Many Germans tried simply to survive rather than ponder on the events which had brought them to a far greater state of humiliation than the defeat of 1918. ‘People were living with their fate,’ a Berliner remarked. The majority of Hitler loyalists persuaded themselves that the behaviour of Soviet troops proved that they had been right to try to destroy the Soviet Union. Others started to have terrible doubts.
Fritz Hockenjos, the army staff officer with the SS corps in the Black Forest, reflected on responsibility for Germany’s defeat in his diary. ‘The people were not to blame for losing the war. Soldiers, workers and farmers had borne superhuman efforts and burdens and they had believed, obeyed, laboured and fought until the end. Were politicians and Party functionaries guilty, economic leaders and field marshals? Had they not told the Führer the truth and played their own game behind his back? Or was Adolf Hitler not the man he seemed to be among the people? Was it possible that perspicacity and parochialism, simplicity and ferment, loyalty and falsehood, faith and delusion lived in the same heart? Was Adolf Hitler the great, inspired leader, who could not be measured by ordinary standards, or was he an impostor, a criminal, an incompetent dilettante, a madman? Was he an instrument of God or an instrument of the devil? And the men of July ’44, were they ultimately not traitors? Questions, questions. I found no answers and no peace of mind.’
Although the announcement of Hitler’s death did not bring an immediate end to the fighting, it certainly accelerated the process of final collapse. On 2 May General von Vietinghoff’s forces in northern Italy and southern Austria surrendered. British troops rushed to secure Trieste at the head of Adriatic. Tito’s partisans had already reached the city, but in insufficient numbers to make a difference.
The citizens in Prague, believing that Patton’s Third Army was about to arrive, rose in revolt against the Germans. The Czechs were assisted by more than 20,000 men of Vlasov’s ROA, who turned against their German allies, but not by the Americans as they had hoped. General Marshall had firmly rejected another of Churchill’s appeals to advance to the Czech capital.
With the Red Army too far way to intervene, Generalfeldmarschall Schörner’s response was almost as savage as the suppression which followed the Warsaw uprising. Changing sides did nothing to spare Vlasov and his troops from Soviet vengeance. Vlasov was denounced by one of his own officers as he attempted to escape under a blanket in the back of a car. Stalin was immediately informed of the capture of ‘traitor of the Motherland General Vlasov’ by Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front. He was flown to Moscow where he was later executed.
On 5 May, after negotiations with senior officers from Simpson’s Ninth Army, the wounded from Busse’s forces were allowed to cross the Elbe. Simpson refused to allow civilians through, because of the agreement with the Soviet Union that they should stay in their home areas. Soon unwounded soldiers, and young women camouflaged in Wehrmacht greatcoats and helmets, began to cross the half-wrecked railway bridge. US troops filtered the stream to stop civilians and to arrest members of the SS. Some of the foreigners in the SS, especially Dutch from the SS Neder-land Division, pretended either that they were German or that they were forced labourers trying to return home. Hiwis, terrified of capture by the NKVD, also tried to escape. Once the bridgehead defended by Wenck’s weak divisions came under Soviet artillery fire, the Americans pulled back to avoid casualties, and a stampede began to get to the west bank. Many soldiers and civilians seized boats or lashed together wood and fuel drums to improvise rafts. Some tried to grab the riderless horses and force them into the river to take them across. A large number of those who tried to swim for it drowned in the strong current. Others, who could not face the water or felt they had nothing left to live for, simply committed suicide.
General Bradley met Marshal Konev to provide him with a map showing the position of every American division. He received no information on Soviet dispositions in return, only an unmistakable warning that the Americans should not attempt to meddle in Czechoslovakia. In Austria the Soviets had set up a provisional government, without any consultation. No signals of friendship were emanating from Moscow. Molotov, who was in San Francisco for the founding conference of the United Nations, shocked Edward Stettinius when he stated that the sixteen Polish representatives, seized by the NKVD despite their safe-conduct passes, had been charged with the murder of 200 members of the Red Army.
On the afternoon of 4 May, Stalin had been angered to hear that Generaladmiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg and General der Infanterie Eberhard Kinzel had come to Montgomery’s headquarters on the Lüneburg Heath to surrender German forces in Holland, Denmark and northwest Germany. Montgomery sent the German delegates on to Rheims to make a full unconditional surrender at SHAEF headquarters. The procedure was unbelievably complicated. SHAEF had received no clear political instructions on the terms of the surrender and on French participation. The Germans hoped to negotiate a surrender solely with the western powers.
Not wanting to antagonize Stalin, SHAEF included in the negotiations General Susloparov, the senior Soviet liaison officer in the west. Eisenhower’s chief of staff General Bedell Smith conducted the proceedings with skill. On 6 May he threatened that if General Jodl, who had arrived to lead the German delegation, did not sign a universal surrender by midnight, then Allied forces would seal the front, meaning that they would all be taken by the Red Army. The German delegation argued that they needed forty-eight hours after signing to distribute the order to surrender, because of the breakdown in communications with subsidiary headquarters. This was in fact an excuse to obtain extra time in which to bring more troops to the west. Eisenhower agreed to the delay. The ‘Act of Military Surrender’ was signed by Jodl and Friedeburg in the early hours of 7 May, to take effect by one minute past midnight on 9 May.
Stalin could not let the final ceremony take place in the west, so he insisted that the Germans sign another surrender in Berlin at one minute past midnight on 9 May, the moment the capitulation agreed at Rheims came into effect. Word of the great events leaked out both in the United States and in Britain. Churchill cabled Stalin to explain that, since crowds were already gathering in London to celebrate, Victory in Europe Day celebrations in Britain would take place on 8 May, as they did in the United States. Stalin retorted in displeasure that Soviet troops were still fighting. German troops were still holding out in East Prussia, the Courland Peninsula, Czechoslovakia and many other places. In Yugoslavia, German forces did not surrender for another week. Victory celebrations, Stalin wrote, could therefore not begin in the Soviet Union until 9 May.
British troops stood by to be flown across the North Sea to help the Norwegians supervise the surrender of the 400,000 German troops in the country, the largest Wehrmacht force and still completely intact. Already in the far north, a Norwegian army expedition had reoccupied Finnmark, backed by Soviet forces. Although Reichskommissar Josef Terboven had plans for turning Norway into the last bastion of the Third Reich, Dönitz recalled him to Germany and told Generaloberst Franz Böhme to take full powers. On the evening of 7 May, Böhme broadcast news of the surrender. A skeleton administration in Oslo called up some 40,000 members of the Norwegian resistance to ensure security. Terboven committed suicide soon afterwards by blowing himself up.
Just before midnight on 8 May the surrender ceremony in Berlin began in Zhukov’s headquarters at Karlshorst. The Soviet marshal was flanked by Air Chief Marshal Tedder, General Spaatz and General Lattre de Tassigny. Generalfeldmarschall Keitel, Admiral von Friedeburg and Generaloberst Hans-Jürgen Stumpff of the Luftwaffe were brought in. As soon as they had signed, they were led out again. And then the party began. All over the city, gunfire broke out as Red Army officers and soldiers, who had hoarded vodka and almost any form of alcohol for the long-awaited moment, blasted off their remaining ammunition. This victory salute killed a number of people. The women of Berlin, well aware of what the drinking would provoke, trembled with apprehension.
Stalin, afraid of Zhukov’s imme
nse popularity both in the Soviet Union and abroad, began to torment him in minor ways. He blamed him for not having found Hitler, when SMERSh had already confirmed the identity of his corpse. They had found the assistant to Hitler’s dentist and made her examine the bridgework on his jaw. Zhukov did not discover that the body had been found until twenty years later. Stalin also used the deliberate mystery to suggest that Hitler had fled to Bavaria, which was occupied by the Americans. It was part of his campaign to insinuate that the Americans had a secret pact with the Nazis.
The longing for political change in the ranks of the Red Army had made the Soviet leadership very suspicious. Soldiers and officers alike had become outspoken in their criticisms of the Communist system. The Soviet authorities also feared foreign influences, after their soldiers had seen far better living conditions in Germany. SMERSh again referred to the threat of a ‘Decembrist’ mood, a reference to the young officers who returned from Paris after the defeat of Napoleon, recognizing that Russia remained politically primitive. ‘A merciless fight is necessary against these attitudes,’ the SMERSh report concluded. Arrests for ‘systematic anti-Soviet talk and terroristic intentions’ rose dramatically. In that year of victory, which saw little more than four months of fighting, 135,056 Red Army officers and soldiers and 273 senior officers were arrested for ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’. Back in the Soviet Union, informers were at work and NKVD arrests in the early morning had become a re-established pattern.
The population of the Gulag and of forced-labour battalions swelled to its largest level. The new convicts included both civilians and an estimated three million Red Army soldiers, sentenced for having collaborated as Hiwis, or simply for having surrendered. Large numbers of others, including eleven generals, were executed after brutal interrogations at the screening centres run by SMERSh and the NKVD. Abandoned by incompetent or terrified superiors in 1941, Soviet soldiers had starved in the indescribable horrors of German camps. Now they found themselves treated as ‘traitors of the Motherland’ because they had failed to kill themselves. Those who survived this second round of punishment remained branded for the rest of their lives and restricted to the most menial work. Right up until 1998, well after the fall of Communism, official forms continued to demand details on any member of an applicant’s family who had been a prisoner of war. The bloody revolts which took place in Gulag camps in the years after the war were almost all led by former Red Army officers and men.
The chaos which the Nazis had brought upon the entire continental land-mass was demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons. ‘On the roads of Germany today,’ wrote Godfrey Blunden, ‘there is the whole story of Europe, or the world for that matter.’ Millions of forced labourers brought to the Reich from France, Italy, the Low Countries, central Europe, the Balkans and above all the Soviet Union began to make their way home on foot. ‘An old woman traveller’, Vasily Grossman noted, ‘is walking away from Berlin, wearing a shawl on her head. She looks exactly as if she were going on a pilgrimage–a pilgrimage amid the expanse of Russia. She is holding an umbrella across her shoulder. A huge aluminium casserole is hung by its ear on the umbrella’s handle.’
Blunden came across a group of young, half-starved American prisoners of war, with ‘xylophone ribs’, sunken cheeks, thin necks and ‘gangling arms’. They were ‘a little hysterical’ from the joy of meeting fellow English-speakers. ‘Some American prisoners whom I met this morning seemed to me to be the most pitiful of all I have seen. They had arrived in Europe only last December, gone immediately into the front line and had received the full brunt of the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes that month. Since their capture they had been moved almost constantly from one place to another. They told stories of comrades clubbed to death by German guards merely for breaking line to grab sugar beets from fields. They were more pitiful because they were only boys drafted from nice homes in a nice country knowing nothing about Europe, not tough like Australians, or shrewd like the French or irreducibly stubborn like the English. They just didn’t know what it was all about.’
Among the displaced persons were many prisoners who had become brutalized by their treatment and longed for revenge on the Germans. Roving freely, looting and raping, they spread chaos and fear. Provost-marshals gave orders that justice was to be administered on the spot. ‘Those identified as murderers and rapists were summarily shot,’ a British soldier recorded. Yet German civilians who came to the occupation authorities to complain about the theft of food by forced labourers received little sympathy. Only a tiny minority had shown any compassion towards them when the Nazis had been in power.
For Churchill, in this immediate post-war period, the problem of Poland loomed above almost everything else. The prime minister’s failure to attend Roosevelt’s funeral had surprised and shocked people on both sides of the Atlantic. There can be little doubt that however much he vaunted their friendship later, Roosevelt’s appeasement of Stalin had gravely disappointed him. Churchill was initially encouraged that Harry Truman, the new President, seemed ready to take a much more robust line with Stalin, mainly as a result of Averell Harriman’s advice.
Roosevelt’s abrupt announcement at Yalta that he intended to withdraw American forces from Europe as soon as possible had alarmed Churchill. Britain alone was far too weak to resist both the strength of the Red Army and the threat of local Communists profiting from a devastated Europe. He was horrified by reports of Soviet revenge and repression behind what he already called the ‘iron curtain’: unfortunately, a term already used by Goebbels.
Within a week of Germany’s surrender, Churchill summoned his chiefs of staff. He astonished them by asking whether it might be possible to force the Red Army back in order to secure ‘a square deal for Poland’. This offensive, he told them, should take place on 1 July, before the military strength of the Allies on the western front was reduced by demobilization or the transfer of formations to the Far East.
Although the contingency planning for Operation Unthinkable was conducted in great secrecy, one of Beria’s moles in Whitehall passed details to Moscow. The most explosive was an instruction to Montgomery to gather up surrendered German weaponry, in case Wehrmacht units were reconstituted to take part in this mad enterprise. The Soviets, not surprisingly, felt that all their worst suspicions had been confirmed.
The planners studied the scenario in great detail, although it had to be based largely on speculation. They totally misread the reaction of British troops, thinking that they would follow such an order. That was most unlikely. The vast majority of British troops were longing to get home. And after all they had heard of the colossal Soviet sacrifice, which had spared them so many casualties, they would have greeted the suggestion of turning against their ally with incredulity and anger. The planning staff also made the unlikely assumption that the Americans would be prepared to join in.
Fortunately, the main conclusions of their report were quite clear. It was a very ‘hazardous’ project, and even if the Red Army were forced to withdraw after initial successes, the conflict would be long and costly. ‘The idea is of course fantastic and the chances of success quite impossible,’ Field Marshal Brooke wrote in his diary. ‘There is no doubt that from now onwards Russia is all powerful in Europe.’ ‘The result of this study’, he added later, ‘made it clear that the best we could hope for was to drive the Russians back to about the same line the Germans had reached. And then what? Were we to remain mobilized indefinitely to hold them there?’ The Second World War in Europe had begun in Europe over Poland, and the notion of a third world war following the same pattern represented a terrifying symmetry.
On 31 May, Brooke, Portal and Cunningham ‘again discussed the “unthinkable war” against Russia… and became more convinced than ever that it is “unthinkable”’. They were unanimous when they reported back to Churchill. Truman proved equally unreceptive to the notion of pushing the Red Army back as a bargaining counter. He was not even prepared to keep Ame
rican forces in those areas of Germany and Czechoslovakia which were due to be handed over to the Soviets as stipulated by the European Advisory Commission. Truman had suddenly swung back to a more accommodating approach to the Soviet Union as a result of listening to Joseph Davies, a former US ambassador in Moscow and ardent admirer of Stalin. Davies had sat through the show trials of the 1930s and seen nothing suspicious about the grotesque confessions beaten out of the accused.
The prime minister had to accept defeat, but he soon came back to the chiefs of staff and asked them to study plans for the defence of the British Isles in the event of a Soviet occupation of the Low Countries and France. By this time he was exhausted by campaigning for the general election, and became increasingly irrational. He even warned of a Gestapo under a future Labour government. Voting took place on 5 July, but because of the need to collect the ballot papers of the armed forces from all round the world, the results would not be known until three weeks later. As well as the problems of Poland, Churchill was also vexed by General de Gaulle’s rash decision to send troops to Syria, where the reimposition of French colonial rule was being resisted. De Gaulle was going through a paroxysm of anglophobia and anti-Americanism at this stage, much to the distress of Georges Bidault, his foreign minister. De Gaulle still resented the failure of the Big Three to include him at Yalta, and he knew he was about to be ignored again at the forthcoming meeting in Potsdam.
Truman, on the advice of Joseph Davies, decided that only a more friendly approach to Stalin could resolve matters. Harry Hopkins, whom the Soviets trusted more than most westerners, was despatched to Moscow to arrange ‘a new Yalta’. Although gravely ill, Hopkins accepted, and as a result of several meetings with Stalin at the end of May and the beginning of June, the discord over the constitution of the Polish government was settled on Stalin’s terms.
The Second World War Page 105