Armageddon - Max Hastings [3]
I suggested to Jorg Friedrich in a television debate, however, that it might be wise for a German to hesitate before saying anything which implies a moral equivalence between Allied excesses and the crimes of the Nazis. I admire the attitude of Helmut Schmidt, Germany’s former chancellor, whom I interviewed about his wartime service as a Luftwaffe flak officer. Asked his opinion about the behaviour of the Red Army in East Prussia, he responded: “You will never hear me, as a German, say anything that suggests a comparison between what happened in East Prussia and the behaviour of Germany’s army in the Soviet Union.”
Some of Hitler’s old adherents remain impenitent, of course. Interviewing a former Waffen SS captain at his home, I noticed on the wall of the lounge his medals and unit badges, which twenty years ago would have been discreetly closeted. After listening to his remarkable tale, I said, intending irony, that he seemed to have enjoyed his experience as a soldier. “Ach, they were great days!” he exclaimed. “The two biggest moments of my life were taking the oath to Hitler’s bodyguard in 1934, and Nuremberg in 1936. You have seen the films—the searchlights, the crowds, the Führer? I was there! I was there!” Another proud veteran of Hitler’s Leibstandarte inquired whether I might be interested in helping him to write his memoirs.
The vast majority of men and women who witness great events recall these solely in terms of personal experience. I met a German woman whose anger about the occupation of her house by GIs, the casual theft of cherished possessions, remained as great in 2002 as it had been in 1945. It would have been meaningless to suggest that she should set her grievances in the context of the mass murder of the Jews, the devastation of Europe, the destitution of millions. Only personal experience possessed real significance for her.
I have described the military campaign for Germany, but have made no attempt to embrace every action. This book is a portrait, not an official history. It concentrates on episodes which seem especially significant, and individual experiences which illustrate wider truths. My purpose is to consider how and why things happened, or did not happen, rather than to rehearse familiar narratives. I have dealt briefly with matters discussed in Overlord, such as the importance of the inferiority of many Allied weapons, and especially tanks, to those of the Germans. There is likewise little here about the Battle of Berlin. That story has been often told, most recently by the admirable Antony Beevor. For the Berlin battle, I have focused chiefly upon material hitherto unpublished, especially from Russian archives. Some episodes which must be discussed, such as Arnhem and the Battle of the Bulge, cannot fail to be familiar. Yet other sagas, such as those of East Prussia and the Dutch Hongerwinter, are amazingly little known. It seems fruitless to revisit the last days of Hitler and his fellow gangsters in the bunker, about which a huge popular pornography exists. This is a book chiefly about ordinary human beings, to whom extraordinary things happened. Although a few of the people I have interviewed are today famous men—Dr. Henry Kissinger, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, Lord Carrington—most, by intent, are not.
I have devoted a chapter to prisoners of the Reich. Beyond the Jews who were explicitly destined for death, millions of other people were captives or slave labourers in Germany in 1945. It was a revelation to hear a survivor of several concentration camps observe: “In Auschwitz, you were either alive or you were dead. I have been in worse camps.” Some soldiers ask: did it matter that the Allies took so long to liberate Germany? It was an issue of vital moment for hundreds of thousands of Hitler’s subjects and captives who died in 1945, some of whom would have lived if their deliverers had been able to hasten just a very