by Ian Kershaw
The guards thought of little besides themselves and their task of delivering their charges at the destination. As long as prisoners were capable of walking, obeying instructions, and serving the needs of their guards – not least keeping them away from the front – they might survive. But any sense that they had become a burden for the guards meant their instant death.114 Once on the marches, no obvious distinction seems to have been drawn by the guards about the prisoners. All, Jewish or not, were subject to their arbitrary murderous actions.115
In some cases, the killings became full-scale massacres. In Celle, 35 kilometres north-east of Hanover, almost 800 prisoners, men and women, fell victim on the night of 8/9 April. The railway wagons transporting them – Russians, Poles and Ukrainians predominantly, some but far from all Jewish – from two satellite camps of Neuengamme at Salzgitter to nearby Bergen-Belsen were caught during a heavy air raid while standing in the station at Celle. Hundreds of prisoners burnt to death while trapped in the wagons.116 Those who escaped the inferno were able to take flight into the nearby woods. The manhunt rapidly set up to track them down consisted not only of their SS guards, but Volkssturm and SA men, local police and Party functionaries, soldiers stationed nearby, members of the Hitler Youth, and also groups of local citizens who spontaneously joined in. When one thirteen-year-old boy enquired about the identity of the prisoners, as shots rang out in the woods, he was told ‘they could well be Jews’. The crowd was easily persuaded that the escapees were dangerous criminals and Communists. The mass shooting of probably around 200 prisoners was thus portrayed, and evidently viewed, as self-protection.117
Shortly afterwards, between 9 and 11 April, about 3,000–4,000 prisoners, many of them from Mittelbau-Dora heading for Bergen-Belsen, Sachenhausen and Neuengamme camps, arrived in the village of Mieste, near Gardelegen, about 40 kilometres north of Magdeburg. When damaged tracks prevented their train from continuing, and the prisoners were force-marched to Gardelegen, the local Kreisleiter, Gerhard Thiele, exploiting stories that escaped prisoners had looted and raped in a village not far away and declaring that he would do everything to prevent such an occurrence in his area, made preparations to have them killed. There was great urgency since the Americans were closing in on the town. The SS were aided in the meantime in guarding the prisoners by detachments from the Wehrmacht, Hitler Youth, the Volkssturm, the local fire brigade and other organizations. When objections were raised that the site of the cavalry school he had proposed for the killing was too close to the town centre, Thiele came up with the idea of a large barn in an isolated position in a field on the outskirts. On 13 April, more than 1,000 prisoners, Jews among them though predominantly ‘politicals’, were herded into the barn. Petrol was poured on the straw, the large doors were sealed, and the barn was set alight. Some prisoners trying desperately to escape were shot by the guards. The remainder died in the flames. Next day, the Americans arrived while the attempt was still being made to bury the charcoaled remains of the prisoners.118
Unlike the earlier death marches that had left from the camps in the east, the thousands of prisoners who had been in every conceivable way degraded and dehumanized now trekked through Germany itself, before the eyes of the German public. As in Gardelegen, their guards were often a motley bunch. Most were drawn from the SS and were well armed and often accompanied by dogs which they did not hesitate to turn on the prisoners. But a march from Ravensbrück in mid-April was guarded only by lightly armed ‘older men’, thought to be auxiliary police. Others had guards composed of SA men or ethnic Germans from different parts of eastern Europe.119
Beatings and shootings of prisoners also took place before the eyes of the public, with no attempt to hide them. The hostile stance of the German population dominates the recollections of the victims, thankful though those doubtless were who benefited momentarily from any sign of human kindness. Post-war German accounts, on the other hand, had good reason to emphasize sympathy for the prisoners and condemnation of the crimes of the SS guards.
Acts of solidarity, friendship or support from bystanders seem at any rate to have been relatively rare. Years of demonization of Jews and indoctrination in racial stereotypes, along with the stoked-up fear of the ‘people’s enemies’ – reinforced through lurid radio reports of former Buchenwald prisoners rampaging and marauding through Weimar, and similar stories used to justify the massacre at Gardelegen – had clearly not been without their baleful effect. However much Germans saw themselves, increasingly, as victims of Hitler and the Nazi regime, many of them were not ready to extend their sympathies to concentration camp prisoners, least of all Jews, or to embrace the true victims of Nazism as part of their ‘community’. The human wrecks before their eyes looked like the caricatures of ‘subhumans’ rammed home in incessant propaganda. But in all their evident frailty, they were still, perversely, seen by many as a threat. ‘What crimes they must have committed to be treated so cruelly,’ was one comment. Another person, justifying the shooting by Wehrmacht soldiers of thirteen escaped prisoners (recaptured with help of the local population), remarked: ‘They were political prisoners and mere criminals.’120 Survivors of the marches recounted, depressingly but unsurprisingly, numerous cases where they had been insulted, jeered at, spat at, had had stones thrown at them, or were refused food and drink by local inhabitants. In some cases, German civilians, as at Celle, aided guards to capture prisoners who had escaped, and apparently participated in the killing.121
Alongside the horrific instances of callous support for murderous action, there were, nevertheless, indications that some civilians, even if they were the exceptions, tried to give food or succour to the prisoners passing through their villages. A British report on the massacre at Celle stated that numerous citizens tried, in the face of threats and abuse from the perpetrators, to aid the prisoners by giving them first aid or comforting them.122 Around 1,250 weak and starving prisoners who arrived in Hütten in Württemberg at the beginning of April were said to have been given food by some local families. The local mayor apparently succeeded in bringing in some supplies for the prisoners and appealed to the Wehrmacht for help. A Wehrmacht officer and veteran of the First World War, called to the scene, then organized a meal for around 200 sick prisoners who remained after the others had been marched off. He also ordered the dead to be properly buried.123
In Altendorf, a village in the Upper Palatinate where 650 prisoners stopped on the night of 21/2 April on their trek from Buchenwald to Dachau, thirteen prisoners who hid in a barn were hunted down by their SS guards with dogs and pitchforks. Twelve were caught and immediately shot. The thirteenth, a Pole, was able to escape when the head of the local constabulary chose not to hand him over to the SS and allowed him to be fed before he disappeared. The dead victims were then buried by Volkssturm men in a mass grave in the cemetery, in contrast to many instances when local inhabitants elsewhere rapidly dug improvised graves where the prisoners had been killed, or simply pushed the corpses into a roadside ditch and covered them over.124 The examples could be multiplied of inhabitants recalling feelings of shock and shame at the beatings and shootings that they witnessed, of providing prisoners with food and drink (not just when the guards simply requisitioned it), or, more rarely, of assisting escape or not betraying hiding-places.125
Most people, however, it seems reasonable to surmise, simply remained passive – not participating, but also showing no opposition – as the maltreatment and murder occurred beneath their gaze. The bystanders’ own fear of the reactions of the guards to support for the prisoners understandably played a part. With the war so close to its end, few were ready to invite retribution, least of all in the cause of prisoners whose guilt was for the most part taken for granted. But some evidently did risk retribution through signs of sympathy for the prisoners. Fear could not, therefore, have been the sole cause of the prevalent passivity. Even so, it was probably less the case that ‘broad social support… was given to the killing’126 than that few were prepared to risk
their own well-being by acting against guards ruthlessly wielding power in attempting humanitarian gestures which, they felt, would change nothing towards people with whom they could not identify. That was enough to make them accomplices to murder. The passivity allowed the killing to continue until the guards fled on the approach of the enemy and the prisoners were liberated not by Germans themselves, but by their conquerors.
VII
In the Berlin bunker on 20 April the Nazi grandees, having congratulated Hitler on his birthday, avowed their lasting loyalty and said what for most of them would be their final farewells, were chafing at the bit to depart before the roads out of the capital became blocked. Goebbels apart, hardly any were anxious to join their Leader on the funeral pyre. Whatever their long-standing rhetoric about fighting or dying, when it came down to it they thought predominantly about saving their own skins. Göring’s copious belongings were packed and on their way to Berchtesgaden. He had sent his wife and family to relative safety there some weeks earlier. His ranch at Carinhall, north of Berlin, was now deserted and waiting to be detonated. A few weeks later he was telling Allied interrogators that until late in the day he had thought Germany might be able to fight to a stalemate.127 Now he was off – to await an uncertain end, but certainly not self-immolation in the Berlin catacombs.
Speer headed north to Hamburg, though he felt he had not properly said goodbye to the man who had dominated his life for more than a decade, and with whom even now he could not completely break the ties which had bound them together. To remedy this he was to make an arduous (and pointless) fleeting return to the bunker on 23 April. Perhaps he was even now thinking that, once the end had come, all might not be lost for him, and hoped that Hitler would anoint him as his successor.128 To Speer’s dismay, Hitler could scarcely bring himself to offer more than a perfunctory goodbye.129
Himmler was also on his way north, and set to continue his clandestine dealings with Count Bernadotte in the hope of extracting something out of the disaster for himself even at the end. In his desperation he was even willing to meet a prominent member of the Jewish World Congress and to agree to the release of female Jews from Ravensbrück concentration camp. He was also ready to make a promise he could not have kept even had he wanted to – that no more Jews would be killed. He had ordered the SS to fight to the last, and never to capitulate.130 He himself was contemplating doing precisely the opposite of what he had preached.
Bormann, the éminence grise of the regime, must have been aware by now that his leadership of the Party Chancellery had become little more than an empty title. Few Gauleiter were even in a position to receive his directives. He could not leave the bunker. That was clear. But once Hitler was dead, which could not be far off, he had every intention of escaping both his own demise and the clutches of the Russians.
Goebbels, the last of the quartet who, beneath Hitler, had dominated internal politics in the last months and ensured that the regime continued to operate until the end, had, whatever his public rhetoric and notwithstanding his private flights of fantasy, clearly seen what was coming for quite some time. He continued to do all he could to help in the fight to fend off the Soviets. Even on Hitler’s birthday, he laid on Berlin buses to carry soldiers out to the Oder front.131 But he knew it would be in vain. By then he had had his personal belongings destroyed. The originals of the diaries he had diligently kept for over twenty years were among them. However, he ensured that this daily record of his role alongside Hitler in Germany’s lost but ‘heroic’ fight – what he saw as his lasting legacy for future generations – would be preserved for posterity by sending out three copies into hiding.132 He and his wife Magda then made ready to move into the Führer Bunker to join Hitler. They knew that in doing so they were taking the decision to end their lives. They had already decided to kill their six children.133
By next morning, 21 April, the government district in the heart of Berlin was being shelled. There was a rumble like distant thunder, but unceasing and growing louder by the hour.134 The Soviets were now only about 12 kilometres away to the east. As the encirclement of the city advanced, a unit of the Red Army liberated some 3,000 prisoners – mainly sick women and children – left behind in Sachsenhausen concentration camp when most of the prisoners had been marched off on 20 April.135 By 24 April Busse’s 9th Army was caught in a tightening Soviet vice. Colonel-General Heinrici’s warnings of this fate had been ignored by Hitler and his military advisers.136 Heinrici would eventually have the dubious distinction of being the last of Hitler’s generals to be dismissed, on the night of 28/9 April, when he finally refused to carry out an utterly impossible order from Keitel and Jodl.137 By then his army was breaking up in a westward stampede of soldiers desperate to avoid Soviet captivity. The constant interference in his command by unrealistic orders had ultimately proved too much for him. But there was also a personal grievance: he felt deeply insulted at the way Keitel and Jodl had treated him, ‘unworthy’, he thought, of the manner in which the commander-in-chief of an Army Group should be addressed and ‘unbearable’ for an officer with forty years of service behind him.138
Heinrici’s stance even in these last days, and that of Field-Marshal Keitel and General Jodl, said much about Hitler’s generals. When Heinrici objected to Keitel and Jodl about the minimal prospects of the slightest success in what his Army Group Vistula was expected to undertake, he was simply told it was his duty to rescue the Führer. Hitler’s main advisers, he felt, either could not or would not accept the true situation and realize that the battle of Berlin was lost. But Heinrici did not offer his resignation. Instead, as he stated in a description of the battle he compiled less than a month later, ‘the bond of my duty of obedience as a soldier, the impossibility of rejecting orders to save the Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht’ meant that he felt unable to refuse ‘without committing treason’. ‘After the OKW had placed “the saving of the Führer” at the head of all orders, this took precedence over other military considerations.’
For Keitel, however, even Hitler’s death would not prevent the continuation of the struggle. If Berlin could not be saved, he suggested to Heinrici, the Army Group should carry on the fight in northern Germany. Heinrici retorted that this was neither economically nor militarily possible. ‘The will to fight on the part of the soldiers was already falling sharply and would collapse altogether with the news of the death of the Führer.’ Keitel answered that this news would therefore have to be delayed as long as possible. Further resistance was necessary in order to enter negotiations with the western enemies. Germany still possessed numerous bargaining counters, such as Denmark, Norway and Bohemia, that would serve as a good basis for negotiation. Heinrici thought Keitel was completely detached from reality, though his awareness of the preparations being made by Dönitz in Plön, in line with Hitler’s orders, to continue the fight in the northern half of the country as long as possible made him take the proposition seriously.139
On 25 April the Reich was cut in two as American and Soviet troops met at Torgau, on the Elbe. By noon that day Berlin was completely encircled. The city centre now came under increasingly heavy artillery bombardment. Berlin had been declared a fortress, to be defended to the last. The forces to do so were weak indeed, compared with the Soviet behemoth. But Dönitz was among the military leaders who took the view that the battle for Berlin was necessary whatever the cost to the civilian population since they would otherwise be deported to Russia without any attempt to prevent their undergoing such a fate.140 As it was, civilians had to experience the misery, suffering and death that accompanied the relentless destruction of their city. Soviet troops had to fight their way practically block by block. But amid intense and bitter street-fighting they pressed inexorably on towards the epicentre of Nazi rule in the Reich Chancellery.141 They knew Hitler was there.
A combination of near hysteria and outright fatalism had by then caught hold in the bunker. Hitler had placed illusory hopes, not defused by Keitel and Jodl, who knew better bu
t were still fearful of giving him bad news,142 in the newly and hastily constituted 12th Army under General Walther Wenck, fighting on the Elbe, and, especially, in a counter-offensive to the north of Berlin led by SS-Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner’s panzer corps. When he had learnt, on 22 April, that Steiner’s attack had not taken place,143 the pent-up feelings had exploded in a torrential outburst of elemental fury. Hitler admitted openly for the first time that the war was lost. He told his shocked entourage that he was determined to stay in Berlin and take his life at the last moment. He seemed to be abdicating power and responsibility, saying he had no further orders for the Wehrmacht. He even implied that Göring might have to negotiate with the enemy.144 But, astonishingly, he had pulled himself together again, refused to concede a grain of his authority, and exuded as always undiluted optimism in his military briefing just moments after speaking privately about his imminent death and the burning of his body.145 The act, which had slipped for a brief moment, was back in place.
Keitel was sent to Wenck’s headquarters with orders – totally unfeasible, but temporarily cheering up Hitler once more – to march on Berlin. The High Command of the Wehrmacht was now split between Krampnitz, near Potsdam (later moving north, until finally based with Dönitz in Plön), and Berchtesgaden. Despite the despairing outburst during his temporary breakdown, Hitler was still in no mood to relinquish control. Göring learnt this when, mistaking the information he had received about Hitler’s eruption as denoting incapacity or unwillingness to lead any longer and assuming, therefore, that on the basis of the long-standing succession law he should take over, he was peremptorily dismissed from all his offices and put under house arrest at the Berghof. Bormann, an arch-enemy for years of the Reich Marshal, could savour a last triumph.