Armageddon - Max Hastings [132]
I spent it predominantly among people who were being prepared for a violent death, and many of them have suffered it meanwhile . . . With all these people I lived in the same house, took part in their fate, listened when they were taken away for interrogations, or when they were removed altogether, talked with almost all of them about their affairs, and saw how they coped with it all . . . here at Tegel, already about ten of my group have been executed. . . . These violent killings eventually became such an everyday matter that I accepted the disappearance of individuals sadly but as a natural event. And now I tell myself, it is my turn.
A total of 5,764 people were executed in 1944 for their alleged roles in the German Resistance, and a further 5,684 in 1945. Of these, barely 100 were directly implicated in the July plot. Von Moltke concluded his last letter before the Nazis hanged him: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hell in the Hürtgen
FIGHTING IN THE FOREST
THOUSANDS OF Americans were now fighting inside the borders of Germany. Sir Alan Brooke wrote in his diary, on beholding the wreckage of Aachen: “It was a relief to see at last German houses demolished instead of French, Italian, Belgian and British!” The occupiers were somewhat bemused by their first encounters with Hitler’s people in their own homes. German civilians of both sexes seemed without humility about their responsibility for the predicament in which they now found themselves. Civil Affairs, a large military bureaucracy whose personnel possessed varying degress of competence, enthusiasm and integrity, followed in the wake of the armies to assume supervision of the vanquished German people. Near Hürtgen, the U.S. 30th Division Civil Affairs officer was summoned to the mansion of a Luftwaffe colonel’s wife, one Frau von Reventlow, who complained bitterly about intrusions upon her privacy by refugees. The American suggested that, since Germany had started the war, it seemed not unreasonable that she, like other Germans, should accept some responsibility towards the refugees caused by it.
Only the Russians possessed clear policies for the lands they occupied. Among the Americans and British, from the humblest footsoldier to the greatest statesmen, deep uncertainties persisted, about whether to treat Germany as a nation of criminals, a threat to world peace that must be permanently emasculated, as U.S. treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau urged; or whether to adopt Churchill’s view, that one could not indict a whole people. The British prime minister preferred to leave great decisions about how to deal with the Germans until after they had been defeated, when the passions of war had abated: “It is a mistake to try to write out on little pieces of paper what the vast emotions of an outraged and quivering world will be either immediately after the struggle is over or when the inevitable cold fit follows the hot,” he wrote to Eden, his foreign secretary.
Among the Allied forces entering Hitler’s dominions, there was an instinctive indifference to German property, reflected in everything from bombing policy to looting. “One advantage of being in Germany is that one can liberate any article which he needs,” Staff-Sergeant Harold Fennema of the 66th Signals Battalion wrote to his wife in Wisconsin. “Since you spoke of wanting a sewing machine, there are lots of them to be liberated here. Washing machines are a little harder to liberate, but we have hopes of getting one soon.” American and British soldiers faced strict injunctions about “non-fraternization” with the enemy. GIs were subject to a fine of $65 for breaking the rules. Soldiers puzzled over how this whimsical figure was determined. In any event, the regulations were heeded more in the breach than in the observance. Many soldiers