• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1042 0

celebrity, Frau Winifried Wagner, granddaughter of the composer. Off-duty one afternoon, Williams knocked on the door of her little chalet at Oberwarmensteinach. A robust forty-year-old welcomed him in perfect English, and solicited his assistance in preventing the requisitioning of her home and car. The GI explained that he was merely sightseeing. Without embarrassment, Frau Wagner indulged him in some reminiscences: “You know, Mr. Williams, the Führer used to come every year to our festival. He did love Wagner’s music so much. Poor dear Führer. It soothed him just to be with us. The children adored him. By the way, how is my dear friend Henry Ford?” While Private Williams was indulging one bizarre cultural pilgrimage, Soviet Lieutenant Gennady Klimenko was engaged upon another. He strolled through the great city cemetery of Vienna, marvelling at the famous names on the tombstones. At the devastated opera house, he was solemnly shown to the door of Goebbels’s box, which he opened to gaze upon a bomb-blasted void.

Victor Klemperer, for whom the end of the war signalled deliverance after twelve years of mortal danger among the Nazis, was surprised by how soon the miseries of peace began to cause him almost as much distress as those of war. “What good is all awareness of the peril we have come through?” he pondered on 13 May.

You may put on the light, you may watch the never-ending fly-past without a care, there is no Gestapo for you to fear, you once again have the same rights—no, probably more rights than those around you—what good is it all? Unpleasantnesses are more bothersome than the nearness of death, and the unpleasantnesses are piling up now and our powers of resistance and patience are very much shaken. The terrible heat, the great plague of mosquitoes on top of that. The lack of anything to drink—now even the inn has run out of coffee. The lack of underwear, the unspeakable primitiveness of everything that has to do with eating: plate, bowl, cup, spoon, knife, partly (or mostly) completely absent . . . I know it all sounds funny, one could also say presumptuous, after everything we had to put up with before; these are no more than everyday calamities. But as such they simply do torment one very greatly.

Ten million German soldiers had become prisoners in the hands of the Allies. In mid-May 1945, the NKVD reported that they were holding 1,464,803 Germans, including ninety-three generals, in camps within Germany alone, in addition to millions more who had already been shipped east. The Allies were spared one difficulty: there was no lack of available prison accommodation ready to house those who had built it. At one of the host of camps throughout Russia to which Stalin was dispatching his captives, the commandant invited his 150 guards to take turns hitting Germans. Russian civilians who passed the compounds retained sufficient hot anger to shout abuse at the prisoners for many months. Ibragim Dominov, a guard from Kazan in Tartary, sometimes talked to the Germans. When they told him about their homes, their cattle, their pigs, he said: “You must have been fascists, to have owned so much.” The most wretched, hopeless, despairing inmates were Cossacks, denied even the privilege of being permitted to sing on the way to labour in the coal mines. Each year that followed, the prisoners were told: “You could be released next year.” They never were.

Lieutenant Tony Saurma of the Grossdeutschland Division contrived to get himself swiftly liberated from British captivity, on the ground that he was an agricultural worker. This was a loose interpretation of his family’s possession of immense Silesian estates which were now lost for ever. Saurma hiked for days to reach his family at a country house near Augsburg. One morning, as he walked tired and dusty up a long avenue of apple trees, he saw a pony and trap coming the other way, containing two women. They were his mother and sister Dolly. “It’s Tony!” they shouted, overjoyed. Saurma’s elder brother Karl-Georg, a twenty-two-year-old officer of 6th Panzer, had been incinerated