Armageddon - Max Hastings [318]
The French Army, and especially its colonial troops, behaved with savage indiscipline in Germany, in some places perpetrating excesses on an almost Soviet scale. The French were indulged in some degree, because their thirst for vengeance against the Germans seemed understandable. General de Gaulle had fiercely insisted upon the French right to enter Germany in arms, and Churchill persuaded Stalin to accede to de Gaulle’s demands for a designated occupation zone. French troops on the ground played out the role of victors with a ruthlessness which dismayed some of their allies.
The Americans and British behaved better than many victorious armies in history, but less well than the official record suggests. If rape was far less widespread than in the east, it was certainly not unknown. Looting was almost universal, mitigated only by spasms of bourgeois conscience on the part of the thieves. “Pitiable middle-aged lady in the house,” wrote Corporal Stan Proctor of 43rd (Wessex) Division in his diary for 26 April, describing his billet, “and we found a young man hiding in what was left of the loft. It was her son, a deserter from a Hitler Youth unit. We had to hand him over to our police. He was a good-looking and quiet young chap. There was a photo of him in his Hitler Youth uniform which I took with me as a reminder of what somebody like Hitler can do to people. We also took two nice wireless sets from the house. I suppose we looked on them as spoils of war, but the lady was upset. I was ashamed of what we did.” In 21st Army Group throughout the campaign, just seventy-two men faced disciplinary charges for looting, against 2,792 charged with being improperly dressed.
Even before they reached the concentration camps, men of the liberating armies were disgusted by their encounters with foreign prisoners of the Nazis, human skeletons scavenging across the countryside of Germany. “The countryfolk and their houses and farms are well cared for,” wrote a British officer. “Only their slaves look miserably underfed and clothed.” An escaped Canadian pilot approached 2nd Fife & Forfar Yeomanry one day, carrying a slave labourer he had met, who was dressed in two sacks and so weak that he could only mutter: “Polski.” British medics could not get food into him. The man lay moaning on a stretcher until he was placed in an ambulance. This was already occupied by a captured German officer who had lost a foot. The German spat upon the Pole. The British dumped the German in a ditch.
Outside the town of Büdingen near Frankfurt, a handful of SS mounted a last-ditch resistance, quickly suppressed by the Americans. The local Nazi officials fled. The grandfather of Helmut Lott, a teenage evacuee living in the town, returned home bearing a Party official’s brown tunic and breeches as mementoes. His grandmother took one look and threw the uniform on the fire, demanding of her husband: “Are you crazy?” There was shelling during the night, which caused the fearful inhabitants to spend the night in their cellars. Next morning, however, a large crowd turned out on the streets to greet their occupiers respectfully. “Everybody was wearing their Sunday best, to demonstrate the whiteness of their consciences,” observed Lott drily. The first vehicle that appeared in the main street, however, was not a tank but a red sports car full of laughing GIs. The people of Büdingen found this ridiculous, and faintly humiliating. “We thought: what is this?” said Lott. “These people are supposed to be occupying us, but they look as if they are on an excursion to the seaside.”
In their turn, the Allies were bewildered by German behaviour. The whole nation seemed in denial of any responsibility for the war, and for the crimes of the Nazis. “The attitude of civilians was really rather typical of the master race,” observed a report by the 2nd Battalion, Warwickshire Regiment. “They seemed to expect us to treat them in the politest possible manner. You would think from their behaviour that they had won this war. They