Armageddon - Max Hastings [369]
As Staff-Sergeant Henry Kissinger, serving with the U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps, processed concentration-camp prisoners, he was taken aback to find a Pole spitting in his face: “Why do you care for the Jews first?” the man demanded savagely. When the Germans ran the camp, this man said, the place of Jews—at the bottom of a hierarchy in which professional criminals commanded the summit—had been properly recognized.
Most Germans, of course, declared passionately that they had known nothing of the existence of the camps. Yet even when the revelation was forced upon them, Allied soldiers noted the local civilians’ apparent indifference. A British supervising officer expressed disgust that German civilians conscripted to bury the dead “displayed no emotion at all—the denial, the absence of any sense of collective responsibility, shocked us all.” This young man, Cliff Pettit, wrote home to his parents about the German burial parties for their victims: “They do it with as little concern as if they were sweeping up their own homes and burying old tins.”
Nikolai Maslennikov was unable to grasp the fact of liberation when Soviet tanks rolled into Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 19 April. “For the last six weeks, I was scarcely able to walk, or even to move. In the final days, I simply felt a huge indifference. I was waiting to die. Nothing seemed to matter any more.” He spent six months in hospital before returning to Leningrad, where he found that his parents were dead, as was his girlfriend Lena.
“Sometimes we despaired for these men,” wrote Brenda McBryde, one of the nurses who cared for liberated prisoners. “What future was there for them? No one knew where their families were, and they themselves seemed to have forgotten that they ever had wives or children. They only cared for the food trolley. Every other instinct or emotion had been suppressed except the will to survive.”
Among the Germans, children found it as hard as adults to adjust to their new circumstances. One night the farmer with whom Jutta Dietze and her family lodged as evacuees invited some American soldiers to share their supper. A local boy came in, to collect the children for labour duty. “Heil Hitler!” he said mechanically as he came through the door. The Americans laughed indulgently. Yet a few weeks later the Americans departed, and the Russians came. Some Mongolian soldiers strode into the kitchen and observed a photograph of Jutta’s father in Wehrmacht uniform, which they had been careless enough to keep on the dresser. “Nazi! Nazi!” the Russians shouted angrily at the frightened children. The family sought to mollify the occupiers by assuring them that their father was nobody important. In justice to their new masters, though the Germans found the Russians very dirty, they behaved much less badly than everyone had feared. Brutality was not universal, once the heat of battle had cooled.
At last, soldiers’ minds began to turn from fighting to the fulfilment of desires which had been in abeyance. Twenty-two-year-old Private Harold Lindstrom from Alexandria, Minnesota, decided to deal with a matter that had played on his mind for many months. He was a virgin. Deeply fearful of disease, he walked to a park, where he met a girl walking a dachshund: “She was a slim brunette, kind of pretty and neatly dressed, wearing a plain dress and knee-high white stockings.” He said hello, and she gave him a big smile. He asked nervously: “Zig zig?” She took his hand, led him confidently into a park shelter, and unzipped his trousers. The process was quickly over. He pulled out an almost full packet of Lucky Strikes and was on the point of handing them over when he changed his mind. “Somehow, I just couldn’t be too nice to her as she was a German, our enemy.” He gave her only the three cigarettes which he had been told was the correct tariff. She said “Zank you” and disappeared.
Private Henry Williams, a New Yorker with the 273rd Field Artillery, learned that near his billet was living a local