Pierre was released from Stalag VIIIC a year later. Back in German-occupied Paris, he was dismayed to find out that he was now liable for compulsory labour service (RAD) in a French factory, manufacturing goods for Germany. He hated the idea of working in a German factory. So he volunteered to join the Todt Organisation, the paramilitary engineering corps, as a Fremdarbeiter in OT-Einsatzgruppe West, becoming, in effect, ‘a military worker in uniform’. At the Todt ‘Information School’, Pierre trained as a telephone operator and, not for the first time, swore an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. The oath marked a ‘definite break’, he says, ‘between yesterday and tomorrow’. Pierre won’t say much about his time in the Todt Organisation (‘boring’), but at the beginning of 1944, he made a decision to ‘take up arms for the Reich’ and in May began training with the Waffen-SS at a camp in Duisberg. Did he not realise that Germany was headed for defeat? ‘We had hope,’ he says, ‘we had heard about the new wonder weapons. And besides, we hated the Bolsheviks.’
Pierre admits that SS training included ‘lessons in political theory’ but ‘Infantry School comprised combat, marches, ‘aiming at targets’, singing led by marvellous instructor sergeants, all bearers of the insignia of combat of their speciality and the Iron Cross Second Class. The comparison with the French army, he says, was not to the latter’s advantage! Once a week the officers took their meals at the same table as the men of their troop who were encouraged to talk freely and ask questions. ‘Unthinkable in France!’ Pierre had hoped to be assigned to the Kriegsmarine, the German navy, but in the last summer of the war the Waffen-SS needed not sailors but soldiers on the Eastern Front. Pierre ended up on a troop train to Greifenberg in Pomerania, where he joined the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolshevisme (LVF), formed in 1941 by French rightists like Bucard, Marcel Déat, Jacques Doriot and others. He was not happy: ‘Many of us were bitter and disappointed to find ourselves again under French orders. To calm us down we were sent into the neighbouring villages to dig potatoes!’ The LVF was in any case a spent force. Sent into action near Moscow at the end of 1941, the legion had been virtually annihilated. The French volunteers would never completely recover. In September, as Pierre was digging up Pomeranian potatoes, Himmler transferred all French nationals serving the Reich in the Waffen-SS, the Wehrmacht and the Todt Organisation to a new SS division: the Waffen-Grenadier-Brigade der SS ‘Charlemagne’ (französische No 1).27
By now Pierre spoke excellent German, and at the beginning of 1945 received promotion to Rottenführer (sergeant) and ‘translator to the High Command’. Pierre sums up the mood of the French SS men laconically: ‘We did not think about whether the war was going to be won or lost, nor did we make any prognosis; our role, the role of every soldier, was to obey … Without getting our hopes too high, we knew that Germany was always good for a surprise.’ In other words, he had every expectation that one of the powerful new ‘Wunderwaffen’ would soon be deployed.
The SS ‘Charlemagne’, commanded by Brigadeführer Gustav Krukenberg, was, as Pierre soon discovered, undermanned and poorly equipped. With just over 7,000 recruits, the ‘Charlemagne’ would never reach divisional strength. In September, the French SS men joined Himmler’s defence of Pomerania, and in the savage battles as the German armies fell back through East Prussia and Pomerania, the French suffered catastrophic losses. A ‘Charlemagne’ veteran, who transferred from the French ‘Milice’, remembered that ‘We marched all night. During the day we hid in the woods. We tried to eat in abandoned farms. Russian and Polish cavalry hunted us down … We went through Stettin, in flames … still on foot still pursued.’28
According to the memoirs of Felix Kersten, Himmler exalted in bloodshed: he proudly informed Kersten that of the 6,000 Danes, 10,000 Norwegians, 75,000 Dutch, 25,000 Flemings, 15,000 Walloons and 22,000 French serving in the Waffen-SS, 1 in 3 had been killed in action. Losses among eastern volunteers from the Baltic and Ukraine had been even more impressive.29 His sanguineous joy was driven by a perverted logic. For him, the catastrophe that engulfed the foreign volunteers had a different kind of significance. This was the blood sacrifice that would bind together the future ‘Germanised’ citizens of ‘SS Europa’. It was a kind of Spartan folly that in death lay rebirth. Himmler had often spoken of ‘harvesting Germanic blood’ wherever it might be found. Now that harvest would be winnowed in the savage winds of war.
A long way from the slaughter, Himmler took refuge inside the Hohenlychen clinic, which was protected from aerial attack by two big red crosses painted on its roof. He was already in disgrace. At the end of the previous year, on 26 November, Hitler had rewarded Himmler, whom we should recall was both SS chief and the Minister of the Interior, by making him commander-in-chief of the Army Group Upper Rhine (Heeresgruppe Oberrhein).30 According to the memoirs of Himmler’s masseur, Felix Kersten, Himmler vowed to drive the Allies into the sea. But the new Supreme Commander had seen little real military action – and Hitler’s appointment provoked a predictable response from Wehrmacht commanders like Guderian: ‘Then whom do we get? Hitler appointed Himmler! Of all people – Himmler!’31 When the Heeresgruppe Oberrhein was humiliatingly swatted aside by advancing American forces, Hitler recalled Himmler from his ‘watch on the Rhine’ and ordered him to rebuild the shattered 2nd and 9th Armies in North Prussia as a new Army Group Vistula (Heeresgruppe Weichsel). This second and, as it turned out, last promotion was, it would seem, a calculated slap in the faces of allegedly defeatist and treacherous Wehrmacht commanders.
Hitler’s appointment led not only to military disaster, but to a humanitarian catastrophe as well. As the Soviet forces raced pell-mell towards the Oder, tens of thousands of German civilians fled west before them, desperately hoping to reach safe havens inside Germany. At the end of January, Himmler halted his headquarters train at Deutsche Krone in western Pomerania (now Wałcz in the west of Poland) and summoned the local Gauleiter Franz Schwede-Coburg. Shortly afterwards, Himmler issued orders that no German citizens would be permitted to leave East Pomerania. As loyal citizens of the Reich they must stand firm. On 4 March, Soviet tanks reached Kolberg and cut off close to a million and a half refugees, compelling them to flee north to the Baltic ports where they sought to escape by sea. The tragic consequences are, of course, well known: Soviet submarines torpedoed grossly crowded refugee ships, including the Wilhelm Gustloff, with dreadful loss of life. The role played by SS Chief Himmler and the grotesque mismanagement of the German administrators has been conveniently forgotten.
It was said by Waffen-SS General Felix Steiner that Himmler’s ‘notions of military affairs were devoid of any real solidity … the most junior lieutenant could put him right’. His evaluation chimes with other eyewitness accounts – most notably, the diaries of Colonel Hans-Georg Eismann, who left a damning portrait of Himmler as military commander.32 His handshake, Eismann recalled, was soft and feminine; his eyes had a distinctly ‘Mongolian look’. Himmler was much preoccupied with health matters and petty obsessions dominated his daily routine, which had little to do with strategic necessity. He worked for an hour before lunch then retired for a siesta until mid-afternoon, then resumed work until 6.30 p.m. Himmler appeared to be exhausted, and unfocused. As a military commander, Eismann concluded, Himmler was like a ‘blind man talking about colour’. But it did not take a military genius to see just how dire was the plight of Himmler’s forces. Like the Wehrmacht commanders to whom he reported, it suited Eismann to point the finger at Himmler, but the harsh reality was that the Soviet tide could no longer be turned back. On 15 March, Zhukov launched a fresh offensive that took Himmler, and indeed the rest of the despised General Staff, completely by surprise, and smashed the surviving German forces in Pomerania. On the 19th, Soviet forces broke through to the Oder, south of Altdamm, and a despairing General Hasso von Manteuffel presented Hitler with an ultimatum: ‘Either withdraw everyone to safety on the west bank of the Oder overnight or lose the whole lot tomorrow.’33 For once, Hitler took a gen
eral’s advice – and the German forces pulled back across the Oder, and destroyed the main bridges.
Himmler had by then been forced to relocate his headquarters to a villa, 80 miles north of Berlin and conveniently close to the SS clinic at Hohenlychen. It was here that Himmler had, probably through the intercession of Kersten, begun to plan secret meetings with the head of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Folke Bernadotte, to hammer out a deal with the Allies, though he continued to insist that he could not contemplate ‘betraying Hitler’. Count Bernadotte had a single objective: to secure prisoner releases; he had no illusions that the Allies would ever contemplate a deal with the ‘hangman of the Reich’.34 Hitler had no idea that Himmler was contemplating such treachery. But the SS chief’s days of military glory were coming swiftly to an end. On 7 March, Himmler suffered a severe attack of angina. Dr Karl Gebhardt (who was responsible for some of the most gruesome medical experiments conducted in the SS camps) had him admitted to Hohenlychen as a patient. In Berlin, a whispering campaign accused Himmler of seeking personal military glory and leading his army group to disaster. Locked away in his subterranean fortress, Hitler finally turned against the man he had long believed to be his most loyal paladin. According to Goebbels’ diary entry for 11 March, Hitler raged that Himmler was guilty of ‘flat disobedience’. On 15 March, a shamed Himmler was driven to the Chancellery to confront the apoplectic Hitler and received, head bowed, a ‘severe dressing down’.35 Humiliated, Himmler slunk back to his sick bed at Hohenlychen, and, after a visit from Guderian, surrendered his command of the Army Group Vistula. Hitler replaced him with the rather more competent General Gotthard Heinrici.
As Stalin’s armies prepared to crush the last strongholds of the Reich, Gottlob Berger dispatched the last of the SS foreign legions to defend Hitler’s capital – Fortress Berlin. The city would now become the bonfire of the collaborators. As the act of the Reich unfolded, Hitler called a military conference in Berlin and denounced Himmler’s SS foreign legions. He demanded a meeting with the SS chief to explain why a ‘Ukrainian legion’ was fighting alongside German soldiers: ‘There’s still a Galician division wandering [about] out there. Is that the same as the Ukrainians? If it consists of Austrian Ruthenians [Ukrainians] we can’t do anything other than take their weapons away immediately. The Austrian Ruthenians were pacifists. They were lambs, not wolves … It’s all just self deception.’ The next day, an abject Himmler was forced to return to the Chancellery for another demented brow beating.
His master plan had at last been torn to shreds.
A week later, Soviet commander-in-chief, Georgi Zhukov, and his staff occupied a command bunker dug into the Reitwin spur, a fish hook of land on the eastern bank of the Oder near the town of Küstrin. From this vantage point, Zhukov contemplated the main axis of attack that led directly across the Oder then ascended, through a labyrinth of marshes, drainage ditches and streams, to the Seelow Heights. His plan was not especially subtle. The Soviet juggernaut, 11 armies and 8,000 artillery pieces, would simply batter the Oder strongholds, occupied by the 9th Army, to dust. Beyond lay the road to Berlin. More than a hundred miles to the south, in the Cottbus region, Zhukov’s rival Ivan Koniev would lead his tank army across the River Neisse, under cover of ‘night and fog’, to strike at the 4th Panzer Army. In Zhukov’s command bunker a scale model of Berlin had been specially constructed, and as he waited impatiently for Stalin’s orders to strike, Zhukov obsessively scrutinised every detail of Hitler’s fortress. Even now, the conquest of the Nazi citadel looked like a formidable challenge. On the other side of the Oder, Himmler’s successor General Gotthard Heinrici had no doubt that the Russians would open proceedings with a massive artillery barrage and he prepared his defences accordingly. On 14 April, as agreed at the Yalta Conference, American forces halted on the Elbe, leaving Berlin to Stalin. Two days later, on 16 April at 5 a.m., a radiant explosion of light signalled the start of the Soviet bombardment. The barrage commenced soon afterwards. But the millions of Russian projectiles crashed and detonated in empty trenches. Heinrici had cunningly pulled back his front-line troops. As lethal fire rained down from the German positions on the Heights, tearing through Zhukov’s men struggling to cross the Oder marshes, Koniev’s engineers rushed to throw bridges and pontoons across the Neisse at 150 carefully chosen points, and his tank armies began rattling across, heading for the autobahn that led straight as an arrow towards the southern suburbs of Berlin.36
The German commander of the French SS division, Dr Gustav Krukenberg, had at his disposal two battalions that between them could muster just 700 men. On 21 March, the French SS volunteers mustered at Anklam railway station to wait for transportation to new billets in Mecklenburg. When no trains appeared, they set off on foot, singing. Three days later, the Frenchmen marched into Neustrelitz, about 50 miles north of Berlin, and found billets in surrounding villages. Krukenberg told the men: ‘You may abandon the armed fight … I only want to have combatants with me now.’ The majority of the French SS volunteers, including Pierre, now agreed to fight on. A hundred miles to the south-east, Zhukov’s armies finally smashed through the Seelow Heights fortresses on the 19 April. Two days later, Koniev’s forces captured the massive and abandoned concrete bunkers at Zossen that had been the headquarters of the German high command and the nerve centre of the German ‘war of annihilation’. At dawn three days later, the two Russian armies joyously met close to Schönefeld Airport.
One evening, as the Soviet armies rumbled ever closer to Fortress Berlin, SS General Felix Steiner escorted the Belgian collaborator and celebrated hero of Cherkassy, Léon Degrelle, on a tour of Berlin’s ringbahn. The light was fading, and Berlin’s concrete ramparts were intermittently illuminated by the unremitting Soviet artillery barrage. Steiner pointed out Soviet tanks already crawling through the eastern suburbs. For the histrionic Walloon, the vast panorama evoked the last days of the Roman Empire. At 9 p.m. Degrelle drove back into the centre of Berlin in a battered Volkswagen. In the Hotel Adlon’s still brightly lit restaurant, waiters in spotless tuxedoes bustled about, serving purple slices of Kohlrabi on silver platters. Soon, Degrelle imagined, the grand old hotel would be set aflame by some ‘large pawed barbarian’. Not far from the Adlon, deep underneath Voss Strasse, Hitler still reigned over his stifling underground empire. Degrelle and a small party of Belgian SS men drove on south towards Potsdam where the little party rested for a few hours.
For Degrelle, Germany still stood for civilisation, a bulwark against those Soviet barbarians he had watched gobble red worms and corpses on the Eastern Front. Here in Berlin, the capital of the Reich, noble, pale-faced young men of the Hitler Youth waited quietly for the enemy, clutching their Panzerfausts ‘as solemn as the Great Teutonic knights’. To the east, along the rapidly disintegrating German front line, Degrelle’s SS ‘Walloonien’ comrades now fought alongside Flemish SS volunteers and a battalion of Latvians. But the former Chef de Rex who inspired them to fight Hitler’s war had had enough of heroics. On 30 April, at 8 a.m., he ordered one of his lackeys to pack some ‘very heavy suitcases’ and set off towards Lübeck in northern Germany, where he hoped to track Himmler down, leaving the Belgian volunteers to fend for themselves.37
The majority of Berliners, with the exception of a few diehard fanatics, had no doubt that to continue to defend the Reich was insanity. They waited stoically for the final cataclysm in stinking cellars and fragile shelters. For the foreign volunteers of the Waffen-SS like Pierre and his comrades realism was not an option. On 25 April, a French SS Sturmbataillon, armed with a few machine guns and Panzerfausts set off in the direction of the centre of Berlin, the citadel, in a ragged convoy of hastily commandeered private cars and trucks. Pierre recalls that ‘there were 450 enthusiastic singing men leaving for the battle’. According to French veteran Robert Soulat, their morale was high: ‘a strange flame burned in our eyes.’ As the French SS battalion assembled in the Marktplatz in Alt-Strelitz, Krukenberg caught sight of a gleaming black Mercedes app
roaching at high speed, Nazi hub pendants fluttering wildly. Krukenberg realised that the bespectacled gentleman gripping the wheel with manic determination was none other than his commander-in-chief, Heinrich Himmler. The French SS men leapt to attention, right arms erect; but, staring rigidly ahead, Himmler swept past, apparently oblivious to the little group of loyal SS recruits. Later, Krukenberg realised that Himmler was returning from a meeting in Lübeck with Count Bernadotte. Their discussions had ended in stalemate and Himmler had begun building a bolthole for himself at Schloss Ziethen on Wustrow Island in the Bay of Lübeck. Soon after this troubling encounter, the SS battalion, numbering about 500 men, began marching south in Himmler’s wake.38
As SS-Brigadeführer Krukenberg led the French SS Sturmbataillon into the outer suburbs of Berlin, they collided with a stream of refugees, flowing south through streets jammed with abandoned and burnt out trucks and carts. Soviet fighters roared back and forth a few hundred metres above roof tops, abruptly diving to strafe the terrified refugees. In the midst of this miserable human flood, men in black SS or green Order Police uniforms shuffled disconsolately, eyes cast down. As the French convoy reached the crossing on the Falkenrehde canal, the bridge exploded, wounding some of Krukenberg’s men and crippling his car. They still had 15 very perilous miles to march before they reached the citadel. After fording the canal on foot, the battalion edged their way under the ringbahn and arrived at the Olympic Stadium about 6 miles west of the Chancellery. They broke into a Luftwaffe supply depot and were delighted to find that it was still crammed with hundreds of bars of Swiss chocolate. The next morning, Krukenberg requisitioned another motor vehicle and drove ahead of the battalion through Charlottenburg towards the Brandenburg Gate, where Speer’s East–West Axis, leading east from the Victory Monument, had been turned into an airstrip. The citadel was eerily quiet. Just after midnight, Krukenberg drove across Pariser Platz then turned right along Wilhelm Strasse towards the Reich Chancellery. The sky over Berlin glowed a lurid red, and the SS men could hear the steady rumble of heavy artillery. Krukenberg was astonished: the citadel appeared to be undefended.
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