Armageddon - Max Hastings [327]
The Russians had encircled the synthetic-oil plant in Silesia where sixteen-year-old Hans Moser had served with a flak battery back at the end of January. Moser and his young comrades watched while NCOs blew up their guns. A huge baulk of timber flew high into the air, landing almost on the top of the teenager, who thought his last hour had come. They were then given three minutes in which to pack a ration-bag and waterbottle apiece and marched away through driving snow towards the distant train station. Men and boys soon started falling out in the freezing cold. Moser suffered frostbite. In Niesse, a baker’s wife allowed him to put his feet in her stove to thaw out. “Are the Russians coming?” she asked fearfully. “No, no,” said the boy stoutly, because he could not face telling her the truth. He trudged onwards. By the wayside, he saw a neat fence beside a churchyard, with a notice proclaiming: “Joseph Eichendorff is buried here.” The great nineteenth-century lyrical poet was one of Moser’s idols. The teenager yearned to make a pilgrimage to the grave. But he did not dare to linger.
One icy night, he and his dwindling body of young companions encountered a terrible vision. A column of shrunken men in striped clothes came past, escorted by SS men with lanterns and dogs. “Who are these people?” he asked a guard. “Jews and gangsters,” said the man tersely. Later, they heard shots, and came upon some of the prisoners lying dead by the road, falling snow already thick upon their bodies. For hours afterwards, they found themselves passing the corpses of prisoners and refugees, many of them old people. One dead face haunted his sleep for months afterwards, a tall man who had been shot in the back of the neck. The bullet had forced open his jaws. The man stared vacantly upwards, eyes and mouth wide open. Once, the gunners saw two elderly German civilians towing on their sled a concentration-camp prisoner who had collapsed. One of the young Luftwaffe men asked the couple roughly: “Why are you bothering to help this gangster?” Moser said nothing, and indeed felt nothing: “We were immersed in our own worries. We just wanted to get home.”
As they crossed into Czechoslovakia, the tension, even hatred, among local people was palpable: “The Czechs were stirring.” Military police patrols questioned every male traveller constantly, searching out deserters. Their party possessed only a single written movement order to cover them all, so they clung together. At Prague, they found a train westwards. At last, after weeks on the road, he reached home in Nuremberg. When the Russians overran his position, Moser had been officially reported “missing.” Now, when he banged the knocker of the family house clad in his white snow smock, his mother opened the door and screamed. She thought he was a ghost.
Even elite units such as the Grossdeutschland were no longer willing to fight. Captain Mackert, one of its battalion commanders, described his shock when men began to flee under Soviet attack even when he drew his pistol upon them: “All my attempts to keep the company together failed . . . The men would rather be shot than stay in their positions.” Mackert was left only with one NCO, two wireless-operators and a runner. He never saw his soldiers again.
It is an extraordinary reflection of the fashion in which weapons and ammunition continued to the end to reach some units—and especially the favoured SS—that as late as 13 April at Wiener Neustadt 1st SS Panzer received a delivery of ten new Mark IV tanks. The division’s paper strength before its final battles was 10,552 men. Yet its morale was no better than that of the Grossdeutschland. “The atmosphere was truly hopeless,” said Werner Sternebeck,