After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (49 page)

This was a desperate last stand. Pückler-Burghaus had about 6,000 men under his command, mostly experienced troops from the SS Das Reich and Wallenstein Divisions. But they were heavily outnumbered – and had nowhere to go. Yet on the evening of 11 May they beat off the first Russian assault. The Soviets – confident of success – launched a Katyusha rocket barrage and sent in their infantry troops. But they were beaten back.

Red Army soldier Alexei Kuchikov remembered: ‘We were advancing into a forest of spruce trees and visibility was poor. The Germans cleverly exploited the terrain – using the irrigation channels from disused water mills and transforming them into a line of trenches. We were taken aback by the ferocity of their resistance.’

Russians and Americans now worked together on a concerted plan of attack. Major General Sergei Seryogin of the Soviet 104th Guards Rifle Division and Lieutenant Colonel William Allison of the US 4th Armored Division met in the Old Mill House in Cimelice. It was decided that just before dawn the Americans would bring down an artillery barrage on General Pückler-Burghaus’s stronghold from the west and the Russians would do the same from the east. Then Soviet infantry would storm the German position.

The sheer strength of Allied firepower now told. Early on 12 May Russian soldiers overwhelmed the first line of German defences. ‘We jumped into their trenches, throwing grenades and firing our machine guns,’ Alexei Kuchikov recalled. ‘We shot everyone we encountered, whether they were resisting or trying to surrender. Panic broke out amongst the enemy.’

Within hours it was clear that the German position was hopeless. At 9.00 a.m. Pückler-Burghaus signed terms of unconditional surrender in the upper room of Cimelice’s Old Mill House. His men would at last capitulate to the Russians. The terms were witnessed by Major General Seryogin and Lieutenant Colonel Allison: the success had been a joint Allied effort. The SS general – aware that he would be tried in the Soviet Union for war crimes – chose to commit suicide shortly after signing the agreement.

Remaining Wehrmacht and SS units in western Czechoslovakia were rounded up later that day. ‘We surrounded a last group of Germans near Besenov on the evening of 12 May,’ Soviet artilleryman Petr Mikhin – fighting with the 52nd Rifle Division – recalled. ‘We only properly celebrated VE Day on 13 May. Our moment of triumph was bitter-sweet – several of our comrades had been killed after the unconditional surrender had supposedly brought the war to an end.’

But the war in the East was not yet over.

In Yugoslavia, Colonel General Alexander Löhr, the German commander-in-chief in south-east Europe, also defied the unconditional surrender agreements. Löhr had about 13,000 German soldiers under his authority, along with Croatian and Chetnik soldiers who had supported the Wehrmacht in its war against Tito’s Yugoslav communist partisans. He attempted to escape with these troops to British-controlled Austria.

Events intervened. On 9 May General Löhr was captured by the 14th Slovenian Division, a formation allied to Tito’s partisan army, at Topolsica in northern Yugoslavia. In talks with his Yugoslav opponents he offered to exchange all his weapons and supplies in return for safe conduct to Austria. This was refused outright. Löhr was then prevailed upon to agree to a ceasefire – but his men refused to obey these instructions. Löhr then managed to escape, countermanded his orders and opened contact with the British. His troops continued to move north towards Austria.

Tito’s forces now gathered in strength and blocked Löhr’s escape route at Poljana, close to the Austrian border. Field Marshal Alexander, the Allied commander in the region, was jointly occupying the Italian city of Trieste with Tito’s Yugoslav forces. Churchill and Truman wanted the Yugoslavs to leave Trieste and also move out of the Austrian province of Carinthia. This had become a political problem, with the Soviet Union, still looking for a resolution of the Polish issue, cautious in its support of its Yugoslav communist ally.

On the ground, Great Britain realised it was vital to implement the unconditional surrender agreement. In a goodwill gesture, Field Marshal Alexander sent twenty British tanks to reinforce the Yugoslavs at Poljana. In two days of bitter fighting, on 13 and 14 May the German and Croatian troops were defeated, Löhr was captured and the surrender terms imposed by force.

On 15 May the clashes in Yugoslavia ceased and Tito sent his troops a communiqué congratulating them on defeating the remnants of the Wehrmacht. On the same day, the Soviet Information Bureau reported that all military action against the Germans had ended. In the West, fighting against Germany concluded on 7 May, and the announcement of this, and the declaration of VE-Day, was awaited with impatience for a matter of hours. In the East, VE-Day was announced on 9 May and fighting then continued for another week.

Milovan Djilas, fighting with Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia, expressed a sense of grievance over this: ‘On May 9th we greeted the unconditional surrender of Germany – Victory Day – in bitter loneliness. It was as if that joy was not meant for us. No-one invited us to the feast, even though – both as a government and as a people – we had helped prepare it through the most terrible suffering and losses.’

However, fulfilling the unconditional surrender terms required British troops in Austria to return to Tito those soldiers – of Germany’s ally Croatia, and Chetniks who had fought with Wehrmacht divisions in Yugoslavia – who crossed the border after 9 May. Some of these men had been involved in bloody anti-partisan operations, but Tito had promised that all would nevertheless receive trial by military tribunal. This commitment was not kept – and the violence continued. Some Croatian and Chetnik units, disarmed and returned to the Yugoslav army, were brutally massacred. British 8th Army soldiers, who had fought an honourable war in North Africa and Italy, were appalled at having to practise deception or resort to force to return these soldiers to Yugoslavia against their wishes.

The troops of Germany’s allies met with very different fates. The Latvian SS Legion was formed of two divisions – the 15th and 19th. Both had fought on the Eastern Front. But in April 1945 the German High Command ordered the 15th to help defend Berlin – and the Kriegsmarine transported it to Germany, while the 19th remained in the Courland Pocket. The men of the 15th were subsequently able to escape to American lines; the 19th went into Soviet captivity on 9 May.

The Galician SS Division, formed of troops from the Ukraine, managed to reach Rimini in northern Italy, where it was sheltered by General Anders’ Polish II Corps. Anders did not witness the creation of a free Poland but was able to protect these men from deportation to Russia, arguing that the area they were recruited from should be seen historically as part of a greater Poland, not the Soviet Union. This did not correspond to the agreement made between the Allies at Yalta, where Britain and America promised to return to the Russians all those who belonged within the 1939 frontiers of the Soviet Union – but Britain accepted Anders’ plan and more than 7,100 Ukrainians were secretly repatriated within the United Kingdom.

The very last of the fighting – on the Dutch island of Texel – did not come to an end until 20 May. Texel’s garrison force included regular Wehrmacht troops but also a brigade of Georgians from the Soviet Union – men who had been recruited from POW camps and were now willing to fight for the Nazi state.

The Georgians were initially deployed by the Germans to guard supply depots and perform sentry duty. But in April 1945, as Canadian troops made inroads in Wehrmacht positions in north-western Holland, the German High Command instructed this force – the 822nd Battalion of the Georgian Legion – to move to the mainland and engage with the soldiers of the Western Allies. The Georgians baulked at this and their commander – in an uncanny echo of the volte-face of the Vlasov troops – disobeyed these orders and launched an uprising against his German masters.

The Georgian Legion knew that Stalin would not take kindly to soldiers from his home republic collaborating with the Germans – and was particularly fearful of its fate. On 5 April 1945 the men of the 822nd Battalion – realising that active combat against the Western Allies would ensure they were handed back to the Soviet Union as POWs – attacked the Germans instead and took over most of the island. However, they were unable to capture the two largest gun batteries there and the Germans responded quickly, landing several thousand more troops on Texel.

The Wehrmacht was incensed by this betrayal on the part of soldiers formerly under its command. Combat was savage and neither side took prisoners. After several weeks of bloody fighting the Georgians were forced back into their last stronghold, the island’s lighthouse. They resisted defiantly – but the Germans brought up engineering units, blasted holes in the base of the building and forced their way in. Some fifty Georgians were captured there, forced to dig their own graves and then executed.

However, the remaining Georgians – supported by members of the Dutch underground – went into hiding, and as the Germans sought them out, sporadic fighting continued. Neither side recognised the ceasefire signed at Rheims and Karlshorst and a Canadian reconnaissance team reported that clashes were still occurring on Texel on 17 May. Only when the main body of Canadian troops arrived on the island three days later – on 20 May – were hostilities eventually brought to an end.

The Canadians were impressed by the Georgians’ desperate resistance and attempted to intercede on their behalf with the Soviet Union. The Canadian 1st Army commander, Lieutenant General Charles Foulkes, wrote a letter of commendation praising the Georgians as ‘valiant allies’, whose continued resistance had led to more than 4,000 German troops being committed to the island, men who otherwise would have impeded the Canadians’ advance. The 226 Georgian survivors were handed over to the Russians at Wilhelmshaven only after Foulkes’ staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel Lord Tweedsmuir, held talks with Red Army liaison officers and each Georgian had been awarded a certificate of bravery.

The Soviet Union was implacable in pursuit of those of its nationals who had collaborated with the Germans, but whether as a result of the Canadian intervention, or the sensing of a propaganda opportunity, the Georgians enjoyed a near-miraculous escape from the firing squad. Most were briefly held in camps, undertook additional service in the Red Army, and were then allowed to return to their homes – on the strict condition they did not speak about their wartime role.
Pravda
then published an article portraying the men as heroes. No mention was made of their collaboration with the Germans.

Some of the Georgian fighters were even offered bit-parts in a film made of their exploits,
The Crucified Island.
Only these exploits had now been liberally revised. Instead of forming part of the Georgian Legion, the men were recast as POWs kept in a camp on Texel. The film showed them staging an intrepid breakout and then waging war on all the Germans on the island. This became the ‘official’ Soviet version of the fighting on Texel – with the heroism of the Georgians offered as a paean of cinematic praise to the Soviet leader. It was – even by Russian standards – an astonishing recreation of historical events. The men of the Georgian 822nd Battalion had won a most fortunate reprieve.

However, there was little hope for the Vlasov Army, despite its heroic role in the Prague uprising.

On 7 May, with relations between East and West under strain, Soviet marshal Ivan Konev formed a special operations unit, recruited from the Soviet 25th Tank Corps, and provided it with secret instructions. Konev anticipated that as his soldiers approached Prague the Vlasov Army would retreat westwards and try to surrender to the Americans. If they did so, the special Soviet force was ordered to cross the American lines and seize Generals Andrei Vlasov and Sergei Bunyachenko, regardless of the consequences. The Soviet Union was determined to bring these men before a Russian military court and put them on trial as traitors, whatever the ramifications of this for the Grand Alliance.

It was hard for Westerners to understand the deep hatred Russians felt for General Vlasov and all that he represented. In Britain, the most famous turncoat, William Joyce – nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw – had gained notoriety through his radio broadcasts, which always began ‘Germany calling!’ and derided Churchill and the war effort in sarcastic, mocking tones. The British public was discouraged but not actually prohibited from listening to him – and by the end of the war Joyce’s commentary had become the butt of humour. His last broadcast, from Hamburg on 30 April 1945, extolled the heroic defence of Berlin and warned of the menace of Bolshevism – but was delivered with Joyce quite plainly drunk. William Joyce was captured near Flensburg on 28 May after making an unsuccessful attempt to escape to Denmark. He would be tried and executed as a traitor – but the small band of British Fascists who had extolled Nazi Germany’s virtues now became an object of ridicule.

Vlasov symbolised something rather different. He had attempted to portray himself as a patriot, offering the Soviet Union an alternative ideology. But Stalin was astute enough to broaden the appeal of the nation’s struggle into a genuine patriotic war, and Vlasov’s message was strongly contaminated by his collaboration with the Nazi state. Few within Russia were sympathetic to it; on the contrary, his urging of Russians to fight against their fellow countrymen was seen as unnatural and abhorrent. Those who gathered under his banner were viewed with revulsion.

On 11 May the Red Army gained intelligence of Vlasov’s whereabouts. He was at the small town of Lnare, 30 miles south-east of Pilsen, with General Bunyachenko and the 1st Division of the Russian Liberation Army, negotiating with an advance force of the American 90th Infantry Division (part of General Patton’s US Third Army). The commander of the Soviet 25th Tank Corps, Major General Fominykh, now ordered a rapid response unit – Captain Ivan Yakushev’s motorised battalion (attached to the 162nd Tank Brigade) – to capture Vlasov and Bunyachenko at all costs.