That same day, Hitler and Eva Braun were married then retired to a private room and killed themselves. It was all over, but no one told the Charlemagne Division in their shrunken world. There were now fifty men capable of fighting in the division. The library location became indefensible, so they moved once again, this time to the Sicherheitshauptamt, the Ministry of Security next to the old Gestapo headquarters and torture cellars on Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. There was little ammunition left and no guns that were effective at any real distance. They waited for the inevitable Soviet advance. They knew full well that there would be no quarter asked and none given. In sporadic fighting, another handful of Charlemagne grenadiers were killed that day.
In the Führer bunker, things were going from bad to worse. General Krukenberg described the situation: “SS General Mohnke asked me if I—being the most senior officer in my rank—would continue to assure the defense of the city, in which case all troops still available would be placed under my command. I rejected that stupid idea” [since all was lost]. The Goebbels murdered their six children then killed themselves. At least some common sense was allowed at that point, and the few remaining members of the Charlemagne Division were given the option of breaking out if they could. Krukenberg assembled what was left of his defenders and began to plan their own breakout.
Those who chose to get away left an hour before midnight on that May Day. It was an unmitigated disaster from the moment it started. The escapees met with what could only be called sheer butchery. They died by the hundreds. They had few weapons, only a handful of ammunition, and the fighting separated them into small disparate groups with no real leadership. Only a very small number of the division got out, and many of them met with murder by the waiting French army. One small group elected to stay in the Sicherheitshauptamt to fight to the bitter end.
An eerie and unnerving silence fell over the city as the Charlemagne grenadiers awaited their fate. Sporadic patrols searched the nearby city streets, and all returned with the thoroughly disheartening news that no one else was there. One patrol went to the Air Ministry and learned that complete capitulation had taken place and that German and Russian soldiers were resting, eating, and trading cigarettes with each other. The last holdouts took up all of their remaining arms and ammunition and walked towards the U-Bahn station where they saw an armada of Soviet tanks, red banners everywhere, and armies of drunken Soviet soldiers engaged in an orgy of looting. The last few dozen Charlemagne troops decided to sneak into the subways to find a way to reach other units of the German military machine still fighting—or so they were informed.
It was a doomed decision. In the night, Soviet soldiers captured the remaining few Charlemagne soldiers who had fought with such distinction in the Battle of Berlin and hauled the survivors away to uncertain futures in the gulag system. There were approximately 1,200 men stationed at Wildflecken and 700 remnants left behind at Carpin; 400 of them were deemed noncombatants. Their hopeless resistance was overwhelmed by Soviet tanks and masses of Soviet infantry on April 27. The remaining Charlemagne members became fleeing refugees and scattered. The last 600 organized members were ordered to go to Bavaria to the Mountain Redoubt to stage a last-ditch stand. They and the escapees that headed south all finally disintegrated as any semblance of fighting units and it became every man for himself.
In the aftermath of the great battle and the horrific war, there was an orgy of revenge, rape, murder, and destruction. Adolf Hitler’s parting legacy to Europe was based on his orders that nothing was to be left for the victorious Allies. Where there had been cities, they would find rubble. Where there had been cultivated fields, they would find wilderness. The Führer and his henchmen came close to achieving this goal. Agricultural production had ground to a halt, while in urban centers millions had been bombed out of their homes and were living on the edge of starvation. Distribution of the limited stockpiles of food was severely constrained by the smashed state of Central Europe’s rail and transport infrastructure. There was an ominous uptick of premature postwar deaths in many of these countries—between a million and 1.5 million deaths in Germany alone. Added to those killed by civil war in Yugoslavia, Greece, Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states, and then those who died because of poor nutrition throughout Europe and Asia, the numbers of premature deaths almost certainly were in excess of two million.
“Borders were redrawn and homecomings, expulsions, and burials were under way. But the massive efforts to rebuild had just begun. When the war began in the late 1930s, the world’s population was approximately two billion. In less than a decade, the war between the Axis and the Allied powers had resulted in eighty million deaths—killing off about four percent of the whole world. Allied forces now became occupiers, taking control of Germany, Japan, and much of the territory they had formerly ruled. Efforts were made to permanently dismantle the war-making abilities of those nations, as factories were destroyed and former leadership was removed or prosecuted. War crimes trials took place in Europe and Asia, leading to many executions and prison sentences,” Alan Taylor, World War II, After the War. Whole populations had lost almost everything and everyone—witness the Holocaust.
There was an orgy of postwar anti-Semitism, mostly due to fights over property. When the Jews had been deported from Poland or Hungary or Romania, all their possessions had been confiscated by Nazis, Nazi sympathizers, and opportunistic anti-Semites and shared out. When the survivors returned to their homelands, they wanted this property back, which made many of the new owners feel threatened and resentful. Most of the time it was easy to frighten returning Jews away, but all too often when Jews insisted on having their possessions returned to them, local communities got violent. It did not take much. There was very little evidence of soul-searching involved. In some areas the people had become so used to violence against Jews during the war that it did not feel at all abnormal.
With due acknowledgment of Mr. Taylor, more than a hundred million people were dead if the fifty million Chinese are included. “Millions of POWs—including two million Axis detainees—languished in appalling pestilential inhuman internment camps. Entire cities lay in complete ruin. Economies were inoperative. There was widespread anarchy, famine, crime, pestilence, and violent conflict, with millions of uprooted people wandering the ruined lands…. The continent was filled with people who regarded violence as a normal way of life,” Keith Lowe, Savage Continent.
Hence, mercy was in very short supply, especially for the defeated German veterans and the civilian population. Things were even worse for the foreign soldiers who had fought for the Third Reich and who had committed unspeakable atrocities—witness the Totenkopfverbände concentration camp officials and guards—including the 33rd Waffen-SS Division Charlemagne—who tormented, humiliated, tortured, and murdered several million hapless Jews, homosexuals, political dissidents, captured Russian civilians, gypsies, and mentally retarded people. Records are replete that the SS committed atrocities, but no records directly incriminate the Charlemagne Division other than their service in the concentration camps. The members of the division who lived long enough to write articles or memoirs back in France denied such service.
Records are limited as to what became of the few survivors of the Charlemagne Division beyond those who lie in unmarked graves or as carrion food throughout the countries they invaded or nearby the dreadful Russian, French, American, and British POW camps. On VE Day, May 8, 1945, French soldiers of the 2nd Armored Division—acting on the orders of French General Leclerk—murdered a dozen defenseless grenadiers near Karlstein, southeastern Bavaria. Many others found it their lot to pay the price for defeat. Some—including those who opted out of the final Battle of Berlin and were captured—went to Russian gulags in 1945, like the infamous Butugychag Tin Mine in Siberia; those designated as war criminals and assigned to “special treatment” camps—including most SS officers and men—were not released until 1956. A million of them died in that period. The period of misery was not over for them, eve
n after their release from Siberia. Most of them were repatriated to Europe and began internment in Allied POW camps which were the equal of those in Soviet Siberia. Hundreds of thousands starved, froze, were worked to death, or died while being forced to march as human shields across unrehabilitated minefields. Soviet prisoners suffered similar terrible mistreatment; only a fraction returned home alive after more than a decade in captivity—a grim parity in atrocities.
The cost was very great for the SS paramilitary soldiers: by 1942, almost every member of the 1934–1935 SS training school at Bad Tölz Junkerschulen—the international school for officer candidates—was dead, and that statistic applied almost across the board at the other training centers. The Death’s Head SS soldiers could be sent to the battle front at any time, and Waffen-SS soldiers could be sent to the camps for guard duty when they were wounded in battle and could no longer fight. By D-Day, 35 percent of all German soldiers had been wounded at least once, and by late 1944, the Waffen SS accounted for 10 percent of the German military and had an even higher WIA, KIA, and MIA rate. By the end of World War II, the Waffen-SS had grown to thirty-nine divisions, which served as elite combat troops alongside the Wehrmacht which finally had to accord them grudging respect.
The twelve-day-long Battle of Berlin was the final major offensive of the European theatre of World War II; the Soviets lost over 78,000 men killed and 274,000 men wounded in that one final battle. The Waffen SS and the few remaining disorganized Wehrmacht units suffered—according to initial Soviet estimates based on kill claims—458,080 killed and 479,298 captured, but later German research puts the number of dead at approximately 92,000–100,000. Both figures were likely inflated or deflated for political purposes, but by any reckoning were enormous.
Among those extremely hardy survivors of the Charlemagne Division were a few who turned themselves in to the headquarters of the French sector and were promptly placed in handcuffs and taken to Tegel Prison. A very few actually made it back to France. Many of those repatriates—often against their will—were tried and sent to prison at hard labor. Many were stripped of their citizenship. Some were executed by hanging; others served prison sentences and then were hanged or shot by firing squad. They were all regarded as pariahs, traitors, and murderers of innocent French people; they were the losers in the war, after all; and justice was defined by the victors. If a French soldier was killed by a repatriated Waffen-SS traitor, fifty repatriated prisoners were rounded up to be executed. Women who bore children by Germans or division men suffered greatly during the postwar period, and their two hundred thousand children—the “Bosche bastards”—also paid the price of their parents’ sins.
Around 761 division members living in France after the war received pensions from the German government and were officially deemed to be traitors by the French government. After pressure from the postwar government of France, they were struck from the pensioner roles of Germany. Some division members made their way into the Foreign Legion and served in Indochina or Algeria, including surviving SS members recruited directly from prisoner of war camps. Others were men from lost German lands who had nowhere to go home to. Highly regarded by the French for their discipline and bravery, an estimated 35,000 Germans and Frenchmen who served the Germans took part in France’s war in Vietnam. Those men made up over half the Foreign Legion units in Vietnam that bore much of the heaviest fighting against the communist Viet Minh forces of Ho Chi Minh. In this brutal conflict, more than 10,000 Legionnaires were killed out of about 70,000 who fought.
Some Charlemagne men made it to South America and joined other Nazis living there. A few of those were hunted down and murdered by French security agents of the Deuxième Bureau [later, the Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage—the SDECE, Foreign Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service]. Most imprisoned members were given early release by the government after it passed the loi d’armistie act in 1947. Most of those faded into intentional obscurity, but a few extremely dedicated anticommunists among them became politically active and publically voiced their views—an act of bravery or foolhardiness of the highest order. Later, some of them attended gatherings of former SS men and were received with great warmth. Some were even allowed to wear a regular French army uniform and to continue being warriors for France.
While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, the fire of God is fallen from heaven, and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
-The Book of Job, KJV
1:13–19
“It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic—love or war or a giant asteroid…. Men just wanted to focus on one big thing, leaving the thousands of smaller messes for the women around them to clean up.”
-Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Based on:
•Jonathan Trigg, HITLER’S GAUL’S, The History of the 33rd Waffen SS Division Charlemagne, Spellmount, History Press.
•Philippe Garrard, THE FRENCH WHO FOUGHT FOR HITLER: Memories from the Outcasts, Cambridge University Press.
•Tony Le Tissier, CHARLEMAGNE: The 33rd Waffen-Grenadier Division of the SS, Pen and Sword, Military.
•Robert Forbes, POUR L’EUROPE—French Volunteers of the Waffen-SS, Trowbridge: Redwood Books, 2000.
•David Schoenbrun, SOLDIERS OF THE NIGHT, London, Robert Hale, 1981.
The Charlemagne Murders Page 69