Armageddon - Max Hastings [300]
Every nationality save the Russians was allowed to send one postcard a month home, which had to be written in German. Semenyak spoke the language, and wrote endless cards for foreign fellow prisoners: “Dear mama and papa, I live well here. We get enough to eat and drink. Nevertheless, could you send us some bread . . .” As the Russians swept across East Prussia, the prisoners were evacuated from Stutthof and marched westwards away from the Red Army. By April 1945, their captors had run out of places to drive them to. Semenyak was among several thousand Stutthof prisoners whom the Germans determined to remove by sea. They were loaded on to barges, then towed by a tug from river estuary to estuary, searching in vain for a path into the Reich which had not yet fallen to the Soviets.
On Semenyak’s barge were 600 men, crammed into the hold and on the decks. They were terrified of capsizing. Those on deck crowded into the hold as the swell rose. They began to die. The corpses were merely thrown overboard. They had no food, and some started drinking sea-water. It seemed unlikely that they would be allowed to live. The Germans had taken immense pains to evacuate Stutthof and keep its inmates out of Soviet hands, “because they feared that we would tell the story of what had been done to us.” Day after day the barges wallowed uncertainly across the sea, with the trail of corpses on the swell lengthening relentlessly. “Despair? We were always in despair. Somehow, each of us persuaded himself that he would be the one to survive. But the barges were the worst thing that ever happened to me.” On their tenth evening at sea, they ran aground on a sandbank. The tug abandoned its search for a landfall, cast off all its charges and steamed away into the darkness. At 6 a.m. next morning, they were sighted by a German naval ship, which put off lifeboats.
Pitying German sailors took the survivors on board and landed them on an island close by. Of several thousand prisoners who had been embarked, just 400 remained. The war was at its last gasp. So also were millions of captives like the stricken survivors of Stutthof.
STARVATION OF A NATION
UNTIL THE VERY end of the Second World War, several nations in their entirety, together with some large communities, remained captives of the Germans: Norway, Denmark, northern Italy, northern Yugoslavia, much of Czechoslovakia, the Channel Islands and most of the population of Holland. The Dutch experience was perhaps the worst. Between November 1944 and May 1945, some 4.5 million people lived not merely on the brink of starvation, but in the midst of its fatal consequences. In Holland during those months, the mortality rate of small children doubled, that of babies trebled. Twelve thousand people died outright of hunger, a further 23,000 as a consequence of Allied air raids on German rocket sites, 5,000 in German captivity and 30,000 as forced labourers. Of the 2,800 Dutch people executed in cold blood by the Germans, 1,560 met their ends in the winter of 1944–45.
The Dutch suffered an abrupt descent into misery. In 1939, as in 1914, Holland sought to escape conflict with its mighty neighbour through a declaration of neutrality. Hitler’s invasion of the Low Countries in May 1940 snuffed out that aspiration. Yet, after the swift military collapse and the decision of the Netherlands royal family and government to choose exile, many Dutch people resumed a remarkably humdrum existence. There had been little anti-German sentiment in Holland before 1939. Now, most of the country’s bureaucracies and institutions accepted Nazi authority, much as they detested the proconsul whom Hitler appointed to rule the Netherlands, the Austrian Arthur Seyss-Inquart. There was a small Resistance movement, whose courageous members ran an escape line for Allied airmen. But the flat, open terrain of a small country did not lend itself to guerrilla war. German intelligence penetrated the Dutch networks of Britain’s Special Operations Executive with deadly consequences. “People soon realized that resistance was very,