Inferno - Max Hastings [383]
Even Tito’s Yugoslav partisans were grudgingly impressed by the retreat conducted by the Wehrmacht against overwhelming odds. Milovan Djilas wrote: “The German army left a trail of heroism, though the domination of Nazism has suppressed in the world’s mind even the thought of such a thing … Hungry and half-naked, they cleared mountain landslides, stormed the rocky peaks, carved out bypasses. Allied planes used them for leisurely target practice. Their fuel ran out … [They] killed their own gravely wounded … In the end they got through, leaving a memory of their martial manhood. Apparently the German army could wage war … without massacres and gas chambers.”
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The paratrooper Martin Poppel’s fiancée, Gerda, was one of many Germans belatedly alienated from the Nazi regime by the horrors it had brought upon her society. She wrote in January 1945 to Poppel, who was serving in Holland: “We are worn out after this terrible hail of bombs. To be hearing the howling of these things all the time, waiting for death at any moment in a dark cellar, unable to see—oh, it’s truly a wonderful life. If only it would stop, they really expect too much of people. Do you still remember the lake? I think you gave me our first kiss there! Everything gone—the lovely cafés Brand and Bohning, the town hall completely burned. It’s impossible even to begin to describe it. But you will be able to imagine it. You have seen Munich. Is everything going to be destroyed? Yet there is no other way out to be seen. Why do people let our soldiers go to their deaths uselessly, why do they let the rest of Germany be ruined, why all the misery, why?” She added later: “If you were still a loyal supporter of these people after the war—you know who I mean—it would inevitably separate us. What have they made of our beautiful, magnificent Germany? It’s enough to make you weep. And one mustn’t even think about how the others will enslave us.”
Histories which depict Hitler’s 1945 “armies” and “divisions” as serious fighting formations mock the reality: every unit was reduced to a fragment of its proper strength in men, tanks, artillery and transport. Between June 1944 and March 1945, the Wehrmacht lost 3.5 million rifles, so that in its last campaigns even small arms were in short supply. Many soldiers were in wretched physical condition: a medical report from a parachute artillery battery on 10 January observed that of its seventy-nine men, all but two were suffering from lice, and eighteen from eczema caused by poor diet. Efforts to sustain discipline invited derision; it must have seemed fantastic to the soldiers of 1/1120 Volksgrenadiers that in January, as the Reich collapsed, their CO Major Beiss issued an order of the day deploring personal slovenliness: “Rifles will be carried on the right shoulder, barrel up. If I should again see a ‘Sunday sportsman’ wandering about with his rifle pointing downwards, he will be punished by seven days’ close arrest. Fresh dirt graces a soldier, but old filth exposes laziness. If I again see any man with a ‘lion’s mane’ or any other fancy hairstyle, I shall personally cut his hair.”
It is a commonplace among armies, especially those facing adversity, that men must never be left idle to brood. In the early