Armageddon - Max Hastings [285]
Cold was the worst hardship in the winter of 1944, and prisoners spent many hours in bed to escape it. Killick became a smoker for the first time in his life—“People said it helped”—and rolled cigarettes from an unlikely blend of dried vegetable leaves. He began imprisonment weighing 189 pounds and emerged weighing 140. Some of the tensions between Allied forces persisted into PoW camps. Most British and American prisoners pitied the Russians, despised the French and thought the Poles unhinged. In Stalag VIIA at Moosburg, near Munich, by the time of its liberation 80,000 prisoners were confined in an area of eighty-five acres, including 38,000 French, 8,000 British, 6,000 American and 14,000 Russian. Nineteen-year-old American Bud Lindsey intensely disliked the three British NCOs who ran Hut 53: “Their demeanour was aloof, conceited. They gave the impression they considered American GIs to be inferior, which did not sit well with our group . . . especially with me, the best soda jerk in central Texas.”
Lindsey and his companions readily measured the fluctuations of the war by the behaviour of their captors. The Germans enjoyed a burst of elation in December, during the Ardennes offensive. This was supplanted two months later by a newfound eagerness to make Allied friends. A guard took Lindsey’s little work gang into a Munich café and bought his charges a beer. The man plainly realized how soon he would be changing places with them. There was a last spasm of German jubilation when news came of President Roosevelt’s death, which some guards, like their Führer, deluded themselves would precipitate the break-up of the Grand Alliance. To the end, their captors strove to maintain their authority. On 3 April, Lindsey was sentenced to thirty days’ punishment for stealing a Red Cross parcel. A German officer told the American that he would be court-martialled as soon as the war was over.
Early in 1945, as the Russians began to sweep across the territory of the Greater Reich, Hitler entertained the notion of murdering all PoWs before they could be liberated. He was enraged by reports of German soldiers surrendering in large numbers to the Western allies. This, he said, was “the fault of that stupid Geneva Convention. We must scrap the idiotic thing.” He argued that, if the Nazis killed their own prisoners, such action would put a stop to the Allies’ humane treatment of Germans who surrendered, and thus destroy any incentive for his soldiers to betray their duty. Jodl and Guderian with difficulty dissuaded Hitler from this course. Yet the Nazi leadership remained determined not to allow Allied captives to be liberated. Göring pointed out to Hitler at a conference on 27 January that 10,000 Allied aircrew were held captive at Sagan, in the path of the Red Army. It had been suggested that these men should merely be left to the Russians. The Luftwaffe’s chief strongly objected to making the Allies a present of 10,000 trained airmen. “They must leave,” agreed Hitler, “even if they march on foot. Anyone who runs away will be shot. That must be done by all means.” Göring said jovially: “Take off their trousers and shoes, so they can’t walk in the snow.”
Hundreds of thousands of prisoners found it hard enough to walk in the snow even when they retained their trousers and shoes. Not only from Sagan, but from scores of camps throughout the eastern Reich, during the first weeks of 1945 the inmates were herded forth