Armageddon - Max Hastings [126]
When Pritz was discharged, his prayers to escape the east were answered. In October 1944, he was drafted to a heavy mortar unit confronting the Americans in the Saarland. After Russia, he found the posting “a vacation.” His experience is not unrepresentative of that of the German soldier of the period, save that he survived. He possessed no pretensions to heroism. He simply continued to obey orders, as he had learned to do since his childhood in the Hitler Youth. In the autumn of 1944, the frontiers of Germany were being defended by a few hundred thousand genuine Nazi zealots, and millions of men like Wilhelm Pritz. A veteran of twenty-two who had known horrors no man should have to see, he now yearned only for survival.
For all its ferocious discipline and draconian punishments, however, the German Army was increasingly troubled by the problem of desertion. An order of 20 November issued by 708th Division in Alsace warned that any unit which posted “missing” figures in excess of 25 per cent after a battle would be subjected to special investigation. Many Alsatians serving in the Wehrmacht seized the opportunity granted by proximity to their homes to slip away. There was a row when it was discovered that a company commander in 352nd Volksgrenadier Division had written to the families of six of his men who were missing, believed to be Allied prisoners, saying: “The Americans opposite us have been fighting fairly, they have treated German prisoners well and fed them. If your husband is a PoW, you will probably receive news of him through the Red Cross.” The division’s National Socialist political officer exploded in fury at the suggestion that captivity might prove a tolerable fate for a German soldier. “The contents of this letter will have a demoralising effect,” wrote the NSPO, “because people at home may influence soldiers in this direction. Unit commanders are held responsible for ensuring that biased information of this kind is suppressed.” An American intelligence report recorded on 5 December: “A PW of 353rd Division captured in GROSSHAU had been sentenced to death for cowardice before the enemy and . . . thought this entitled him to gratitude from our side.” In the last months of the war, there was a drastic increase in court-martial sentences on delinquent German soldiers. Beyond 15,000 recorded executions—and many more unrecorded—tens of thousands of men were dispatched to penal battalions, where the possibility of survival was no higher than in their Soviet equivalents. A total of 44,955 men were sent for trial in October 1944 alone, and many of these received long sentences at hard labour. Desertion became a very serious problem for Hitler’s forces in the last months of the war.
Dispirited Wehrmacht soldiers, hastening to the rear amid a Russian attack, shouted angrily at men of the Grossdeutschland Division, waiting patiently for the Soviets in their positions: “You silly sods are just keeping the war going!” Yet even as late as the winter of 1944 Germany possessed some outstanding fighting formations. “We knew we were still pretty good,” said Sergeant Max Wind of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers with pride. “The important thing in war is not the equipment, but the man behind it. The allies’ biggest mistake was ‘unconditional surrender.’ If there had been a chance of a deal, we would have taken it. Hitler did not play the role people think. He was simply our leader. The issue was Germany. It was common knowledge what the enemy would do if they won—and what indeed they did. Knowing that, we only wanted to fight.”
Twenty-six-year-old Captain Walter Schaefer-Kuhnert of 9th Panzer Division had endured many hardships in the course of the war. His father, a proud First World War veteran and estate owner, had urged him to volunteer for military service, “because that is how a man grows up.” Schaefer-Kuhnert was wounded once in France in 1940, then twice again in Russia, where he also survived typhus. He had known the exhilaration of marching