Inferno - Max Hastings [389]
Corp. Helmut Fromm, facing the Russians in Saxony, wrote in his diary at Easter: “I’m sitting in my candle-lit O[bservation P[ost] 500 metres from the Ivans. An icy wind is blowing through the tarpaulin. Shelling continues all night, interspersed with machine-gun fire and my neighbour’s snoring. When I walked along the trench an hour ago, an NCO told me the Americans are in Heidelberg. Now, I’m cut off from all my loved ones, and they must be worrying about me. I wonder where my brother is. I am convinced I will see them again, because I believe in God. How long will this madness continue? May God have mercy on his people. This has been a long crusade, strewn with corpses and tears. Please grant us an Easter followed by redemption.” Corporal Fromm was sixteen years old.
Guy Sajer, serving with the Grossdeutschland Division, wrote: “We no longer fought for Hitler, or for National Socialism, or for the Third Reich or even for our fiancées or mothers or families trapped in bomb-ravaged towns. We fought from simple fear … We fought for ourselves, so that we shouldn’t die in holes filled with mud and snow; we fought like rats.” A German lieutenant protested wearily to his fiancée: “To be an officer means always having to swing back and forth like a pendulum between a Knight’s Cross, a birchwood cross and a court-martial.” A Berlin woman wrote: “These days I keep noticing how my feelings towards men … are changing. I feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. Deep down we women are experiencing a kind of collective disappointment. The Nazi world—ruled by men, glorifying the strong man—is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of ‘Man.’ ”
A Russian soldier wrote to his wife from East Prussia on 19 April:
Hello my darling! For the past fortnight I have been moving almost daily, sleeping in bunkers, tents, or simply under the open sky. Since yesterday, however, we have been quartered in a house and sleeping in beds … Our unit has earned this, for we’ve played our parts in the assault on Königsberg, and of course we’ve taken it. Our planes bombed the city for three days. The earth shook under artillery bombardment, which enveloped the city in clouds of smoke. At first the Fascists fought back fiercely, but they could not endure this hell. They seemed to be short of ammunition and had no air support either … There were masses of prisoners. The radio has announced: ‘Allied patrols have crossed the border into Czechoslovakia!’ Everything is bound to finish soon! Perhaps it still won’t be over—there is also Japan, damn it … But one would imagine that once the European war ends, the Allies will try to finish that quickly.
As the German food distribution system collapsed, from late March onwards civilians began to suffer severe hunger even in areas still held by the Wehrmacht. And they knew worse was to come. A Berlin teenager named Dieter Borkovsky was riding the city’s S-Bahn on 14 April, amid a throng of passengers loudly venting their anger and despair. Suddenly a soldier, adorned with medals which seemed absurdly incongruous on his small, dirty figure, shouted, “Silence! I’ve got something to tell you. Even if you don’t want to listen to me, stop whingeing. We have to win this war. We must not lose our courage. If others win the war, and they do to us only a fraction of what we have done in the occupied territories, there won’t be a single German left in a few weeks.” Borkovsky wrote: “It became so quiet in that carriage one could have heard a pin drop.”
When the Russians reached Lubbenau, sixty miles south of Berlin, Hildegard Trutz, the wife of an SS officer, hoped that clutching her two young children would spare her from rape. “My God! What a fuss I made with the first one! I can’t help laughing when I think of it now. I held Elke in my arms and pushed Norfried in front of me, hoping that would soften his heart. But he simply pushed Norfried aside and threw me on the ground.