CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“THE DEAD-END OF
HITLER’S REICH”

By now, the Russians were in Berlin. Even as the bodies of SS victims were being buried along the shores of Lübeck Bay under the watchful gaze of British soldiers, their Red Army counterparts were busily scouring the Berlin bunker for signs of Hitler’s corpse. They had to search for two more days before they found his charred remains in the Chancellery garden.

What they did discover straight away, however, were the bodies of Josef Goebbels, his wife, Magda, and their six children. In his last will and testament, Hitler had nominated the über-loyal Propaganda Minister as the new Chancellor of Germany, with Doenitz as President. But Goebbels and his wife chose suicide rather than life in a world without their leader. First, they arranged to have their children murdered by cyanide inserted into their mouths by Hitler’s personal physician as they slept. Then, they climbed out of the bunker into the Chancellery garden and bit on their own suicide capsules. An SS man put bullets through their heads to make sure they were dead. The Russians found the children still tucked under blankets in their bunk beds, as though they were sound asleep.

Hitler’s death did not put an end to the fighting. German forces surrendered in Italy, but they continued to resist the Red Army in Austria, Czechoslovakia and eastern Germany. Along the Baltic coast, the Russians continued to race towards Lübeck.

On the night of Wednesday 2 May, far in advance of his own columns, a Red Army scout officer arrived in his jeep at the port of Wismar, barely thirty miles east of Lübeck. This was another small medieval port of patrician gabled houses and huge red-bricked Gothic churches. In 1922, its labyrinthine streets had formed the backdrop for F.W. Murnau’s classic Expressionist vampire film, Nosferatu. Now they lay in ruins, smashed by recent allied bomber raids. Only one of the town’s three steepled churches remained intact. Over the winter, the freezing population had resorted to burning the remains of the wooden statue of St. George and the Dragon from the fire-gutted church of the same name.

To his surprise, the Soviet officer found that Wismar was already occupied by troops from the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion under the control of General Matthew Ridgway’s American XVIII Airborne Corps sent to secure the east flank of the allied advance. With this meeting of the two allied armies at Wismar, both sides now halted their advance. “It’s the end, the dead-end, of Hitler’s Reich,” reported an exultant Wynford Vaughan Thomas while standing beside the wooden barrier across the road that marked the demarcation line between the British and Soviet armies. Shortly before, a few German prisoners had been stopped as they desperately tried to cross to the British side. “The Russian guard gave a wink to me,” Vaughan Thomas told his British listeners, “and said ‘Siberia.’ ”

Evidence of widespread German terror about the advancing Russians was plentiful on the road to Wismar. At one point, the Canadian tanks had stopped to refuel. In a small wood they came across a German workshop detachment numbering some three thousand troops. They were eager to surrender. “German civilian women, men and children were there with the troops,” reported one of the Canadians, “and when the troops were lined up three deep on the road many had their wives and children with them to accompany them on the trek back to [the prisoner-of-war] cage. This was because the rumor was rife that the Russian army was only nine miles away. They wanted only to be taken by us.” The Canadians’ advance to Wismar was so swift because the Germans wanted them to get as far east as possible to head off the Russians. Thousands of German troops lined the roads and crowded the villages. Some even cheered on the Canadians.¹

By this time, Gavin’s Eighty-second Airborne Division was also across the Elbe. Still driving his jeep, Leonard Linton rushed ahead to Neuhaus, the first small town east of the river, convinced he would be the first American there. To his dismay, though, when he drove up to its main hotel scribbled on its walls was “Kilroy Was Here”–the motto daubed throughout Europe by GIs to announce their arrival. He pressed on into the town of Ludwigslust.

The town’s name translates as “Ludwig’s Joy.” It acquired it in 1754, after Ludwig II, the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, established a hunting-lodge there and gradually transformed it into his main residence and the capital of his duchy. Later, he built a grand Baroque palace, or Schloss, which was situated in the middle of a vast park laid out in the English style with canals, fountains and artificial cascades. The town also boasted a church that resembled a Greek temple with Doric columns, built at the same time. Although it now lay on a railway line, when Linton arrived its population was only about ten thousand and it had long since lost its status as the state’s capital. The palace and its gardens had become a municipal park. Yet some locals still thought of their town as the “Versailles of the North.”

Barely two miles to its north, outside the tiny village of Wobbelin, the Americans discovered a small camp packed with some 7,500 emaciated, dying, diseased and starving prisoners, both men and women. The swastika was still flying from the flagpole. “One could smell the camp,” wrote a disgusted Gavin. Most of the prisoners were from Russia, Poland and Czechoslovakia, but many came from France, the Low Countries, Spain and Greece, as well as from Germany itself. Fewer than half were Jews.

Linton decided to see the scene for himself:

The gate was wide open, and all the German guards were gone, so I asked the [prisoners] why they were not leaving. Their pathetic answer was that they did not know where to go, and my Latvian guide pointed to the barracks and said “most of those there will not see sun tomorrow.” It had not yet dawned on me that I was about to enter the gates of hell. I went to my jeep and gave them the few chocolate and candy bars that I had and saw that my Latvian was too weak to tear open the papers, and most of the others were just holding them and not eating them.

He asked how the Germans had been killing them, since he saw no signs of any gas chambers or crematoria. “They said in a sad voice,” he recorded, “ ‘simply by not giving any food.’ ”²

The SS guards had fled the day before. Bodies lay strewn about in the open. Linton walked into a small building that served as a cross between a first-aid post and a hospital. “Inside,” he wrote, “was a pile of skinny and naked corpses piled against a wall with other smaller stacks of corpses here and there.” In the brick barracks buildings, skeletal prisoners dressed in the standard concentration camp garb of black-and-gray striped clothes still lay in their three- or four-tiered bunks. Some of them were dead, but most were mute, staring and silent. “I talked to a number of other survivors ambling around, asking where they were from,” Linton continued. “Almost all said they were Russian farmers and [had been] several years in various concentration camps.” Gradually it dawned on him that these were relatively hardy peasants and that was why they had survived. Prisoners from towns and cities had quickly died from the rigors that faced them.

Almost the worst thing of all was the smell, both inside the barracks and outside. “I can’t describe it adequately,” Linton wrote, “nor do I think better writers would be able to. It had a smell of dead human flesh but drier, more fungus-like, somewhat sweetish–quite unlike the smell of well-fed corpses rotting under bombed buildings we often smelled–mixed with the smell of putrefaction and dirt.” He drove out of the camp leaning over the side of the jeep to let the wind clean away the tiny particles of the stench that he imagined were physically clinging to him.

The camp was a satellite of Neuengamme and had been built only that February. Conditions deteriorated so quickly that by the time the paratroopers arrived prisoners were eating the livers of those who had died. It was Linton’s first experience of Nazi horrors. “I went back to our office,” he recalled, “with the hatred of everything German even more accentuated, if that was possible.”

The atmosphere was grim and quiet. Major Seward, Linton’s commanding officer, summoned the Mayor to come and see him. He proceeded, Linton wrote,

to give him a tongue lashing that should have been recorded for posterity. I translated it . . . Deep emotional indignation poured out of [him], without any four letter words, but in the most erudite terms I had heard since entering the army. It filled me with pride and humility at the mere fact of being alive and wearing the uniform of the US Army. On finishing, my CO turned away in disgust from the silent Mayor.

Linton took the man outside. He did not want to see a moment’s hesitation, he told him, from the Mayor himself or any other German from Ludwigslust in helping save every one of the camp’s survivors. Later that same day, the Mayor was taken out to the camp to witness the scenes of degradation and death. The next day, he committed suicide by taking poison along with his wife and daughter.³

For the American GIs, Wobbelin was as much of an eye-opener and had much the same effect as Belsen had for the British. It revealed the worst horrors of the regime they were fighting, and gave vivid shape to the cause they served but had never fully understood. “It was a defining moment in our lives,” wrote one of the All-Americans, “who we were, what we believed in, and what we stood for.”⁴

The Mayor’s was not the only self-inflicted death in Ludwigslust. A woman of the town who believed her Luftwaffe husband had died on the Eastern Front shot herself and her two small children when she heard a rumor that the Russians were moving into the town. Linton saw the blood-spattered cribs and learned that the children had survived and been taken to a hospital. A few days later, the husband walked into his office asking where they were. Linton tried to find out, but they had been moved on somewhere else and he was unable to help. The man joined the thousands of others across Europe searching for the remnants of his family.

Linton and his detachment did their best for the Wobbelin survivors by moving most of them to a nearby hospital, but he lent a special hand of his own when he came across a small group of prisoners speaking French. Dressed in their striped uniforms, two of them were clearly “zombies,” captives so mentally inert that they had lost the will to survive.

They will never survive in the crowded hospital, thought Linton. So he loaded them into the back of his jeep and took them to an empty and undamaged office in the town’s railway station. Then he drove around, found some food, and took it back to the leader of the group, who was in the most reasonable condition, warning him to hand it out in only small amounts. Every now and again he returned to see how they were doing, and gradually he saw a change. The eyes of the zombies began to follow his moves and they seemed to listen to his words. “After a few more days of intermittent visits,” he recorded, “the former zombies started talking and I admired the one responsible for saving his colleagues’ lives.”

On one of the visits, the leader asked Linton where he had learned to speak such excellent French. “I told him a little about my life in Paris and my going to the Lycée Claude Bernard,” remembered the American. “I was amazed to learn that one of the former zombies was a classmate of mine in that Lycée. He became a journalist, writing for several years for some Parisian newspaper that was a mouthpiece of the German propaganda organization.” But, Linton went on, the man had been arrested and thrown into the notorious Drancy prison camp “because some other Frenchmen denounced him to the French censors explaining that this journalist was writing in fine innuendoes which the Germans failed to grasp, ridiculing [them] right under their noses.”⁵

Meanwhile, other members of the division were accepting the local surrender of an entire German army. Only hours after Gavin had set up his command post in the Ludwigslust palace, he was visited by Lieutenant-General Kurt von Tippelskirch, commander of the German Twenty-first Army Group. Although his army had been fighting the Russians, von Tippelskirch, like most of the Wehrmacht at this point, was eager to surrender to the Americans. After some initial haggling over terms, he agreed to the unconditional surrender of the 150,000 men under his command.

The next morning, the Germans began pouring through the American lines. They passed in reverse order, beginning with General Staff officers and ending with the front-line combat troops. The headquarters staff included ten generals. As they rode past in their large, chauffeured limousines, they seemed, noted one amazed American paratrooper, “to have prepared for the grand finale. Clean shaven and groomed, uniforms clean and neatly pressed, boots shined, with monocles and medals, they were proud to the very end.” Bumper to bumper, it took several hours for all the vehicles to pass.

At last, on foot, came the weary front-line troops. Some were as old as sixty, others as young as sixteen. “All were dirty and unkempt with shoes held together by rags,” observed the same witness, “[and] there seemed no question they were a soundly beaten force, with no fight left in them.”

But Linton had a very different impression when he ran into a battleship-gray convoy of trucks packed with Doenitz’s unrepentant men on the northern outskirts of the town. The Kriegsmarine officers, like their army counterparts, were immaculately dressed in gray, ankle-length leather overcoats and gold- and silver-decorated caps. But the sailors were truculent and hostile, sitting in their trucks with rifles and fixed bayonets, and far from cooperative. When Linton ordered them to remove the bolts from their rifles, they simply jeered at him and ignored his instructions. Only after the order was transmitted through their captain did they obey.⁶

Two Hungarian cavalry units also proved an exception to the dispirited mien of the German Army front-line troops. Surrendering with hundreds of beautifully groomed horses and immaculately kept and polished equipment, they offered to join forces with the Americans to fight the Russians. Instead, they were relieved of their arms and their mounts. For days afterwards, the Americans enjoyed riding the thoroughbreds in makeshift races around the town.

There was only one minor hitch in the otherwise peaceful proceedings. This came when a company of SS troopers hiding out in nearby woods refused to surrender. A company of paratroopers was sent in with orders either to capture them or wipe them out. Feeling that they had already done their bit in the war, defied all the statistics and come out the other side alive, the paratroopers went in fast and heavy. After they had killed about forty of the SS men, the rest came out waving white flags and pleading, “Bitte! Bitte!” (Please! Please!). They were marched off roughly to the cage.⁷

Linton was confronted with a tidal wave of work as military government and counterintelligence units toiled hard to bring order out of the general chaos. They struggled to find a new mayor untainted by either Nazism or communism but eventually unearthed a white-haired socialist who was willing to take on the task. Linton also had to deal with the local Kreisleiter, the highest official in the area. He found him to be a “master of silent deception” who merely feigned cooperation while subtly resisting. Before long, the man was arrested by the Counter-Intelligence Corps.

Thousands of items of weaponry and military equipment littered the streets. The debris looked like seaweed left on a beach after a storm, thought Linton. Simply supervising its collection to make the roads safe for children, pedestrians and vehicles took up much of his time. There was also the urgent matter of food. For a few days, he devoted most of his energy to supervising the three or four bakeries in town, ensuring they had ample supplies of wheat, and looking after the distribution of loaves to the most needy. He also found a garage piled high with brand-new medical equipment, and made sure that it went to help the concentration camp survivors. Between times, he scoured the town and surrounding countryside for souvenirs to take home, especially small weapons, cameras and any optical instruments he could lay his hands on. He was a keen amateur astronomer and photographer.

Like most young American troops, he struggled hard to live by the rule of nonfraternization. At least once, he enjoyed a brief fling with a girl from Schleswig-Holstein. But most of the time, unlike the combat troops whose job was now over, he was simply too exhausted by the demands of his job for much fun. After rising each dawn to cope with a range of unpredictable emergencies and problems that took up most of the day, he usually keeled over in bed each night and fell fast asleep.

He also had to deal with cases of rape–although not by fellow GIs but by Red Army troops. Thousands of terrified German civilians had reached the town from the East, where Red Army troops had raped and looted their way through East Prussia and Pomerania. “Red Army soldiers don’t believe in ‘individual liaisons’ with German women,” wrote a Russian marine officer in his diary. “Nine, ten, twelve men at a time–they rape them on a collective basis.”⁸ The Red Army had crossed into East Prussia in January. By April, stories of the mass and systematic rape of German women and girls were causing panic everywhere threatened by Stalin’s forces. Goebbels and his propaganda machine exploited them to the full.

The stories were only marginally exaggerated. Not all Soviet soldiers joined in, and occasional efforts were made to stop it. But on the whole, rape and indiscriminate looting accompanied Stalin’s men in their advance into Germany as a matter of course. Mostly, it was explained or justified as vengeance for the destruction wreaked by the Germans in Russia. Typical was the response of Marshal Vasilevsky, commander of the Third Byelorussian Front, when he was told of looting by his troops. “I don’t give a fuck,” he said after a moment’s pause, “it is now time for our soldiers to issue their own justice.” But even this was to put a gloss on what was usually the spontaneous explosion of a potent mix of testosterone and alcohol-fueled desire to humiliate and dominate. By April, the Red Army’s soldiers “tended to regard German women more as a casual right of conquest than a target of hate.”⁹

The town of Schwerin lay close to Ludwigslust and had just been sacked by the Soviet Eighth Guards Army. The Russian novelist and war correspondent Vassily Grossman was there. “Terrible things are happening to German women,” he wrote. “A cultivated German man explains with expressive gestures and broken Russian words that his wife has been raped by ten men that day.” He also reported that a young mother had been continuously raped in a farm shed until her family was finally forced to ask the soldiers to take a break to allow her to breast-feed her baby to stop it crying. All this, noted Grossman, was taking place in full view of the officers supposedly responsible for discipline.¹⁰

Linton had to deal with at least one similar case. One day, a seventy-two-year-old farm woman came to ask his help. Ten Red Army men had raped her the previous day and then thrown her down a flight of stairs. All he could do was direct her to the hospital.

At night, across the canal that formed the demarcation line agreed with the Russians, the American paratroopers frequently heard the screams of German women. “When mankind sends their young men off to wars to kill one another,” wrote one of the paratroopers, “the victims extend beyond the battlefield.”¹¹

Thousands of German women committed suicide to escape being raped. In one small German village, a whole unit of Hitler Youth girls perished in a group wrist-slashing. Others who were raped killed themselves later. Altogether, it is estimated that up to two million German women may have been raped by Stalin’s conquering armies. Of those who became pregnant, it has also been estimated that some 90 percent obtained abortions.¹²

Five days after Linton’s arrival in Ludwigslust, a symbolic reburial ceremony took place in front of the palace for the victims of the Wobbelin camp. First, leading civilians from the town were forced to exhume two hundred bodies from the common pits behind the barbed wire and bring them to the palace. There they were made to dig an individual grave for each one and wrap them in sheets. Then the division’s chaplain, Major George Wood, read out a simple burial service. The camp’s registry had disappeared just before it was liberated, so none of the names of the dead were known, but of the 200 graves, 179 were marked with crosses and 21 with stars of David.

It was Monday 7 May. Several hundred miles to the west, in Reims, France, representatives of the Wehrmacht were putting their signatures to the unconditional surrender of all German forces in Europe.

Meanwhile, high up in the Italian Alps, Fey von Hassell was enjoying her first few days of liberation. The hotel to which they had been brought felt like an “earthly paradise.” She took walks in the woods, delighted in jumping across crystal-clear mountain streams, and enjoyed lashings of good food and wine. Yet, inside, anxiety slowly began to eat away at her relief at being finally free. The last desperate cries by Corrado as he was wrenched from her grasp by the SS nurse rang incessantly in her ears. What had happened to her boys? Would she ever see them again? If so, when? And would they even recognize her? Now that she had little else to worry about, the torment of her lost children began to give her sleepless nights.

Fey’s lifeline, as so often, was Alex von Stauffenberg. He had been her constant soulmate during their ghastly forced odyssey of the last few months, and since the tragic death of his wife they had drawn even closer together. Liberated but still trapped in the mountains, they whiled away the time by taking long walks together through the woods. “Although the loss of the children weighed heavily on my mind and would often dampen my spirits,” she confessed, “I found a kind of inner peace being with Alex, who, after all, had lost practically everything.”¹³

The few days in the mountains provided others in the group with the chance of some quiet time and intimacy, too. Watching over the scene, the eagle eye of SIS officer Sigismund Payne Best missed little. “Although I may have seemed unobservant,” he admitted later, “there was really little . . . which escaped my notice. I was, however, overjoyed when I saw flirtations and incipient love affairs starting, for that proved more than anything that people were on the high road to recovery.”¹⁴

After one of their excursions, Fey and Alex returned to find several camouflaged jeeps parked in front of the hotel and people milling about. It was Friday 4 May. A company of American infantry had finally arrived. Close by, troops of the US Seventh Army advancing from Germany had also driven over the Brenner Pass and linked up with the Fifth Army heading north through Italy. In the process, they had finally put paid to any notion of the Alpine Redoubt. The American troops had already disarmed the German soldiers who had been guarding the group and were also trying to control a bunch of Italian partisans who had arrived on the scene eager for some action. Eventually, they got rid of them.

So, at last, true liberation had come. Most of the American soldiers had never heard of Blum, Schuschnigg or indeed any of the others from the polyglot group that now greeted them, although they knew they were important and loaded them with gifts. This in itself was enough for Blum and his wife. The idea of death had been a constant companion for months, and the Americans’ arrival produced in him a feeling akin to ecstasy. “For several days,” wrote the former French Prime Minister, “we had known we were alive. Now, we knew we were free.”

Food, medicine and clothing materialized overnight, and the group was showered with cigarettes and chocolate. Payne Best had a similar response to Blum: “It was simply astounding,” he remembered, “what trouble they took to promote our comfort and security, and what nice fellows they were, too.” A couple of days later, a flock of allied journalists, photographers and war correspondents descended on the hotel. They interviewed the big names, and the lobby and corridors popped and flashed with the sounds and lights of their cameras.¹⁵

Fey was thankful that she still had a few days of quiet in the mountains before having to adjust to the real world, and to say her slow, inevitable goodbye to the group who had become her surrogate family over the last few terrible months. The following day, a Catholic priest from Munich who had been with the prisoners most of the way said mass in the small stone chapel next to the hotel. Fey, along with many of the others, was Lutheran, but they all went to the service anyway. The priest “thanked God for having protected and saved us,” she wrote. “His sermon was so simple and touching that everyone was profoundly moved in that forlorn mountain chapel, so far from the rest of the world. It was a place perfectly adapted to such a service.”

By contrast, she was irritated by the Protestant service held by Martin Niemoller, the one time U-boat commander. “He marched up and down in front of us as if he were still standing on the bridge of a ship,” she wrote. She recognized well enough that in Britain and the United States he had become a powerful symbol of Christian resistance to Hitler, and that he had shown great personal bravery. But in the circumstances, when she was just thankful to be alive, she did not feel like boasting about personal suffering.¹⁶

Fey’s children were only two among the millions of lost and displaced victims of the war. Now that the fighting was ending, the lucky ones were beginning to return home. Some walked, others were carried by truck, but most were transported by rail. Not long before, the Reichsbahn had been busy shunting millions of troops to the front and millions of Jews to the death camps. Now, in May, it started ferrying displaced persons (DPs) back to their homelands.

Many of the liberators suddenly found themselves overwhelmed with tasks they could never have imagined when they had first donned their uniforms. One such was a British officer who was seconded to Patton’s army to set up a feeding center for DPs. Like Francesca Wilson, he had worked with refugees after the First World War, feeding the starving in Silesia.

On the main line between Munich and Frankfurt lay a small hamlet near to Bamberg named Stullendorf. The station had a couple of sidings and a branch line that could take three trains at a time. Nearby, there was a river where the DPs could bathe. “I had five or six trains each day, 40 trucks to each train, 30 to 40 people to each truck,” recalled the British officer. “And I had trains come through at night, as well. I worked out I had to feed between 12,000 to 22,000 people each day.” Heading north were Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Hungarians. Going south were Italians, Greeks and Yugoslavs. “I had six big boilers holding 500 liters of soup,” he said, “and bread and cheese and American army ration packs, and little packs of sweets for the children. Some of the people had been on the line for two or three days and were very hungry . . . Some of them were still in their concentration camp clothes. Some of the people out of the camps were in a very bad way, dying or too ill to move.” Once, he had to summon a medical team to look after a trainload of people who were seriously ill and covered in sores. More than once, he buried some unfortunate soul.

One day, he received a phone call from Nuremberg. “You’ve got trouble coming,” an American voice said. “Two thousand Russians on a train. They’ve got guns from somewhere and they’re shooting at people as they pass by.” The Russians were also drunk. Almost immediately, a military government officer from Bamberg tore up in his car. “I hear you’re going to have a lot of trouble,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep in my bed and leave you to face all this trouble alone. I’ve alerted some troops. They’ll be here any minute. We’ll lay each side of the track. We’ll put the lights out and give them a reception.”

They waited in the darkness. Then they heard the train approaching. The Russians were shouting and firing their guns. As the locomotive pulled into the station, the Americans suddenly switched on the lights and the Russians found themselves staring at two lines of US infantry pointing automatic weapons straight at them. “That soon sobered them up,” said the British officer, and they gave him no trouble.¹⁷