by Heinz Kohler
German troops expected to use weapons of despair in defense of their capital, most likely Sarin and Tabun nerve gas
Radio Berlin, meanwhile, provided additional news. The death of President Roosevelt was reported as a “sign” that victory would be ours. The “heroic resistance of encircled German troops in East Prussia” was seen as another such sign. And on April 17, Heinrich Himmler solemnly announced:
“No German town will be declared an open city. Every village and every town will be defended with all possible means. Any German who offends against this self-evident duty to the nation will lose his life as well as his honor.”
On the occasion of the Führer’s birthday, on April 20, Reich Minister Goebbels declared:
“The Führer is in us and we are in him. The Führer is in each of us and each of us is within him.”
He promised that the Führer would soon unleash a massive counter attack with new wonder weapons, tied to V3 and V4 rockets. That was also the day on which Dr. Dietrich made a speech on the steps of the Town Hall. He said there was good news from Berlin. A super secret wonder weapon of incredible power was now being readied. It would make the V2 rockets look like toys. In a matter of days, the new weapon would be in use and would reverse the tide of the war. Adolf Hitler was the only one who could and would save us from Bolshevism.
“Germans will conquer the world! Sieg Heil!” he said.
By then, Mr. Kalitz and I had collected further bits of news:
April 20
On Hitler’s birthday, U.S. forces take Nuremberg, the shrine of National Socialism; first Russian troops reach outskirts of Berlin
April 25
Marshal Georgi Zhukov, commander of the 1st White Russian Front, and Marshal Ivan Konyev, commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front, complete the encirclement of Berlin.
-----
Before long, the Werewolf Station at Königswusterhausen was broadcasting an appeal to werewolves of Berlin and Brandenburg to rise against the enemy and engage in partisan action. My mother turned off the radio, but she couldn’t turn off the noise in the street. We ran to the windows and witnessed the unfolding of another spectacle yet.
“My God, Kettenhunde [Chain Hounds] all over the place,” my mother said.
Helmut jumped out of bed to have a look, too. They were right across the street now, about a dozen of them, wearing black boots, black uniforms, black helmets, the ones with skulls and crossbones. Like dog collars, big silver medallions hung on their chests on long, silver chains–symbols of absolute power over life and death. They carried brushes and buckets full of white paint. For a moment, they stopped in front of Furtwängler’s tobacco store. Then they painted a sentence across the walls of three houses:
NOT ANOTHER FOOT OF SOIL TO OUR ENEMIES!
akg-images, London, United Kingdom
“When German soldiers and officers surrender, the Red Army takes them prisoner and spares their lives.” (From Stalin’s Order Nr. 55 of March 23, 1942)
Safe Passage Certificate
Every German officer and soldier is entitled, with the help of this certificate, to cross the front line and surrender to the Russians. Every member of the Red Army and every Soviet citizen is obligated to deliver him to the nearest command of the Red Army. The prisoner of war is guaranteed life, good treatment, and return home after the war.
Supreme Command of the Red Army
27. Gallows
[April 1945]
One morning in April, there was a lot of commotion at the Town Hall, just a few houses down the street from us. My mother said I could go and investigate, and I got there just in time. A crowd had gathered in the street and the Chief of Police was standing next to the Thousand-Year Oak, talking to one of the Chain Hounds who was wearing the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, which made me think he was the man in charge. I must have been right; he climbed to the top step and made a speech.
He said gallows would be set up in front of the Town Hall that night. Henceforth, his SS men would execute any and all traitors right then and there. He trusted, he said, that the population would fully cooperate, and he reminded everyone to turn in enemy leaflets and to remember the Sippenhaft Laws [kinship responsibility laws], which made close relatives of traitors into accessories who were equally guilty.
“Death to all traitors! Heil Hitler!" he said.
Captain Werther made a speech, too, explaining the measures about to be taken.
“In the coming days,” he said, “instant death sentences will be carried out against members of the armed forces and, if necessary, their closest relatives, for various acts of desertion and treachery. Such acts include the obvious, such as running away from the field of battle, malingering in the hinterland, creating self-inflicted wounds in order to be shipped to a hospital, and putting on civilian clothes.”
“But,” Captain Werther continued, “we will be watching also for more subtle signs that particular soldiers are planning to preserve their pitiful lives at the expense of the German people–signs such as possessing or spreading around enemy leaflets or carrying white handkerchiefs, which can be used to signal surrender.”
Captain Werther also told us what had happened to Dr. Weiss after he ran off to the west.
“Black savages strung him on a tree upside down till his head burst,” he said.
That scared me and I so craved my Valerian drops! I ran home to my mother, but she said Captain Werther, like Dr. Dietrich, was a fanatical liar; nobody could possibly know where Dr. Weiss had gone and what had happened to him. She also gave me one Valerian drop.
Being thus reassured, I went back down to find out what else the Chain Hounds had done with all the buckets of white paint. I made a list of all the slogans they had painted on the walls of houses on our street. Some of their slogans were really long and spanned four or five houses; others were much shorter:
“Those who are afraid of an honest death in battle deserve the mean death of cowards.”
“Protect our women and children from the Red Beasts!”
“Traitors take care, the Werewolf is watching!”
“We will never surrender!”
“We believe in Victory!”
-----
During the next week, I helped my mother get ready for what we all knew would surely come. Before all else, I had to get food; then I would ferret out the latest news. Mr. Albrecht lent me his bicycle so I could check out the dairy and the wind mill; both of them stood a kilometer out of town on the road to Paplitz. I had made the trip before, bringing home milk and butter from one place and a sack of wheat flour from the other. But that had been three months ago, and things had certainly changed. The road was now littered with abandoned things: Broken wagons without horses, wrecked army trucks in camouflage paint, perambulators and hand carts without wheels, torn suitcases, empty ammunition boxes, forsaken weapons, cast off helmets, pitiful piles of crockery and toys…. And I came upon the carcass of a horse, smelling sickly and vile. Strips of meat had been hacked from its flanks, by then thick with maggots; thousands of flies rose up in black swarms to greet me. I felt ill, like throwing up, and wished I had my Valerian drops.
Still, I continued on my mission. On my way back, with a canister of cottage cheese, a jug full of whey and, alas, no flour at all, I distracted myself by counting the wooden crosses on the side of the road. They had been fashioned from nearby trees, birches usually, often listing just a name, sometimes rank and years of birth and death, and sometimes nothing at all.
Things got much worse when I pedaled onto Breite Weg. A Chain Hound stood in the middle of the road, legs astride, holding a pistol. A soldier in a gray-green uniform lay in front of him. The Chain Hound jammed the muzzle against the man’s forehead, and I saw the man rise to his knees, then to his feet, the pistol following, his eyes closed, waiting, I presumed, for the last sound he would ever hear. But then the Chain Hound put away the pistol and took the lapels of the man’s coat in both of his hands, pulling the man’s he
ad into his collar and making it disappear like that of a turtle I had once seen at the zoo. I didn’t wait to watch and hurried home.
-----
The next morning, we found three soldiers hanging from the gallows in front of the Town Hall. Each of them had a different sign around his neck, written in large black letters:
“Whoever fights can die. Whoever betrays his fatherland must die. I had to die!” one sign said.
“Here I hang because I did not believe in the Führer” said the next one.
“I was a coward, but died just the same!” said the last one.
And in the glass case, right next to the Town Hall door, the Chain Hounds had posted their evidence of one soldier’s treachery, a Safe Conduct Certificate, signed by General Eisenhower.
-----
It was time to go on my second mission and collect the news, which I tried to do on the very next day. But Mr. Kalitz wouldn’t cooperate, not with the Chain Hounds in town and soldiers swinging on the gallows for treachery. As luck would have it, however, I managed to get a current newspaper from a soldier who was sitting in front of the town hall. It was dated April 25, 1945 and although I didn’t know it at the time, it was the last issue ever published of Nachrichten für die Truppe [News for the Troops]. A giant headline proclaimed “BERLIN SURROUNDED, Two Thirds of City Occupied. Battle Rages in Subway Tunnels.” Other front-page articles talked of “Soviets Crossing the Elbe River” and of “Bombs Falling on Berchtesgaden” (Adolf Hitler’s favorite Alpine retreat). There was a long list of heroes receiving the Iron Cross as well. Beyond that, my mother and I had to rely on the Goebbels Snout, but that was easier said than done.
Later on the same day, Reich Minister Goebbels broadcast a message to all women and girls. “Take up the weapons of our wounded and fallen soldiers and fight!” he yelled. “Defend your freedom, your honor, and your life! Build a wall against the Mongol hordes!”
Then Radio Germany fell silent, never to be heard from again. Something terrible, we were sure, had happened in Berlin. We thought of Aunt Martel and my grandmother, but there was nothing we could do. My mother cried and I kept playing with the dials. Radio Hamburg was still on the air, reporting stories that made it into my notebook like this:
1945
April 26
General Dwight D. Eisenhower apparently halts Western Allied forces at the Elbe, refusing to aid the Red Army in the Battle for Berlin. This Anglo-American/Russian rift is a good sign for Germany!
April 28
Reich Commissar for the Netherlands, Artur von Seyss-Inquart, orders all German troops to stop fighting in Holland
The Duce, Benito Mussolini, killed by Italian partisans! After being shot, strung up by his heels on Milan’s main square, the Piazzale Loreto, Radio Stockholm reports
April 29
General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, Commander-in-Chief of German forces in North Italy, surrenders unconditionally
There was more! In the evening of May 1, Radio Hamburg repeatedly warned its listeners of an important announcement about to be made. My mother, Helmut, and I joined the Albrechts in their living room, which is why I noted down the time. At 21:40 hours, the station began to play Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods. And then it came:
“Achtung! Achtung! Our beloved Führer, Adolf Hitler, has fallen on the field of honor at the head of his troops….”
The Führer’s successor, the station said, would be Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who would, in turn, give an important speech on the next day.
“So Hitler Youth Quax made it after all,” Mr. Albrecht said with a grin and, except for Helmut, we all knew what he meant. We had all seen the propaganda movies, featuring Quax, the Crash Pilot, the overeager Nazi youth. The equally devoted Grand Admiral Dönitz, the once so popular head of Germany’s U-boat fleet, had often been compared to Quax.
On May 2, again on Radio Hamburg, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz confirmed the Führer’s death. He pledged that the war would go on to save us from the Russians, but German troops would henceforth fight the Western Allies only if they helped the Russians. In that spirit, he said, he had ordered German forces to evacuate Norway and Denmark.
-----
Later that week, with Adolf Hitler dead, the Chain Hounds gone, and Dr. Weiss having walked back into town quite unharmed, I found Mr. Kalitz much more cooperative. As a result, we got a final bit of news from the BBC, which I also recorded in my little book:
1945
May 2
U.S. forces capture Munich and then Braunau, Hitler’s birthplace
British forces bypass Hamburg, take Lübeck on the Baltic Sea
Russian forces hoist the hammer-and-sickle flag over the Reichstag in Berlin; General Helmuth Weidling, commandant of Berlin, surrenders; estimated losses in the Battle of Berlin: 300,000 Soviets, 1 million Germans
May 3
Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz proposes to make separate deal with Western Allies; is rebuffed by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery
May 4
German forces in the Northwest surrender in Lüneburg; document signed by Admiral Hans Georg von Friedeburg and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery
An American leaflet that, if discovered on a German soldier by the SS, could easily cost the soldier’s life:
Safe Passage Certificate
The German soldier who presents this safe passage certificate is using it as a sign of his honest desire to surrender. He is to be disarmed. He is to be well treated. He has the right to receive food and, if necessary, medical attention. He is to be removed from the danger zone as soon as possible.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Supreme Commander
Allied Expeditionary Force
The English translation on the reverse side serves as instruction for the Allied outposts.
28. Mongol Dance
[May 1945]
With Brandenburg, and then Berlin, in Russian hands to our east and the Americans on the Elbe to our west, we all knew that it was a matter of days, perhaps hours, before we would be occupied by one side or the other. Everyone hoped that the Americans would get to us first, given the horror stories we had heard about the Russians, but that wasn’t likely, if Radio Hamburg was to be believed. For some unknown reason, the Americans wouldn’t cross the Elbe, a mere 50 kilometers away. Accordingly, everyone’s mind turned to making last-minute preparations for the worst.
Mr. Albrecht dug a big hole in the backyard and got ready to bury all his liquor bottles, lest the Russians found them and went on a drunken rampage. Mrs. Albrecht made a bonfire nearby, ever so reluctantly feeding it with pictures of her son Werner, all of them showing him in Army uniform with swastikas on his lapels. She was soon joined by Mrs. Ebner, Mrs. Holland, and Mrs. Gronostalski, our neighbors from Cologne. Among other things, they contributed a picture of the Führer, an SA uniform, and lots of family pictures of various brothers, fiancés, husbands, sons, and uncles, all in some kind of uniform. Watching them thus cover their tracks made me think of all the Hitler pictures in my own book of the 1936 Olympic Games. I went up to get it and then remembered my Hitler stamps, too. My mother came down with me to watch the show. But I didn’t want to lose my stamps; nor did I want to give up the book with all its three-dimensional effects. Rather than burning it, I stashed it next to Mr. Albrecht’s liquor hoard and let him bury it.
Just then we saw a truck appear through clouds of dust, coming up the side road from the fields. It stopped, it moved, it came to our house! We saw red crosses on the side. A soldier asked for my mother.
“I know, I know,” she sobbed. “Just go and let me be.”
Mrs. Albrecht talked to him, and then let out a piercing shout:
“Trudchen come here, he’s alive!”
My mother stared at them in disbelief and made the soldier tell the story: a piece of shrapnel in his head at Cottbus, surgery in the field, transfer to Brandenburg, then Hanover.
“He’s fine, I swear, will be like new; he sends his love. The English
have him now.”
And my mother jumped across the yard, embraced the messenger, let go a flood of tears and kisses, cries and laughter.
“Good luck to all of you,” the soldier said. “We’ve got to run. North to Havelberg; Schwerin, if we are lucky; it’s the only way out of here now.”
The soldier turned and saw the sign next to the cellar door. “LSR” it said, which stood for “Luft Schutz Raum” or “air raid shelter.”
“LSR has a new meaning now,” he said, with a grin: “Lernt Schnell Russisch!” [Learn Russian Fast!], and off they sped, the low-hanging branches swatting their truck as it raced out of sight.
-----
The flow of refugees had ceased. The German Army had disappeared. The Chain Hounds were gone, too, but the Chief of Police was still there. In fact, Captain Werther argued with a group of women in front of the police station.
“A bunch of traitors, that’s what you are,” he yelled. “There’s going to be no white flag on the church tower as long as I am in charge!”
Dr. Dietrich was there, too.
“Every male in a house where a white flag appears will be shot,” he said.
“And there is going to be no defeatist evacuation of this village,” he added.
A man swayed from the gallows near the Town Hall. A black plane roared down the center of the street, no higher than the trees, and I saw its red star! And then there was silence; silence to the east and to the south; silence to the west and to the north; silence everywhere.
-----