Armageddon - Max Hastings [127]
By the autumn of 1944, “We recognized the inevitability of defeat, but we had to consider what we owed to our honour as soldiers. We had to stick together.” He was appalled by the breakdown of discipline he saw during the retreat from France, “men fleeing loaded down with loot, taking girls, driving commandeered civilian vehicles . . . already there was a breakdown.” One battery in his own regiment was now equipped with captured Russian mortars, because it lacked sufficient 105mm guns. Yet he found confronting the U.S. Third Army in Lorraine a very much more acceptable experience than the Eastern Front. “You were fighting against human beings, who shared broadly the same philosophy. Once we agreed a truce with them, to remove dead and wounded from the battlefield. One of our men carried a wounded American from no-man’s-land to their lines, and came back loaded with chocolate and cigarettes the ‘Amis’ had given him. That could never have happened in the east.” Schaefer-Kuhnert “took it for granted that we must go on to the end, whatever that meant.”
Lieutenant Helmut Schmidt expressed sentiments that were widely shared: “I knew that I was against the Nazis—but I did not know what I was for. Like most German soldiers, I thought that it was my duty to fight, and by day we did fight. But at night we prayed for the war to end. I felt no personal sense of shame. Once, when I saw a train loaded with Russian prisoners, I felt a stab of pity. But then I also felt: ‘Such is war.’ I didn’t know the ‘German Resistance’ existed. I read Marcus Aurelius. From him, I learned that it makes no sense to fight what you cannot change.” Sergeant Otto Cranz said: “I get so angry when people ask why we did not join the heroic resistance to Hitler. One could do nothing.”
“I wonder what Hitler’s thinking now,” mused General Weiknecht, a Wehrmacht captive in Soviet hands. General Friedrich von Paulus, the vanquished commander of Stalingrad, said savagely: “He’s trying to find some way of inspiring the nation to new sacrifices. Never in history have lies been such vital instruments of diplomacy and policy. We Germans have been tricked by this usurper.” Colonel-General Strekker asked: “Why has the Lord been so angry with Germany as to send us Hitler? Is the German nation so base as to deserve such a punishment?”
POSTERITY IS bemused by the banality of Hitler and the coterie of gangsters who formed the leadership of the Third Reich. It is scarcely surprising that during the 1944–45 campaign they sought refuge in military and political fantasies, and committed themselves to a struggle to the end. Most tacitly acknowledged that their own lives were forfeit, and they were therefore indifferent to the fate of others. Through the last months of the war, many Nazi officials, Gestapo agents and SS men showed themselves eager to encompass the deaths of as many enemies of the Third Reich as possible before their own time came. Beria reported to Stalin on 19 September the discovery of a concentration camp near Tallin in Estonia. A squad of sixty SS had been rushed there, on the eve of its liberation by the Red Army, and 1,600 Jews—“mostly doctors, artists and scientists”—together with 260 Russian PoWs, had been murdered in a matter of hours, leaving only eighty survivors.