CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Bitter End

RETRIBUTION

“THE GERMANY IN which we found ourselves travelling at the end of April,” wrote the correspondent Alan Moorehead, “presented a scene that was almost beyond human comprehension. Around us fifty great cities lay in ruins . . . Many had no electric light or power or gas or running water, and no coherent system of government. Like ants in an ant-heap the people scurried over the ruins, diving furtively into cellars and doorways in search of loot . . . Everyone was on the move, and there was a frantic ant-like quality about their activities. Life was sordid, aimless, leading nowhere.”

Almost every factory chimney in the greatest industrial society in western Europe stood cold and still. Businesses lay empty, for what business could be done? No trains ran. Refugees huddled in overcrowded ruins, feeding on soup, potatoes and despair. No vessels save Allied warships moved in the ports. The roads were clogged with stony-faced people: soldiers in tattered uniforms or ill-fitting civilian clothes creeping home; families fleeing from the Russians; freed prisoners and slave labourers roaming the landscape in search of freedom, revenge or booty. Thick dust, generated by countless millions of explosive concussions from end to end of Germany, lay upon everything—windows, furniture, vehicles, houses, corpses, living people. The victors observed that a physical pallor of defeat possessed the faces of Germans, a compound of hunger, exhaustion and fear for the future. Among young and old alike, laughter had become a redundant sensation.

The orgy of looting, destruction and rape which followed the Red Army’s triumph in Berlin and across the rest of eastern Germany seemed to Stalin a just recompense to his soldiers for their labour, and a fitting chastisement for the German people. The Imperial Japanese Army had been behaving in similar fashion in China since 1937. Napoleon’s soldiers likewise shamed the name of France during their campaign in Spain a century and a half before. But nothing on the scale of the Soviet terror had been seen in Europe since the seventeenth century. “It was bitter to learn that Goebbels’s propaganda had been factual and accurate,” wrote the Danish journalist Paul von Stemann. “It was not that a sex-starved Russian soldier forced himself upon a girl who took his fancy. It was a destructive, hateful and wholesale act of vengeance. Age or looks were irrelevant. The grandmother was no safer than the granddaughter, the ugly and filthy no more than the fresh and attractive.” Von Stemann protested to a Soviet officer about the rapes he witnessed all around him. “Keep out of this,” the soldier told him sternly. “Just leave it alone. It has nothing to do with you.” Most Russians, then and later, excused what took place. Valentin Krulik shrugged: “People had so much hatred to work off.”

Ursula Siwik, wife of Hans who was once among Hitler’s bodyguard, was raped three times by Russian soldiers in Berlin. Siwik, outraged, said without any hint of irony: “No German soldier would have behaved as they did.” Waltraut Ptack, a thirteen-year-old who had escaped with her mother, brother and sister from East Prussia, was huddled with her family in an abandoned seaside villa in Pomerania when the Red Army came. They heard women screaming in nearby houses, then two Russians kicked open their own door. One spoke German. “Hitler kaputt!” he said. Then he began to harangue the cringing little group about Germany’s crimes in Russia. Waltraut said: “It was so awful having to listen to all this, when we knew that we had done nothing wrong. It wasn’t us who had done these things.” The Russians raped her mother.

The family lived in unbroken fear through the weeks that followed. They were conscripted to work as forced labourers on a farm. The women never undressed, nor went anywhere alone. Once, they were all herded into a barn, and assumed that they were going to be shot. Instead, as part of a clumsy programme of de-Nazification, they were compelled to watch a Soviet propaganda film with Hitler and his colleagues played by comic actors: “We were meant to laugh, to see how ridiculous they were, but we simply sat frozen with fear.”

Nineteen-year-old Helga Braunschweig sat in a cellar with her mother and some twenty other women in a village just outside Berlin through the long, terrifying days of the battle. When at last the shooting died, they emerged thankfully from their refuge, to find Russians outside, eagerly shaking hands and saying: “War finished!” Then soldiers began to set up their cry of “Uri! Uri!” The German women were bemused, and at first disbelieving. Then they bowed to the inevitable, and surrendered their watches and jewellery. The Russians’ mood became visibly less inhibited and more dangerous. The German woman retreated to their cellar. The older ones urged the younger to dirty their faces and even to smear them with egg yolk. Then a Russian officer entered, and pointed to several Germans in succession: “You! And you! And you!” Helga’s mother pleaded with the Russian: “Leave my daughter. Take me.” She was ignored. The girl was a virgin, for although she and her boyfriend Wolfgang had often passionately kissed they had never made love. Now, she unwillingly obeyed the Russian’s instructions to follow him upstairs, strip and get on the bed. “I thought I had no choice.”

The women in their hamlet had supposed that they would be safe if they stuck together. Discovering their mistake, one family killed themselves. By contrast, a committed Nazi among the women now sought favour by offering herself to the conquerors. Helga observed of those days: “What happened in the huge city of Berlin was somehow anonymous. But in our little community, everything seemed somehow so horribly personal.” After the first Russian incursion, Helga and her mother hid in the attic of a house for ten days. “Red soldiers during the first weeks of their occupation raped every woman and girl between the ages of twelve and sixty,” a British PoW liberated in Pomerania testified. “That sounds exaggerated, but it is the simple truth. The only exceptions were girls who managed to remain in hiding in the woods, or who had the presence of mind to feign . . . some infectious disease.”

The grotesque comedies precipitated by the Red Army’s addiction to alcohol continued even now. On the night of 2 May, the Russian commandant of Lodz became drunk and ordered the city’s sirens to be switched on to celebrate the fall of Berlin. This caused panic. Anti-aircraft gunners opened fire, believing there was an air raid, which in turn provoked a flight of civilians. Russian soldiers manning roadblocks saw cars and civilians hastening towards them and supposed themselves under attack. They began shooting, killing and wounding dozens of people. The NKVD arrested the commandant.

Many Russians found in the service of the Wehrmacht were summarily dispatched. “Vlassov’s men were kicked to death on the spot,” said Gennady Ivanov. “In general, we tried to persuade men not to kill prisoners, but it was very hard. We were living an existence in which people’s lives had absolutely no value. All that seemed important was to stay alive and look after oneself.” A day or two before the end, Valentin Krulik was ordered to take twenty-five men to accept the surrender of a large body of Germans waiting in their trucks down the road. When he reached the column, he was alarmed to find himself among so many fully armed enemy soldiers. He gestured the German column to follow him into the Russian lines and walked ahead of them until they reached a field headquarters. “What’s in the trucks?” an officer demanded. “Germans,” answered the lieutenant. “Then get them out of the vehicles, and take them 500 metres into the fields.” Krulik never asked what happened to the prisoners, but he guessed.

There were anguished protests from German communists that when they joyfully revealed themselves to their Soviet deliverers they were treated no better than Nazis. Yelena Kogan, the NKVD interpreter in Berlin, saw a man standing with his pregnant wife shouting: “Hooray! The filthy fascists have been smashed by the workers!” His Soviet listeners responded scathingly: “Where were all you German workers when Germany invaded Russia?” Vasily Filimonenko felt no trace of pity for the Germans. “Let us not kid ourselves—they had attacked our country. They deserved everything they got.” The son of dirt-poor, illiterate peasants from a village near Novgorod, he had fought for four long years. His seventeen-year-old sister Evdokia had died as a nurse at Stalingrad. He was outraged, much later, when Germany was allowed to build a war memorial in Russia, “on land steeped in our blood. It is not a matter of vengeance, but of justice, the memory of the devastating pain of our country. For the sake of all our people who died, the war crimes of Germany can never be forgiven.”

Yelena Kogan said: “What the Red Army did in Germany was the darkest stain on its record in the war.” As the first revelations of Russian behaviour, of the reign of terror sweeping the east, began to seep through to the Western allies, many American and British soldiers were baffled. Since 1941, they had been urged to think so warmly of their ally “Uncle Joe.” Captain David Fraser wrote cynically: “The British people were surprised and shocked at that time to discover that many European peoples regarded the Soviet regime and the Red Army with a horror and alarm greater than that previously aroused by Nazi Germany. Any sympathy with the victims of the Bolsheviks . . . smacked of incipient leniency to the Germans.”

Dorothea Goesse, wife of an Austrian officer of the Wehrmacht’s Cossacks, stood in the middle of the border town of Klagenfurt and watched the British Army march in. Then, from the opposite direction, she saw approaching a column of Yugoslav communist partisans: “They looked like Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves.” She remembered what her father had said, long ago in September 1939: “A terrible time is coming.” Almost six years later, it had arrived. “For us,” said Dorothea Goesse, whose family had occupied the same castle for 300 years, “a world was drowning.”

HITLER’S DEATH ensured that the end would soon come, but did not itself terminate the dying. At no single moment did every corner of the German, Czech, Dutch, Scandinavian, Baltic and Yugoslav battlefields fall silent. Rather, the struggle stuttered to an end in one corner of Europe after another during the first two weeks of May, as one by one Hitler’s commanders succumbed to the inevitable. Even as some Russian soldiers, victorious in Berlin, were addressing themselves to the fruits of victory, elsewhere they were obliged to fight fiercely, not against an enemy aspiring to victory, but against Germans preferring death to Soviet captivity. A total of 3,404,950 of Hitler’s soldiers were disarmed following the final surrender. Most of these men, it may be assumed, were still offering at least nominal resistance to the Allies after the fall of Berlin.

On the evening of 1 May, from his headquarters at Plön in north Germany, Grand-Admiral Karl Dönitz announced on German radio the death of Hitler and his own appointment as the Führer’s designated successor:

German men and women, soldiers of the German armed forces! Our Führer, Adolf Hitler, has fallen. In deepest grief and respect the German people bow. He early recognized the frightful danger of Bolshevism and dedicated his being to this struggle. At the end of this, his struggle, and his unswerving life’s path, stands his hero’s death in the capital of the German Reich. His life was a unique service for Germany. His mission in the battle against the Bolshevist storm-flood is valid for Europe and the entire civilized world. The Führer has appointed me as his successor. In consciousness of the responsibility, I take over the leadership of the German Volk at this fateful hour.

An element of black farce was thus introduced to a tragedy. Instead of seizing the opportunity to offer an immediate capitulation and save thousands of lives, Dönitz’s mockery of a government permitted the killing to go on for a further week. The admiral sought negotiations with the Western allies, while striving to sustain resistance to the Russians. Capital sentences for desertion and mutiny continued to be carried out. On the Eastern Front, men fought on, unable to perceive any way to stop.

“I did not mourn Hitler,” said Captain Karl Godau of 10th SS Panzer, “but we felt that his death meant the end of everything. We simply could not imagine what might happen next. After all the threats that the Allies had made against Germany, one could not believe that anything good would follow.” Maria Brauwers of Jünkerath, however, grieved when she heard of Hitler’s passing: “I knew nothing about the Holocaust. But I remembered that the Führer had done many good things before the war, especially for those of us who were young.”

Corporal Helmut Fromm, a sixteen-year-old soldier from Heidelberg, shared the agony of the encircled Ninth Army in the fields and forests south of Berlin after the city had fallen and Hitler was dead. In their thousands, some in organized bodies and others alone, they trudged westwards, like some gigantic armed football crowd dispersing after a match, fighting Russians wherever they met them. The roads and surrounding countryside were jammed with fugitives, constantly attacked by Soviet aircraft. Sharing their misery were scores of thousands of civilian refugees of both sexes and all ages, clutching pitiful possessions. The remains of Fromm’s unit was commanded by a young Luftwaffe lieutenant, and included two women in army uniform. As they reached a ride in a forest, they suddenly saw two Soviet tanks, which fired at them. “Quick!” said their officer. “Run across while they’re reloading!” One of the women stopped dead in the midst of the ride, staring “like a paralysed rabbit” at the T-34 before her. “Run, you silly bitch!” shouted the officer. He raced out and dragged her into the trees. On and on they marched. No one thought of fighting, only of reaching the American lines. Yet when they reached Halle and found Russians, they felt that all hope was gone. Darkness was coming on. Shells were falling all around them. Fromm saw a Russian infantryman shooting down on them from a church tower, and fired a futile burst at the man from his machine-pistol: “It seemed that the world was coming to an end.”

He joined several men sheltering behind a slow-moving Tiger. There was a heavy explosion. Stunned, Fromm reached for his Schmeisser and found it plastered with the intestines of his neighbour. He threw away the gun in revulsion. They laid a groaning teenager on the hull of a tank and plunged on into the woods. The Tiger tracks rolled impassively over men lying wounded in its path. Fromm was surprised how unaffected he was by their plight. He felt drained of all sentiment save the urge to survive. He abandoned the sluggish tank to follow an officer whom he saw studying a map by torchlight, because such a man seemed likely to know where he was going. There were soldiers milling everywhere. Suddenly, a shadow loomed ahead in the darkness. A dozen guns were raised. The faceless figure said: “If you start shooting at me, you’re all dead, but if you stick to this path, you’ll get through.”

Early in the morning, however, they found themselves under fire again. Fromm had picked up another weapon, but buried himself as deep as he could behind a log pile. “Don’t be so feeble,” said an SS man scornfully. “Get up where you’ve got a field of fire.” The boy’s gun was jammed with sand. He hurled it aside. At last they moved on, sleep-walking. As night came again, they reached a village. “We’ll get through if we run,” said an SS man who proved to have a mutual friend with Fromm in Heidelberg. There was a nightmare moment when one German ran into a huge Russian emerging from a cottage. Both men exclaimed in shock and fled in opposite directions. Next morning, as Fromm rested exhausted by the roadside, he saw a VW Schwimmwagen race by, bearing a Luftwaffe general adorned with decorations. The boy felt fiercely angry: here was one of the leaders who had brought them all to this, riding in a car while soldiers walked. It was too much. He clambered to his feet and staggered on, almost comatose.

Many Allied soldiers found it confusing to spend the last days of the war fighting children. A British Bren-gunner firing into a house defended by Hitler Jugend trained his weapon on a side door from which it was plain that, sooner or later, the cornered defenders would try to escape. A few minutes later, a figure dashed out. After a burst of Bren fire, the German fell writhing and screaming in the midst of the street. As the British soldier pressed the trigger again, he glimpsed the face of a young boy, who slumped in death. “His features have been printed on my mind ever since,” said the infantryman. “I have always asked myself: if I hadn’t fired the second burst, might that boy have lived to grow into a decent man?”

“The fourteen-year-olds were very dangerous, because they possessed no sense of adult behaviour,” said Major Bill Deedes. “They might produce a grenade they had hidden, and throw it after being taken prisoner.” Private Walter Brown and his platoon of the U.S. 90th Division were sickened to find that they had shot ten of a group of fifteen German boys firing on them from a mountainside near the Czech border: “we felt like butchers, and yet those bullets would have killed us as dead as those of any SS soldier.” A young captive tossed a “potato masher” grenade at the colonel of the Scots Greys on 2 May. The British officer shot him with his pistol. “The rules of war got very fractured in the last phase—we lost three officers to these child soldiers,” said Deedes. “Until then, the courtesies had still obtained. But we ceased to extend them to the Hitler Jugend. I became almost more nervous and jumpy than I had been in Normandy. Here one was facing the odd German who would just stay and pick off a couple of one’s men not as part of any military plan or organized defence, but on his own initiative. The war became much less formalized and organized, and in some ways more dangerous as a result.”

Teenagers often fought on under circumstances in which adult soldiers would have quit. The British found Wunsdorf airfield near Hanover defended by Hitler Youth manning 40mm flak guns, who shot up the point platoon of 13 Para. Sergeant Scott, one of the battalion medical team, rode forward on a motorcycle prominently displaying a red cross. A German bullet shattered his head. Dr. David Tibbs drove forward. A wounded man said: “Please sir, would you remove Sergeant Scott’s brain from my tunic.” Tibbs laid the ghastly object reverently on the roadside. A Sherman disposed of the German flak-gunners. When Tibbs soon afterwards found himself trying to treat one of the enemy wounded, the teenager spat at him and rolled away. Here, indeed, was a triumph for Goebbels.

On 6 May, a “frightful thug” appeared at the HQ of the British 13th/18th Hussars, wearing a Red Cross armband and claiming to be a refugee. On being searched, he was found to have a pistol, and admitted to being a German marine. The adjutant wrote: “After a certain amount of argument, we decided he was a proper wrong ’un, and he was duly dispatched by firing squad in the garage.” Some soldiers’ attitudes to such exercises bemused their comrades. Private Ron Gladman noticed that several men in his company of the Hampshires seemed to enjoy service with firing squads to execute alleged spies and malefactors: “They always put on their best battledress.”

Field-Marshal von Manstein, perhaps the most brilliant of all Hitler’s commanders, disgraced since 1944, had retired to a house in Schleswig-Holstein to await the end. On 3 May, he invited Field-Marshal von Bock to come to tea. Von Manstein’s adjutant was standing outside his commander’s manor-house when he saw British fighters machine-gunning a road nearby. Soon after, von Manstein was summoned to a hospital. The strafing aircraft had hit von Bock’s car, killing his wife and daughter and mortally wounding the old field-marshal. Von Bock, swathed in bandages, lived long enough to murmur to his visitor: “Manstein, save Germany!”

As late as 3 May, in Hungary German troops were still fighting fiercely. A moment of black farce took place in Valentin Krulik’s unit of Sixth Guards Tank Army. The company commander was frying a pan of eggs for some fellow officers when he glanced through the window and saw men running for their lives in the street outside. He told Krulik to investigate. The lieutenant returned to report that German troops were advancing towards their positions. The company commander threw down the skillet and ran outside to check his fleeing soldiers. He fired a tommy-gun burst in the air, which caused them to halt in their tracks. “Boys!” he shouted. “Don’t you know what today is? State Loan Day! Unless you get back to your positions, you won’t get a kopek!” They returned to the line. “We went on taking casualties right to the very end,” said Krulik. “If we hadn’t been willing to take the losses, the war might have gone on much longer. We wanted to get this over. Everyone was now desperate to go home.”

In those days, the innocence of childhood seemed to assume a quality of madness. An onlooker in the village of Niemegle, in the path of the Soviet advance, saw grim German soldiers trudging up the main street towards the line, watched by children who chattered and laughed euphorically, their lips caked chocolate brown. A local confectionery factory had thrown open its gates and distributed its entire stocks to the villagers before the Russians could reach them.

Gottfried Selzer, a young artilleryman deployed on the Czech border, thanked God that the Russians were too busy with Prague and Berlin to trouble much with his own area. On 6 May, a rumour swept through the unit, in common with much of the Wehrmacht at this time, that the British and Americans intended to arm the Germans to fight the Russians. Two days later, as dusk fell, their commanding officer summoned them all. “It’s over, men,” he said. “It’s every man for himself now, so get home as best you can.” The officers rode away on their horses. The soldiers stripped off their insignia and put on white armbands. Then they started walking, among many thousands of others. Selzer was disconcerted “to watch the mighty Wehrmacht falling to pieces in such a fashion.” He and a handful of others crossed the Neisse, were briefly imprisoned by Poles from whom they escaped, then were fortunate enough to be ignored by the Russians as they crossed the Elbe. “We fell happily into the hands of the Americans.” He reached home to discover that his only surviving brother Alois had died in the battle for Berlin on 29 April. His parents were distraught with mingled grief for one son and relief that another, at least, had come home. “I simply thanked God for being alive myself.”

On the morning of 4 May, a delegation of Breslau churchmen called on the military commandant to urge the surrender of the city. Two days later, the city’s commander Hermann von Niehoff went out to meet his Soviet counterpart and offered capitulation in return for assurances about the safety of the garrison. That night, the guns fell silent. About a quarter of the inhabitants of Breslau had been killed or wounded in the siege, 30,000 in all. They had inflicted some 60,000 casualties on the Russians. Little of the great old city survived. Von Niehoff refused the chance of escape in a Storch aircraft, preferring to accept captivity with his men. Gauleiter Hanke, however, eagerly seized the opportunity and fled, never to be heard of again. The Soviet occupying forces embarked upon an orgy of plunder and rape in the ruins of Breslau.

In Czechoslovakia, Field-Marshal Schörner, that dedicated Nazi, maintained the struggle to defend the Reich’s last important industrial region, at the head of a million men of Army Group Centre. On his western front, Patton’s Third Army was already at the Czech border. Russian armies of 2nd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts pressed on Schörner from the north and east. Yet still the battle continued. On 6 May, as the German perimeter narrowed, Czech partisans rose in revolt in Prague and other cities still held by the Germans. They gained the support of General Vlassov, the most senior Russian officer to have entered Hitler’s service, at the head of one of his divisions of mostly Ukrainian soldiers. Vlassov’s men, in those last days, made a belated and futile bid to save themselves from Soviet vengeance by turning on the Germans. Czech radio appealed to the nation to rise.

What followed was similar in kind, if not in scale, to earlier events in Warsaw. The Germans, motivated partly by self-preservation and partly by the culture of massacre which now held sway among the doomed fanatics, found means to suppress the revolt with the same energy with which they had addressed previous risings of Poles and Slovaks. A last tragedy, involving the deaths of 3,000 Czechs and terrible damage to their capital, thus took place even after Hitler’s death. SS men herded civilians out of their houses into the street, where they were mown down. A senior Wehrmacht officer announced that he cared nothing for armistices, that his men would fight on until they were granted passage westwards. German radio in Prague continued to broadcast signals of defiance and to threaten draconian reprisals against any civilian found in possession of arms. Here was another example of the folly of inciting civilian insurrection against regular troops. The Allies, through the BBC’s Czech Service, should surely have sought to deter the insurgents, rather than allow them to immolate themselves. The uprising could not conceivably influence events.

On 8 May, the Russians launched an assault on Prague. They entered the city the next day, too late for a substantial number of its citizens. Churchill suffered a new spasm of dismay when he saw that the Czech capital, too, must fall into communist thraldom. He had raised the issue of Prague with Eisenhower a fortnight before. The Supreme Commander responded that the Czech capital had never played any part in his military plans. “I thought it was too late now to bring the political aspect before him,” observed Churchill sadly to the British Chiefs of Staff. In truth, it was never realistic to suppose that the Czechs’ political destiny could have altered. The Czech government in exile, profoundly alienated since Czechoslovakia’s 1938 betrayal at Munich by Britain and France, had already determined that their nation’s future must lie in alliance with the Soviet Union.

But the Czechs might have been spared their immediate misfortunes by a modest military effort. Bradley believed that Patton’s formations could have reached Prague in twenty-four hours, in time to save the Czechs from the tragedy in their capital. Twelfth Army Group’s commander was probably right. Yet it was Marshall who told Eisenhower to ignore British urging for a push on Prague. “Personally,” said the U.S. Chief of Staff, “and aside from all logistic, tactical or strategical implications, I would be loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes.”

On 10 May Schörner surrendered his forces, before himself discarding uniform in favour of Bavarian national costume and escaping westwards in a Storch. He was later captured and imprisoned as a war criminal. Some of his men continued to resist the Russians, even after the formal capitulation. In the fighting around Prague, between 6 and 11 May alone the Russian 1st, 2nd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts reported casualties of 23,383, 14,436 and 11,529 respectively.

Though the struggle persisted in the east for days longer, the formal end of the war between Germany and the Allies came on 8 May 1945. Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, former Chief of Staff of OKW and Hitler’s principal military lackey, was brought to a technical school in Karlhorst, one of the few surviving buildings in Russian-occupied Berlin, just before midnight to confirm the surrenders already made to Montgomery at Lüneburg Heath and to Eisenhower at Rheims. Indeed, the ceremony at Karlhorst was rendered necessary by Soviet rage that Keitel had already performed a submission at SHAEF. On 8 May, twenty-four hours later, Allied commanders led by Zhukov were waiting. Tedder, as Eisenhower’s deputy, demanded: “Have you received the document of unconditional surrender? Are you ready to execute its provisions?” Keitel fixed his monocle into his left eye and held up the document agreed at Rheims the previous day: “Ja. In Ordnung.” In addition to his medals, Hitler’s chief soldier still wore his National Socialist Party golden emblem. His aide, Lieutenant-Colonel Karl Brehm, was in tears. Keitel removed a glove, signed the surrender and said drily to Brehm: “You can make your fortune after the war writing a book about this—‘With Keitel in the Russian camp.’ ” The Germans departed back to their cells. The Russians spread the table for one of their prodigious banquets, which lasted until 0400. “When those men left this room,” said Andrei Vyshinsky, Soviet deputy commissar for foreign affairs, “Germany was torn from the pages of history. We shall never forgive and never forget.” When General Johannes von Blaskowitz surrendered the German forces in Holland to First Canadian Army, an onlooker wrote that the German delegation “looked like men in a dream, dazed, stupefied and unable to realise that their world was utterly finished.” As a result of Soviet refusal to recognize the validity of the earlier Rheims surrender, the Russians celebrated “Victory Europe,” VE-Day, twenty-four hours after the rest of the world.

SHAEF’s Supreme Commander dispatched a wonderfully succinct cable to the Combined Chiefs of Staff: “The mission of this Allied Force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7th 1945//signed//Eisenhower.” The leader of the Western allied forces had staked no claims to greatness as a field commander during the campaign in north-west Europe, but he earned the gratitude of history by the forbearance, wisdom and generosity of spirit with which he had managed the march of the Allied armies to victory.

Winston Churchill, to whom more than any other human being the world owed its escape from Nazi domination, broadcast to the British people:

The German war is therefore at an end . . . After gallant France had been struck down we, from this island and from our united Empire, maintained the struggle single-handed for a whole year until we were joined by the military might of Soviet Russia, and later by the overwhelming powers and resources of the United States. Finally almost the whole world was combined against the evil-doers, who are now prostrate before us. We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing . . .

Flight-Lieutenant Richard Hough was reclining on a heap of kitbags in the belly of a Dakota over the Channel, going home on completing his tour as an RAF Typhoon pilot, when a crewman suddenly pulled open the cockpit door and shouted down the fuselage: “It’s fucking over!” The passengers went mad, hurling kitbags wildly at each other in an orgy of celebration. An RAF “erk,” one of the crew, glanced at the motionless Hough: “Come on, sir, the war’s over. Aren’t you glad?”

“I shut my eyes, swallowed painfully, and lay very still.”

Lieutenant Vasily Kudryashov heard the news in the tiny apartment in Leningrad to which he had returned after losing a foot in his T-34 a few months earlier. “I felt a great sadness not to be with my unit,” he said. “I thought of all the things I might have accomplished that I hadn’t. I could have done so much more.” His father had been killed as a supply officer on the Baltic Front in 1944. He himself had lost four crews in action. His family’s home had been destroyed in the siege of Leningrad. “I still felt a terrible anger towards the Germans,” he said.

“It’s over! Europe is at peace!” shouted a signaller at 0200, after picking up a plain-language transmission at the headquarters near Berlin where Yulia Pozdnyakova was serving. She celebrated by drinking some condensed milk, because her corporal would not allow a seventeen-year-old to drink alcohol. “For me, the whole war had been like some terrible fairytale. Now, we laughed and we cried and we wrote letters about how wonderful it was to be alive.”

“We didn’t celebrate the end of the war,” said Private Ron Gladman of the 1st Hampshires. “It was reward enough to have survived.” On 8 May, “three beautiful Red Army reconnaissance men” appeared at the Latvian farm where ten-year-old Gennady Trofimov, together with his mother, grandmother and sister, had spent the last icy, starving months of the war in slavery. The soldiers asked suspiciously: “Who are you?” Every Russian had been conditioned to treat every citizen of the motherland whom he met in German hands as an actual or potential traitor. The Germans in their area had fought to the very last day. The liberated family walked to the local Soviet headquarters and asked how they might get home. An officer said: “Well, mother—you see this horse and cart? You take it, and drive yourselves back to Novgorod.” And so they did, performing a journey of a thousand miles. They returned to find themselves outcasts, the children tormented as “fritzies” because they had lived among the Germans. Not only was Gennady’s father lost, but two uncles were dead. His aunt and her fifteen-year-old daughter had been hanged by the Germans in Latvia in April 1945. They later found one seven-year-old cousin alive in an orphanage, unaware of her own age or identity. The city of Novgorod was a ruin. Yet these indomitable people survived.

Lieutenant Gennady Ivanov was in Rostock with his tank battalion when the radio operators picked up news of the German surrender. He emptied his captured Mauser into the air. Many crews leaped into the tanks, started up and drove the few hundred yards to the sea to fire a triumphant salvo from their guns. Ivanov’s crew carried 100 per cent alcohol diluted with water in one of their external fuel tanks, and broached this stock at once. His friend Kazak dressed himself in a top hat and dress suit, and careered through the lines on a motorbike. “We got so drunk that if the Germans had any fight left in them, they could have wiped out the whole brigade,” said Ivanov happily. His men noted with contempt the terrified servility of the local civilians, who bowed even to private soldiers. Now, Germans seemed to possess only two words in their vocabulary—“Kamerad!” and “Gut!” Civilians of all ages and both sexes raised their hands in the air reflexively at the very sight of a Russian soldier.

Inge Stolten, a Düsseldorf housewife evacuated to Thuringia, smashed the family radio in despair when she heard the news of Germany’s surrender. She had been an ardent Nazi all her adult life. She saw this moment as the end of all her dreams. She was an educated woman who spoke good English and French. Yet she sincerely believed that the Americans would kill all Germans when they arrived.

At the farm in Saxony where eleven-year-old Jutta Dietze was an evacuee, the child burst into tears when she heard that Germany had surrendered. “We were so indoctrinated that we had never considered any possible ending of the war except victory. I thought: this is the end of Germany. We’ll never be allowed to sing our German folk songs again. We shall never again be allowed to be proud of being Germans.” In a cell in Moscow’s Butykri prison, Major Karl-Günther von Hase heard the fireworks exploding outside. “Hitler kaputt!” said his guards tersely. He sat down on his palliasse, put his head in his hands and sobbed: “I thought of all the comrades I had lost in the war. I felt only an overwhelming sadness about what had happened to Germany.” He spent three years in Russian captivity before he was able to return to formalize the marriage ceremony to his fiancée Renate which had been solemnized by proxy during the siege of Schneidemühl in February 1945.

Eleonore von Joest, who had escaped from East Prussia, exulted: “Now life begins!” she thought. Then she and her family began to ask each other: “Who else is left alive?” Lieutenant Vladimir Gormin, with 3rd Ukrainian Front, saluted his commanding officer and reported solemnly: “Colonel, the war is over.” The colonel, a much older man whose son had died in the war, leaned forward and kissed the lieutenant three times. By evening, their soldiers were tossing officers skywards in blankets, beginning an orgy of drinking that left no man sober for three days.

In Pomerania, Waltraut Ptack and her family were ordered by Russian soldiers, most of them very drunk, to ring the local church bells, and indeed to keep ringing them for many hours: “We did not mind doing this, because for us, too, it was a happy day. But it did not prove a happy day for many of the German women there.”

“I suppose I should feel elated,” Lieutenant Christopher Cross of 2nd Ox & Bucks wrote to his parents, “but I feel tired and disgusted, and I can’t get the smell of Germans out of my mouth and nose, no matter how much I clean my teeth. Disgust, contempt and a little pity mix ill. What now, I wonder?”

Lieutenant Hans-Otto Polluhmer, former signals officer of 10th SS Panzer, heard the news with his comrades in a prison camp in Oklahoma. Some men expressed delirious joy. Others succumbed to despondency: “Everything we had fought for seemed to have been in vain.” Several prisoners killed themselves. Polluhmer had heard the news of Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, as the family listened to the radio on his tenth birthday. His father had said: “My boy, this is the finest birthday present you could have.” Now, Polluhmer learned that his parents had been found dead in their flat near Potsdam. He never knew whether they died at the hands of the Russians or destroyed themselves.

Those who had most cause to rejoice were the liberated peoples of Europe. “Every day seemed a festival day to us,” said Theodore Wempe, a Dutch Resistance worker in Apeldoorn. In a little town outside Amsterdam, twenty-year-old Bob Stompas saw a Jew burst from the hiding place he had occupied for four years, and stand in the midst of the street crying to the sky: “I’m alive! I’m alive!”

IN THE ENTIRE north-west Europe campaign since June 1944, American forces had lost 109,820 men killed and 356,660 wounded. Eisenhower’s British, Canadian and Polish formations reported total casualties of 42,180 men killed, 131,420 wounded. These figures contrasted with the Red Army’s losses on the Eastern Front between October 1944 and May 1945 alone of 319,000 killed, well over half a million dead since D-Day in June 1944. Field-Marshal Keitel observed ingratiatingly to his Soviet captors: “Germany and Russia have suffered the greatest losses in the war, while the Western allies have suffered very little.” Yet the “big picture” masks the extraordinary weight of casualties that fell upon the footsoldiers. At the end of the campaign, the U.S. 2nd Infantry Regiment, with an established strength of 3,000 men, calculated that since D-Day it had sustained 3,745 battle and 3,677 non-battle casualties. Some 714 of its men had been killed, 2,736 wounded, 215 missing, and eighty were known to be prisoners. The U.S. 4th Infantry Division lost a total of 4,834 men killed between June 1944 and May 1945, more than 100 per cent of its rifle strength. Private Len Stokes of the 7th Somersets found that just five men of the 120-strong infantry company with which he had landed in Normandy in June 1944 remained in its ranks on VE-Day. The company had lost 105 men killed or wounded in Normandy; twenty-four in Belgium and Holland; eighty-seven in Germany—about 180 per cent of its strength.

IT IS UNREMARKABLE that Hitler and other senior Nazis chose suicide in the face of defeat. It seems more noteworthy that so many senior officers and ordinary Germans also killed themselves. There is no German cultural tradition of suicide as a response to military failure, of the kind familiar in Japan. No significant number of Germans took their own lives in the face of their nation’s earlier defeat in 1918. In the whole of the First World War, sixty-three German generals died on active service, while 103 died of other causes. In the Second World War, twenty-two generals were executed by Hitler. Another 963 died or were posted missing on active service. An astonishing 110 killed themselves. Model, we know, took the view that “it is unthinkable for a field-marshal to allow himself to be captured.” Rommel felt obliged to accept poison to spare his family from the consequences of Hitler’s belief in his treachery. British troops of 13 Para briefly occupied an elderly German general’s magnificent castle. They confiscated all his personal weapons except a pistol. When the Russians took over, they smashed everything—family paintings, heirlooms, furniture. The general used his remaining weapon to shoot himself. The burgomaster of Leipzig, together with his wife and daughter, the city treasurer, his wife and daughter and four Volkssturm men all killed themselves in various offices of the city hall, with poison or pistols. The burgomaster’s body was found slumped, his glazed and empty eyes staring upwards at a portrait of Hitler on the wall. Major-General Georg Majewiski, commanding the German garrison in Pilsen, surrendered to the U.S. Third Army in a brief ceremony, which he concluded by shooting himself in front of his staff and an American officer of 16th Armored Division.

The most common cause of self-destruction appears to have been despair, an unheroic desire to escape from acknowledgement of Germany’s defeat and its consequences. The young mayor of Barth appeared at the gates of a local PoW camp. He sought the assistance of its American and British prisoners to have Barth declared an open town and spare it from destruction. When they protested their impotence, the mayor returned home and hanged himself alongside his wife. There were many cases such as that of General von Bothmer, who shot himself after being stripped of his rank and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for failing to hold Bonn. Some officials chose to die because they anticipated retribution for their crimes in the name of the Nazis. A significant number of people decided that the passing of Hitler’s Reich signalled the end of life as they knew it, or wished to know it. Thousands of civilians killed themselves in fear of the Red Army, or after suffering early experience of its behaviour.

A schoolteacher told the girls of her class two days before the fall of Berlin: “If a Russian soldier violates you, then remains nothing but death.” Ruth Andreas-Friedrich commented in her diary on 6 May that more than half of this woman’s students had taken their teacher at her word, often by drowning themselves in the nearest body of water. “They kill themselves by the hundreds. The phrase ‘honour lost, everything lost’ had been the words of a distraught father who presses a rope into the hand of his daughter who has been violated twelve times. Obediently she goes and hangs herself at the nearest window transom.” Sexual violation was, perhaps, the most comprehensible reason for self-destruction. No one has ever reliably quantified the suicides in Germany in 1945, but these certainly ran into many tens of thousands. In every city occupied by the victors, corpses hung from the rafters, or lay slumped where poison had done its business with them.

Everywhere, surviving servants of the Third Reich were striving to rid themselves of the trappings of allegiance, which now placed them in mortal peril. An SS general arrived at a Schloss which harboured two Englishwomen married to Germans. “My dears,” he said apologetically, “excuse this dreadful uniform,” and hastened to discard it. The leader of the Belgian SS, Léon Degrelle, demanded a U-boat to escape to Spain or Japan. Degrelle did not get his submarine, but he was successful in escaping vengeance. Dönitz, at Kriegsmarine headquarters in Flensburg, provided SS men with naval uniforms, in accordance with Heinrich Himmler’s last advice to his personal followers, “to dive for cover in the Wehrmacht.” Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, was given an order on 6 May posting him to Naval Headquarters on the island of Sylt, disguised and equipped with the papers of boatswain’s mate Franz Lang. Dönitz’s behaviour during his brief, grotesque masquerade as the last Führer makes a mockery of delusions that he was a mere naval officer who fell into bad company. He was fortunate to escape the gallows at Nuremberg.

In some cases, Germans themselves exposed senior Nazi officials. Martin Mutschmann, gauleiter of Saxony, was brought forth from the house in Annebourg where he had been hiding, after an informer denounced him. The local burgomaster marched the Nazi official through the streets in his underpants, then displayed his captive before the war memorial in the town square, before surrendering him to the Russians. The gauleiter survived a half-hearted attempt to slash his own wrists.

On 7 May, in the ruins of Dresden, the inhabitants heard firing to the north-west. A deputation from the local hospital called upon Emil Bergander. They begged him to destroy the alcohol stocks at his distillery: “If the Russians get at them, they’ll do vile things.” Bergander said: “They’ll do even more vile things if they find we’ve deliberately got rid of it.” He compromised, by selling off stock at the gates at rock-bottom prices. He said with passionate determination to his son: “We and the factory have survived the bombing. Now we are going to survive the Russians.” That night, the two stood on the roof of the building, watching the few remaining houses of Neustadt, on the opposite side of the river, burning fiercely. There was a series of thunderous explosions as the Wehrmacht demolished the bridges. “The Russians will be here tomorrow,” said his father resignedly.

The eighth of May was a beautiful day, which began with a flight of Stormoviks making low passes over the city. The Berganders went to the distillery with Anna, their Russian maid, in readiness to act as interpreter. They heard engines, and expected tanks. Instead, anticlimactically, a single Russian soldier plodded up the road. When he reached them, he levelled his sub-machine-gun. Anna, who was from Smolensk, started explaining to him what the distillery was. “Have a drink,” she said encouragingly. Soon afterwards, another truckload of Russians arriving, firing their weapons exuberantly in the air. They all packed into the distillery office, exchanging toasts. The courtyard became crowded with Italian prisoners and Russian slave labourers who had heard of the arrival of Soviet troops. Soon the Russians were very drunk. The Germans remained uneasily sober. A Russian crashed his truck into a wall after indulging in their hospitality, whence the vehicle had to be rescued by a T-34. Finally, a young lieutenant arrived in a jeep to take formal possession of the distillery. The Berganders’ alcoholic diplomacy had achieved its objective. While there were many Soviet atrocities elsewhere in Dresden, there were none in their corner of the city. For a brief time at least, a strange harmony reigned, uncharacteristic of eastern Germany under the Red Army.

If conditions in western Germany and Austria were nothing like as unhappy as those in the east, the chaos seemed desperate enough to those in its midst. Millions of people were clogging every road: Allied soldiers doing their business; liberated prisoners seeking refuge or vengeance; German soldiers struggling to get to their homes; refugees fleeing the Russians. Daily scenes of horror were enacted in the American and British zones, even if these lacked the formal sanction granted to mayhem by the Red Army. The rampage of east European ex-prisoners dismayed many Allied soldiers. “I don’t think there is a girl left over 14 who hasn’t been raped on some of the farms round here,” a British officer, a Jew born in Germany, wrote to his wife. “One surely has not too much sympathy with the German people; but this sort of punishment—well, as Colonel Bird expressed it, is so untidy.” Ron Graydon and some of his fellow PoWs liberated by the Red Army from a camp at Mühlberg were bewildered to find German women beseeching them to accept their sexual services, simply to save themselves from their Russian occupiers.

The Germans, wrote Alan Moorehead,

expected to be ill-treated. They had an immense sense, not of guilt, but of defeat. If a man’s shop was entered and looted by allied soldiers, he never dreamed of protesting. He expected it. And the reason for this was that he was afraid. Mortally and utterly afraid. One saw few tears. For the Germans the catastrophe had gone far beyond that point. Tears were a useless protest in front of the enormity of the shelling and the bombing. And so one was always surrounded by those set wooden faces. Sometimes our car got stuck in the mud. At a word, the Germans ran to push it out. Once a German came up to my driver and said: “The Russian prisoners of war are looting my shop. Will the English soldiers please come and see they do it in an orderly manner?”

An ashen-faced German officer at one PoW camp told the British that he and his men were getting out ahead of the Russians. He advised the prisoners to join them. The British refused, saying that the Russians were their allies. The German said: “You do not understand how brutal the Russians can be.” But only the small Polish contingent, fearing the Russians above all else, departed with the guards. Next morning, a group of wild horsemen on shaggy ponies appeared, followed by an equally disorderly mob of infantrymen. The French PoWs attacked the carefully hoarded clamps of potatoes. The British felt too stupefied by the speed of what was happening to do anything at all. Russian prisoners in the next compound broke out, slaughtered the cattle at a neighbouring farmhouse and began an orgy of looting and gorging their starved bodies. The British prisoners sent out a few patrols, and were so disturbed by the tales of chaos in the countryside that they decided it would be safer to stay where they were. Under Russian escort, almost as much captives as they had been a few days earlier, they were marched thirteen miles to a nearby town, where they were held for long, dreary, hungry weeks before being grudgingly repatriated.

When Corporal Harry Trinder was freed from his PoW camp by the Americans, he found himself pushed into a truck heading for the rear, carrying fifty German prisoners. This felt very strange, all the more so when the GI driver gave him brief instruction on the workings of the .30 calibre machine-gun mounted on the roof. He explained that Trinder must act as guard. “After about an hour, we had to stop because of an obstruction on the road. A large number of the Germans on the truck jumped down and started racing across the fields. I don’t know what I was thinking of, but I swung the cannon round and let off a continuous burst of fire until I was pulled off the gun by the Germans still on the truck. Then an American officer arrived . . . and said that I had killed or injured 15 Germans, and I was put in an escorting jeep under arrest. I explained my own history, and was released.” By contrast, Private Bill Bampton and some other liberated British prisoners were offered weapons “to take a bit of revenge if we felt like it, but we were too dazed and happy to think of that.”

Many Poles harboured implacable grudges against the Germans. Those who found themselves in Germany when peace came, as prisoners or forced labourers, possessed exceptional opportunities to avenge themselves. At Piotr Tareczynski’s PoW camp, “we were unofficially told that anyone who had any personal grievance to settle with any German could do so within a fortnight of the announcement, and would be immune from prosecution, regardless of what form his revenge took. Personally, I had no personal accounts to settle with anyone, and just wanted to be left alone.” The wife of a large estate-owner implored a British sergeant to stop the looting of cherished family possessions. The NCO replied that he could do nothing, because he was not allowed to interfere with the Poles.

Soon after Texan GI Bud Lindsey was liberated from PoW camp, he received a touching letter from an Indian soldier who had been his friend behind the wire. “The only thing which I will miss when I am away from here will be ‘my sweet American,’ ” wrote Armin Ghafur Dist, who hailed from Campbellpore in the Punjab. “When I reach my own home I will tell The Old Girl (my mother) that the American tanks brought the happiest day of my life on 29 April. Freedom! Freedom! After hard long starving nights . . . good on you America. The Gerry is kaputt now!” Six-year-old Klaus Fischer’s chief impression of American occupation was that everything seemed scented—the fresh coffee, even the chewing gum: “We had not smelt sensation for years.”

GOING HOME

SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD Corporal Helmut Fromm’s odyssey westwards from Ninth Army’s Berlin encirclement continued on foot and by bicycle through the early days of May. Sometimes he travelled alone, sometimes with one of the innumerable small groups of desperate men thronging the countryside. He was among a cluster of fugitives who eventually reached the Elbe at Magdeburg to find the bridge blown and the Americans on the far side. He rode a bicycle upstream to a dam, searching for a crossing. A German military police party stopped him and demanded his medical discharge certificate. He was fortunate enough to be able to talk his way through. There was a great crowd of men at the Elbe bank. Fromm threw his bike and machine-pistol into the water. A gunner officer rowed alone in a small boat to the far bank and smartly saluted the American officer on the far side. After a few moments’ conversation, the officer shouted across: “Men! They’ll let us come over if we don’t give the Hitler salute!” Somebody said: “If the Amis want us to stick our fingers up our arses, we’ll do it.” On the far bank, Fromm met his first gum-chewing American. “What will happen to us?” he asked. “You’ll be going home,” said this amiable enemy. “Now quick march, friends!” They were placed in a cage guarded by black Americans, who jovially referred to the Germans as “white negroes.” The only indignity they suffered was to be pelted with stones by newly liberated Allied prisoners. Fromm made the last entry of the war in his diary: “Lord, your mercy is endless.”

The family of sixteen-year-old Hans Moser, a former Luftwaffe flak gunner, possessed the luxury of a small country home in the hills a few miles above Neumarkt in Bavaria. Late in April, they had taken refuge there, to await the end. A group of SS defended the town ferociously against the advancing Americans. Neumarkt changed hands several times, and paid the price. From the hills, the Mosers could see flames rising from the ruins. At last, the shooting stopped. Moser’s uncle Hans, the burgomaster, put on a top hat and tailcoat and went out formally to receive the Americans. The first soldiers pushed him brusquely aside. The teenage Hans had outgrown his civilian clothes. His Luftwaffe uniform was the only outfit he possessed. On the strength of it, he was thrown into a barn under guard for some days, along with a host of other uniformed stragglers and local officials. The boy proudly rejected the offer of candy from a GI: “They were the enemy. I didn’t see this as a liberation. I hated our helplessness—the fact that now these Americans could do absolutely anything they liked with us.” His mother, a committed Nazi, was deeply distressed by Germany’s defeat, but when she heard of Hitler’s death, like tens of millions of former believers, she was past caring about his fate. She asked simply: “What happens to our family now?” His father, a devout Catholic who had been badly wounded in the First World War, was merely grateful that it was over.

Captain Leopold Goesse watched his thousand-strong Cossack unit of the Wehrmacht parade near the Austrian border and proudly advance their blue-and-black Cossack standard. They swore a new oath of allegiance, in place of that which had died with Hitler, to their flag. Goesse, a young Austrian aristocrat, had never felt entirely comfortable with the Cossacks. Despite some historians’ idealization of those who were ruthlessly returned to Stalin, the murderous record of Cossacks who served the Wehrmacht in northern Italy and Yugoslavia deserves more attention than it has received. Goesse was troubled by the incidence of rape and looting in his own unit: “There were severe disciplinary problems . . . I didn’t feel like a Cossack, as some German officers did.” The knowledge of the Cossacks’ assured fate if they remained in Yugoslavia caused them to march hastily across the Austrian border in the first days of May, among a host of retreating German soldiers abandoning their weapons. They forded the river into Carinthia to escape the attentions of Bulgarian troops guarding the bridges. The Cossacks’ German officers sought out the nearest British unit and offered their surrender.

A British officer urged them to throw down their weapons and surrender to the Bulgarians—“They are our allies.” Goesse said, in the excellent English he had learned among British friends before the war—his father had attended an English public school—“I’m sorry, sir, but we know the Bulgarians better than you do.” The British officer went to talk to the Bulgarians. He returned to say: “You’re right. They’re not gentlemen. They want to shoot you all.” The Cossacks established themselves amid a ring of British tanks and military police. In the days that followed, apprehension grew among the Germans as well as the Cossacks about their likely fate. Goesse was able to exploit his position as an English-speaking liaison officer to effect an escape to his family schloss, a few hours away. He hid in its attic for some weeks, until he adopted a new role as sporting guide for British officers of the army of occupation, clad in British battledress and the protective social armour common to the European upper classes. His aide even brought home his horse Bitomka, on which his wife later learned to ride. The Goesses were able to save a few Cossacks, who escaped to their schloss and were helped to disappear, having been provided with civilian clothes: “We burned their uniforms and those beautiful Cossack hats.” The remainder of those in British hands were handed over to the Russians, and shot. Their German officers remained in Soviet captivity for a decade.

“What extraordinary people the Germans are,” mused Bill Deedes. The British officer found himself being addressed by a German colonel in a PoW cage almost as if he was a subordinate. “It seemed that the concept of defeat was right outside his reckoning.” Even now, many Germans seemed to regret only that they had lost the war. The last order of the day on 6 May from the general commanding 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division declared defiantly: “Every man of the division should look to the future with pride. If our soldiers do as much towards building a new Germany as they have done towards fighting for the old one, our nation will rise again.”

Field-Marshal Schörner, who had driven his men to resist fiercely to the end, said wistfully in captivity: “It might have been different if we had only had to deal with Britain . . .” He added, not without satisfaction: “Britain has lost its leading role in Europe. Russia now dominates Germany. Soon, she will be able to take the next step—to the Channel.” Another German officer in Soviet captivity spoke with scorn of Russian demands for reparations: “Russians tend to forget that Germany has also suffered huge damage, mostly from the British and Americans. We never took plant or material from Russia. This is simply an attempt by Russia to enrich herself at our expense.” A German general said: “Think how many roads and railways we built in the territory we occupied in Russia.” A Wehrmacht doctor suggested that Russians should reflect that “some of the destruction was the consequence of their own actions . . . the figures are meaningless—we can never pay anyway. Poor Russians! They talk as if we were living in castles in their country. Russians don’t even know what a castle looks like!” A lieutenant said: “The only damage I ever did to Russia was to slaughter a couple of pigs. I wish I had killed the whole herd!” Some captives made pitiful efforts to divide the Allies. Göring, interviewed by a Russian officer in his American prison, “whispered to his interpreter that he had something important to say, when no British or Americans were present.” They never discovered what this was.

Von Rundstedt, being driven as a captive through the ruins of Kassel, angrily reproached his escorting officer: was not he, as an American, shocked by the devastation caused by Allied bombing? Several times during their journey, reported von Rundstedt’s guardian, the rugged old veteran “broke down in tears of self-pity and rage” about the humiliations of defeat and imprisonment. The Russians reported that those members of the German high command who fell into their hands behaved in a “most defiant” manner:

They professed to be outraged that they were being isolated from the Americans and British. F-M Keitel and other generals under interrogation answered questions only briefly . . . Negotiations between General Zhukov and the Allies went well, except for the 2–3 hours delay in signing the capitulation, which was attributable to the negligence of a Foreign Ministry official, Ambassador Svirnov, who had omitted four lines from the text of the document. This was noticed by the Allies, who refused to sign the draft . . . During dinner, Keitel said that the present German government had learned its lesson from this war, and hoped that in future the German nation would display the same unity as the Soviet Union had done. He had no doubt that Germany would assume its place in the world again, and would enjoy normal relations with Russia.

General Erich von Straube, after signing the surrender of his forces in Holland to First Canadian Army, was being escorted back to the German lines by Brigadier James Roberts. After driving for some twenty minutes in silence, von Straube’s aide tapped Roberts on the shoulder and said that his commander wished to know what the brigadier had done before the war: “Were you a professional soldier?” Roberts was momentarily bemused by the question. He had indeed been a soldier for so long that his other life seemed impossibly remote. Then he realized that the German was seeking some crumb of solace for his defeat. He answered von Straube: “No, I wasn’t a regular soldier. Very few Canadians were. In civilian life I made ice cream.”

The victors embarked upon the colossal task of sorting millions of people displaced from their homes and their lives, which would continue for a decade to come. Every Allied soldier who served in Germany was awed by the tide of humanity surging among the armies now at rest. “There were thousands of men,” wrote Carl Basham, a GI from Ohio, stationed at Marburg rail station,

clinging precariously to the boxcars of the slow-moving trains, a bag of personal effects in their spare hands. Where were they going? Where were their families? Where was their home? Most were quiet, grim, sullen, in shock. Many had been wounded in some manner, and had staggered from hospital beds in fear of the Russians. Despite their civilian clothes, it was plain that most were former soldiers, in fear for their lives. Others appeared to have been allied or Axis civilians forced into service with the German army. Others again were merely German civilians, moving westwards as fast as possible.

The Soviets supervised these vast migrations of population in predictably pitiless fashion. An NKVD report described thousands of Germans leaving Czechoslovakia every day after the war’s end. German nationals were evicted from their houses at fifteen minutes’ notice, permitted to take with them only five marks and none of their household possessions, in pursuit of the policy agreed between the Allies, of relocating minorities to their “natural national homes.” The commanding officer of the Red Army’s 28th Czech Rifle Regiment evicted every ethnic German in his area on his own initiative. “I hate them all,” he said laconically. The NKVD complained that such unilateral action was compounding the administrative problems of occupation: “As a result, we have tens of thousands of starving and begging Germans on the move. Typhoid and other infectious diseases are rife. There are many cases of suicide.” One local commandant registered seventy-one suicides in a single day. Colonel-General Hesleni, commanding the Third Hungarian Army, which fought against the Russians to the end, slashed his wrists with a fragment of glass from the window pane of his cell, leaving a terse note: “I have killed myself because of my health. With a stomach like mine, I could never survive imprisonment.”

Throughout their advance across Germany, the Americans and British were relieved to encounter negligible resistance from “werewolf” units, which had been so prominent a feature of Nazi propaganda since the winter of 1944. Beyond the assassination of the Allied-appointed burgomaster of Aachen, there was no significant hostile activity behind the Western Front. In the east, however, it was another story. For weeks after the German surrender, the NKVD continued to report incidents of sniping at Red soldiers, mostly by boys of sixteen and seventeen. This plainly reflected their greater hatred of the Russians, however futile.

Some SS fanatics believed, probably rightly, that only death awaited them in the hands of the Red Army. They fought on for weeks after VE-Day. Men of Gennady Klimenko’s division were attacked by SS troops while driving through a Hungarian forest as late as 20 May. “Our men had dropped their guard,” said Klimenko. “Quite a lot of people were killed like that, after it was all supposed to be over.”

And then there were the camps. Polish officer Piotr Tareczynski finished the war with his PoW contingent alongside concentration-camp prisoners at Sandbostel.

At first they mobbed us, hoping for food. Finding that we had none, they drifted away. Most sat in the sun and seemed to doze. Several toppled to one side, and were obviously dead. We had to remove several hundred of their corpses. We were surprised, not shocked. One’s mind only registered whatever we saw without much emotion or even horror. By that time we had heard of concentration camps, and had some vague idea they were extermination centres. On seeing one in real life, one’s reaction was: “So—this is what it looks like.”

Tareczynski spoke with the detachment of a man whose sensibilities had been dulled by six years of his own sufferings. The soldiers of liberating armies were shocked beyond reason by the Nazis’ vast monuments to human savagery and tragedy, which scarred Germany from end to end.

When Zinaida Mikhailova saw the first Soviet soldiers walk into her compound at Ravensbrück, she and some of the other Russian women burst into tears and tried to embrace them. The Red Army men pushed away the ragged skeletons in revulsion. Zinaida had been in the camp for three years. Some of her fellow inmates were catatonic. “Quite a few simply could not understand the meaning of liberation at all,” she said. “Our minds were not very well.” Twenty-three thousand women survived. At Ravensbrück alone, some 115,000 prisoners had died during the previous two years, including Anne Frank and the British agent Violette Szabo.

When Veta Kogakevich was liberated by the Red Army from her camp in Poland, she believed herself to be about seven years old. She was sent to an orphanage in Novgorod, where she was presented with a birthday, arbitrarily selected as 28 October. It was twenty years before she was able to discover any clues about her own background, since all documentation about her origins in Belorussia had been destroyed. She was the youngest survivor of her camp.

The U.S. 82nd Airborne Division liberated Jerzy Herszburg’s concentration camp at Wöbbelin on 2 May. “We felt too exhausted to celebrate in any jubilant way,” he observed, but one of his friends fulfilled an old, old promise, to kiss the feet of the first Allied soldier he saw. Afterwards, said Herszburg, as they strove to come to terms with the miracle of their own survival and the nightmare they had experienced, “I believed that we were fortunate that there were no psychologists or social workers with us, to help sort out our problems.”

Lieutenant Dorothy Beavers was one of a U.S. Army medical team dispatched to Ebensee. “Nothing had prepared us for the camps,” she said. To their amazement, many of the inmates spoke English. These were highly educated Hungarian Jewish girls, reduced by lice and starvation to the last waystation before death. When a photographer from Life magazine appeared, one of them ran away into a field. “Look at me,” she sobbed to Dorothy. “I’m twenty years old, and no man will ever want me now.” It was Edith Gabor. Many of her fellow prisoners were suffering from tuberculosis, and all had ulcers. As the nurses gently bathed them and treated their hurts, Dorothy Beavers was astonished to hear them describing pre-war trips to London, visits to the British Museum. “We discussed Shakespeare, Dante, Beethoven—and the food we’d prepare for the Jewish holidays.” The nurse spent six weeks at Ebensee, administering plasma to men and women at the last extremities of life, carefully weaning them on to a liquid diet. “It was the greatest shock of my life, to see hay ladders jammed with bodies. It got to us all. After two weeks, we were just sitting around staring into space.” Medical teams began to arrive at the camp, to take away their own nationals. An Italian doctor turned up one day and asked: “Any Italians here?” “Yeah, one guy,” came back the answer, “but he’s dying.” “If he is going to die,” said the doctor passionately, “he is going to die with us.”

Edith Gabor was photographed at Ebensee by Life. She met Clark Gable, though she was made to promise that she would not say who he was, for fear of causing a riot among the other prisoners. Many months later, she went home to Budapest. She found her family’s apartment in the hands of hostile strangers who demanded, “Who are you?,” then closed the door on her for ever. The Gabors had lost everything, including the lives of most of the family. By a miracle, Edith discovered her eight-year-old brother Georg living as a scavenger on the streets nearby. She learned that their mother had been shot soon after Edith was deported to Ravensbrück.

As Staff-Sergeant Henry Kissinger, serving with the U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps, processed concentration-camp prisoners, he was taken aback to find a Pole spitting in his face: “Why do you care for the Jews first?” the man demanded savagely. When the Germans ran the camp, this man said, the place of Jews—at the bottom of a hierarchy in which professional criminals commanded the summit—had been properly recognized.

Most Germans, of course, declared passionately that they had known nothing of the existence of the camps. Yet even when the revelation was forced upon them, Allied soldiers noted the local civilians’ apparent indifference. A British supervising officer expressed disgust that German civilians conscripted to bury the dead “displayed no emotion at all—the denial, the absence of any sense of collective responsibility, shocked us all.” This young man, Cliff Pettit, wrote home to his parents about the German burial parties for their victims: “They do it with as little concern as if they were sweeping up their own homes and burying old tins.”

Nikolai Maslennikov was unable to grasp the fact of liberation when Soviet tanks rolled into Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 19 April. “For the last six weeks, I was scarcely able to walk, or even to move. In the final days, I simply felt a huge indifference. I was waiting to die. Nothing seemed to matter any more.” He spent six months in hospital before returning to Leningrad, where he found that his parents were dead, as was his girlfriend Lena.

“Sometimes we despaired for these men,” wrote Brenda McBryde, one of the nurses who cared for liberated prisoners. “What future was there for them? No one knew where their families were, and they themselves seemed to have forgotten that they ever had wives or children. They only cared for the food trolley. Every other instinct or emotion had been suppressed except the will to survive.”

Among the Germans, children found it as hard as adults to adjust to their new circumstances. One night the farmer with whom Jutta Dietze and her family lodged as evacuees invited some American soldiers to share their supper. A local boy came in, to collect the children for labour duty. “Heil Hitler!” he said mechanically as he came through the door. The Americans laughed indulgently. Yet a few weeks later the Americans departed, and the Russians came. Some Mongolian soldiers strode into the kitchen and observed a photograph of Jutta’s father in Wehrmacht uniform, which they had been careless enough to keep on the dresser. “Nazi! Nazi!” the Russians shouted angrily at the frightened children. The family sought to mollify the occupiers by assuring them that their father was nobody important. In justice to their new masters, though the Germans found the Russians very dirty, they behaved much less badly than everyone had feared. Brutality was not universal, once the heat of battle had cooled.

At last, soldiers’ minds began to turn from fighting to the fulfilment of desires which had been in abeyance. Twenty-two-year-old Private Harold Lindstrom from Alexandria, Minnesota, decided to deal with a matter that had played on his mind for many months. He was a virgin. Deeply fearful of disease, he walked to a park, where he met a girl walking a dachshund: “She was a slim brunette, kind of pretty and neatly dressed, wearing a plain dress and knee-high white stockings.” He said hello, and she gave him a big smile. He asked nervously: “Zig zig?” She took his hand, led him confidently into a park shelter, and unzipped his trousers. The process was quickly over. He pulled out an almost full packet of Lucky Strikes and was on the point of handing them over when he changed his mind. “Somehow, I just couldn’t be too nice to her as she was a German, our enemy.” He gave her only the three cigarettes which he had been told was the correct tariff. She said “Zank you” and disappeared.

Private Henry Williams, a New Yorker with the 273rd Field Artillery, learned that near his billet was living a local 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 in his tank on the Moselle, leaving too few remains even to bury. Yet now one son, at least, had come home.

When Ursula Salzer escaped from Pillau on a hospital ship in March 1945, her fifty-seven-year-old father remained to serve with his Volkssturm unit. He shrugged indifferently: “It can’t be that bad. The Russians are only human beings.” When he returned from Soviet captivity three years later, Herr Salzer was unrecognizable. His teeth had been smashed with a rifle butt when he was found scavenging in the camp rubbish dump. He was suffering acute malnutrition. He said simply to his daughter: “Thank God you weren’t there. You would never have survived.”

There has been bitter criticism of the manner in which the Allies permitted many Nazis to escape justice in 1945. It is undoubtedly true that all manner of evil men were allowed to disappear into the undergrowth of post-war Europe, South America or even the United States, by neglect or wilful indulgence. But consider the circumstances: by the war’s end, most of those who had taken part were suffering from a profound moral, as well as physical and mental, exhaustion. Those who had fought in the American and British armies suffered no doubts about the virtue of their cause, yet most felt compromised by their experiences. That is the fate of all thoughtful men who take part in all wars. “Is there any place that is free from evil?” the novelist Evelyn Waugh reflected, expressing a British officer’s view of Europe in 1945. “It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war . . . Even good men thought that their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardship in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege.”

Waugh’s was an elitist vision, shared by only the most thoughtful Allied soldiers. Most American and British soldiers had simply seen a job to be done, which they were profoundly grateful now to have completed. Yet, in the course of the war, many had also come to share the novelist’s disbelief in moral absolutes. Few, if any, of Eisenhower’s soldiers were responsible for acts of wickedness remotely comparable to those of Hitler’s armies. But most had seen prisoners casually killed, towns levelled, civilians reduced to destitution in a manner which made them instinctively reluctant to pass judgement upon others, even if these wore German uniforms. The Western allies reserved their anger, and commitment to retribution, for those Germans who had been concerned in the most monstrous evils of all, the concentration-camp system and the destruction of the Jews.

Only the Russians, driven by personal suffering and Stalin’s insatiable appetite for vengeance against enemies real and imagined, sustained policies of absolute ruthlessness in all the regions of Europe which they occupied. Ironically, the NKVD showed its willingness selectively to indulge former Nazis if these were willing to assist in the subjection of their country to its new masters. Beria’s men reserved the most savage rewards for their own countrymen who had allowed themselves to be captured by the Germans, irrespective of the degree of culpability involved. Heroes who had been shot down in flames in 1944 were subjected to the same humiliations and lasting disgrace as those who had surrendered in 1941 because they lacked rifles with which to defend the motherland.

Around 1.68 million Russian prisoners were returned to the Soviet Union in 1945, out of the 4,059,000 captured by the Germans. Of these, 930,287 were liberated from camps, while the remaining 740,000 were found elsewhere, acting as slave labourers. These totals do not include men captured while serving in Hitler’s forces, many of whom were shot out of hand. By 1953, some 5,457,856 Soviet citizens had been returned to their grateful motherland—this figure includes great numbers of people who had fled west, rather than be captured in arms by the Germans. Russian historians estimate that 20 per cent of all those repatriated were either executed or given a maximum twenty-five-year sentence in the Gulag. Some three million other former prisoners served shorter sentences. An NKVD report of 26 May detailed 40,000 “Vlassov men” returned by the British, including 9,000 family members and 1,000 German personnel. Twenty-nine thousand were dispatched to work in coal mines at Prokopiezki and Kenerova, the remainder to Camp 535 for “dangerous prisoners.” None is thought to have survived.

Some of the Western sympathy extended to repatriated Russians who fought in Wehrmacht uniform seems misplaced. Appalling atrocities were carried out by Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks and men from the Baltic states under German command in northern Italy, Yugoslavia, Poland, not to mention the Soviet Union. Thousands of Ukrainians and citizens of the Baltic states who served as concentration-camp guards, and were eventually returned to Stalin, must rank low on the roster of those deserving of pity. This should be reserved for millions of other Russians, hapless captives of the Germans, often victims of the concentration camps, on their return to Soviet jurisdiction. They were subjected to the same repatriation procedures as Russians who had actively served the Nazis. Only some 20 per cent were allowed to return home. All Stalin’s citizens who survived captivity were marked for the rest of their lives as suspect persons—“socially dangerous.” Few were permitted to rise or prosper in the post-war Soviet Union.

Genrikh Naumovich survived Mauthausen concentration camp after refusing to join the Vlassov Army fighting with the Germans. He was liberated by the Americans on 5 May, his twenty-second birthday, one of 68,268 inmates who lived. Another 195,000 prisoners had died there. Naumovich spent some weeks at the end of the war driving for a Red Army division’s medical team. Remarkably, he harboured no animosity towards the German people. “The SS and Gestapo were animals. But ordinary German soldiers suffered as much as we did.” When at last Naumovich returned home, his mother fainted. She had always waited for him, but knew nothing of his fate. He was not held in an NKVD screening camp when he returned, but his papers bore the indelible mark of an ex-prisoner. He could find no work. Finally, in despair, he went to the local police chief and demanded to know how he might support himself. The man replied with a sneer: “As a prisoner of the facists, you’re lucky to be allowed to live in this city at all. You can clean shoes on the Nevsky Prospect!” Naumovich finally found work as a mechanic. “I hated Stalin. The very word made me feel sick. The Germans used to say to us: ‘We can do exactly what we like with you, because Stalin has washed his hands of you!’ Now, I believed them. All the prisoners who came home were unjustly treated. Was it their fault that in 1941 they were asked to fight without rifles? Was it their fault that the artillery ran out of shells?”

Eighteen-year-old Viktor Mamontov returned from Belsen to find that among his entire extended family only his mother, a seamstress, survived. He himself was “detained” in Belorussia for many months, constantly interrogated by the NKVD. When finally released in February 1946, he was refused a passport and could get work only on a construction site. His health never fully recovered. Many people who had endured his experience, he said, “started to hate not only the Germans, but each other. Many ex-prisoners drank themselves to death. After the war, it was very hard to live.”

Liberated in Germany by the Americans, seven-year-old Valya Brekeleva and her family of slave labourers went home to Novgorod as non-persons. “Most of the people from our village who went to Latvia survived. But most of those who were sent to Germany had died. For those of us who remained, the suspicion was always there.” Most of her family were killed by one side or the other in the course of the war. Her mother died in 1947, worn out by the struggle to keep her daughters alive. She was thirty-six. Her father completed his sentence for “political crimes” and came home from the Urals in 1951, an old man. Even after Valya had completed university and applied for work at a Kazan shipbuilders in the 1960s, when the manager saw that her papers showed her to be an ex-Nazi prisoner he said grimly: “Before we consider anything else, we have got to establish whether you have done damage to the state.”

Georgi Semenyak, who survived the ordeal on the concentration-camp barges in the Baltic, finally returned home on 5 December 1945. His parents had heard no word of him since 1941. He would have relished an opportunity to serve some time guarding German prisoners, but was discharged as unfit for further military duty. He was dismayed to learn that, as an ex-prisoner of the fascists, he was ineligible to go to university. After experiencing great difficulties, he found work as an electrician, but was discharged when his employers discovered that he was an ex-PoW. For the next forty-five years, he performed menial jobs in an industrial plant, all that were available to him, as a “person of the second sort.”

Captain Vasily Legun, a Soviet bomber pilot held prisoner by the Germans for two years, woke one morning at the work camp in Czechoslovakia where he spent his last weeks as a prisoner and found the German guards gone. He and others broke into the camp armoury, seized weapons and took over the local town, some twelve miles from Prague. When they met the Red Army, they were enlisted to round up German stragglers, which involved them in some firefights which continued until 17 May. Then he and the other prisoners were flown to join some 30,000 other former PoWs at an NKVD screening camp in the Ukraine. They endured weeks of brutal interrogation about their captivity, sometimes by day and sometimes by night, once stripped naked. “It was worse than the German camps, because we had no idea what would happen to us. We were now prisoners of the country we had fought to defend. We were all treated as traitors. The experience killed our spirit.” NKVD agents visited Legun’s apartment in Moscow. His wife had been told that he was dead, and now all his personal property and papers were removed. After four months, he was released from captivity, but his papers too contained the fatal words about his former PoW status. For many years he was unable to gain proper employment. He became a gold prospector, eking out a living in the remote northern wastelands of Russia. His Party membership was not restored until 1957.

SIXTY YEARS ONWARDS, any civilized person must react with horror to the human consequences of the catastrophe that befell the German people in the last months of the war. The battle for the Third Reich cost the lives of something like 400,000 Germans killed in ground fighting and by aerial bombardment in 1945 alone, together with anything up to two million who died in the flight from the east. Eight million became homeless refugees. Yet it is hard to conceive any less dreadful conclusion to the nightmare Hitler and his nation had precipitated. When the German people failed to depose their leader, when they made the choice, conscious or otherwise, to fight to the end, they condemned Germany to the fate which it suffered in the closing months of the Second World War. Japan’s surrender in August 1945, before the Allies were obliged to invade its mainland, undoubtedly spared it from death and destruction on a scale to match that which took place in Germany. It is relevant to observe that Japanese casualties from the dropping of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which precipitated that surrender, were vastly smaller than those suffered by the Germans in the struggle to defend their country, and in the flight from the invaders.

In 1918, the German government had surrendered while its armies were still fighting exclusively upon foreign soil. Ordinary Germans suffered severely from famine, and two million of the Kaiser’s soldiers had died upon the battlefield. But the physical fabric of their country remained almost untouched. The foundations of National Socialism were built upon the myth that the German Army had never been defeated, that the German people were the victims of the notorious “stab in the back” by politicians and leftist revolutionaries. To this day, many Germans decline to accept any responsibility for the horrors the First World War brought upon Europe, and blame subsequent events upon the “great injustice” done to them by the 1919 Versailles Treaty.

In 1945, by contrast, every man, woman and child in Germany was brought face-to-face with the price of Hitler, the consequences of the dreadful lunge for greatness upon which he had led his people, and which so many supported until its failure was manifest. A few noble souls, of the stamp of Adam von Trott, recognized Hitler from the outset as an absolute evil. Yet most of the July 1944 bomb plotters turned against the Nazis only when it became plain that they were leading Germany to defeat. The German officer corps bore almost as great a responsibility for Germany’s fate as their Führer. The scope of Hitler’s ambitions for world domination was matched in May 1945 by the depth of Germany’s abasement. In Russian eyes, justice was thus done. For the Western allies, who had suffered much less at the hands of the Nazis, and for whom humanity ranked higher in the scale of virtues, the spectacle of Germany’s devastation gave rise to more complex emotions. In the midst of the revelations about the concentration camps, the evidence accumulating from every corner of occupied Europe about the bestiality of the Nazi record, it seemed possible to find pity for some Germans as individuals, but very little for their society as an entity.

The nation’s fate prompted a revulsion among its people against Germany’s historic militarism which persists to this day. “I grew up in a world in which the only thing that all of us cared about was that there should be no more war,” said Anita Barsch, who as a child endured the flight from East Prussia. “I wasn’t angry—just sad. It was Germans, after all, who refused to allow us to flee in time to save ourselves.” It is possible to be appalled by the behaviour of the Soviet Union in eastern Europe, and by the excesses of the Anglo-American air bombardment, without seeing reason to transfer blame for these horrors from Hitler and those who made his European rampage possible.

Insofar as any conflict in history has been waged between the forces of virtue and those of evil, it was the Second World War. Dwight Eisenhower could justly entitle his memoirs Crusade in Europe. Yet Soviet involvement in the Grand Alliance posed greater moral issues than the Western allies found it convenient to recognize at the time, and than some historians have acknowledged since. Degrees of evil are never easily measured, yet Stalin seems at least as great a monster of the twentieth century as Hitler. The Soviet dictator’s crimes have incurred less popular censure only because most people in the West know less about them, and have never seen films and photographs of Soviet mass murders, of the kind hideously familiar in the case of Nazi crimes. Allied victory in 1945 was deeply compromised by Anglo-American dependence upon one tyranny to encompass the destruction of another. This was not merely a political and moral issue, but a military one also. The democracies found it convenient, perhaps essential, to allow Stalin’s citizens to bear a scale of human sacrifice which was necessary to destroy the Nazi armies, but which their own nations’ sensibilities rendered them unwilling to accept. Marshall’s note to Stimson in May 1944, cited above, almost explicitly acknowledges as much.

The Western allies indulged the Soviet Union from 1941 onwards because they perceived its indispensability. Washington’s deference to Stalin in the last months of the war reflected a delusion, understandable at the time, that Soviet military assistance would be needed in the Far East after Germany was defeated, to encompass the swift defeat of Japan. Even given the demands of statesmanship, it is chilling to read the words of Truman’s 1945 testament to Stalin, in the hour of victory. Stalin, said the new president of the world’s greatest democracy, “had demonstrated the ability of a peace-loving people, with the highest degree of courage, to destroy the evil forces of barbarism.” Churchill was at least as fulsome. In the bitter words of a modern Russian historian, General Dmitry Volkogonov, Stalin had “translated the nation’s tragedy into his personal triumph.”

Even after the Second World War ended and the Cold War began, many thoughtful British and Americans restrained their strictures upon Soviet wartime behaviour because they recognized that Russian sacrifices had made it possible to defeat Hitler at relatively small cost in American and British lives. To this day, some people are surprised to be reminded that the U.S. and British armed forces each suffered fewer than 300,000 fatal casualties as a direct result of enemy action, about the same as the forces of Yugoslavia, and approximately half America’s 600,000 battle deaths in its Civil War. For every British and American citizen who died, more than thirty of Stalin’s people—many of them from his subject republics—perished.

No American or British commander in north-west Europe revealed the highest gifts of generalship, because a combination of cautious grand strategy and the limitations of Allied troops denied the few plausible candidates for greatness scope to demonstrate it. Had Patton, for instance, been leading Waffen SS formations, he possessed the energy and grasp of war to have performed spectacular feats. As it was, constrained by the nature of American citizen soldiers, he showed flashes of inspiration, but his army experienced as much hard plodding as any on the Western Front. Montgomery was a meticulous planner of operations, Market Garden excepted, but his soldiers rarely displayed the tactical energy to deliver grand coups. They were deeply grateful that their commander did not demand from them the sacrifices required by Soviet battlefield triumphs. This helps to explain the lasting affection in which Monty is held by those whom he led. Conversely, had von Manstein or Zhukov commanded troops burdened by the decencies of the democracies, these formidable commanders might have emerged from the war as apparently pedestrian fellows. Over the course of history, many ruthless generals have been able to forge armies after their own image, in the manner of Genghiz Khan. But by the mid-twentieth century civilized societies imposed upon their military leaders parameters of humanity and respect for life. Thus it was that the least civilized combatants of the Second World War performed the most notable military feats achieved by flesh and blood. It was left to the Western allies to amaze the world by the deeds that could be accomplished through the brilliant application of technology and industrial might.

I remarked in Overlord that no military plan is in isolation good or bad. It must be judged according to the capabilities of those available to carry it out. Eisenhower’s armies possessed insufficient mass and combat power to defeat Germany in the autumn of 1944 until months more bombing, shelling and above all Soviet assault had ground down Hitler’s forces to the point of collapse. If Allied soldiers had possessed the energy, commitment and will for sacrifice of either the German or Russian armies, they might have achieved a decisive breakthrough. But American and British soldiers were not panzergrenadiers. Socially and morally, we should be profoundly grateful that it was so. If this view is accepted, then it becomes no more relevant to suggest that the Allies could have won the war in 1944 than to debate how history might have turned out if the ancient Britons had learned to fight like Roman legionaries. To have achieved a swift victory, Eisenhower’s soldiers would have needed to be different people. If American and British soldiers of 1944–45 had matched the military prowess and become imbued with the warrior ethos of Hitler’s armies, it is unlikely that we should today hold the veterans of the Second World War in the just regard that we do. They fought as bravely and as well as any democracy could ask, if the values of civilization were to be retained in their ranks.

Yet the consequence of the Western allies’ measured approach to fighting their war against Germany, coupled with the delusion of many German soldiers that “duty” and “honour” required them to fight to the last, was that eastern Europe became Soviet booty, exchanging the tyranny of Hitler for that of Stalin in 1945. America’s Chiefs of Staff recognized, as Churchill was unwilling to do, that the Soviets could be denied their new empire only by fighting a war with them, which was unthinkable militarily as well as politically. “After the defeat of Japan,” they recorded, “the United States and the Soviet Union will be the only military powers of the first magnitude . . . While the United States can project its military power into many areas overseas, it is nevertheless true that the relative strength and geographic positions of these two powers preclude the military defeat of one . . . by the other, even if that power were allied with the British Empire.”

At one of the first big fashionable weddings in London after peace came, the MP and society diarist “Chips” Channon stood gazing complacently upon the jewelled throng. He observed to Emerald Cunard: “This is what we have been fighting for.” With blinding penetration, Lady Cunard demanded: “What? Are they all Poles?” Long after the din of battle had died elsewhere in Europe, it persisted in Poland. Almost unreported in the West, a guerrilla war continued for many months between the communist regime and the survivors of the “London Poles,” whose only crime was their yearning for freedom. Casualties were substantial, for the anti-communists fought with the despair of men and women who knew that capture meant death. “Bands of Army Krajowa bandits are continuing fighting in many parts of Poland,” Beria reported to Stalin on 17 May 1945, “attacking prisons, militia headquarters, state security departments, banks, businesses and democratic organizations.” He claimed that twenty-eight AK groups, comprising 6,000 men and women, together with 4,000 men of the Ukrainian Patriotic Army were still active in Poland. Beria concluded that it was impossible to use communist Polish troops against the AK, since these were unreliable. Instead, he had committed five NKVD regiments and a motorized infantry battalion. The communist Polish government had also requested the deployment of the two best available infantry divisions for internal security, and Beria proposed to deploy an additional three regiments of NKVD Frontier Guards. All this was designed to complete the “liberation” of the people for whose freedom the Western democracies had gone to war with Hitler in 1939.

One important social and historical consequence of the behaviour of the Red Army in eastern Europe and Germany in 1945 deserves attention here. It caused many German soldiers to feel justified in having prolonged their resistance. They cherished through the balance of their lives a conviction that they had acted rightly and honourably in seeking to preserve their kin from Soviet barbarism. Most forgot to consider why the Soviets acted as they did. They failed to reflect that it was German savagery which provoked Russian savagery, which indeed had obliged Stalin’s tyranny to enter the war at all. They erased from their consciousnesses the memory of Germany’s bloody deeds in the east, which far outstripped anything done in the Reich by the Red Army. Turning reality on its head, many Germans chose to see the ravaging of their own country as a unique phenomenon, and to regard a determination to escape vengeance for their own nation’s crimes as sufficient justification for fighting on under Hitler’s banner. Their logic was not dissimilar from that of the convicted murderer who hopes to be applauded for his courage because he struggles with the hangman to the trapdoor of the gallows. It would have been incomparably harder for Stalin to allow, far less to justify, the Red Army’s barbarism in Germany in 1945 had Germans not resisted to the end. Far from serving their society’s interests by maintaining the struggle, Germany’s soldiers ensured that its eventual fate was very much worse than it might otherwise have been. It could have become rational to defend the east to the last only if the Western allies were meanwhile granted an easy passage into Germany.

Those who fulfil law-abiding and peaceful lives find it hard to grasp what it must be like for men who have committed unspeakable crimes against their fellow humans to return to an after-life in civilization. All men who participate in wars find themselves obliged to do things which, if they are decent people, they afterwards regret. That was the case with many American and British soldiers, and some German and Russian ones, after the Second World War. More than a few were traumatized for years by events in which they had participated. Other Germans and Russians, however, including those who must be categorized as war criminals, suffered no guilts or doubts. They developed a mechanism for justifying their actions, and for expunging memories, which has served them well. How else could the mass-killers, so many of whom went unpunished, have continued to go to work, visit the local café, shop at the supermarket, watch television, kiss their children and grandchildren goodnight until death claimed them in their beds? It is necessary for mankind to be capable of forgetting, and for societies to know how to forgive. But it must be a matter for regret that many individuals who bore responsibility for terrible deeds escaped a reckoning.

The Western allies were obliged to conclude the Second World War having freed western Europe from the tyranny of Hitler while acquiescing in the subjection of eastern Europe to that of Stalin. He had got there first. More than any other combatant, the United States chose to focus overwhelmingly upon its military objective, the destruction of Hitler, with limited regard for the political future, save a general commitment to self-determination for all nations. This was intended to be altruistic, but it also proved naive. The British were wrong after the war to seek to blame the United States for the Soviet Union’s seizure of eastern Europe. It is hard to see how this could have been prevented, given the Western allies’ sluggish conduct of the war, for which the British bore at least as much responsibility as the United States. But despite all the efforts of Roosevelt’s apologists to argue that his conduct towards Stalin reflected merely a pragmatic view of strategic realities, the balance of evidence suggests that the U.S. president was indeed slow to perceive the depth of horror and cruelty which Stalin represented. Roosevelt treated Churchill and his fears about eastern Europe with a condescension merited only by American might, not by superior judgement. The president fully recognized Soviet perfidy only in the last weeks of his life, as Moscow systematically breached all its Yalta undertakings to support pluralism in the governance of the “liberated” countries of eastern Europe.

Churchill could have attended Roosevelt’s funeral in April 1945. The logistical difficulties were surmountable, as Roy Jenkins has observed. Yet he chose not to do so. It is difficult not to regard the prime minister’s absence as a reflection of the alienation between himself and the president, which grew grave indeed in the last months of Roosevelt’s life. By 1945, the Russians cared little for British remonstrances, but they respected the power of the Americans. Stalin’s recognition that the United States would do little to frustrate his designs upon eastern Europe confirmed his belief that he possessed freedom of action there.

So much public sentiment was lavished upon the partnership between Britain and the United States during the war years, above all through the rhetoric of Churchill, that it is important to emphasize that affection played no part in the decisions or actions of either ally. At all times, tough negotiation and hard-headed calculation determined American and British behaviour. It remains highly doubtful that the United States would have entered the war against Germany within a useful time frame had not the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and had not Hitler thereafter declared war upon America. By 1945 relations between Britain and America had become profoundly strained. While Britain had bankrupted itself to play its part in the defeat of Hitler, the United States emerged from the war richer than it had ever been. There was deep resentment among Churchill’s people of American wealth and British poverty, matched by American exasperation about Britain’s residual pretensions to influence, and to empire. All those holding power in the United States and its armies recognized that only two powers would count in the post-war world, and Britain would not be one of them. It is against this background that Eisenhower’s great achievement should be measured. He sustained the military partnership between allies who were weary to death of each other, and led them to share in victory with the façade of unity unbroken.

The battle for Germany began as the largest single military event of the twentieth century, and ended as its greatest human tragedy. More than half a century later, we may be profoundly grateful that its worst consequences have been undone without another war. The men who fought and died for the freedom of Europe received their final reward with the collapse of the Soviet tyranny, two generations after the destruction of its Nazi counterpart.