All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [380]
The Western Allies advanced through Germany in the same measured fashion in which they had conducted their campaign since October 1944. They sought to complete the destruction of Nazism at acceptable human cost, advancing to the lines of occupation agreed with the Russians, and only temporarily and in a few areas beyond them. The Germans continued to resist, but few displayed the fanaticism that characterised the eastern battle to the end. The hard part, for the vanquished, was to identify an opportunity to quit without being shot by one side or the other. American aidman Leo Litwak described his experience of ministering to an elderly German hit while attempting to reach the American lines unarmed, presumably to surrender:
He wore a gray wool uniform and cap, his eyes huge, his face pinched and unshaven, his mouth stretched as if shrieks were coming out, but it was a smothered sound, Ohhhhh, Ohhhhh. He saw the red crosses on my arms and helmet and reached for me and cried, ‘Vater!’ Father. A spoke of femoral bone was sticking through his trousers. I slit his pants, bared the wound at mid-thigh. He’d shit small, hard, gray turds – what you might see in the spoor of an animal. The shit had worked itself down near the fracture. The stink was pungent and gagging. I put sulfa powder on the exposed bone, covered it with a compress, tied a loose tourniquet above the wound high on the thigh. He was graying fast, going into shock. He said ‘Vater, ich sterbe.’ Father, I’m dying. I stuck morphine into his thigh. He wasn’t eased and I gave him another eighth of a grain. I watched him lapse into shock – lips blue, sweat cold, skin gray, pupils distended, pulse weak and fluttery … I yearned for him to be dead so we’d both be relieved from his pain.
The bulk of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS faced the armies of Zhukov, Konev and Rokossovsky; the Russians deployed 6.7 million men on a front extending from the Baltic to the Adriatic. The final death grapple between the forces of the two rival tyrants, Stalin and Hitler, was among the most terrible military encounters of the war, while Eisenhower’s armies occupied a wing of the stage. It was entirely irrational, because the outcome was not in doubt; but the Nazis were successful in inducing a quorum of their soldiers to make a last sacrificial effort. As for those who flinched, East Prussian schoolteacher Henner Pflug said that he ceased to gape at men hanging from trees, placards around their necks proclaiming ‘I am a deserter’ or ‘I failed to defend the fatherland’, because he saw so many.
Even Tito’s Yugoslav partisans were grudgingly impressed by the retreat conducted by the Wehrmacht against overwhelming odds. Milovan Djilas wrote: ‘The German army left a trail of heroism, though the domination of Nazism has suppressed in the world’s mind even the thought of such a thing … Hungry and half-naked, they cleared mountain landslides, stormed the rocky peaks, carved out bypasses. Allied planes used them for leisurely target practice. Their fuel ran out … [They] killed their own gravely wounded … In the end they got through, leaving a memory of their martial manhood. Apparently the German army could wage war … without massacres and gas chambers.’
Paratrooper Martin Poppel’s fiancée Gerda was one of many Germans belatedly alienated from the Nazi regime by the horrors it had brought upon her society. She wrote in January 1945 to Poppel, who was serving in Holland: ‘We are worn out after this terrible hail of bombs. To be hearing the howling of these things all the time, waiting for death at any moment in a dark cellar, unable to see – oh, it’s truly a wonderful life. If only it would stop, they really expect too much of people. Do you still remember the lake? I think you gave me our first kiss there! Everything gone – the lovely cafés Brand