After the Reich

by Giles MacDonogh

  The march of German captives through France provided the French public with the chance to tell the Landser (privates and NCOs) what they thought of them. One woman who disregarded an order to stop pelting the prisoners with stones was shot by a black American soldier. ‘She lay there in the street. No one took any notice of her . . .105 Another prisoner who was taken to a camp near Annecy to work in the quarries was told that the French were receiving one mark for every prisoner they took off the Americans. As they were marched through France a French soldier showed off to little girls at the roadside by kicking him in the backside. Watch-stealing was almost as common in the west as it was with the Red Army.106 One German describes a sergeant-major who showed him his watch, only to lose it soon afterwards. The prisoner was not so badly treated for all that. After the quarries he was able to work on the land and the local farmers fed him well - all but one, that is, who cooked ‘roast cat’ in a cream sauce that Christmas. He ate some of the sauce, but spurned the cat.107

  On 22 July 1946 Hans Johnert learned that America no longer possessed prisoners of war. They had all been put out on loan. Soon after his ‘repatriation’ he was moved to Pont d’Ain, near Bourg-en-Bresse. The Germans were used to provide labour for the local community. They worked on the farms and in the quarries. They served different masters, some of whom were kind, some not. On 9 December Frenchmen dressed as Germans threw grenades at the POWs, killing two of them and injuring many more. Johnert was sent home in the spring of 1947.108 Another, anonymous prisoner also found himself handed over to the French by the Americans. He was originally taken to a tent camp outside the Breton city of Rennes where the prisoners slept on the wet earth. The Americans were particularly trigger-happy and one man was killed simply for running to pick up a cigarette butt thrown down by a guard. Any prisoner found guilty of theft was buried up to his neck in a hole in the ground. Those who tried to run were confined for thirty days. ‘Vae victis,’ concludes the prisoner - ‘woe to the vanquished’.109

  On 24 June 1945 the prisoner in Rennes learned that the French were due to take over the camp. Despite the rough way they had been handled by the Americans it was not a pleasant thought - ‘the modern slave-trade’ he called it. If anything, the French were even quicker on the draw than the Americans. Soon after they took control of the camp they shot three Germans, two in the head: ‘Buy combs, you lot, there are lousy times ahead!’ Shooting continued to be a frequent occurrence at night. Poor provision meant that people died of hunger too. Two men starved to death in the huts, but the prisoner added that about twenty died daily in the camp sickbay. ‘Die. Who would ever learn about it - who would believe it? The dead tell no tales.’ This death rate would tally with the known figures for France in 1945.110

  One evening a drunken guard fired into a group of prisoners. He missed the Germans but hit a black American guard outside the perimeter, killing him outright. Red wine was responsible for the guards hurling salvoes of stones at the prisoners to shouts of ‘Vive la France!’, ‘Vive de Gaulle!’ and ‘boches!’ At least one of the guards was from Alsace. The Germans inflicted revenge on him by using the insulting word Wackes behind his back.ds On 8 August another eight men died of hunger in the sickbay. On the other hand most of the starving men were in the huts, not in the sickbay. When the Red Cross parcels arrived that August the men were as happy as children. The arrival of food, however, failed to prevent ten more men dying on the 22nd. One of the prisoner’s friends cut his wrists when the guard discovered the tell-tale blood-group tattoo in his armpit. Meanwhile, the scandal of the camps had reached the French press: reporters were comparing them to Buchenwald. In the Figaro a writer acknowledged that the Germans had committed terrible crimes but ‘these horrors should not become the theme of a sports competition in which we endeavour to outdo the Nazis . . . We have to judge the enemy, but we have a duty not to resemble him.’111

  The prisoner volunteered for a work detail that took him off to defuse mines around the Breton coast - in blatant violation of the Geneva Convention - but he was happy to do anything to escape from the misery of the camp, and possibly get something better to eat. As he was signed up there was a new spate of robbery, this time by both guards and civilians. The men were beaten and kicked and they lost their watches, rings, shoes, even their trousers.112

  Belgium

  Britain and America donated over 60,000 of their POWs to the Belgians. One German soldier who ended up in a camp near Mons in the south of the country had been captured in the South Tyrol. At the airport he was robbed by an American soldier. Travelling through Germany he was able to toss out a letter on Günzburg Station. A nod from the station master told him that he would deal with it. In Mannheim they came across some soldiers who had been shipped up from Lake Constance. ‘They reported that the Franzmann [army slang for a Frenchman] was taking everything away.’113

  The Americans left them in Erbisoeuil camp with 30,000 others. Before they quit their charges, the GIs robbed them of their wristwatches. What they failed to take, the Belgians grabbed, adding that they would have it back on their release: ‘These people were the worst we had met up to now.’ The prisoners were registered. When they produced their pay-books, the Belgians were astonished to learn that they were not SS men, but that did not prevent them from stealing the prisoner’s pen, money and clothes. Once the Germans were admitted to the camp it became clear that the guards wanted to see them as the perpetrators of brutal acts in concentration camps: ‘You did this too in concentration camps . . .’ they said. When the men tried to leave their huts to urinate or defecate, the guards shouted at them, ‘You German pigs, do it inside, that’s how it was in the KZ!’ When one of them chanced it, he was shot at. They got round the problem by urinating through the window.114 The prisoner could not understand why they had been sent to the camp: ‘The Belgian people don’t want us at all, and they are frightened of unemployment and are threatening to go on strike.’115

  The prisoner was put to work in the mines. The work was only for the Landser - the officers were exempted. The Belgian prime minister, Achille van Acher, had given him some hope by affirming that the men would be sent home in the spring of 1947. It was not just the work which was gruelling, it was the occasional letters from home which painted a disturbing picture of the life of their dear ones. They heard about the rapes in the Russian Zone, the theft of all their belongings and the penury of their families, and the desperation to get home meant there were frequent attempts to escape. There were, however, advantages to living in the British or Soviet Zones. It is not hard to see that the experience with the Americans had made the prisoner bitter: ‘In the English [sic] or Russian Zones the women receive a little support at least, but with the Yanks and their complete democracy, everyone has to get on with their life as best they can.’116

  The official statistics for deaths in custody in the Benelux lands are 450 in Belgium, 210 in Holland and 15 in Luxembourg.117

  The Russian Camps.

  The Russians seemingly made no distinction between a POW and a civilian, and both were liable to arrest and to be shipped to the Soviet Union to work, or to rot in camps. On 29 June 1945 the Soviet Union was said to have between four and five million Germans within its borders, helping rebuild its cities.118 The imprisonment of German and other Axis POWs in Russia was marked by an element of callous chaos. Huge numbers of Germans went east - not just soldiers, but non-military men aged between sixteen and sixty, including scientists and technicians. Records attesting to their identity were inadequate, and whether they lived or died was clearly a matter of supreme indifference to the Soviet authorities. As it happened, 1,094,250 soldiers perished, half of them before April 1945.119 Sometimes it was the vast majority: of the 90,000 soldiers taken prisoner at Stalingrad, only 5,000 returned home. By 1950 numbers had considerably decreased. At the beginning of that year there were still 46,841 POWs in Russia; by its end the number had sunk to 28,711.120 It was roughly the same figure as those who had been put on trial for w
ar crimes. They had all received twenty-five years.

  On 31 May 1945, Margret Boveri made a list of her journalist colleagues whom she knew to have been arrested by the Russians: Molkenthin, who was not a Party member but had joined the SS to protect his back, and was a harmless reporter; Scharp, who had been forced to join the Party in Prague in 1939; Sprang, a real Nazi; Wirths, a known anti-Nazi, but the Russians refused to believe him because he was assistant editor of Das Reich; John Brech, economics editor of the same paper, an anti-Nazi, but who had been forced to join the Party in 1938; a lot of people from the DNB (Deutsche Nachrichten Büro, the official press agency), including anti-Nazis; Seibert from the Völkische Beobachter. All the others fled in good time. The ones who were really important had naturally vanished without trace, but the Russians were too foolish to know that. The treatment of the smaller fry was not too bad. The food was decent, and the interrogations polite; only the living conditions were bad. The bankers she knew came out after two or three weeks. Three girls from the Foreign Office were locked up for three days, during which they were beaten and had their hair pulled. They could not tell the Russians where the bigwigs were. Then they were dismissed. Even men and women who had been involved in the July Plot were arrested and interrogated in this way.

  Things got worse when the prisoners were marched off into captivity. Some managed to escape. The Russians reacted by arresting the same number in the next village so that they delivered the correct number of internees as listed on the paperwork. Their flats and furniture were requisitioned. Unimportant prisoners taken in Poland might eventually turn up in the Russian Zone. Libussa von Krockow’s stepfather Jesko von Puttkamer, who had done no more than lead the local Volksturm in the Second World War, had last been heard of in prison in Danzig. In the spring of 1947 his family received a message that he was in a POW camp in Leipzig. Libussa knew the way over the green border and made her way to Leipzig. She found the camp in a suburb of the city, and spoke to a prisoner through the barbed wire. She went back later that evening with a crowbar. By dawn he was free.121

  The Soviet authorities were as wont to arrest monarchists as Nazis. Hermine of Reuss, the Kaiser’s second wife, might have been described as both. She had flirted with the Nazis before the Second World War and damaged the reputation of her husband’s family in the process. After the Kaiser’s death in 1941 she had withdrawn to her Schloss Saabor in Thuringia. At the end of the war she had sought refuge near by with her sister, Princess Ida zu Stolberg-Rossla. The Duke of Brunswick, who was married to the Kaiser’s daughter, Victoria Louise, went to Thuringia to warn her about the Russians. She replied that Thuringia was under American occupation and that she had no reason to move. She remained obstinate when the duke told her, ‘Just think who you are; you must not fall into Russian hands.’ She replied, ‘I have no reason to reproach myself. I shall stay here.’ She was not warned of the American withdrawal in July, and soon the Russians arrived to take her into custody. After a long period in which there was no news, she re-emerged in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, where she remained under house arrest in a building on the edge of the town. She died in August 1947 of a heart attack brought on by ‘uncertainty and profound mental suffering’.122

  The Russians were keen to get their hands on all the leading army commanders who had operated in their territory, whether they had been party to the atrocities or not. One who is credited with having been a humane general was Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist. He had been dismissed from his command by Hitler at the same time as Erich von Manstein. They were clever officers, but not National Socialists.123 Kleist retired to his Silesian estate, moving to Bavaria at the approach of the Red Army. There he was arrested by the Americans, who handed him over to the Yugoslavs in 1946 - Kleist had performed an important role in the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941.The former army commander was incarcerated in no fewer than twenty seven prisons in nine years. The Yugoslavs tried him and sentenced him to fifteen years as a war criminal. After two years he was extradited to Russia, where he was charged - with heavy irony - with having ‘alienated through mildness and kindness the population of the Soviet Union’. In March 1954 he reached the end of his Calvary at Vladimir camp, where he was finally allowed to make contact with his family. He died in October that year of ‘general arteriosclerosis and hypertension’. 124

  Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, defeated at Stalingrad, had the doubtful honour of being among the 5,000 or so of his troops to return to Germany, but that did not occur until November 1954, when he had already served eleven years. His treatment was not bad. He was kept under house arrest in Moscow, and once he began to co-operate with the Soviet authorities after 20 July 1944 he was accorded some privileges. He gave evidence for the prosecution at Nuremberg, but even on his release he was not allowed to join his family in the West and died of motor-neuron disease in Dresden in 1957.

  If life was tough for German POWs in Russian camps, one or two of them could claim that the Soviet authorities preserved their lives. SS-BRIGADEF ührer Wilhelm Mohnke, who led the defence of the government quarter in Berlin in April 1945 and was taken prisoner on 2 May, was wanted by the Western Allies for ordering the execution of unarmed POWs. Had he fallen into British or American hands he would almost certainly have been hanged. As it was he was released from Soviet custody in 1955, when the Anglo-Americans were no longer interested in pursuing German war criminals, and died in his bed forty-six years later.125

  Mohnke’s ten years in captivity were a curate’s egg. They began with a remarkable meal in the Belle Alliance Strasse of Berlin. After they surrendered, he and twelve other SS officers were taken to a four-storey building and invited to a proper Russian feast complete with caviar and vodka. The Germans failed to tuck in with a gusto equal to the Russians. At 10.30 p.m. the dinner came to an end and the Germans were locked up. The next day Mohnke and Rattenhuber of the SD, Hitler’s pilot Baur and his chief bodyguard Günsche were taken to a transit camp for high-ranking German officers in Strausberg. On 9 May they were moved again - this time to Russia.126

  The Soviet authorities refused to extradite Mohnke or to give any information on his whereabouts. With time any pretence at co-operation in these matters broke down. One of the reasons the British tried Manstein, it is said, is because they did not wish to hand him over to the Soviets. Mohnke was taken to the Budirka Prison and finally to the Lubyanka, where he walked the gangways with Admiral Erich Raeder and Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner. In the meantime he was beaten and tortured by Soviet secret agents. Interrogations by the NKVD were no gentler than those carried out by the Americans. Baur, for example, was deprived of sleep for twenty-one nights in succession.

  These were important Nazis, but there were plenty of men in Russian camps who had no particular affiliation to the regime. Heinz Pust was a typical German POW in Soviet captivity. He was taken prisoner in Czechoslovakia, as a soldier in Schörner’s vast army. On 9 May 1945 he had heard the Soviet soldiers shooting into the air. It was the first he was even aware that the Germans were losing the war, let alone surrendering. He was given papers that released him home, but he was caught hiding in the woods by partisans and locked up in a school house. He was decently treated after a local policeman decided to give the partisans a lecture on the laws of war. On 16 May he was handed over to the Red Army.

  He was taken to Georgievsk in Russia with a number of Hungarian soldiers. Discipline tended to be relaxed in the camp. Sometimes you could come and go as you pleased. The food was poor and the men were always hungry. Two or three times a day there was kasha: gruel. They had seventeen grams of sugar and five grams of tobacco which they made up into cigarettes with old newspapers. To supplement this there was a daily ration of 300-600 grams of soggy bread and seventeen grams of fat or meat. Sometimes there was a soup made from rotten vegetables. The prisoners would strew the sugar on the bread to give themselves the illusion of eating cake. Pust’s first packet from home came in 1950 or 1951.127

  Molotov stated at the Moscow
Conference in March 1947 that there were 890,532 German prisoners in Russian captivity. It was a moment of terrible disappointment: only a third of Germany’s missing men were alive.128 The news broke through to Pust that all POWs would be released by the end of 1948, ‘but the year 1948 came and went without anyone in our camp noticing any acceleration’.129 Clay can’t have believed the Russians, but he could see a stick to beat the enemy with when he called for a tough stance: ‘tell the truth about Moscow’ - they have two million POWs. As he told Senator Kenneth Keating, ‘Don’t let’s be the first to get nervous in this war of nerves.’130

  There were no Russian trials until 1949. Most of the important prisoners received the same tariff of twenty-five years’ hard labour. On 6 December 1949 Pust was indicted for war crimes. In Moscow he was placed in ‘investigative custody’. The men were tried in batches. It took all of fifteen to twenty minutes. They each received twenty-five years, even - it seemed - a Berlin bus driver whose main crime was to have been found wearing his uniform. Now Pust’s imprisonment took on an official status for the first time. At Rostov on the Don his head was shaved, and his picture taken along with his fingerprints.131

  The generals and staff officers were exempted from work, but that did not always mean that their lives were any more pleasant and many volunteered simply in order to have something to do. They were sent to the generals’ camp at Voikova, which contained 186 senior German commanders, where they peeled potatoes, tended the garden, fed rabbits and brought in the harvest. Although officers could lead a lazy life, there was little chance of getting out. The higher the rank the less the possibility of reprieve: in 1947 officers represented 7 per cent of prisoners held; by 1949 the percentage had risen to 36.132 There was no hope of reprieve before Stalin’s death in 1953. After Chancellor Adenauer’s visit in 1955 three Russian generals appeared in the camp to break the news that the men were free. Mohnke and his comrades then had a second feast from their Soviet captors.