Armageddon - Max Hastings [362]
A schoolteacher told the girls of her class two days before the fall of Berlin: “If a Russian soldier violates you, then remains nothing but death.” Ruth Andreas-Friedrich commented in her diary on 6 May that more than half of this woman’s students had taken their teacher at her word, often by drowning themselves in the nearest body of water. “They kill themselves by the hundreds. The phrase ‘honour lost, everything lost’ had been the words of a distraught father who presses a rope into the hand of his daughter who has been violated twelve times. Obediently she goes and hangs herself at the nearest window transom.” Sexual violation was, perhaps, the most comprehensible reason for self-destruction. No one has ever reliably quantified the suicides in Germany in 1945, but these certainly ran into many tens of thousands. In every city occupied by the victors, corpses hung from the rafters, or lay slumped where poison had done its business with them.
Everywhere, surviving servants of the Third Reich were striving to rid themselves of the trappings of allegiance, which now placed them in mortal peril. An SS general arrived at a Schloss which harboured two Englishwomen married to Germans. “My dears,” he said apologetically, “excuse this dreadful uniform,” and hastened to discard it. The leader of the Belgian SS, Léon Degrelle, demanded a U-boat to escape to Spain or Japan. Degrelle did not get his submarine, but he was successful in escaping vengeance. Dönitz, at Kriegsmarine headquarters in Flensburg, provided SS men with naval uniforms, in accordance with Heinrich Himmler’s last advice to his personal followers, “to dive for cover in the Wehrmacht.” Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, was given an order on 6 May posting him to Naval Headquarters on the island of Sylt, disguised and equipped with the papers of boatswain’s mate Franz Lang. Dönitz’s behaviour during his brief, grotesque masquerade as the last Führer makes a mockery of delusions that he was a mere naval officer who fell into bad company. He was fortunate to escape the gallows at Nuremberg.
In some cases, Germans themselves exposed senior Nazi officials. Martin Mutschmann, gauleiter of Saxony, was brought forth from the house in Annebourg where he had been hiding, after an informer denounced him. The local burgomaster marched the Nazi official through the streets in his underpants, then displayed his captive before the war memorial in the town square, before surrendering him to the Russians. The gauleiter survived a half-hearted attempt to slash his own wrists.
On 7 May, in the ruins of Dresden, the inhabitants heard firing to the north-west. A deputation from the local hospital called upon Emil Bergander. They begged him to destroy the alcohol stocks at his distillery: “If the Russians get at them, they’ll do vile things.” Bergander said: “They’ll do even more vile things if they find we’ve deliberately got rid of it.” He compromised, by selling off stock at the gates at rock-bottom prices. He said with passionate determination to his son: “We and the factory have survived the bombing. Now we are going to survive the Russians.” That night, the two stood on the roof of the building, watching the few remaining houses of Neustadt, on the opposite side of the river, burning fiercely. There was a series of thunderous explosions as the Wehrmacht demolished the bridges. “The Russians will be here tomorrow,” said his father resignedly.
The eighth of May was a beautiful day, which began with a flight of Stormoviks making low passes over the city. The Berganders went to the distillery with Anna, their Russian maid, in readiness to act as interpreter. They heard engines, and expected tanks. Instead, anticlimactically, a single Russian soldier plodded up the road. When he reached them, he levelled his sub-machine-gun. Anna, who was from Smolensk, started