Armageddon - Max Hastings [361]
IN THE ENTIRE north-west Europe campaign since June 1944, American forces had lost 109,820 men killed and 356,660 wounded. Eisenhower’s British, Canadian and Polish formations reported total casualties of 42,180 men killed, 131,420 wounded. These figures contrasted with the Red Army’s losses on the Eastern Front between October 1944 and May 1945 alone of 319,000 killed, well over half a million dead since D-Day in June 1944. Field-Marshal Keitel observed ingratiatingly to his Soviet captors: “Germany and Russia have suffered the greatest losses in the war, while the Western allies have suffered very little.” Yet the “big picture” masks the extraordinary weight of casualties that fell upon the footsoldiers. At the end of the campaign, the U.S. 2nd Infantry Regiment, with an established strength of 3,000 men, calculated that since D-Day it had sustained 3,745 battle and 3,677 non-battle casualties. Some 714 of its men had been killed, 2,736 wounded, 215 missing, and eighty were known to be prisoners. The U.S. 4th Infantry Division lost a total of 4,834 men killed between June 1944 and May 1945, more than 100 per cent of its rifle strength. Private Len Stokes of the 7th Somersets found that just five men of the 120-strong infantry company with which he had landed in Normandy in June 1944 remained in its ranks on VE-Day. The company had lost 105 men killed or wounded in Normandy; twenty-four in Belgium and Holland; eighty-seven in Germany—about 180 per cent of its strength.
IT IS UNREMARKABLE that Hitler and other senior Nazis chose suicide in the face of defeat. It seems more noteworthy that so many senior officers and ordinary Germans also killed themselves. There is no German cultural tradition of suicide as a response to military failure, of the kind familiar in Japan. No significant number of Germans took their own lives in the face of their nation’s earlier defeat in 1918. In the whole of the First World War, sixty-three German generals died on active service, while 103 died of other causes. In the Second World War, twenty-two generals were executed by Hitler. Another 963 died or were posted missing on active service. An astonishing 110 killed themselves. Model, we know, took the view that “it is unthinkable for a field-marshal to allow himself to be captured.” Rommel felt obliged to accept poison to spare his family from the consequences of Hitler’s belief in his treachery. British troops of 13 Para briefly occupied an elderly German general’s magnificent castle. They confiscated all his personal weapons except a pistol. When the Russians took over, they smashed everything—family paintings, heirlooms, furniture. The general used his remaining weapon to shoot himself. The burgomaster of Leipzig, together with his wife and daughter, the city treasurer, his wife and daughter and four Volkssturm men all killed themselves in various offices of the city hall, with poison or pistols. The burgomaster’s body was found slumped, his glazed and empty eyes staring upwards at a portrait of Hitler on the wall. Major-General Georg Majewiski, commanding the German garrison in Pilsen, surrendered to the U.S. Third Army in a brief ceremony, which he concluded by shooting himself in front of his staff and an American officer of 16th Armored Division.
The most common cause of self-destruction appears to have been despair, an unheroic desire to escape from acknowledgement of Germany’s defeat and its consequences. The young mayor of Barth appeared at the gates of a local PoW camp. He sought the assistance of its American and British prisoners to have Barth declared an open town and spare it from destruction. When they protested their impotence, the mayor returned home and hanged himself alongside his wife. There were many cases such as that of General von Bothmer, who shot himself after being stripped of his rank and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for failing to hold Bonn. Some officials chose to die because they anticipated retribution for their crimes in the name of the Nazis. A significant number of people decided