Armageddon - Max Hastings [263]
Many Germans were shocked by the ruthlessness with which their own soldiers behaved towards civilian homes and possessions. The CO of the 17th SS Artillery Regiment felt obliged to draft an order reminding his men that they were no longer fighting in occupied territories, where licence was permitted: “The reputation of the Waffen SS cannot tolerate the confiscation of bicycles and horse teams at pistol point. It seems to me that some NCOs and other ranks have still not recognized that they are in their own country again.” Civilians were shocked to discover that their own forces ruthlessly bombarded German towns and villages occupied by the Americans and British.
Twenty-two-year-old Katharina Minniger spent seven days in the cellar of her family home in the village of Hausbach as battle raged around it. A Wehrmacht Nebelwerfer battery was deployed close by, provoking fierce counter-fire and air attack from the Americans. In a lull, Katharina ventured out to ask an officer what was happening, and realized that the end was close. The mortar teams were packing to go. A soldier who had been billeted in the Minniger house bade her a wistful farewell. The soldiers could not hitch up one tube, and abandoned it in their garden. Infantrymen began to trickle through the village towards the rear, some wounded, some sobbing, some riding horses. Many were terrified boys. Bizarrely, the civilians found themselves trying to calm the soldiers’ fears. Katharina’s elder sister Maria played draughts with one teenager in their cellar. Shell-severed telephone lines lay strewn across the road. The American bombardment began again. Dragging a wounded man with her, Katharina returned to the cellar.
They lay there through the night, listening to intermittent shelling and screaming. Then she heard a noise above, and went cautiously to investigate, thinking that it was the Americans. Two ashen-faced young soldiers, who had been billeted in the house, were begging sanctuary. “It’s been terrible up here,” said one, “as bad as I’ve ever seen. There’s not much left.” They all went underground again, and huddled shaking with terror. A few hours later, on 21 March, the Americans came. The soldiers filed upstairs clutching a white flag and were marched off to captivity. Every window in the Minniger house was shattered by blast, but the structure survived. Katharina received permission to feed the stock. The Minnigers’ cow survived, but the fields were littered with dead animals and dead men. Other civilians emerged from their refuges to shuffle about in shocked silence. The stench of death was terrible, and most people held pads over their noses and mouths. The nearby woods which they loved so well were blackened and stripped of leaf, many trees torn to stumps. Katharina was horrified to see fragments of a man hanging from a branch. A headless soldier hung over the fence outside their home. Yet her chief emotion was an overwhelming surge of relief.
In the middle of February, retreating German troops seeped through the little village of Dorweiler, a few miles east of the Moselle near the Luxembourg border. Twenty-two-year-old Hildegarde Platten watched them fearfully—“They were in a terrible state, a gun painfully towed by a single ox.” Since 1940, life in the village had been miserably dreary, with all the young men away and social life suspended. Her father had always predicted that the war would “end in tears.” Fugitives came to the village from bombed cities, desperate to barter their remaining possessions for food, or to find sanctuary. It was a poor district, and Hildegarde was the only child of a smallholder with a few cows, pigs, chickens and an ox plough for his three small fields. One morning, a retreating soldier said: “We’re pulling out. You’d better go and hide in the woods.” At first, they were reluctant to leave their stock, and sat in the cellar as desultory shells began to fall from American guns six miles away, on the far side of the Moselle. Devout Catholics, they prayed constantly.