The Bitter Taste of Victory (7 page)

In the US the Office of War Information declared in July that motion pictures would be instrumental in ‘reorienting and re-educating the German mind out of its enslavement to Nazi and militarist doctrine’. The selection of films was ‘an act of political warfare – warfare against an idea’. Simultaneously the US government was issuing books to enemy prisoners of war and liberated civilians, urged by Archibald MacLeish (poet and Librarian of Congress) to ‘recognise the power of books as truly as the Nazi mob which dumped them on fire’. Books by Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Carl Zuckmayer, John Dos Passos and
others were distributed liberally around the world, in part by Mann’s own publisher Gottfried Bermann-Fischer, now in exile in New York. American officials were keen to continue this translation programme in Germany, believing that books exerted a ‘greater influence’ in Germany than in the US and were more likely to ‘mold public opinion’ than newspapers and periodicals. They wanted to use the translation programme both to inculcate a more tolerant world view and to persuade the Germans to treat American culture with more respect than they did at present. This is a vision of cultural policy in which culture (the arts) is able to showcase a nation’s culture (its way of life) in order to reorient the minds and therefore the general culture (way of life) of another nation. It was somewhat naïve, given that most of these authors had been both available and popular in Germany in the early 1930s and had neither instilled tolerance nor prevented the Germans from voting in the National Socialists. But it was a vision that would guide Allied policy in Germany in subsequent months.
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At Yalta it was clear that for the Allies to be able to effect the kinds of changes they intended to bring about in Germany, they needed an unconditional surrender. ‘Nazi Germany is doomed,’ the three leaders stated in the declaration following Yalta. ‘The German people will only make the cost of their defeat heavier to themselves by attempting to continue a hopeless resistance.’ The controversial two-day bombing campaign in Dresden that started on 13 February 1945 was intended to enable the advance of the Red Army and to prevent the German redeploying forces from the West to the East. It also had the effect of frightening the Germans with a terrifying display of power.
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Some 796 bombers visited Dresden that night, creating a firestorm that eliminated much of the city. The former academic Victor Klemperer was one of many refugees to evacuate his home during the night. As one of the few surviving Jews in Dresden, he had just been issued with a deportation order by authorities still madly devoted to implementing racial policies even in the midst of apocalyptic chaos. Now he stripped off his yellow star and joined the crowds leaving the
devastated city: ‘Fires were still burning in many of the buildings on the road above. At times, small and no more than a bundle of clothes, the dead were scattered across our path. The skull of one had been torn away, the top of the head was a dark red bowl. Once an arm lay there with a pale, quite fine hand, like a model made of wax such as one sees in barbers’ shop windows . . . Crowds streamed unceasingly between these islands, past these corpses and the smashed vehicles, up and down the Elbe, a silent, agitated procession.’

There were over 25,000 dead in Dresden. The bodies were collected in large pyres and burned swiftly to avoid a health crisis. Of the city’s 220,000 homes, 75,000 were completely destroyed and 18,500 severely damaged; there were 18 million cubic metres of rubble. The Allies seemed determined to ensure that the country they inherited was even more helpless than it necessarily was. Yet still the German leaders demanded that the struggle continue. In a set of instructions issued for the impending battle of Berlin, the leadership insisted that it mattered less that the soldiers defending the city were equipped with weapons than that ‘every fighter is inspired and permeated by the fanatical will TO WANT TO FIGHT’. Surrender had proved disastrous in 1918. Now Hitler had resolved to grind down the invader into a state of collapse or to end in heroic and apocalyptic flames.
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The war was becoming almost as demoralising for the onlookers as for the defeated victims. It certainly did not feel as if victory was within sight. At the start of February 1945
Collier’s
published a private letter written late at night by Martha Gellhorn, asking her editors for a rest. The magazine’s editors claimed that they had printed this personal missive because it revealed the war-weary state of mind. Gellhorn was furious, ostensibly because she felt the truth of war was unprintable, but perhaps more because she did not want her own vulnerability broadcast to a nation that included her husband and lover. ‘Today,’ she had written in the letter, ‘I saw pictures of two bodies, dug up from some boneyard in Toulouse. They were bodies of what had once been two Frenchmen aged 32 and 29, but they had been tortured by the Gestapo until they died. I look at anything, you see, because I do not admit that one can turn away; one has no right to spare oneself. But I
never saw faces (decayed in death, of course, anyhow) with gouged-out eyes. I thought I’d seen it all but evidently not.’
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While Gellhorn was reeling from the sights of war, Gavin was in the Hürtgen Forest, where he was sent to prepare a mission to cross the turbulent Rur river. He found, as Lanham’s regiment had before him, that the forest was too muddy to be traversed by jeep so he wandered on foot, trying to avoid the barbed wire and pillbox fortifications, crossing a mountain stream six feet wide. He was relieved when the division was posted back to Sissonne on 17 February, before the mission could be accomplished. In Sissonne he received a visit from another blonde American beauty, though this one had been German until she had taken US citizenship in 1939. Earlier in the year, Gavin’s press officer, Buck Dawson, had called on Marlene Dietrich in Paris and begged her to come and visit the 82nd. Dietrich now appeared asking for Dawson, entertained the troops with songs, magic acts and autographs and fell swiftly in love with their general. Here was another hero to impress with her courage; another lonely American to remind of the comforts of home.

Gavin was captivated by Dietrich but he did not summon her to bed. Instead she returned to Paris, to her lover the actor Jean Gabin, for whose sake she had come to Europe in the first place. Gavin, meanwhile, continued to write letters of love and longing to Gellhorn: ‘I have always thought that love like this was something that imaginative people wrote about in books, but something that never really happened,’ he told her. Gellhorn herself carried on flitting frenetically from place to place, not often enough in Gavin’s direction.

In March she finally made it to Germany, in a British aircraft on a dangerous night mission. Hemingway may have been the first to reach Germany by land, but Gellhorn now saw it flattened below her, ‘and a blacker, less inviting piece of land I never saw. It was covered with snow. There were mountains; there was no light and no sign of human life, but the land itself looked actively hostile.’ According to the
Collier’s
headline she was the ‘first girl correspondent’ to go on a combat mission over Germany. Her nose ran; her oxygen mask slipped off; she felt as though an enormous weight was crushing her. But she impressed the
pilot with her bravery and she had achieved a minor victory in the competition with her soon-to-be ex-husband.
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As Gellhorn watched new ruins being created from the skies, Lee Miller finally travelled to Germany from Paris, where she had been based since the previous summer, photographing and reporting on fashion shows, paintings and torture chambers. She had visited the Siegfried Line at Luxembourg and the front line at Jebsheim in France, where she saw her first war dead and, writing in
Vogue
, wondered why she had been cosseted as a child when it had prepared her so badly for the sights she was now witnessing. At home, the dead were decently arranged and distantly peaceful; now they were discarded in the streets. ‘Why should I have been put to bed for ten hours sleep . . . We should have been exposed to night clubs and sleep-snatching and alarms and excursions to prepare us for this, our life. Why meals at regular hours, with calories and vitamins and bulk considered? We should have been made to scrounge like street arabs, survive on a crust and beg our way.’
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Arriving in Germany, Miller was even more shocked by the scenes she encountered. ‘Germany is a beautiful landscape dotted with jewel-like villages, blotched with ruined cities, and inhabited by schizophrenics,’ she wrote in her report. She was repelled by the immaculate villages where birches and willows still flanked the streams and little girls in white dresses promenaded after their first communion. Mothers sewed and swept and baked; farmers ploughed and harrowed; they all seemed like ordinary people, but Miller reminded herself and her readers that they were the enemy and needed to remain figures of hate.
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When she visited Cologne soon after it was captured in March 1945, Miller confronted a city where 100,000 people were apparently living in vaulted basements beneath the ruins. She found the few who did emerge from the ground repellent in their obsequiousness. They invited her to dine, begged rides in military vehicles and tried to cadge cigarettes and chewing gum. ‘How dared they?’ she asked; ‘What kind of idiocy and stupidity blinds them to my feelings? What kind of detachment are they able to find, from what kind of escape zones in the
unventilated alleys of their brains are they able to conjure up the idea that they are liberated instead of conquered people?’

Cologne had been bombed in a staggering 262 separate air raids since 1940 and had been chosen for the RAF’s first thousand-bomber raid in 1942. Now only 20,000 people remained out of a population of 700,000 and there was 24 million cubic metres of debris in need of clearing. The city’s three bridges were buried in the river and most of its public buildings were reduced to jagged chaos. As in Aachen, the cathedral remained eerily undamaged, towering above a flattened wasteland, apparently ready to crumble down onto the tiny figures trading in the black market below. On one side of the sooty building there was a gash that seemed to one observer to be a fresh red wound that bled at twilight.
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This was the city that greeted George Orwell when he arrived towards the end of March as a war correspondent for the
Observer
. Like Miller, Orwell had come from Paris, where he had been pleased to find himself drinking with Hemingway at the Ritz. After the relatively picturesque ruins of London and Paris, he was startled by the complete destruction of Cologne, lamenting the loss of the Romanesque churches and museums.

Orwell was less straightforward in his German-hating than Miller. That January he had mocked the simplicity of the British anti-German fervour in two of his regular columns in the socialist magazine
Tribune
. Reading a copy of the
Quarterly Review
from the Napoleonic Wars, he had been impressed to find French books respectfully reviewed at a time when Britain was fighting for its existence in a bloody and exhausting war. He complained that no such reviews of German literature could appear in the press now, although the situation was very similar. In fact, as Orwell well knew, the situation was very different; any works of literature to come out of Nazi Germany would be endorsed by the fascists. The Allies were fighting partly in the name of all the German cultural figures who had been persecuted by the Nazis. But Orwell’s complaints the following week were more convincing. Visiting a London exhibition of waxworks illustrating German atrocities, he was sickened by captions inviting people to ‘Come inside and see real Nazi tortures, flogging, crucifixion, gas chambers’ and advertising a children’s amusement section at no extra charge. Nazi-hating was being
used to justify sadist pornographic voyeurism: ‘If it were announced that the leading war criminals were to be eaten by lions or trampled to death by elephants in the Wembley Stadium, I fancy the spectacle would be quite well attended.’
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