Armageddon - Max Hastings [264]
Then came a morning when a villager came to the quarry and announced “The Amis are here.” They made their way cautiously into the village, led by a man bearing a white flag. There was no firing, but they found a hive of American activity. Tents were being pitched, soldiers were washing and cooking. In her own house, she was shocked to find a GI frying eggs with the family’s cherished silver cake-knife. Another was wearing her favourite shawl. “That’s mine,” she said. “No,” the man replied easily, “it’s mine.” Her father said wearily: “These are only the first. There will be many more. Say nothing.” Then he sat down outside and burst into tears. “So this is what my whole life has been for,” he exclaimed brokenly, “losing everything.”
When the Americans left, they had wilfully damaged nothing, though they removed all the family’s portable valuables, especially cameras and watches. The villagers of Dorweiler learned to count their blessings, however. At least there had been no battle among their homes. At nearby Bucholz, a group of Waffen SS fought to the bitter end, defending roadblocks on both sides. At Beltheim, one officer and a handful of men held out until American gunfire obliterated every building around them. “Ridiculous . . . ridiculous,” said Hildegarde Platten. Yet when she and her parents heard afterwards about what had happened in the east, the family recognized its good fortune.
SOME ALLIED SOLDIERS were merely bemused by their first encounters with German civilians. Others recoiled. Soon after Dai Evans and men of 53rd (Welsh) Division occupied billets in a house, “the farmer went into a spiel we were to hear so often in the months to come: how he had hated the Hitler regime; how he had never agreed with the Nazis. He even hinted that he and his wife had been in danger due to their outspoken animosity towards the local Nazi officials. We soon learned to treat such statements in the way we treated those of the French who bragged of their activities with the Resistance.”
The Allies strove to find means by which their soldiers might distinguish Nazis from the rest of the civilian population. A notable example of the perils of enlisting psychologists in the service of armies may be found in an intelligence circular sent to all British commands, summarizing identifiable Nazi traits: “undue acceptance of parental authority, with a resultant docility to those above and an expected right to dominate those below; exaggerated awkwardness or shame on the subject of tender relations between parents and children . . . the over-valuation of male friendship and masculinity associated with a social depreciation of the female sex . . . a marked unconscious tendency to read one’s own traits or impulses into the actions of others, to seek scapegoats.”
At the age of twenty-one, Staff-Sergeant Henry Kissinger of the U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps found himself running the city of Krefeld, rounding up Gestapo agents and Nazi officials. Although he himself had grown up in Germany, “this was the one period of my life when I felt completely American. I even thought I had lost my accent.” Yet he cherished a fierce determination not to allow himself to be angry with the Germans: “I felt that I had seen what it was like to be discriminated against. It seemed wrong to go back and do to the Germans what they had just done to us.”
Almost all German attempts to deploy “werewolf” groups, to wage guerrilla war behind