The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  But now that Model had manned the Westwall, German resistance was fierce. The Allies regretted that the supply crisis of early September had halted them just short of it. A staff officer at First Army headquarters remarked: ‘At that time I could have walked through it with my dog and my daughter.’ Now they found field defences dug by civilian forced labour, cottages turned into pillboxes and concrete bunkers with iron doors. Sherman tanks were called up to deal with them, using armour-piercing ammunition. As soon as American infantry platoons had cleared a bunker with grenades and sometimes flamethrowers, they called in engineers who welded the doors shut with oxy-acetylene torches to prevent other German soldiers slipping back to reoccupy them.

  On 12 October Hodges issued an ultimatum demanding unconditional surrender, otherwise the city of Aachen would be flattened by bombing and shelling. Refugees had told officers that between five and ten thousand civilians had refused to leave, despite Nazi Party orders. Hitler had decreed that the capital of Charlemagne and the German emperors should be defended to the last. Hodges’s First Army surrounded Aachen, and now the encircling troops faced fierce German counter-attacks, a situ ation which produced some misleading and rather confused comparisons to Stalingrad. The German counter-attacks were smashed with relative ease by American artillery concentrations. Many of their guns were firing German shells which they had captured in France.

  German defenders included a mixture of infantry, panzergrenadiers, Luftwaffe, SS, marine infantry and Hitler Jugend volunteers. The damage to buildings was considerable, and the Rathaus or town hall was totally destroyed. With rubble and smashed glass in the streets, empty windows and trailing telephone wires, Aachen took on the ‘malevolent appearance of a defeated city’. Fortunately, the American artillery and P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bomber pilots managed to avoid the great cathedral, as they had been ordered to.

  House-to-house-fighting continued pitilessly during October. Starting at the top of a house, the Americans blasted their way through to the next building using a bazooka. It was too dangerous to try the street. The 30th Division suffered such a high rate of casualties that a replacement private who arrived at the start of the battle found himself a sergeant in charge of a platoon three weeks later.

  Aachen was a prosperous, largely middle-class city. American soldiers began to search apartments with hefty furniture, portraits of Hindenburg and the Kaiser, Meerschaum pipes, ornamental beer steins and posed photographs of university duelling fraternities. But German soldiers booby-trapped building with trip wires and charges, which the Americans called ‘bundling babies’. ‘I don’t get it,’ said a GI angrily. ‘They know they most likely will get killed. How come they don’t give up?’ GIs threw a grenade into practically every room before they entered, because German defenders concealed themselves ready to shoot back. Several of them, having just shot an American in the back, jumped up with their arms raised to surrender, as if they were playing a child’s game. Not surprisingly, a number of prisoners were roughly handled.

  On one occasion four German boys, the youngest of whom was eight, began firing with abandoned rifles at an American field-gun crew. A patrol went out to investigate the source of the shots. ‘The American patrol leader was so incensed with the children’s action that he slapped the eldest with his hand and afterward reported back that the boy stood at attention and took the slap as though he had been a soldier.’

  The American military authorities managed to evacuate the German civilians from cellars and air-raid shelters as the fighting continued. They noticed that, after all the Nazi propaganda, they nervously eyed the black American truck drivers who took them off to a holding camp. Civilians were screened for Nazi Party members, but it was an almost impossible task. Most of them complained of the way they had been treated by the German troops defending the city, because they had refused to leave when told. Some were deserters who had managed to obtain civilian clothes. A Jeep outside Aachen was ambushed, and this raised fears following rumours of a Nazi guerrilla resistance codenamed Werwolf.

  The US military authorities also found themselves struggling to cope with around 3,000 Polish and Russian forced labourers, including ‘large blank-faced women in old ragged skirts with kerchiefs wrapped around their heads and carrying cloth bundles’. Some of the men had already started to attack and threaten German householders with knives to obtain food and sometimes loot. They had much to avenge, but MPs rounded up between seven and eight hundred offenders and kept them in a stockade. It was a small foretaste of the complications to come with an estimated eight million displaced persons in Germany.

  The Nazi regime had no intention of allowing indiscipline to reign in any form. Ever since the failed July plot, which greatly increased the power of Martin Bormann, the Nazi Party secretary, Goebbels and Himmler, Nazi ideology was increasingly imposed on the Wehrmacht. This made any subsequent attempt to remove Hitler impossible. Beyond symbols, such as replacing the military salute with the ‘German greeting’, the number of NSFOs or National Socialist leadership officers was increased. Soldiers and officers found behind the front without authorization to retreat were far more likely to be shot, and staff officers were searched by SS guards when entering Führer headquarters.

  Increased repression also began in Soviet ranks. To make up for its huge losses, the Red Army was forcibly recruiting Ukrainians, Belorussians, Poles and men from the three Baltic states, which were once again under Soviet control. ‘Lithuanians hate us even more than Poles do,’ a Red Army soldier wrote home on 11 October, ‘and we pay them back in the same manner.’ These recently inducted soldiers were inevitably the most likely to desert. ‘The Special Detachment [SMERSh] was keeping an eye on me as I was the son of a purged man,’ a sergeant explained later. ‘We had a lot of Asians in my unit, who often ran away, either to the rear or to the Germans. Once an entire group defected. After that we, the Russians, were told to keep an eye on the Uzbeks. I was a sergeant then, and the political officer told me: you will pay with your life if anyone in your section defects. They could easily have shot me. Once a Belorussian escaped. They caught him and returned him to the unit. The man from the Special Detachment said to him: if you are going to fight properly we will hush this affair up. But he escaped again and again was caught. He was hanged. Not shot, but hanged as a deserter. We were lined up in a forest ride. A truck appeared with a gallows mounted on it. The CheKa [NKVD] man read out the order: “To be executed for treason to the Motherland”. The man was hanged, and then the CheKa man also shot him.’

  Germans retreating from Belorussia after the collapse of Army Group Centre had few illusions about the fate of civilians who had been friendly to them. A medical Obergefreiter who had escaped just in time to avoid encirclement wondered: ‘What will have happened to the poor people who had to stay behind, by that I mean the locals?’ German soldiers knew well that the NKVD and SMERSh would arrive just behind the fighting troops to interrogate civilians to see who had collaborated.

  During the Soviet advance into Romania, an officer recorded that the company had consisted almost entirely of Ukrainian peasants from the regions that had been under the ‘temporary occupation’ of the enemy. ‘Most of them had no desire to fight and had to be forced to do this. I remember walking through the trench. Everybody was digging except for one soldier who was supposed to be digging the fire position for the Maxim. He was standing there doing nothing. I asked him what the matter was. He fell on his knees in front of me and began to whine: “Have mercy on me! I’ve got three kids. I want to live!” What could I say? All of us understood that an infantry soldier at the front had only two possible fates: to the hospital, or to the grave.’ This officer, like most in the Red Army, was convinced that successful companies depended entirely on a core of Russian or Siberian soldiers. ‘I would always select a couple of men from among the reliable Russian soldiers before an attack, and when the company got up to attack these soldiers would stay in the trench and kick out all those who were trying to hide and
avoid going forward.’

  Well to the rear, vengeance on a mass scale was being carried out against ethnic minorities who had welcomed the Germans in 1941 and 1942. In December 1943, Beria had deported 200,000 Crimean Tatars to Uzbeki-stan. Some 20,000 of these Muslims had served in German uniform so the remaining 90 per cent had to suffer, although many others had fought well in the Red Army. They had been rounded up on 18 May and given no time to prepare. Some 7,000 died on the journey and many times that number died in exile through starvation. Some 390,000 Chechens were also rounded up, and delivered to railheads in Lend–Lease Studebaker trucks intended for the Red Army. Some 78,000 of them are said to have died on the journey. Stalin had started with his own peoples before he began on his enemies and the Poles, who were allies, at least in theory.

  Stalin and his generals were uneasy about the fighting qualities of the new intakes because German resistance was stiffening. In the battles for the Carpathian mountain range to defend eastern Hungary and Slovakia, the troops of Hitler’s last ally surprised Soviet veterans, especially after the sudden collapse of the Romanian army. ‘The Hungarians were actually a big problem for us in Transylvania,’ a Red Army officer recorded. ‘They fought with great courage to the last bullet and the last man. They would never surrender.’

  Malinovsky, with his reinforced 2nd Ukrainian Front, tried to conduct a large encirclement in eastern Hungary. In what was called the Debrecen Operation, a bold strike which began on 6 October was thwarted by a counter-attack two weeks later with III Panzer Corps and XVII Corps. Malinovsky, on Stavka urging, launched another attack to the south near Szeged and towards Budapest, breaking through the Hungarian Third Army. But Malinovsky’s considerable forces were halted short of the capital by another counter-attack with three panzer divisions and the Panzergrenadier Division Feldherrnhalle. It became increasingly clear that the battle for Budapest would become one of the most violent of the war.

  Following the defections of Romania and Bulgaria, Admiral Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, made secret contacts with the Soviet Union. Molotov demanded that Hungary should immediately declare war on Germany. On 11 October, Horthy’s representatives signed the agreement in Moscow. Four days later, Horthy informed the German envoy in Budapest and made an announcement of the armistice in a broadcast. The Germans, already informed of Horthy’s moves, reacted quickly. On Hitler’s orders, Otto Skorzeny, the SS commando leader who had rescued Mussolini, had already prepared to seize Horthy in his residence, the Citadel, which overlooked the Danube. The Germans would replace him with Ferenc Szálasi, the ferociously anti-semitic leader of the Nazi-inspired Arrow Cross movement.

  Operation Panzerfaust, as it was called, would be overseen by Obergruppenführer von dem Bach-Zelewski, who had just finished his murderous task in Warsaw. Skorzeny persuaded Bach-Zelewski not to repeat the same heavy-handed tactics, and avoid smashing the Citadel into submission. Instead, on the morning of 15 October, just before Horthy’s announcement of the armistice, Skorzeny’s SS commandos managed to kidnap Horthy’s son in a street ambush after a shoot-out with his bodyguards. Miklós Horthy was trussed up, flown to Vienna and transferred to Mauthausen concentration camp, which already contained such Prominenten as Francisco Largo Caballero, the former prime minister of the Spanish Republic.

  Horthy was told bluntly that, if he persisted with his ‘treason’, his son would be executed. The admiral, although in a state of nervous collapse at the threat, went ahead with his broadcast. Arrow Cross stormtroopers seized the building immediately afterwards and put out a denial, insisting on Hungary’s determination to fight on. Ferenc Szálasi took power later that afternoon. Horthy was given little option. He was brought back to Germany in protective custody.

  Horthy had put a stop to Eichmann’s deportation of Jews in the summer, by which time 437,402 had been killed, mostly at Auschwitz. But even though Himmler was halting the mass extermination programme with the approach of the Red Army, the remaining Jews were rounded up for slave labour and forced to march to Germany because of a lack of rolling stock. Tormented, beaten and clubbed to death by SS and Arrow Cross guards, many thousands died on the way. Although Szálasi stopped these death marches in November, more than 60,000 Jews remained prisoners in a tiny ghetto in Budapest. Most of his followers were now determined to embark on their own ‘Final Solution to the Jewish question’. The notorious Arrow Cross activist Father Alfréd Kun, who later admitted to 500 murders, used to give the command: ‘In the name of Christ–Fire!’

  Arrow Cross militia, some of them aged from fourteen to sixteen years old, would seize groups of Jews from the ghetto, force them to strip to their underclothes and march them barefoot through the freezing streets to the Danube embankments of the city for execution. In many cases, their firing was so inaccurate that a number of victims managed to jump into the icy river and swim away. On one occasion a German officer halted a mass killing and sent the Jews home, but this was probably no more than a temporary reprieve.

  Although some NCOs of the Hungarian Gendarmerie joined the 4,000 Arrow Cross militiamen in torturing and murdering Jews, others helped them. There were even a few members of the Arrow Cross itself who helped Jews escape, proving that one can never make sweeping generalizations. The efforts of one of them, Dr Ara Jerezian, later received full acknowledgement from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel.

  The greatest operation to save Jews was mounted by the Swede Raoul Wallenberg who, despite having no more than semi-official status in Hungary, issued tens of thousands of documents stating that the bearer was under the protection of the Swedish government. Later, during the siege, the Arrow Cross invaded the Swedish embassy and murdered several of its staff in revenge for their activities. Along with the Swedes, the Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, the Portuguese diplomat Carlos Branquinho, the International Red Cross and the papal nuncio issued their own protection papers to help other Hungarian Jews escape.

  The embassies of El Salvador and Nicaragua provided several hundred certificates of citizenship, but the most extraordinary bluff emerged from the Spanish embassy. The Spanish chargé d’affaires, Angel Sanz-Briz, knew that the Szálasi regime was desperate to be recognized by his government. He encouraged its members in this illusion, while taking on the Arrow Cross even more robustly than the Swedish embassy. Sanz-Briz was forced to leave, but he handed over to a new ‘chargé d’affaires’, Giorgio Perlasca, who was in fact an Italian anti-Fascist. Perlasca assembled 5,000 Jews in safe houses under Spanish protection, while Franco’s government in Madrid had no idea of what was being done in its name. An even braver confidence trick was carried out by Miksa Domonkos, a member of the Jewish Council, who forged safe conducts in the name of a superintendent of Gendarmerie. All these attempts to save lives took on a greater urgency as the Red Army advanced on Budapest, and the Arrow Cross became more deadly.

  On 18 October, just as the First Army was securing Aachen, Eisenhower presided over a conference to discuss strategic options in Brussels at 21st Army Group headquarters. This was rather a pointed choice of location, since Montgomery had angered his American colleagues by failing to attend the previous one on 22 September at SHAEF headquarters in Versailles. He had sent in his place Lieutenant General Freddy de Guingand, his much liked chief of staff and ‘genial peacemaker’ as Bradley put it. This time Monty could not avoid attending.

  One option was to sit out the winter, waiting until more divisions arrived from the United States and a good reserve of supplies built up, having arrived through Antwerp once it was open. The other was to launch a major offensive in November using the resources available. Inaction in the west was unthinkable simply because of what Stalin would say about the Allies’ reluctance to fight. Montgomery’s renewed argument for a major push north of the Ruhr was again overruled. Eisenhower, strongly backed by Bradley, wanted a double thrust, with First and Ninth Armies on the northern side, and Patton’s Third Army attacking in the Saar. Montgomery was told to swing south from Nijmegen between the Rhi
ne and the Maas. This concentration of forces north and south of the Ardennes would leave a very weakly held sector in the middle. To cover this part of the front, Bradley brought in Major General Troy Middleton’s VIII Corps, which had been finishing off in Brittany.

  Aachen itself was not cleared until the end of the third week in October. On 30 October, Cologne received a virtual coup de grâce from Harris’s bombers in another heavy raid. The destruction of the Reichsbahn meant that there were insufficient trains to evacuate those left in the ruins. The city then saw the only example of civilian armed resistance against the Nazis, when Communists and foreign workers seized weapons from isolated policemen. Fighting an urban guerrilla war, they attacked the police and even managed to kill the local head of the Gestapo, until a vicious retaliation wiped them out.

  Allied bombing intensified. The RAF and USAAF no longer had a great deal to fear from the Luftwaffe, although Spaatz was worried that the new Me 262 jet fighters would suddenly appear and blast his bombers from the sky. Approximately 60 per cent of all the bombs dropped on Germany fell in the last nine months of the war. Hitler’s armaments minister Albert Speer acknowledged that the damage to Germany’s economic infrastructure ‘only became insurmountable during the autumn of 1944, largely as a consequence of the systematic destruction of the transport and communications network through a relentless Allied bombing campaign that had begun in October’. And despite Harris’s scepticism, Spaatz’s oil plan against refineries and benzol plants was also having a marked effect on Wehrmacht operations, especially the Luftwaffe’s. Only arms production held up, largely thanks to Speer’s energy and talents.