Armageddon - Max Hastings [325]
One day in April, Klaus Fischer and his mother were walking past the old Lamsdorfer bridge in Jena when they saw soldiers working on it, laying cables in a trench, then carefully replacing the cobblestones on top of them. They were preparing the bridge for demolition, and indeed destroyed it hours before the Russians arrived. With meticulous efficiency even amid disaster, the city fathers arranged for Jena’s streetcars to be divided, half placed on each side of the river before the bridge was blown. Everyone prepared for the end in different ways. Henner Pflug fell into conversation on a train with a young Waffen SS man. “Surely it’s all over,” said Pflug. The soldier said defiantly: “Oh we’ll lick the Russians yet!” But then he added impulsively that he had two spare shirts. Would Pflug like them? “I shan’t be needing them any more.” The civilian took the shirts, and the two men parted.
Lieutenant Rolf-Helmut Schröder served briefly on the staff of General Walter Botsch, commanding LIII Corps near Bonn. Day after day, Schröder’s principal duty was to move pins on the map, to mark Allied advances which German forces were impotent to arrest. He watched Russian prisoners digging emplacements to house guns which had long ago been destroyed west of the Rhine. One day Schröder ran into the command bunker pursued by a barrage of exploding grenades, and indeed carrying in the back of his head a fragment from one of them. “The Americans are here,” he announced tersely. In a room adjoining the military operations centre, he glimpsed a cluster of Nazi Party officials, policemen and women, all very drunk—“a bad memory.” His general hastily put on his overcoat inside out, so that the red lapels of high command were invisible. The staff wrecked the radio equipment, then decamped. In a few moments, the bunker was almost empty. The young officer was bemused when a civilian entered. It was the local museum director, who also happened to be the uncle of his girlfriend. “Herr Schröder!” exclaimed the visitor. “What are you doing here?” The lieutenant shrugged: “Waiting to die.” “Don’t you know your general’s done a bunk?”
Schröder escaped on foot to his family home in Westphalia. Under a railway embankment on the edge of Hagen, his own town, he met two German tanks, waiting for the Americans. “We’ve got thirty rounds between us,” said one of the commanders. “When they’re gone, we’re finished.” To his mother’s consternation, Schröder arrived home with a fellow officer, his driver and batman. They all put on civilian clothes, and Schröder buried his pistol. But he soon realized that escape was impracticable. He dressed once more in his uniform, and surrendered to two American NCOs. One said: “This is all crap—let him go home.” But the other American insisted that Schröder must be held, removed his Iron Cross and started him on the journey to a PoW camp.
Late in March after his unit was overrun, Helmut Schmidt decided to try to get back to his wife in Hamburg, rather than allow himself to be taken prisoner. He and two other men set off eastwards from the American front, walking by night and hiding by day. At first, they received considerable help and kindness from German peasants. As they reached the north German plain, fear of Allied reprisals made local people become progressively more reluctant to shelter fugitive soldiers. They spent several nights huddled beneath bushes under the stars. At last, Schmidt reached his family.
When Sergeant George Schwemmer of 10th SS Panzer was discharged from the hospital where he had spent February being treated