All Hell Let Loose (102 page)

Amazingly, soldiers of the Charlemagne and some other Waffen SS units mustered sufficient determination to mount local counter-attacks, one of which retook from the Russians the Gestapo headquarters building on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. Some men and boys who sought salvation in flight were summarily hanged in the streets by the SS men ranging the city. Russians and Germans alike were mocked by the contrast between the mountains of wreckage, heaped and broken bodies, littering the landscape, and signs of spring breaking through. When gunfire paused even briefly, birds could be heard singing; trees blossomed until blast reduced them to blackened skeletons; tulips flowered in some places, and in the parks there was an overpowering scent of lilac. But mostly there were corpses. Germany’s leaders had conducted a long love affair with death: in Berlin in April 1945, this achieved a final consummation.

On 28 April Benito Mussolini was captured and shot by partisans while attempting to escape from northern Italy. On the afternoon of the 30th, as Russian troops stormed the Reichstag building four hundred yards from Hitler’s bunker, the leader of the Third Reich killed himself and his wife. The banality of evil has seldom been more vividly displayed than by the couple’s conduct in their last days. Eva Braun was much preoccupied with the disposal of her jewellery – ‘my diamond watch is unfortunately being repaired’ – and by concealing her dressmakers’ accounts from posterity: ‘On no account must Heise’s bills be found.’ She wrote in a last letter to her friend Herta Ostermayr, ‘What should I say to you? I cannot understand how it should have all come to this, but it is impossible to believe any more in a God.’

Most Germans received the news of Hitler’s death with numbed indifference. Soldier Gerd Schmuckle was at a crowded inn far from Berlin when the radio bulletin was broadcast. ‘If – instead of this announcement – the innkeeper had come to the door and said that an animal of his had died in the stable, the sympathy could not have been less. Only one young soldier leapt up, extended his right arm and cried out “Hail to the Führer!” All the others continued to eat their soup as though nothing of importance had occurred.’ In the capital sporadic fighting persisted for two more days, until Berlin’s commandant Lt. Gen. Karl Wiedling surrendered on 2 May.

A terrible quiet, the quiet of the dead and damned, fell upon the city. ‘No sound of man or beast, no car, radio or tram …’ wrote a Berlin woman. ‘Nothing but an oppressive silence broken only by our footsteps. If there are people inside the buildings watching us, they are doing so in secret.’ She added a week later: ‘Everywhere there’s filth and horse manure and children playing – if that’s what it can be called. They loiter about, stare at us, whisper to one another. The only loud voices you hear belong to Russians … Their songs strike our ears as raw, defiant.’

Everywhere the Soviet victors held sway, they embarked upon an orgy of celebration, rape and destruction on a scale such as Europe had not witnessed since the seventeenth century. ‘The baker comes stumbling towards me down the hall,’ wrote a Berlin woman about one of her neighbours, ‘white as his flour, holding out his hands: “They have my wife …” His voice breaks. For a second I feel I’m acting in a play. A middle-class baker can’t possibly move like that, can’t speak with such emotion, put so much feeling into his voice, bare his soul that way, his heart so torn. I’ve never seen anyone but great actors do that.’

A German lawyer, who had miraculously preserved his Jewish wife through the Nazi years, now sought to protect her from Russian soldiers. One shot him in the hip. As he lay dying, he saw three men rape her as she screamed out her Jewish identity. The anonymous Berlin woman diarist who recorded the episode wrote: ‘No one could invent a story like this: it’s life at its most cruel – mad blind circumstance.’ An elderly Berliner moaned, ‘If only it were over, this poor bit of life.’ The diarist, who was herself repeatedly raped, wrote of experiencing a sense of detachment from her own physical being, ‘a means of escape – my true self simply leaving my body behind, my poor, besmirched, abused body. Breaking away and floating off, unblemished, into a white beyond. It can’t be me that this is happening to, so I’m expelling it all from me.’

A Soviet soldier wrote to a friend about German women. ‘They do not speak a word of Russian, but that makes it easier. You don’t have to persuade them. You just point a Nagan [pistol] and tell them to lie down. Then you do your stuff and go away.’ In one place, the bodies of a group of raped and mutilated women were found, each with a bottle stuffed up her vagina. Vasily Grossman was dismayed to see that the men of the Red Army made no distinction among their victims: ‘Horrifying things are happening to German women … Soviet girls liberated from the camps are suffering a lot now.’ Alexander Solzhenitsyn, serving with Rokossovsky as a gunner officer, wrote an ironically indulgent poem about what he witnessed as his people sealed their victory:

When the former Jewish hospital at Wedding was overrun on 24 April, Russian soldiers found eight hundred Jews, most in desperate physical condition, whom the Nazi killing-machine had miraculously overlooked. A disbelieving Soviet soldier said in broken German, ‘
Nichts Juden. Juden kaput.
’ The Russians raped the female inmates anyway: ‘
Frau ist Frau.
’ A further 1,400 Berlin Jews emerged from hiding after the liberation, last survivors of a once-great community. There were also Jews in the Red Army. One terrified German family found themselves confronted by a Soviet commissar who said, ‘I am a Russian, a communist and a Jew … My father and mother were murdered by the SS because they were Jews. My wife and two children are missing. My home is in ruins. And what has happened to me has happened to millions in Russia. Germany has murdered, raped, plundered and destroyed … What do you think we want to do, now that we have defeated German armies?’

He turned on the eldest son of the family, demanding, ‘Stand up. How old are you?’ The boy answered, ‘Twelve.’ The Russian said, ‘About as old as my son would be today. The SS criminals took him from me.’ He drew his pistol and aimed it at the boy, provoking frenzied consternation and pleas for mercy from the parents. Finally the Russian said, ‘No, no, no, ladies and gentlemen. I will not shoot. But you must admit, I have enough reasons to do so. There is so much that screams for revenge.’ This encounter ended without bloodshed, because the Russian protagonist was unusually enlightened. Many other such meetings climaxed in screams, horrors, sobbing women, wrecked homes, mutilated bodies.

Stalin was untroubled by the behaviour of his soldiers towards the Germans – or to their supposedly liberated slaves. The Soviets saw no shame, such as burdens Western societies, about the concept of revenge. The war had been fought chiefly on Russian soil. The Russian people had endured sufferings incomparably greater than those of the Americans and British. As conquerors, the Germans had behaved barbarously, their conduct rendered the more base because they spoke so much of honour, and professed adherence to civilised values. Now the Soviet Union exacted a terrible punishment. The German nation had brought misery on the world, and in 1945 it paid. The price of having started and lost a war against a tyranny as ruthless as Stalin’s was that vengeance was exacted on terms almost as merciless as those Hitler’s minions had imposed on Europe since 1939.

In those days there were tens of thousands of suicides throughout eastern Germany. Liselotte Grunauer, a sixteen-year-old, recorded in her diary: ‘The pastor shot himself and his wife and daughter … Mrs H. shot her two sons and herself and slit her daughter’s throat … Our teacher Miss K. hanged herself; she was a Nazi. The local party leader S. shot himself and Mrs N. took poison. It’s a blessing that there is no gas at present, otherwise some more of us would have taken their own lives.’ Nor were Russian depredations confined to Germany: Tito’s partisans were stunned by the excesses of the Red Army in Yugoslavia, even against people fighting for the same cause. Rape, pillage and murder were inflicted with indiscriminate abandon.

British SOE officer Basil Irwin was astonished to witness the contempt the Soviets displayed towards their allies: ‘They treated us with no hostility or suspicion, but they treated the partisans like dirt … It was such a shock to [them], who thought here was the welcome they were giving to their brother Slavs and the great Russian army.’ When Stalin was taxed with this, he merely shrugged. Milovan Djilas wrote bitterly: ‘Illusions about the Red Army, and consequently about the communists themselves, were being destroyed.’ In Belgrade, Tito protested personally to the local Soviet commander, Korneyev, that his followers were dismayed by the contrast between the correct behaviour of British soldiers and the savagery of the Russians. Korneyev exploded: ‘I protest most emphatically against the insults being levelled at the Red Army by comparing it with the armies of the capitalist countries!’

In Yugoslavia, as everywhere that Stalin’s soldiers went, the Soviet Union declined – as modern Russia still declines – to acknowledge the crimes committed by those wearing its uniform.
Pravda
observed sardonically on 22 April 1945: ‘The British press displays just indignation in reporting the atrocities committed by Germans in Buchenwald concentration camp … Soviet people can understand better than anyone else the anger and bitterness, pain and resentment that have now overtaken British public opinion … We saw the enemy for what he was a long time ago. Our allies have not seen what we have seen. Now they will understand us better, more readily appreciate our insistent demands for the indictment of the fascist butchers.’

Following Hitler’s death, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz assumed the mantle of Führer. He postured in that role for a fortnight, attempting to buy time for German forces to escape westward from the Russians by staging partial capitulations and seeking to parley with the Americans. SS General Karl Wolff had already concluded a unilateral negotiation for the surrender of his army in Italy, signed at Caserta on 29 April. German forces in north-west Germany, Holland and Denmark surrendered to Montgomery at Lüneburg Heath on 4 May. Resistance on the American fronts ended two days later, while the Red Army closed up to the Elbe. The dying continued to the end: Captain Nikolai Belov, whose diary vividly described his experiences in action, had been wounded five times since 1941. On 5 May 1945 he was killed in action.

Patton’s army reached Pilsen and might have advanced to Prague, but the Russians insisted on taking the Czech capital themselves. They finally accomplished this on 11 May, after a disastrous uprising against the Germans by local partisans provoked a final spasm of bloodshed. Meanwhile, a delegation from Dönitz reached Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims on 5 May, seeking an exclusive surrender to the Americans. The Supreme Commander required a simultaneous and unconditional surrender on all fronts, which Gen. Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s senior military adviser, signed on 7 May. The 8th was celebrated by all the Western Allies as VE-Day. Stalin, however, insisted on a further ceremony in Berlin, at which the Russians were full parties. This took place on 8 May, and the 9th thereafter became Russia’s own appointed date of victory: in this, as in so much else, Stalin’s nation chose to march to its own step.

Sporadic exchanges of fire persisted in the east for many weeks, with NKVD troops killing Poles and Ukrainians who refused to accept the substitution of Soviet tyranny for that of the Nazis. British Lt. David Fraser wrote: ‘There was still too much vile cruelty in the world for us to be able to say with true satisfaction, “Good is victorious.”’ American Lt. Lyman Diercks, at Unterach near Salzburg in Austria, wrote: ‘Our celebration was low-key. An American in the town loaned us an American flag which we flew from a pole in the square. The elderly Austrian couple who owned the hotel cooked us a wonderful meal. She cried and said: “Maybe now my son will be able to come home from Russia where he is a prisoner.” But he never did.’ In the British lines, Corporal John Cropper described a sense of ‘instant relief – no wild cheering or running about. It was a case of thank God it’s all over and we were safe at last. We had nothing to celebrate with anyway, just compo tea and normal rations. It was if you’d had an exhausting day and you flop down in a chair at the end of it.’

The American and British armies in Germany looted energetically and raped occasionally, but few men sought explicit revenge from the vanquished. The French, however, saw many scores to be paid. Major Albrecht Hamlin, OC of a US Civil Affairs unit running Merzig (population 12,500), submitted a despairing report cataloguing wholesale acts of pillage following the arrival of a French cavalry unit: ‘Within an hour the city was in a state of complete confusion. The Chasseurs spread out … taking whatever houses they wished, ejecting civilians from their homes, impressing them on the street for forced labor, confiscating bicycles, automobiles, trucks, and general looting of houses and stores … The acts were manifestly committed as revenge upon the Germans. Reprimands to the officers were met with the repeated excuse that the Germans did these things to France, and now it was their turn.’