Hellstorm
The Death of Nazi Germany
1944–1947
by Thomas Goodrich
10
The Death of Nazi Germany
1944–1947
by Thomas Goodrich
10
The Halls of Hell
Soon after the Allied victory in Europe,the purge of Nazi Party
members from government, business, industry, science, education,
and all other walks of German life commenced. While a surprising
number of Nazis were allowed—even compelled—to man their
posts temporarily to enable a smooth transition, all party members,
high and low, were sooner or later excised from German daily life. In
theory, “deNazification” was a simple transplanting of Nazi officials
with those of democratic, socialist or communist underpinnings. In
practice, the purge became little more than a cloak for an orgy of rape,
torture and death. Because their knowledge of the language and culture was superb, many of the intelligence officers accompanying US and British forces into the Reich were Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi persecution in the late 1930s. Although their American and English “aides” were hardly better, the fact that many of these “39ers” became interrogators, examiners and screeners, with old scores to settle, insured that Nazis— or any German, for that matter—would be shown no mercy.
One man opposed to the vengeance-minded program was George Patton. “Evidently the virus started by Morgenthau and Bernard Baruch of a Semitic revenge against all Germans is still working . . . ,” wrote the general in private. “I am frankly opposed to this war-criminal stuff. It is not cricket and it is Semitic. . . . I can’t see how Americans can sink so low.”1
Soon after occupation, all adult Germans were compelled to register
at the nearest Allied headquarters and complete a lengthy questionnaire
on their past activities. While many nervous citizens were
detained then and there, most returned home, convinced that at long
last the terrible ordeal was over. For millions, however, the trial had
but begun.
“Then it started,” remembered Anna Fest, a woman who had registered with the Americans six weeks earlier.
Such a feeling of helplessness, when three or four heavily armed military police stand in front of you. You just panic. I cried terribly. My mother was completely beside herself and said, “You can’t do this. She registered just as she was supposed to.” Then she said, “If only you’d gone somewhere else and had hidden.” But I consider that senseless, because I did not feel guilty. . . . That was the way it went with everyone, with no reason given.2
Few German adults, Nazi or not, escaped the dreaded knock on the door. Far from being dangerous fascists, Freddy and Lali Horstmann were actually well-known anti-Nazis. Records Lali from the Russian Zone:
“I am sorry to bother you,” he began,“but I am simply carrying out my orders. Until when did you work for the Foreign Office?”
“Till 1933,” my husband answered.
“Then you need fear nothing,” Androff said. . . . “We accuse you of nothing, but we want you to accompany us to the headquarters of the NKVD, the secret police, so that we can take down what you said in a protocol, and ask you a few questions about the working of the Foreign Office. . . .”
We were stunned for a moment; then I started forward, asking if I could come along with them. “Impossible,” the interpreter smiled. My heart raced. Would Freddy answer satisfactorily? Could he stand the excitement? What sort of accommodation would they give him?
“Don’t worry, your husband has nothing to fear,”Androff continued.“He will have a heated room. Give him a blanket for the night, but quickly, we must leave. . . .”
“Then it started,” remembered Anna Fest, a woman who had registered with the Americans six weeks earlier.
Such a feeling of helplessness, when three or four heavily armed military police stand in front of you. You just panic. I cried terribly. My mother was completely beside herself and said, “You can’t do this. She registered just as she was supposed to.” Then she said, “If only you’d gone somewhere else and had hidden.” But I consider that senseless, because I did not feel guilty. . . . That was the way it went with everyone, with no reason given.2
Few German adults, Nazi or not, escaped the dreaded knock on the door. Far from being dangerous fascists, Freddy and Lali Horstmann were actually well-known anti-Nazis. Records Lali from the Russian Zone:
“I am sorry to bother you,” he began,“but I am simply carrying out my orders. Until when did you work for the Foreign Office?”
“Till 1933,” my husband answered.
“Then you need fear nothing,” Androff said. . . . “We accuse you of nothing, but we want you to accompany us to the headquarters of the NKVD, the secret police, so that we can take down what you said in a protocol, and ask you a few questions about the working of the Foreign Office. . . .”
We were stunned for a moment; then I started forward, asking if I could come along with them. “Impossible,” the interpreter smiled. My heart raced. Would Freddy answer satisfactorily? Could he stand the excitement? What sort of accommodation would they give him?
“Don’t worry, your husband has nothing to fear,”Androff continued.“He will have a heated room. Give him a blanket for the night, but quickly, we must leave. . . .”
There was a feeling of sharp tension, putting the soldier on his guard, as though
he were expecting an attack from one of us. I took first the soldier, then the interpreter,
by their hands and begged them to be kind to Freddy, repeating myself
in the bustle and scraping of feet that drowned my words. There was a banging of doors. A cold wind blew in. I felt Freddy kiss me. I never saw him again.3
“We were wakened by the sound of tires screeching, engines stopping abruptly, orders yelled, general din, and a hammering on the window shutters. Then the intruders broke through the door, and we saw Americans with rifles who stood in front of our bed and shone lights at us. None of them spoke German, but their gestures said: ‘Get dressed, come with us immediately.’ This was my fourth arrest.”4
Thus wrote Leni Riefenstahl, a talented young woman who was perhaps the world’s greatest film-maker. Because her epic documentaries— Triumph of the Will and Olympia—seemed paeans to not only Germany, but Nazism, and because of her close relationship with an admiring Adolf Hitler, Leni was of more than passing interest to the Allies. Though false, rumors also hinted that the attractive, sometimes-actress was also a “mistress of the devil”—that she and Hitler were lovers.5
“Neither my husband nor my mother nor any of my three assistants had ever joined the Nazi Party, nor had any of us been politically active,” said the confused young woman. “No charges had ever been filed against us, yet we were at the mercy of the Allies and had no legal protection of any kind.”6
Soon after Leni’s fourth arrest, came a fifth.
The jeep raced along the autobahns until, a few hours later . . . I was brought to the Salzburg Prison; there an elderly prison matron rudely pushed me into the cell, kicking me so hard that I fell to the ground; then the door was locked. There were two other women in the dark, barren room, and one of them, on her knees, slid about the floor, jabbering confusedly; then she began to scream, her limbs writhing hysterically. She seemed to have lost her mind. The other woman crouched on her bunk, weeping to herself.7
As Leni and others quickly discovered, the “softening up” process began soon after arrival at an Allied prison. When Ernst von Salomon, his Jewish girl friend and fellow prisoners reached an American holding pen near Munich, the men were promptly led into a room and brutally beaten by military police. With his teeth knocked out and blood spurting from his mouth, von Salomon moaned to a gum-chewing officer, “You are no gentlemen.” The remark brought only a roar of laughter from the attackers. “No, no, no!” the GIs grinned. “We are Mississippi boys!” In another room, military policemen raped the women at will while leering soldiers watched from windows.8
After such savage treatment, the feelings of despair only intensified once the captives were crammed into cells.
“The people had been standing there for three days, waiting to be interrogated,” remembered a German physician ordered to treat prisoners in the Soviet Zone.“At the sight of us a pandemonium broke out which left me helpless. . . . As far as I could gather, the usual senseless questions were being reiterated: Why were they there, and for how long? They had no water and hardly anything to eat. They wanted to be let out more often than once a day. . . . A great many of them have dysentery so badly that they can no longer get up.”9
“Young Poles made fun of us,” said a woman from her cell in the same zone.“They threw bricks through the windows, paper bags with sand, and skins of hares filled with excrement. We did not dare to move or offer resistance, but huddled together in the farthest corner, in order not to be hit, which could not always be avoided. . . We were never free from torments.”10
“For hours on end I rolled about on my bed, trying to forget my surroundings,” recalled Leni Riefenstahl, “but it was impossible.”
The mentally disturbed woman kept screaming—all through the night; but even worse were the yells and shrieks of men from the courtyard, men who were being beaten, screaming like animals. I subsequently found out that a company of SS men was being interrogated.
They came for me the next morning, and I was taken to a padded cell where I had to strip naked, and a woman examined every square inch of my body. Then I had to get dressed and go down to the courtyard, where many men were standing, apparently prisoners, and I was the only woman. We had to line up before an American guard who spoke German. The prisoners stood to attention, so I tried to do the same, and then an American came who spoke fluent German. He pushed a few people together, then halted at the first in our line. “Were you in the Party?”
The prisoner hesitated for a moment, then said: “Yes.”
He was slugged in the face and spat blood.
The American went on to the next in line. “Were you in the Party?”
The man hesitated.
“Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
And he too got punched so hard in the face that the blood ran out of his mouth. However, like the first man, he didn’t dare resist. They didn’t even instinctively raise their hands to protect themselves. They did nothing. They put up with the blows like dogs.
The next man was asked: “Were you in the Party?”
Silence.
“Well?”
“No,” he yelled, so no punch. From then on nobody admitted that he had been in the Party and I was not even asked.11
As the above case illustrated, there often was no rhyme or reason to the examinations; all seemed designed to force from the victim what the inquisitor wanted to hear, whether true or false. Additionally, many such “interrogations” were structured to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible. Explained one prisoner:
The purpose of these interrogations is not to worm out of the people what they knew—which would be uninteresting anyway—but to extort from them special statements. The methods resorted to are extremely primitive; people are beaten up until they confess to having been members of the Nazi Party. . . . The authorities simply assume that, basically, everybody has belonged to the Party. Many people die during and after these interrogations, while others, who admit at once their party membership, are treated more leniently.12
“A young commissar, who was a great hater of the Germans, cross examined me. . . ,” said Gertrude Schulz. “When he put the question: “Frauenwerk [Women’s Labor Service]?”, I answered in the negative. Thereupon he became so enraged, that he beat me with a stick, until I was black and blue. I received about 15 blows . . . on my left upper arm, on my back and on my thigh. I collapsed and, as in the case of the first cross-examination, I had to sign the questionnaire.”13
“Both officers who took our testimony were former German Jews,” reminisced a member of the women’s SS, Anna Fest. While vicious dogs snarled nearby, one of the officers screamed questions and accusations at Anna. If the answers were not those desired, “he kicked me in the back and the other hit me.”
They kept saying we must have been armed, have had pistols or so. But we had no weapons, none of us. . . . I had no pistol. I couldn’t say, just so they’d leave me in peace, yes, we had pistols. The same thing would happen to the next person to testify. . . . The terrible thing was, the German men had to watch. That was a horrible, horrible experience....That must have been terrible for them. When I went outside, several of them stood there with tears running down their cheeks. What could they have done? They could do nothing.14
Not surprisingly, with beatings, rape, torture, and death facing them, few victims failed to “confess” and most gladly inked their name to any scrap of paper shown them. Some, like Anna, tried to resist. Such recalcitrance was almost always of short duration, however. Generally, after enduring blackened eyes, broken bones, electric shock to breasts— or, in the case of men, smashed testicles—only those who died during torture failed to sign confessions.
Alone, surrounded by sadistic hate, utterly bereft of law, many victims understandably escaped by taking their own lives. Like tiny islands in a vast sea of misery, however, miracles did occur. As he limped painfully back to his prison cell, one Wehrmacht officer reflected on the insults, beatings, and tortures he had endured and contemplated suicide.
I could not see properly in the semi-darkness and missed my open cell door. A kick in the back and I was sprawling on the floor. As I raised myself I said to myself I could not, should not accept this humiliation. I sat on my bunk. I had hidden a razor blade that would serve to open my veins. Then I looked at the New Testament and found these words in the Gospel of St. John: “Without me ye can do nothing.”
Yes. You can mangle this poor body—I looked down at the running sores on my legs—but myself, my honor, God’s image that is in me, you cannot touch. This body is only a shell, not my real self. Without Him, without the Lord, my Lord, ye can do nothing. New strength seemed to rise in me.
I was pondering over what seemed to me a miracle when the heavy lock turned in the cell door. A very young American soldier came in, put his finger to his lips to warn me not to speak. “I saw it,” he said. “Here are baked potatoes.” He pulled the potatoes out of his pocket and gave them to me, and then went out, locking the door behind him.15
Moments after arrival, prisoners were made horrifyingly aware of their fate. John Sack, himself a Jew, reports on one camp run by twenty six-year-old Shlomo Morel:
“I was at Auschwitz,” Shlomo proclaimed, lying to the Germans but, even more, to himself, psyching himself like a fighter the night of the championship, filling himself with hate for the Germans around him. “I was at Auschwitz for six long years, and I swore that if I got out, I’d pay all you Nazis back.” His eyes sent spears, but the “Nazis” sent him a look of simple bewilderment. . . . “Now sing the Horst Wessel Song!” No one did, and Shlomo, who carried a hard rubber club, hit it against a bed like some judge’s gavel. “Sing it, I say!”
“The flags held high . . . ,” some Germans began.
“Everyone!” Shlomo said.
“The ranks closed tight. . . .”
“I said everyone!” . . .
“Blond!” Shlomo cried to the blondest, bluest-eyed person there.“I said sing!” He swung his rubber club at the man’s golden head and hit it. The man staggered back.
“Our comrades, killed by the Reds and Reactionaries. . . .”
“Sonofabitch!” Shlomo cried, enraged that the man was defying him by not singing but staggering back. He hit him again, saying, “Sing!”
“Are marching in spirit with us. . . .”
“Louder!”
“Clear the street for the Brown Battalions. . . .”
“Still louder!” cried Shlomo, hitting another shouting man....
“Millions of hopeful people. . . .”
“Nazi pigs!”
“Are looking to the swastika. . . .”
“Schweine!” Shlomo cried. He threw down his rubber club, grabbed a wooden stool, and, a leg in his fist, started beating a German’s head. Without thinking, the man raised his arms, and Shlomo, enraged that the man would try to evade his just punishment, cried, “Sonofawhore!” and slammed the stool against the man’s chest. The man dropped his arms, and Shlomo started hitting his now undefended head when snap! the leg of the stool split off, and, cursing the German birchwood, he grabbed another stool and hit the German with that. No one was singing now, but Shlomo, shouting, didn’t notice. The other guards called out, “Blond!” “Black!” “Short!” “Tall!” and as each of these terrified people came up, they wielded their clubs upon him. The brawl went on till eleven o’clock, when the sweat-drenched invaders cried,“Pigs! We will fix you up!” and left the Germans alone.
Some were quite fixed. . . . Shlomo and his subordinates had killed them.17
The next night it was more of the same . . . and the next night and the next and the next. Those who survived the “welcoming committees” at this and other camps were flung back into their pens.
“I was put with 30 women into a cell, which was intended to accommodate one person,” Gerlinde Winkler recalled. “The narrow space, into which we were rammed, was unbearable and our legs were all entangled together.... The women, ill with dysentery, were only allowed to go out once a day, in order to relieve themselves. A bucket without a cover was pushed into the cell with the remark: ‘Here you have one, you German sows.’ The stink was insupportable, and we were not allowed to open the little window.”18
“The air in the cells became dense, the smell of the excrement filled it, the heat was like in Calcutta, and the flies made the ceiling black,” wrote John Sack. “I’m choking, the Germans thought, and one even took the community razor blade and, in despair, cut his throat open with it.”19
When the wretched inmates were at last pried from their hellish tombs, it was only for interrogation. Sack continues:
As many as eight interrogators, almost all Jews, stood around any one German saying, “Were you in the Nazi Party?” Sometimes a German said, “Yes,” and the boys shouted, “Du schwein! You pig!” and beat him and broke his arm, perhaps, before sending him to his cell. . . . But usually a German said, “No,” and the boys ...told him, “You’re lying. You were a Nazi.”
“No, I never was.”
“You’re lying! We know about you!”
“No, I really wasn’t—”
“Du lugst! You’re lying!” they cried, hitting the obstinate man. “You better admit it! Or you’ll get a longer sentence! Now! Were you in the Nazi Party?”
“No!” the German often said, and the boys had to beat him and beat him until he was really crying, “I was a Nazi! Yes!”
But sometimes a German wouldn’t confess. One such hard case was a fifty year-old....
“Were you in the Party?”
“No, I wasn’t in it.”
“How many people work for you?”
“In the high season, thirty-five.”
“You must have been in the Party,” the boy deduced. He asked for the German’s wallet, where he found a fishing license with the stamp of the German Anglers Association. Studying it, he told the German,“It’s stamped by the Party.”
“It’s not,” said the German. He’d lost his left arm in World War I and was using his right arm to gesture with, and, to the boy, he may have seemed to be Heiling Hitler. The boy became violent. He grabbed the man’s collar, hit the man’s head against the wall, hit it against it ten times more, threw the man’s body onto the floor, and, in his boots, jumped on the man’s cringing chest as though jumping rope. A half dozen other interrogators, almost all Jews, pushed the man onto a couch, pulled off his trousers, and hit him with hard rubber clubs and hard rubber hoses full of stones. The sweat started running down the Jews’ arms, and the blood down the man’s naked legs.
“Warst du in der Partei?”
“Nein!”
“Warst du in der Partei?”
“Nein!” the German screamed—screamed, till the boys had to go to Shlomo’s kitchen for a wooden spoon and to use it to cram some rags in the German’s mouth. Then they resumed beating him.... The more the man contradicted them, the more they hated him for it.20
After undergoing similar sessions on a regular basis, the victim was brought back for the eighth time.
By now, the man was half unconscious due to his many concussions, and he wasn’t thinking clearly. The boys worked on him with rubber and oak-wood clubs and said, “Do you still say you weren’t in the Party?”
“No! I didn’t say I wasn’t in the Party!”
“You didn’t?”
“No!” said the punch drunk man. “I never said it!”
“You were in the Party?”
“Yes!” The boys stopped beating him. They practically sighed, as if their ordeal were over now. They lit up cigarettes....
“Scram,” one said to the German. The man stood up, and he had his hand on the doorknob when one of the boys impulsively hit the back of his head, and he fell to the floor, unconscious. “Aufstehen, du Deutsches schwein. Stand up, you German pig,” the boys said, kicking him till he stood up and collapsed again. Two boys carried him to his cell and dropped him in a corner....
Of course, the boys would beat up the Germans for “Yes”es as well as “No”s. In Glatz, the Jewish commandant asked a German policeman, “Were you in the Party?”
“Of course! I was obliged to be!” “Lie down,” the commandant said, and six weeks later the boys were still whipping the German’s feet.21
Some torture sessions lacked even the pretense of an examination. Remembered Eva Reimann:
My cell door opened. The guard, who, because of the foul smell, held a handkerchief to his nose, cried,“Reimann Eva! Come!” I was led to a first-floor room.
He shouted at me, “Take off your shoes!” I took them off. “Lie down!” I lay down. He took a thick bamboo stick, and he beat the soles of my feet. I screamed, since the pain was very great. . . . The stick whistled down on me. A blow on my mouth tore my lower lip, and my teeth started bleeding violently. He beat my feet again. The pain was unbearable....
The door opened suddenly, and, smiling obligingly, a cigarette in his mouth, in came the chief of the Office, named Sternnagel. In faultless German he asked me,“What’s wrong here? Why do you let yourself be beaten? You just have to sign this document. Or should we jam your fingers in the door, until the bones are broad? . . .
A man picked me up by the ankles, raised me eight inches above the floor, and let me fall. My hands were tied, and my head hit hard. . . . I lay in a bloody puddle. Someone cried,“Stand up!” I tried to, and, with unspeakable pain, I succeeded. A man with a pistol came, held it to my left temple, and said, “Will you now confess?” I told him, “Please shoot me.” Yes, I hoped to be freed from all his tortures. I begged him, “Please pull the trigger.”22
After barely surviving his “interrogation,” one fourteen-year-old was taken to the camp infirmary. “My body was green, but my legs were fire red,” the boy said. “My wounds were bound with toilet paper, and I had to change the toilet paper every day. I was in the perfect place to watch what went on. . . . All the patients were beaten people, and they died everywhere: at their beds, in the washroom, on the toilet. At night, I had to step over the dead as if that were normal to do.”23
When the supply of victims ran low, it was a simple matter to find more. John Sack:
One day, a German in pitch-black pants, the SS’s color, showed up in Lola’s prison. He’d been spotted near the city square by a Pole who’d said, “Fascist! You’re wearing black!” At that, the German had bolted off, but the Pole chased him a mile to the Church of Saints Peter and Paul, tackled him by a gold mosaic, hit him, kicked him, and took him to Lola’s prison. Some guards, all girls, then seized the incriminating evidence: the man’s black pants, pulling them off so aggressively that one of the tendons tore. The man screamed, but the girls said, “Shut up!” and they didn’t recognize that the pants were part of a boy scout uniform. The “man” was fourteen years old.
The girls decided to torture him with . . . fire. They held down the German boy, put out their cigarettes on him, and, using gasoline, set his curly black hair afire.24
At the larger prison camps, Germans died by the hundreds daily.
“You pigs!” the commandant then cried, and he beat the Germans with their stools, often killing them. At dawn many days, a Jewish guard cried, “Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier!” and marched the Germans into the woods outside their camp. “Halt! Get your shovels! Dig!” the guard cried, and, when the Germans had dug a big grave, he put a picture of Hitler in. “Now cry!” the guard said. “And sing All the Dogs Are Barking!” and all the Germans moaned,
The guard then cried, “Get undressed!” and, when the Germans were naked,
he beat them, poured liquid manure on them, or, catching a toad, shoved the
fat thing down a German’s throat, the German soon dying.25
Utterly unhinged by years of persecution, by the loss of homes and loved ones, for the camp operators, no torture, no sadism, no bestiality, seemed too monstrous to inflict on those now in their power. Some Germans were forced to crawl on all fours and eat their own excrement as well as that of others. Many were drowned in open latrines. Hundreds were herded into buildings and burned to death or sealed in caskets and buried alive.26
Near Lamsdorf, German women were forced to disinter bodies from a Polish burial site. According to John Sack:
The women did, and they started to suffer nausea as the bodies, black as the stuff in a gutter, appeared. The faces were rotten, the flesh was glue, but the guards— who had often seemed psychopathic, making a German woman drink urine, drink blood, and eat a man’s excrement, inserting an oily five-mark bill in a woman’s vagina, putting a match to it—shouted at the women . . . “Lie down with them!” The women did, and the guards shouted,“Hug them!”“Kiss them!” “Make love with them!”and, with their rifles, pushed on the backs of the women’s heads until their eyes, noses and mouths were deep in the Polish faces’ slime. The women who clamped their lips couldn’t scream, and the women who screamed had to taste something vile. Spitting, retching, the women at last stood up, the wet tendrils still on their chins, fingers, clothes, the wet seeping into the fibers, the stink like a mist around them as they marched back to Lamsdorf. There were no showers there, and the corpses had all had typhus, apparently, and sixty-four women . . . died.27
Not surprisingly, the mortality rate at the concentration camps was staggering and relatively few survived. At one prison of eight thousand, a mere 1,500 lived to reach home.28 And of those “lucky” individuals who did leave with their lives, few could any longer be called human.
When a smattering of accounts began to leak from Poland of the unspeakable crimes being committed, many in the West were stunned. “One would expect that after the horrors in Nazi concentration camps, nothing like that could ever happen again,” muttered one US senator, who then reported on beatings, torture and “brains splashed on the ceiling.”29
“Is this what our soldiers died for?” echoed a Briton in the House of Commons.30
Added Winston Churchill: “Enormous numbers of Germans are utterly unaccounted for. It is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the Iron Curtain.”31
While Churchill and others in the West were expressing shock and surprise over the sadistic slaughter taking place in the Soviet Zone, precious little was said about the “tragedy on a prodigious scale” that was transpiring in their own backyard.
“We were thrown into small cells stark naked,” Hans Schmidt later wrote.“The cells in which three or four persons were incarcerated were six and a half by ten feet in size and had no windows or ventilation.”
When we went to the lavatory we had to run through a lane of Americans who struck us with straps, brooms, cudgels, buckets, belts, and pistol holders to make us fall down. Our head, eyes, body, belly, and genitals were violently injured. A man stood inside the lavatory to beat us and spit on us. We returned to our cells through the same ordeal. The temperature in the cells was 140 Fahrenheit or more. During the first three days we were given only one cup of water and a small slice of bread. During the first days we perspired all the time, then perspiration stopped. We were kept standing chained back to back for hours. We suffered terribly from thirst, blood stagnation and mortification of the hands. From time to time water was poured on the almost red-hot radiators, filling the cells with steam, so that we could hardly breathe. During all this time the cells were in darkness, except when the American soldiers entered and switched on electric bulbs . . . which forced us to close our eyes.
Our thirst became more and more cruel, so that our lips cracked, our tongues were stiff, and we eventually became apathetic, or raved, or collapsed.
After enduring this torture for several days, we were given a small blanket to cover our nakedness, and driven to the courtyard outside. The uneven soil was covered with pebbles and slag and we were again beaten and finally driven back on our smashed and bleeding feet. While out of breath, burning cigarettes were pushed into our mouths, and each of us was forced to eat three or four of them. Meanwhile the American soldiers continued to hit us on eyes, head, and ears. Back in our cells we were pushed against burning radiators, so that our skin was blistered.
For thirteen days and nights we received the same treatment, tortured by heat and thirst. When we begged for water, our guards mocked us. When we fainted we were revived by being drenched with cold water. There was dirt everywhere and we were never allowed to wash, our inflamed eyes gave us terrible pain, we fainted continuously.
Every twenty minutes or so our cell doors were opened and the soldiers insulted and hit us. Whenever the doors were opened we had to stand still with our backs to the door. Two plates of food, spiced with salt, pepper, and mustard to make us thirstier, were given us daily. We ate in the dark on the floor. The thirst was the most terrible of all our tortures and we could not sleep. In this condition I was brought to trial.
During the Nazi war crimes trials and hearings, almost any method that would obtain a “confession” was employed. Eager to implicate high-ranking German officers in the Malmedy Massacre, American investigator Harry Thon ordered Wehrmacht sergeant Willi Schafer to write out an incriminating affidavit:
Next morning Mr. Thon appeared in my cell, read my report, tore it up, swore at me and hit me. After threatening to have me killed unless I wrote what he wanted, he left. A few minutes later the door of my cell opened, a black hood encrusted with blood, was put over my head and face and I was led to another room. In view of Mr. Thon’s threat the black cap had a crushing effect on my spirits....Four men of my company . . . accused me, although later they admitted to having borne false testimony. Nevertheless I still refused to incriminate myself. Thereupon Mr. Thon said that if I continued to refuse this would be taken as proof of my Nazi opinions, and . . . my death was certain. He said I would have no chance against four witnesses, and advised me for my own good to make a statement after which I would be set free. . . . I still refused. I told Mr. Thon that although my memory was good, I was unable to recall any of the occurrences he wished me to write about and which to the best of my knowledge had never occurred.
Mr. Thon left but returned in a little while with Lieutenant [William] Perl who abused me, and told Mr. Thon that, should I not write what was required within half an hour, I should be left to my fate. Lieutenant Perl made it clear to me that I had the alternative of writing and going free or not writing and dying. I decided for life.33
Another Landser unable to resist the pressure was Joachim Hoffman:
When taken for a hearing a black hood was placed over my head. The guards who took me to my hearing often struck or kicked me. I was twice thrown down the stairs and was hurt so much that blood ran out of my mouth and nose. At the hearing, when I told the officers about the ill treatment I had suffered, they only laughed. I was beaten and the black cap pulled over my face whenever I could not answer the questions put to me, or gave answers not pleasing to the officers. . . . I was beaten and several times kicked in the genitals.34
Understandably, after several such sessions, even the strongest submitted and signed papers incriminating themselves and others.“If you confess you will go free,” nineteen-year-old Siegfried Jaenckel was told.
“You need only to say you had an order from your superiors. But if you won’t speak you will be hung.”35 Despite the mental and physical abuse, young Jaenckel held out as long as he could: “I was beaten and I heard the cries of the men being tortured in adjoining cells, and whenever I was taken for a hearing I trembled with fear. . . . Subjected to such duress I eventually gave in, and signed the long statement dictated to me.”36
Far from being isolated or extreme cases, such methods of extorting confessions were the rule rather than the exception. Wrote author Freda Utley, who learned of the horror after speaking with American jurist Edward van Roden:
Beatings and brutal kickings; knocking-out of teeth and breaking of jaws; mock trials; solitary confinement; torture with burning splinters; the use of investigators pretending to be priests; starvation; and promises of acquittal.... Judge van Roden said: “All but two of the Germans in the 139 cases we investigated had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair. This was standard operating procedure with our American investigators.” He told of one German who had had lighted matchsticks forced under his fingernails by the American investigators to extort a confession, and had appeared at his trial with his fingers still bandaged from the atrocity.37
In addition to testimony given under torture, those who might have spoken in defense of the accused were prevented. Moreover, hired “witnesses” were paid by the Americans to parrot the prosecution’s charges.38
When criticism such as Utley’s and van Roden’s surfaced, and even as victims were being hung by the hundreds, those responsible defended their methods.“We couldn’t have made those birds talk otherwise . . . ,” explained Colonel A. H. Rosenfeld. “It was a trick, and it worked like a charm.”39
The shooting is over but there is a lot to be done. . . . Look out, the people are still a formidable enemy. . . . There are children who shuffle from one foot to another outside your mess hall; they’ll be too polite or too scared to ask for food but you can see in their eyes how hungry they are. . . . Old men and women pulling carts, young girls in threadbare clothing . . . are still better off than thousands of the Greeks and Dutch and Poles they enslaved.... The ragged German trudging along the street with a load of firewood may not look vicious but he has a lot in common with a trapped rat.40
With centuries of colonial experience to draw upon, the British Government issued similar directives to its soldiers stationed in “darkest Germany”:
Do play your part as a representative of a conquering power and keep the Germans in their place. Give orders—don’t beg the question. Display cold, correct, dignified curtness and aloofness. Don’t try to be kind—it will be regarded as weakness. Drop heavily on any attempt to take charge or other forms of insolence. Don’t be too ready to listen to stories from attractive women—they may be acting under orders. Don’t show any aversion to another war if Germany does not learn her lesson this time.41
While non-fraternization became the official vehicle to dispossess Germans of their homes and property and deny them access to shops, stores and restaurants, unofficially the edicts acted as a license for the conquerors to abuse, insult and mistreat the conquered whenever the urge struck.42
“I hate germans,” a sign over an American major’s desk warned. Not surprisingly, many enlisted men took such hints to heart. Wrote one US soldier, Joseph Halow:
I recall one Jewish-American translator who, when driving his Jeep . . . never missed a chance to hit a puddle at high speed, drenching as many German pedestrians as he could with cold, muddy water. I was along on one of these occasions. After swerving to splash a large crowd of Germans walking along a dirt road, he grinned at me and freely admitted that it was all deliberate, that he thought the Germans had it coming. Although I could understand his feelings, I deplored this habit, for by then I knew the painstaking care with which my own German acquaintances, very few of them able to buy new clothes, cleaned and mended their old clothes.43
Another sport Allied soldiers in jeeps enjoyed was hooking with a cane the ankles of women they passed and upending them. German men were bashed over the head.44 Joseph Halow remembered another incident that became all too common:
As I was standing in front of the Excelsior Hotel, about to board a bus ...I noticed a crowd gathered at the corner. Hurrying over, I discovered the attraction. A US Army enlisted man was beating a German, who offered no resistance. He soon fell to the pavement, saying over and over:“Aber ich habe nichts getan!” (“But I’ve done nothing!”) His pleas were useless to calm the frenzied GI. I asked a bystander what had happened, and learned that the German had insulted an American girl by calling her a “whore.”
As the German lay there the enlisted man began kicking him furiously, in the side, in the chest, all over his writhing body. Two American lieutenants stood among the onlookers. I asked if there was nobody who could stop the attack. One of the officers showed obvious distaste, but continued to watch in silence. When I asked him directly if he couldn’t order the man to stop, he merely shrugged his shoulders wordlessly.45
Nor was such random brutality lost on the Germans themselves. Wrote American, Freda Utley:
I remember one young German, who had been in occupied France, saying to me, “When I was a soldier in France, I never had a chance to enjoy life and kick other people around as you do. We were strictly disciplined and told to be polite and considerate to the French; we lived with them in their houses, and did not throw them into the gutter as you do us. We have learned our lesson though; if there is ever a next time you have taught us Germans what is permitted to a conqueror."46
Although some soldiers wholeheartedly embraced the non-fraternization edict with a vindictiveness to satisfy even Eisenhower, most GIs and Tommies remained true to their better nature. Peter Fabian, a young artillery officer in a British division, recalled one day when a “very distraught” German farm wife rushed up to him.
She had run all the eight miles from the farm. She said she had scalded her baby and begged us to help save it. So I went to our Medical Officer, who was a woman, and asked her if she could do anything. She said she thought she could but she didn’t have any transport. So I nicked some transport. I took a jeep without proper authority—and drove the MO and the [mother] over to the farm. We found the baby almost dead. It was scalded all over. The mother had covered the burns in flour, which was the last thing you should do. So the MO had to spend two or three hours getting the flour off....
The next day, Monday morning, I was on the carpet sharpish in front of the Colonel, my Commanding Officer, who was a Christian and hated Germans. He said: “How dare you speak to the Germans! You’ve absolutely no right. Don’t you know there’s a law about that sort of thing! Next time you’ll be in serious trouble.” This made me very, very angry, so I retorted: “Well, now I know how you Christians feel about these things, but I’m afraid we have other standards.” He didn’t answer to that. He just went red in the face and said: “Alright, go.” I never heard anymore.47
Such islands of humanity—tiny havens that they were—could not materially ease the dreadful conditions existing throughout Germany, nor could they ameliorate the vast sea of human suffering. One year after war’s end, the former Reich was still a land of “troglodytes” with urban-dwellers clinging precariously to their caves and cracks. After viewing for himself conditions in Hamburg, Victor Gollancz was horrified. Penned the Jewish publisher to his wife in England:
In one room were living a soldier, his wife (who is expecting a baby in a fortnight) and his seventy-two-year-old mother. They live, eat, cook, work,and sleep in the one room. There is one bed; a table; two chairs; a very small side-table; and a little cooking stove. . . . The old mother sleeps in the bed; on the floor, on a filthy rug but no mattress, sleep the husband and wife. The wife’s clothes were wretched, and she was barefoot. She has no baby clothes or cradle—nothing. People like this have literally nothing. Their chief concern is to get a basket or something to put the baby in. I asked the old mother whether she had enough to eat, and she replied with a smile, “Nein, nein, ich bin immer hungrig”—as if that were the fault of her appetite.
This was all pretty shaking, but it was heaven—I really mean this—in comparison with the next place. . . . The place was a cellar under rubble in one of the huge devastated areas. For light and air there was one tiny window. On a table was a sort of open lamp with a naked flame. . . . The air was so thick that I could hardly keep my glasses free enough from steam to see. . . . There was one bed in which the husband and wife were sleeping; on a sort of couch was the son, crippled in the war; and on the floor, on an indescribably filthy “mattress” which was all broken open with the sawdust spilling out, was the daughter. She looked fifty but I suspect she was about twenty-five. This was an extraordinary creature, with a huge nose, a bony, emaciated face, and several front teeth missing. She also appeared to be pretty crippled, and her hand was shaking terribly, I suppose from hunger. There was no free space in the cellar at all and again they lived, ate and slept here. Nobody could work—the young man could not because he was crippled, and the father because he was too weak. . . . The woman cried when the Salvation Army people gave her some money.48
As Gollancz made note, one of the few relief organizations that dared face and fight the incredible suffering, irregardless of Allied political pressure, was the Salvation Army. With characteristic warmth and compassion that seemed all the more startling amid the crushing climate of hate and revenge, the charity dispensed food, clothing and shelter. But even the heroic efforts of the Salvation Army and its well-funded, well-organized staff could hardly make a dent in the growing catastrophe.
Given the feral conditions and the scarcity of resources, competition among the swarms of orphans was keen, especially in winter. “Every time a lorry drove out of a coal depot,” one British officer recalled, “hundreds of little kids would run out after it to pick up any pieces of coal that fell off as it swept past, and many of them were run over in the melee.”50
While occupation troops dined on five-course meals complete with fried sole, Dutch steak and ice cream, thousands of starving children felt fortunate if a potato peel or crust of moldy bread was unearthed.51 Christopher Leefe remembered an incident that occurred during dinner at a British mess:
We were about halfway through when there was a terrific commotion in the hall outside and the mess waiter burst in dragging a small boy behind him. The boy had been caught robbing our rooms. He had climbed up a drainpipe and got in through a window four stories up. He had nicked a few cigarette lighters and a watch and was just about to make his getaway when he got caught. So there he stood, this little German ragamuffin, in front of us grand British officers. He was only about 10, thin as a bean pole, clothes hanging on him like sacks—when kids are starving their clothes always look too big for them. He was stood in front of the senior officer present . . . and the major asked him, “Why did you do it?. . .”
The boy just stood there and said nothing. He was blonde and Aryan and defiant, and suddenly the major leaned forward and whacked him across the face with his hand. “you fucking little kraut!” he yelled. “Come on, where have you put it all?” Bash, bash! The boy just stood there with the tears streaming down his face and the German mess waiter behind him snarling at him in German. His eyes were so blue and his hair was so blonde and he stood there so arrogant and defiant that I’ve always asked myself right to this day: “God, I wonder how many of our boys would be as tough as that?”
The point is that none of us could have cared a bit for that little boy. He was probably an orphan, his father dead on the Eastern Front, his mother rotting under the rubble of the bombed-out ruins, and here he was—starving and risking his life climbing up drainpipes in the middle of a British tank regiment. So what? We didn’t feel any compassion for him or any of the Germans.52
Children who could not live by their wits, died. Those who didn’t starve or freeze, were crushed by the walls of their caves or torn to shreds by unexploded bombs which lay scattered across Germany by the ton.
“I saw a friend playing with a hand grenade,” said nine-year-old Martha Suentzenich. “It exploded and blew off his head. He jumped around like a chicken with blood going everywhere.”53
On their own, orphans aged fast, and little girls aged fastest of all. Like their older sisters, the children soon discovered that selling themselves could stave off starvation.
“Germany’s youth is on the road ...because there was not enough to eat at home,” the New York Times reported. “Homeless, without papers or ration cards . . . these groups rob Germans and displaced persons. They are . . . wandering aimlessly, disillusioned, dissolute, diseased, and without guidance.”54
Just as pangs of conscience were creeping over many Allied soldiers—
as well as New York reporters—so too were others beginning to recoil
at the ruthless reign of terror transpiring in Germany. Over the next
months and years, voices, heretofore muted or silent, at last were raised.
George Kennan, a high-ranking US State Department official, was outraged
by what he saw in Germany:
Each time I had come away with a sense of sheer horror at the spectacle of this horde of my compatriots and their dependents camping in luxury amid the ruins of a shattered national community, ignorant of the past, oblivious to the abundant evidences of present tragedy all around them, inhabiting the same sequestered villas that the Gestapo and SS had just abandoned, and enjoying the same privileges, flaunting their silly supermarket luxuries in the face of a veritable ocean of deprivation, hunger and wretchedness, setting an example of empty materialism and cultural poverty before a people desperately in need of spiritual and intellectual guidance.55 [same thing they did in Iraq,and if we allow it, Iran is surely to come, as war is the only act these creatures know. Just cannot see Trump going against them in the long run,no matter how much hope there is for him,and short term?Are you kidding me? Anyone with working brain cells knows he is being used by them every day.THAT is what this past Tuesday told me.DC]
Added fellow American and historian, Ralph Franklin Keeling:
While the Germans around them starve, wear rags, and live in hovels, the American aristocrats live in often unaccustomed ease and luxury.... They live in the finest homes from which they drove the Germans; they swagger about in fine liveries and gorge themselves on diets three times as great as they allow the Germans. . . . When we tell the Germans their low rations are necessary because food is so short, they naturally either think we are lying to them or regard us as inhuman for taking the lion’s share of the short supplies while they and their children starve.56
One of the underlying concerns that many critics of Allied policy had was that the atrocious example being set by the democracies would soon drive all Germans into Soviet hands; that the victims, despite their deep-seated aversion, would soon view communism as the lesser of two evils.
“What we are doing is to utterly destroy the only semi-modern
state in Europe so that Russia can swallow the whole,” warned George
Patton prophetically, shortly before he was sacked by Eisenhower.57
As the general had earlier made clear, and in spite of the worldwide sympathy expressed for Jews persecuted by the Nazis before and during the war, a rising tide of voices were equally horrified by Jewish treatment of Germans after the war. Certainly no anti-Semite herself, as fervently anti-Nazi as she was anti-communist, journalist Freda Utley gave substance to the growing mood of many in her book, The High Cost of Vengeance:
Unfortunately for the future, the revengeful attitude of some Military Government officials who were Jews, the fact that Morgenthau gave his name to the policy of genocide underwritten by President Roosevelt, and the abuse by many non-German Jews of their privileged position as Displaced Persons have converted more Germans to anti-Semitism than Hitler’s racial laws and propaganda. Under the Nazis many, if not most, Germans sympathized with the Jews and were ashamed of the atrocities committed by the Nazis. But according to what I was told by German Jews, since the defeat of Germany and the Allied occupation more and more Germans formerly free of anti-Semitic prejudice are saying that after all Hitler was right; the Jews are the cause of German misery and the unjust treatment Germans receive at the hands of the victorious democracies....
Jeanette Wolff, the intrepid Jewish Social-Democratic leader ...told me that it was tragic for the German Jews that the behavior of many American Jews and DP’s was giving legitimate grounds for anti-Semitism in Germany....Jeanette Wolff’s views were not exceptional. Whereas hatred of the German people too often drives out all pity and sense of justice among those Jews who escaped from Germany in the thirties or never lived in Germany, the German Jew who stayed at home and suffered under Hitler’s terror, whose relatives and friends were murdered, and who themselves endured the horrors of the concentration camps, are for the most part without hatred of the German people, and still feel themselves to be Germans. It is the American Jews (often of Polish or Russian origin) and the returned exiles who seem determined to avenge the agony of the Jewish people in Hitler’s Reich by punishing the whole German people.
I suppose the explanation lies in the fact that the Jews who stayed in Germany know from experience that the German people as a whole were not responsible for Nazi crimes. Many of them owe their survival to the risks taken by plain ordinary Germans to save them by hiding them or feeding them. And the Jews who emerged alive from the concentration camps know that many Germans suffered the same hunger and torture as the Jews because they opposed the tyranny of the Nazis and spoke out against the persecution of Jews.58
While politics and fear of further anti-Semitism motivated many critics, nothing more than genuine compassion for innocent victims compelled others to speak out. In his Christmas Eve 1945 message, Pope Pius XII appealed to the world to end the “ill-conceived cruelty” that was secretly destroying the German people.59 As powerful as the Pope’s plea undoubtedly was, a report later filed by Herbert Hoover was perhaps more shocking and had greater implications. After visiting Germany, the former US president told of homeless children freezing to death by the hundreds, of men and women fainting at their work stations from hunger, of motorists taking special care not to run down diseased and emaciated pedestrians as they crossed the streets.60 Also sifting to the surface were horrific tales of Allied torture chambers.
“Americans torture Germans to extort confessions,’” ran British headlines. “An ugly story of barbarous tortures inflicted in the name of allied justice. . . . strong men were reduced to broken wrecks ready to mumble any admission demanded by their prosecutors.”61
Embarrassed and aghast, many Americans were horror-struck.Viewing Allied atrocities against Germany as a whole, it was, said Henrik Shipstead on the floor of the US Senate,“America’s eternal monument of shame, the Morgenthau Plan for the destruction of the German speaking people.”62 Although Henry Morgenthau was gone—ousted by President Truman—and although some of the more savage aspects of the plan had been shelved, the agreement signed by the victorious Allies at Potsdam was in many respects even more draconian than the original.
Even as the chorus of critics over the sadistic treatment of Germany grew, a nightmare of almost unbelievable proportions was developing behind the Iron Curtain. Here, in the centuries-old provinces of Prussia, Pomerania, but especially Silesia, the seeds sown at Yalta and Potsdam bore a rich and terrible fruit. What transpired in this former German region was, announced an American historian at the time, “the most staggering atrocity in all history. It is deliberate, it is brutal, it is enormous—and it is an Allied crime. It is an American, British, Russian, Morgenthau, Potsdam crime.”63
It was, an American bishop said simply, “the greatest crime of the age.”64
Next...
Crime of the Age
Notes
1. Martin Blumenson, The Patton Papers—1940–1945 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1972), pages?
2. Owings, Frauen, 334.
3. Horstmann, We Chose to Stay, 198–200.
4. Riefenstahl, A Memoir, 308.
5. Ibid., 327.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 309.
8. Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, 263.
9. Von Lehndorff, Token of a Covenant, 128–129.
10. Schieder, Expulsion of the German Population, 258.
11. Riefenstahl, Memoir, 310.
12. Von Lehndorff, Token, 127.
13. Schieder, Expulsion, 173.
14. Owings, Frauen, 335, 336.
15. Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt, Against Stalin and Hitler (New York: John Day Co., 1973), 243.
16. Botting, Ruins of the Reich, 262; John Sack, An Eye for an Eye (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 87.
17. Sack, Eye, 102–103.
18. Schieder, Expulsion, 163.
19. Sack, 74.
20. Ibid., 74–75, 76.
21. Ibid., 77, 78.
22. Ibid., 152–153.
23. Ibid., 172–173.
24. Ibid., 87–88.
25. Ibid., 110.
26. Ibid., 111; Botting, Ruins of the Reich, 185
27. Sack, Eye For an Eye, 130–131.
28. Ibid., 131.
29. Ibid., 111.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Utley, High Cost of Vengeance, 190–191.
33. Ibid., 192–193.
34. Ibid., 193
35. Ibid., 194.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 186.
38. Ibid., 197; Joseph Halow, Innocent at Dachau (Newport Beach, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1992), 311.
39. Utley, High Cost, 197.
40. Davidson, Death and Life of Germany, 81.
41. Botting, Ruins of the Reich, 206.
42. Crawley, Spoils of War, 53, 57.
43. Halow, Innocent, 41.
44. Crawley, Spoils, 57.
45. Halow, 89–90.
46. Utley, High Cost, 236.
47. Botting, Ruins of the Reich, 206–207.
48. Ibid., 126–127.
49. Garrett, Ethics and Airpower, 141.
50. Botting, Ruins, 251.
51. Ibid., 214.
52. Ibid., 207–208.
53. Interview with Martha Suentzenich Dodgen, Topeka, Kansas, Dec. 12, 1996.
54. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, 67.
55. Botting, 215.
56. Keeling, 101.
57. Bacque, Other Losses, 149.
58. Utley, High Cost, 243–245.
59. Austin J. App, “Mass Expulsions: ‘Tragedy on a Prodigious Scale,’ “ The Barnes Review 2, no. 10 (October 1996): 22.
60. Crawley, Spoils of War, 61.
61. Grenfell, Unconditional Hatred, 191.
62. De Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, 134.
63. App, “Mass Expulsions,” 24.
64. Ibid., 21
“We were wakened by the sound of tires screeching, engines stopping abruptly, orders yelled, general din, and a hammering on the window shutters. Then the intruders broke through the door, and we saw Americans with rifles who stood in front of our bed and shone lights at us. None of them spoke German, but their gestures said: ‘Get dressed, come with us immediately.’ This was my fourth arrest.”4
Thus wrote Leni Riefenstahl, a talented young woman who was perhaps the world’s greatest film-maker. Because her epic documentaries— Triumph of the Will and Olympia—seemed paeans to not only Germany, but Nazism, and because of her close relationship with an admiring Adolf Hitler, Leni was of more than passing interest to the Allies. Though false, rumors also hinted that the attractive, sometimes-actress was also a “mistress of the devil”—that she and Hitler were lovers.5
“Neither my husband nor my mother nor any of my three assistants had ever joined the Nazi Party, nor had any of us been politically active,” said the confused young woman. “No charges had ever been filed against us, yet we were at the mercy of the Allies and had no legal protection of any kind.”6
Soon after Leni’s fourth arrest, came a fifth.
The jeep raced along the autobahns until, a few hours later . . . I was brought to the Salzburg Prison; there an elderly prison matron rudely pushed me into the cell, kicking me so hard that I fell to the ground; then the door was locked. There were two other women in the dark, barren room, and one of them, on her knees, slid about the floor, jabbering confusedly; then she began to scream, her limbs writhing hysterically. She seemed to have lost her mind. The other woman crouched on her bunk, weeping to herself.7
As Leni and others quickly discovered, the “softening up” process began soon after arrival at an Allied prison. When Ernst von Salomon, his Jewish girl friend and fellow prisoners reached an American holding pen near Munich, the men were promptly led into a room and brutally beaten by military police. With his teeth knocked out and blood spurting from his mouth, von Salomon moaned to a gum-chewing officer, “You are no gentlemen.” The remark brought only a roar of laughter from the attackers. “No, no, no!” the GIs grinned. “We are Mississippi boys!” In another room, military policemen raped the women at will while leering soldiers watched from windows.8
After such savage treatment, the feelings of despair only intensified once the captives were crammed into cells.
“The people had been standing there for three days, waiting to be interrogated,” remembered a German physician ordered to treat prisoners in the Soviet Zone.“At the sight of us a pandemonium broke out which left me helpless. . . . As far as I could gather, the usual senseless questions were being reiterated: Why were they there, and for how long? They had no water and hardly anything to eat. They wanted to be let out more often than once a day. . . . A great many of them have dysentery so badly that they can no longer get up.”9
“Young Poles made fun of us,” said a woman from her cell in the same zone.“They threw bricks through the windows, paper bags with sand, and skins of hares filled with excrement. We did not dare to move or offer resistance, but huddled together in the farthest corner, in order not to be hit, which could not always be avoided. . . We were never free from torments.”10
“For hours on end I rolled about on my bed, trying to forget my surroundings,” recalled Leni Riefenstahl, “but it was impossible.”
The mentally disturbed woman kept screaming—all through the night; but even worse were the yells and shrieks of men from the courtyard, men who were being beaten, screaming like animals. I subsequently found out that a company of SS men was being interrogated.
They came for me the next morning, and I was taken to a padded cell where I had to strip naked, and a woman examined every square inch of my body. Then I had to get dressed and go down to the courtyard, where many men were standing, apparently prisoners, and I was the only woman. We had to line up before an American guard who spoke German. The prisoners stood to attention, so I tried to do the same, and then an American came who spoke fluent German. He pushed a few people together, then halted at the first in our line. “Were you in the Party?”
The prisoner hesitated for a moment, then said: “Yes.”
He was slugged in the face and spat blood.
The American went on to the next in line. “Were you in the Party?”
The man hesitated.
“Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
And he too got punched so hard in the face that the blood ran out of his mouth. However, like the first man, he didn’t dare resist. They didn’t even instinctively raise their hands to protect themselves. They did nothing. They put up with the blows like dogs.
The next man was asked: “Were you in the Party?”
Silence.
“Well?”
“No,” he yelled, so no punch. From then on nobody admitted that he had been in the Party and I was not even asked.11
As the above case illustrated, there often was no rhyme or reason to the examinations; all seemed designed to force from the victim what the inquisitor wanted to hear, whether true or false. Additionally, many such “interrogations” were structured to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible. Explained one prisoner:
The purpose of these interrogations is not to worm out of the people what they knew—which would be uninteresting anyway—but to extort from them special statements. The methods resorted to are extremely primitive; people are beaten up until they confess to having been members of the Nazi Party. . . . The authorities simply assume that, basically, everybody has belonged to the Party. Many people die during and after these interrogations, while others, who admit at once their party membership, are treated more leniently.12
“A young commissar, who was a great hater of the Germans, cross examined me. . . ,” said Gertrude Schulz. “When he put the question: “Frauenwerk [Women’s Labor Service]?”, I answered in the negative. Thereupon he became so enraged, that he beat me with a stick, until I was black and blue. I received about 15 blows . . . on my left upper arm, on my back and on my thigh. I collapsed and, as in the case of the first cross-examination, I had to sign the questionnaire.”13
“Both officers who took our testimony were former German Jews,” reminisced a member of the women’s SS, Anna Fest. While vicious dogs snarled nearby, one of the officers screamed questions and accusations at Anna. If the answers were not those desired, “he kicked me in the back and the other hit me.”
They kept saying we must have been armed, have had pistols or so. But we had no weapons, none of us. . . . I had no pistol. I couldn’t say, just so they’d leave me in peace, yes, we had pistols. The same thing would happen to the next person to testify. . . . The terrible thing was, the German men had to watch. That was a horrible, horrible experience....That must have been terrible for them. When I went outside, several of them stood there with tears running down their cheeks. What could they have done? They could do nothing.14
Not surprisingly, with beatings, rape, torture, and death facing them, few victims failed to “confess” and most gladly inked their name to any scrap of paper shown them. Some, like Anna, tried to resist. Such recalcitrance was almost always of short duration, however. Generally, after enduring blackened eyes, broken bones, electric shock to breasts— or, in the case of men, smashed testicles—only those who died during torture failed to sign confessions.
Alone, surrounded by sadistic hate, utterly bereft of law, many victims understandably escaped by taking their own lives. Like tiny islands in a vast sea of misery, however, miracles did occur. As he limped painfully back to his prison cell, one Wehrmacht officer reflected on the insults, beatings, and tortures he had endured and contemplated suicide.
I could not see properly in the semi-darkness and missed my open cell door. A kick in the back and I was sprawling on the floor. As I raised myself I said to myself I could not, should not accept this humiliation. I sat on my bunk. I had hidden a razor blade that would serve to open my veins. Then I looked at the New Testament and found these words in the Gospel of St. John: “Without me ye can do nothing.”
Yes. You can mangle this poor body—I looked down at the running sores on my legs—but myself, my honor, God’s image that is in me, you cannot touch. This body is only a shell, not my real self. Without Him, without the Lord, my Lord, ye can do nothing. New strength seemed to rise in me.
I was pondering over what seemed to me a miracle when the heavy lock turned in the cell door. A very young American soldier came in, put his finger to his lips to warn me not to speak. “I saw it,” he said. “Here are baked potatoes.” He pulled the potatoes out of his pocket and gave them to me, and then went out, locking the door behind him.15
☠☭☠
Horrific as deNazification was in the British, French and, especially,
the American Zones, it was nothing compared to what took place in
Poland, behind Soviet lines. In hundreds of concentration camps sponsored
by an apparatus called the “Office of State Security,” thousands
of Germans—male and female, old and young, high and low, Nazi and
anti–Nazi, SS, Wehrmacht, Volkssturm, Hitler Youth, all—were
rounded up and imprisoned. Staffed and run by Jews, with help from
Poles, Czechs, Russians, and other concentration camp survivors, the
prisons were little better than torture chambers where dying was a
thing to be prolonged, not hastened. While those with blond hair, blue
eyes and handsome features were first to go, anyone who spoke German
would do.16 Moments after arrival, prisoners were made horrifyingly aware of their fate. John Sack, himself a Jew, reports on one camp run by twenty six-year-old Shlomo Morel:
“I was at Auschwitz,” Shlomo proclaimed, lying to the Germans but, even more, to himself, psyching himself like a fighter the night of the championship, filling himself with hate for the Germans around him. “I was at Auschwitz for six long years, and I swore that if I got out, I’d pay all you Nazis back.” His eyes sent spears, but the “Nazis” sent him a look of simple bewilderment. . . . “Now sing the Horst Wessel Song!” No one did, and Shlomo, who carried a hard rubber club, hit it against a bed like some judge’s gavel. “Sing it, I say!”
“The flags held high . . . ,” some Germans began.
“Everyone!” Shlomo said.
“The ranks closed tight. . . .”
“I said everyone!” . . .
“Blond!” Shlomo cried to the blondest, bluest-eyed person there.“I said sing!” He swung his rubber club at the man’s golden head and hit it. The man staggered back.
“Our comrades, killed by the Reds and Reactionaries. . . .”
“Sonofabitch!” Shlomo cried, enraged that the man was defying him by not singing but staggering back. He hit him again, saying, “Sing!”
“Are marching in spirit with us. . . .”
“Louder!”
“Clear the street for the Brown Battalions. . . .”
“Still louder!” cried Shlomo, hitting another shouting man....
“Millions of hopeful people. . . .”
“Nazi pigs!”
“Are looking to the swastika. . . .”
“Schweine!” Shlomo cried. He threw down his rubber club, grabbed a wooden stool, and, a leg in his fist, started beating a German’s head. Without thinking, the man raised his arms, and Shlomo, enraged that the man would try to evade his just punishment, cried, “Sonofawhore!” and slammed the stool against the man’s chest. The man dropped his arms, and Shlomo started hitting his now undefended head when snap! the leg of the stool split off, and, cursing the German birchwood, he grabbed another stool and hit the German with that. No one was singing now, but Shlomo, shouting, didn’t notice. The other guards called out, “Blond!” “Black!” “Short!” “Tall!” and as each of these terrified people came up, they wielded their clubs upon him. The brawl went on till eleven o’clock, when the sweat-drenched invaders cried,“Pigs! We will fix you up!” and left the Germans alone.
Some were quite fixed. . . . Shlomo and his subordinates had killed them.17
The next night it was more of the same . . . and the next night and the next and the next. Those who survived the “welcoming committees” at this and other camps were flung back into their pens.
“I was put with 30 women into a cell, which was intended to accommodate one person,” Gerlinde Winkler recalled. “The narrow space, into which we were rammed, was unbearable and our legs were all entangled together.... The women, ill with dysentery, were only allowed to go out once a day, in order to relieve themselves. A bucket without a cover was pushed into the cell with the remark: ‘Here you have one, you German sows.’ The stink was insupportable, and we were not allowed to open the little window.”18
“The air in the cells became dense, the smell of the excrement filled it, the heat was like in Calcutta, and the flies made the ceiling black,” wrote John Sack. “I’m choking, the Germans thought, and one even took the community razor blade and, in despair, cut his throat open with it.”19
When the wretched inmates were at last pried from their hellish tombs, it was only for interrogation. Sack continues:
As many as eight interrogators, almost all Jews, stood around any one German saying, “Were you in the Nazi Party?” Sometimes a German said, “Yes,” and the boys shouted, “Du schwein! You pig!” and beat him and broke his arm, perhaps, before sending him to his cell. . . . But usually a German said, “No,” and the boys ...told him, “You’re lying. You were a Nazi.”
“No, I never was.”
“You’re lying! We know about you!”
“No, I really wasn’t—”
“Du lugst! You’re lying!” they cried, hitting the obstinate man. “You better admit it! Or you’ll get a longer sentence! Now! Were you in the Nazi Party?”
“No!” the German often said, and the boys had to beat him and beat him until he was really crying, “I was a Nazi! Yes!”
But sometimes a German wouldn’t confess. One such hard case was a fifty year-old....
“Were you in the Party?”
“No, I wasn’t in it.”
“How many people work for you?”
“In the high season, thirty-five.”
“You must have been in the Party,” the boy deduced. He asked for the German’s wallet, where he found a fishing license with the stamp of the German Anglers Association. Studying it, he told the German,“It’s stamped by the Party.”
“It’s not,” said the German. He’d lost his left arm in World War I and was using his right arm to gesture with, and, to the boy, he may have seemed to be Heiling Hitler. The boy became violent. He grabbed the man’s collar, hit the man’s head against the wall, hit it against it ten times more, threw the man’s body onto the floor, and, in his boots, jumped on the man’s cringing chest as though jumping rope. A half dozen other interrogators, almost all Jews, pushed the man onto a couch, pulled off his trousers, and hit him with hard rubber clubs and hard rubber hoses full of stones. The sweat started running down the Jews’ arms, and the blood down the man’s naked legs.
“Warst du in der Partei?”
“Nein!”
“Warst du in der Partei?”
“Nein!” the German screamed—screamed, till the boys had to go to Shlomo’s kitchen for a wooden spoon and to use it to cram some rags in the German’s mouth. Then they resumed beating him.... The more the man contradicted them, the more they hated him for it.20
After undergoing similar sessions on a regular basis, the victim was brought back for the eighth time.
By now, the man was half unconscious due to his many concussions, and he wasn’t thinking clearly. The boys worked on him with rubber and oak-wood clubs and said, “Do you still say you weren’t in the Party?”
“No! I didn’t say I wasn’t in the Party!”
“You didn’t?”
“No!” said the punch drunk man. “I never said it!”
“You were in the Party?”
“Yes!” The boys stopped beating him. They practically sighed, as if their ordeal were over now. They lit up cigarettes....
“Scram,” one said to the German. The man stood up, and he had his hand on the doorknob when one of the boys impulsively hit the back of his head, and he fell to the floor, unconscious. “Aufstehen, du Deutsches schwein. Stand up, you German pig,” the boys said, kicking him till he stood up and collapsed again. Two boys carried him to his cell and dropped him in a corner....
Of course, the boys would beat up the Germans for “Yes”es as well as “No”s. In Glatz, the Jewish commandant asked a German policeman, “Were you in the Party?”
“Of course! I was obliged to be!” “Lie down,” the commandant said, and six weeks later the boys were still whipping the German’s feet.21
Some torture sessions lacked even the pretense of an examination. Remembered Eva Reimann:
My cell door opened. The guard, who, because of the foul smell, held a handkerchief to his nose, cried,“Reimann Eva! Come!” I was led to a first-floor room.
He shouted at me, “Take off your shoes!” I took them off. “Lie down!” I lay down. He took a thick bamboo stick, and he beat the soles of my feet. I screamed, since the pain was very great. . . . The stick whistled down on me. A blow on my mouth tore my lower lip, and my teeth started bleeding violently. He beat my feet again. The pain was unbearable....
The door opened suddenly, and, smiling obligingly, a cigarette in his mouth, in came the chief of the Office, named Sternnagel. In faultless German he asked me,“What’s wrong here? Why do you let yourself be beaten? You just have to sign this document. Or should we jam your fingers in the door, until the bones are broad? . . .
A man picked me up by the ankles, raised me eight inches above the floor, and let me fall. My hands were tied, and my head hit hard. . . . I lay in a bloody puddle. Someone cried,“Stand up!” I tried to, and, with unspeakable pain, I succeeded. A man with a pistol came, held it to my left temple, and said, “Will you now confess?” I told him, “Please shoot me.” Yes, I hoped to be freed from all his tortures. I begged him, “Please pull the trigger.”22
After barely surviving his “interrogation,” one fourteen-year-old was taken to the camp infirmary. “My body was green, but my legs were fire red,” the boy said. “My wounds were bound with toilet paper, and I had to change the toilet paper every day. I was in the perfect place to watch what went on. . . . All the patients were beaten people, and they died everywhere: at their beds, in the washroom, on the toilet. At night, I had to step over the dead as if that were normal to do.”23
When the supply of victims ran low, it was a simple matter to find more. John Sack:
One day, a German in pitch-black pants, the SS’s color, showed up in Lola’s prison. He’d been spotted near the city square by a Pole who’d said, “Fascist! You’re wearing black!” At that, the German had bolted off, but the Pole chased him a mile to the Church of Saints Peter and Paul, tackled him by a gold mosaic, hit him, kicked him, and took him to Lola’s prison. Some guards, all girls, then seized the incriminating evidence: the man’s black pants, pulling them off so aggressively that one of the tendons tore. The man screamed, but the girls said, “Shut up!” and they didn’t recognize that the pants were part of a boy scout uniform. The “man” was fourteen years old.
The girls decided to torture him with . . . fire. They held down the German boy, put out their cigarettes on him, and, using gasoline, set his curly black hair afire.24
At the larger prison camps, Germans died by the hundreds daily.
“You pigs!” the commandant then cried, and he beat the Germans with their stools, often killing them. At dawn many days, a Jewish guard cried, “Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier!” and marched the Germans into the woods outside their camp. “Halt! Get your shovels! Dig!” the guard cried, and, when the Germans had dug a big grave, he put a picture of Hitler in. “Now cry!” the guard said. “And sing All the Dogs Are Barking!” and all the Germans moaned,
All the dogs are barking,
All the dogs are barking,
Just the little hot-dogs,
Aren’t barking at all.
Utterly unhinged by years of persecution, by the loss of homes and loved ones, for the camp operators, no torture, no sadism, no bestiality, seemed too monstrous to inflict on those now in their power. Some Germans were forced to crawl on all fours and eat their own excrement as well as that of others. Many were drowned in open latrines. Hundreds were herded into buildings and burned to death or sealed in caskets and buried alive.26
Near Lamsdorf, German women were forced to disinter bodies from a Polish burial site. According to John Sack:
The women did, and they started to suffer nausea as the bodies, black as the stuff in a gutter, appeared. The faces were rotten, the flesh was glue, but the guards— who had often seemed psychopathic, making a German woman drink urine, drink blood, and eat a man’s excrement, inserting an oily five-mark bill in a woman’s vagina, putting a match to it—shouted at the women . . . “Lie down with them!” The women did, and the guards shouted,“Hug them!”“Kiss them!” “Make love with them!”and, with their rifles, pushed on the backs of the women’s heads until their eyes, noses and mouths were deep in the Polish faces’ slime. The women who clamped their lips couldn’t scream, and the women who screamed had to taste something vile. Spitting, retching, the women at last stood up, the wet tendrils still on their chins, fingers, clothes, the wet seeping into the fibers, the stink like a mist around them as they marched back to Lamsdorf. There were no showers there, and the corpses had all had typhus, apparently, and sixty-four women . . . died.27
Not surprisingly, the mortality rate at the concentration camps was staggering and relatively few survived. At one prison of eight thousand, a mere 1,500 lived to reach home.28 And of those “lucky” individuals who did leave with their lives, few could any longer be called human.
When a smattering of accounts began to leak from Poland of the unspeakable crimes being committed, many in the West were stunned. “One would expect that after the horrors in Nazi concentration camps, nothing like that could ever happen again,” muttered one US senator, who then reported on beatings, torture and “brains splashed on the ceiling.”29
“Is this what our soldiers died for?” echoed a Briton in the House of Commons.30
Added Winston Churchill: “Enormous numbers of Germans are utterly unaccounted for. It is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the Iron Curtain.”31
While Churchill and others in the West were expressing shock and surprise over the sadistic slaughter taking place in the Soviet Zone, precious little was said about the “tragedy on a prodigious scale” that was transpiring in their own backyard.
☠☠☭☭☭☠☠
Among the millions imprisoned by the Allies were thousands of Germans
accused of having a direct or indirect hand in war crimes. Because
the victorious powers demanded swift and severe punishment, Allied
prosecutors were urged to get the most damning indictments in as
little time as possible. Unfortunately for the accused, their captors
seemed determined to inflict as much pain as possible in the process.“We were thrown into small cells stark naked,” Hans Schmidt later wrote.“The cells in which three or four persons were incarcerated were six and a half by ten feet in size and had no windows or ventilation.”
When we went to the lavatory we had to run through a lane of Americans who struck us with straps, brooms, cudgels, buckets, belts, and pistol holders to make us fall down. Our head, eyes, body, belly, and genitals were violently injured. A man stood inside the lavatory to beat us and spit on us. We returned to our cells through the same ordeal. The temperature in the cells was 140 Fahrenheit or more. During the first three days we were given only one cup of water and a small slice of bread. During the first days we perspired all the time, then perspiration stopped. We were kept standing chained back to back for hours. We suffered terribly from thirst, blood stagnation and mortification of the hands. From time to time water was poured on the almost red-hot radiators, filling the cells with steam, so that we could hardly breathe. During all this time the cells were in darkness, except when the American soldiers entered and switched on electric bulbs . . . which forced us to close our eyes.
Our thirst became more and more cruel, so that our lips cracked, our tongues were stiff, and we eventually became apathetic, or raved, or collapsed.
After enduring this torture for several days, we were given a small blanket to cover our nakedness, and driven to the courtyard outside. The uneven soil was covered with pebbles and slag and we were again beaten and finally driven back on our smashed and bleeding feet. While out of breath, burning cigarettes were pushed into our mouths, and each of us was forced to eat three or four of them. Meanwhile the American soldiers continued to hit us on eyes, head, and ears. Back in our cells we were pushed against burning radiators, so that our skin was blistered.
For thirteen days and nights we received the same treatment, tortured by heat and thirst. When we begged for water, our guards mocked us. When we fainted we were revived by being drenched with cold water. There was dirt everywhere and we were never allowed to wash, our inflamed eyes gave us terrible pain, we fainted continuously.
Every twenty minutes or so our cell doors were opened and the soldiers insulted and hit us. Whenever the doors were opened we had to stand still with our backs to the door. Two plates of food, spiced with salt, pepper, and mustard to make us thirstier, were given us daily. We ate in the dark on the floor. The thirst was the most terrible of all our tortures and we could not sleep. In this condition I was brought to trial.
During the Nazi war crimes trials and hearings, almost any method that would obtain a “confession” was employed. Eager to implicate high-ranking German officers in the Malmedy Massacre, American investigator Harry Thon ordered Wehrmacht sergeant Willi Schafer to write out an incriminating affidavit:
Next morning Mr. Thon appeared in my cell, read my report, tore it up, swore at me and hit me. After threatening to have me killed unless I wrote what he wanted, he left. A few minutes later the door of my cell opened, a black hood encrusted with blood, was put over my head and face and I was led to another room. In view of Mr. Thon’s threat the black cap had a crushing effect on my spirits....Four men of my company . . . accused me, although later they admitted to having borne false testimony. Nevertheless I still refused to incriminate myself. Thereupon Mr. Thon said that if I continued to refuse this would be taken as proof of my Nazi opinions, and . . . my death was certain. He said I would have no chance against four witnesses, and advised me for my own good to make a statement after which I would be set free. . . . I still refused. I told Mr. Thon that although my memory was good, I was unable to recall any of the occurrences he wished me to write about and which to the best of my knowledge had never occurred.
Mr. Thon left but returned in a little while with Lieutenant [William] Perl who abused me, and told Mr. Thon that, should I not write what was required within half an hour, I should be left to my fate. Lieutenant Perl made it clear to me that I had the alternative of writing and going free or not writing and dying. I decided for life.33
Another Landser unable to resist the pressure was Joachim Hoffman:
When taken for a hearing a black hood was placed over my head. The guards who took me to my hearing often struck or kicked me. I was twice thrown down the stairs and was hurt so much that blood ran out of my mouth and nose. At the hearing, when I told the officers about the ill treatment I had suffered, they only laughed. I was beaten and the black cap pulled over my face whenever I could not answer the questions put to me, or gave answers not pleasing to the officers. . . . I was beaten and several times kicked in the genitals.34
Understandably, after several such sessions, even the strongest submitted and signed papers incriminating themselves and others.“If you confess you will go free,” nineteen-year-old Siegfried Jaenckel was told.
“You need only to say you had an order from your superiors. But if you won’t speak you will be hung.”35 Despite the mental and physical abuse, young Jaenckel held out as long as he could: “I was beaten and I heard the cries of the men being tortured in adjoining cells, and whenever I was taken for a hearing I trembled with fear. . . . Subjected to such duress I eventually gave in, and signed the long statement dictated to me.”36
Far from being isolated or extreme cases, such methods of extorting confessions were the rule rather than the exception. Wrote author Freda Utley, who learned of the horror after speaking with American jurist Edward van Roden:
Beatings and brutal kickings; knocking-out of teeth and breaking of jaws; mock trials; solitary confinement; torture with burning splinters; the use of investigators pretending to be priests; starvation; and promises of acquittal.... Judge van Roden said: “All but two of the Germans in the 139 cases we investigated had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair. This was standard operating procedure with our American investigators.” He told of one German who had had lighted matchsticks forced under his fingernails by the American investigators to extort a confession, and had appeared at his trial with his fingers still bandaged from the atrocity.37
In addition to testimony given under torture, those who might have spoken in defense of the accused were prevented. Moreover, hired “witnesses” were paid by the Americans to parrot the prosecution’s charges.38
When criticism such as Utley’s and van Roden’s surfaced, and even as victims were being hung by the hundreds, those responsible defended their methods.“We couldn’t have made those birds talk otherwise . . . ,” explained Colonel A. H. Rosenfeld. “It was a trick, and it worked like a charm.”39
☠☭☠
Meanwhile, as the judicial charade was in progress behind prison walls,
tortures of another kind stalked the land. Indeed, during the first postwar
years conquered Germany was little better than a vast concentration
camp. Coinciding with the ruthless Allied program of denazification
and “reeducation,” was the American and British policy of
non-fraternization. In theory, “nonfrat” was little more than a simple
segregation of victors from vanquished to ensure that the occupation
was both efficient and economical. In cold, hard fact, however,
the program was a deliberate attempt to further degrade and
demonize Germans and crush what little pride and respect remained.
Ran one post-war pamphlet issued to US troops: The shooting is over but there is a lot to be done. . . . Look out, the people are still a formidable enemy. . . . There are children who shuffle from one foot to another outside your mess hall; they’ll be too polite or too scared to ask for food but you can see in their eyes how hungry they are. . . . Old men and women pulling carts, young girls in threadbare clothing . . . are still better off than thousands of the Greeks and Dutch and Poles they enslaved.... The ragged German trudging along the street with a load of firewood may not look vicious but he has a lot in common with a trapped rat.40
With centuries of colonial experience to draw upon, the British Government issued similar directives to its soldiers stationed in “darkest Germany”:
Do play your part as a representative of a conquering power and keep the Germans in their place. Give orders—don’t beg the question. Display cold, correct, dignified curtness and aloofness. Don’t try to be kind—it will be regarded as weakness. Drop heavily on any attempt to take charge or other forms of insolence. Don’t be too ready to listen to stories from attractive women—they may be acting under orders. Don’t show any aversion to another war if Germany does not learn her lesson this time.41
While non-fraternization became the official vehicle to dispossess Germans of their homes and property and deny them access to shops, stores and restaurants, unofficially the edicts acted as a license for the conquerors to abuse, insult and mistreat the conquered whenever the urge struck.42
“I hate germans,” a sign over an American major’s desk warned. Not surprisingly, many enlisted men took such hints to heart. Wrote one US soldier, Joseph Halow:
I recall one Jewish-American translator who, when driving his Jeep . . . never missed a chance to hit a puddle at high speed, drenching as many German pedestrians as he could with cold, muddy water. I was along on one of these occasions. After swerving to splash a large crowd of Germans walking along a dirt road, he grinned at me and freely admitted that it was all deliberate, that he thought the Germans had it coming. Although I could understand his feelings, I deplored this habit, for by then I knew the painstaking care with which my own German acquaintances, very few of them able to buy new clothes, cleaned and mended their old clothes.43
Another sport Allied soldiers in jeeps enjoyed was hooking with a cane the ankles of women they passed and upending them. German men were bashed over the head.44 Joseph Halow remembered another incident that became all too common:
As I was standing in front of the Excelsior Hotel, about to board a bus ...I noticed a crowd gathered at the corner. Hurrying over, I discovered the attraction. A US Army enlisted man was beating a German, who offered no resistance. He soon fell to the pavement, saying over and over:“Aber ich habe nichts getan!” (“But I’ve done nothing!”) His pleas were useless to calm the frenzied GI. I asked a bystander what had happened, and learned that the German had insulted an American girl by calling her a “whore.”
As the German lay there the enlisted man began kicking him furiously, in the side, in the chest, all over his writhing body. Two American lieutenants stood among the onlookers. I asked if there was nobody who could stop the attack. One of the officers showed obvious distaste, but continued to watch in silence. When I asked him directly if he couldn’t order the man to stop, he merely shrugged his shoulders wordlessly.45
Nor was such random brutality lost on the Germans themselves. Wrote American, Freda Utley:
I remember one young German, who had been in occupied France, saying to me, “When I was a soldier in France, I never had a chance to enjoy life and kick other people around as you do. We were strictly disciplined and told to be polite and considerate to the French; we lived with them in their houses, and did not throw them into the gutter as you do us. We have learned our lesson though; if there is ever a next time you have taught us Germans what is permitted to a conqueror."46
Although some soldiers wholeheartedly embraced the non-fraternization edict with a vindictiveness to satisfy even Eisenhower, most GIs and Tommies remained true to their better nature. Peter Fabian, a young artillery officer in a British division, recalled one day when a “very distraught” German farm wife rushed up to him.
She had run all the eight miles from the farm. She said she had scalded her baby and begged us to help save it. So I went to our Medical Officer, who was a woman, and asked her if she could do anything. She said she thought she could but she didn’t have any transport. So I nicked some transport. I took a jeep without proper authority—and drove the MO and the [mother] over to the farm. We found the baby almost dead. It was scalded all over. The mother had covered the burns in flour, which was the last thing you should do. So the MO had to spend two or three hours getting the flour off....
The next day, Monday morning, I was on the carpet sharpish in front of the Colonel, my Commanding Officer, who was a Christian and hated Germans. He said: “How dare you speak to the Germans! You’ve absolutely no right. Don’t you know there’s a law about that sort of thing! Next time you’ll be in serious trouble.” This made me very, very angry, so I retorted: “Well, now I know how you Christians feel about these things, but I’m afraid we have other standards.” He didn’t answer to that. He just went red in the face and said: “Alright, go.” I never heard anymore.47
Such islands of humanity—tiny havens that they were—could not materially ease the dreadful conditions existing throughout Germany, nor could they ameliorate the vast sea of human suffering. One year after war’s end, the former Reich was still a land of “troglodytes” with urban-dwellers clinging precariously to their caves and cracks. After viewing for himself conditions in Hamburg, Victor Gollancz was horrified. Penned the Jewish publisher to his wife in England:
In one room were living a soldier, his wife (who is expecting a baby in a fortnight) and his seventy-two-year-old mother. They live, eat, cook, work,and sleep in the one room. There is one bed; a table; two chairs; a very small side-table; and a little cooking stove. . . . The old mother sleeps in the bed; on the floor, on a filthy rug but no mattress, sleep the husband and wife. The wife’s clothes were wretched, and she was barefoot. She has no baby clothes or cradle—nothing. People like this have literally nothing. Their chief concern is to get a basket or something to put the baby in. I asked the old mother whether she had enough to eat, and she replied with a smile, “Nein, nein, ich bin immer hungrig”—as if that were the fault of her appetite.
This was all pretty shaking, but it was heaven—I really mean this—in comparison with the next place. . . . The place was a cellar under rubble in one of the huge devastated areas. For light and air there was one tiny window. On a table was a sort of open lamp with a naked flame. . . . The air was so thick that I could hardly keep my glasses free enough from steam to see. . . . There was one bed in which the husband and wife were sleeping; on a sort of couch was the son, crippled in the war; and on the floor, on an indescribably filthy “mattress” which was all broken open with the sawdust spilling out, was the daughter. She looked fifty but I suspect she was about twenty-five. This was an extraordinary creature, with a huge nose, a bony, emaciated face, and several front teeth missing. She also appeared to be pretty crippled, and her hand was shaking terribly, I suppose from hunger. There was no free space in the cellar at all and again they lived, ate and slept here. Nobody could work—the young man could not because he was crippled, and the father because he was too weak. . . . The woman cried when the Salvation Army people gave her some money.48
As Gollancz made note, one of the few relief organizations that dared face and fight the incredible suffering, irregardless of Allied political pressure, was the Salvation Army. With characteristic warmth and compassion that seemed all the more startling amid the crushing climate of hate and revenge, the charity dispensed food, clothing and shelter. But even the heroic efforts of the Salvation Army and its well-funded, well-organized staff could hardly make a dent in the growing catastrophe.
☠☭☠
In Berlin alone, an estimated 50,000 orphans struggled to survive.
“Some of them,” wrote a witness, were “one-eyed or one-legged veterans of seven or so, many so deranged by the bombing and the
Russian attack that they screamed at the sight of any uniform, even a
Salvation Army one.”49 Given the feral conditions and the scarcity of resources, competition among the swarms of orphans was keen, especially in winter. “Every time a lorry drove out of a coal depot,” one British officer recalled, “hundreds of little kids would run out after it to pick up any pieces of coal that fell off as it swept past, and many of them were run over in the melee.”50
While occupation troops dined on five-course meals complete with fried sole, Dutch steak and ice cream, thousands of starving children felt fortunate if a potato peel or crust of moldy bread was unearthed.51 Christopher Leefe remembered an incident that occurred during dinner at a British mess:
We were about halfway through when there was a terrific commotion in the hall outside and the mess waiter burst in dragging a small boy behind him. The boy had been caught robbing our rooms. He had climbed up a drainpipe and got in through a window four stories up. He had nicked a few cigarette lighters and a watch and was just about to make his getaway when he got caught. So there he stood, this little German ragamuffin, in front of us grand British officers. He was only about 10, thin as a bean pole, clothes hanging on him like sacks—when kids are starving their clothes always look too big for them. He was stood in front of the senior officer present . . . and the major asked him, “Why did you do it?. . .”
The boy just stood there and said nothing. He was blonde and Aryan and defiant, and suddenly the major leaned forward and whacked him across the face with his hand. “you fucking little kraut!” he yelled. “Come on, where have you put it all?” Bash, bash! The boy just stood there with the tears streaming down his face and the German mess waiter behind him snarling at him in German. His eyes were so blue and his hair was so blonde and he stood there so arrogant and defiant that I’ve always asked myself right to this day: “God, I wonder how many of our boys would be as tough as that?”
The point is that none of us could have cared a bit for that little boy. He was probably an orphan, his father dead on the Eastern Front, his mother rotting under the rubble of the bombed-out ruins, and here he was—starving and risking his life climbing up drainpipes in the middle of a British tank regiment. So what? We didn’t feel any compassion for him or any of the Germans.52
Children who could not live by their wits, died. Those who didn’t starve or freeze, were crushed by the walls of their caves or torn to shreds by unexploded bombs which lay scattered across Germany by the ton.
“I saw a friend playing with a hand grenade,” said nine-year-old Martha Suentzenich. “It exploded and blew off his head. He jumped around like a chicken with blood going everywhere.”53
On their own, orphans aged fast, and little girls aged fastest of all. Like their older sisters, the children soon discovered that selling themselves could stave off starvation.
“Germany’s youth is on the road ...because there was not enough to eat at home,” the New York Times reported. “Homeless, without papers or ration cards . . . these groups rob Germans and displaced persons. They are . . . wandering aimlessly, disillusioned, dissolute, diseased, and without guidance.”54
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Each time I had come away with a sense of sheer horror at the spectacle of this horde of my compatriots and their dependents camping in luxury amid the ruins of a shattered national community, ignorant of the past, oblivious to the abundant evidences of present tragedy all around them, inhabiting the same sequestered villas that the Gestapo and SS had just abandoned, and enjoying the same privileges, flaunting their silly supermarket luxuries in the face of a veritable ocean of deprivation, hunger and wretchedness, setting an example of empty materialism and cultural poverty before a people desperately in need of spiritual and intellectual guidance.55 [same thing they did in Iraq,and if we allow it, Iran is surely to come, as war is the only act these creatures know. Just cannot see Trump going against them in the long run,no matter how much hope there is for him,and short term?Are you kidding me? Anyone with working brain cells knows he is being used by them every day.THAT is what this past Tuesday told me.DC]
While the Germans around them starve, wear rags, and live in hovels, the American aristocrats live in often unaccustomed ease and luxury.... They live in the finest homes from which they drove the Germans; they swagger about in fine liveries and gorge themselves on diets three times as great as they allow the Germans. . . . When we tell the Germans their low rations are necessary because food is so short, they naturally either think we are lying to them or regard us as inhuman for taking the lion’s share of the short supplies while they and their children starve.56
One of the underlying concerns that many critics of Allied policy had was that the atrocious example being set by the democracies would soon drive all Germans into Soviet hands; that the victims, despite their deep-seated aversion, would soon view communism as the lesser of two evils.
As the general had earlier made clear, and in spite of the worldwide sympathy expressed for Jews persecuted by the Nazis before and during the war, a rising tide of voices were equally horrified by Jewish treatment of Germans after the war. Certainly no anti-Semite herself, as fervently anti-Nazi as she was anti-communist, journalist Freda Utley gave substance to the growing mood of many in her book, The High Cost of Vengeance:
Unfortunately for the future, the revengeful attitude of some Military Government officials who were Jews, the fact that Morgenthau gave his name to the policy of genocide underwritten by President Roosevelt, and the abuse by many non-German Jews of their privileged position as Displaced Persons have converted more Germans to anti-Semitism than Hitler’s racial laws and propaganda. Under the Nazis many, if not most, Germans sympathized with the Jews and were ashamed of the atrocities committed by the Nazis. But according to what I was told by German Jews, since the defeat of Germany and the Allied occupation more and more Germans formerly free of anti-Semitic prejudice are saying that after all Hitler was right; the Jews are the cause of German misery and the unjust treatment Germans receive at the hands of the victorious democracies....
Jeanette Wolff, the intrepid Jewish Social-Democratic leader ...told me that it was tragic for the German Jews that the behavior of many American Jews and DP’s was giving legitimate grounds for anti-Semitism in Germany....Jeanette Wolff’s views were not exceptional. Whereas hatred of the German people too often drives out all pity and sense of justice among those Jews who escaped from Germany in the thirties or never lived in Germany, the German Jew who stayed at home and suffered under Hitler’s terror, whose relatives and friends were murdered, and who themselves endured the horrors of the concentration camps, are for the most part without hatred of the German people, and still feel themselves to be Germans. It is the American Jews (often of Polish or Russian origin) and the returned exiles who seem determined to avenge the agony of the Jewish people in Hitler’s Reich by punishing the whole German people.
I suppose the explanation lies in the fact that the Jews who stayed in Germany know from experience that the German people as a whole were not responsible for Nazi crimes. Many of them owe their survival to the risks taken by plain ordinary Germans to save them by hiding them or feeding them. And the Jews who emerged alive from the concentration camps know that many Germans suffered the same hunger and torture as the Jews because they opposed the tyranny of the Nazis and spoke out against the persecution of Jews.58
While politics and fear of further anti-Semitism motivated many critics, nothing more than genuine compassion for innocent victims compelled others to speak out. In his Christmas Eve 1945 message, Pope Pius XII appealed to the world to end the “ill-conceived cruelty” that was secretly destroying the German people.59 As powerful as the Pope’s plea undoubtedly was, a report later filed by Herbert Hoover was perhaps more shocking and had greater implications. After visiting Germany, the former US president told of homeless children freezing to death by the hundreds, of men and women fainting at their work stations from hunger, of motorists taking special care not to run down diseased and emaciated pedestrians as they crossed the streets.60 Also sifting to the surface were horrific tales of Allied torture chambers.
“Americans torture Germans to extort confessions,’” ran British headlines. “An ugly story of barbarous tortures inflicted in the name of allied justice. . . . strong men were reduced to broken wrecks ready to mumble any admission demanded by their prosecutors.”61
Embarrassed and aghast, many Americans were horror-struck.Viewing Allied atrocities against Germany as a whole, it was, said Henrik Shipstead on the floor of the US Senate,“America’s eternal monument of shame, the Morgenthau Plan for the destruction of the German speaking people.”62 Although Henry Morgenthau was gone—ousted by President Truman—and although some of the more savage aspects of the plan had been shelved, the agreement signed by the victorious Allies at Potsdam was in many respects even more draconian than the original.
Even as the chorus of critics over the sadistic treatment of Germany grew, a nightmare of almost unbelievable proportions was developing behind the Iron Curtain. Here, in the centuries-old provinces of Prussia, Pomerania, but especially Silesia, the seeds sown at Yalta and Potsdam bore a rich and terrible fruit. What transpired in this former German region was, announced an American historian at the time, “the most staggering atrocity in all history. It is deliberate, it is brutal, it is enormous—and it is an Allied crime. It is an American, British, Russian, Morgenthau, Potsdam crime.”63
It was, an American bishop said simply, “the greatest crime of the age.”64
Next...
Crime of the Age
Notes
1. Martin Blumenson, The Patton Papers—1940–1945 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1972), pages?
2. Owings, Frauen, 334.
3. Horstmann, We Chose to Stay, 198–200.
4. Riefenstahl, A Memoir, 308.
5. Ibid., 327.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 309.
8. Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, 263.
9. Von Lehndorff, Token of a Covenant, 128–129.
10. Schieder, Expulsion of the German Population, 258.
11. Riefenstahl, Memoir, 310.
12. Von Lehndorff, Token, 127.
13. Schieder, Expulsion, 173.
14. Owings, Frauen, 335, 336.
15. Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt, Against Stalin and Hitler (New York: John Day Co., 1973), 243.
16. Botting, Ruins of the Reich, 262; John Sack, An Eye for an Eye (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 87.
17. Sack, Eye, 102–103.
18. Schieder, Expulsion, 163.
19. Sack, 74.
20. Ibid., 74–75, 76.
21. Ibid., 77, 78.
22. Ibid., 152–153.
23. Ibid., 172–173.
24. Ibid., 87–88.
25. Ibid., 110.
26. Ibid., 111; Botting, Ruins of the Reich, 185
27. Sack, Eye For an Eye, 130–131.
28. Ibid., 131.
29. Ibid., 111.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Utley, High Cost of Vengeance, 190–191.
33. Ibid., 192–193.
34. Ibid., 193
35. Ibid., 194.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 186.
38. Ibid., 197; Joseph Halow, Innocent at Dachau (Newport Beach, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1992), 311.
39. Utley, High Cost, 197.
40. Davidson, Death and Life of Germany, 81.
41. Botting, Ruins of the Reich, 206.
42. Crawley, Spoils of War, 53, 57.
43. Halow, Innocent, 41.
44. Crawley, Spoils, 57.
45. Halow, 89–90.
46. Utley, High Cost, 236.
47. Botting, Ruins of the Reich, 206–207.
48. Ibid., 126–127.
49. Garrett, Ethics and Airpower, 141.
50. Botting, Ruins, 251.
51. Ibid., 214.
52. Ibid., 207–208.
53. Interview with Martha Suentzenich Dodgen, Topeka, Kansas, Dec. 12, 1996.
54. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, 67.
55. Botting, 215.
56. Keeling, 101.
57. Bacque, Other Losses, 149.
58. Utley, High Cost, 243–245.
59. Austin J. App, “Mass Expulsions: ‘Tragedy on a Prodigious Scale,’ “ The Barnes Review 2, no. 10 (October 1996): 22.
60. Crawley, Spoils of War, 61.
61. Grenfell, Unconditional Hatred, 191.
62. De Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, 134.
63. App, “Mass Expulsions,” 24.
64. Ibid., 21
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