Armageddon - Max Hastings [367]
The victors embarked upon the colossal task of sorting millions of people displaced from their homes and their lives, which would continue for a decade to come. Every Allied soldier who served in Germany was awed by the tide of humanity surging among the armies now at rest. “There were thousands of men,” wrote Carl Basham, a GI from Ohio, stationed at Marburg rail station,
clinging precariously to the boxcars of the slow-moving trains, a bag of personal effects in their spare hands. Where were they going? Where were their families? Where was their home? Most were quiet, grim, sullen, in shock. Many had been wounded in some manner, and had staggered from hospital beds in fear of the Russians. Despite their civilian clothes, it was plain that most were former soldiers, in fear for their lives. Others appeared to have been allied or Axis civilians forced into service with the German army. Others again were merely German civilians, moving westwards as fast as possible.
The Soviets supervised these vast migrations of population in predictably pitiless fashion. An NKVD report described thousands of Germans leaving Czechoslovakia every day after the war’s end. German nationals were evicted from their houses at fifteen minutes’ notice, permitted to take with them only five marks and none of their household possessions, in pursuit of the policy agreed between the Allies, of relocating minorities to their “natural national homes.” The commanding officer of the Red Army’s 28th Czech Rifle Regiment evicted every ethnic German in his area on his own initiative. “I hate them all,” he said laconically. The NKVD complained that such unilateral action was compounding the administrative problems of occupation: “As a result, we have tens of thousands of starving and begging Germans on the move. Typhoid and other infectious diseases are rife. There are many cases of suicide.” One local commandant registered seventy-one suicides in a single day. Colonel-General Hesleni, commanding the Third Hungarian Army, which fought against the Russians to the end, slashed his wrists with a fragment of glass from the window pane of his cell, leaving a terse note: “I have killed myself because of my health. With a stomach like mine, I could never survive imprisonment.”
Throughout their advance across Germany, the Americans and British were relieved to encounter negligible resistance from “werewolf” units, which had been so prominent a feature of Nazi propaganda since the winter of 1944. Beyond the assassination of the Allied-appointed burgomaster of Aachen, there was no significant hostile activity behind the Western Front. In the east, however, it was another story. For weeks after the German surrender, the NKVD continued to report incidents of sniping at Red soldiers, mostly by boys of sixteen and seventeen. This plainly reflected their greater hatred of the Russians, however futile.
Some SS fanatics believed, probably rightly, that only death awaited them in the hands of the Red Army. They fought on for weeks after VE-Day. Men of Gennady Klimenko’s division were attacked by SS troops while driving through a Hungarian forest as late as 20 May. “Our men had dropped their guard,” said Klimenko. “Quite a lot of people were killed like that, after it was all supposed to be over.”
And then there were the camps. Polish officer Piotr Tareczynski finished the war with his PoW contingent alongside concentration-camp prisoners at Sandbostel.
At first they mobbed us, hoping for food. Finding that we had none, they drifted away. Most sat in the sun and seemed to doze. Several toppled to one side, and were obviously dead. We had to remove several hundred of their corpses. We were surprised, not shocked. One’s mind only registered whatever we saw without much emotion or even horror. By that time we had heard of concentration