CHAPTER SIX

“ICH WAR IMMER DAGEGEN”

Cautiously, he walked along the footpath. It was pitch-black ahead. Breaking the commonsense rule always to go with a buddy, he was patrolling alone. That was why people called him a risk-taker. He was also getting careless. Instead of carrying his M-1 rifle at the ready, firmly with both hands across the front of his body, it was dangling casually from his right hand. Above him to one side was the railway line, running parallel to the path, the occasional dull shine of the steel his only visual guide. From time to time, a distant searchlight lit up the clouds. He could hear the thump, thump of heavy artillery in the background.

Suddenly, something brushed his lip. He heard a slight noise, and felt moisture on his mouth. Licking it with his tongue, he tasted blood. He stood still for a few moments, listened intently, and then, hearing nothing, he moved on slowly. When he finally reached the railway station he walked carefully around it several times. Finally satisfied, he concluded that no German troops were hiding in the buildings.

Dawn was breaking when he set off back down the track. Then he spotted the source of the blood. Across the path at head height was a single strand of barbed wire suspended between a concrete post on one side and a wooden pole on the other. Attached to the pole was a hand grenade. When he had walked into the wire it had tugged at the release string of the grenade, but by some miracle, it had failed to explode. Looking closer, he saw that the barbed wire was badly rusted, so presumably the detonator had got damp as well and not gone off. The grenade was only six feet from his head. He was a lucky man, this time.

Leonard Linton was twenty-three years old. A paratrooper with the American Eighty-second Airborne Division, he was on duty outside Cologne. Germany’s fourth-largest city, on the banks of the Rhine, was little more than a pile of rubble with hardly a building undemolished.

It had been entered by the US First Army early in March. Over a hundred thousand of its inhabitants had died in allied bombing attacks, and a similar number were now living like troglodytes among the ruins. The city, wrote Janet Flanner, one of the first American correspondents to arrive, “is now a model of destruction . . . [It] lies recumbent, without beauty, shapeless in the rubble and loneliness of complete physical defeat. Through its clogged side streets trickles what is left of its life, a dwindled population in black with bundles–the silent German people appropriate to the silent city.” One of the last orders issued by the departing Nazis was still plastered on posters over the city: “Schweigen siegen”–“To keep silent is to win.” Having lost the war of arms, concluded Flanner, defeated Germany was counting again on the psychological victory it had won after the last war–“the victory of silence, lies, whining, energy, devotion, and guile.” She could only hope that the US military government running the city would not fall for it all.¹

Most of the buildings of architectural interest had been destroyed, including at least two of its magnificent Romanesque churches. By some miracle, however, the great Gothic cathedral, with its twin towers reaching over five hundred feet into the sky, was still standing. Its smoke-blackened stone was pitted with shrapnel, and a burned-out Tiger tank still guarded its entrance. The Eighty-second Airborne had moved into the city in early April after the collapse of the Ruhr pocket, when 325,000 German troops had been surrounded and trapped by allied forces before they surrendered and their commander, Field Marshal Walther Model, walked off into a forest and shot himself.

Now the paratroopers were regrouping, awaiting the orders for their next mission deeper into the German heartland. In the meantime, the division set itself up in buildings along the riverfront of the Rhine and established listening posts to detect any movements by Germans on the other bank. From time to time, patrols were sent out to capture prisoners for interrogation by intelligence officers. To the rear, military police and other units stood guard over bridges and factories to prevent sabotage.²

The episode with the grenade was Linton’s third piece of luck in as many months. The first had been a matter of timing. That January, he had been shipped out of New York aboard a luxury Cunard liner, the Aquitania, along with sixteen hundred other GIs. A few days out, he could tell by the stars and the balmy weather they were passing close to the equator. Some of the men thought this meant they were in the South Pacific, heading to fight the Japanese, but he knew that for this they should have already have passed through the Panama Canal. Then the weather grew cold again, and from the Polar Star Linton could tell they were heading north. “We had many drills with life jackets,” he recalled, “and spent hours in food and other lines which whiled away the time. I read everything within reach. Many played poker, and a rumor spread that several women on an upper deck were making a fortune every night off men who came from the lower deck for numerous short visits.”³

January 1945 was a bleak month for the allies. The euphoria of D-Day just six months before had long since evaporated. Paris had been quickly liberated, followed by Brussels, and in September 1944 there was wildly optimistic talk of the war being over that Christmas. But then things started to go badly wrong. The Germans fought back ferociously, there was a spectacular failure to land parachute forces behind the lines at Arnhem, and in December there was almost a major catastrophe for the allies. Back in 1940, Hitler had surprised everyone by launching his attack on France through the heavily forested and hilly area of the Ardennes. Now he fooled the allies again by launching a massive counteroffensive in the same place with the aim of recapturing the vital port of Antwerp and driving a wedge between the American and British armies. It caught them completely off guard. The result was a month of bitter and desperate fighting in appalling winter conditions.

With the stakes enormous for both sides, this “Battle of the Bulge,” as it became known, saw the conflict frequently descend into savagery. Losses were heavy, especially for the Americans, who lost several thousand dead and twenty thousand men taken prisoner in the largest surrender of GIs on foreign soil. Eventually, the allies won, but with no sign yet of the long-promised Soviet offensive on the Eastern Front, pessimism took hold in London and Washington. All the talk was suddenly of war extending to the end of 1945.⁴

When Linton saw the lights of Manhattan disappearing behind him, all that he knew was that the Americans were still taking heavy casualties. The Eighty-second Airborne was in the thick of the fighting, and he assumed he would soon be joining what was known as the “All-American Division.” It was the US Army’s first airborne unit, and along with its rival, the 101st–the “Screaming Eagles”–it formed the elite of American forces, wearing their coveted jump boots and silver parachute badges. “Devils in baggy pants!” one petrified German soldier had yelled when he first confronted the paratroopers–and they had happily adopted the title.

The Aquitania, which had done similar troopship duty in the First World War, was fast enough to cross the Atlantic without convoy protection. But one day a sudden alert sounded, and the ship abruptly changed course and veered to one side. Linton found himself running for his emergency station. Then the captain came on the loudspeaker. He told them that a U-boat had just fired a torpedo at them, and from now on they would be taking a zig-zag course into port. To his surprise, Linton could see land on the horizon on all sides. Everyone stayed in their life jackets, ready for orders, but they all remained calm. The captain came back on the loudspeaker to say (“in very British fashion,” thought Linton) that they had picked up a German broadcast claiming that the Aquitania had been sunk outside Glasgow. Then he welcomed the Americans to Europe. Shortly afterwards, two British tugs appeared and stayed close as they came into the Clyde. A twelve-hour rail journey later, the GIs were in Southampton, boarding a much smaller vessel to cross the English Channel to the French port of Le Havre.

It was a trouble-free crossing, with not a Luftwaffe plane to be seen, but by this time the mood of the paratroopers was sober and quiet, and they could see some heavy destruction in the port. Waiting on the quayside was a steam locomotive and a long line of empty freight cars. Each was stenciled with the numbers 40/8. This meant either forty men or eight horses. The Americans were privileged, though, and only twenty men were assigned to each car.

Linton lucked out. Somehow he managed to wangle himself a place in the “luxury” car, two or three back from the locomotive, and equipped with a jerry can of fresh drinking water, a portable Coleman stove to heat up coffee or soup, and a hole in the corner. This small comfort meant he did not have to wait for the so-called piss stops that the train made from time to time to allow the men to relieve themselves beside the tracks. To avoid boredom, he sometimes rode in the locomotive and got friendly with the crew, from whom he eventually learned they were bound for Verviers. But no one had yet officially revealed their destination, and the officer in charge kept his maps securely by his side. Linton decided not to tell him he knew.

Several hours and many halts later, the train arrived at Verviers in eastern Belgium, on the edge of the Ardennes. Here Linton was issued with an M-1 rifle and an escape kit: a high-quality map printed on silk, a small hacksaw blade in a waxed cardboard container small enough to be hidden in some item of clothing and a tiny, round compass. Given the instructions on where best to conceal it, Linton crudely named it his “asshole compass.” His final pieces of kit included a gas mask and ammunition. Having received them, he clambered aboard a truck, part of a long convoy, and drove off into the cold, foggy night. Some hours later they stopped in a small village and he and twenty-five other men were marched to a nearby farmhouse and told to bed down. Looking around, Linton found a pile of old newspapers and magazines and a box of letters and other documents. All were in German, and many bore official stamps with the Nazi insignia of the German eagle clutching a swastika in its claws.

From this, he concluded he was on German soil. By now, the Battle of the Bulge was officially over and won, but the Americans had suffered their heaviest casualties of the war in Europe so far. He hoped that the fight might have finally gone out of the Germans, but he had hardly arrived before finding that the Germans still had plenty of fight, and his luck was tested again.

He and a few other men were sent out on patrol to locate the enemy. Trucked out to the edge of a forest, they set off on foot through the trees, line abreast, keeping each other in sight so they could communicate silently with hand signals. There was snow on the ground and the tops of the trees had been shredded by low-flying shells and their trunks scarred savagely by shrapnel.

They reached a small ravine, and Linton and two companions were ordered to move around to the left while the others headed off to the right. After a while, they arrived at a small clearing and an abandoned German dugout. As they were looking around, they suddenly heard the low rumbling of a tank coming towards them, and the cracking sound of small trees and undergrowth being crushed beneath its tracks. Quickly, they jumped into the dugout. It was L-shaped, and sturdily reinforced with timber–excellent, thought Linton, for taking cover from artillery fire, and better built than most GIs would have bothered to dig. One of the others readied a wine bottle he was carrying in a sock, filled with oil and gasoline. If he got the chance, he would throw it into the grille of the tank’s rear air intake.

“I was amazingly calm,” Linton wrote. Then a German Tiger tank broke out of the trees and headed straight towards them. Linton got down as low as he could and waited. Everything suddenly went dark. The tank was directly above them. “It was driving right over our emplacement,” he remembered, “when suddenly it made some loud crunching noises and our dugout caved in; obviously the tank alternated its right and left treads into forward and reverse directly above us to collapse the dugout. The sandy earth pulled me downward. I sank with it a little and was buried into immobility but heard the tank move on until all was silent.” Luckily, as the earth poured over him, his helmet slipped over his face, creating a pocket of air. He heard the tank move off into the trees and then lost track of time, but the clammy earth began to chill his body and he realized he might die. He still could not move. Ages seemed to pass before he heard a scraping sound above him. The rest of the patrol had returned to find out what had happened. Luckily, one of them had spotted Linton’s rifle barrel sticking out of the ground.⁵

Soon after this narrow escape, the Eighty-second was sent back for refitting to its main base outside the small town of Sissonne, a few miles from Reims and SHAEF headquarters. Casualties were replaced with fresh GIs and equipment was repaired or replaced from the vast and seemingly inexhaustible stock of supplies pouring in daily to the armies in Europe from the United States. Linton was issued with a brand-new gas mask. Obviously, the chemical weapons experts were expecting the Germans to start using poison gas sooner or later.

Linton’s tent was pitched close to the building that housed divisional HQ and its commander General James (“Slim Jim”) Gavin. Close by, always at the ready for take-off, stood his personal C-47. At thirty-seven, Gavin was the youngest general in the American Army since the Civil War, a Brooklyn-born son of impoverished Irish immigrants with handsome good looks, oodles of glamour and a driving, aggressive desire to hit the enemy fast and hard. One day, at dusk, Linton saw Gavin’s plane take off; it returned the next morning. Almost immediately, rumors swept through the base that Gavin had met with Eisenhower to receive the All-Americans’ new assignment: an airborne assault on Berlin.

To most of the paratroopers, this came as a relief. Many had parachuted into Sicily, Italy, Normandy–where they had jumped just a few hours before the ground forces landed on the D-Day beaches to seize a vital bridgehead–and Holland. But since then, they had seen action only on the ground. It seemed like a frustrating waste of all their hard training. What was the point of wearing their treasured and distinctive jump boots? True, German propaganda had built them up as a force to be dreaded, and their tough reputation alone worked wonders–many an enemy unit threw in the towel just knowing they were coming, whether they parachuted behind enemy lines or not. On the other hand, thought Linton more practically, the boots had not been very warm nor sufficiently sturdy for the tough winter conditions they had just endured.

So the rumors about Berlin electrified everyone at the base. In a carefully sealed office and with maps concealed behind covers, Gavin secretly briefed a handful of his senior officers in a vain attempt to keep it under wraps. The drop would be part of Operation Eclipse, he told them, a plan that would be activated if the Germans appeared to be on the edge of imminent collapse. The All-Americans’ target was Tempelhof airfield; the rival Screaming Eagles would capture Gatow, another airfield in the city. Then they would both hang on until the ground forces arrived.⁶

Intensive parachute training began, and at an abandoned airfield close to Sissonne rehearsals started for the landings. Linton, though, decided on some preparations of his own. Paris was only three hours away if he hitch-hiked, easy enough to do given the hundreds of military vehicles going to and from the liberated French capital, fun city for thousands of GIs. So off he went, partly to enjoy himself before the assault on Berlin, but also, so he told himself, to get hold of some street maps of Hitler’s capital more detailed than those provided by the US Army.

After tracking down a suitable one on the Left Bank, he found a girl and enjoyed what Paris could offer. Two or three times a day he phoned back to a buddy at Sissonne to ask whether an alert had been issued. His leave was unofficial, and strictly speaking he was AWOL, but everyone did it–Paris was too close to resist–and his buddies were covering for him. If the order came to move, or his absence was noted, he would get back immediately.

This he promptly did after being told his name had been called out to report to personnel. He raced back to base, where he was asked about his knowledge of Russians and of Soviet society. It all came to nothing, but confirmed to Linton that the rumors about Berlin were true. Yet, despite his best efforts, he could find out nothing more. Eventually, the rumors subsided and Berlin disappeared altogether as a talking point. Linton knew nothing, of course, of the great row that had erupted between Montgomery and Eisenhower over the fate of the city.

Instead, he was soon sent to Cologne. By the time he reached the city, he was almost a hardened veteran of battle. He had learned how to distinguish between the sounds of shells screaming overhead, either from US artillery behind him or from the Germans ahead. At first, he always dived for cover, but then, like the old timers, he just went about his business if the sound told him the shells were not going to land close by. Even when the dreaded “88” German shells whizzed fifty yards overhead, he kept on moving. Occasionally, he heard V1 missiles flying overhead, bound for the Belgian cities of Liège and Antwerp.

He also learned how to translate everyday army slang into the language of his training school back in the States. Before his close encounter with the Tiger tank, the sergeant had told Linton’s patrol: “Everything is f-cked up and no one knows where the f-cking front or the f-cking rear is. We are going into the f-cking forest in a f-cking skirmish line to find the f-cking Krauts and come the f-ck back to report that.” In other words, realized Linton, this was a reconnaissance patrol.

He was hardened now, too, to the sight of death. Once on a side road, he had come across two burned-out tanks, one American and a German Tiger. The latter’s feared armor-piercing gun was pointing sideways at the American tank, whose own gun was aimed at the Tiger. They had fired at each other simultaneously, each with deadly effect. Linton clambered on top of the Tiger and peered inside. “I could clearly see the light gray powdery remains of the crew burned by the large amounts of gas and oil these tanks contain as well as from the explosion of their cannons and machine gun ammunition,” he wrote. “Nothing recognizably human remained except a metal belt buckle with charred remnants of leather.” He chose not to look inside the American tank. Eventually, such sights became normal and he stopped looking inside because he always saw the same thing.⁷

He also now knew that in the heat of battle the rules of war were quickly bent. By the time he arrived at the front, everyone had heard about the Malmédy massacre. It had occurred during an especially desperate moment during the Battle of the Bulge, when an American unit rushing to reinforce the beleaguered town of St. Vith was captured at Malmédy by troops of the First SS Panzer Division. The Germans herded the Americans into a field and opened up with machine-guns. When the firing stopped, SS men walked among the bodies and shot anyone still alive. Eighty-one bodies were later recovered, their hands still tied behind their backs. It was one of several such atrocities carried out by the same SS division during the battle. Most of them also involved Belgian men, women and children murdered in cold blood in their own homes.

The reaction to Malmédy was predictable and immediate. As Linton observed, “these and innumerable other German brutalities simply did not bring out the milk of human kindness in our troops.” One US unit, according to an American war reporter, was issued with the blunt and unmistakable order: “No SS troops or paratroopers will be taken prisoner but will be shot on sight.” Soon afterwards, when twenty-one German soldiers were forced by a firefight out of a cellar being used as a first-aid post, they were cut down by machine-gun fire at the doorway. One GI remembered another act of revenge for Malmédy: “We were bringing in casualties. The captain said, ‘Take them out and shoot ’em.’ And they did. It was awful. He murdered them.”⁸

Often such crimes were committed in the heat of battle, but this was not always the case. Captured German soldiers had to be marched back to the prisoners’ cages in the rear, sometimes a distance of several miles, and afterwards the men detailed for the task had to return to their unit. This made for a journey of several miles, sometimes through heavy snow, and always at considerable personal risk. Especially if the German prisoners belonged to the SS, their chances of arriving alive at the cages were slim. Frequently, instead, they were reported as “shot while trying to escape.” Undoubtedly some did try to escape–SS officers had every reason to worry about falling into allied hands–and it was not unknown for German POWs to hide grenades on their bodies then blow up their allied escorts. You could never be too careful, and survival was the name of the game. But it was common knowledge among GIs that the march to the cage often meant an automatic death sentence.

Nor was it any different on the British and Canadian front. Since the Normandy landings, they too had learned to be wary of German prisoners, especially those pretending to surrender. There were dozens of examples of allied soldiers being killed by Germans feigning death or capitulation, then suddenly opening fire–as Bryan Samain had learned. Inevitably, survival instincts kicked in. “When the Jerries came in with their hands up shouting ‘Kamerad,’ ” said one Canadian soldier happily during the bitter battle for Caen, “we just bowled them over with bursts of fire.”⁹ Here, too, SS prisoners were the most likely to be slaughtered, often as a result of their own wanton disregard of the laws of war. On the Belgian–Dutch border a group of SS prisoners was being walked through the streets of a town when one of them threw a grenade at a group of British officers and killed a regimental commander. Every one of the SS prisoners was shot. Sometimes, allied soldiers also responded to requests for revenge from civilians. “There were a lot of areas where [the SS] had killed the people in the towns and villages and we’d get to hear about it,” said one allied veteran. “There weren’t too many prisoners taken in a place like that.”¹⁰

In the end, though, the shooting of German prisoners proved counterproductive. “The POW cages were not getting any significant inflow and the interrogators not getting the raw material they needed for good battlefield intelligence,” Linton recorded. And, as Geoffrey Cox was finding out in Italy, first-hand and up-to-date information from prisoners could prove vital for hard-pressed intelligence staff.

So, without acknowledging that illegal shootings had ever occurred, orders were issued to increase the flow of prisoners to the cages. Everyone knew what this meant. Linton was unfazed by the shooting of captured SS men, but like the vast majority of GIs, he avoided getting involved himself, and when the heat of battle had died down, he spoke out against it.¹¹

As for interrogation, this too proved a flexible concept. Under the Geneva Convention, a prisoner of war was obliged to give only his name, rank and serial number, and should not be subjected to any violence. But one day Linton witnessed a blatant breach of the rule. His unit had brought in a prisoner, a Wehrmacht captain who was determined to give only the minimal personal information required by the Convention. Yet, from other prisoners already captured, the American interrogators knew that the captain was the artillery fire co-ordinating officer of his unit. This meant that he certainly knew the location of the German artillery batteries and could pinpoint them ahead of the forthcoming American attack. “Time was short, tensions high, life was cheap, human feelings absolutely worthless [but our] troopers’ lives on the other hand were the only precious thing,” noted Linton, who was sitting in on the session.

Finally, after the German once again insisted on his rights, the frustrated interrogating officer picked up the phone on his desk and muttered a few quiet words into the mouthpiece. Almost immediately from the next room in stormed another IPW (interrogator of prisoners of war). He was unshaven and exhausted, his trench coat wet and muddy. He rushed up to the German officer and smacked his fist right into the man’s face. “Talk or you’ll get more since the Wehrmacht buried the Geneva Convention,” he snarled. The German smartly began to talk. But, he insisted, “only under protest.”¹²

This, too, was no isolated incident. Again, it boiled down to the survival instinct trumping the rules of law drawn up in peacetime by lawyers sitting at a table. One British soldier witnessed a scene involving a captured German sniper brought in for interrogation by a brigadier. “An officer held a pistol at his temple as the brigadier tried to interrogate him,” the soldier recorded. “He said nothing. I watched horrified in case the officer pulled the trigger. I can still see the expression on the prisoner’s face as he expected to have his brains blown out.”¹³

Then there was looting. This was strictly forbidden under army regulations, but under the guise of “souvenir hunting” it was widely practiced by all armies. This was especially true during the first few hours after a town or city was captured. Popular prizes for British, American and Canadian troops were Wehrmacht or Nazi memorabilia, such as Luger pistols, Nazi flags and other party insignia, medals, Schmeisser machine-pistols, daggers, cameras and other easily transportable items.

Here again, definitions varied according to time and circumstance. Linton shared the general view that the SS was a legitimate target for “souvenirs.” The wallets of captured SS men would be emptied and family photos thrown into one pile; ID papers and orders into another; German money into another; and French, Belgian or Dutch currency shared out by the GIs. But while this was thought to be legitimate “liberation” on the battlefield, later it morphed into illegitimate looting–especially if it was directed against civilians at roadblocks, for example.

Soon, Linton was deeply enmeshed in dealing daily with civilians. After they learned that he spoke fluent German, staff at the Eighty-second Airborne HQ sent him to Romilly in France for a short course on military government. MG units, as they were called, were attached to combat units to enforce occupation policy in the immediate wake of the advancing front line. Linton was taught how Germany was divided into provinces, counties, cities, towns and villages, and which authorities were in charge of which services. He learned how the civil police and the fire services operated, how postal and telephone services functioned, who provided water supplies, and how the railways, canals and other waterways were organized. All these services would come under allied control once the fighting passed on. He also discovered that the entire Nazi Party apparatus would be abolished and the secret and political police dissolved, along with all the German armed forces, while Nazi officials at every level of German administration would be immediately removed from office.

The basic idea was to keep German society functioning in spite of all this. People like Linton were being trained to fill the vacuum caused by the removal of the Nazis, in part by quickly finding suitable replacements from among the German population who were untainted by Nazism. Following immediately behind the combat troops, MG units (known as G-5 units in the US Army) would arrive in a town, set up office and start issuing orders to local German officials. Their first act was invariably to post up a large notice in prominent places marked “Proclamation No. 1.” Written in German and English, and signed by Eisenhower as Supreme Commander, it announced that he was assuming all control and establishing military government. After any Nazis in the “automatic arrest” category had been identified and locked up, replacements were appointed.

This was a massive challenge in itself. To make it more difficult, however, it all had to be done under the strict rule, controversial from the start and more often than not simply breached, of “nonfraternization.” “There must be no fraternization. This is absolute! . . . you will not visit German homes or associate with Germans on terms of friendly intimacy, either in public or private. They must never be taken into your confidence,” read the US Army guide handed out to all GIs as they crossed the frontier into Germany. To make sure they always had it handy, they were instructed to carry it securely inside the liner of their steel helmet. The Stars and Stripes, the GIs’ newspaper, put it more colloquially: “Don’t get chummy with Jerry,” it urged. “In heart, body and spirit, every German is a Hitler.”¹⁴

The pocketbook given to British and Commonwealth troops contained similar advice. Much of it read like an elementary travel guide for backpackers, with a lengthy introduction on German history and the Nazis followed by chapters on society, food, beer, sport, money, weights and measures, religion, literature, music and health, along with a glossary of useful words and phrases such as “Bitte,” “Danke sehr,” “Guten Morgen,” and “Wie heissen Sie?” But its main objective was to warn the British soldiers against being soft or sentimental about the Germans. “You may see many pitiful sights,” it warned. “Hard luck stories may somehow reach you. Some of them may be true, at least in part, but most will be hypocritical attempts to win sympathy. For, taken as a whole,” declared the handbook, “the German is brutal when he is winning, and is sorry for himself and whines for sympathy when he is beaten.” It continued in this style, generalizing that all Germans “adore military show” and “love melancholy songs.”

The reader was repeatedly warned that this was the second time in thirty years that the Germans had started and lost a war in Europe. This time, however, unlike before, they had to have it made unmistakably clear that they had been well and truly beaten. “We were taken in by them after the last war,” the handbook declared, “and so we let ourselves in for this war.” It acknowledged that there were many sincere anti-Nazi Germans, but many would pretend to be, and almost all would have some axe to grind. That was one of the reasons, the book explained, for the order not to fraternize.

It ended with a list of dos and don’ts. Among the former, it urged troops to remember that they were representatives of Britain and the Commonwealth, to set an example, to be smart and soldierly, firm and fair, to go easy on the schnapps, and to remember that in Germany “venereal diseases strike at every fourth person between the ages of 15 and 41.” Next to that, the injunction to “KEEP GERMANS AT A DISTANCE, even those with whom you have official dealings,” seemed almost redundant.

Among the don’ts were injunctions not to be sentimental–“the Germans have only themselves to blame”–not to believe German accounts of the war or the events that had led up to it, not to believe tales that were critical about Britain’s allies or the dominions–“They are aimed at sowing ill will between us”–and not to be taken in by superficial resemblances between the Germans and themselves. It concluded by reminding the reader of the fundamental need for security. The war was not over even if there was no fighting where the reader found himself, and Germans must still be regarded as “dangerous enemies” until the final peace settlement was reached. Nazi agents, propagandists and saboteurs were still at work, the book warned. Life in Germany, it declared, “will demand your constant vigilance, alertness, and self-confidence. Each one of you has a job to do . . . See that you carry it through . . . The more thorough we are now the less likely are we to have trouble in the future.”¹⁵

It all made sense, up to a point. As long as the fighting continued, mixing with enemy civilians could compromise vital security and give away useful information–especially if, as the allies feared, there was a serious Werewolf movement to worry about. But the main purpose of the ban was to make it clear to the Germans that they were a nation guilty of aggression and criminality and had made themselves pariahs and outcasts of the civilized world.

The policy worked–more or less–in dealings with local officials appointed by the allies to carry out basic administrative tasks and keep things running. They were simply issued orders and had to comply. But once the fighting stopped, and troops felt increasingly secure, non-fraternization rapidly began to break down. Not being friendly to small children, being forbidden from handing them chewing gum or candies, and from even smiling and talking with them, proved almost impossible for most soldiers from the start.

But what really broke the “frat ban” was sex. This was especially true after the fighting stopped and the initial horror over the discovery of camps such as Buchenwald and Belsen had faded. To the delight of allied soldiers, German women proved little different from the women of France, Belgium and Holland. The standard fine for breaking the ban in the American sector was sixty-five dollars; so, inevitably, propositioning German women became known as “the sixty-five-dollar question.” Thousands of allied soldiers thought the price well worth it–even if they were caught. Sex could be had for little more than a packet of cigarettes, which in the general breakdown of society acted as basic currency. As did chocolate. It has been estimated that some 90 percent of GIs ignored the frat ban when it came to sex.

Indeed, a whole vocabulary of slang grew up around the ban. Non- fraternization became known as “nonfertilization.” Simply to go out with a Fräulein was known as “Goin’ fratin’,” while to sleep with one was “to frat”–a convenient alternative to the more familiar four-letter word for the same activity. In the British Army, the standard-issue cheese or corned-beef sandwich–a proven way to “catch” a woman–was known as a “frat sandwich.” And to the tune of “Lili Marlene” allied soldiers sang, “Underneath the bushes/You take your piece of frat.”¹⁶

One American soldier recorded his experiences of fratting in Brunswick, which became the headquarters of the US Ninth Army when the fighting stopped. A peacetime psychologist, he was given the mission of exploring “the German mentality.” He took his task seriously and roamed the city’s streets. Everywhere, he recorded, “women, some of them beautiful and most of them young, accosted us and whispered invitations. They would pass slowly, give us a long sideways look and murmur, “I live all by myself; would you like to come up and see me?’’ There was virtually no competition from German men, who were nearly all still in the Wehrmacht, in prison or in hospital.¹⁷

German women were now the sole breadwinners for millions of families and survival was the name of the game. “Women from all walks of life,” writes one historian, “flocked to the barracks and billets of British soldiers where they traded their bodies for coffee, cigarettes, and food. Some of the more desperate individuals at many camps wore nothing more than shoes and coats, always ready to pleasure another man in order to save her family from starvation.” Late in 1945, a German police official reported, “It is impossible to distinguish between good girls and bad girls in Germany. Even nice girls of good families, good education and fine backgrounds have discovered their bodies afford the only real living. Moral standards have crashed to a new low.”¹⁸

Leonard Linton’s life as a corporal in G-5 began outside Cologne, when his commanding officer ordered him to find a billet for the unit. Scouting around in his jeep, he spotted a suitable-looking villa that had suffered no obvious damage. In he marched and handed over a pocket-sized copy of Proclamation No. 1 to the elderly occupant. The man was visibly trembling with fear. Standing over him, Linton made him read it. Then he told the German he had thirty minutes to pack his bags and get out. He never saw the man again.

Soon, though, he was overwhelmed by a pile of problems that kept him and the other G-5 personnel working well past curfew hours. There were anxious relatives querying the fate of family members in the automatic arrest category, individuals protesting their dismissal from office, others seeking jobs, and yet more proclaiming that their membership in the Nazi Party had meant nothing serious. Claimants lined up outside his office requesting extra food rations, seeking permits to travel outside the restricted zone around their residence, asking for medical help, looking for a roof over their head, and an abundance of other requests. Wherever he could, Linton referred them all to the local German civilian administration, some of which was still being run by Nazis. Theoretically, such officials should have been dismissed, but practical considerations sometimes led to a waiving of that rule. Such was the case with the local water supplies, where the only competent technician was a party member. Until someone else could be found, he was left in place.

In Linton’s dealings with German civilians, two main refrains dominated the conversations: “Ich war immer dagegen” (“I was always against the Nazis”) and “I had [or helped] a Jewish friend.” If he added up the professed anti-Nazis, he noted wryly, the vast roaring crowds that had once greeted Hitler must have been a mirage. As for the Jews, to go by the number that kindly Germans had claimed to help, they must have totaled fifty million. Sometimes, before he learned not to bother, he would ask for the names and details of the Jews involved. “Oh, they disappeared without trace,” would come the response. To which Linton would crudely riposte, “No, they left in a cloud of smoke, perhaps at Auschwitz.” Rarely did this evoke anything but silence, except for the occasional disclaimer: “I knew nothing about that.” Such disavowals were even harder to take after Linton’s commanding officer arranged for explicit photographs from Bergen-Belsen to be posted in the unit’s reception area. Here, German civilians waited, sometimes for hours, for their problems to be addressed. When a few of them suggested the pictures were nothing but allied propaganda, Linton’s anger bubbled over in a way he later regretted.

One day he stopped to have lunch at an army street kitchen. Standing in line, he got the usual generous GI serving slapped on his plate. But this time, instead of one large steak, he received two, along with the usual pile of mashed potatoes, a dollop of rich steaming-hot gravy, and for dessert canned peach slices. He found he could eat only half of the meal, so he scraped what was left into the rubbish bin, which was already half full. As he did so, a few blond and blue-eyed skinny German boys aged about seven or eight tried desperately to scoop up some of it. Furious, he made sure none of them got their hands on any of it. “I hated their looks only because they were German and somehow responsible for the . . . misery we saw,” he confessed. It took several months for such feelings to subside. He was far from alone, and lording plentiful food over starving Germans was a common way of behaving, but in the future he remembered the moment as “probably the blackest day of my life.”¹⁹

A fellow All-American who shared Linton’s view tried to enforce the ban when it came to relations between his men and German women. He fully understood the men’s sexual needs, but he found it hard to accept the willingness of the German women to sleep with their enemy for either sexual pleasure or material gain. One night on patrol he opened a barn door, lighting up the scene inside with the powerful beam of his motorcycle headlight. What met his eyes, he wrote, was “a love fest in a haymow.” The men quickly scattered, but he rounded up three of the women for breaking the dawn-to-dusk curfew and locked them in an unlit cellar for forty-eight hours without food or water, to make an example of them.²⁰

All this might have kept Linton hard at work until the day of German surrender, but then Eisenhower made a decision that was to affect every single man in Gavin’s division. The issue of Berlin was still simmering in the background, poisoning relations between the allies. To resolve it once and for all, on Hitler’s birthday Eisenhower flew to the headquarters of Field Marshal Montgomery for yet another tête-à-tête about strategy. Montgomery was still smarting about Eisenhower’s Berlin decision, one made even harder to bear because he had also taken the US Ninth Army away from Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group to be used by Bradley in the drive into central Germany.

So difficult had things become that before seeing Montgomery, Eisenhower had made a special flight to London to talk personally with Churchill about the issue. Reluctantly, the Prime Minister finally accepted that the Russians should be the first to enter Berlin and that it made little sense for the allies, who were not yet across the Elbe in much strength but had advanced beyond the range of fighter support, to make an attempt. As an alternative, they agreed that another German city now urgently merited their attention: Lübeck, on the Baltic coast. “Our arrival at Lübeck before our Russian friends . . . would save a lot of argument later on,” Churchill told Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, after his talk with Eisenhower. “There is no reason why the Russians should occupy Denmark, which is a country to be liberated and to have its strength restored. Our position at Lübeck, if we get it, would be decisive in this matter.” This was not the only political matter decided between Eisenhower and Churchill. The Prime Minister also agreed with the Supreme Commander’s decision to capture the German atomic research facilities near Stuttgart before the French First Army arrived.²¹

When Montgomery greeted Eisenhower he was in his usual tetchy mood: he felt hamstrung, his campaign had stalled, and his forces, unlike those of the Americans, were not yet across the Elbe. For his part, Eisenhower felt Montgomery was plodding and needed firm encouragement to speed up his progress. His view was reinforced by Bradley, who intensely disliked the British Commander and, as he scathingly wrote later, believed that he was reluctant “to go for the jugular, to make the kill, take risks.”

So the Supreme Commander spoke frankly. Unless the British speeded up and reached Lübeck and the Baltic soon, he warned, the Russians might beat him to it, reach the Danish border, and perhaps even keep on going into Denmark itself. For political reasons alone this was undesirable, but strategically it could be disastrous. Failure to close off the base of the Jutland Peninsula might enable the Germans to evacuate a large number of their forces through Denmark to Norway for the establishment of a northern redoubt. This prospect did not play such a large part in SHAEF fears as did its southern counterpart, but Eisenhower was worried enough about the possibility for it to color his calculations.

To encourage Montgomery, who made noises about the Elbe being almost as bad a challenge as the Rhine, Eisenhower offered him additional help in the shape of Matthew Ridgway’s XVIII Airborne Corps. Reluctantly, Montgomery accepted the offer–but only after several days of wavering. Ridgway’s corps included the US Seventh Armored and Eighth Infantry divisions, the British Sixth Airborne Division, and Gavin’s Eighty-second Airborne.

Within a matter of days, Gavin’s men received their orders to quit Cologne and go like hell for the Elbe.²²

For Linton, though, there was time for one last mission. He was called into the office of his commanding officer and told that information had just come in about a significant arms and ammunition dump concealed by the Germans in the Ruhr. The informant was a Russian from a nearby recently liberated slave labor camp. The Americans had been prepared for just about every occupation problem except the vast number of such Nazi victims, and they were almost overwhelmed by the task of dealing with them, but here, it seemed, was something promising, a lead that demanded to be followed up.

Linton was detailed to interrogate the man further. The Russian was about twenty-four and explained that he had been working on a farm digging potatoes and beets when, over several nights, he saw the Germans burying their supplies: weapons, ammunition and radios.

“Did you see any Leica cameras?” asked Linton.

“Yes, quite a few,” replied the Russian.

“I always wanted a Leica,” said the commanding officer dreamily when Linton reported back, and promptly ordered a raid. The Russian jabbed his finger at a point on a map, and off roared Linton and a squad of GIs in a couple of jeeps with the man in tow. It was not so much the prospect of some personal loot that excited them–any Leica they found would obviously become the CO’s–as the hope that at last they had received some solid information about a persistent problem: the Werewolves.

Shortly before the First World War, a north German writer named Hermann Lons had published Der Wehrwölf, a novel based on the semi-mythical “Werewolves”–peasant guerrillas of the Lüneberg Heath who had fought the Swedes and foreign mercenaries during the Thirty Years’ War. Their bloodthirsty vigilantism and sadistic killings were legitimate “folk” justice, argued Lons, because normal law and order had broken down. Close to the soil and roaming through the forests, he constantly compared them to wolves. It was an image that resonated deeply in a nation brought up on the dark and frightening tales of the Grimm brothers. (Significantly, when Hitler chose an alias for himself in the 1920s it was “Herr Wolf,” and his Eastern Front headquarters hidden in the forests of East Prussia was known as the “Wolf’s Lair.”)

Lons’s book was a bestseller in Germany and inspired at least one of the Freikorps groups that waged guerrilla warfare against the Poles in post–First World War Upper Silesia. In 1944, as the Western allies crossed into Germany, the Nazi Party published a special edition of the novel and excerpts also appeared in several newspapers. The SS also began to organize special Werewolf units. Because all talk of defeat was strictly forbidden, their task would be to harass enemy forces in areas “temporarily” occupied by the allies, and, as befitted guerrilla warfare, they were to form and fight in individual and highly decentralized cells. Their national coordinator was SS Oberstgruppenführer Hans Adolf Prützmann, a Freikorps veteran from Upper Silesia.

The allies were significantly worried about Prützmann’s Werewolves, as well as other behind-the-lines German resistance groups that might cause trouble. After all, they had themselves successfully created the SOE and OSS to create murder and mayhem behind the German lines. This concern deepened after a Werewolf group assassinated the American-appointed Mayor of Aachen in March 1945 and intensified with the first broadcast at the beginning of April of “Werewolf Radio.”

This was a last-ditch effort by Goebbels to inspire behind-the-lines resistance against the British and Americans, something that had so far been conspicuously lacking. “Hatred is our prayer and revenge is our war cry,” announced the station in its inaugural broadcast. “Woe to foreigners who torture and oppress our people, but threefold woe to the traitors among our own people who help them.” Naming and shaming Germans who collaborated with the allies was as much the station’s purpose as targeting allied soldiers.

But how extensive and serious was the threat? Allied counterintelligence staff circulated endless warnings to units at the front and ceaselessly urged caution. If what the Nazis threatened was true, then a serious danger still lurked ahead for the allied armies. Typical was a nineteen-page report issued five days after Hitler’s birthday. After accurately identifying Prützmann as the movement’s leader, and reminding readers of the Aachen Mayor’s murder, it concluded that the Werewolf danger could “hardly be over-rated,” especially as early successes might catch the imagination of fanatical members of the Hitler Youth.²³

Almost every day a similar intelligence bulletin from SHAEF headquarters crossed Linton’s desk, warning him to keep an eye open for any sign of Werewolves. They were supposedly highly organized: arms and ammunition, for example, might be concealed in cans disguised to look like tinned goods, and were coded with certain letters and numbers. Fortunately, learned Linton, SHAEF had secured copies of all the codes and could identify which cans were innocent and which suspect.

He also received a bulletin detailing an almost diabolical cleverness on the part of the Werewolves. The Germans, claimed the SHAEF experts, were able to transform a high explosive into threads, out of which they could fashion overcoats. It would be possible for a man to wear such a garment and pass undetected through a control point. All he would need to do later was take it off, roll it up tightly, attach a conventional detonator, and he could blow up a bridge.

This and other similar dirty tricks seemed highly plausible to Linton. After all, the Germans were still fighting on despite all the odds against them. So why would they not have put in place an organized resistance that they could mobilize after their surrender? France and Norway had been defeated, and look what had happened there, he reasoned. The bulletins were circulated to all units. GIs were warned not to wander out alone, to keep weapons at the ready and to report all sabotage.

Now, it seemed, as Linton and the jeeps headed off into the German countryside, they were at last on to something concrete. At first, their Russian guide appeared disoriented by all the rubble and debris from the recent fighting. Then, suddenly, he pointed at a large farmhouse with a high stone wall. The jeeps roared in, surrounded the building and screeched to a halt. The GIs leaped out with their machine-guns at the ready. Linton walked into the building behind the Russian. Inside, huddled against a wall, he saw ten to fifteen Germans, mostly men, but some women and a girl of about eight. The Russian was shouting and pointing at them, tugging at Linton’s sleeve and pleading with him to let him shoot them. Linton calmed him down, then read out Proclamation No. 1 to the farmer and asked him if the farm contained any hidden weapons. “No,” replied the man. Linton therefore asked the Russian to point out the spot where he claimed to have seen the equipment being buried.

He went straight to a barn, opened the door, and stomped on the ground close to a cart. It sounded hollow. Linton asked the farmer for the truth this time. The man said they had hidden some family items for safekeeping. It was true as well, he admitted, that the Russian was one of more than twenty field workers assigned to him by the local Labor Office for help with the harvest. But, he insisted, all the Russians had been very well treated and ate the same food as his own family. He even asked why the man was so angry, and concluded by saying that farming people had never been for Hitler, that most of them had never heard of the concentration camps, and that they were glad the war was over so they could all go back to their work in the fields. To Linton, it all sounded drearily familiar.

While the farmer coolly talked, the GIs were breaking through the floor. It looked highly suspicious. Down below they found an oblong room lined with shelves. Many were piled with household items such as sheets, towels and clothing. There were also a number of cardboard boxes. To save time, the GIs simply ripped them open with their bayonets and within minutes the place looked as though a tornado had torn through it. But, to their increasing fury, they found not a single weapon, not a single radio and not even a single Leica, only a battered old Brownie box camera that belonged to the little girl.

The whole affair, it was suddenly clear, had been a wild-goose chase caused by the Russian’s bitter if understandable desire to visit revenge on his former German boss. He barely got back alive. The GIs threatened to kill him, and twice Linton had to stop them. But once back in Cologne he was happy to deliver the man to his camp, which was now being firmly and roughly administered by Red Army officer POWs. Here, Linton assumed, the man would be court-martialed, and perhaps even shot. But he was far too busy to return there so never found out the man’s fate. He continued to remain on the alert, however, for any signs of real Werewolf activity.²⁴

Other units did likewise. One of them moved into Bonn specifically to neutralize the potential resistance threat by intensive house-to-house searches for illegal arms dumps. “We carried out this search in a manner designed to convince the local population that we meant business,” recalled one of the paratroopers involved.

After dividing the city into sectors, the sectors to be searched were sealed off. The first day, I led a team that searched Bonn City Hall and its adjoining air raid shelter. The shelter, which rose several stories above ground, was also a flak tower. There were four or five underground levels . . . [where] . . . we discovered room after room filled with oil paintings and other art objects. I reported this to the US military government authorities.

The next day, the unit searched every building in the center of the city. When owners complained that the keys had been lost, the paratroopers shot a few locks to pieces until they “got the message.” But the only find of any significance was a cellar full of wine and spirits. After some civilians moved the stash to another location under cover of darkness, the paratroopers quickly located it, brought up a truck and drove it away.

But of Werewolves, there was not a sign.²⁵