The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (21 page)

The Times of London sent a reporter to inspect the re- lief convoys now queuing up to carry food northward. The highway running from Allied lines north to Utrecht “presents an impressive and heartening sight,” the cor- respondent wrote on May 7. “On either side, as far as the eye can see, are stacks of boxes, tins, and sacks of foodstuffs, medical stores and coal, with long columns of Army lorries incessantly bringing more.” Dutch men enthusiastically worked alongside the Allies in loading trucks; but they could only labor for fifteen minutes be- fore feeling faint. This writer had not yet reached Am- sterdam, but reported dreadful rumors: the city was “a vast concentration camp beyond all imagination.” The Times editorial page echoed these words by declaring that “horrors comparable to those of Belsen and Bu- chenwald appear to have been enacted.”
39

Fearing an apocalyptic, nightmarish scenario, Allied soldiers and relief workers moved into Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the Hague with trepidation. What they found was an unsettling and alarming picture of the ef- fects of nine months of deprivation. In Amsterdam, the presence of suffering was everywhere, in the sunken, colorless faces, the pipe-stem legs, the swollen joints of the children. The tree-lined streets had been de- nuded as residents had descended like leaf-cutter

ants and cut down trees for firewood. The railroad ties from beneath the tramways had been dug out and hauled away for the same purpose. Even the homes of deported laborers and Jews had been broken into and systematically dismantled, their floorboards and book- shelves having been used for fuel. A tour by two British officials in mid-May revealed “large numbers of people suffering from extreme starvation who were unable to walk about the streets.” In the last stage of the war, the weekly ration for Dutch people had fallen to 400 grams of bread—about half a small loaf—and 500 grams of potatoes or beets. A small milk ration was available for children only. Days after the liberation, there were at least 20,000 cases of “extreme starvation” in Utrecht and possibly 50,000 in Amsterdam. The Military Gov- ernment Branch of the First Canadian Army reported that in western Holland there were 100,000 to 150,000 cases of starvation edema, “with a death rate of 10%,” chiefly among people over sixty. The black market, and trips to the countryside for foraging, had kept many people alive; those who suffered most were the poor and elderly who had no such resources. An orphan- age and a mental institution whose patients had been limited to the official ration contained “patients on the ‘Belsen’ level.” The situation was “not as catastroph- ic as feared,” but millions of Dutch people were in a desperate state of emaciation and required immediate

and effective aid.
40

It stands as a vivid testament to the commitment of the Allied forces and the international relief societies that aid did come, and in remarkable fashion and with stunning speed. Since January, SHAEF had been work- ing with the Netherlands Military Administration—the provisional Dutch military power in the liberated part of the country—to prepare fifty-one medical feeding teams to be rushed into western Holland, and these teams now leaped into action. Each team included a doctor, six nurses, five social workers, and other staff. They had all received Red Cross training and were well supplied with specially prepared packages of emer- gency rations. Overall they treated some 279,000 pa- tients in the early summer of 1945, mostly on an out- patient basis. They combed byways, back streets, and slums, searching for the poor and the destitute; they sent sound trucks through the towns, announcing the presence of aid and clinics for the hungry and ill. SHAEF supplied trucks and 189,000 tons of supplies, all of which had been stockpiled in southern Holland since the winter for precisely this purpose. On May 5, the first ships arrived in Rotterdam and many more fol- lowed. Relief organizations poured in: the Red Cross, the Friends Relief Service, the Salvation Army, Save the Children, and the Catholic Committee for Relief

Abroad, all sent staff, aid, and supplies. Further aid was raised by the Holland Council in Britain through char- ity operas and clothing drives. Within two weeks, the Allies were able to offer the Dutch people a daily ration of two thousand calories, four times what the Germans had given them. Here was liberation at its best.
41

The Allied armies achieved a great deal in Holland in the final weeks of the war, and their strenuous efforts to deliver aid upon the liberation of the country no doubt saved thousands of lives. Throughout the summer of 1945, Canadian and British troops labored to clear the country of mines, repair roads, bridges, and dykes, re- patriate German POWs, and offload massive imports of food into the country that by August totaled 669,244 tons of food, medical supplies, clothing, vitamin tab- lets, vehicles, picks, shovels, and of course cigarettes— five million of them. In July, the SHAEF mission handed over control of the country to the Dutch government. Yet for all the cooperation and mutual respect between liberated and liberators, the Dutch could not fully for- give the delay in getting aid into the country in that aw- ful spring of 1945. It had been a deliberate choice by Eisenhower on military grounds, and it naturally left some people wondering if more lives might have been saved by an earlier air supply effort or perhaps a revi- sion of Allied military strategy. This is turn led British

and Canadian officials to blame the Dutch for failing to give sufficient credit to their liberators for the im- mense efforts they had made. “It would improve the reputation of the Netherlands with the many British officers and men who have come into contact with the country in the past months and who are now leaving, if there was rather more public expression of gratitude for the debt which the Netherlands owe to those who have freed them,” concluded a detailed British Embas- sy report in September 1945.
42

The gratitude would come soon enough. Ever since the end of the war, numerous Dutch communities have erected testimonials of thanks to their liberators, espe- cially the cheerful, underdog Canadians. But in 1945, as the war finally ground to its miserable end, the Dutch still faced the bitter realities of shortages, deprivation, destruction, and of course the memories of missing loved ones, some of whom had dropped dead in the dusty streets simply for lack of food. For Holland, lib- eration had been a slow, excruciating passage between war and freedom. A fifth of the country was freed in September 1944, but there was little to celebrate. The rest of the Netherlands suffered through nine months of bitter fighting, the destruction and flooding of the once carefully tended Dutch landscape, and the unfor- givable cruelty of Germany’s deliberate starvation poli-

cies. The generally agreed upon figure for deaths due to starvation and related illnesses is 16,000, reached by comparing the mortality rate in the first six months of 1944 against the first six months of 1945. In Amsterdam, 5,336 more people died in the spring of 1945 than had died in the same period the year before. In Rotterdam, the figure was 4,599, and in the Hague, the number was 3,422. The precise cause of death for these tragic indi- viduals cannot be known, since malnutrition opens the door to many other fatal illnesses, weakening the body as well as the spirit. Yet it cannot be denied that these thousands of Dutch civilians died in great misery, just a few miles from Allied lines, in cities whose prosperity, learning, and culture had once expressed the essence of European civilization.
43

Part II: INTO GERMANY

Prologue: Armies of Justice

O

N THE VERY day that Hitler shot himself in a stifling, dust-choked bunker deep beneath the Reich Chancellery in bombed-out Berlin, Ruth

Andreas-Friedrich and a few companions huddled in their own basement sanctuary in the city’s ruins. Ruth and her friends were members of an anti-Nazi under- ground cell, and for years they had lived in fear and anxiety in Berlin, powerless against the massive terror apparatus of the Nazi state, but determined somehow to stake a claim in their own small way for humanity. Their cell was tiny, comprising only a handful of mem- bers, and theirs was perhaps more an intellectual resis- tance than a militant one. On April 30, with Hitler dead upon the floor of his bunker next to the lifeless corpse of his bride, Eva Braun, Ruth could imagine a future not dominated by fanaticism and hatred. Liberation, she believed, was at hand. These thoughts of the future, however, had to be pushed to the back of her mind, for on this day she was preoccupied with survival in a city that had been bombed and shelled into an apocalyptic wreck. Everything was scarce, including shelter, cloth- ing, drinkable water, and especially food. “ The streets are deserted,” she noted in her diary, and then correct- ed herself. “ There are no more streets. Just torn-up ditches filled with rubble between rows of ruins. What

kind of people used to live here,” she wondered. “ The war has blown them away.”

When she and her friends saw, from the slits in the base- ment windows, a disoriented white ox, “with gentle eyes and heavy horns,” stumbling through the streets, lost amid the bricks and craters in the road, they knew what they had to do. Slipping out of their subterranean cavern, they darted out into the street, seized the beast by the horns, and pulled it into a courtyard. There, they slaughtered it, slavering over the thoughts of the lav- ish meal to come. But they were being watched, as she recalls in her remarkable diaries.

Suddenly, as if the underworld had spit them out, a noisy crowd gathers around the dead ox. They come creeping out of a hundred cellar holes. Women, men, children. Was it the smell of blood that attracted them? They come running with buckets. With tubs and vats. Screaming and gesticulating, they tear pieces of meat from each other’s hands. “ The liver belongs to me,” someone growls. “ The tongue is mine! The tongue, the tongue!” Five blood-covered fists angrily pull the tongue out of the ox’s throat…. I sneak away. Never in my life have I felt so miserable. So that is what the hour of liberation amounts to. Is this the moment we have awaited for twelve years? That we might fight over an

ox’s liver?
1

Like Germany, also defeated and dismembered, the white ox lay in a pool of blood, a corpse swarming with scavengers.

* * *

I

N MID-MARCH 1945, the Anglo-American armies, recovered now from the losses of the Bulge, finally crossed the Rhine, encircled 300,000 German sol- diers of Army Group B in the Ruhr pocket, and sped on into the heartland of Germany. By April 12, the Ameri- cans had reached the Elbe river, while the horns of this advancing bull sliced outward, one northward toward Hamburg, one to the south, through Bavaria and into Czechoslovakia. They soon encountered the massive armies of the Soviet Union, which since January had been churning up the Germans at a stupendous rate, leaping from the Vistula in Poland to the Oder river in eastern Germany in a matter of weeks; on April 16 the Soviets launched their final assault from the Oder to Berlin, swallowed the capital city, and pressed west to the Elbe, where they shook hands with the Americans on a bridge at Torgau on April 25. Five days later, his country overrun, his army defeated, and his capital city ground to rubble by the powerful Red Army, Adolf Hit-

ler killed himself in his bunker. The men of the Allied armies had put to rest the lunacy of the thousand-year Reich.

What were these men fighting for? Certainly not for the liberation of Germany or of Germans from an oppres- sive regime. During the war, American leaders sharply distinguished between the peoples who deserved lib- eration—the French, Belgians, Dutch, Poles, and oth- ers who had suffered under German occupation—and the Germans. Whereas the liberation of western Eu- ropean states had involved the restoration of freedom and autonomy to once-oppressed peoples, American officials had in mind a very different fate for Germany. America’s war strategy unequivocally sought to destroy Germany, its Nazi regime, and its military-industrial capacity. The Anglo-American bombing campaign, which reached unprecedented intensity in the last nine months of the war, revealed that Americans and Britons accepted massive numbers of civilian deaths as the price of victory. They agreed to wipe out Ger- man cities, raze German schools and hospitals and air raid shelters, and set fire to the bodies of the children, patients, and refugees within. They believed that these things had to be done to win the war. Nor would post- war Germany escape punishment. The Allies’ planning documents for the postwar occupation were charac-