Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (24 page)

Miller herself was only too glad to leave once she had her pictures. Loathing the Germans more than ever, she and Scherman put the camp behind them at length and set off down the autobahn for Munich. If Munich was where Nazism had begun, they wanted to be there when the city fell, recording every wonderful moment with their cameras after what they had seen at Dachau: “The sight of the blue and white striped tatters shrouding the bestial death of the hundreds of starved and maimed men and women had left us gulping for air and for violence, and if Munich, the birthplace of this horror was falling we’d like to help.”

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A FEW MILES
from Dachau, in the little village of Unterbernbach, Victor Klemperer had been following the Americans’ progress for days, listening intently as bombs fell nearby and the sound of guns drew closer by the hour. As a Jew married to a German Gentile, he was longing for the Americans to arrive, if it meant that his personal nightmare would be over at last.

Son of a rabbi, Klemperer had converted to Christianity before the Great War, in which he had served with distinction. Being Jewish had never been very important to him. He had always seen himself as German, first and foremost. But his patriotism hadn’t saved him from the race and citizenship laws introduced by the Nazis. He had lost his job as a university professor in Dresden before the war and had later been forced to move into the ghetto with his wife, Eva.

Klemperer had spent the war working in a factory or at manual jobs, such as shoveling snow. He had watched with dismay as deportation orders were served on the Jewish community in Dresden—curt summonses to report immediately with one suitcase for resettlement in the east. With a good war record and an Aryan wife, Klemperer was a “privileged” Jew, one of the last to receive such a summons. But he had always known that it was only a matter of time. And that Jews bound for resettlement were never heard of again.

But then something wonderful had happened. The Allies had bombed Dresden. More than seven hundred aircraft in two waves had carpeted the city, dropping a mix of high explosives and incendiaries, killing twenty-five thousand people and reducing one of the most beautiful places in Germany to a smoldering ruin. Klemperer had been separated from his wife in the confusion, running for the Jewish shelter as a bomb exploded nearby. He had found her again next morning, sitting on her suitcase near the Elbe. Dying for a cigarette to calm her nerves, yet without matches during the raid, she had thought seriously of getting a light from a body burning nearby.

Kurt Vonnegut, an American prisoner of war in Dresden, had taken shelter during the raid in an underground abattoir named Slaughterhouse Five by the Germans. He had felt only shame for humanity as he helped them clear up their dead. But Dresden had been a legitimate target ahead of the Russian advance. Among the many buildings destroyed had been Gestapo headquarters, and with it all their files on the Jews. Assured by his friends that the files were gone, Klemperer had seized the opportunity to reinvent himself as a displaced German who had lost his identity card in the raid. Issued with temporary papers, yet afraid of being unmasked if he remained in Dresden, he had left with his wife to join the flow of refugees to the west, heading for Bavaria.

They had ended up at Unterbernbach, just northwest of Dachau, where room had been found for them in an attic. They had been there for two weeks, waiting for the Americans to come. Klemperer had found it a fascinating experience as all manner of displaced Germans passed through the village, with widely differing views on the war and how it was likely to end. There had been two SS men who had demanded accommodation in the same house as Klemperer, threatening to evict anyone who opposed them. They had been followed by two other SS, who had been perfectly decent and well mannered. There had been the deputy burgomaster, loudly proclaiming that he had nothing to fear from the Americans, when everyone else said he had been the keenest Nazi in the village. There had been the Berliner, unaware that Klemperer was Jewish, who confided his anger at the way the Jews had been treated in Berlin; and the blond, blue-eyed, stern-looking schoolmistress, who seemed to Klemperer the epitome of everything the Nazis held dear. She had surprised him with her loathing for Nazis, complaining openly about the atrocities at Dachau, telling him that thirteen thousand people had died there in three months and that the rest were being released because they had nothing to eat.

Everyone was waiting for the Americans to come, longing for the war to be over. The village’s electricity had been cut off, so they could no longer follow the war on the radio, but they only had to put their heads out of the window to hear the rattle of machine-gun fire and the distant sound of artillery toward Munich. Most of it had died away now, which suggested to Klemperer that the city must have fallen to the Americans. If so, the U.S. troops would be in Unterbernbach soon enough. The burgomaster had already taken the precaution of removing the Nazi swastika previously displayed so prominently on the gable above his office. He was delighted to see it come down, he told anyone prepared to listen, since he had never actually been a Nazi.

*   *   *

KLEMPERER HAD
chosen not to emigrate before the war, but many other Jews had left Germany as soon as it became clear that the Nazis were there to stay. Private Henry Kissinger’s father had lost his teaching job in 1933, but had stuck it out for another five years before finally admitting defeat. He and his family had left Germany in August 1938, going to London first, and then to the United States. They had settled in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan, a place so full of German-Jewish immigrants that it was known to everyone else as the Fourth Reich.

Henry was the older of the Kissingers’ two sons. He had grown up in Fürth, just outside Nuremberg. While Hitler strutted at his rallies and the SS goosestepped through the streets, Henry Kissinger had been a middle-class Jewish boy, living in a second-floor apartment on Matildenstrasse, in the heart of the Old Town. He had gone to school with German children at first, playing soccer with the other boys like everyone else. But then the Jews had been segregated, sent to their own school, and beaten up on the streets by gangs of Aryan youths looking for trouble. Kissinger and his brother had quickly learned to avoid trouble if they saw it coming, always crossing the road to escape groups of youths, stepping off the pavement and walking in the gutter rather than give anyone the chance to take offense. They had watched half-enviously as their erstwhile schoolfellows joined the Hitler Youth and had a high old time marching through the town together and singing patriotic songs.

Kissinger had retained his habits in America at first, a Jew always stepping off the sidewalk if he saw a group of youths coming, steering well clear of trouble. But then he had remembered where he was, a free man in a free country. He had as much right to be on the sidewalk as anyone else. He had adapted readily to his new country, learning the mysteries of baseball and going to night school in order to pursue the American dream and become an accountant.

He had been drafted in 1943, sent to boot camp in North Carolina, and sworn in as a U.S. citizen during his training. His new country had expected him to walk for miles in boots and attack dummies with a bayonet, but Kissinger had decided very early on that combat was not for him. His application for medical training had been rejected, but he had soon found a more congenial job in division intelligence. It was as interpreter/driver to the Eighty-fourth Infantry Division’s General Alexander Bolling that Private Kissinger found himself on German soil again at the beginning of 1945.

His progress since then had been stellar. The Rhine town of Krefeld had fallen to the Americans in March. Without gas, water, power, or refuse collection, its population of two hundred thousand had been in dire straits after the hurried departure of the town’s Nazi administrators. Among the Americans brought in to replace them, Kissinger was the only one who could speak German. Still only a private, he had been put in charge of Krefeld, given the task of restoring order in the town and establishing a civilian administration. He had done it within a week.

Kissinger had developed a taste for the work, solving intractable problems with a few minutes’ thought and rebuilding a broken organization from scratch. He had weeded out the remaining Nazis in Krefeld and arrested all the Gestapo he could find. Expecting them to be monsters, he had been surprised to discover that most were just “miserable little bureaucrats” looking to ingratiate themselves with their new masters. Wherever Kissinger went, Germans snapped to attention at his approach, the same Germans who had kicked him off the pavement when he was a boy in Fürth.

Kissinger was enjoying that, yet without bitterness. His parents bore a lifelong grudge against Germany that he did not share, despite the humiliations of his youth. He found it impossible to hate the whole country. He kept his distance from the Germans and refused to fraternize, but he wasn’t looking for revenge. Kissinger saw himself as a liberator, not a conqueror, far more interested in solving Germany’s problems than in getting his own back. He was just there to get the country up and running again.

He was planning to revisit his old home as soon as the war was over. He owed it to his parents to go back and see how it was. Nuremberg had taken a pasting from the Allied bombing, and probably Fürth, too. The first chance he got, Kissinger was going to take a Jeep and get over there, see if there was anyone left from the old days. Most of his friends had emigrated at the same time as the Kissingers, and the rest had disappeared into the concentration camps. There had been three thousand Jews living in Fürth when the Kissinger boys were growing up. There were only seventy left in the first full head count after the war.

14

ITALY

IN SWITZERLAND,
the two German officers bringing the Italian surrender terms from Caserta were on their way to Wehrmacht headquarters at Bolzano. In the small hours of April 30, Eugen Wenner and Viktor von Schweinitz were being driven through the night to the Austrian border at Buchs. A Wehrmacht car was waiting on the Austrian side to take them the rest of the way to Bolzano.

It had been a nightmare journey for the two Germans. After signing the surrender terms at the royal palace in Caserta, they had been flown to Annecy in France, arriving early the previous evening. Annecy was just across the border from Geneva, in Switzerland, but their contact hadn’t shown up to help them make the crossing. They had had to bluff their way into Switzerland, claiming that the Swiss general staff was taking a keen interest in their mission. The border guards had allowed them in with reluctance, but the delay meant that they had arrived at Geneva station just as the last train of the night was pulling out for Bern.

There had been no cars for hire, because of the fuel shortage. They had a contact in Geneva, but he had gone out for the evening and wasn’t answering his phone. The Germans had ended up sitting in the outdoor restaurant at the station with the surrender documents burning a hole in their pockets. They had rung their man every fifteen minutes until he answered at last. A car had been procured and they had arrived in Bern just before midnight.

Bern was the Swiss base for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services. The office was headed by Allen Dulles, who had been closely involved in the secret peace negotiations. He opened the door to find Wenner, von Schweinitz, and Gävernitz, their interpreter, looking very sorry for themselves in the cold. They had been up all the previous night, studying the surrender terms, and had had very little sleep since. They were half-dead with exhaustion.

Dulles gave them whisky and sandwiches and thawed them out with hot coffee in front of the fire. They left again after an hour, taking blankets and pillows for the long drive to the Austrian border. Dulles went to bed after they had gone, imagining that it would be plain sailing from then on. He soon learned otherwise:

Before seven in the morning the telephone rang. Gävernitz was on the other end of the wire calling from Buchs. The envoys had arrived at the frontier, but they were blocked. The Swiss government, by formal action, had hermetically closed the Swiss frontier. No one could enter or leave without special permission. Ordinary visas were of no use, and even the special facilities enjoyed by the Swiss intelligence officers were ineffective. Only direct action by the Swiss government could help us out.
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Dulles wasted no time. He rang Switzerland’s acting foreign minister, Walter Stucki, and asked for an immediate meeting. Sensing his urgency, Stucki agreed to see him at the foreign office as soon as he could get there.

Dulles put his cards on the table when they met. He told Stucki that the Germans at the frontier had signed the surrender of all German forces in north Italy and had the document with them. If they were allowed to proceed to Bolzano, the fighting would stop at once. If the fighting stopped, the Swiss would be spared the prospect of guerrilla warfare in their mountains, followed by an influx of thousands of German soldiers seeking internment, or even looting the country on their way home. The situation was too urgent to waste time consulting colleagues. Stucki should let the Germans through at once.

He took the point. Where others would have hummed and hawed and wanted to cover their backs, Stucki gave the order without further delay. Wenner and von Schweinitz were allowed through immediately and crossed the border into Austria.

But their troubles still weren’t over. A car was waiting to take them to Bolzano, but its driver had a worrying message for them. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the SS security service, and Franz Hofer, Gauleiter of the Tyrol, were opposed to the surrender in Italy. They had ordered the Gestapo to arrest Wenner and von Schweinitz as they passed through Innsbruck on their way to Bolzano. For that reason, the driver was going to take them a different way, avoiding Innsbruck altogether but traveling along back roads still covered in snow.