Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (7 page)

Bazookas or explosive charges were used to smash through walls from house to house, an activity which became known as ‘mouse-holing’. It
was safer to blast through a wall, which would shock anyone in the room beyond, than enter through the door. As soon as an opening into the next-door house had been made, one of the team would throw a hand grenade into the adjoining room, and they would rush in following the explosion. Soldiers carried armour-piercing rounds to shoot up through the ceiling or down through the floor. They then dashed to the top of the house and worked their way down, forcing the Germans into the cellar. When a whole block had been cleared, guards were posted to prevent Germans from sneaking back in. The Germans also used their Panzerfausts in a similar fashion.
‘When attacked in this way,’
a report admitted, ‘American strong-point crews surrendered in most cases immediately, [once] deprived of sight due to dust clouds caused by explosions.’

The Americans soon found that mortar and longer-range artillery fire was uncertain and often dangerous to their own men in urban combat, so they insisted on direct fire wherever possible. In any case, fuses on American mortar rounds were so sensitive that they exploded as soon as they touched a roof, and did little damage to the inside of a building. But their artillery fire was so intense that Oberst Wilck, the commander of the German forces in the town, had to move his command post to an air-raid shelter.
‘The few assault guns
which we had just received were put out of action straight away,’ Wilck recounted afterwards. ‘You can’t hold a town with just carbines!’ The Germans in fact had more than carbines, and managed to use their heavy 120mm mortars very effectively.

Allied aircraft were closely managed by a ground controller, but it was impossible to identify specific points in the ruins, so
‘no close-in bombing
missions were undertaken’. In any case, the presence of friendly aircraft overhead certainly seemed to bolster the morale of the troops on the ground and kept German heads down. There were firm orders in place not to damage the cathedral, which was spared from ground fire. Even so, the destruction was so great that VII Corps could report that
‘the flattened condition of the buildings’
at least allowed ‘actual physical contact [to] be maintained among adjacent units’.

‘The operation was not unduly
hurried,’ VII Corps reported. ‘It was realized that street fighting is a slow, tedious business which requires
much physical exertion and time if buildings are searched thoroughly.’ House clearing, the GIs had been told, meant firing constantly at every window until they were inside the house, then with one man ready with a grenade in his hand and two others covering him with rifles, or ideally Thompson sub-machine guns, they would go from room to room. But they soon found that they needed to mark houses occupied by their own troops.
‘Numerous times we have had
casualties by grenades thrown into buildings or shooting into them by our own troops after we had occupied the building.’

As the Red Army had discovered, heavy artillery at close range was the most cost-effective, as well as destructive, means of advance. The Americans in Aachen used 155mm self-propelled ‘Long Toms’ at ranges as close as 150 metres. Oberst Wilck admitted after his surrender that
‘the direct fire of the 155mm
self-propelled gun was very devastating and demoralizing. In one instance a shell completely pierced three houses before exploding in and wrecking the fourth house.’

‘Civilians must be
promptly and vigorously expelled from any area occupied by our troops,’ one American officer in Aachen emphasized. ‘Failure to do so costs lives.’ Holding pens were constructed and guarded by MPs, but Collins’s corps did not have enough trained interpreters or members of the Counter Intelligence Corps to filter out Nazi supporters, or interview the hundreds of foreign forced labourers. At one point during the battle, three small boys found a rifle. They fired at an American squad. A sergeant spotted them, ran over to grab the rifle off them and cuffed the boy who held it. This story somehow spread and was taken up as an example of heroism by German propaganda, which claimed with shameless exaggeration that
‘they held up all
the enemy troops there’. But as the diarist Victor Klemperer pointed out, the example was surely self-defeating. The Nazis now claimed to be using partisans, whom they had always condemned as ‘terrorists’. It also underlined the weakness of German forces when, according to Nazi newspapers,
‘Eisenhower is attacking
with seven armies, with two million men (men not children!),’ Klemperer emphasized.

On 16 October, the 30th and 1st Divisions finally met up north-east of Aachen, having suffered heavy casualties. Two days later, Himmler declared that
‘Every German homestead
will be defended to the last.’
But on 21 October Oberst Wilck surrendered with the remainder of his exhausted and hungry men. He was not a devotee of Hitler and knew that the killing went on because Hitler was living in his own fantasy world.
‘Even the Führer’s adjutant
told me how the Führer is surrounded by lies,’ he remarked in captivity. Knowing that it would please Hitler, Himmler would come in with a beaming face to say: ‘
Heil mein Führer
, I wish to report the establishment of a new division.’

One of Wilck’s men later complained that the worst part of being taken prisoner was being marched through Aachen.
‘The civilian population
behaved worse than the French,’ he said. ‘They shouted abuse at us and the Americans had to intervene. We can’t help it if their houses have been smashed to smithereens.’ German women had soon emerged from cellars under the rubble to search for food. They could be seen butchering a fallen horse in the street hit by shellfire, and wheeling back turnips in little wooden baby carriages.

Goebbels tried to lessen the impact of the defeat. German propaganda assured the German people that
‘the time gained at Aachen
, Arnhem and Antwerp has made Fortress Germany impregnable. The Luftwaffe is being rejuvenated and Germany now has more artillery and tanks to throw into battle.’

The most frustrating delay for the Allies was their inability to use the port of Antwerp. This gave the Germans the breathing space they needed to rebuild and redeploy their armies for Hitler’s new plan. But other factors also played a part. Encouraged by victory fever and the idea that the European war would be over by Christmas, American commanders in the Pacific had seized the chance to boost their own strengths. SHAEF suddenly woke up to the fact that the ‘Germany first’ policy, originally agreed in 1941, had slipped out of the window, resulting in alarming shortages of ammunition and men.

The Nazis, with Germany now threatened from the east, the south-east and the west, suffered their own internal tensions. On 15 October, Admiral Nikolaus Horthy, after secret negotiations with the Soviet Union, declared over the radio that Hungary was changing sides. The Germans knew of his betrayal. A commando led by SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, the enormous Austrian who had snatched Mussolini from the Gran Sasso, kidnapped Horthy’s son as a hostage in
a street ambush just before the broadcast.
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Horthy himself was brought back to Germany and the government was handed over to the fascist and fiercely anti-semitic Arrow Cross.

In East Prussia, as the Red Army advanced on to German territory for the first time, the power struggle behind the scenes intensified. General der Flieger Kreipe, the chief of staff of the Luftwaffe, was now persona non grata in the Wolfsschanze. Keitel and even Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant Oberst von Below turned their backs on him as a ‘defeatist’. Göring decided to extend his deer hunt near by at Rominten, Kreipe noted in his diary, because
‘he has to watch
Himmler and Bormann a little closer. Himmler has now requested some squadrons for his SS.’ This appears to have been Himmler’s first attempt to increase his military empire beyond the ground forces of the Waffen-SS. Part of the power game around the Führer depended on the two gate-keepers: Bormann, who controlled access over anyone outside the Wehrmacht and SS, and Keitel.
‘Before the Generals or anyone
get to Adolf to make a report,’ a captured general remarked to his companions, ‘they are given detailed instructions by Keitel what they are to say, how they are to say it, and only then are they allowed into Adolf’s presence.’

On an inspection of flak batteries nearer the front, Kreipe wrote on 18 October of the Red Army incursion:
‘Fears in East Prussia
, the first refugee treks to be seen, horrible.’ Göring had to leave Rominten in a hurry, and Keitel tried to persuade Hitler to leave the Wolfsschanze, but he refused. A few days later, Kreipe visited the Panzer Corps
Hermann Göring
at Gumbinnen.
‘Gumbinnen is on fire
,’ he noted. ‘Columns of refugees. In Nemmersdorf, shot women and children have been nailed to barn doors.’ Nemmersdorf was the site of an atrocity, which was almost certainly exaggerated in Nazi propaganda, and Kreipe had probably not visited the scene.

Also on 18 October, just as the battle for Aachen was coming to an end, Eisenhower, Bradley and Montgomery met in Brussels. Since the British and the Canadians were so involved clearing the Scheldt estuary,
Eisenhower decided that the US First Army should focus on obtaining a bridgehead across the Rhine south of Cologne, while the recently arrived Ninth Army protected its left flank. As might be imagined Montgomery was not pleased that the First Army was to be given priority, but he had been silenced for the moment after his climbdown. For the Americans, on the other hand, this strategy led to the plan to advance through the Hürtgen Forest. Neither the commanders nor the troops had any idea of the horrors that awaited them there.

The brief Soviet rampage on to East Prussian territory in October prompted Goebbels to play up stories of rape, looting and destruction by the Red Army. He tried to invoke the idea of
Volksgemeinschaft
, or national solidarity, in the face of mortal danger. Yet on the western front Wehrmacht generals were shocked by reports of German soldiers looting German homes.

‘The soldiers’ behaviour today is unbelievable,’
said a doctor with the 3rd Fallschirmjäger-Division. ‘I was stationed in Düren and the soldiers there robbed their own people. They tore everything out of the cupboards … They were like wild animals.’ Apparently this behaviour had started when the division was in Italy. And other formations which had looted during the retreat through France and Belgium did not change their habits when back on German soil. Their tattered uniforms had not been replaced, some 60 per cent of them were estimated to be infested with lice, and they were permanently hungry. Just behind the front line, there were reports of soldiers blinding horses so that they could be slaughtered and eaten.

This did not mean that they were reluctant to fight on, for the knowledge that the Red Army had reached the borders of the Reich had concentrated their minds. Significantly, a captured German army doctor called Dammann considered that
‘German propaganda urging
the men to save their Fatherland has helped to keep down the number of cases of combat exhaustion.’

Looting by German soldiers was not the only reason for relations
between civilians and troops to deteriorate sharply in western Germany. Women wanted the fighting to end as quickly as possible. For them, East Prussia was very far away.
‘You’ve no idea
what morale is like at home,’ an Obergefreiter told fellow prisoners. ‘In the villages the women cursed and yelled: “Get out! We don’t want to be shot to bits!”’ A member of the 16th Fallschirmjäger-Regiment agreed.
‘They called us “prolongers
of the war”, and that wasn’t just in one place either, but in fifty towns and villages in the West.’ An Unteroffizier Mükller said that in Heidelberg
‘The mood there is shit
, yet the hatred is not directed at the enemy, but against the German regime.’ People were saying: ‘If only the Allies would hurry up and come to end the war.’ While most within the armed forces were still eager to believe in Hitler’s promises of secret weapons, cynicism was much greater in civilian circles, except of course for the Party faithful and the desperate. In some places the unreliable V-1 flying bomb was already referred to as
‘Versager-1’
, or ‘No. 1 Dud’.

Goebbels seized every opportunity to make civilians in the west of Germany fear an Allied victory. The announcement in September of the plan by Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury, to turn Germany
‘into a country
primarily agricultural and pastoral in character’ was disastrous. It enabled Goebbels to claim that
‘every American soldier
will bring Morgenthau along with him in his duffle bag’ and Germany would be broken up. This idea clearly influenced Wehrmacht forces in the west. An officer taken prisoner was asked by his American interrogator whether he regretted the destruction of the Rhineland.
‘Well, it probably won’t be ours after the war,’
he replied. ‘Why not destroy it?’

The Nazi newspaper the
Völkischer Beobachter
warned:
‘The German people must realize
that we are engaged in a life and death struggle which imposes on every German the duty to do his utmost for the victorious conclusion of the war and the frustration of the plans of destruction planned by these cannibals.’ The fact that Morgenthau was Jewish also played straight into the hands of the propaganda ministry and its conspiracy theories of a Jewish plot against Germany. The ministry tried to increase the effect with some dubious quotations from the British press, including ‘Henningway’ cited in the
Daily Mail
as saying:
‘The power of Germany
will have to be destroyed so thoroughly that Germany will never rise again to fight another battle. This goal can only be achieved by castration.’

After the presidential election in the United States, Goebbels said that President Roosevelt had been re-elected as
‘generally expected’
, with the support of American Communists at Stalin’s urging. Yet German propaganda also played a double game, encouraging the belief that the alliance of the Reich’s enemies would soon fall apart. According to the US Counter Intelligence Corps, the Germans circulated leaflets showing
‘Tommy and his Yankee pal
regarding with disgust the spectacle of Russians taking over and policing Brussels, Berlin, etc.; the Teuton being apparently unable to get out of his head that when it comes to an abject fear of Bolshevism we’re All Krauts Together’. Other leaflets tried to make the point that
‘while Americans
are being slaughtered by the thousand, Monty’s troops are indulging in a “Dutch Holiday Slumber”’.

‘German civilians don’t know what to expect,’
the Counter Intelligence Corps reported. ‘They are torn between belief in the “terror” stories of German authorities and those which cross the lines, by rumor and Allied radio, about the fairness of our treatment of civilians in captured areas.’ The Allies were of course helped by accounts which circulated within Germany of Nazi Party corruption at home and of the shameless looting in France by senior officials of the military administration. Gauleiters were amassing great wealth, and their children were allowed cars and petrol when even the heads of companies were rationed to forty litres a week.

The Counter Intelligence Corps admitted that it had crossed into German territory
‘armed with a few
directives, no precedents, uncertainty as to its potentialities, and [with an] uneasy expectation of partisan warfare’. Its priority was to seize Nazi Party records quickly, but its operatives found themselves overwhelmed by the numbers of
‘suspicious civilians’
arrested by American soldiers for screening along with the prisoners of war. German soldiers and civilians found it very easy to escape from American compounds. The other problem which the CIC faced was the number of Belgian and French Resistance members crossing into Germany to loot, or on
‘intelligence missions of their own’
.

In Aachen the Counter Intelligence Corps estimated that up to 30 per cent of the population had defied Nazi orders to evacuate the city.
‘Don’t kick them around,’
was the CIC advice on treating Germans under American occupation, ‘but don’t let them fool you. The Germans are
accustomed to taking orders, not complying with requests.’ Many were indeed willing to denounce Nazis and to provide information, but it was often hard for Allied intelligence units to know exactly what to believe. Word had spread of the unrest in bomb-shattered Cologne, where police were engaged in running battles with the so-called
‘Edelweiss Pirates’
: bands of dissident youth, plus an estimated 2,000 German deserters and absconded foreign workers sheltering in the ruins.

Allied bombing had not only flattened cities. Travel by train had become very difficult, if not impossible. German officers and soldiers who had finally obtained home leave found that almost all of their precious days were spent sitting in trains or waiting in stations.
‘A Leutnant of ours
went to Munich on leave [from Rheine near the Dutch border],’ a Luftwaffe Unteroffizier Bock recounted. ‘He was away ten days, but he only had one day at home.’

Hardly any soldier chose to go to Berlin on leave unless he had family or a sweetheart there. Everyone in the capital was exhausted from sleepless nights, as RAF Bomber Command fought its own ‘Battle of Berlin’, hammering the city night after night.
‘What is cowardice?’
ran a typical example of the city’s gallows humour. ‘When someone in Berlin volunteers for the Eastern Front.’

Visitors were often amazed how its inhabitants from all classes had adapted to the conditions.
‘I am so accustomed now to living
among these ruins,’ wrote Missie Vassiltchikov in her diary, ‘with the constant smell of gas in the air, mixed with the odour of rubble and rusty metal, and sometimes even the stench of putrefying flesh.’ Apartments were particularly cold during that winter of fuel shortages. There was little glass available to repair windows and people opened their windows wide when the sirens sounded in the hope of saving any remaining panes from bomb blast.

During air raids, the packed cellars and concrete air-raid shelters shuddered and shook. The low-wattage bulbs flickered, dimmed still further, went out and then came back. Children screamed, many adults buried their heads between their knees. After the all-clear had finally sounded, many admitted to a curious exhilaration when they found themselves still alive. But some people stayed in the cellars even after the others had trooped off. It was warmer and less threatening there.

‘Skin diseases’
, a doctor reported, ‘have become very common both in the Army and at home, owing to the poor quality of the soap available, overcrowding in air-raid shelters and in those houses which are still standing, shortage of clothing, poor hygiene etc.’ Workers in industrial areas were increasingly succumbing to diphtheria, and venereal diseases had spread, partly as a result of German troops returning from France, Belgium, the Balkans and Poland.

According to a court-martial judge, there were estimated to be 18,000 Wehrmacht deserters in Berlin. Many were hiding in huts on allotments. They no doubt subscribed to the German army joke:
‘War is just like
the picture-house: there’s a lot going on up in the front, but the best seats are right at the back.’ Ordinary Germans were at last ready to shelter deserters, usually sons or nephews but sometimes even strangers, at terrible risk to themselves. By the end of the year, the Wehrmacht had executed some 10,000 men, a figure which was to increase significantly in the final months of the war.

The families of deserters were also liable to severe penalties.
‘During the night of 29–30 October’
, the commander of the 361st Volksgrenadier-Division announced in an order of the day, ‘Soldat Wladislaus Schlachter of the 4th Company, 952nd Grenadier-Regiment, deserted to the enemy. The court martial assembled on the same day passed the death sentence on Schlachter. Thus he was expelled forever from the community of our people and may never return to his home. Most ruthless reprisals will be enacted against the members of his family, measures which are a necessity in this struggle for the survival of the German people.’ Threats were also made against the families of prisoners of war who told their American captors too much.

The more prosperous classes increasingly feared the tens of thousands of foreign workers in and around the city. Some were volunteers, but most had been brought to Germany as forced labourers. The authorities were losing control of them. Barracks were often burned down, leaving the foreigners homeless. German shopkeepers would claim that gangs of them had broken in to their establishments and stolen supplies, when in fact they themselves had sold the missing items on the black market. Alongside food, cigarettes were the most sought-after commodity. In Berlin, according to one captured officer, a single English cigarette sold for five Reichsmarks, while a Camel went for twice as much. Real
coffee was out of almost everyone’s reach at 600 Reichsmarks a kilo. According to one officer, most of the black market in coffee was organized by the SS in Holland.

Coffee, because of its rarity, was the conspicuous consumption of choice for the Nazi hierarchy. A horrifying and bizarre conversation between two captured Kriegsmarine admirals was secretly recorded in their camp in England in 1945. Konteradmiral Engel told Vizeadmiral Utke about fellow admirals entertained by Arthur Greiser, the notorious Gauleiter of the Wartheland, who was later hanged by the Poles.

‘Greiser boasted
: “Do you know that the coffee you’re drinking now, cost me 32,000 Jewish women?”’

‘Where did they go?’ Vizeadmiral Utke asked.

‘“Into the incinerators probably,” Greiser said to us at the time. “Let’s hope we all get as easy a death as they had.” That was the first thing he said. All the admirals sat around laughing themselves sick and thinking of the human suffering behind the coffee they were drinking.’

Following the Roman tradition of bread and circuses, the Nazi administration organized an ice show in the bomb-damaged Sportpalast to distract people from the shortage of rations. The Deutsches Frauenwerk welfare organization produced bakery booklets and brochures on how to save food. One was entitled
‘Main meal without meat’
, which no doubt prompted another Berlin joke that the next one would be how to produce a main meal without food. A satirical song, sung to the tune of the Nazi anthem, the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’, went:

Leave was much easier for the Allied armies on the western front. The British and Canadians went to Brussels and the Americans to
Paris. Senior officers could always find a good excuse to visit SHAEF at Versailles or Com Z in the city itself. From mid-September, almost 10,000 American soldiers were arriving in Paris every day on seventy-two-hour passes. The priorities of what the poet-paratrooper Louis Simpson called
‘the over-heated soul of the
dogface
fresh from his dugout’ were predictable. Paris became known as ‘the silver foxhole’, and the term ‘zig-zag’ covered both drink and sex. Pigalle became known as ‘Pig Alley’ where prostitutes, both professional and amateur, charged anything up to 300 francs or five dollars.
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