All Hell Let Loose (98 page)

Two thousand wounded men lay in the cellars of the Royal Palace. In the words of a witness who came upon them, ‘Pus, blood, gangrene, excrement, sweat, urine, tobacco smoke and gunpowder mingle in a dense stench.’ Panic and factional strife overtook the doomed garrison. Two soldiers burst in on surgeons who had just opened a wounded man’s stomach, and began shooting at each other across the operating table. Soon afterwards fire engulfed the building, killing almost all the casualties. In the headquarters of Gen. Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, a young NCO donned his commander’s abandoned uniform – and was promptly shot dead by a crazed soldier. Stragglers roamed the city’s public buildings among slashed paintings, shattered porcelain, broken furniture and abandoned personal possessions. Fires raged everywhere unchecked.

Some defenders sought to escape along the sewers by candlelight, wading through filth that sometimes rose to their waists, while the sounds of desperate fighting echoed down from the street above. They came upon the body of a handsome woman, elegantly clad in fur coat and silk stockings, still clinging to her handbag, and speculated about her identity. After advancing several hundred yards, the water level rose too high for passage. Most, including Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, were obliged to ascend through manholes into the street, where they were soon captured by the Soviets. An estimated 16,000 people, soldiers and civilians, escaped to the surrounding hills, where they roamed or lay in hiding. Some captured a Soviet bread wagon, precipitating a gunfight among themselves for its contents. Others who trudged on westwards found themselves emerging from woodland into the open ground of the Zsámbék basin. Here Soviet snipers and machine-gunners shot them down in hundreds, exposed against the snow. Throngs of desperate men were also killed in the city. A Soviet officer wrote, ‘The Hitlerists continued their advance towards the city exit despite their huge casualties, but soon ran into our multiple rocket-launchers firing salvos from point-blank range. It was a terrible sight.’ Only seven hundred of the 43,900 men in the Budapest garrison on 11 February reached the German front further west; of the remainder, 17,000 had been killed and more than 22,000 taken prisoner.

A deathly silence fell upon Budapest. Fifteen-year-old László Deseö wandered back into his family’s apartment after the first Russians had stormed through it. ‘One could howl, walking through the rooms. There are eight dead horses there. The walls are red with blood as high as a man, everything is full of muck and debris. All doors, cupboards, furniture and windows are broken. The plaster is gone. One steps over the dead horses. They are soft and springy. If you jump up and down on them, small bubbles, hissing and bloody, rise near the bullet wounds.’

Survivors began to creep warily out of rubble. They were bemused by the unpredictable conduct of the victors: sometimes, on entering an apartment, Russians killed whole families; at other times they instead fell to playing with toys, then left peacefully. A Hungarian writer said of the conquerors, ‘They were simple and cruel like children. With millions of people destroyed by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin or in the war, death to them had become an everyday affair. They killed without hatred and let themselves be killed without resisting.’ There were many executions – especially of Russians caught in German uniforms. Some postmen and tram conductors were shot, because the Russians mistook their tunics for those of Arrow Cross militiamen. Systematic looting of bank deposits and art collections was conducted under NKVD auspices, notably including those of the great Hungarian Jewish collectors; the booty was shipped to Moscow. A large proportion of Budapest’s surviving women, of all ages from ten to ninety and including pregnant mothers, were raped by Red soldiers. The plight of the victims was worsened by the fact that many of the perpetrators were diseased, and in all Hungary there were no drugs to be had. Bishop Joseph Grosz wrote despairingly, ‘This is how things may have been in Jerusalem when the prophet Jeremiah uttered his laments.’

Hungarian communists pleaded with the Soviet command to restrain its soldiers. ‘It is no good praising the Red Army on posters, in the Party, in the factories and everywhere,’ declared one such bitter appeal late in February, ‘if men who have survived the tyranny are now herded along the roads like cattle by Russian soldiers, constantly leaving dead bodies behind. Comrades sent to the country to promote land distribution are being asked by the peasants what use the land is to them if their horses have been taken from the meadows by Russians. They cannot plough with their noses.’ Such representations were vain. Stalin decreed that pillage and rape were the rightful rewards of his soldiers for their sacrifices. Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs and Hungarians alike suffered the fate that would soon fall upon Germans.

In Budapest, even before the final collapse of the defence, the city’s first cinema reopened with a showing of the Soviet propaganda film
The Battle of Oryol
. Work began almost immediately on erecting statues of Soviet war heroes in public spaces. After enduring extremities of suffering, Hungarians yearned to laugh again, and cabarets were soon doing brisk business amid the rubble. The comedian Kálmán Latabár walked on stage to a standing ovation which became ecstatic when he pulled up his sleeves and trouser-leg to reveal rows of watches, mocking Hungary’s Soviet ‘liberators’. A few months later, he would have been shot for less.

The capture of Budapest cost the Russians around 80,000 dead and a quarter of a million wounded. Some 38,000 civilians died in the siege; tens of thousands more were deported to the Soviet Union for forced labour, from which many never returned. The German and Hungarian forces lost about 40,000 dead and 63,000 men taken prisoner. This savage, futile battle would have been accounted an epic had it taken place on the Anglo-American front. As it was, only the Hungarians took much notice of its horrors, then or later. Within three months it was eclipsed by a matching drama, on a much larger scale, in Hitler’s own capital.

2
EISENHOWER’S ADVANCE TO THE ELBE

In the first months of 1945, most Germans greeted the arrival of American and British forces in their country as an undeserved intrusion; if many understood that Hitler had led them to disaster, they nonetheless found it hard to accept the implications for their own domestic lives. Men of the US 273rd Field Artillery occupied a house inhabited, in the words of one of its soldiers, by ‘a small, bird-like woman dressed in black, who tottered out from a side door. As soon as she saw us plundering her woodpile, she started hollering in German. As we carried away armfuls, she burst into tears and wailed uncontrollably, choking on half-sentences.’ The Americans debated before dismissing their own scruples. ‘“Hell,” said Frenchie, “she’s just as German as all the rest of the krauts.”’ Likewise a hillbilly in Pfc Charles Felix’s unit, when a voluble German woman complained bitterly that the GI intruders were scratching the furniture in her house. ‘I’ve had enough of these goddamn krauts!’ expostulated the soldier. ‘We’re over here fighting because of them and she’s got the nerve to complain about her furniture! Here, lady, I’ll show you some goddamn damage!’ He seized a chair and threw it at the wall. Only a minority of Allied soldiers preserved lingering inhibitions towards civilians: a soldier in Aaron Larkin’s engineer platoon burst into tears when ordered to evict a German family from their house, to make way for his unit; Pfc Harold Lindstrom suffered an instinctive pang of guilt when he lay down on a woman’s feather bed in full infantry kit and boots.

The US Army’s judge-advocate-general recorded a steep increase in incidents of rape once Allied soldiers entered German territory: ‘We were members of a conquering army, and we came as conquerors,’ declared his post-war report. ‘It was only in a very exceptional case that the German victim vigorously resisted her armed attackers … The German victims were apparently thoroughly cowed … Their mortal fear was not entirely groundless, as demonstrated in a number of cases in which the Germans who sought to prevent the soldiers from carrying out their designs to commit rape were mercilessly murdered.’ A
Stars & Stripes
reporter who in March 1945 filed a dispatch about the high incidence of rape in the Rhineland found it suppressed by the censor, as was other ‘negative reporting’ on Allied conduct in Germany.

There was also, of course, widespread semi-voluntary copulation, which caused venereal disease rates to soar, as desperate German women sold their only marketable commodity, often in order to feed their families. Many Allied soldiers recoiled from the shamelessness of German behaviour; even the educated among Hitler’s people were brutalised by the privileges of oppression. Scots Guardsmen, welcomed by the aristocratic owners of a castle in north Germany, were appalled to discover that in its adjoining park lay a small concentration camp containing two hundred starving slave labourers. When a British officer remonstrated, their host replied in bewilderment, ‘Major, you don’t understand. These people are animals – they can only be treated like animals.’

The Anglo-American armies’ last battles were incomparably less bloody than those in the east, because it suited both sides that it should be so. British Lt. Peter White shouted at a fleeing German to halt: ‘I took aim in the middle of his back with a strong feeling of repugnance at having to fire at a man running away … when something seemed to tell him it was hopeless. To my intense relief he spun around, flinging his rifle into the snow and raising his hands in a swift dramatic gesture. He called out a jumbled stream of broken English in a frightened voice … “Don’t shoot, please sir! … Hitler no good … don’t shoot …
Kamerad
, please!” At the same time he reached suddenly into his clothing, which nearly caused me to fire as I half-expected a pistol or grenade to be pulled out. Instead … he swung what turned out to be a gold pocket watch on a chain in my face as a peace offering.’

The Western Allies advanced through Germany in the same measured fashion in which they had conducted their campaign since October 1944. They sought to complete the destruction of Nazism at acceptable human cost, advancing to the lines of occupation agreed with the Russians, and only temporarily and in a few areas beyond them. The Germans continued to resist, but few displayed the fanaticism that characterised the eastern battle to the end. The hard part, for the vanquished, was to identify an opportunity to quit without being shot by one side or the other. American aidman Leo Litwak described his experience of ministering to an elderly German hit while attempting to reach the American lines unarmed, presumably to surrender:

The bulk of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS faced the armies of Zhukov, Konev and Rokossovsky; the Russians deployed 6.7 million men on a front extending from the Baltic to the Adriatic. The final death grapple between the forces of the two rival tyrants, Stalin and Hitler, was among the most terrible military encounters of the war, while Eisenhower’s armies occupied a wing of the stage. It was entirely irrational, because the outcome was not in doubt; but the Nazis were successful in inducing a quorum of their soldiers to make a last sacrificial effort. As for those who flinched, East Prussian schoolteacher Henner Pflug said that he ceased to gape at men hanging from trees, placards around their necks proclaiming ‘I am a deserter’ or ‘I failed to defend the fatherland’, because he saw so many.

Even Tito’s Yugoslav partisans were grudgingly impressed by the retreat conducted by the Wehrmacht against overwhelming odds. Milovan Djilas wrote: ‘The German army left a trail of heroism, though the domination of Nazism has suppressed in the world’s mind even the thought of such a thing … Hungry and half-naked, they cleared mountain landslides, stormed the rocky peaks, carved out bypasses. Allied planes used them for leisurely target practice. Their fuel ran out … [They] killed their own gravely wounded … In the end they got through, leaving a memory of their martial manhood. Apparently the German army could wage war … without massacres and gas chambers.’

Paratrooper Martin Poppel’s fiancée Gerda was one of many Germans belatedly alienated from the Nazi regime by the horrors it had brought upon her society. She wrote in January 1945 to Poppel, who was serving in Holland: ‘We are worn out after this terrible hail of bombs. To be hearing the howling of these things all the time, waiting for death at any moment in a dark cellar, unable to see – oh, it’s truly a wonderful life. If only it would stop, they really expect too much of people. Do you still remember the lake? I think you gave me our first kiss there! Everything gone – the lovely cafés Brand and Bohning, the town hall completely burned. It’s impossible even to begin to describe it. But you will be able to imagine it. You have seen Munich. Is everything going to be destroyed? Yet there is no other way out to be seen. Why do people let our soldiers go to their deaths uselessly, why do they let the rest of Germany be ruined, why all the misery, why?’ She added later: ‘If you were still a loyal supporter of these people after the war – you know who I mean – it would inevitably separate us. What have they made of our beautiful, magnificent Germany? It’s enough to make you weep. And one mustn’t even think about how the others will enslave us.’