All Hell Let Loose (100 page)

The chief impediment to the Soviet advance was the weather. A sudden thaw slowed to a crawl armoured movement through slush and mud. By 3 February, Zhukov’s and Konev’s armies held a line along the Oder from Kustrin, thirty-five miles east of Berlin, to the Czech border, with bridgeheads on the western bank. On the 5th, Hitler’s commander in Hungary reported: ‘Amid all these stresses and strains, no improvement in morale or performance is visible. The numerical superiority of the enemy, combined with knowledge that the battle is now being fought on German soil, has proved very demoralising for the men. Their only nourishment is a slice of bread and some horsemeat. Movement of any kind is hampered by their physical weakness. In spite of all this and six weeks’ unfulfilled promises of relief, they fight tenaciously and obey orders.’ The Russians acknowledged this with grudging respect in a 2 March intelligence report: ‘Most German soldiers realise the hopelessness of their country’s situation after the January advances, though a few still express faith in German victory. Yet there is no sign of a collapse in enemy morale. They are still fighting with dogged persistence and unbroken discipline.’ Hitler rejected his generals’ urgings to evacuate the beleaguered Courland peninsula on the Baltic, where 200,000 men who might have reinforced the Reich lingered in impotence.

On the central front, the Russians temporarily halted. It is plausible that Zhukov could have continued his advance, exploiting momentum to seize Berlin, but the logistics problems were formidable. Stalin’s armies had no need to take risks. Further north, Rokossovsky pushed on through the snows of Prussia. Russian soldiers derived deep satisfaction from witnessing the destruction they had seen wreaked upon their own homeland now overtaking German territory. One man wrote from East Prussia on 28 January 1945: ‘Estates, villages and towns were burning. Columns of carts, with dazed German men and women who had failed to flee, crawled across the landscape. Shapeless fragments of tanks and self-propelled guns lay everywhere, as well as hundreds of corpses. I recalled such sights from the first days of the war …’ His memories were, of course, of the struggle in Mother Russia. Landowners in East Prussia and Pomerania rash enough to remain in their homes, sometimes because of age or infirmity, suffered terrible fates: to be identified by the invaders not merely as Germans, but also as aristocrats, invited torture before death.

Millions of refugees fled westwards before the Soviets. The strong survived their journeys, but many children and old people perished. ‘At least we were young,’ said Elfride Kowitz, a twenty-year-old East Prussian. ‘We could cope with it better than the old.’ The snowclad landscape of eastern Europe was disfigured by tens of thousands of corpses. Fugitives shared dramas of fantastic intensity which made them briefly companions in adversity, who ate or starved, lived or died, trekked and slept with one another until some new shift of circumstances separated them. ‘In these situations,’ said schoolteacher Henner Pflug, ‘people were thrown together in great intimacy for hours, days, weeks, then sundered again.’

One among the great host of dispossessed German women wrote, ‘The world is a very lonely place without family, friends, or even the familiarity of a home.’ She learned the meaning of desperation when she saw other housewives, frantic for warm clothing in the icy weather, dash past soldiers engaging the Russians with rifles and mortars to reach a
Schloss
where they had heard there was a garment store, to seize whatever they could lay their hands on. Fleeing with two small children, she herself plumbed a depth of exhaustion wherein she could no longer push uphill the cart carrying their pathetic baggage: ‘I leaned on all our worldly goods and wept bitterly.’ Two passing French PoWs took pity, and helped them over the crest. A few days later, a farmer in whose house she briefly sought refuge urged her to leave her son behind for adoption by himself. ‘He promised me the earth if I would leave him. What future had the child? There, he might have a good and safe home.’ But this mother clung to a reserve of stubborn courage which enabled her to refuse. ‘I had set myself a task – to take the children to safety and see them grow up. How? I did not know. I just tackled each day as it came.’ This little family at last reached the sanctuary of the American lines, but many other such stories lacked happy endings.

The advancing Soviet legions resembled no other army the world had ever seen: a mingling of old and new, Europe and Asia, high intelligence and brutish ignorance, ideology and patriotism, technological sophistication and the most primitive transport and equipment. T-34s, artillery,
katyusha
rocket-launchers were followed by jeeps, Studebaker and Dodge trucks supplied under Lend-Lease, then by shaggy ponies and columns of horsemen, farm carts and trudging peasants from the remote republics of Central Asia, clad in footcloths and rags of uniform. Drunkenness was endemic. German harmonicas provided musical accompaniment for many units, because they could be played in rattling trucks. The only discipline rigorously enforced was that which required men – and women – to attack, to fight, and to die. Stalin and his marshals cared nothing for the preservation of civilian life or property. When one of Vasilevsky’s officers asked for guidance about the proper response to wholesale vandalism being committed by his men, the commander sat silent for several seconds, then said, ‘I don’t give a fuck. It is now time for our soldiers to issue their own justice.’

Near Toru
in Poland one such man, Semyon Pozdnyakov, glimpsed a German soldier in no man’s land between the armies, shuffling towards his own lines, head bent low, wounded right arm held close to his body, his left arm limply dragging a machine-pistol. Pozdnyakov challenged him, shouting, ‘
Fritz, halt!
’ The German dropped his weapon and raised his left hand in a feeble gesture of surrender. As a group of Russians approached him, they saw blood on the man’s face, and empty, despairing eyes. ‘
Hitler kaput
,’ he said mechanically. The Russians laughed at the words they now heard so often, and an officer told them to take the man to the rear. ‘
Nein! nein!
’ said the German, thinking he was to be shot. Pozdnyakov roared at him angrily, ‘Why are you shouting, you half-dead fascist? You’re afraid of death? Didn’t you treat our people the same way? We should finish you off, and be done with you.’ Such was indeed the fate of many Germans, who sought mercy in vain.

Reckless abuse of weapons caused significant numbers of Russians to kill each other in rage or carelessness, to press triggers as readily as their Western counterparts might spit or blaspheme. For all its commanders’ military sophistication, this was a barbarian army, which had achieved things such as only barbarians could. Paradoxically, its educated elements were driven by a sense of righteousness greater than any that stirred American or British soldiers. They cared nothing for Stalin’s 1939 devil’s bargain with Hitler, nor for Soviet aggression against Poland, Finland, Romania. They recognised only that Russia had been invaded and devastated, and now they were approaching a reckoning with the nation responsible.

Vyacheslav Eisymont, a former history teacher who served as an artillery observer, wrote from East Prussia on 19 February: ‘We stay in all sorts of places: sometimes in a shed, sometimes a bunker, and right now a house. It is spring weather, wet, sometimes raining. There are civilians who failed to escape, now being sent to the rear … We saw them as we advanced on Königsberg: old men, women and children with shouldered bundles, in long crocodiles trudging along the roadsides – the road itself was occupied by our column. That night, we saw terrible things. But our battery commander spoke for many when he said: “Sure, you look and you feel saddened by the sight of old people and children on foot and dying. But then you remember what they did in our land, and you feel no pity!”’

In February Konev advanced across the Oder towards Dresden, before halting at the Neisse; in the weeks that followed, his principal achievement was to secure Pomerania and Upper Silesia. Early in March a half-hearted SS panzer counter-offensive in Hungary, undertaken in pursuit of Hitler’s fixation with recovering lost oilfields, was easily repulsed. On the 16th, two Soviet
fronts
began to push for Vienna. Even that dedicated Nazi Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner told Hitler on 20 March: ‘I must report that the military worthlessness of troops in [Upper Silesia] exceeds my worst expectations. Almost without exception, they are exhausted. Formations have been broken up, mingled with alarm and Volkssturm units. Their military value is shockingly low. North of Leobschutz there is no one deserving of the name of a German soldier. My impression is that the Russians can do anything they choose, without great exertion or expenditure of strength.’ Second Panzer Army in Hungary reported to OKW without irony on 10 April, ‘To improve morale, an execution was carried out on the battlefield.’

Corporal Helmut Fromm, facing the Russians in Saxony, wrote in his diary at Easter: ‘I’m sitting in my candle-lit O[bservation] P[ost] 500 metres from the Ivans. An icy wind is blowing through the tarpaulin. Shelling continues all night, interspersed with machine-gun fire and my neighbour’s snoring. When I walked along the trench an hour ago, an NCO told me the Americans are in Heidelberg. Now, I’m cut off from all my loved ones, and they must be worrying about me. I wonder where my brother is. I am convinced I will see them again, because I believe in God. How long will this madness continue? May God have mercy on his people. This has been a long crusade, strewn with corpses and tears. Please grant us an Easter followed by redemption.’ Corporal Fromm was sixteen years old.

Guy Sajer, serving with the Grossdeutschland Division, wrote: ‘We no longer fought for Hitler, or for National Socialism, or for the Third Reich or even for our fiancées or mothers or families trapped in bomb-ravaged towns. We fought from simple fear … We fought for ourselves, so that we shouldn’t die in holes filled with mud and snow; we fought like rats.’ A German lieutenant protested wearily to his fiancée: ‘To be an officer means always having to swing back and forth like a pendulum between a Knight’s Cross, a birchwood cross and a court-martial.’ A Berlin woman wrote: ‘These days I keep noticing how my feelings towards men … are changing. I feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. Deep down we women are experiencing a kind of collective disappointment. The Nazi world – ruled by men, glorifying the strong man – is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of “Man”.’

A Russian soldier wrote to his wife from East Prussia on 19 April:

As the German food distribution system collapsed, from late March onwards civilians began to suffer severe hunger even in areas still held by the Wehrmacht. And they knew worse was to come. A Berlin teenager named Dieter Borkovsky was riding the city’s S-Bahn on 14 April, amid a throng of passengers loudly venting their anger and despair. Suddenly a soldier, adorned with medals which seemed absurdly incongruous on his small, dirty figure, shouted, ‘Silence! I’ve got something to tell you. Even if you don’t want to listen to me, stop whingeing. We have to win this war. We must not lose our courage. If others win the war, and they do to us only a fraction of what we have done in the occupied territories, there won’t be a single German left in a few weeks.’ Borkovsky wrote: ‘It became so quiet in that carriage one could have heard a pin drop.’

When the Russians reached Lübbenau, sixty miles south of Berlin, SS officer’s wife Hildegard Trutz hoped that clutching her two young children would spare her from rape. ‘My God! What a fuss I made with the first one! I can’t help laughing when I think of it now. I held Elke in my arms and pushed Norfried in front of me, hoping that would soften his heart. But he simply pushed Norfried aside and threw me on the ground. I cried and clung onto Elke, but the Russian just went ahead until I had to let go of her. He was quite quick about it, and the whole thing didn’t take more than five minutes … I soon found that it was much better not to resist at all, it was all over much quicker if you didn’t.’