The Second World War (141 page)

In Soviet eyes the definition of ‘fascist’ included anyone who did not follow the orders of the Communist Party. On 28 March sixteen representatives of the Home Army and its political wing were invited for discussions by the Soviet authorities. Although given guarantees of safe-conduct, they were immediately arrested by the NKVD and taken to Moscow. They were later put on trial, and in 1946 their leader General Leopold Okulicki was murdered in prison. Churchill tried to prompt Roosevelt into a ‘showdown’, but the American President, although shaken by Stalin’s bad faith, wanted to ‘
minimize the general Soviet problem
as much as possible’.

British indignation was prompted mainly by Eisenhower’s obstinate refusal to accept that there were political implications in his strategy. He believed that his task was to finish the war in Europe as rapidly as possible, and he did not share British concerns about Stalin and Poland. Senior British officers referred to Eisenhower’s deference to Stalin as ‘
Have a go, Joe
’, a call used by prostitutes in London when soliciting American soldiers. Eisenhower may have been politically naive, but it was Churchill who demonstrated a more serious failure to grasp geo-political reality at this moment. In one sense at least, the decisions at Yalta and his own percentage agreement were irrelevant. Ever since the Teheran conference at the end of 1943 when Stalin, supported by Roosevelt, had defined Allied strategy in the west, Europe was bound to be divided in Stalin’s favour. The western Allies were finding that they could liberate half of Europe only at the cost of re-enslaving the other half.

Stalin still suspected that Eisenhower’s frankness about Allied intentions was a trick. On 31 March he received the
American ambassador Averell Harriman and Sir Archibald Clark Kerr
, his British counterpart, in the Kremlin. They discussed the overall plan which Eisenhower had described in his signal, SCAF-252, and his intention to ignore Berlin. Stalin said that it seemed a good one, but first he must consult his staff.

The very next morning, which happened to be 1 April, Marshals Zhukov and Konev were summoned to Stalin’s office. ‘
Are you aware
how
the situation is shaping up?’ he asked them. They were clearly not quite sure what they were supposed to say and replied cautiously.

‘Read the telegram to them,’ he told General S. M. Shtemenko, the Stavka chief of operations. This message claimed that Montgomery would head for Berlin, and that Patton’s Third Army would turn from its drive towards Leipzig and Dresden to attack Berlin from the south. Stalin was presumably putting pressure on the two front commanders with a faked document, which bore little relation to SCAF-252.

‘Well, then,’ Stalin said, staring at his two marshals. ‘Who is going to take Berlin: are we or are the Allies?’

‘It is we who shall take Berlin,’ Konev replied immediately, ‘and we will take it before the Allies.’ Konev was evidently keen to beat Zhukov to the prize, and Stalin, who liked to create a rivalry between his commanders, approved. He made one alteration to General Antonov’s plan, by eliminating part of the boundary between the two fronts to give Konev the chance of striking for Berlin from the south. The Stavka went to work with a vengeance. The operation involved 2.5 million men, 41,600 guns and heavy mortars, 6,250 tanks and self-propelled guns and 7,500 aircraft. Everything had to be ready in just over two weeks, by 16 April.

Once the conference was over, Stalin replied to Eisenhower’s message. He told him that his plan ‘
completely coincided
’ with that of the Red Army and that ‘Berlin has lost its former strategic importance.’ The Soviet Union would deploy only secondary forces against it, while its main effort would be made to the south to join up with American forces, probably in the second half of May. ‘However, this plan may undergo certain alterations, depending on circumstances.’ It was the greatest April Fool in modern history.

At the meeting with Harriman and Clark Kerr, Stalin had appeared ‘
much impressed
’ by the vast numbers of prisoners the Allies were rounding up in the west. Patton’s Third Army alone had taken 300,000. But such figures of course fed his suspicion that the Germans were surrendering to the British and Americans, while concentrating their forces against the eastern front. Ilya Ehrenburg reflected this in an article in
Krasnaya Zvezda
. ‘
American tankists
are enjoying excursions in the picturesque Harz mountains,’ he wrote. The Germans were surrendering ‘with fanatical persistence’. But the phrase which angered Averell Harriman the most was his remark that the Americans were ‘
conquering with cameras
’, implying that they were just tourists.

Even devoted followers of the Führer found their faith in ‘final victory’ shaken. ‘
In the last few days
we have been rushed by events,’ an army officer on the staff of an SS corps in the Black Forest wrote in his diary on 2
April. ‘Düsseldorf lost, Cologne lost. The disastrous bridgehead at Remagen… In the south-east the Bolsheviks have reached Wiener Neustadt. Blow upon blow. We are coming to the end. Do our leaders see perhaps a possibility? Does the death of our soldiers, the destruction of our cities and villages make any sense now?’ Yet he still felt that they should fight on until told otherwise.

The war correspondent Godfrey Blunden noted how Germans still made ambushes, killed some Americans and then jumped up with their arms raised shouting ‘Kamerad!’ and expecting to be treated well. He was struck by the contrasts in the advance. ‘
We have gone through small towns
perfectly preserved from war and a few miles further on entered cities lying in ruins.’ Almost everywhere, they were greeted by pillow slips and sheets hung out of windows as tokens of surrender. The destruction wrought by the combined bomber offensive shook all who observed the reality on the ground. Stephen Spender later wrote of Cologne: ‘
One passes through
street after street of houses whose windows look hollow and blackened–like the open mouths of a charred corpse.’ In Wuppertal, the tram lines were ‘curled up like celery stalks’. ‘
Roads are still thronged
with slave workers steadily moving westward,’ Blunden recorded. ‘I saw one today with a tricolore flying from the pack on his back.’ He also saw released slave workers raid a brewery, then dance in the street and smash windows.

It was not long before the full horrors of the Nazi regime became apparent. On 4 April American troops entered Ohrdruf concentration camp, part of Buchenwald, to find apathetic, skeletal figures surrounded by unburied corpses. Eisenhower was so appalled that he ordered soldiers to visit the camp, and brought in war correspondents to witness the sight. Some of the guards had tried to disguise themselves, but when they were pointed out by prisoners Allied troops shot them on the spot. Other guards had already been killed by prisoners, but few had the strength. On 11 April, American soldiers came across the tunnel factory of Mittelbau-Dora. Four days later British troops entered Belsen. The stench and the sights made most of them feel physically sick. Some 30,000 prisoners were in a limbo between life and death, surrounded by more than 10,000 rotting corpses. Belsen’s population had been grotesquely swollen by the survivors of death marches who had been dumped there. More than 9,000 had died in the previous two weeks and 37,000 in the previous six, from starvation and a typhus epidemic. Of those still just alive, another 14,000 died despite all the efforts of the Royal Army Medical Corps. The senior officer present ordered a strong detachment of troops to march into the adjacent town of Bergen, to bring back the whole population at bayonet point. As they were to put to work moving corpses to mass graves, these German civilians all
professed shock and protested their ignorance, to the angry disbelief of British officers.

The aimless movement of tens of thousands of concentration camp prisoners from one place to another continued with murderous futility. Some 57,000 women and men from Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen were still being herded west. Altogether, between 200,000 and 350,000 prisoners are estimated to have died on the death marches. German civilians showed them little pity. Blunden heard of the
Gardelegen massacre
, where SS guards handed over several thousand prisoners from Dora-Mittelbau to a mixed group of Luftwaffe personnel, Hitler Jugend and local SA members. They forced the prisoners into a barn and set fire to it, then shot down any who attempted to escape. The speed of the Allied advance in the west prompted groups of SS, often aided by Volkssturm, to carry out many other massacres of prisoners.

Allied forces also had to care for their own prisoners of war, released from camps overrun in their advance. During the month of April a quarter of a million needed to be fed and repatriated. Eisenhower requested RAF and USAAF bombers to be diverted to this task, now that their work of destruction was virtually over.

The biggest relief operation was planned for the starving Netherlands. When Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart threatened to drown large areas, Eisenhower’s SHAEF headquarters announced that he and Generaloberst Blaskowitz, the commander-in-chief in Holland, would be treated as war criminals if that happened. Then, after complicated negotiations through the Dutch resistance, the German authorities agreed not to hinder attempts to drop food supplies in the worst-affected areas, including Rotterdam and The Hague. In Operation Manna, 3,000 sorties by RAF bombers parachuted in more than 6,000 tons. For countless people close to death, it came only just in time.

After the encirclement of Generalfeldmarschall Model’s Army Group B in the Ruhr during the first week of April, divisions from Simpson’s Ninth Army pushed rapidly forward towards the River Elbe. Eisenhower, taken aback by the British reaction over his change of strategy, vacillated over the taking of Berlin. Simpson, in his orders, was told to exploit any opportunity for seizing a bridgehead over the Elbe and to be prepared to continue the advance on Berlin or to the north-east. First Army on his right was heading for Leipzig and Dresden, while Patton’s Third Army was already in the Harz Mountains and heading for Czechoslovakia. In southern Germany, Lieutenant General Alexander M. Patch’s Seventh Army and Lattre de Tassigny’s First French Army were advancing through the Black Forest.

On 8 April Eisenhower visited Major General Alexander Bolling, the
commander of the 84th Infantry Division, after it had taken the city of Hanover.

‘
Alex, where are you going next
?’ Eisenhower asked him.

‘General, we’re going to push on ahead. We have a clear go at Berlin and nothing can stop us.’

‘Keep going,’ Eisenhower told him and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘I wish you all the luck in the world and don’t let anybody stop you.’ Bolling understood this as confirmation that Berlin was their objective.

On 11 April American troops reached Magdeburg along the autobahn from Hanover, and the following day crossed the Elbe south of Dessau. Over the next two days several other bridgeheads were seized across the river. Bolling’s 84th Division repulsed a counter-attack by part of General Walther Wenck’s lightly armed Twelfth Army. He had bridges across the Elbe ready to take the 2nd Armored Division, and during the night of 14 April its vehicles rumbled across ready to advance on Berlin. Both Simpson and Bolling guessed that opposition would be light. They were right. Almost all the SS formations were deployed facing the Red Army, which they knew was about to unleash its own assault on the capital. Most army units were now only too happy to surrender to the Americans before the Soviets arrived.

Eisenhower suddenly had another change of heart. He talked to Bradley, who thought that the capture of Berlin might cost 100,000 casualties, an estimate he later admitted to have been far too high. They both agreed that heavy casualties were an unacceptable price to pay for a prestige objective, from which they would have to withdraw anyway when the fighting finished. The European Advisory Commission had already settled the boundary of the Soviet occupation zone along the Elbe, while Berlin itself would be partitioned. Roosevelt had died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 12 April, and perhaps this also had an effect on Eisenhower’s thinking.

Early on 15 April, Simpson was summoned to 12th Army Group headquarters near Wiesbaden. Bradley was waiting for him at the airfield when his aircraft touched down. Without wasting any words, Bradley told him straight off that Ninth Army was to halt on the Elbe. There was to be no advance on Berlin. ‘
Where in hell did you get this
?’ Simpson asked.

‘From Ike,’ Bradley replied. Simpson, feeling dazed and dejected, returned to his headquarters wondering how he was going to announce this to his officers and men, especially as it came on top of the news of Roosevelt’s death.

Eisenhower had made the correct decision even if for the wrong reason. Stalin would never have allowed the Americans to take Berlin first. As soon as Red Army aviation pilots had spotted their advance, Stalin would almost certainly have ordered Soviet aircraft to attack them. Afterwards,
he would probably have claimed that it had been the fault of the Allies for trying to trick him with their assurances of advancing further to the south. Eisenhower wanted to avoid clashes with the Red Army at all costs. And strongly supported by Marshall, he rejected Churchill’s argument that the Americans and British ‘
should shake hands
with the Russians as far to the east as possible’. They knew that Churchill wanted to put pressure on Stalin in the hope of obtaining better treatment for Poland, but they both refused to be influenced by what they saw as the post-war politics of Europe.

Goebbels, on hearing of Roosevelt’s death, was overjoyed. He immediately telephoned Hitler, who was sunk in gloom in the Reichschancellery bunker. ‘
My Führer, I congratulate you
!’ he said. ‘Roosevelt is dead. It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us. This Friday 13 April, it is the turning point!’ Goebbels had been trying to raise Hitler’s spirits a few days before by reading to him from Carlyle’s
History of Friedrich II of Prussia
, including the passage where Frederick, tempted by suicide at the lowest point of the Seven Years War, suddenly received news of the death of the Tsarina Elizabeth. ‘The Miracle of the House of Brandenburg had come to pass.’ The following night Allied bombers reduced much of Frederick the Great’s Potsdam to rubble.