Inferno - Max Hastings [364]
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
GERMANY BESIEGED
IN THE FIRST DAYS of September 1944, much of the Allied leadership—with the notable exception of Winston Churchill—supposed their nations within weeks of completing the conquest of the Third Reich. Many Germans were of the same opinion, making grim preparations for the moment when invaders would sweep their country. A German NCO named Pickers wrote to his wife in Saarlouis: “You and I are both living in constant mortal danger. I have written finis to my life, for I doubt if I’ll come out of this alive. So I’ll say goodbye to you and the children.” The soldier Josef Roller’s father wrote to him from Trier: “I have buried all the china and silver and the big carpet in the stables. The small carpet is in Annie’s cellar. I have bricked in Annie’s china where the wine used to be. So if we should have gone you will find it all, but be careful in digging, so that nothing gets broken. So, Josef, all the best and keep your head down, fondest greetings and kisses from us all, your papa.”
The German people understood that if the Russians broke through in the east, all was lost. “Then there’ll be nothing left but to take poison,” a Hamburg neighbour told Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg, “quite calmly, as if she was suggesting pancakes for dinner tomorrow.” It is more surprising that some Nazi followers still clung doggedly to hope. Konrad Moser was a child evacuee in one of many hostels for his kind, located beside a POW camp at Eichstadt on the grounds that the Allies were unlikely to bomb it. Late in 1944 when his elder brother Hans arrived to take him back home to Nuremberg, the hostel’s warden said accusingly, “I know why you want him. You don’t believe in final victory!” Hans Moser shook his head and said, “I’m on leave from the Eastern Front.” He took Konrad back to his parents, with whom the child survived the war.
Most of Germany’s cities were already devastated by bombing. Emmy Suppanz wrote to her son on the Western Front from Marburg, describing life at home: “Café Kaefer is still open from 6:30 to 9 a.m. and from 5 to 10 or 11 p.m. Bits of plaster moulding fell off the ceilings in the last attack, though oddly enough the mirrors are still unbroken. The windows in the café and the flat above have gone, of course. Burschi had two rabbits, one fairly big white one called Hansi and a smaller grey one to which we had not yet given a name, and was eaten a fortnight ago. The cook wanted to kill Hansi also, but she didn’t do it. Yesterday Burschi met me with news that Hansi had seven young ones! Sepp, the town … was dreadful.” Such news from home ate deep into the spirit of soldiers far away, fighting for their lives.
On the other side of the hill, the Allied armies’ dash across France amid rejoicing crowds infused commanders and soldiers alike with a sense of intoxication. The GI Edwin Wood wrote of the exhilaration of pursuit: “To be nineteen years old, to be nineteen and an infantryman, to be nineteen and fight for the liberation of France from the Nazis in the summer of 1944! That time of hot and cloudless blue days when the honeybees buzzed about our heads and we shouted strange phrases in words we did not understand to men and women who cheered us as if we were gods … For that glorious moment, the dream of freedom lived and we were ten feet tall.” Sir Arthur Harris asserted that, thanks to the support of the