Armageddon - Max Hastings [117]
CHAPTER SIX
Germany Besieged
SHADOWS OF DEFEAT
MOST OF THE German people had not wanted war in 1939, but gained greater satisfaction than they expected from the early years of victory. Lieutenant Leopold Goesse, a young Austrian cavalry officer, thoroughly enjoyed the 1940 Norway campaign, in which finally he watched British soldiers fleeing to their boats. Heinz Knoke, a Luftwaffe fighter pilot, felt himself “enraptured” by an encounter with his triumphant Führer in December 1940. When Knoke heard rumours of the impending German invasion of Russia in June 1941, he wrote in his diary: “The idea appeals to me. Bolshevism is the arch-enemy of Europe and of European civilization.” Eleonore Burgsdorf and her family filled the cellars of their home in East Prussia with Scotch whisky, French cognac and champagne brought to them as presents by the heroes of Germany’s campaigns in the west. Many German soldiers revelled in Paris leaves, and rejoiced at their distant glimpse of Moscow.
All sensations of that kind perished, however, with Stalingrad. By the winter of 1944, the reality of war seeped into almost every corner of the Reich. Few households had been spared some personal sacrifice to the demented ambitions of Adolf Hitler. It was a custom in bereaved German families to distribute among friends a black-bordered memorial card, bearing a photograph and brief details of a lost son. Millions of such souvenirs of death now stood above fireplaces in millions of homes. Katharina Minniger, a twenty-two-year-old from the village of Hausach in the Schwartzwald, lost her brother Ludwig soon after Stalingrad. Her parents sent out the customary tokens of remembrance for him. Over the two years that followed, she was dismayed to see the neatly printed cards arrive again and again to mark the passing of old schoolfriends: “Joseph Mehrfeld—Stalingrad”; “Victor Mehrfeld—Stalingrad”; “Willi Enders—lost on a ship to Africa”; “Willi Webers—died Eastern Front aged 19.5,” and likewise for many more. Lieutenant Helmut Schmidt, a Luftwaffe flak officer, now believed that when the Allies completed their triumph all Germans of working age would be deported to become slaves in Russia. Eighteen-year-old Klaus Salzer, a tall, serious, classically handsome middle-class Königsberger, was unwillingly conscripted to the paratroops in October 1944. As the boy left home, he lingered in the hall, gazing at its heavy, familiar furniture. “Why are you looking at everything like that?” demanded his mother. “Because I shall never see it all again,” said Klaus sadly. Indeed he did not, for he was killed in action a few months later.
“The vain hope that the war would end before Christmas 1944 faded out as the autumn dragged along,” wrote Paul von Stemann, a Danish correspondent in Berlin. Rationing tightened: “housewives counted potatoes as if they were gold nuggets.” The fat porter at the city’s grand Esplanade Hotel began to look like a circus clown, his uniform hanging in loose folds on his shrunken frame. Smart folk drank a lot, because there was little else to do—no books to buy, no films or theatres to visit, no sport or radio entertainment or social life. Privileged people seized opportunities to escape to the countryside for weekends. Yet even in great houses the small talk was bleak. When von Stemann went to stay with friends in Bavaria and asked his hostess how life was treating her, she responded tersely: “My uncle was hanged the other day.” This was Berlin Police President Graf Wolf Heinrich von Helldorff, one of the July plotters against Hitler.* 7 “Missie” Vassiltchikov, a young White Russian aristocrat who maintained a diary of wartime life in Berlin, shocked her old cook