few days after the destruction, the figure is closer to 200,000 than 100,000’. On 4 March,
Das Reich
carried a story written by its editor-in-chief entitled ‘The death of Dresden: A beacon of resistance’. The Allied raids, the article declared, represented ‘four acts of a coolly calculated plan of murder and destruction’, with the second wave of British planes deliberately targeting the refugees sheltering on the banks of the Elbe and causing ‘a bloodbath’. The high casualty figure rapidly entered German public consciousness; it was registered by both the Paulus and de Boor families.
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Goebbels had plucked his statistics from the air. In February the military and police in Dresden had only just begun to build up an accurate picture by counting the dead, street by street, block by block. As they did so, they came under pressure from the local military commander, General Karl Mehnert, to find more bodies. The destruction and the concentration of bodies within the narrow inner city was so great that it would have seemed to him – and many others – that the scale of destruction was even worse than it was. A special SS unit was brought in to oversee the cremation of the remains of 6,865 people by concentration camp prisoners in the Altmarkt square. As the
Sonderkommando
brought back to one of the Reich’s finest baroque cities the methods pioneered for disposing of the Jews gassed in Treblinka, it added another involuntary image to the store of German parallels between their own victimhood and what they had done to the Jews.
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But the actual death toll did not match Mehnert’s and Goebbels’s guesses. By 10 March, the police had discovered 18,375 bodies; five days later, their ‘final report’ confirmed this number, predicting that the total would probably rise to 25,000. A further report on 22 March brought the actual number of the dead to 20,204 and repeated the estimate of a maximum total of 25,000. This was to be the final wartime report. To substantiate the exaggerated claims it had already made, the Propaganda Ministry simply added a zero to these numbers, setting before the world an utterly unprecedented death toll of 202,000, rising to a probable 250,000; it explained the large numbers by claiming that the population of the city had been tripled by a huge influx of refugees from the east. Yet in the twenty years after the war only a further 1,858 bodies were recovered, confirming the accuracy of the local police’s original estimate. Both in Germany and outside it, however, Goebbels’s mythical claims would enjoy a long run.
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This quest to influence international opinion, especially the public in Britain and the United States, was remarkably successful. Support came from an unexpected direction, when journalists were told at a press briefing at Eisenhower’s headquarters that Dresden amounted to ‘terror bombing’, a term the British and Americans had always rejected in public – even though Churchill did use it privately. The British media responded to pressure not to report the slip, yet it got out in the United States via Associated Press, triggering a major debate on the ethics of ‘area bombing’. Articles in the
Manchester Guardian
followed and on 6 March the Labour MP Richard Stokes used a question in the House of Commons to place all the information he had obtained about Dresden on the official record. On 28 March, Churchill bowed to public pressure and ordered a halt to the bombing of German cities. The heroism of Bomber Command had been lauded when Britain had possessed no other effective weapon against Germany, but now there was a queasy sense that an ethical line had been crossed.
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After three months of fighting in the Vosges hills, the Americans were forcing the Germans back to the Rhine at Colmar. Ernst Guicking was still defending the western, Alsatian bank of the Upper Rhine and, for the next few weeks, his wife Irene was torn between her fears for him and her anxiety that the Allies might manage to cross the great river. She confessed that her dearest wish was that he could turn into a mole and dig an underground tunnel to her in Lauterbach: ‘I would bathe you in the laundry, rid you of all the bits of soil and then, yes then, I would dig you into the soil again, or hide you somewhere else, till no danger threatened you any more.’ On 4 February, Ernst was at last able to write to tell her that his unit had crossed the Rhine to the Badenese side at Neuenburg and that they were now stationed in the relative safety of the Black Forest. They were still involved in fighting, but, as Ernst’s private account veered into the language of the military bulletins with their calming talk of ‘planned withdrawals’, he assured Irene: ‘Yes, the bridgehead has been cleared in the best order and with intelligent foresight. Over there they may shout about another victory, but on our side everything was already planned long in advance.’
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Irene was not perhaps a natural reader of
Das Reich,
but the young florist found herself forced to think about politics by the approaching front. She pored over an article Goebbels had written:

We do not doubt for an instant that we will succeed in smashing the global threat from the east. When and how is a matter of the means which have been set in motion. The [hordes from the] steppes will be brought to a halt, and at the very moment when the danger has reached a peak and so is clear to everyone. Till then, keep a cool head.

The piece only half reassured Irene. She could not help asking Ernst if he thought that there were still ‘elements in the Wehrmacht’ who wanted to ‘plot another 20 July’. ‘Will Himmler pay enough attention?’ she asked too, wondering why there were still ‘so many healthy, young chaps running around here’ when they could be at the front. Lauterbach remained relatively quiet, with occasional bombs dropped near the station, but Irene’s main concern was getting in enough wood from the forest to see her through to the end of winter.
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While Guicking’s Upper Rhine sector remained relatively quiet, much heavier fighting was under way to the north. Along the wide Lower Rhine, Canadian and British forces pushed from Nijmegen on 8 February. The American advance across the river Roer towards the Cologne plain was delayed for a further twelve days when German engineers opened the dams, flooding the valley. The German armies under Rundstedt fought bitterly to hold on to their positions west of the Rhine, continuing to inflict heavier casualties on the Allies than they were suffering themselves. Such continued ‘fighting power’ was all the more striking given the huge imbalance of forces: by February, 462,000 German troops were facing 3.5 million Allied soldiers. To make matters worse, many of the German divisions had a high proportion of raw recruits, who had not been hardened in the difficult rearguard battles for which their commanders, Model, Blaskowitz and Hausser, were famous. Nor could they rely on the same level of artillery or armour as their opponents. Indeed, having starved the eastern front of tanks and artillery in December and January in order to mount the Ardennes offensive, Hitler and Keitel were now sending heavy weapons eastwards again, in a desperate attempt to block the Red Army in Silesia and Hungary. On 2 March, the Americans reached the western bank of the Rhine south and north of Düsseldorf, and occupied Krefeld. Three days later, they broke through the weak defences around Cologne and took the city in a day, the Wehrmacht hurriedly detonating the main Hohenzollern bridge as soon as they had crossed to the eastern bank.
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