Armageddon - Max Hastings [267]
Many soldiers had become desperate to escape from the war, if they could only identify an opportunity to surrender. On 17 March, twenty-two-year-old Corporal Henry Metelmann lay over his elderly rifle and watched with considerable bewilderment as the American Seventh Army advanced on Speyer. “The whole cavalcade looked like a Sunday school outing. What a strange army! Infantry spread out in line with tanks.” Metelmann came from a working-class Hamburg family and was an ardent Nazi when he marched into Russia as a volunteer with the Wehrmacht in 1941. Three years later, his idealism had evaporated. He yearned only to survive. He had been transferred to an improvised unit in the west after being wounded in the east. As they paused in Speyer, housewives pleaded with them not to fight in the town. When he laid down his faust by a wall, it disappeared. Women in the vicinity merely giggled when he begged for its return. The soldiers discussed among themselves what to do next, and agreed to surrender as swiftly as possible.
When they heard American tanks a few cobblestoned streets away, they retired to the cellar of the nearest house, took out cards and played the first of many games of Skat. The young son of the house eventually came in, contentedly munching a chocolate bar which a GI had given him. Their moment had come, the soldiers decided. They stepped apprehensively into the street. Some chattering women laughed and said something about “Hitler’s last hope.” The men hung a white towel on a broomstick, and walked cautiously forward until they met two Americans strolling towards them with hands in their pockets. Metelmann said, “Surrender! Surrender!,” and was disconcerted when the enemy soldiers hastily turned and fled. Five minutes later, some infantry and armoured cars appeared, told the German to drop his broomstick and herded the prisoners into willing captivity. When they ate their first American rations, these half-starved men decided “that with food and beverages of that quality and quantity, we could have conquered the world.”
“SINCE THE ISSUE of the Yalta communiqué,” suggested a Second Army Intelligence Report on 22 February, “the very hopelessness of Germany’s fate after the war may be one of the reasons for the continuance of a struggle which daily becomes more desperate. Death is better than slavery. Smashed cities are better than seeing them handed over to the Poles or occupied by the Allies.” A German company commander fighting near Oppeln, Lieutenant Patteer, addressed his men: “Friends, this isn’t about our lives any more, it’s about the fate of Germany. We soldiers must prove that we are real Germans. Imagine what the fate of our own families will be if the Russians get to them. It will mean death.” Likewise Lieutenant Hummel: “Men, we must fight to the end, or we’re all dead anyway. Think of East Prussia and what the Bolsheviks are doing there!” Within the British Army, a marked class division influenced attitudes towards the tide of Soviet vengeance now sweeping into Germany. “Other ranks” had been incited by their own country’s propaganda and by a fashionable sense of socialist solidarity to regard the Russians and “Uncle Joe” with enthusiasm. Many of their officers did not share this view. David Fraser, a twenty-five-year-old captain of the Grenadiers, wrote in disillusionment to his family on 25 February, after hearing news of the Yalta conference: “It fills me with utter gloom . . . Poland has been sold, which one knew would happen but is nonetheless disgusting and humiliating when it occurs . . . All this has been ratified, and yet are the very things against which . . . we went to war.”
Fraser felt little animosity towards the Germans, but profound hatred for the Soviets: “I cannot see that this war has or will have accomplished anything except a military decision as unimportant as a victory in one of the dynastic wars. The root evil still flourishes,