Armageddon - Max Hastings [329]
Yet in the east, six million Russian soldiers were preparing for the day of triumph and retribution which they had been promised for so long. Their victory was not in doubt, but they now faced some of the Second World War’s most savage encounters upon the battlefield. In the east, the last act was among the most terrible, as the Russians faced Germans ready to fight with the fanaticism of despair, amid a society collapsing into hysteria. Adolf Hitler had led one of the most educated and cultured societies on earth to a moral, political and military abyss. He now sought to ensure that as many as possible of his own people accompanied him over the brink.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“The Earth Will Shake as We Leave the Scene”
THE ABYSS
EVEN AS THE Americans and British were advancing eastwards in April, and while Zhukov and Konev marshalled their forces on the Oder, elsewhere Soviet armies were fighting gigantic battles along almost a thousand miles of front. In the west, Germans were surrendering. In the east they were dying in their tens of thousands. The testimony of Wehrmacht soldiers who survived the war is unrepresentative of the experience of Hitler’s forces fighting the Russians in the last weeks, because so many such men perished. The fate of some units, especially those of the Waffen SS, is lost in fire and smoke, because no witnesses remained to record their destruction. Significant numbers of young soldiers, children of the Third Reich, betrayed no interest in surviving its collapse. Any temptation to applaud their courage is undone by an understanding of its futility, and of the depravity of the mindset which it reflected.
Hitler himself was indifferent, of course, and consumed by self-pity. “If the war should be lost,” he said in one of the most notorious of all his utterances, “then the nation, too, will be lost . . . There is no need to consider the basic requirements that a people needs in order to live a primitive life. On the contrary, it is better to destroy such things, for this nation will have proved itself the weaker and the future will belong exclusively to the stronger Eastern nation. Those who remain alive after the battles are over are in any case only inferior persons, since the best have fallen.” The Third Reich had always been in love with death. Now, its passion would achieve a final consummation.
Major Karl-Günther von Hase’s father, Paul, commandant of Berlin, had been hanged for his part in the July bomb plot. His son was recalled from Italy for interrogation. Although he established his innocence, he was discharged from the General Staff, and sent in mid-January 1945 to serve as operations officer of one of Hitler’s designated fortresses, Schneidemühl in East Pomerania. Von Hase saw no dilemma in continuing to fight, despite his family’s purgatory at Hitler’s hands: “I was a professional—I had to do my duty. Obviously the war was lost, but there was an obligation to defend Germany, and a clear distinction between fighting the Russians and the Western allies. German behaviour in 1945 reflected a determination not to repeat the experience of 1918, when the German army was not defeated, but gave up.”
As von Hase drove through the snow to his new posting, a black cat crossed the road. He found nothing in the “fortress” to discourage superstition. Its commander was an able regular officer a few years older than himself, Colonel Remlinger. Yet the garrison was pitifully weak. Beyond a few regular Wehrmacht troops, Schneidemühl was manned by 6,000 Volkssturm, the teenagers of an NCO cadet school and