The German War (90 page)

While the fighting in the west was turning into a series of gigantic mopping-up operations for the Western Allies, as long as the Oder front held, Germans still wanted Heinrici’s armies to halt the ‘Asiatic hordes’ from the ‘steppes’. This imperative continued even after the military map of a defensible ‘Reich’ had been erased in the west: in the final weeks of the war, German soldiers fought on for a variety of motives – out of automatism, because this was what they had been instructed to do, because they were still trying to hold back the ‘red tide’, or because they wanted to be conquered and taken prisoner by the Western Allies. To the east of the Oder front, the besieged fortress cities fell one by one. In Upper Silesia, Oppeln fell on 24 January while Ratibor held out for another two months. In West Prussia, Graudenz and Posen were captured in the first week of March. Danzig, where the war had begun on 1 September 1939, was taken in the Soviet offensive on eastern Pomerania in March, while the East Prussian capital of Königsberg finally surrendered after an intensive three-day assault on 9 April. On 5 March General Hermann Niehoff was sent to the capital of Lower Silesia, Breslau, to renew the fighting spirit of the defenders. Niehoff deployed thousands of forced workers to turn the principal Kaiserstrasse into an alternative airstrip so that the Luftwaffe could continue to supply the inner city once the suburbs fell. They razed the churches and grand university buildings under continual strafing attacks by the Red Air Force, and the Luftwaffe continued its perilous daily flights into Breslau. The German armoured divisions in the city used Goliaths, the miniature remote-controlled tanks they had deployed to reconquer Warsaw, but this time to destroy buildings occupied by the advancing Soviets. While the less reliable and experienced German troops were held in reserve to plug gaps in the line, the elite units of paratroopers and Waffen SS continued to mount counter-attacks, halting the Red Army’s advance in the southern suburbs: a single apartment block on the corner of the Höfchenplatz and Opitzstrasse was fought over for eight days.
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Holding the line was not just an imperative for fanatical Nazis and military commanders hardened on the eastern front. Workers in Berlin could be overheard talking approvingly on the S-Bahn about the three soldiers and the local Party leader who had been hanged from telephone poles in Fürstenwalde on the Oder, bearing placards proclaiming their desertion from the front. Others called for the press to publish the numbers of deserters executed. The months of fighting on German soil had already created divisions between those civilians engulfed by combat in the borderlands and those sheltering behind them in the hinterland. As the conquest of the Reich entered its final, critical phase, these divisions became still more acute and violent.
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In the quiet flatlands of the Lüneburg Heath, where the teacher Agnes Seidel had been evacuated with her Hamburg schoolchildren since March 1944, a strange calm reigned. Seidel saw no tangible signs of the approaching front, even though she knew from the Wehrmacht report that the British and Canadians had crossed the Lower Rhine and that Blumentritt’s 1st Paratroop Army was fighting a slow, tenacious retreat eastwards. Her son Klaus, who had manned a flak gun in the middle of Hamburg throughout the firestorm, had last written from Pomerania, a short postcard sent on 1 March on his way to the front. On Sunday 1 April, the day the Ruhr was encircled, the children had their Easter egg hunt as usual in the garden and farmyard but a few days later, on the 5th, parents began to fetch their children home after the Hamburg educational authority gave in to their lobbying. Within two days, only five remained in the village. If it had not been for the sixteen boys and girls who had arrived with the refugees from East Prussia and Pomerania, Agnes Seidel would have had no one to teach. On 11 April, 1,500 British prisoners of war arrived at the farm where Agnes lodged. Like the German refugees before them, they were fed – potatoes and broth with milk in it – before continuing on their way. That night Agnes joined the farmer’s family, celebrating the birthday of one of the other teachers by drinking more heavily than usual. As the SD noted in their last attempt at a nationwide report at the end of March, across the Reich any occasion now seemed a good opportunity to uncork bottles which had been carefully put by for so long to celebrate ‘final victory’.
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Agnes had ordered packing crates for her own possessions but she did not begin to grasp the gravity of the situation until 12 April, when the soldiers at the nearby Wehrmacht base blew up their ammunition dump and left. People started arriving at the farm laden with cloth, cooking pots, pails, buckets and bundles of clothing. She realised that they were looting the shops and the army warehouse at Melzingen. That night she could hardly sleep. The next day the police accepted her gift of cigarettes to transport 2 hundredweight of potatoes on their truck to Hamburg – her post-war provisions. On 16 April, a local foster mother came to complain that she had no butter or meat and hardly any bread to feed the boy she had taken in from Hamburg. Trust in the system of payments which had worked for the last two years was clearly evaporating. Exhausted and no longer bothered by the frequent noise of low-flying aircraft overhead, Agnes took an afternoon nap. At 4 p.m., she woke to a different sound – the roar of British trucks and tanks pouring through the village in an endless stream. She was outraged when the polite English officers and an aggressive American ‘half-nigger’ came to the farm later that afternoon to arrest the German officers, including two 17-year-old SS men. She ran after the car to pass some food to them both and to shake their hands one more time. As the new occupiers claimed the best rooms in the farmstead, she had to move upstairs. Over the next two weeks, as one set of occupiers followed another, the reserved English were replaced by unfriendly Americans, most of them, Agnes thought, of Polish origin. In the stillness of the night in the house, she found the noise of singing and dance music coming from the barn where the Polish farm workers still slept unnerving.
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Margarete Töpperwien was not in Solingen when the town fell. She and her daughter Bärbel had let out the house and repaired to the quiet of her mother-in-law’s in the Harz town of Osterode the previous autumn. In early March she could still write that ‘we are living incredibly peacefully here, in spite of all the overflights, in spite of all the refugees’. But, like Agnes Seidel, she too felt that ‘the flood is rising’. Placing her trust in God that all would be well, she reassured her husband August that ‘inner integrity is more important than external preservation’. Now in the quiet Czech backwater of Petersdorf, August was reduced to watching with mounting anxiety from afar the Americans’ conquest of western Germany: ‘All of mine in the field of fire and I – as a soldier – in what looks like deepest peace!’
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After being evacuated from Dresden, the Klemperers had spent late February and March in the tiny, one-up, one-down house of their former domestic servant Agnes in the Wendish-speaking village of Piskowitz. They gradually put on weight and rebuilt their strength on a diet of the excellent rye bread, unlimited amounts of butter, curd cheese and honey, even enjoying meat every day. When the village was cleared of refugees to accommodate troops, they journeyed on to Pirna, where old friends took them in for the night and gave Victor shoes and new trousers. Next they stayed with their old pharmacist friend Hans Scherner at Falkenstein in the Vogtland until 1 April, when once again their room was requisitioned.
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Until now, the Klemperers had been using their real names. Eva, with her ‘Aryan’ passport and identity card, had acted as their ‘tour guide’, dealing with the local authorities and buying train tickets, while Victor hid his ‘Jewish passport’ and proffered only the ‘Aryan’ ration card he had been issued with after the Dresden raid. They were aware that their name sounded suspiciously Jewish. Before leaving Falkenstein, they decided to falsify their documents. Ironically, the idea came from a dispensing chemist, who had made a slip a year before, spelling their name as ‘Kleinpeter’. Eva realised that she only had to dot the ‘m’ and lengthen the ‘r’ to achieve the transformation. Having doctored their police registration of departure and their ration cards, on 2 April they embarked once more, to all the world just another weary couple in their sixties who had been caught in Dresden during the raids, Victor a secondary-school teacher from his real birthplace of Landsberg an der Warthe. With Landsberg already in Soviet hands, their cover story was safely uncheckable. Still, they decided to keep their real passports and one of Victor’s Jewish stars at the bottom of a bag. It was a huge risk, but they wanted to hang on to them for when the Allies arrived, ‘because we shall need this evidence to save ourselves, just as much as we need the Aryan identity’.
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Travelling on to Munich, the ‘Kleinpeters’ found themselves unwittingly journeying ever deeper into what remained of the Third Reich. A night in a waiting room at Marktredwitz ‘made a great impression on me’, Victor noted, ‘because of the crowding together and the different groups mixed up on the floor: soldiers, civilians, men, women, children, blankets, suitcases, kitbags, rucksacks, legs, heads jumbled together, the picturesque centrepiece a girl and a young soldier sleeping gently shoulder to shoulder’. As they stood or sat on slow-moving trains, sometimes forced to get off and walk along sections where the line had been bombed, it was the same picture, just on a progressively larger scale, in Eger, Regensburg and Munich. After years of being marked out, Klemperer could finally blend in as a ‘national comrade’, a participant-observer of how ‘ordinary Germans’ talked amongst themselves. On the night of 4–5 April, he recorded the conversation that unfolded in the dark of a second-class compartment of the train:

A young man beside me: My father still believed in victory, never listened to me. But now even he doesn’t believe any more . . . Bolshevism and international Jewry are the victors . . . A young woman sitting some distance away: She still believed in victory, she trusted in the Führer, her husband was fighting in Breslau, and she believed.

Klemperer’s interest in how people talked was fuelled by an enduring need to know how much they believed Goebbels’s propaganda, how far it chimed with or shaped their common sense of the war. As he jotted down these increasingly unstable oscillations between hope and despair he became ever more attentive to the odd juxtapositions and split-mindsets they entailed, uncertain himself whether the people he was listening to were ready to abandon or continue the war.
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Trekking to and from the Bavarian capital over the next week, the ‘Kleinpeters’ found themselves increasingly dependent on precisely the kind of public assistance they had tried so hard to avoid in order to escape the notice of Nazi officialdom. In Munich they slept in the vast underground shelter of the main station run by the National Socialist People’s Welfare: Eva with her thick glasses and short, grey hair, wearing a fur coat with bald patches singed by flying sparks during the Dresden raid; Victor sprouting white stubble and clad in a heavy but threadbare old overcoat. As they adjusted to Munich in early April 1945, they discovered a kind of spontaneous social order underlying the apparent chaos. They found out where the National Socialist People’s Welfare dispensed soup, bread and coffee. There was the improvised tram service after the heavy bombing: ‘tracks laid on the streets, little locomotives, giving off black clouds, pull trains of wagons, each truck converted into a primitive carriage by means of box boards, all the seats packed, also clusters of people hanging between and on the wagons’. In Munich, Eva and Victor managed to track down the last link in their network of pre-Nazi friends and acquaintances: Klemperer’s old doctoral supervisor, Professor Karl Vossler, a Catholic keen to air his anti-Nazi views over lunch in his grand apartment but unwilling to provide any further support for his former pupil.
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After the Vosslers, the Klemperers’ private network was exhausted and they had no choice but to turn to the People’s Welfare office and hope that no one became too curious about them. What is remarkable is how effectively the system of resettlement still operated in Bavaria in early April 1945. The trains, although irregular and overcrowded, still ran and people grudgingly made space for each other and told each other their stories in the darkness. In the small villages they were sent to, local police and mayors did their best to help them, although they struggled to find a room. But each time the ‘Kleinpeters’ returned, defeated, to the People’s Welfare in Aichach, a town not far from Augsburg, apologetic assistance was at hand; the volunteers clearly wanted to solve their problem and find them lodging, rather than just pass them on to someone else. On 12 April they arrived at the village of Unterbernbach in the evening, where the local farmers’ leader, a big, gaunt, grey-haired man called Flammensbeck, and his wife ‘immediately took care of us with touching kindliness (a Quaker, says Eva)’. Exhausted, Victor and Eva were deeply relieved: ‘It was a matter of course for straw beds, pillows and blankets to be laid down on the living room floor for us’, but soon they were billeted in an attic room at the end of the village.
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They continued to take their meals at the Flammensbecks’ table, and the food they provided was wholesome and generous. Over the next few days, Victor learned that Flammensbeck had been one of the first and most ardent Nazis in the village; now a son was missing in Russia, one son-in-law had been killed in action, and the other wounded five times and back in the village with his wife and baby. A few days after the ‘Kleinpeters’ arrived in Unterbernbach, large sections of the Vogtland from which they had just come were occupied by the US 3rd Army. They had reached one of the remaining heartlands of the Third Reich.
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The day that Eva and Victor reached Unterbernbach brought news that President Roosevelt had died on 12 April. Goebbels rushed to cheer Hitler with the news, pointing out the miraculous parallel with the death of Tsarina Elizabeth in 1762 and the collapse of the coalition facing Frederick the Great. With his usual care to control the reporting of good news, the Propaganda Minister instructed the press not to make this overly explicit in case it prompted ‘premature hopes and exaggerated expectations’. Meanwhile, in the capital, graffiti with Soviet stars started to appear on formerly communist housing estates. More generally, most Berliners vented their bitterness at their plight on the Party and its meddling in military affairs, but there was still a clamour for Hitler, or even Goebbels, to speak ‘now in the hour of greatest need’. Flight seemed pointless: ‘Where should one flee to?’ The only hope lay in the very speed of the Americans’ advance towards the Elbe during the previous week, as people canvassed the possibility ‘that the Anglo-Americans will still reach Berlin ahead of the Soviets’.
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