After the Reich
Page 9
It was Käthe von Normann’s turn next. She was told to go with the soldiers. She sent for a worker who could translate: she would go only with her children, otherwise they should shoot all four of them straight away. The Russians reconsidered: she and her family had five minutes to pack and get out of the house. Soon afterwards she saw the Russian general arrive.
As the women of the estate left en masse to find a refuge, the Russians kept coming back to search for arms and watches. Then they caught sight of a Frau Westphal and tried to drag her away. She was defended by her ten-year-old son with an axe, until the Russians finally desisted and merely robbed her of a pot of lard. The women made for comparative shelter in the woods, although the weather was bitterly cold and there were frequent snowfalls. Eventually they found quarters in one of the many farmhouses abandoned by Germans fleeing across the Oder. The usual news came in from the neighbouring villages: a woman raped twenty times, and she was not the only one. Frau von Normann looked at her son. ‘He doesn’t cry, but the sight of indescribable misery in the eyes of my ten year old I shall never forget so long as I live.’27
On 12 March rumours reached Käthe von Normann that Polish units had occupied some of the local villages. She drew the wrong conclusions - she thought they would want to see the farms working again under their industrious German owners. She had no inkling, any more than anyone else, that her land had already been promised to the Poles.
It was on 30 March that General Berling’s First Polish Army raised their flag on Danzig town hall. The fighting had come to an end, and the people were gradually emerging from the cellars where they had lived through the Russian shelling. The Western Allies were informed that a Wojewoda or provincial governor had been appointed. Only later did the Americans realise that this was all part of the fait accompli, and that Danzig was going to be incorporated into a Polish state shifted westwards, to allow the Soviets to hang on to the territory they had negotiated over with Ribbentrop in 1939.28
The Soviets estimated that 39,000 dead bodies lay in the city. They had captured 10,000 German soldiers. Others held out on the tip of the Hela Peninsula where General von Sauken was performing a remarkable job in transporting citizens and troops to Schleswig-Holstein. Some 1,200,000 escaped the Red Army in this way before Sauken capitulated on 9 May. Not all of them survived the crossing. Two out of four barges containing prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp at the mouth of the Vistula failed to make it: one was scuttled by the SS, the other was bombed by the RAF. The two that reached Neustadt, north of Lübeck, were fired on by SS men and naval personnel.29 The Russians did not actually bother to enter Stutthof until 9 May, more than a month after the fall of Danzig. Stutthof was just one of 2,000 camps, great and small, liberated by the Allies between the autumn of 1944 and the late spring of 1945. Most of the prisoners at Stutthof were women, and most of the women Jews. About 3,000 had been shot or thrown into the icy waters of the Bight in January.30
Germany’s prisons were also evacuated. Once again it seemed that the Nazis did not want the world to know what they had been perpetrating. In November prisons had been emptied on the left bank of the Rhine. A month later they emptied the gaols of Königsberg. The inmates were transferred to penal institutions in central Germany. Prisoners were divided into three groups: those who could be released; those who could be despatched to army formations; and those who were under no circumstance to be liberated. This last group was largely made up of racial types that were anathema to the Nazis: Jews and ‘half-Jews’ above all, but gypsies, Poles and Czechs as well. Also in this category were the worst criminals - murderers and psychopaths. These could be shot if necessary.31
The marches took place in a fiercely cold winter, and many died. Nonetheless the death rate was not as high as on the similar treks that took place on the closing of the extermination and concentration camps. It has been estimated there were fifty-two of these ‘death marches’ involving 69,000 people, of whom 59 per cent perished.32 Women prisoners proved frailer, and many were raped by retreating German soldiers, or captured and killed by the Red Army. The prison warders who accompanied the treks were not as brutal as concentration camp guards, and up to a third of the convicts managed to escape. More closely watched were the ‘NN’ or Nacht und Nebel (night and fog) prisoners, who had simply been abducted and never formally tried. At best they were to be transferred to a concentration camp; at worst shot.33
In Danzig it was open season for the Russian soldiers once again. They raped, murdered and pillaged. Women between the ages of twelve and seventy-five were raped; boys who sought to rescue their mothers were pitilessly shot. The Russians defiled the ancient Cathedral of Oliva and raped the Sisters of Mercy. Later they put the building to the torch. In the hospitals both nurses and female doctors were subjected to the same outrages after the soldiers drank surgical spirit. Nurses were raped over the bodies of unconscious patients in the operating theatres together with the women in the maternity ward. Doctors who tried to stop this were simply gunned down. The Poles behaved as badly as the Russians. Many Danzigers took their own lives.34 The men were rounded up, beaten and thrown into the concentration camp at Matzkau. From there 800 to 1,000 were despatched to Russia twice daily.
The scene is familiar from Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum of 1959. Grass was a Danziger, and, although he was serving with the Waffen-SS when Danzig fell, he speaks with authority. When the Russians break into his ‘presumed’ father’s grocers shop they rape the widow Greff while playing with little Kurt. Rapists and child-lovers - two clichés of the invasion. Not all Red Army soldiers spared children by any means, and not all of them were rapists either. The protagonist Oskar Matzerath’s father famously swallows his Nazi Party badge to conceal it, choking to death in the process: a powerful metaphor for Germany in its hour of defeat.35 In his 2002 novella Im Krebsgang about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff at the end of January 1945 Grass has returned to the theme. The ship was being used as part of the efforts to evacuate the German population. Anything up to 9,000 people died in the icy waters, many of them children. It was the worst maritime tragedy of all time.36
Silesia
As the Red Army approached German Silesia it liberated the camps at Auschwitz. The sight that confronted its soldiers doubtless sharpened their resolve when it came to the Germans. The Russians arrived on the heels of the retreating SS, which had been busy destroying the evidence of what had gone on there. Twenty-nine out of thirty-five storerooms had also been destroyed, but in the six that remained there was more than enough evidence to condemn them: 368,280 men’s suits, 836,255 women’s coats and dresses and 5,525 pairs of women’s shoes. In the tannery they found seven tons of human hair. Seven thousand inmates survived to greet them. Their places were taken by German POWs and Silesian civilians.
The rest of the victims of Nazi terror had been hurriedly marched towards the Reich to the more political camps that were in German and Austrian territory. Mauthausen, which had not been a Jewish camp before, suddenly became one; Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and Buchenwald were similarly transformed. Belsen was crammed to bursting point with Jewish prisoners, many of them already suffering from typhus. Other camps that were restocked in this way were Dora Mittelbau, Gross Rosen and Flossenbürg. Thousands died en route.37
The Russians reached the old Silesian frontier as early as 19 January 1945. The Gauleiter had proclaimed, ‘They will not cross the Silesian border.’ The next day he authorised the departure of 700,000 Breslauer, most of them women and children who marched off to Germany in temperatures of twenty degrees below zero.38 Some arrived in Dresden and were camping in the streets when the Anglo-Americans destroyed the city. Others went to Berlin, where they were burned to death in the great February raids. The capital of Lower Silesia, Breslau was surrounded on 16 February; it finally surrendered on 6 May. The day before, Hitler’s last favourite, Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner, marched his troops away leaving the commander of the garrison, General Niehoff, to go
to the Villa Colonia to sign the capitulation. Niehoff ’s soldiers were led off to captivity in the east. The city had been one of Hitler’s Kesseln: fortresses to be defended to the last drop of German blood. It had suffered horribly, and so had its people. Now they hung white flags from their windows and prepared for the ordeal.
Those who escaped from Breslau crossed the Neisse river at Görlitz. Conditions were so bad there that it has been described as ‘the worst city in Germany’ at the time. In one appalling incident thirty women were driven into a barn and raped. When one refused she was shot. The local Soviet commander heard about the atrocity and went to the barn and shot four of his own men. In another incident eight Russian soldiers died after drinking methylated spirits. Forty more were struck blind.39
Apart from hunting down women to rape, the Russians were anxious to weed out the major Nazis of Breslau. On 7 May the Red Army deliberately started fires in the ruins. What was left of the city was looted. On 10 May the library of the university or Leopoldina for which Brahms had written his famous Academic Festival Overture went up in flames; on the 15th it was the turn of the city museum. On the same day the twin towers of one of the city’s great Backsteingotik churches - St Mary Magdalene - were blown up. Rival units fought over the remaining food left by the Germans. ‘The idea that Breslau had been completely destroyed by the siege was a post-war fiction.’40
The occupation followed the usual pattern of three waves: first came the bombardment and the armies; these were replaced by the second force that took possession of the land, and anything else for that matter, including the women; and finally the Poles came in their wake. The last chunk of Silesia to be taken was the county of Glatz and the Riesengebirge mountains, which fell to the Red Army only after the ceasefire, so that at least the quaint villages and the town of Glatz were spared destruction.41 After the initial rage and lust abated, the Soviet armies turned their hands to demontage. On 1 June they dismantled the power station at Kraftborn. The major factories went next, followed by street lights, overhead cables and freight trains. The soldateska continued to steal watches, window frames, wheelbarrows and bicycles. They also took every piano they could find.
In the Upper Silesian town of Steinau one mother of two small children frankly described her ordeal at the hands of the Red Army: ‘A young Russian with a pistol in his hand came to fetch me. I have to admit that I was so frightened (and not just of the pistol) that I could not hold my bladder. That didn’t disturb him in the least. You got used to it soon enough and realised there was no point in putting up a fight.’42 Later she went with her heavily pregnant sister to see a Russian doctor, believing that he would be a civilised man. They were both raped by the medic and a lieutenant, even though she herself was menstruating. That was no disincentive either.43
The soldiers raped every female they found; one twelve-year-old girl complained of the terrible tearing they had caused her. On another occasion when all the surviving Steinauer were taking refuge in a cellar and the women were once again threatened with gang rape, this same mother gave her children coffee that had been laced with poison. But the dose was not strong enough to do them any harm. She thought she was doing the right thing then: ‘I can only assure people that a mother never believes herself more holy than at that moment.’ When she was subjected to what she feared would be rape by an entire platoon, she remembered a Russian word for ‘child’. The rapist got up and escorted her from the room, before the eyes of the others waiting their turn. The Steinau woman repeated the story - often told - that the Russians treated children with kindness. She had seen a tank come up to a child in the middle of a road and the driver climb out and pick up the boy and place him on the pavement.44
Peace came to Europe two days after the Russians took Breslau. The Breslauer scarcely noticed. The remaining German citizens were well behind the lines. Their fate was mostly decided: unless the Western Allies were capable of pulling a rabbit out of a hat at the Peace Conference, Prussia’s second city would fall to Poland and they would be driven west.
Brandenburg
The Red Army encountered death in all its forms on the road to the German capital. At the Sonnenburg Prison - ‘die Sonne’ as it had been known to its inmates - they found that 800 chiefly foreign prisoners had been slaughtered as recently as 30 January 1945, and it had not been deemed worth while to repatriate them across the Oder.45 The last batch of prisoners to be executed at Brandenburg-Görden were killed on 20 April, Hitler’s birthday. The Russians liberated the prison a week later. The Russians, accompanied by Polish soldiers, chanced upon Sachsenhausen concentration camp as they moved to invest Berlin. The camp was in Oranienburg, and the fall of that former royal borough brought it home to Hitler that his days were numbered.
There were just 5,000 prisoners left in Sachsenhausen of a population that had reached 50,000. The rest had been taken on ‘death marches’.46 As in most concentration camps, a number of Sachsenhausen’s prisoners had been out-housed, in this case in smaller camps in Lieberose and Schwarzheide in the Mark Brandenburg. This had been the fate of many of the Jews brought to Sachsenhausen from Slovakia and Auschwitz. As the Russians closed in on the Mark, the prisoners were marched out of the camps towards the coast. Many were beaten to death or shot on the way. The camp administrators, including the notorious Obersturmbannf ührer Höss, also fled from their HQ in Ravensbrück. They ran to the comparative safety of Flensburg to seek out their master Himmler. The latter advised Höss to save his skin by crossing into Denmark. Höss received false papers as Able Seaman Franz Lang, but was caught and hanged for all that.47
In the middle of May, the writer and journalist Margret Boveri finally made it to her country cottage in Teupitz in the Spreewald. She and a Frau Becker undertook a hair-raising journey on bicycles, dodging - successfully and not so successfully - the Soviet troops who wanted to appropriate their valuable vehicles. They found it sinister that the place names had been crossed out and rewritten in Cyrillic script, which they took for a sign that eastern Germany was to be incorporated into the Soviet Empire.
The place seemed to have died, even if most of the houses seemed undamaged from the outside [in the square a few corpses in uniform were lying around, stiff like giant puppets]; the house was completely wrecked behind which we moor the boat on our trips into the little town, the next-door property likewise. On Kohlgarten (our peninsula), I spoke to one man only. He said, ‘My child is dead, my wife in the hospital.’ In my house I found the usual picture of destruction: everything was shattered, smashed and plundered, and the three boats were gone. The clothes had all been taken, just like the food, down to the last grain of salt; the last naturally snatched by our dear compatriots. My archive portfolios were strewn about the place. The oil paint for painting the house had been emptied out and everything was stuck to it. In the flower beds cows and horses had grazed and for the first time we found some proper manure.48
The Schloss had taken the brunt of the destruction: the lords had fled, presumed dead, and the Russians had turned the building into a hospital; despite that they spent the night bawling and brawling and playing gramophone records. The two women made their way back to Berlin. The normally resilient Frau Becker was reduced to tears by the sight of German civilians being marched into captivity. Those who straggled or stumbled were beaten with whips.49 Ruth Friedrich and her doctor friend Frank went on a journey into Brandenburg in pursuit of food. They stopped at a country inn. Eventually a woman came out with a headscarf pulled down over her brow: the usual device to conceal her age from the rapists. Here and there they could see some soiled straw, but nothing else. They asked the peasant woman if she had food. She told them it had all been stolen. ‘Russians or Germans?’ Frank asked. ‘Thieves,’ the woman replied impassively. The pair ran into a trek on the road. These unfortunates were aged between twelve and thirty. One of the children told her, ‘We are all going to die . . . Why not? Death is not the worst thing.’50
Liberation from the West
The Rhineland was the first part of Germany to be liberated from the west, and the first city was Aachen. The place of Charlemagne’s coronation had been pitilessly pummelled by Anglo-American bombers so that there was little left of it. Of the 15,000 homes in the city only a fifth were vaguely intact. The American-installed administration estimated that they could make the damaged properties habitable within a year, but to rebuild the city would take twenty.51
One of the first Americans into Aachen was Saul Padover, who was then working for the Psychological Warfare Division. He followed behind the troops, interviewing Germans to compile a dossier on their affiliation to Nazism. His memoirs of the campaign provide a variety of snapshots, but many of them are coloured by the anti-German propaganda he was cooking up as he went. In Jülich he found two Flemings who had been living the life of Riley in an air-raid shelter. They believed themselves the only civilians left in the bombed-out town, and had a huge stock of champagne and cognac, tins of food, eggs and chicken. In their ‘drowsy moments’ they read travel books or romantic novels.52
Padover was keen to record the moral loucheness of the German survivors. Wiesbaden ‘was packed with German civilians, many of whom were gaily attired. There were lots of pretty girls, and they smiled at us broadly and invitingly.’y The Americans had entered the spa town on 28 March 1945 and the defenders had prudently tossed their weapons into whatever expanse of water they could find. The Americans fenced off the centre of town with barbed wire and moved into the Hotel Rose. Denazification began on 10 April, when all Pgs and SA men were asked to report to the American authorities.53