by Alex Kershaw
Antelme walked over to a rail beside a trench and untied the strings holding up his pants. The pants dropped, revealing torn underwear and a sickly mauve coloring on his thighs.
Antelme began to defecate.
Tomorrow it’s Christmas. Maybe there’ll be a truce for the ovens at Auschwitz tonight?
“Tonight we don’t kill. No, not tonight. It’s off until tomorrow.”
It was too much to hope for and Antelme knew it. It was just wishful thinking. Not until the Americans, British, or Soviets arrived would there be an end to it all. Until they appeared, there would be no reason to hope, no reason to do anything, just suffering and “shit, true shit; true latrines, true ovens; true ashes.…”
OBERSTEINBACH, GERMANY, DECEMBER 24, 1944
THREE HUNDRED MILES to the southwest, the snow fell on Sparks’s positions dug into the rock-hard soil on a bleak hillside. The leafless hardwoods’ topmost limbs were coated in a fine ermine. The whiteness made everything appear fresh and pure.
There were no carols, not even a murmured “Silent Night” that evening. Men shivered, huddled three to a hole, limbs numb, faces drained of color, a crude, snow-crusted canvas cover over them if they were lucky. No playing soccer in no-man’s-land with the enemy, no tidings of joy for the men just over the ridge somewhere, waiting to kill or be killed. “We exchanged Christmas greetings with the Germans,” recalled Sparks, “in the form of artillery fire.”
Sparks knew that his men’s morale was at an all-time low. Desertions from the Thunderbird Division and others had never been higher as men endured their second Christmas away from family and loved ones, sharing cigarette butts and defecating into their helmets in freezing mountain foxholes all along the Western Front, from the besieged Bastogne in the Ardennes, to northern Italy, where men now cursed whenever they heard Mark Clark’s name. “I sure wish I could see my darling wife so I could cry on her shoulders,” wrote one Thunderbird to his family. “There are only a handful of us ‘old fellows’ left. Maybe my luck will change for ‘better,’ let’s not even think of worse.”
Another Thunderbird recalled how the living now shared that Christmas with the dead: Frozen American and German bodies were piled high on trucks near one command post, stacked on top of one another like so many uniformed boards. Everyone swore about the Germans, the Allied generals, and the press, and scoffed bitterly at the flag-waving back home and at the politicians’ false promises made to keep a naïve American public buying war bonds. “I don’t owe my country a damned thing” was one refrain. Hope had given way to the universal foxhole religion of cynicism, marked in the most devout by outbursts of piercing black humor. The optimistic rallying call “HOME IN FORTY-FOUR” had become “STAY ALIVE IN FORTY-FIVE.”
The day after Christmas, Sparks was on the move again. His Third Battalion seized two towns, Niedersteinbach and then Obersteinbach, where they dug in and awaited further orders. He knew his men were increasingly vulnerable and they knew it too. It didn’t take a military genius to wonder what might happen if the Germans launched a fierce counterattack as they had to the north, in the Ardennes. Sparks had fewer than a thousand men to patrol and defend a front that stretched almost ten miles. It was a job for a division, numbering ten times more men, not a depleted and demoralized battalion.
When Sparks walked through his positions near Obersteinbach, within striking distance of the Siegfried Line, he could sense his men’s growing anxiety. To break the tension a little, he announced that they were all to fire their weapons at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. Sparks himself would fire first, opening up with his trusted shotgun to mark the beginning of his third year at war in Europe. His entire battalion would follow suit, shattering the frozen silence.
ALDERHORST, GERMANY, DECEMBER 28, 1944
HITLER WAS UNDERGROUND once more, in his latest headquarters, colored crayons in shaking hands, beside a map table. Increasingly, he spent his days strung out on amphetamines, needing to be brought down by sedatives to be able to sleep. He had withdrawn from public life, having made his last speech before a crowd in 1943. He refused to visit bombed areas as he moved from one troglodyte’s lair to another, preferring fevered fantasy to reality. He could not even bear to look at his own troops, ordering his valet to pull down the blinds in his carriage when his train passed them.
The Battle of the Bulge was still raging, but the German attack had been stalled. Hitler’s forces in the Ardennes were, in some places, being pushed back toward the Fatherland. Yet the Führer was not downcast, even though his “last great gamble” had clearly not paid off. Instead, he was convinced that one more surprise strike at the Allied lines, this time in the Vosges, would decisively change the course of the entire war. The German First and Nineteenth Armies were to strike in three days’ time, break through the lines of the U.S. Seventh Army and the French First Army in Alsace, and then destroy them before taking on Patton’s Third Army and wiping it out.
Before Hitler ended the day with his standard post-midnight snack of tea and cream buns, he addressed a group of field commanders.
“This is a decisive operation,” stressed the Führer. “Your success will knock out half the enemy forces on the Western Front. We will yet be masters of our fate.”
Operation Northwind, the last major German attack in the west, was about to begin.
THE ISLE OF FYNN, NORWAY, NEW YEAR’S EVE, 1944
THE SONGS GREW louder and more drunken as midnight approached. The young men in gray uniforms, the symbol of a black Edelweiss mountain flower on their caps, SS runes on their lapels, sang along to the radio and tried to forget the war for one night at least. Among them was twenty-year-old Johann Voss, a machine-gun squad leader in SS Mountain Infantry Regiment 11, “Reinhard Heydrich.”*
Having joined the SS at age seventeen and fought in Finland against the Soviets, Voss had spent the last few days wandering the Norwegian island, stealing kisses in a barn from a skinny blue-eyed farm girl, and learning how to operate his unit’s new MG42 machine guns. “I remember us singing more and more loudly,” Voss recalled, “and that at midnight [a comrade] fired a whole box of tracer ammunition in the air with the new MG42 he had mounted in an anti-aircraft position. We switched off the radio when we heard some Party big shot speechifying. We wanted none of that.”
Voss was one of more than four million German soldiers sworn to support Adolf Hitler and to defend their homes and families that winter. He and his comrades had not fought for four years simply to lay down their weapons at the borders of the Reich. Despite heavy losses, Voss and his fellow German soldiers were far from physical and moral collapse: There were still 168 infantry and 25 Panzer divisions intact. The Waffen SS, to which Voss belonged, could boast twenty-three well-equipped divisions, seven of them armored. All were supplied with superb weapons, like the MP40 submachine gun, manufactured in huge quantities from stamped steel and ideal for use in forested terrain like the Vosges.
Voss and his comrades in his Black Edelweiss Regiment had long become inured to the empty phrases of politicians, just as Sparks had long since stopped paying attention to the jingoism that was interspersed with radio broadcasts of Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller tunes. But that did not mean that men like Voss, having spent their entire adolescence in the golden years of the Third Reich, were not still fiercely committed to Hitler and, more importantly, to one another. In fact 62 percent of captured Wehrmacht soldiers still professed loyalty to their Führer. The percentage among the SS, who had sworn a solemn blood oath of allegiance to Hitler, was higher still.
LONDON, NEW YEAR’S EVE, 1944
THE SNOW FELL on the drunken revelers, on Buckingham Palace, and on Nelson’s Column at the heart of Trafalgar Square. Standing among the throngs, counting down the last seconds to 1945 was twenty-four-year-old American reporter Marguerite Higgins, hoping she might finally get to the front lines before the war was over. She would in fact do so, encountering Sparks in the most extraordinary circumstances, but as bells rang
out across London that night the prospect of filing even one decent story seemed remote. For months now, the talk back in America had been of the war ending in Europe.
The ambitious Higgins had arrived in London from New York a few weeks before aboard the Queen Mary. Among other reporters crossing the Atlantic had been the New Yorker’s Janet Flanner, who vividly recalled Higgins’s arrival on board. Higgins had missed the sailing and reached the Queen Mary as it actually steamed out of New York Harbor. Flanner had watched as a ladder was dropped to a tugboat and then a slim, blue-eyed woman in army uniform climbed onto the deck, her helmet falling back to release a cascade of blond hair. “She looked so sweet and innocent,” recalled Flanner. “I immediately thought of Goldilocks and wanted to protect her.”
The headlines that New Year made Higgins even more aware that she was missing the “Big Show”: U.S. FLYERS BLAST NAZI ARMOR FLEEING BULGE. BRITISH IN GERMANY, 29 MILES FROM DUSSELDORF. TWIN DRIVES IN HOLLAND BREAK NAZI LINE. BRITISH LAND IN GREECE, NAZIS WITHDRAWING. 3RD ARMY SMASHES THROUGH SIEGFRIED LINE.
THERE WERE ALSO stories about the Red Army on the front pages. It had stalled in late 1944 in its advance toward Berlin but by New Year’s Day was advancing once more. As it did so, it liberated concentration camps hastily abandoned by the SS in the face of the Soviet onslaught. Few prisoners were found alive. Most had been killed or were being marched west, ahead of the Soviet advance, deeper into the gulag of six-hundred-odd camps in the Reich, where seven hundred thousand people still languished, caught between life and death.
Twenty-one-year-old Jack Goldman was one of fifty-eight thousand Auschwitz prisoners marched west from Poland, where some four million European Jews had been exterminated in the Final Solution, including most of Goldman’s German family. His father had in fact been shot in front of him in retaliation for the assassination of SS general Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942.
To avoid Allied planes, the SS made Goldman walk at night in the cold and snow. He and his fellow survivors, marching in rows of five abreast, sometimes managed a few minutes of sleep, held up by the men around them. Then they were ordered into open freight cars and taken to a transit camp in Germany, where Goldman was placed in a barrack that looked to him to be no bigger than a doll’s house but which was soon home to fourteen other men. Fifteen thousand of his fellow prisoners from Auschwitz had not survived the journey to Germany.
Soon after, Goldman fell ill with typhoid fever and became delirious. One day, the SS ordered him and his fellow survivors to get ready to march once more, and Goldman could not move. He was too weak.
A German guard approached him.
“Shoot me,” said Goldman. “Do what you want.”
“Get up!”
The German hit him with his rifle butt.
“Go!” said the German.
Goldman somehow found the strength to get up. Those who couldn’t were shot.
GOLDMAN AND OTHERS being forcibly removed from the territories closest to the Soviet advance were joined that winter by hundreds of thousands of German civilians fleeing the Red Army, clogging the iced roads with their carts loaded with meager possessions, desperate to find sanctuary from “Ivan,” the murderous Slav rapist invoked by Nazi propaganda.
The Red Army liberated mostly women as it swept into eastern Germany that January—the men were either dead or away fighting. “Women, mothers and their children,” noted one Soviet officer, “lie to the right and left along the route, and in front of each of them stands a raucous armada of men with their trousers down. The women who are bleeding or losing consciousness get shoved to one side, and our men shoot the ones who try to save their children.”
The mass rape often ended with the victims being mutilated and bludgeoned to death. Such was the indiscriminate vengeance of Stalin’s warriors. “We are taking revenge for everything,” wrote one Soviet soldier to his parents. “Fire for fire, blood for blood, death for death.”
No wonder that at least fifty thousand traumatized refugees were arriving in Berlin each day—a pathetic fraction of the eight million civilians fleeing west, their future dependent on the speed of the Western Allies’ advance. Indeed, the faster Sparks and his battalion pushed forward, the more women and children they would be able to save from rape and enslavement under Stalinism. The quicker they destroyed all German resistance in their path, the more Jews like Jack Goldman and other victims of the Nazi terror like Robert Antelme might survive. Every setback and delay now cost more than ever.
ON NEW YEAR’S Day 1945, Johann Voss and his regiment, part of the 6th SS Division “Nord,” sailed for the mainland of Norway and the following day left by train for Germany. He and his fellow SS were about to face their greatest test yet. The last of Hitler’s elite, they were headed to fight in familiar winter conditions, this time in the mountains of the Vosges, where an increasingly nervous Sparks and his men were huddled, trying their best to fend off frostbite, in their dugouts and foxholes.
* * *
* Voss is a pseudonym.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE BREAKING POINT
Every man has a breaking point.
—FELIX SPARKS
American shells land on the village of Reipertswiller, January 1945. [National Archives]
REIPERTSWILLER, THE VOSGES, FRANCE, JANUARY 1, 1945
DAWN BROKE ON THE first day of 1945. The sun pierced the heavy mist and dark clouds but then quickly disappeared. All along the thinly held Seventh Army lines, shells whistled and screamed. Operation Northwind had begun. By sundown, eight German divisions, including more than thirty thousand SS, were storming west through the high mountain passes and valleys of the Vosges, headed toward Strasbourg.
Along with the rest of the 45th Division, Sparks and his battalion retreated to defensive positions ten miles to their rear. There was little panic even though heavy Germany shelling continued as they withdrew in trucks to Reipertswiller, a small village in France. It was painful to pass through ruined towns that had been so hard-won and were now to be ceded back to the enemy. Thunderbirds cursed bitterly. Having to turn their backs and return to France without putting up a fight felt wrong. “It is getting hard to know who wants to keep us from reaching the Rhine,” complained their new division commander, General Frederick. “Ike or the Krauts.” In some of the villages that had to be abandoned, bewildered French children threw icy snowballs at the departing Thunderbirds.
For the next ten days fighting raged in the Vosges as more than one hundred thousand enemy troops fought to break through the Seventh Army’s defenses. General Frederick faced his first great challenge as a division commander: stopping the rampaging SS from rolling over the Thunderbirds, who held the critical center of the Allied line. With the Seventh Army fighting on three sides, and Eisenhower fearing it might soon be destroyed, all manner of reinforcements were rushed to help bolster the front, including French soldiers from General Leclerc’s 2nd French Armored Division and green troops from the U.S. 70th Division.
The Thunderbirds stood firm but not without significant loss. In Sparks’s regiment, fifty men were injured as they held off the German attacks. They included popular medic Joe Medina, who was wounded and knocked unconscious by shell fire and days after being hit woke in a hospital in France. Medina was possibly the last medic from the regiment to have known Sparks before the war. They had come a long way together, the soft-spoken Mexican-American shepherd’s son and the lieutenant colonel who had joined the “Eager for Duty” regiment at Fort Sill on February 6, 1941. Medina had since tended scores of badly wounded men under Sparks’s command, in every battle since Sicily, and had been treated by Sparks with real warmth, like a good friend, until this, his third serious wound, finally took him off the line for good.
REIPERTSWILLER, FRANCE, JANUARY 14, 1945
IN THE HILLS north of Reipertswiller it was 8:30 A.M. when German shells began to explode and shards of hot steel flew in every direction. The rate of fire was so quick it sounded as if the 88mm guns
were in fact machine pistols, the shrill whistles of shells becoming a constant scream, the crump and thud of explosions a steady drumming.
The Thunderbirds were striking back, pushing the German forces in Operation Northwind toward Germany. But the Nazis were in no mood to give up without a fight. At Reipertswiller and in many other villages and nameless mountain passes, Seventh Army units were meeting truly stunning resistance.
Even after the ordeal of Anzio, Sparks was surprised by the intensity of the German shelling. He knew that without massive counterfire and armored support his Third Battalion could not advance much farther. Later that morning of January 14, he set out to join the forward elements of his Third Battalion. He was with three other men: a translator, nineteen-year-old German-born Karl Mann, who had joined the regiment as a replacement at Anzio; a much-trusted driver, Albert Turk; and a runner, Carleton Johnson. Sparks and Turk were up front.
Karl Mann sat in the backseat beside Johnson. Mann had first seen combat as an ammunition carrier for a water-cooled .30-caliber machine gun in the battalion’s heavy-weapons company, before being asked by Sparks the previous November to become his interpreter. Despite Mann spending most days in Sparks’s company, the twenty-seven-year-old Third Battalion commander remained a distant, inscrutable figure to him. Colonel Sparks was not one for small talk or sharing his feelings and never mentioned his family back home, unlike some officers. With the often curt, no-nonsense “Shotgun” Sparks, it was all business all the time.