Armageddon - Max Hastings [118]
Even in the face of looming catastrophe, most German civilians focused their minds upon the small details of their own daily lives, because that is human nature. Maria Hustreiter was troubled by the difficulty of getting shoes. She was a fourteen-year-old small farmer’s daughter living at Landshut, thirty miles north-east of Munich. In the country, there was usually enough to eat. The household received a steady stream of city visitors, who walked miles to farmhouse doors hoping to barter their household goods for food. The people of Landshut were all conscious of the town’s only Jew, a kettle-seller. Somehow, in that isolated rural community, the man was left alone to survive the war, which afterwards became a source of relief and even pride to his neighbours. Maria’s two elder brothers were in the army. Her mother prayed constantly to Our Lady for their deliverance, but one would never return.
There was church every Sunday and the inevitable Nazi school parades, but no parties, no dancing. In that simple community in those simple days, she was too young to think about boys. Two French prisoners, amiable young men, lived with them and helped to till their eighty acres. The family knew very little about events beyond their small world. “I understood that the war was not good, but life went on.” Her immediate awareness of the conflict stemmed from watching the distant glow of Munich, Regensburg, Nuremberg, lit up by flames under bombing. Sometimes, the family found their fields littered with “window,” the tinfoil strips dropped by Allied planes to baffle German radar. There was once a terrible time after a big raid, when the railway was cut. A train loaded with livestock en route to the slaughterhouse in Munich was obliged to halt for days on the track beside the Hustreiter farm. The sounds of pigs squealing and cattle lowing in despair haunted even a country girl like Maria, familiar with the traumas of animals.
The countryside was full of evacuees from the bombed cities. Ten-year-old Jutta Dietze from Leipzig lived on a farm in Saxony with her mother and three siblings for more than a year after their home was destroyed. They were expected to work hard in the fields, for the local farmers tolerated rather than welcomed their uninvited guests. They ate each day at a big table among a mixed gathering of French PoWs from a nearby camp and Russian labourers who slept above the stables. The bathroom of the farmhouse was crammed with every kind of household valuable from carpets to grandfather clocks, bartered for food by families who had trudged out from nearby Chemnitz. Unsurprisingly, the children adapted to their new circumstances more easily than the adults. Dietze family photographs of the period show the young ones grinning cheerfully as they posed among the animals in their rural idyll, even as Germany plunged towards final disaster.
Cities in the east of the country, hitherto immune from air attack, were now experiencing the devastating bombardments with which western Germany was already familiar. The tempo of destruction increased relentlessly. A Darmstadt housewife wrote to her husband at the front after a raid by the RAF’s 5 Group on 12 September which precipitated a firestorm and killed 12,000 people: “This is now a dead town.” Another woman reported from Wiesbaden: “13 full alerts and 18 warnings last week. We all broke down. 13 people were killed in one shelter.” Emmy Suppanz wrote to her son from Marburg on 23 November: “Yesterday, against my will I had to go through one part of the town. Sepp, it was dreadful. Luckily I didn’t have to go through the quarter where the station is, for it is said to be much worse