Hellstorm The Death of
Nazi Germany 1944–1947
By Thomas Goodrich
Nazi Germany 1944–1947
By Thomas Goodrich
2
The Dead and
the Dead to Be
By the beginning of the new year,1945, the greatness and glory
that had been Berlin was little more than a fast-fading memory.
Gone were the notes of blaring brass bands and victory parades,
the stirring speeches, the cheering crowds. Replacing these sounds were
the wailing of air raid sirens, the pulsating roar of Allied war planes
as they darkened the skies overhead, the earth-shaking thunder of
death-dealing bombs. And when the bombers banked for home to take
on yet another load of destruction, only silence settled over the smoking
hulk of what had once been one of the world’s grandest and most
glittering capitals. As a symbol of the Third Reich, as the most obvious
example of Germany’s will to fight on, more bombs had been
devoted to Berlin than any other German city and in total tonnage,
more explosives were dropped on the capital alone than the Luftwaffe
had dumped on all of England throughout all the war. Hence,
of an original population of nearly four and a half million, roughly
half had now vanished; some as refugees, some as casualties. An estimated
50,000 Berliners had been killed by the incessant raids.1
Despite being the most heavily defended city in the world, Berlin
had nevertheless become little better than “a vast heap of rubble.”2
To those survivors who rode out the storm in the hundreds of shelters
scattered about the capital, each raid was seemingly heavier and more devastating than the last. The destruction was so complete that
one Berliner was heard to quip,“If they want to hit more targets, they’ll
have to bring them with them.”3
For those refugees reentering the capital after a lengthy absence,
the transformation was staggering. Lali Horstman returned via train:
On coming up the steps of the underground to the daylight, I was shocked by the
grimaces of abandoned buildings, by the ruins of the last disastrous bombings,
and the streets now empty of traffic. A few shivering people walked by quickly,
muffled up against the intense cold, as drab and sad as their surroundings.
Although all life seemed extinct, every one individually was full of spirit. The city
was like a snake of which the parts continued to live after it had been cut into
small pieces. A vivifying spiritual current made it resist being killed outright.4
As Lali suggested, though their once-magnificent city was in ruins,
the morale of those who remained had not been broken. Like survivors
in other German towns, Berliners who had endured countless air raids
had become inured to fear and were learning to deal with even death
itself.
“I feel a growing sense of wild vitality within myself . . . ,” Ursula von
Kardorff confided to her diary after surviving yet another Berlin air
raid.“If the British think that they are going to undermine our morale
they are barking up the wrong tree. . . . They are not softening us
up.”5
“I was amazed at their excellent spirit,” waxed Minister of Propaganda,
Dr. Joseph Goebbels, who visited victims on a regular basis.
“Nobody is crying, nobody complaining . . . the morale shown here
by the population of Berlin is simply magnificent.”6
With wit, humor and irrepressible optimism, the little doctor was
himself a source of comfort to the stricken, as an employee of the Propaganda
Ministry, Rudolf Semmler, makes clear:
Goebbels drives round the whole city. Everywhere desolation. At several points
he takes charge of the firefighting. . . . Wherever he is recognized he gets a friendly greeting in spite of everything. Even bombed-out people come and shake him by
the hand. He is always ready for a jest. A woman who is engaged to be married
complains that her whole home has been wrecked the very night before her
wedding. She is no longer young: she tells Goebbels she is 55. “Well then,” he
says to comfort her,“be thankful that it’s your furniture that’s gone and that your
future husband is still alive. You can get new furniture all right but do you think
you would find a new husband easily?” Many people gather round and laugh.7
To Goebbels’ chagrin, and despite his repeated promptings, Adolf
Hitler could not be induced to go among the victims and offer words
of encouragement. When Hitler traveled by train through the blasted
cities of Germany, he did so with the curtains drawn tight and when
photos of ruins crossed his desk, he refused to view them. No doubt,
the German Fuhrer feared that even a glimpse of a war gone wrong
might weaken his resolve to fight on—that to have walked amid the
smoking embers and witness for himself the dismembered bodies of
women and children or see first-hand the destruction of Germany’s
centuries-old culture might have caused him to waver, to despair, to
doubt. To meet the coming crisis, the German chancellor simply could
not afford even a slight crack in his will to persevere.
Few in devastated Berlin were aware of the fact, but their leader
had now returned to his command post in the bunker beneath the
Reich Chancellery. Since the onset of war in 1939, Hitler had seldom
worked from the capital. Moving his headquarters with the army, from
west to east, then back again, the supreme commander chose to direct
operations close to the fronts. When he was not actively engaged in
the war, Hitler was at Berchtesgaden, his mountain retreat in the Bavarian
Alps. Now, without fanfare, the German leader had returned to
Berlin, his greatest gamble of the war a failure.
Had the operation taken place earlier in the war, the brilliant surprise
would almost certainly have pushed the Allies back to the Channel
coast and perhaps ended the war in the west then and there. But
the story of the Ardennes offensive was the story of Germany over
the past several years—Allied air superiority. When the winter skies
finally cleared over the Belgium battlefield after Christmas 1944, British and American aircraft reappeared with a vengeance, halting the attack
and forcing the Wehrmacht back to its starting point.
Much through the incompetence, even indifference, of Hermann
Goring, head of the Luftwaffe, the once invincible German Air Force
had fallen into a condition whereby it could no longer offer serious
opposition to the enemy. Prior to hostilities, Goring had pompously
assured his countrymen that no German need fear British bombs striking
the Fatherland. If so, the field marshal winked, “you may call me
Maier.” It had long since become the stalest of jokes that among bombing
victims the rotund Luftwaffe chief was commonly known as “Hermann
Maier.” Despite persistent, frantic efforts by his advisers, Hitler
refused to sack his old friend and fellow fighter from the days of Nazi
Party struggle.
Although nothing could stop the rain of death pouring down on
Germany, Adolf Hitler was determined to trade terror for terror. While
damage was trifling compared to that of the Reich, it was a boost to
German morale when the first “wonder weapons,” or V-rockets, began
slamming into England during the summer of 1944. Outraged by
this “inhuman, criminal” new device, Churchill made plans to saturate
Germany with poison gas and deadly anthrax germs, despite an
international ban on such warfare.8
“We could drench the cities of . . . Germany in such a way that most
of the population would be requiring constant medical treatment,” the
prime minister argued to his advisers.9
Fearful, no doubt, that Hitler would respond in kind from his own
stockpile of such weapons, Churchill wisely hesitated.
In addition to V-rockets, many, including volunteers, urged the chancellor
to deploy suicide planes, as Germany’s ally, Japan, was doing
with such striking success. Hitler, however, quickly vetoed the idea.
“Every person who risks his life in the battle for his Fatherland must have a chance for survival, even if it’s small,” explained the Fuhrer.“We
Germans are not Japanese kamikaze.”10
Like many of his beleaguered countrymen, Adolf Hitler still believed
in miracles. He had to. To toss away this final hope would have been
to admit defeat. With the weight of the world against him, with “unconditional
surrender” the adamant Allied demand, Hitler was determined
to continue the fight unto death . . . or a miracle. No one need remind
him of the worsening odds—a simple glance at the map was proof
enough. The Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain and its
Commonwealth, France and her colonies—with well over half a billion
people to draw from, the Reich’s enemies dwarfed Germany’s tiny
population of 70 million. Great as the demographic disparity was, it
seemed trivial compared to the industrial imbalance. With almost
unlimited natural resources—coal, oil, ore, rubber—a seemingly inexhaustible
supply of tanks, planes, ships, and guns were ready to replace
enemy losses with ease. On the other hand, Germany’s shattered and
rapidly shrinking industries were merely struggling to survive, with
many operations forced underground into caves and tunnels.
Against such impossible odds, with such an overpowering enemy
closing on all sides, a normal man might have gone mad. Indeed,
suspecting such was the case, Allied propagandists reported that Hitler
frequently frothed at the mouth following each new disaster, rolling
in a rage on the floor as he chewed rabidly on the carpet.
“I was with him every day and almost every night to the very end,”
revealed one confidant.“Long fits of sullen silence, yes. Volcanic explosions,
yes—although the lava was usually controlled. Hitler was a consummate
actor, not a rug-chewer.”11
Hopeless as the odds were, impossible as the situation became with
each passing day, for Adolf Hitler surrender was simply not an option.
As a common soldier during World War I, well did Hitler remember
the last German surrender. Although the troops were more than willing
to fight on in 1918, the politicians in Berlin had caved in and capitulated. As a consequence of this “stab in the back,” Germany
had been humbled and humiliated, dismembered, then all but enslaved
by the victors. It was the lesson of 1918—a time when hatred of Germany
was not a tithe as great as now—that steeled Hitler’s resolve by
reminding him that surrender was tantamount to national suicide.
Even after the death-knell in the Ardennes, the Fuhrer was firm.
“You should not infer that I am thinking even in the slightest of
losing the war,” Hitler confided to a group of generals. “I have never
in my life learned the meaning of the word capitulation, and I am
one of those men who have worked their way up from nothing. For
me, therefore, the circumstances in which we find ourselves are nothing
new.”12
Additionally, Hitler had the towering figure of Frederick the Great
to serve as his model. During another dark time in Germany’s past,
a time when enemy armies also stood poised to devour the Reich, Frederick
had stood firm. Because of “Old Fritz’s” determination to fight
to the last ditch, the impossible had occurred when the Czarina of Russia,
Elizabeth, had died, throwing the alliance against Germany into
disarray and enabling the improbable victory. It was this amazing
eleventh hour miracle of the eighteenth century, more than anything
else, that buttressed Hitler’s will to hold out in hope of a similar occurrence
in the twentieth century. That he might never forget this lesson
and weaken, a portrait of Frederick hung wherever the Fuhrer
established headquarters, including now, in his tomb-like bunker
beneath Berlin.
“When bad news threatens to crush my spirit,”mused Hitler,“I derive
fresh courage from the contemplation of this picture. . . . We have
reached the final quarter of an hour. The situation is serious, very serious.
It seems even to be desperate. While we keep fighting, there is
always hope. . . . All we must do is refuse to go down!”13
Abysmal as conditions were in the west, where American, British and French forces were now free to advance on the Rhine, and as devastating
and deadly as the bombing massacres had been, these were mere
sideshows to the main event. While the embattled chancellor’s gaze
might be distracted momentarily in these directions, his eyes always
reverted east. It was here, Hitler knew, that the war would be won or
lost. It was here that diametrically opposed ideologies were locked in
a fang and claw fight to the finish. And thus, it was here, more than
anywhere else, that the German Army had to hold. If the approaching
red storm could be weathered, then turned back, all else would
manage itself. Weak, bleeding and decimated as it was, the Wehrmacht
was still more than a match for threats from the west. But above
all, it was the communist peril looming to the east that had to be faced
and overcome. If not, if there was no modern miracle for Germany,
then not only would the Reich cease to exist, but much of Europe would
pass into darkness as well.
✪✪✪✪✪
Since the German invasion of the Soviet Union in September 1941, the
fight on the Eastern Front had been little better than a savage war of
annihilation. A contest between “European Nationalism” on the one
hand, and “International Bolshevism” on the other, would have been
a most desperate struggle under any conditions. But then, fighting
for his life, Josef Stalin deliberately exacerbated the situation.
Dubious over the loyalty of his armed forces, aware of the massive
Russian surrenders during the First World War, the Red premier steadfastly
refused to sign the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war or
the Hague Treaty regarding land warfare. It was Stalin’s belief that if
a soldier had no guarantee of survival in captivity, then he must of
necessity fight to the death in battle. Despite such ruthless measures,
Soviet troops surrendered by the hundreds of thousands in the first
weeks and months of the war. Swamped by the flood of prisoners,
strained to adequately clothe, feed and house such numbers, and
understandably hesitant to even do so unless the Russians reciprocated the Germans time and again tried to reach an accord with Stalin.
The efforts were flung back with contempt.14
Soviet soldiers do not surrender, communist officials airily
announced. “A prisoner captured alive by the enemy is ipso facto
a traitor. . . . If they had fulfilled their duty as soldiers to fight to the
last they would not have been taken prisoner.”15
“Everyone who was taken prisoner, even if they’d been wounded . . .
was considered to have ‘surrendered voluntarily to the enemy,’” wrote
Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, whose own brother was captured and
promptly disowned by her father. “The government thereby washed
its hands of millions of its own officers and men . . . and refused to
have anything to do with them.”16
Hence, growled a disgruntled captain of Russian artillery, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, “Moscow did not recognize its own soldiers of
the day before.”17
Not surprisingly, many Red Army men, including General Andrei
Vlasov, swiftly turned on their government after capture and became
“traitors” not only in name, but in fact, by joining the Germans in their
anti-communist crusade.
That the Soviets would treat their own troops in such a deplorable
manner bode ill for that German soldier, or Landser, unlucky enough
to fall into enemy hands. Although responses varied greatly among
Soviet units and some captured Germans were treated as POW's, most
were not. During the first glorious days of German victory in 1941,
the Red Army’s headlong retreat precluded the likelihood that large
numbers of Landsers would be captured. Nevertheless, thousands of
unwitting Germans did fall into communist hands and were dispatched
on the spot.
On July 1, 1941, near Broniki in the Ukraine, the Soviets captured
over 160 Germans, many of them wounded. In the words of Corporal
Karl Jager:
After being taken prisoner . . . other comrades and I were forced to undress....
We had to surrender all valuable objects including everything we had in our pockets.
I saw other comrades stabbed with a bayonet because they were not fast
enough. Corporal Kurz had a wounded hand and ...could not remove his belt
as quickly as desired. He was stabbed from behind at the neck so that the bayonet
came out through the throat. A soldier who was severely wounded gave slight
signs of life with his hands; he was kicked about and his head was battered with
rifle butts. . . . Together with a group of 12 to 15 men I was taken to a spot north
of the road. Several of them completely naked. We were about the third group
coming from the road. Behind us the Russians commenced the executions . . .
panic broke out after the first shots, and I was able to flee.18
“My hands were tied up at my back . . . and we were forced to lie
down . . . ,” said another victim in the same group. “A Russian soldier
stabbed me in the chest with his bayonet. Thereupon I turned
over. I was then stabbed seven times in the back and I did not move
any more. . . . I heard my comrades cry out in pain. Then I passed out.”19
In all, 153 bodies were recovered by advancing Germans the following
morning. Despite the summary slaughter of their own men
at Broniki and elsewhere, Wehrmacht field marshals strictly forbid
large-scale reprisals. One group which could expect no mercy from
the Germans was the communist commissars who traveled with Red
Army units. Composed “almost exclusively” of Jews, it was these fanatical
political officers, many Germans felt, who were responsible for the
massacres and mutilations of captured comrades.20 Explained one witness,
Lieutenant Hans Woltersdorf of the elite SS:
One of our antitank gun crews had defended itself down to the last cartridge,
really down to the last cartridge. Over thirty dead Russians lay before their positions.
They then had to surrender. While still alive they had their genitals cut off,
their eyes poked out, and their bellies slit open. Russian prisoners to whom we
showed this declared that such mutilations took place by order of the commissars.
This was the first I had heard of such commissars.21
With the threat of torture and execution facing them, many idealistic
German soldiers had an added impetus to fight to the death. In the minds of most Landsers, the war in the east was not a contest against
the Russian or Slavic race in particular, but a crusade against communism.
In the years following World War I, Marxist revolutionaries
had nearly toppled the German government. Because most of the leaders
were Jews, and because Lenin, Trotsky, and many other Russian revolutionaries
were Jewish, the threat to Nazi Germany and Europe
seemed clear. Hence, from Adolf Hitler down to the lowliest Landser,
the fight in the east became a holy war against “Jewish Bolshevism.”
“The poor, unhappy Russian people,” said one shocked German soldier
as he moved further into the Soviet Union.“Its distress is unspeakable
and its misery heart-rending.”22
“When you see what the Jew has brought about here in Russia,
only then can you begin to understand why the Fuhrer began this struggle
against Judaism,” another stunned Landser wrote, expressing a sentiment
shared by many comrades. “What sort of misfortunes would
have been visited upon our Fatherland, if this bestial people had gotten
the upper hand?”23
Following the devastating German defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, the
“upper hand” did indeed pass to the enemy. Supplied by the US with
a seemingly inexhaustible amount of goods, from tanks and planes
to boots and butter, the resurgent Red Army assumed the offensive.24
As the heretofore invincible Wehrmacht began its long, slow withdrawal
west, a drama as vast and savage as the steppe itself unfolded,
the likes of which the modern world had never witnessed. In dozens
of major battles, in thousands of forgotten skirmishes, a primeval contest
was waged wherein victory meant life and defeat meant death.
✪✪✪✪✪
Overwhelmingly outnumbered in men and materiel, especially the
dreaded tank, for young German recruits sent to fill depleted ranks
there was no subtle transition from peace to war on the Eastern Front, they simply stepped straight from the train or truck into the inferno.
Likewise, the step from boy to man could, and often did, come within
a matter of moments once the recruit reached the lines. Guy Sajer’s
youth ended abruptly one day when his convoy was ambushed.
“Anybody hit?” one of the noncoms called out. “Let’s get going then. . . .”
Nervously, I pulled open the door of the truck. Inside, I saw a man I shall never
forget, a man sitting normally on the seat, whose lower face had been reduced
to a bloody pulp.
“Ernst?” I asked in a choking voice.“Ernst!” I threw myself at him. . . . I looked
frantically for some features on that horrible face. His coat was covered with
blood. . . . His teeth were mixed with fragments of bone, and through the gore
I could see the muscles of his face contracting. In a state of near shock, I tried
to put the dressing somewhere on that cavernous wound. . . . Crying like a
small boy, I pushed my friend to the other end of the seat, holding him in my
arms. . . . Two eyes opened, brilliant with anguish, and looked at me from his
ruined face.
In the cab of a . . . truck, somewhere in the vastness of the Russian hinterland,
a man and an adolescent were caught in a desperate struggle. The man
struggled with death, and the adolescent struggled with despair. . . . I felt that
something had hardened in my spirit forever.25
“The first group of T34’s crashed through the undergrowth,” another
terrified replacement recalled when Russian tanks suddenly shattered
his once peaceful world.
I heard my officer shout to me to take the right hand machine. . . . All that I
had learned in the training school suddenly came flooding back and gave me
confidence. . . . It had been planned that we should allow the first group of T34’s
to roll over us. . . . The grenade had a safety cap which had to be unscrewed
to reach the rip-cord. My fingers were trembling as I unscrewed the cap . . . [and]
climbed out of the trench. . . . Crouching low I started towards the monster,
pulled the detonating cord, and prepared to fix the charge. I had now nine
seconds before the grenade exploded and then I noticed, to my horror, that
the outside of the tank was covered in concrete. . . . My bomb could not stick
on such a surface. . . . The tank suddenly spun on its right track, turned so that
it pointed straight at me and moved forward as if to run over me.
I flung myself backwards and fell straight into a partly dug slit trench and so
shallow that I was only just below the surface of the ground. Luckily I had fallen face upwards and was still holding tight in my hand the sizzling hand
grenade. As the tank rolled over me there was a sudden and total blackness....
The shallow earth walls of the trench began to collapse. As the belly of the
monster passed over me I reached up instinctively as if to push it away and . . .
stuck the charge on the smooth, unpasted metal. . . . Barely had the tank passed
over me than there was a loud explosion. . . . I was alive and the Russians were
dead. I was trembling in every limb.26
Another Landser who found truth facing Russian tanks was eighteen-year-old
Guy Sajer. Armed with single-shot “Panzerfausts,”a shoulder-held
anti-armor weapon, Sajer and five comrades cowered in a
shallow hole. “Our fear reached grandiose proportions, and urine
poured down our legs,” admitted the young soldier. “Our fear was so
great that we lost all thought of controlling ourselves.”
Three tanks were moving toward us. If they rolled over the mound which protected
us, the war would end for us in less than a minute. I. . . . raised my
first Panzerfaust, and my hand, stiff with fear, was on the firing button.
As they rolled toward us, the earth against which my body was pressed transmitted
their vibrations, while my nerves, tightened to the breaking point, seemed
to shrill with an ear-splitting whistle. . . . I could see the reflected yellow lights
on the front of the tank, and then everything disappeared in the flash of light
which I had released, and which burned my face. . . . To the side, other flashes
of light battered at my eyes, which jerked open convulsively wide, although there
was nothing to see. Everything was simultaneously luminous and blurred. Then
a second tank in the middle distance was outlined by a glow of flame....
We could hear the noise of a third tank. . . . It had accelerated, and was no
more than thirty yards from us, when I grabbed my last Panzerfaust. One of
my comrades had already fired, and I was temporarily blinded. I stiffened my
powers of vision and regained my sight to see a multitude of rollers caked with
mud churning past . . . five or six yards from us. An inhuman cry of terror
rose from our helpless throats.
The tank withdrew into the noise of battle, and finally disappeared in a volcanic
eruption which lifted it from the ground in a thick cloud of smoke. Our
wildly staring eyes tried to fix on something solid, but could find nothing except
smoke and flame. As there were no more tanks, our madness thrust us from
our refuge, toward the fire whose brilliance tortured our eyes. The noise of the
tanks was growing fainter. The Russians were backing away.27
After pulling wounded from the burning tanks, Sajer collapsed in
a heap. As the young Landser and his exhausted comrades well knew,
however, the respite would be brief: “They would undoubtedly reappear
in greater numbers, with the support of planes or artillery, and
our despairing frenzy would count for nothing.”28
Sajer was correct. In yet another contest between man and machine,
the soldier and his companions could only watch in helpless horror
as the steel monsters overran a gun emplacement.
Our cries of distress were mingled with the screams of the two machine gunners
and then the shouts of revenge from the Russian tank crew as it drove over
the hole, grinding the remains of the two gunners into that hateful soil. . . . The
treads worked over the hole for a long time, and . . . the Russian crew kept
shouting, “Kaputt, Soldat Germanski! Kaputt!”29
Many scenes from the East Front, like the above, seemed scripted in
hell. After a hastily organized force of mechanics, bakers and cooks had
beat back one enemy assault, a group of Landsers, including Hans
Woltersdorf, crept up to a damaged Russian tank. “The men looked
into the tank,” the lieutenant remembered, “and they were near vomiting,
so they didn’t look further but instead went away, embarrassed.
A headless torso, bloody flesh, and intestines were sticking to the walls.”30
Several soldiers did succeed in pulling an injured driver from the wreck.
“He lay there, wearing a distinguished award for bravery . . . ,” noted
Woltersdorf.“The back of his head was gaping open and bloody brains
were pouring out. He was foaming at the mouth and his breath was
still rattling, the typical rattle after an injury to the back of the head.
You’re dead but your lungs are still puffing. . . . I took his military papers
and the award. Later, when it was all over, I would send them to his
family and write to them that he had fought bravely to the last for
his country . . . he had given his best . . . they could be proud of him
. . . what does one write at such times?”31
Terrible in their own right, sights and sounds such as the above were made doubly horrifying by the haunting suspicion that the viewer was
gazing down on his own fate. “One always sees oneself sticking to
the walls in thousands of pieces like that,”confessed Woltersdorf,“without
a head, or being dragged from the tank with a death rattle in
one’s throat.”32
✪✪✪✪✪
Facing cold, robot-like tanks was terrifying enough. When humans
became such, the results were devastating. Perhaps the most frightening
moment in any Landser’s life came when he first faced the human
wave. In a nation so vast that it compassed two continents, men were
a resource the Soviets could afford to waste . . . and did. Following a
Russian artillery barrage upon his position, Max Simon redeployed
surviving soldiers along a ridge.
“Then,” the SS general wrote, “quite a long distance from our positions
there were lines of brown uniformed men tramping forward. The
first of these crossed a small river and was followed at about 200 meters distance by a second line. Then there rose out of the grass—literally
from out of the ground—a third wave, then a fourth and a fifth.”33
“To see them, the Ivans, rise up from the ground and just stand there,
thousands of them, was really frightening,” said another who faced the
human wave. “They would stand there, within range . . . silent, withdrawn
and not heeding those who fell around them. Then they would
move off, the first three lines marching towards us.”34
Returning to General Simon:
The lines of men stretched to the right and left of our regimental front overlapping
it completely and the whole mass of Russian troops came tramping solidly
and relentlessly forward. It was an unbelievable sight, a machine gunner’s dream.
. . . At 600 meters we opened fire and whole sections of the first wave just vanished
leaving here and there an odd survivor still walking stolidly forward. It was
uncanny, unbelievable, inhuman. No soldier of ours would have continued to
advance alone. The second wave had also taken losses but closed up towards the center, round and across the bodies of their comrades who had fallen with
the first wave. Then, as if on a signal, the lines of men began running forward.
As they advanced there was a low rumbling “Hoooooraaay. . . .”35
“The sound of that bellowing challenge was enough to freeze the
blood,” admitted one trembling Landser. “Just the sound alone terrified
the new recruits.”36
Again, Max Simon:
The first three waves had been destroyed by our fire, but not all of the men
in them had been killed. Some who dropped were snipers who worked their way
forward through the grass to open fire upon our officers and machine gun posts.
The rush of the fourth wave came on more slowly for the men had to pick
their way through a great carpet of bodies and as the Soviets moved towards
us some of our men, forgetful of the danger, stood on the parapets of their slit
trenches to fire at the oncoming Russians. The machine guns became hot from
continual firing and there were frequent stoppages to change barrels....
The great mass of the Soviet troops was now storming up the slope towards
us but our fire was too great and they broke. About an hour later a further five
lines of men came on in a second assault. The numbers of the enemy seemed
endless and the new waves of men advanced across their own dead without
hesitation.... The Ivan's kept up their attacks for three days and sometimes even
during the night. Suddenly they stopped and withdrew.37
While the slaughter of thousands in such suicidal assaults seemed
senseless, the results were not altogether one-sided. The psychological
wounds inflicted on the Germans were, as Gen. Simon acknowledged,
perhaps an even greater blow than the physical havoc wrought
on the Russians. “The number, duration and fury of those attacks had
exhausted us . . . ,” confessed Simon. “If the Soviets could waste men
on our small move, and there was no doubt that these men had been
sacrificed, how often, we asked ourselves, would they attack and in what
numbers if the objective was really a supremely important one?”38
The carnage following battles such as the above was truly horrific.
Although most recruits soon became hardened after two or three similar
encounters, no soldier ever became complacent about war. The battlefield had many grim faces and no two were alike. Surprisingly,
some of the most shattering moments in a Landser’s life concerned
the dreadful impact war had on horses, thousands of which served
both armies. Harald Henry remembered vividly one animal in particular,
laying by the wayside:
It reared, someone gave it a mercy shot, it sprang up again, another fired.... The horse still fought for its life, many shots. But the rifle shots did not quickly
finish off the dying eyes of the horse. . . . Everywhere horses. Ripped apart by
shells, their eyes bulging out from empty red sockets....That is just almost worse
than the torn-away faces of the men, of the burnt, half-charred corpses.39
After just experiencing what he imagined was all the horror one battle
had to give, Lieutenant Friedrich Haag noticed a “beautiful white
horse grazing by a ditch.”
An artillery shell . . . had torn away his right foreleg. He grazed peacefully but
at the same time slowly and in unspeakable grief swayed his bloody stump of
a leg to and fro. . . . I don’t know if I can accurately describe the horror of this
sight. . . . I said then . . . to one of my men: “Finish that horse off!” Then the
soldier, who just ten minutes before had been in a hard fight, replied: “I haven’t
got the heart for it, Herr Lieutenant.” Such experiences are more distressing than
all the “turmoil of battle” and the personal danger.40
Although massed human assaults and tank battles were dramatic,
earth-shaking events, surviving German soldiers could normally expect
a welcome, if brief, respite between contests. Not so with the ever-lurking,
ever-active partisan war. For that Landser behind the front who
dropped his guard, the result could mean instant death . . . or worse.
“When German soldiers were captured by guerrillas, they were often
abominably treated,” one Wehrmacht general recounted.“It was not
unusual for the Soviets to torture their prisoners and then hang them
up, sometimes with their genitals stuffed in their mouths.”41 Other
Landsers were released, then sent staggering down roads toward their
comrades, naked, bloody, eyes gouged from sockets, castrated.
Unable to deal decisively with the civilian-clad irregulars, German
reprisals against the surrounding communities were swift, grim and
arbitrary.
“A partisan group blew up our vehicles,” recorded one private,“and . . . shot the agricultural administrator and a corporal assigned to
him in their quarters. . . . Early yesterday morning 40 men were shot
on the edge of the city. . . . Naturally there were a number of innocent
people who had to give up their lives.... One didn’t waste a lot
of time on this and just shot the ones who happened to be around.”42
As with commissars, “no quarter” was the standard fate of guerrillas
who fell into German hands. Wrote a witness:
Businesslike, the men of the field police emerge and tie with oft-practiced skill
seven nooses on the balcony railing and then disappear behind the door of the
dark room. . . . The first human package, tied up, is carried outside. The limbs
are tightly bound . . . a cloth covers his face. The hemp neckband is placed around
his neck, hands are tied tight, he is put on the balustrade and the blindfold is
removed from his eyes. For an instant you see glaring eyeballs, like those of an
escaped horse, then wearily he closes his eyelids, almost relaxed, never to open
them again. He now slides slowly downward, his weight pulls the noose tight,
his muscles begin their hopeless battle. The body works mightily, twitches,
and within the fetters a bit of life struggles to its end. It’s quick; one after the
other are brought out, put on the railing. . . . Each one bears a placard on his
chest proclaiming his crime. . . . Sometimes one of them sticks out his tongue
as if in unconscious mockery and immoderate amounts of spittle drip down
on the street.43
✪✪✪✪✪
As the Wehrmacht was pressed inexorably west, the daily attrition was
staggering. Repeated Russian attacks opened gaps in German ranks
simply too great to be filled. Outnumbered sometimes ten to one, each
Landser was thus expected to fight as ten if they were to survive. Many
did. After beating back waves of Soviets with only a handful of men,
Leopold von Thadden-Trieglaff refused to abandon his tiny section of line. Holding on throughout the night, the surrounded squad again
fought furiously the following dawn.
“A hail of fire rained on us, from right, from left,” recorded the
young soldier in his journal. “In a few minutes our bunker was full
of wounded and I struggled to quiet the poor fellows. . . . Screams
and groans, and singing. I had to strain every nerve in order to remain
as calm as before.”44
Finally, a German counterattack broke through and rescued the survivors,
ending “the most terrible night and the hardest battle of my life
. . . ,” wrote Thadden-Trieglaff. “As I returned to my command post
in the village I gaped at the dead comrades. I was so shaken that I almost
cried. . . . When might this hideous defensive struggle come to an
end?”45
For the heroic twenty-year-old, that end came the following day
when he was killed.
As the crushing attrition ground the German Army into the Russian
mud, the turnover rate from death and wounds was tremendous.
Green recruits often found themselves within months, even weeks, the
oldest veterans in their unit. “I noticed that it was particularly in the
first few days that newcomers were most likely to get killed,” observed
Jan Montyn.
Gert was one of those newcomers. He was sixteen. . . . I saw in his eyes, behind
his round spectacles, the same bewilderment that I had felt myself when I was
finding my way around that first day—almost a month ago now. His legs were
trembling, he kept blinking. He had never held a real gun in his hands before.
And I felt that he would not be with us for long.
“You have to think carefully about everything you do,” I told him. “You must
not allow anything to become a habit. On the other side there are snipers on
the look-out day and night. If you as much as strike a match, you are finished.
They notice every regularity in your behavior. When you have to scoop out a
trench, don’t throw the earth over the side in the same place twice. . . .
Gert nodded. He would remember. But less than two hours later I heard a cry.
He had climbed out of the trench. He had been hit with his trousers down. In
ten paces I was with him, and pulled him back into the trench by his legs. Oh,you idiot! Did I have to say that . . . ? There was a big hole in his groin. I pulled
a roll of substitute bandage out of my breast pocket. But the poor quality paper
was drenched within a few seconds. I tried to close the wound by pressing on
it with my thumbs, begging and praying that someone might come along. I dared
not call; that might provoke mortar fire. Gert lay panting, his mouth half open.
He did not seem to feel any pain. For God’s sake let someone come. No one came.
The blood that gushed through my fingers mingled with the mud. And Gert
no longer moved.46
Added to the trauma of watching comrades die one by one, was concern
for the safety of loved ones at home. Unlike Allied soldiers, whose
words from home brought comfort and cheer, for the German Landser
a letter from a loved one was merely one more burden to bear. Penned
Martin Poppel in his diary:
My wife wrote to me: “Today we are worn out after this terrible hail of bombs.
To be hearing the howling of these things all the time, waiting for death at any
moment, in a dark cellar, unable to see. . . . Everything gone. . . .” No, here at
the front we musn’t think about it. . . . We understood the feelings of the people
at home, suffered with them and feared for our loved ones who had to bear
terror bombing.47
“A few days ago,” scribbled a tormented sergeant, “I found out that
just at the same time as we dreamed of home, the rubble was smoking
in my home city of Mannheim. What a bitter irony.”48
“These pigs . . . think they can soften us up in that way. But that is
a mistake, a mistake,” growled another sergeant.“Ah, if only the Fuhrer
would send a pair of . . . divisions to England. They would deal a death
dance that would give the devil himself the creeps. Oh, I have a rage,
a wild hatred.”49
Despite official orders against killing prisoners, the unofficial reality
was often quite different. Living without hope, dealing with death
on a daily basis, aware of the fate their loved ones at home were facing,
as well as their own should they be captured, many crazed, brutalized
individuals could not be restrained.
“A prolonged and penetrating cry rose from the hole on my left . . . ,”
Guy Sajer noted after one desperate fight.“Then there was a cry for help.”
We arrived at the edge of a foxhole, where a Russian, who had just thrown
down his revolver, was holding his hands in the air. At the bottom of the hole,
two men were fighting. One of them, a Russian, was waving a large cutlass, holding
a man from our group pinned beneath him. Two of us covered the Russian
who had raised his hands, while a young [corporal] jumped into the hole
and struck the other Russian a blow on the back of his neck with a trenching
tool. . . . The German who had been under him . . . ran up to ground level. He
was covered with blood, brandishing the Russian knife with one hand ...while
with the other he tried to stop the flow of blood pouring from his wound.
“Where is he?” he shouted in a fury.“Where’s the other one?” In a few bounding
steps he reached the . . . prisoner. Before anyone could do anything, he had
run his knife into the belly of the petrified Russian.50
Following three days of frenzied fighting, Sajer and his sleepless comrades
finally snapped.
Sometimes one or two prisoners might emerge from their hideout with their
hands in the air, and each time the same tragedy repeated itself. Kraus killed four
of them on the lieutenant’s orders; the Sudeten two; Group 17, nine. Young Lindberg,
who had been in a state of panic ever since the beginning of the offensive,
and who had been either weeping in terror or laughing in hope, took Kraus’s
machine gun and shoved two Bolsheviks into a shell hole. The two wretched victims
. . . kept imploring his mercy. . . . But Lindberg, in a paroxysm of uncontrollable
rage, kept firing until they were quiet.
We were mad with harassment and exhaustion. . . . We were forbidden to
take prisoners. . . . We knew that the Russians didn’t take any,... that it was
either them or us, which is why my friend Hals and I threw grenades . . . at
some Russians who were trying to wave a white flag.51
Nevertheless, amid the insane upheaval of combat, the same soldier
who might one moment murder helpless prisoners could the next
risk his own life to pull men from burning enemy tanks. Hans Woltersdorf
stood for one eternal instant, his machine-gun trained on several
Russians he had surprised, the last flicker of humanity struggling
mightily against all the dark forces of his past. “Do I shoot or not? . . . ,” the lieutenant asked himself, as the terrified prisoners begged
for mercy. “They got up . . . , stumbled backwards a few steps more
to the fir thicket, turned round, put their hands down and ran like
the devil. . . . Did I try to shoot? Did my machine gun really fail to function,
as I claimed later?”52
Very often, death was the highest act of kindness one could show
an enemy. “On Tuesday I knocked out two T-34’s . . . ,” one Landser
wrote. “Afterward I drove past the smoking remains. From the hatch
there hung a body, head down, his feet caught, and his legs burning
up to his knees. The body was alive, the mouth moaning. He must have
suffered terrible pain. And there was no possibility of freeing him....
I shot him, and as I did it, the tears ran down my cheeks. Now I have
been crying for three nights about a dead Russian tank driver.”53
“From time to time one of us would emerge from torpor and
scream,” admitted Guy Sajer. “These screams were entirely involuntary:
we couldn’t stop them. They were produced by our exhaustion.
. . . Some laughed as they howled; others prayed. Men who could
pray could hope.”54 Sajer continues:
We felt like lost souls who had forgotten that men are made for something else,
. . . that love can sometimes occur, that the earth can be productive and used
for something other than burying the dead. We were madmen, gesturing and
moving without thought or hope.... Lindberg . . . had collapsed into a kind of
stupor. . . . The Sudeten . . . had begun to tremble . . . and to vomit uncontrollably.
Madness had invaded our group, and was gaining ground rapidly....I
saw . . . Hals leap to his machine gun and fire at the sky. . . . I also saw the [sergeant]
...beat the ground with his clenched fist.... I shouted curses and
obscenities at the sky. . . . After hours and then days of danger . . . one collapses
into unbearable madness, and a crisis of nerves is only the beginning. Finally, one
vomits and collapses, entirely brutalized and inert, as if death had already won.55
“We were the dead or the dead to be,” stated one Landser simply.56
As the East Front moved steadily west, the struggle became even more desperate. By the winter of 1944, the Red Army had finally driven the
invaders from Russian soil and was pressing them through Poland.
Although enormous losses had melted away much German manpower,
and although the odds remained overwhelmingly in the Soviets’ favor,
the Red Army suffered grievously as well. For every German casualty
on the field of battle, there were four Russians. Many Soviet units had
been reduced to a mere 50% of their original strength.57 Consequently,
Red ranks were increasingly filled by troops from far eastern provinces.
“This is not the Red Army,” spit one Russian officer.“The Red Army
perished on the battlefields in 1941 and 1942. These are the hordes of
Asia.”58
In addition to Asians, Soviet officials called up a motley reserve—
boys as young as thirteen, women, cripples, even convicts.59 “We opened
up our penitentiaries and stuck everybody into the army,” Stalin admitted.60
If possible, these raw levies were thrown away with more criminal
disregard than ever. Wrote a German soldier:
It does not matter that these conscripts are untrained, that many are without
boots of any kind and that most of them have no arms. Prisoners whom we took
told us that those without weapons are expected to take up those from the fallen.
. . . I saw . . . attacks which were preceded by solid blocks of people marching
shoulder to shoulder across the minefields which we had laid. Civilians and Army
punishment battalions alike advanced like automata, their ranks broken only
when a mine exploded killing and wounding those around it. The people seemed
never to flinch nor to quail and we noticed that some who fell were then shot
by a smaller wave of commissars or officers who followed very closely behind.61
“This was not war anymore,” a Landser who witnessed the massacres
confided. “It was murder.”
Of all the horrors the East Front had to give—human waves, Red
crewmen bolted inside burning tanks, murder of prisoners, partisan
atrocities—the single facet most frightening to the average Landser
was undoubtedly “Ivan” himself.
“The Russian infantryman . . . always defended himself to the last
gasp . . . ,” remembered Gen. Max Simon. “Even crews in burning
tanks kept up fire for as long as there was breath in their bodies.
Wounded or unconscious men reached for their weapons as soon as
they regained consciousness.”62 Added another German soldier, Erich
Dwinger:
Among the prisoners waiting to be ferried back across the river were wounded,
many of whom had been badly burnt by flame-throwers. . . . Their faces had
no longer any recognizable human features but were simply swollen lumps of
meat. One of them also had had his lower jaw torn away by a bullet and this
wound he had bandaged roughly. Through the rags his windpipe, laid bare,
was visible and the effort it made as his breath snorted through it. Another
soldier had been hit by five bullets and his right shoulder and his whole arm was
a ragged mass of flesh. He had no bandages and the blood oozed from his wounds
as if from a row of tubes. . . .
Not one of them was moaning as they sat there in the grass. . . . Why did
they not moan? But this was not the most tragic picture of that day . . . Some
of our soldiers brought out barrels of margarine and loaves of Russian bread.
They began their distribution more than thirty meters distant from the place
where the badly wounded were lying and these rose up, yes, even the dying
rose up quickly and in an inexpressible stream of suffering hurried toward the
distribution point. The man without a jaw swayed as he stood up, the man
with the five bullet wounds raised himself by his good arm . . . and those with
burned faces ran . . . but this was not all; a half dozen men who had been lying
on the ground also went forward pressing back into their bodies with their
left hands the intestines which had burst through the gaping wounds in their
stomach wall. Their right hands were extended in gestures of supplication . . . As they moved down each left behind a broad smear of blood upon the grass
. . . and not one of them cried . . . none moaned.63
As Dwinger makes implicit, such scenes left a profound impression
on thousands of Landsers. The almost unearthly stoicism of the
Russian, his fatalism, his willingness to suffer and die in silence, was
bewildering to German soldiers. To some, it was as if the harsh climate
and crushing conditions of communism had molded a man in which
normal human emotions were no longer important.64
“It’s not people we’re fighting against here,” one Landser burst out,
“but simply animals.”
Perhaps. And yet, as deep as their differences undoubtedly were, there
were also similarities, some as elemental and ancient as the earth itself.
On December 24, a strange, seemingly impossible understanding was
reached by the deadly foes in which each side promised to stop hating
the other “from four o’clock in the afternoon until six o’clock
the following morning.”
“An unreal silence fell,” recalled Jan Montyn.
Hesitantly, we crawled out into the open. We on our side. They on theirs.
Step by step we approached one another, almost timidly. And the enemy, of
whom we had seen nothing until then but the vague movement of a helmet or
the barrel of a gun, suddenly turned out to be boys like ourselves. They too
were dressed in rags, they too were starving, ill, filthy.
We met in the middle of no-man’s land. We shook hands, exchanged names
and cigarettes. They tried out their few words of German, we our Russian. We
laughed at one another’s accents. Merry Christmas. We made big bonfires, shared
out our Christmas rations....
When we withdrew, after midnight, each to his own side, the fires in no-man’s
land were still glowing. For several hours the silence lasted. Then firing broke
out. Was it heavier than the day before? Not at all. But there were more casualties
than ever. The break, however brief, had broken the resistance of many of
us.65
Obviously, by the winter of 1944, German soldiers on the East Front
were well aware that all their sacrifices during three years of war had
been for naught; defeat was inevitable. Close as victory had once been,
by invading the Soviet Union tiny Germany had unleashed a force of
almost unlimited resources; a colossus spanning much of the globe.
To continue the struggle against such a giant was hopeless. And yet,
many German soldiers, especially those of the elite SS, were determined
to fight to the death, or, as one private wrote,“to sell our skins as dearly
as possible.” Explained an observer:
Even the last soldier was aware that the war was lost. He was aiming to survive,
and the only sense he could see was to protect the front in the East to save as many refugees as possible. . . . He was hoping for a political solution
for ending the war. . . . but . . . the demand for unconditional surrender left in
the light of self-respect no alternative but to continue the hopeless fighting.66
As was the case during the Christmas truce, when “Fritz” looked into
the face of “Ivan” the White Russian, or “Popov” the Ukrainian, he generally
saw himself reflected. Not so the inscrutable Mongolians and
other Asiatic “slit eyes” that usually followed just behind the front.
In their faces the German saw something ferocious and frightening
and something not seen in Europe since the days of Ghengis Khan.
Lurking in the back of every Landser’s mind, especially after the horror
at Nemmersdorf, was the nightmare should this new “yellow peril”
reach the Reich to run loose among the cities, towns and farms of Germany,
among wives, sweethearts, sisters, and mothers.
next
Between Fire and Ice
1. Tony LeTissier, The Battle of Berlin, 1945 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 16.
2. Charman, The German Home Front, 144.
3. Christabel Bielenberg, The Past is Myself (Dublin: Ward River, 1982), 194.
4. Lali Horstmann, We Chose to Stay (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), 39.
5. Charman, Home Front, 145.
6. Ibid., 144.
7. Rudolf Semmler, Goebbels—The Man Next to Hitler (London: Westhouse, 1947), 110.
8. Hastings, Bomber Command, 287; Richard Landwehr,Charlemagne’s Legionnaires (Silver Spring,
Maryland: Bibliophile Legion Books, Inc., 1989), 14–15; Mark Weber, “Churchill Wanted to
‘Drench’ Germany with Poison Gas,”The Journal of Historical Review 6, no. 4 (Winter 1985–86):
501–502.
9. Garrett, Ethics and Airpower, 194.
10. Leni Riefenstahl, A Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 320–321.
11. James P. O’Donnell, The Bunker (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1978), 318.
12. Earl F. Ziemke, The Soviet Juggernaut (Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life Books, 1980), 179.
13. Christopher Duffy, Red Storm on the Reich (New York: Atheneum, 1991), 39; John Toland, The
Last 100 Days (New York: Random House, 1965), 72–73.
14. Mark Elliott, Pawns of Yalta (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 9, 168; Nikolai Tolstoy,
The Secret Betrayal, 1944–1947 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977), 323.
15. Elliott, Pawns, 168.
16. Ibid., 169–170.
17. Ibid., 9.
18. Alfred deZayas, The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939–1945(Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1989), 163.
19. Ibid., 164.
20. Ibid., 167; Douglas, Gestapo Chief, II, 223; Sorge, Other Price, 7.
21. Hans Werner Woltersdorf, Gods of War (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1990), 214
22. Stephen G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 52.
23. Ibid., 195.
24. LeTissier, Battle of Berlin, 7.
25. Fritz, Frontsoldaten, 176
26. Ibid., 41–42.
27. Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 446–447
28. Ibid., 447.
29. Fritz, 42.
30. Woltersdorf, Gods of War, 73.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. James Lucas, War on the Eastern Front, 1941–1945 (London: Jane’s Pub. Co., 1979), 32.
34. James Lucas, Last Days of the Third Reich (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1986), 19.
35. Lucas, Eastern Front, 32.
36. Lucas, Last Days, 19.
37. Lucas, Eastern Front, 32–33.
38. Ibid., 33.
39. Fritz, Frontsoldaten, 153.
40. Ibid.
41. John H. Nugent and George Fowler,“The Geneva & Hague Conventions—And the ‘Holocaust,’”
The Barnes Review 2, no. 2 (Nov. 1996): 16.
42. Fritz, 50–51.
43. Ibid., 51.
44. Ibid., 40.
45. Ibid., 41.
46. Montyn, Lamb to Slaughter, 97.
47. Fritz, Frontsoldaten, 84.
48. Ibid., 85.
49. Ibid., 86.
50. Ibid., 52–53.
51. Ibid., 53–54.
52. Woltersdorf, Gods of War, 34.
53. Fritz, 88–89.
54. Ibid., 88.
55. Ibid., 89.
56. Ibid., 84.
57. Duffy, Red Storm, 25, 54.
58. Aidan Crawley, The Spoils of War (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 20.
59. McKee, Dresden 1945, 30.
60. deZayas, Wehrmacht, 179.
61. Lucas, Eastern Front, 35–36.
62. Ibid., 52.
63. Ibid., 51–52.
64. Rauss, Erhard, et al, Fighting in Hell, (Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole Books, 1995), 22
65. Montyn, Lamb, 106.
66. Duffy, Red Storm, 56
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