Inferno - Max Hastings [382]
There was also, of course, widespread semivoluntary copulation, which caused venereal disease rates to soar as desperate German women sold their only marketable commodity, often in order to feed their families. Many Allied soldiers recoiled from the shamelessness of German behaviour; even the educated among Hitler’s people were brutalised by the privileges of oppression. Scots Guardsmen, welcomed by the aristocratic owners of a castle in northern Germany, were appalled to discover that in its adjoining park lay a small concentration camp containing 200 starving slave labourers. When a British officer remonstrated, their host replied in bewilderment, “Major, you don’t understand. These people are animals—they can only be treated like animals.”
The Anglo-American armies’ last battles were incomparably less bloody than those in the east, because it suited both sides that it should be so. British lieutenant Peter White shouted at a fleeing German to halt: “I took aim in the middle of his back with a strong feeling of repugnance at having to fire at a man running away … when something seemed to tell him it was hopeless. To my intense relief he spun around, flinging his rifle into the snow and raising his hands in a swift dramatic gesture. He called out a jumbled stream of broken English in a frightened voice … ‘Don’t shoot, please sir! … Hitler no good … don’t shoot … Kamerad, please!’ At the same time he reached suddenly into his clothing, which nearly caused me to fire as I half-expected a pistol or grenade to be pulled out. Instead … he swung what turned out to be a gold pocket watch on a chain in my face as a peace offering.”
The Western Allies advanced through Germany in the same measured fashion in which they had conducted their campaign since October 1944. They sought to complete the destruction of Nazism at acceptable human cost, advancing to the lines of occupation agreed with the Russians, and only temporarily and in a few areas beyond them. The Germans continued to resist, but few displayed the fanaticism that characterised the eastern battle to the end. The hard part, for the vanquished, was to identify an opportunity to quit without being shot by one side or the other. The American aidman Leo Litwak described his experience of ministering to an elderly German shot while attempting to reach the American lines unarmed, presumably to surrender:
He wore a gray wool uniform and cap, his eyes huge, his face pinched and unshaven, his mouth stretched as if shrieks were coming out, but it was a smothered sound, Ohhhhh, Ohhhhh. He saw the red crosses on my arms and helmet and reached for me and cried, “Vater!” Father. A spoke of femoral bone was sticking through his trousers. I slit his pants, bared the wound at mid-thigh. He’d shit small, hard, gray turds—what you might see in the spoor of an animal. The shit had worked itself down near the fracture. The stink was pungent and gagging. I put sulfa powder on the exposed bone, covered it with a compress, tied a loose tourniquet above the wound high on the thigh. He was graying fast, going into shock. He said “Vater, ich sterbe.” Father, I’m dying. I stuck morphine into his thigh. He wasn’t eased and I gave him another eighth of a grain. I watched him lapse into shock—lips blue, sweat cold, skin gray, pupils distended, pulse weak and fluttery … I yearned for him to be dead so we’d both be relieved from his pain.
The bulk