Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  The Hitler Youth boy took Leitgeb’s papers to make identification difficult, covered the body with branches and made his way back to join the other survivors. They pressed on – only to set off a smaller trip mine, which wounded Ilse Hirsch so badly that she could not continue. It was getting dark. The other two survivors, also injured but still able to walk, were forced to leave her, hoping that she would be found next day by locals. In the early hours, she was, in fact, able to attract the attention of a passing farmer, who helped her on to his cart and took her to the town for medical attention.

  Morgenschweiss made it through several hours of marching before, weakened by loss of blood, he too had to be left behind. He was also picked up by a local – a woman by the name of Frau Sülz, who prudently disposed of the boy’s gun before taking him to a nearby hospital for treatment.

  Despite the state of his own health, Heidorn continued alone, following a route that led him across the flooded River Urft. Early on the morning of 1 April 1945, he reached his destination. This was a farmhouse, early twentieth century in origin but built in the style of a medieval manor, hidden in the woods near Mechernich and known as Gut (or Haus) Hombusch. It seems to have been designated as a Werwolf safe house (after the war, a substantial arms and weapons dump was found nearby and exploded by British Army engineers).21 The house itself appeared deserted, but when Heidorn cautiously made his way into the building, he heard familiar voices. In the kitchen, two men were in conversation: it was Wenzel and Hennemann.

  The three conspirators, reunited but still far behind enemy lines, set off for the Rhine a short while later. When they reached the big river, Wenzel mysteriously announced that he planned to go no further. After parting from his comrades, he made his way to a remote farm in the area, which seems also to have been recommended during their Werwolf training as a safe refuge. He stayed there for another four months, helping out with the work and even conducting a small dalliance with the farm maid, before announcing at the beginning of August that he was going to ‘find his uncle in Halberstadt’. Post-war investigations would reveal that he had no such relation. Wenzel was never seen again.

  Heidorn and Hennemann swam the Rhine, only to be picked up by an American patrol and shipped back to an internment camp – in Aachen. They managed to convince the Allied authorities there that they were harmless and were soon released. After this they travelled east into what was now the Soviet Zone, to join their wives, who had been evacuated the previous autumn to escape the Allied bombing of western Germany.

  And so ended the actions of the most notorious Werwolf team, its members either dead, scattered or captured. None was connected to Oppenhoff’s death until well after the war, when the British, who now controlled Aachen, reopened the case.

  In fact, the Oppenhoff assassination, while it made a splash, did not represent any kind of yardstick by which to judge the Nazi guerrilla movement. The Lord Mayor’s murder had been undertaken only because of pressure from Berlin, not as a result of any local anti-collaborator groundswell. For the rest of the war, the Rhineland was as peaceful as could reasonably be expected. There were no more major acts of violence against the Allies or their appointed German officials.

  In the Catholic, less pro-Nazi west of the country, the Werwolf movement was even feebler than elsewhere, but as the Anglo-American forces pushed further east into the centre and east central part of Germany, they found a more hostile environment in which planned and spontaneous guerrilla activity could thrive.

  In another notorious case associated with Werwolf agitation, on 21 April two of British Field Marshal Montgomery’s liaison officers, Major Earle and Major Poston, were ambushed by a heavily armed Hitler Youth unit while driving their jeep through a rugged part of Lüneburg Heath. Only lightly armed, they were forced to ram their attackers’ machine-gun nest as a last resort. Thrown from their vehicle by the impact, they found themselves at the enemy’s mercy. Poston was promptly bayoneted, while, mysteriously, the wounded Earle was spared and transported back through enemy lines, first to a farmhouse and then to a German field hospital (where he would be rescued within twenty-four hours by advancing British troops).22

  Sporadic acts of sabotage and violence would continue to occur in the areas occupied by the Western Allies – the stringing of wires across country roads to decapitate jeep drivers was a favourite, though rarely successful, ploy – but broadly speaking the organised Werwolf movement took a serious, lasting form mainly in the Soviet- and Polish-occupied areas of Silesia, East Prussia and the Czech borderlands. Here the continuing guerrilla struggle was symptomatic not just of Nazi fanaticism but of a desperate resistance against rape, massacre and forced resettlement.

  East of the Elbe, the greatest population movement since the fall of the Roman Empire was under way, driven by the advance of the Red Army and their vengeful Slavic brothers, who for nearly six years had suffered under a brutal German occupation.

  Vengeance is never beautiful. In what was to follow, it was ugly beyond belief.

  3

  The Great Trek

  In early 1945, the Allies began to advance once more on all fronts. The Soviets in particular made spectacular progress. They finally took what was left of Warsaw, once Hitler’s executioners and demolition squads had finished with it, pushing through pre-war Poland and into the historic eastern provinces of Germany – lands that had formed an integral part of the Reich since the Middle Ages.

  The German population fled or was subjected to rape, pillage and forced expulsion. Among these refugees was sixteen-year-old Katherina Elliger, born in Upper Silesia, a traditionally culturally diverse region close to where Poland, the Czech lands and Germany met. As the fighting came closer, she and her mother fled into a nearby corner of the Czech lands, heading by a roundabout route for the home of Katherina’s uncle, which lay in the county of Glatz (Polish Kłosko, Czech Kladsko), a short way back across the German border in Lower Silesia. She later described what they found as they journeyed through the wooded landscape:

  One evening, we arrived at a farm, which lay off the beaten track in a hollow . . . We entered the spacious hallway. Lights were burning inside. Around a large, round oak table knelt six or seven people. They were quite still and made no movement. Their heads had slumped forward. When we came closer, we saw that they had been nailed to the table edge by their tongues.1

  Afterwards, they learned that ‘hordes’ of Slavic locals had swept through the district, seeking revenge on their German neighbours. Presumably the nailing of their victims’ tongues had to do with a symbolic retaliation against the language, as well as the bodies, of the hated former ‘master race’. Katherina and her mother were warned on no account to continue towards their planned destination.

  However, it was not just old local racial scores that would be settled as the Reich crumbled. After a winter of stalemate in east and west, a great Russian offensive had begun on 12 January along a front extending several hundred kilometres between the Baltic Sea and the same Bohemian forest in which the Silesian woman and her daughter had come upon the grisly banqueting scene. The Soviet forces, totalling more than two million, outnumbered the German defenders of Wehrmacht Army Group A by around five to one, with a superiority of six to one in tanks, the same in artillery and four to one in self-propelled guns.

  Shortly after Warsaw fell, the Red Army began pressing forward with tremendous speed, often advancing thirty to forty kilometres a day. The great eastern German cities of Königsberg, ancient capital of East Prussia, and Breslau, capital of Silesia, soon lay encircled and under siege.

  Most Germans who could flee did so. Vast columns of refugees – women, children and the old, for most adult men were either dead or away fighting – thronged the roads leading westwards into the heart of the Reich, their pathetic collections of portable belongings crammed on to wagons and handcarts. The winter weather was cruel, reaching more than twenty below zero, and would remain so until the end of March. Cold was the first great contributor
to the harvest of death that would prove so rich during the year to come.

  It was not just consciousness of the vast superiority of the Soviet forces in arms, equipment and numbers that spurred Stalin’s soldiers on into German territory. These troops had seen their own land devastated. There were living witnesses of the fact that at least twenty-five million of their compatriots of all ages and both sexes had died in battle, or by massacre, and often by deliberate starvation – all in an aggressive German war of choice executed by Hitler’s forces with scant regard for even the most basic, minimally humanising rules of conflict. As a result, the Red Army was also driven by hate, perhaps to a degree comparable to no other army in modern history.

  A young Wehrmacht ensign from a prominent Silesian family, undergoing his baptism of fire with a Panzer unit in a part of the Czech lands near his own home region, recalled the horrors he witnessed in a Sudeten German village they had temporarily retaken from the enemy during these last bewildering weeks of the war:

  What we found there cannot easily be described in words. Houses full of dead, hanged men, violated women, wandering half crazed through the streets, children with their bellies slit open. If I am honest, I have to say: This is one of those things of which one has suppressed the memory.2

  Nonetheless, as the young soldier – himself too young to have served on the Eastern Front in Russia itself – went on to speculate, ‘What actually must we have done over there that so many Russian soldiers behaved with such bestial rage?’

  The great Nazi justification for the war against the Soviet Union had been the alleged German need for more Lebensraum (‘living space’), which could be gained only at the expense of the racially inferior Slavic peoples who occupied these great fertile plains to the east. When the men of the Red Army finally crossed the border into Germany in the last months of the war and saw how well the Germans actually lived in the supposedly narrow, impoverishing country that they had so urgently needed to outgrow, it caused even more fury. As one simple soldier said to his commander after examining the neat, to him impossibly prosperous-looking farmhouses of East Prussia:

  How should one treat them, Comrade Captain? Just think of it. They were well off, well fed, and had livestock, vegetable gardens and apple trees. And they invaded us . . . For this, Comrade Captain, we should strangle them.3

  Another Russian, an officer this time, described being billeted in April 1945 in a block of flats outside Berlin:

  Each small flat is comfortably furnished. The larders are stocked with home-cured meat, preserved fruit, strawberry jam. The deeper we penetrate into Germany the more we are disgusted by the plenty we find everywhere . . . I’d just love to smash my fist into all those neat rows of tins and bottles.4

  Rape may or may not have been the Russian soldiers’ main intent at Nemmersdorf. By the time, three months later, that the Red Army moved into German territory finally and definitively, there could be no doubt that a hate-fuelled spoliation of German bodies as well as property had become an obsessive preoccupation of the invaders.

  Perhaps Russian soldiers saw enemy women as a form of German property. These were the women who – so their own prejudices and their government’s propaganda told them – had sat safe at home while the men of the Wehrmacht ravaged Belarus, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, the plains before Moscow; who had received those parcels of exotic good things from conquered Russia while the wives, sisters and daughters of the men who now entered Germany as victors were starved and massacred – and, yes, raped, too. Although rape by German soldiers was not nearly as systematic (the Nazi regime disapproved of sexual intercourse with Russian women on racial grounds), it – and its marginally more respectable cousin, sexual exploitation – was certainly not unknown.

  In fact, millions of by no means pampered German women had already suffered bombing, bereavement and loss of their homes. However, this was not, perhaps understandably, how the bitter and infuriated men of the Red Army saw it.

  Not that the Red Army’s record in other countries was spotless. In September 1944 the Bulgarian Communist Party was constrained to address a complaint to the Soviet General Staff (the Stavka), calling for it to ‘take measures to end occurrences of banditry, looting, and rape, strictly punishing guilty persons’.5

  Bulgaria had unwisely allied itself with the Axis early in the war. The same was true of Hungary, and in February 1945 the fall of Budapest to the Soviets was followed by ghastly scenes of mass rape and sexual violence on a scale unseen since the Thirty Years War. However, even though Czechoslovakia was considered a friendly country with close cultural and linguistic links to Russia, and had suffered grievously under German occupation for more than six years, even there, despite clear orders to avoid actions that could alienate the population, the advancing Soviet troops caused problems.

  In March 1945, Stalin himself was forced to warn a Czechoslovak delegation, in his sinister, fake-jocular way:

  The fact is that there are now 12 million people in the Red Army. They are far from being angels. They have been coarsened by war. Many of them have gone 2,000 kilometres from Stalingrad to the middle of Czechoslovakia. On their way they have seen much sorrow and many terrible things. So do not be surprised if some of our people do not behave as they should in your country. We know that some of our soldiers with a low level of political consciousness are pestering and abusing girls and women, are behaving badly. Let our Czechoslovakian friends know that now, so that the attraction of our Red Army does not turn into disappointment.6

  All the same, there can be no doubt that, once in Germany, it all got immeasurably worse. Subjected to crushing, brutalising discipline – initially aimed at stiffening defensive resolve during the calamitous months following the German invasion in June 1941 – the Red Army continued to suffer near-catastrophic losses even as the war turned around and its troops began to advance inexorably towards the heartland of the loathed and despised German empire. They had indeed, as their leader said, seen and undergone terrible things.

  At the same time, the drumbeat of official Soviet propaganda became ever louder, more jarring and more menacing. No more ‘proletarian internationalism’. Increasingly, its message was one of visceral, xenophobic hatred for Germany and all things German. Soldiers were encouraged to keep a ‘book of revenge’ that would remind them of the need to repay the Germans for their crimes. Most notoriously, the brilliant journalist Ilya Ehrenburg, read by millions of soldiers and civilians, kept up a litany of highly literate hate-speak:

  If you have not killed a German a day, you have wasted that day . . . If you kill one German, kill another – there is nothing funnier for us than a pile of German corpses.7

  On the eve of the crossing into East Prussia, the army’s Main Political Administration told the troops: ‘On German soil there is only one master – the Soviet soldier . . . he is both the judge and the punisher for the torments of his fathers and mothers, for the destroyed cities and villages . . .’ Road signs put up by the advancing army instructed the following units: ‘Soldier: You are in Germany, take revenge on the Hitlerites!’8

  All these factors combined to turn the advance of the Red Army in early 1945 into a thing of ominous horror. The scale of the mass rape, murder and destruction in Germany’s eastern provinces during the first months of 1945 was truly appalling. It is quite clear that from the moment the Red Army reached German soil, everything, living or inanimate, was considered fair game. Many uneducated Russian soldiers saw not just improbably neat, prosperous villages and towns, but also insultingly cosseted women and girls, surrounded by items of finery that may well – as their propagandists encouraged them to believe – have been looted from Russian homes during the occupation, perhaps even torn from the quivering, half-starved backs of their own mothers and sisters.

  The Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an artillery officer with the Red Army in East Prussia in early 1945, chronicled that season of terror and destruction in his epic poem Prussian Nights:

  Zwe
iundzwanzig, Höringstrasse

  It’s not been burned, just looted, rifled.

  A moaning by the walls half muffled:

  The mother’s wounded, still alive.

  The little daughter’s on the mattress,

  Dead. How many have been on it

  A platoon, a company perhaps?

  A girl’s been turned into a woman.

  A woman turned into a corpse . . .9

  Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sent to a labour camp in early 1945 after critical remarks about Stalin’s leadership qualities were found in his mail home. Likewise, Captain Lev Kopelev, hitherto an enthusiastic communist and commander of a front-line propaganda unit, unwisely intervened to dissuade a group of soldiers intent on the rape of German women and the looting of their homes. He was sentenced to ten years in the Gulag for crimes dubbed ‘bourgeois humanism’ and ‘compassion towards the enemy’.10

  So, all over the area that was rapidly falling to the Red Army, women were raped and murdered, houses looted and destroyed. Just as Wehrmacht officers had almost never intervened to prevent the brutalities exercised by the German forces in Russia, so it was fairly rare that fastidious men in positions of authority, such as Solzhenitsyn and Kopelev, became involved.

  The accounts of the rapes, each an unspeakable horror for individual German women and families, blur into each other. In one small village in Pomerania, which fell in the first weeks of 1945, there was an added curse that would also repeat itself across the conquered lands. Alcohol. The area concerned made its main living from potato growing, with a sideline in distilling schnapps from the crop surplus. When the Soviets took the village, they ordered all the remaining civilian inhabitants from their homes and locked them in the church. Having discovered the local distillery, the Russian soldiers proceeded to drink heavily, after which they laid waste to the village. Finally, they came back to the church, for the women and girls.