Armageddon - Max Hastings [365]
The family of sixteen-year-old Hans Moser, a former Luftwaffe flak gunner, possessed the luxury of a small country home in the hills a few miles above Neumarkt in Bavaria. Late in April, they had taken refuge there, to await the end. A group of SS defended the town ferociously against the advancing Americans. Neumarkt changed hands several times, and paid the price. From the hills, the Mosers could see flames rising from the ruins. At last, the shooting stopped. Moser’s uncle Hans, the burgomaster, put on a top hat and tailcoat and went out formally to receive the Americans. The first soldiers pushed him brusquely aside. The teenage Hans had outgrown his civilian clothes. His Luftwaffe uniform was the only outfit he possessed. On the strength of it, he was thrown into a barn under guard for some days, along with a host of other uniformed stragglers and local officials. The boy proudly rejected the offer of candy from a GI: “They were the enemy. I didn’t see this as a liberation. I hated our helplessness—the fact that now these Americans could do absolutely anything they liked with us.” His mother, a committed Nazi, was deeply distressed by Germany’s defeat, but when she heard of Hitler’s death, like tens of millions of former believers, she was past caring about his fate. She asked simply: “What happens to our family now?” His father, a devout Catholic who had been badly wounded in the First World War, was merely grateful that it was over.
Captain Leopold Goesse watched his thousand-strong Cossack unit of the Wehrmacht parade near the Austrian border and proudly advance their blue-and-black Cossack standard. They swore a new oath of allegiance, in place of that which had died with Hitler, to their flag. Goesse, a young Austrian aristocrat, had never felt entirely comfortable with the Cossacks. Despite some historians’ idealization of those who were ruthlessly returned to Stalin, the murderous record of Cossacks who served the Wehrmacht in northern Italy and Yugoslavia deserves more attention than it has received. Goesse was troubled by the incidence of rape and looting in his own unit: “There were severe disciplinary problems . . . I didn’t feel like a Cossack, as some German officers did.” The knowledge of the Cossacks’ assured fate if they remained in Yugoslavia caused them to march hastily across the Austrian border in the first days of May, among a host of retreating German soldiers abandoning their weapons. They forded the river into Carinthia to escape the attentions of Bulgarian troops guarding the bridges. The Cossacks’ German officers sought out the nearest British unit and offered their surrender.
A British officer urged them to throw down their weapons and surrender to the Bulgarians—“They are our allies.” Goesse said, in the excellent English he had learned among British friends before the war—his father had attended an English public school—“I’m sorry, sir, but we know the Bulgarians better than you do.” The British officer went to talk to the Bulgarians. He returned to say: “You’re right. They’re not gentlemen. They want to shoot you all.” The Cossacks established themselves amid a ring of British tanks and military police. In the days that followed, apprehension grew among the Germans as well as the Cossacks about their likely fate. Goesse was able to exploit his position as an English-speaking liaison officer to effect an escape to his family schloss, a few hours away. He hid in its attic for some weeks, until he adopted a new role as sporting guide for British officers of the army of occupation, clad in British battledress and the protective social armour common to the European upper classes. His aide even brought home his horse Bitomka, on which his wife later learned to ride. The Goesses were able to save a few Cossacks, who escaped to their schloss and were helped to disappear, having been provided with civilian clothes: “We burned their uniforms and those beautiful Cossack hats.” The remainder of those in British hands were handed