The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  “Why don’t the silly bastards give up?” asked a Coldstream Guards corporal. That enigma perplexed every Allied soldier at one moment or another. Imminent, ineluctable disaster had enhanced a perverse sense of German national cohesion, inflamed by terror, misery, and unhappy memories of the last, lost world war. Lurid propaganda—regarding Soviet atrocities in the east, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender, and those “Negro brothels”—fueled the resistance.

  “Mother, you asked me when I was coming home. I don’t know,” Captain Jack Golden had written his family in Seymour, Texas, a few weeks earlier. “I don’t see any end to the war. I can’t see what the Germans hope to gain but they aren’t giving up.” Now twenty-three, a graduate of Texas A&M University, Golden had been overseas for more than two years; he had seen enough combat in North Africa and in landings at Gela and Omaha Beach to earn two Silver Stars and a Purple Heart. “I am getting a little tired and I am so nervous that I bite people’s head off at the least mishap,” he confessed in his looping cursive. The cannon company he commanded in the 16th Infantry Regiment, part of the 1st Division, had fired more than 75,000 rounds since June 6, he added. “We don’t count what went on in Africa and Sicily. That is too long ago. Seems like another war.”

  In an April 3 letter from Germany, Golden expressed relief that his brother, a lieutenant in the Army Air Forces, was headed home on leave. “It will take a little worry off my mind. Every time I saw a bomber go down, I prayed it wasn’t Bill.” He continued:

  There are too many German towns that we haven’t had time to fire our artillery into. I think we should fire about a thousand rounds into every town. Do them all good.… Enough. Enough.

  That would be his last letter home. On Sunday, April 15, in the Harz foothills, two ambushers with machine pistols stepped from behind a house in Amelunxen onto the same road that a 16th Infantry rifle company had just cleared. They shot Captain Golden dead in his jeep. Jack’s passing would be, his family acknowledged, “the greatest trial of our lives.” In a condolence note to his parents, Secretary of War Stimson wrote, “The loss of a loved one is beyond man’s repairing.” Enough. Enough.

  * * *

  “Half the nationalities of Europe were on the march,” wrote Alan Moorehead, “bundles on their shoulders, trudging along the ditches in order to avoid the passing military traffic.” In fact, nearly all the nationalities of Europe were on the march, in what one witness called “that monstrous, moving frieze of refugees.” Allied officers estimated that 4.2 million “displaced persons” from forty-seven nations trudged through 12th Army Group’s sector of Germany alone. They were among some 11 million unmoored souls wandering across central Europe in the spring of 1945.

  Some were on forced marches, including Allied prisoners-of-war evacuated by their captors to camps deeper within the shrinking Reich. Darrell W. Coates, a turret gunner shot down and captured in 1942, kept a journal as he and four thousand others from Stalag 17B were prodded across Austria just ahead of Soviet forces approaching from the east.

  April 9: Most of us refused to move until they fed us. Bayonets and rifle fire quickly changed our minds.

  April 11: We were very hungry this nite and we boiled grass in the rain so that we would have something inside us.

  April 14: Rain again as usual.… Miserable as hell. Marched till after 6 P.M.

  April 15: Hurry up Patton for Christ sake.

  April 19: Get soup tonight. They must have just run a horse harness through hot water. Tastes like hell.

  Others were liberated before the Germans could move them. “Everyone is yelling and jumping around,” Lieutenant Bernard Epstein, who had been captured in the Bulge, told his diary on April 12 after Ninth Army troops drove through the gates of Oflag 79, near Braunschweig. “An American officer beside me with one leg amputated is so overcome he can’t talk. He’s blowing his nose and tears are streaming down his cheeks.” Given the dearth of food and medical supplies, many were in wretched condition. “Smaller wounds were covered with toilet paper,” wrote Lieutenant June Wandrey, a Seventh Army nurse from Wisconsin. “Their brutal amputations were covered with rags.… Their bodies were covered with scratches, inflicted when they clawed at their body lice.” Some British prisoners captured at Dunkirk or in the Western Desert had been incarcerated for four years or more. “So,” one Tommy said, eyeing his liberators, “that’s what a jeep looks like.” Trucked westward to the Allied rear, the men cheered wildly at the sight of every ruined German town.

  Of the shambling millions, many hundreds of thousands were slave laborers freed when factories were bombed or encampments overrun. SHAEF broadcasts in various languages by Radio Luxembourg offered instructions both to those not yet freed—“Take shelter and await the Allied armies. Form small groups of your own nationality and choose a leader”—and to those already at liberty: “Do not move out of your district. Wait for orders. Keep discipline.… Let your behavior be a credit to your national honor.”

  Instead, starvation, revenge, indiscipline, and chaos often created what Allied officers called a “liberation complex.” SHAEF had presumed that refugees “would be tractable, grateful, and powerless after their domination for from two to five years as the objects of German slave policies.” As an Army assessment concluded, “They were none of these things.… Newly liberated persons looted, robbed, murdered, and in some cases destroyed their own shelter.” Freed laborers plundered houses in the Ruhr, burning furniture for cook fires and discarding slave rags to dress in business suits, pajamas, and evening clothes ransacked from German wardrobes. Ravenous ex-prisoners licked flour off the floor of a Farsleben bakery. In Osnabrück, “rampageous” Russian slaves died after swilling V-2 rocket fuel discovered in a storage yard. Others smashed wine barrels and liquor bottles in a Hanover cellar, drinking so heavily from a sloshing, six-inch-deep pool of alcohol on the floor that several collapsed in a stupor and drowned before U.S. MPs could close the entrance.

  Thousands of refugees carried tuberculosis, diphtheria, and other contagions. As medical officers charted typhus outbreaks in the Rhine valley, roadblocks were thrown up to keep migrating eastern European hordes from advancing farther west. Pilgrims were dusted with DDT and herded into new camps, where a SHAEF sermon blared from public address loudspeakers: “Alleluia! The Lord is victorious, and the spirit of unrighteousness has been reduced to dust and ashes!”

  Still the moving frieze moved on. “Some went barefoot even in the frost, others wrapped their feet in blanket strips and sacking,” wrote Osmar White.

  There were farm carts, milk floats, bakers’ wagons, buggies, sometimes drawn by skinny horses but more often by teams of men and women. Once I saw an ancient steamroller, belching smoke and sparks, towing a long line of drays and carts on the Berlin–Frankfurt autobahn. These processions were amazing and ludicrous … heavily salted with suffering.

  Shallow graves were “marked by a truss of straw tied on as a crosspiece.” Those were the fortunate dead; many found no grave at all. On a road in upper Bavaria, the 90th Division medical battalion described discovering bodies in sad attitudes of liberation: “One man died in the position of massaging his feet. One died taking a drink from a tire rut. He remained on his hands and knees with his face in the rut for two days.”

  For the liberators, this great floodtide of misery was unnerving. “It’s too big,” an 82nd Airborne paratrooper wrote in a letter home. “Personally I don’t give a damn.… It makes you hard.” After passing four hundred Italian slave laborers swaddled in rags, Eric Sevareid took inventory of his own sentiments: “a kind of dull satisfaction, a weary incapacity for further stimulation, a desire to go home and not have to think about it anymore—and a vague wondering whether I could ever cease thinking about it as long as I lived.”

  * * *

  There was worse to see and to think about—much worse. Ohrdruf had been but the first concentration camp liberated by Western armies in the Fatherland, and it was hardly the most heinous. Other
s followed in short order, and new discoveries revealed the Reich’s full depravity. “If the heavens were paper and all the water in the world were ink and all the trees turned into pens,” a rabbi told a war correspondent, “you could not even then record the sufferings and horrors.”

  Nordhausen was overrun by the 3rd Armored and 104th Infantry Divisions, which found what one witness described as “a charnel house” of several thousand corpses. “Men lay as they had starved, discolored and lying in indescribable human filth,” a medic reported. “One hunched-down French boy was huddled up against a dead comrade, as if to keep warm.” In nearby tunnels used to assemble V-weapons, GIs beat up a captured German scientist, then beat him up again for the benefit of a Signal Corps photographer. General Collins ordered two thousand German civilians to carry Nordhausen’s dead half a mile for burial in two dozen mass graves. “There is no greater shame for any German,” Collins told them, “than to be a citizen of this town.”

  Soldiers who in years of combat had seen things no man should ever see now gawked in disbelief at the iniquities confronting them. “There was no fat on them to decompose,” Major Ralph Ingersoll wrote after viewing corpses at Landsberg. “You are repelled by the sight of your own leg, because in its shape it reminds you of one of those legs. It is a degenerating experience.” At the Wöbbelin camp near Ludwigslust, General Gavin ordered local civilians to open the mass graves of camp victims and lift the dead into wagon beds lined with evergreen boughs; they were to be reinterred in graves dug on the town square. “Each body was pulled out, handed up and wrapped in a white sheet or tablecloth,” an 82nd Airborne lieutenant wrote his sister. “We were united in a bond of shame that we had ever seen such things.” Gavin arranged for a film crew to record the proceedings, and years later he wept while watching the footage. “It was a defining moment in our lives,” a paratrooper said. “Who we were, what we believed in, and what we stood for.”

  Such a moment arrived for the British Army, and the civilized world, on April 15 when the 11th Armored Division stumbled upon the Bergen-Belsen camp, fifty miles south of Hamburg. “We came into a smell of ordure—like the smell of a monkey camp,” a British intelligence officer reported, and a “strange simian throng” greeted them at the gates. Over forty thousand men, women, and children jammed a compound designed for eight thousand; since January they had survived on watery soup, fourteen ounces of rye bread a day, and a kind of beet called mangel-wurzel, normally used as livestock feed. But for the past four days they had received neither food nor water and were reduced to eating the hearts, livers, and kidneys of the dead. Plundered bodies lay in such numbers that it was “like trying to count the stars,” a medic reported. Ten thousand corpses littered the camp: two thousand lined a pit on the southern perimeter and others were stacked four deep around the crude hospital. “Both inside and outside the huts,” the British Army reported, “was an almost continuous carpet of dead bodies, human excreta, rags, and filth.” One soldier recounted seeing “a woman squatting gnawing at a human thigh bone.… In war you see humanity at the end of its tether.” A wire-service reporter admitted to “peeping through fingers like a frightened child.”

  The living looked like “polished skeletons,” in the phrase of a BBC correspondent, with faces resembling “a yellow parchment sheet with two holes in it for eyes.” Among the survivors—“these clowns in their terrible motley,” as an intelligence officer described them—medics tallied ten thousand cases of tuberculosis, ten thousand of typhus, and twenty thousand of enteritis. Still others had typhoid. A Life magazine reporter described an inmate who hobbled up and muttered something in German. “I couldn’t understand what he said and I shall never know for he fell dead at my feet in the middle of his sentence.” Of those still alive in what British doctors called “the horror camp,” thirteen thousand died of their insults after liberation, passing at a rate of a thousand a day. The dead were bulldozed into pits, or carried to mass graves by barefoot German guards, who were hectored by Tommies and clubbed with rifle butts. A month later, after the last survivors had been evacuated, Bergen-Belsen would be burned to the ground.

  An estimated quarter-million concentration camp inmates had died since the beginning of the year in death marches from one confinement to another, murdered outright by their guards or succumbing to malnutrition, exposure, and disease. Allied soldiers found the spoor of these perambulations across Germany, but few discoveries were more appalling than that made by a battalion from the U.S. 102nd Infantry Division on April 15 outside Gardelegen, twenty-five miles north of Magdeburg. In and around a smoldering brick barn lay more than a thousand charred bodies of political prisoners, Jews, and other inmates who had been evacuated mostly from camps around Nordhausen. By the time the columns of prisoners reached Gardelegen, hundreds had already been executed. The remnant was locked into the barn, which had been strewn with gasoline-soaked straw and potato sacks. A fusillade of rifle, machine-gun, and Panzerfaust fire, supplemented by fifty grenades, turned the structure into a flaming abattoir, as dying men screamed for mercy in Russian, Polish, French, Hungarian, and Dutch. Others sang “La Marseillaise,” the “Internationale,” or the Polish national anthem while roasting alive. By the time American soldiers arrived, the flames had subsided, although wisps of smoke rose from the bodies for days. Few of the 1,016 victims from the burning barn were ever identified by name.

  For the U.S. Army, the camp at Buchenwald offered a uniquely searing epiphany of liberation because of its size and the clear evidence of systemic evil. Built in 1937 outside Weimar, a city that had once been home to Goethe, Schiller, and Franz Liszt, Buchenwald and its satellites had grown to more than 100,000 inmates by March 1945, with offenders categorized by triangle insignia on their uniforms: red for political prisoners, pink for homosexuals, green for criminals, yellow for Jews. Just after noon on April 11, a warning over the public address system advised, “All S.S. men leave the camp immediately.” Sentries “ran with long strides into the forest,” a witness reported, and at 3:15 P.M. a white flag rose above the camp. An hour later, outriders of the Third Army’s 6th Armored Division burst through the main gate, which stood beneath a large sign proclaiming Recht oder Unrecht, mein Vaterland. Right or wrong, my Fatherland. They found twenty-one thousand survivors from thirty-one nations—engineers, lawyers, professors, editors, and a thousand boys under age fourteen—living on six hundred calories a day. As one liberator said of the liberated, “They were so thin and so dried out that they might have been monkeys or plaster of Paris and you had to keep saying to yourself, these are human beings.”

  An intricate, awful world soon was revealed: the cement cellar “strangling room,” where the condemned were garroted and hung on forty-five wall hooks, those still struggling to be bashed with a wooden mallet; Block 46, where gruesome medical experiments were conducted; the dissecting room, where inmate tattoos were excised, tanned, and fashioned into lampshades, wall hangings, and a pair of gloves for the commandant’s wife. “Inmates were beaten with fists, sticks, clubs, dog whips, riding crops, rubber hoses, ox-tail whips, leather belts, rifle butts, shovels, spade handles, and rocks,” an Army report noted. “Also they were bitten by dogs.” Others were strung up by their hands for hours from tree boughs in a grove known to SS guards as the “singing forest” because of the victims’ cries. Music blared from the loudspeakers to mask gunfire at the camp stables or rifle range by the execution squad, “Detail 99.”

  The SS had murdered at least 56,000 inmates in Buchenwald and its subcamps. Many then were consigned to six brick ovens that could reduce a “charge” of eighteen bodies to bone ash in twenty minutes. A verse in gold and black lettering above the crematorium door caught Osmar White’s eye:

  Worms shall not devour but flames

  Consume this body. While I lived

  I always loved the heat and light.

  Patton marched the burghers of Weimar through Buchenwald, and sent photos to George Marshall. As if to nurture some living thing in
this cantonment of death, Patton personally watered the parched plants in a greenhouse. The journalist Edward R. Murrow, rarely at a loss for imagery, found that Buchenwald beggared the imagination. “The stink was beyond all description,” he told his radio audience. “For most of it I have no words.… If I’ve offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’m not in the least sorry.”

  Shocking evidence of German torture and murder had been emerging for many months as Allied armies overran crime scenes at Breedonck prison in Belgium, or in camps like Natzweiler in France and Majdanek in Poland. Yet not until the revelations of April 1945 did the vast criminality of the Nazi regime spark enduring outrage in the West. Hyperbolic propaganda about World War I atrocities “had left an enduring legacy of skepticism,” the U.S. Army acknowledged; a survey in early December found that barely one-third of British citizens believed atrocity stories about the Germans. Graphic film footage from Europe had been suppressed because Hollywood worried about nauseating moviegoers or creating ill-will toward newsreel companies. But photography and eyewitness accounts from Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and other hellholes now filled newspapers and cinema screens. Warner Bros. and other studios collaborated with the Pentagon in releasing atrocity documentaries. By mid-April, another survey showed that more than four in five Britons were convinced that the Reich had done evil on a monumental scale.

  Even war-weary soldiers felt a new sense of purpose. “What kind of people are these that we are fighting?” an anguished GI in the 8th Infantry Division asked after viewing Wöbbelin. If the answer to that question remained elusive, the corollaries—What kind of people are we? What kind of people should we be?—seemed ever clearer. Complete victory would require not only vanquishing the enemy on the battlefield, but also bearing witness to all that the war had revealed about the human heart. “Hardly any boy infantryman started his career as a moralist,” wrote Lieutenant Paul Fussell, “but after the camps, a moral attitude was dominant and there was no disagreement on the main point.” A rifleman in the 157th Infantry agreed. “I’ve been in the Army for thirty-nine months,” he said. “I’ve been overseas in combat for twenty-three. I’d gladly go through it all again if I knew that things like this would be stopped.”