Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II

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Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II Page 8

by Nicholas Best


  * * *

  ACROSS THE REST OF BERLIN it was the same story, the Russians closing in on all sides while the Germans struggled to hold them back. There was no fixed front line as the battle raged to and fro. Berlin’s canals formed a natural barrier, but the Russians were advancing underneath them, along the U-Bahn lines, to attack the Germans in the rear. The Germans were doing the same, which led to clashes in pitch darkness as the two sides fought it out in train tunnels far beneath the earth.

  Helmut Altner had spent much of the previous day underground, stepping nervously forward with the rest of his patrol along one tunnel after another. They were attacked by their own people at one point, shot at by Hitler Youth and Waffen-SS as they arrived at a U-Bahn station. Four men had been killed or wounded before the defenders realized their mistake. The two patrols had then joined forces in an attempt to force a passage past the enemy. Fighting had been furious as the Russians fired at them from an adjacent tunnel, bullets flying in all directions as both sides opened up with Panzerfausts and machine guns. Altner had lost all sense of time as he stumbled for hour after hour through the blackness, often crawling forward on all fours in a desperate attempt to avoid being hit and dying unnoticed in the dark.

  He had been enormously relieved when they emerged at last into the open air, parading for roll call in the ticket hall of a U-Bahn station. He had had enough of fighting underground. If he was going to be killed, he would far prefer it to happen in the open air rather than down a tunnel, like a rat in a drainpipe.

  Altner had spent the rest of the night creeping through the no-man’s-land west of the Zoological Gardens, trailing after the man in front as they advanced through the rubble, expecting to be attacked at any moment. They had come under fire once or twice, but had pressed on regardless, heading back to their base at Ruhleben. They had passed a lost child at one stage, crying in the darkness as it called for its mother. They had seen two men furtively cutting the flesh from a dead horse still harnessed to a wagon, and had stepped over dead soldiers from both sides: a Hitler Youth with his head smashed to a pulp, a Russian woman in a brown uniform, her hair in disarray as she lay beside a burned-out tank. Mostly, however, the streets had been deserted as they passed, the barricades abandoned and the buildings empty on either side. Everything had been eerily quiet in their immediate vicinity, while the din of battle continued unabated elsewhere.

  As dawn approached, and the Russians prepared for their attack on the Reichstag, Altner found himself back at Ruhleben, looking forward to some sleep at last after more than twenty-four hours on his feet. The place was full of rumors as he searched for somewhere to lie down. Some Germans still had faith in Wenck’s relieving army; others had heard of a new secret weapon that could yet turn the war in their favor: a gas or a bomb or something that could be launched against America with a destructive power never seen before. Altner himself had heard a story earlier that seemed even more unlikely. It was about the Führer in his bunker:

  One soldier says that Hitler got married in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery yesterday. A latrine rumour? That would have been a jolly wedding night under the thunder of the guns! And we still have to go on fighting for this man, to whom Germany no longer belongs! Because of the oath we swore to him, soldiers and civilians have to go on dying. Someone says that Hitler has married an actress and that she will appear as a milkmaid on the new twenty mark note.7

  Too exhausted to care much, Altner didn’t know what to make of the rumor:

  Depression has set in. Most people do not want to believe it, and even I find it unbelievable. I think that, as a result of the shock of the news of Hitler’s marriage, many of them have started thinking for themselves. Someone says that, once the capital has fallen, he is to be flown out with the whole government from Ruhleben to Brazil to continue the fight from there, in any case as far as possible from the firing, so as to be out of immediate danger. A soldier claims to have seen Hitler climb into an armoured personnel carrier on the 27th, demanding to be taken to the scene of the fighting in the Tiergarten. However, I think this just another fairy story, like so many others.8

  * * *

  WHILE ALTNER SEARCHED for a place to sleep, Hildegard Knef and Ewald von Demandowsky were thinking of following Hitler’s example and getting married. In the freight yard at Schmargendorf, under sniper fire so intense that a water container had just been shot out of Knef’s hands, Demandowsky had asked her to be his wife. He wanted to marry her while they still had the chance, before one or the other of them was killed in the fighting.

  Knef could think of several objections to getting married, not least that Demandowsky already had a wife. But he argued that no one knew that at Schmargendorf. He saw no reason why the lieutenant shouldn’t marry the two of them at once, like the captain on a ship.

  They were still discussing it when they heard a rumble from the tennis courts. Peering out of their shed, they saw a tank weaving through the craters, flattening bushes, fences, and anything else that stood in its way. Looking closer, they were very relieved to see that the tank was German.

  “That’s the relief force,” Demandowsky shouted to Knef. “I knew it. I knew it. I always told you they wouldn’t let us down.”

  As he spoke, a small boy in a Hitler Youth jacket sprinted past them toward the tank. The boy was carrying a Panzerfaust. Before anyone could stop him, he fired it and the tank disappeared in a sheet of flame.

  The blast knocked everyone off their feet. Covered in blood, the lieutenant was the first to pick himself up. Rising groggily to his feet, he began to curse the Hitler Youth furiously. Demandowsky chose that moment to announce his wedding plans.

  “We want to get married,” he told the lieutenant. “We’d like you to marry us.”

  Still dazed, the lieutenant stood stock-still in the glare of the burning tank. With so much else on his mind, he could hardly believe what he was hearing.

  “I don’t have the authority,” he snapped at Demandowsky after a moment. He was about to say more when he took a sniper’s bullet full in the face. Knef watched in horror as the lieutenant slumped wordlessly to the ground, his face a bloody mess, just a lump of red meat under his helmet where his features had been.

  Knef didn’t linger. She and Demandowsky ran for cover at once, zigzagging hastily across the freight yard while bullets flew all around them. Some soldiers gave them covering fire as they sprinted for the embankment and were pulled up over a wall. Knef was glad to see that these were real soldiers, not old men or Hitler Youths or SS. There were fifteen or twenty of them and they clearly knew their business.

  The Russians attacked later, giving their usual screech as they charged across the freight yard. Crouching down, the Germans held their fire until the last possible moment, Knef gripping the ammunition belt while Demandowsky aimed the machine gun. They managed to beat the Russians off, but they knew it would be only a matter of time before they tried again. The Germans retreated as soon as night fell, quietly abandoning their position and slipping back through the ruins toward Hohenzollerndamm under cover of darkness.

  They found a cellar full of civilians and tried to join them, hoping for some shelter from the constant fire in the streets. The civilians were mostly women and children, sitting on kitchen chairs around a single candle stub, waiting passively for the Russians to arrive. They weren’t pleased to see Knef and the others.

  “Go away!” they yelled. “We don’t want any soldiers here. They’ll kill us if they find you here. Go away!”

  “We just need some water,” said one of the soldiers.

  “Have a heart.” A fat woman was indignant. “We’ve got children here.”

  Another woman, a toothless old hag, took pity on them. Emerging from a corner, she shoved a bottle of water into the soldier’s hands. “God have mercy on us,” she mumbled, as she turned away. Like everyone else in the room, she was under no illusions about what was going to happen when the Russians arrived.

  They all seemed m
ad to Knef, like sheep in a slaughterhouse patiently waiting to be killed. Leaving them to it, she was glad to rejoin the others outside. The whole street appeared to be in flames as she emerged. There was no more talk of marriage as she and Demandowsky linked up with some other soldiers and set off at a run for Hohenzollerndamm, where they had orders to dig in at the cemetery and be ready to hold the Russians again when they attacked at dawn.

  * * *

  THE WOMEN IN THE CELLAR were quite right to fear the Russians. Thousands of women were being raped every day as the fight for Berlin intensified. It was often the first thing the Russians did when they arrived, after disarming everyone and pocketing their wristwatches.

  Some said that the front line troops were well disciplined and that it was the ones who came after who could not be trusted. Others, that the rapists were recently liberated prisoners of war or soldiers avenging similar assaults on their own womenfolk during the German advance. Whatever their motives, the result was always the same for the women. Young and old alike, they were all in danger as the Russians advanced. Some were raped again and again, so often that they lost count after a while. Others were assaulted so brutally that they couldn’t walk afterward and could only crawl away, hoping not to be attacked further. After all they had endured on the Eastern Front, the Russian army was not inclined to show any mercy to the German women of Berlin.

  Ursula Köster was hiding in a Zehlendorf cellar with her parents and three children when the Russians came for her. She was raped by four soldiers that night and another two the next morning. Staggering outside afterward, she found an upturned bathtub lying in the rubble of the communal gardens. She crawled underneath it and hid there with her six-year-old twins and her seven-month-old son.

  Hannelore von Cmuda, aged only seventeen, was raped repeatedly by drunken troops, then shot three times and left for dead. Anneliese Antz was dragged from her mother’s bed just before dawn and taken screaming to an apartment, where a Soviet officer roughly assaulted her. Her sister Ilse was stripped naked by another soldier who mistook her half-starved body for a man’s before realizing his mistake and raping her. “That’s what the Germans did in Russia,” he told her, after he had finished.

  Eighteen-year-old Juliane Brochnik hid behind the sofa in her father’s cellar when the Russians came. She was safe until two elderly Germans in the adjoining cellar told the Russians where she was. Margarete Probst concealed her blond hair under a cap, dirtied her face, and put a large bandage on her cheek to make herself unattractive. She succeeded, but other women in the shelter with her at Kreuzberg were less fortunate: “The girls were simply rounded up and taken to the apartments upstairs,” she remembered. “We could hear their screams all night. The sound even penetrated down to the cellars.”9 One of them, a woman of eighty, was raped repeatedly by the Russians despite her advanced age.

  In another shelter, Margarete Promeist, too, was raped, despite telling her assailant that she was far too old for him. Margarete was supposed to be in charge of the shelter, but there was nothing she could do against the Russians: “For two days and two nights, wave after wave of Russians came into my shelter raping and looting. Women were killed if they refused. Some were shot and killed anyway. In one room alone I found the bodies of six or seven women, all lying in the position in which they were raped, their heads battered in.”10

  Actress Magda Wieland hid herself in a cupboard, only to be hauled out by an Asiatic soldier, who then suffered premature ejaculation at the sight of a beautiful blonde. His companion raped her instead. Downstairs, Magda’s Jewish friend Ellen Götz was dragged out and raped, too, despite the protests of the Germans who were sheltering her. Ellen had hidden in the cellar after escaping from the prison in Lehrterstrasse, but her Jewishness did not save her from the Russians. They raped Jewish women and Communists as well, party members who had concealed their membership from the Nazis for twelve long years and had initially welcomed the Soviets with open arms.

  Children were raped, too, young girls of eleven or twelve with torn ligaments, bleeding to death from punctured bowels after what the Russians had done to them. Few females were too young or too old for the Russians’ attention. Their officers sometimes tried to stop them, but more often than not they just laughed instead or attempted to join in. Women soldiers laughed, too, amused at the sight of their comrades openly violating German women on the street. Individual Russian soldiers were occasionally kind and gentle, but as an army, they showed no mercy as they fell on Berlin. Their country had suffered too much in the past four years for them to show any mercy. And the people of Germany hadn’t suffered enough.

  7

  BELSEN

  IN BELSEN, the British had just finished burying the bodies. There had been ten thousand bodies when they liberated the camp on April 15, the vast majority dead from typhus or starvation. The guards had refused to dispose of them for fear of infection, and the remaining prisoners had lacked the strength, so the bodies had been abandoned instead, dumped in great piles around the camp and left to rot.

  The British had been shocked beyond belief at the sight of so many corpses. The first soldiers to reach the wire had retched at once, overcome by the smell of death before they even entered the camp. The living had seemed almost as terrible as the dead, skeletal figures fighting over scraps of food or lying uncaring in their own excrement. The British were hardened troops who thought they had seen it all in the fight across Europe. But Belsen had made them cry like babies.

  The worst of it was that Belsen was not even an extermination camp. It had no purpose-built gas chambers or execution sheds. It was simply a holding camp that had gone wrong, overflowing with prisoners from elsewhere who had been moved to Belsen to escape the Russians advancing from the east. The Germans had never fed the prisoners well, but they had found it difficult to feed them at all when the food supply was disrupted by the British advance. The Germans had left the prisoners to starve instead, while remaining perfectly well nourished themselves.

  Richard Dimbleby had been the first to reveal Belsen to the outside world. Reporting for the BBC, he had spoken of living skeletons and cannibalism, corpses with their livers and kidneys cut out, men and women clubbed senseless by the SS and then thrown alive into the crematorium. His report had been measured and calm, but it had been received with frank incredulity by the BBC. They had refused to broadcast it until the story had been verified by independent sources. Dimbleby had telephoned London in a blind rage, swearing that he would never make another broadcast as long as he lived if this one wasn’t transmitted. The BBC had reluctantly complied, while insisting on a few cuts nevertheless, for their own peace of mind.

  Yet Dimbleby had told only the half of it. He hadn’t mentioned the children forced to stand and watch as their parents were murdered; the man torn apart by dogs for calling out to his wife; the suspected cannibals made to sit with a dead man’s eyeball between their lips and their arms above their heads, beaten to death as soon as they wavered and couldn’t hold the position any longer. He had said nothing of excrement inches deep in every hut; children throwing stones at corpses; women who hadn’t menstruated since their arrival at the camp; women co-opted into prostitution—fourteen German soldiers a day, five days a week—in return for enough food to keep body and soul together. Nor had he spoken of the prisoners praying for the British to arrive before a planned gas chamber was completed; of guards continuing to kill prisoners even after the British appeared; of invalids screaming with fear whenever anyone came near them with a needle; of others in a blind panic as they were carried on stretchers toward a building with chimneys, which, for Auschwitz survivors, could have only one meaning. Dimbleby hadn’t mentioned any of these things in his broadcast. There had been only so much his listeners could take at a single hearing.

  The British had hardly known where to begin after the initial shock had worn off. Feeding the prisoners and nursing the sick had been the most urgent priorities, followed by burying the dead. Unprepared for
the complexity of the task, and with the front line still only a few miles away, the British had made mistakes at first, pressing their own rations on prisoners too far gone to digest food properly, killing unknown numbers with kindness instead of saving them as they intended.

  Michael Bentine, an intelligence officer with the RAF, had been in Celle, nearby, when a British doctor had appeared in a Jeep, demanding K-rations and chocolate. “I’ve never seen anything so awful in my life,” he had told Bentine. “You just won’t believe it till you see it—for God’s sake come and help them!”1 Others had helped, too. Lieutenant Robert Runcie and Major Willie Whitelaw of the Scots Guards had delivered a Jeepload of sweets and chocolate from their battalion’s own rations for the children in the camp. But British army rations had often proved too rich for stomachs unused to such fare. Prisoners had continued to die at the rate of several hundred a day for weeks after the British arrived.

  The bodies all had to be buried. The prison guards had been made to do the work at first, Germans and Hungarians lugging corpses so putrid that the arms sometimes came away in their hands. The guards had complained that they would catch typhus, but had received scant sympathy from the British. SS guards demanding a few minutes’ rest had been made to lie facedown in a burial pit, where they had cowered in fear, expecting to be killed at any moment. One guard had committed suicide after a few hours of burial work. Others had begged to be shot. Progress had been so slow that the British had been forced to take over after a while, putting aside their scruples and using bulldozers to finish the job before the bodies decomposed altogether.

 

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