Armageddon - Max Hastings [360]
Inge Stolten, a Düsseldorf housewife evacuated to Thuringia, smashed the family radio in despair when she heard the news of Germany’s surrender. She had been an ardent Nazi all her adult life. She saw this moment as the end of all her dreams. She was an educated woman who spoke good English and French. Yet she sincerely believed that the Americans would kill all Germans when they arrived.
At the farm in Saxony where eleven-year-old Jutta Dietze was an evacuee, the child burst into tears when she heard that Germany had surrendered. “We were so indoctrinated that we had never considered any possible ending of the war except victory. I thought: this is the end of Germany. We’ll never be allowed to sing our German folk songs again. We shall never again be allowed to be proud of being Germans.” In a cell in Moscow’s Butykri prison, Major Karl-Günther von Hase heard the fireworks exploding outside. “Hitler kaputt!” said his guards tersely. He sat down on his palliasse, put his head in his hands and sobbed: “I thought of all the comrades I had lost in the war. I felt only an overwhelming sadness about what had happened to Germany.” He spent three years in Russian captivity before he was able to return to formalize the marriage ceremony to his fiancée Renate which had been solemnized by proxy during the siege of Schneidemühl in February 1945.
Eleonore von Joest, who had escaped from East Prussia, exulted: “Now life begins!” she thought. Then she and her family began to ask each other: “Who else is left alive?” Lieutenant Vladimir Gormin, with 3rd Ukrainian Front, saluted his commanding officer and reported solemnly: “Colonel, the war is over.” The colonel, a much older man whose son had died in the war, leaned forward and kissed the lieutenant three times. By evening, their soldiers were tossing officers skywards in blankets, beginning an orgy of drinking that left no man sober for three days.
In Pomerania, Waltraut Ptack and her family were ordered by Russian soldiers, most of them very drunk, to ring the local church bells, and indeed to keep ringing them for many hours: “We did not mind doing this, because for us, too, it was a happy day. But it did not prove a happy day for many of the German women there.”
“I suppose I should feel elated,” Lieutenant Christopher Cross of 2nd Ox & Bucks wrote to his parents, “but I feel tired and disgusted, and I can’t get the smell of Germans out of my mouth and nose, no matter how much I clean my teeth. Disgust, contempt and a little pity mix ill. What now, I wonder?”
Lieutenant Hans-Otto Polluhmer, former signals officer of 10th SS Panzer, heard the news with his comrades in a prison camp in Oklahoma. Some men expressed delirious joy. Others succumbed to despondency: “Everything we had fought for seemed to have been in vain.” Several prisoners killed themselves. Polluhmer had heard the news of Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, as the family listened to the radio on his tenth birthday. His father had said: “My boy, this is the finest birthday present you could have.” Now, Polluhmer learned that his parents had been found dead in their flat near Potsdam. He never knew whether they died at the hands of the Russians or destroyed themselves.
Those who had most cause to rejoice were the liberated peoples of Europe. “Every day seemed a festival day to us,” said Theodore Wempe, a Dutch Resistance worker in Apeldoorn. In a little town outside Amsterdam, twenty-year-old Bob Stompas saw a Jew burst from the hiding place he had occupied for four years, and stand in the midst of the street crying to the sky: “I’m alive!