• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1089 0

to murder Dutchmen not only after Hitler’s death, but in their rage and bitterness after VE-Day. Germans indulged an orgy of looting and killing before the Canadian liberation forces arrived. On 8 May, twenty-year-old Elsa Caspers remonstrated with an SS man standing over three bodies, which he said were those of “terrorists.” Elsa, a Resistance courier, said: “Surely you must know the war is over?” The German sneered: “We did it just for fun.” Annie van Beek, who was twenty-three in 1945, retained for the rest of her life her bitterness towards the Germans: “They took away what should have been the best years of my life. They gave us that awful last winter. My fiancé spent three years as a prisoner of war. My younger brother died in one of their terrible camps.” If the law had been enforced against all Germans who committed crimes against humanity in the countries occupied by Hitler, post-war executions on a Soviet scale would have been necessary. The Dutch experience of war in the winter of 1944–45 was as terrible as that of any nation in western Europe. To the very end, the Germans showed no hint of mercy to millions held in the Nazi maw.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Collapse in the West

EISENHOWER’S DECISION

THE SEIZURE of the bridge at Remagen, one of the most melodramatic episodes of the Allied campaign, was followed by a march to victory on the Western Front that ended in anticlimax, for reasons that were inescapable. Bradley’s forces staged their breakout from the Remagen bridgehead on 25 March, almost three weeks after the crossing was taken. Here again, caution had prevailed. After a slow start, making four or five miles a day, the pace of the advance quickened. German resistance was slight. Bradley, who had never achieved a successful envelopment, now became passionately committed to encircling the Ruhr and at last making the massive capture of Germans which had eluded his armies since Normandy. His plan was that the U.S. First Army, pushing up from the south, should link with Simpson’s Ninth, swinging south-east from Wesel. It seemed to some observers strange that, after Eisenhower had repeatedly asserted the primacy of Berlin as the focus of all Allied hopes and aspirations since June 1944, the Americans should now throw overwhelming force behind a limited operation 250 miles west of the capital. The Ruhr’s strategic and industrial importance stemmed from its production of raw steel rather than finished munitions. At this stage of the war, it was implausible that any steel leaving the presses could be converted into weapons in time to be employed by the Wehrmacht. Russell Weigley is among the fiercest American critics of Bradley’s decision to concentrate on the Ruhr, “whose strategic significance was . . . essentially nil.” Yet Bradley judged the capture of the remains of Army Group B, his adversary since Normandy, as the most substantial objective for his armies. In the light of subsequent events, he may have been right.

Some Allied units encountered stubborn local resistance. There was an unhappy episode on 30 March: as the U.S. 3rd Armored Division barrelled confidently eastwards, tanks from the SS Panzer Training School at Paderborn struck hard at the American column. A Tiger smashed into the jeep of the division’s commander, the much admired Maurice Rose. The general was trapped on the road. He reached down to his waist, apparently to unbuckle his pistol belt to surrender. A German shot him. It was fancifully suggested that Rose had been deliberately killed because he was Jewish, indeed a rabbi’s son. In truth, the general was merely a victim of the chance of battle.

In the days that followed, the Americans fought some fierce little battles with Germans seeking to escape capture, but nothing seriously impeded their advance. Whatever delays some spearheads suffered, overall American casualties were small, and armoured columns ate up the miles eastwards. In the first days of April, Bradley committed eighteen American divisions to tighten the Ruhr noose on 317,000 men, the ruins of Army Group B. As the Americans