Armageddon - Max Hastings [328]
At the makeshift hospital in the school of a small town in Schleswig-Holstein where sixteen-year-old Melany Borck worked as a nurse, the last days were awful. There were few doctors. The men were riddled with lice. Those with families in eastern Germany were desperate for news of them, of which there was none. Drugs had run out. They were reduced to boiling birch-bark to make a primitive antiseptic. Melany administered anaesthetic by holding an ether pad over a man’s mouth. Once, in her pathetic ignorance, she overdid the process so that a patient remained unconscious for eight hours. Beyond the casualties laid in rows on straw palliasses in the classrooms and corridors, others remained in bunks on the hospital train which had brought them, because there was nowhere else. At the beginning, the girl had found working at the hospital rewarding. For the first time in her life, she was treated as an adult rather than as a child. But when she found herself reliving the last battle for Pillau through the fevered nightmares of a dying man whose hand she held, the memory haunted her. Even after many months on the wards, she still found it hard to look upon shattered limbs, the ruins of so much youth.
“We’re retreating again,” Corporal Helmut Fromm of Ninth Army wrote in his diary on 19 April, on the road thirty-five miles south-east of Berlin in front of Konev’s tanks, “nobody knows where to. The columns of men stumble along these dusty roads, horses dragging our grenade-launchers. The infantry pulled back past us while we were still in action. Our tanks are on the same road . . . Just now at least there is no air attack, but shells are falling right and left. I am filthier than any pig, we’ve nothing hot to eat, I’m smoking my last cigarette. How long can this go on?”
Piotr Tareczynski, a thirty-two-year-old Polish gunner officer, crossed the Oder with his PoW column in darkness, over a bridge being prepared for demolition. Stettin, some fifteen miles northwards, was being bombed. “The flares being dropped by aircraft made it look as if a pink blanket was suspended above the city.” Next day, as they passed among prosperous farms, he pondered the likely fate of their inhabitants: “The time for settling accounts was approaching fast. Nemesis was at their door. Those farmers still viewed us as enemies, though we were hardly able to walk. They were afraid of us. To them, we were living proof of Germany’s crimes against humanity.” There were many belated deaths from Allied strafing. The neighbouring column of PoWs to that of British airman Trevor Peacock was attacked by RAF Typhoons, whose rockets and cannon inflicted some eighty casualties. Lieutenant Philip Dark, a British naval officer captured at St. Nazaire, watched in impotent horror as RAF Tempests swept down on his group. “One’s nerves, after those three years, were in a poor state. It had been a cotton-wool existence. I noticed a body lying flat in the ditch as I upped and ran . . . I thought ‘You silly bloody fools!’ Being shot up by one’s own boys, what irony!”
In the last weeks, there was a belated rush of killings in the concentration camps. Some enemies of the Third Reich seemed in danger of surviving its demise, and the Nazis hastened to eliminate them. At Dachau on 9 April, Johann Georg Elser, the communist who had tried to assassinate Hitler in November 1939, was executed. At Flossenburg the same day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Admiral Canaris and his Chief-of-Staff General Hans Oster were hanged, likewise Hans von Dohnanyi in Sachsenhausen. Thus too died many less famous names.
Never had the contrast been more brutally drawn between the experience of the Eastern and Western Fronts. As the last act of the battle for Germany approached, the American and British armies were advancing against only spasmodic resistance, suffering few casualties, knowing that their task was all but completed.