All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [379]
2 EISENHOWER’S ADVANCE TO THE ELBE
In the first months of 1945, most Germans greeted the arrival of American and British forces in their country as an undeserved intrusion; if many understood that Hitler had led them to disaster, they nonetheless found it hard to accept the implications for their own domestic lives. Men of the US 273rd Field Artillery occupied a house inhabited, in the words of one of its soldiers, by ‘a small, bird-like woman dressed in black, who tottered out from a side door. As soon as she saw us plundering her woodpile, she started hollering in German. As we carried away armfuls, she burst into tears and wailed uncontrollably, choking on half-sentences.’ The Americans debated before dismissing their own scruples. ‘“Hell,” said Frenchie, “she’s just as German as all the rest of the krauts.”’ Likewise a hillbilly in Pfc Charles Felix’s unit, when a voluble German woman complained bitterly that the GI intruders were scratching the furniture in her house. ‘I’ve had enough of these goddamn krauts!’ expostulated the soldier. ‘We’re over here fighting because of them and she’s got the nerve to complain about her furniture! Here, lady, I’ll show you some goddamn damage!’ He seized a chair and threw it at the wall. Only a minority of Allied soldiers preserved lingering inhibitions towards civilians: a soldier in Aaron Larkin’s engineer platoon burst into tears when ordered to evict a German family from their house, to make way for his unit; Pfc Harold Lindstrom suffered an instinctive pang of guilt when he lay down on a woman’s feather bed in full infantry kit and boots.
The US Army’s judge-advocate-general recorded a steep increase in incidents of rape once Allied soldiers entered German territory: ‘We were members of a conquering army, and we came as conquerors,’ declared his post-war report. ‘It was only in a very exceptional case that the German victim vigorously resisted her armed attackers … The German victims were apparently thoroughly cowed … Their mortal fear was not entirely groundless, as demonstrated in a number of cases in which the Germans who sought to prevent the soldiers from carrying out their designs to commit rape were mercilessly murdered.’ A Stars & Stripes reporter who in March 1945 filed a dispatch about the high incidence of rape in the Rhineland found it suppressed by the censor, as was other ‘negative reporting’ on Allied conduct in Germany.
There was also, of course, widespread semi-voluntary copulation, which caused venereal disease rates to soar, as desperate German women sold their only marketable commodity, often in order to feed their families. Many Allied soldiers recoiled from the shamelessness of German behaviour; even the educated among Hitler’s people were brutalised by the privileges of oppression. Scots Guardsmen, welcomed by the aristocratic owners of a castle in north Germany, were appalled to discover that in its adjoining park lay a small concentration camp containing two hundred starving slave labourers. When a British officer remonstrated, their host replied in bewilderment, ‘Major, you don’t understand. These people are animals – they can only be treated like animals.’
The Anglo-American armies’ last battles were incomparably less bloody than those in the east, because it suited both sides that it should be so. British Lt. Peter White shouted at a fleeing German to halt: ‘I took aim in the middle of his back with a strong feeling of repugnance at having to fire at a man running away … when something seemed to tell him it was hopeless. To my intense relief he spun around, flinging his rifle into the snow and raising his hands in a swift dramatic gesture. He called out a jumbled stream of broken English in a frightened voice … “Don’t shoot, please sir! … Hitler no good … don’t shoot … Kamerad, please!