After the Reich (16 page)

Charlotte and her children were allotted a tower and a kitchen in the servants’ quarters, so that they could maintain their independence from the wilder shores of the castle. A gemstone proved enough to procure a stove on the black market. With Jonny’s permission, they collected furniture from other parts of the house. When Charlotte had finished, her tower room was so lovely that visitors compared it to the Marschallin’s bedroom in Act One of
Der Rosenkavalier
.

In 1946 the entire population of an evacuated Upper Silesian village was accommodated in a back wing of the Schloss. The men were found work in the village and oven pipes protruded from the windows as they installed kitchens in their rooms. The bridge and courtyard buzzed with women and children dressed in traditional headscarves. That Christmas Charlotte organised a nativity play at the Schloss in which her children and the Silesians performed the roles. It was the village’s first taste of post-war ecumenicalism, as the Silesians were all Catholics and the Hanoverians were Lutheran to a man. British soldiers came to hunt at the Schloss and paid for their pleasure in cigarettes and alcohol - much to Jonny’s delight. The parties at the castle were as mad as ever as he drove his motorbike round the knights’ hall and hurled bottles at the portraits of his ancestors.
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In the chaos that was Germany in 1945, it was hard to know if the writer Ernst Jünger had survived. Many of his friends and admirers had perished on Hitler’s gibbets. Others had fallen victim to bombs and bullets - both soldiers and civilians. Jünger, however, was at home in his house in Kirchhorst near Celle in Hanover. He watched the American advance in a detached way. It literally passed him by. The black soldiers in the American army were the subject of much gossip. A little boy of nine told Jünger, ‘I am frightened of him.’ He meant a black GI. The Negroes were accused of perpetrating several rapes, in one instance of a fourteen-year-old girl in the village of Altwarmbuch.
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Americans and Poles searched Jünger’s house, but he had wisely hidden incriminating objects such as his weapons (in the pond) and his hunting rifle (buried) and stashed away his collection of burgundy where he thought no one would find it: ‘It would be a criminal offence to let nectar like this fall into the hands of the Kentucky men.’
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Sadly for him, some GIs were billeted on him. The usual bands of DPs were stealing and murdering - coming for spirits, meat and bicycles - but Jünger had the Americans on the ground floor to protect him: ‘downstairs is Wallenstein’s Camp:
^af
loudspeakers announce news of victory, patrols bring in prisoners whom they have tracked down in the bog’. Jünger read his way slowly through the Bible, turning to the poet Rückert and others when he wanted a break. He was relieved to hear that the Americans were not allowed to talk to the Germans.

All around him order was breaking down, and the Allies were doing little to restore it while they advanced on Berlin. On 28 April the owner of the neighbouring estate was killed by DPs looking for benzene. He had been tortured first. Another local had been tied to a car and dragged along the road. The villages were full of drunken American blacks with women on their arms, looking for beds. DPs would visit the men-less houses and ‘feast like the suitors of Penelope’. Mussolini’s and Hitler’s deaths prompted more classical references: ‘We are living now in the time of the fall of Galba, Otho and Vitellius, repeating events in every detail . . .’
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Some things could not be found in the lives of the later Augustan emperors. On 4 May he had two prisoners from nearby Belsen to breakfast, and was fascinated by their yellow faces and parchment-like skin. One of them had had one of the best positions in the camp: he was the kitchen-kapo, and if there were any food, he had first pick. On 6 May Jünger was visited by six Jews from the camp. The youngest was a boy of eleven. He watched the child devour a picture with his eyes. It was not just food they craved. And then the child was in raptures when he saw the Jüngers’ cat.
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The novelist Jünger was calmly jotting down the stories brought to him by refugees. A woman from the east told him how prosperous Prussians had committed suicide
en masse
. During their trek they would look in at the windows of large houses and see a ‘party of corpses sitting around a table covered with a cloth’.
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Two American journalists came to see him; the day before they had visited a ‘concentration camp on the outskirts of Weimar’. Jünger had not heard of Buchenwald. They told him about the crematorium and the sign that read ‘Wash your hands. In this room cleanliness is a duty.’ The job of the journalists was to ‘put together a sort of spiritual stock-taking in our field of rubble’. He had seen no journalists for six years: it was the ‘first thread in a new weave’. When they left they gave him some of their food.

The war ended for the Kaiser’s only daughter, Victoria Louise, on Hitler’s Birthday, 20 April. She was living with her husband the Duke of Brunswick in Blanckenburg in the Harz Mountains when the Americans arrived. Soon after the Americans had paid a visit to the Schloss, the British came by. They were interested in some cases that had been lodged in the cellar. After the British left, Americans arrived to carry off the cases. They were unconcerned when they were told that the British had already claimed them. One of the Americans who came for them had been brought up in Potsdam, where he had played golf with the crown prince, William, and had been present at the arrest of her Nazi brother, Auwi, in Frankfurt.

Victoria Louise was much struck by the arrival of blacks - ‘niggers’, as she called them. They were, in her report, friendly and cheerful. To the princess’s staff they shouted, ‘We are slaves, now you are slaves!’ The Americans behaved well in general, but the British who relieved them left a bad impression. The colonel ordered the duke and duchess to report to him; failed to get up when they entered the room; and threatened to shoot them because they had concealed weapons. Victoria Louise observed that it was not
à propos
to shoot a prince of the Hanoverian royal house, which was Britain’s own! The guns in question had been locked up by the Americans in a wing of the house and the keys removed to the command post.
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Princess Victoria Louise opened the door one day to find her brother Oscar standing before her. He had left his house in Potsdam on foot and walked to safety. He was ‘at the end of his strength. He had battled through the advancing American forces, through fields and thicket, from hiding place to hiding place, in constant fear of being taken prisoner’. Prince Oscar had begun the war as a regimental commander, and there had even been a suggestion that he should receive a division, until Hitler slapped it down. He wanted no heroes among the princes. Oscar’s eldest son had been the first of the Hohenzollerns to die in action, in 1939. When there was a massive demonstration of royalist sympathy in Potsdam at the burial of the crown prince’s eldest son, William, the following year, Hitler resolved to dismiss the princes from the armed forces.
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The British had their first experience of a Nazi death camp near Celle as they advanced towards the Elbe in the second week of April 1945. The 11th Armoured Division was pushing towards its military objectives when its forward troops were met by a Mercedes staff car containing two Wehrmacht colonels. They had come to offer them Bergen-Belsen camp, where, they said, the inmates were dying of typhus. It was three days before the British entered the camp, and they were naturally horrified by what they saw.
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Belsen was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz, Treblinka or Majdanek. It had been set up as recently as 1943 to house ‘exchange Jews’. These were Jews with non-German passports who Himmler believed could be bartered for money or for German nationals in Allied captivity. The idea of selling Jews to the West went back to the abortive Evian Conference of 1938. Conditions at Belsen had been as good as any until the end of the war, when the SS began driving the inmates of the camps west, in order to prevent them falling into the hands of the advancing Red Army. As much as possible, evidence of the Final Solution was to be destroyed. Hitler was furious with Himmler when he learned on 13 or 14 April that the Americans had liberated Buchenwald and found 20,000 prisoners the SS had failed to evacuate or shoot. Hitler had barked into the telephone at the SS chief: ‘. . . make sure that your people don’t become sentimental!’
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Large numbers of former prisoners from eastern camps were shipped into Belsen. They were not only Jews. Estimates for the number of Jews in Belsen at the time of the liberation vary, but at most they were not much more than half. There were prisoners from all over Europe as well as the usual concentration camp inmates: political prisoners, ‘anti-social elements’ and criminals - including homosexuals - who had contravened Article 175 of the Prussian Legal Code. Not only were the food and medical supplies inadequate to deal with them, but they brought typhus. Lack of food had resulted in outbreaks of cannibalism. By the time the British had made up their minds to go in, the plague had reached epidemic proportions. Over the next few weeks a quarter of the 60,000 inhabitants would die. Most of these were deemed to have been beyond medical care, but some died because the British were at a loss to know how to treat and feed them.
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In hindsight it is easy to accuse them of negligence, but they still had military objectives. There was a war to be won, and a pressing need to prevent the Red Army from absorbing the whole of Germany. Himmler knew that many Britons wanted to push on and fight the Russians, and while he bartered Jews with the Swedish count Bernadotte, he hoped that he himself might be retained in the fight against Bolshevism.

The living skeletons of Belsen wrought their revenge on the hated kapos, throwing some 150 of them out of first-floor windows under the eyes of the British soldiers.
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Baden and Württemberg

The Badenese university town of Heidelberg was liberated by the Americans on 30 March. The philosopher Karl Jaspers recorded the event in his diary. He had been put out to grass because he refused to divorce his Jewish wife Gertrud - or Trudlein - and they had lived through recent years in mortal fear that she would be deported to the east.

No electricity, no water, no gas. We are trying to equip ourselves. A spirit stove will do for a short time. Water can be fetched from the spring at the Klingentor. The young people are in the best mood. It is magnificent fun for them to live like Indians . . .

. . . this morning the Americans arrived on the Neuenheimerlandstrasse, they found all the bridges destroyed and stood in front of them with tanks. They discovered the boathouse near the new bridge, took the paddleboats and paddled across the river, landing at the grammar school where they are stationed. They must have arrived upstream by the Neckar.

Frau von Jaffe came to congratulate us that at last our Trudlein is free: a moment without words. It is a miracle that we are still alive.
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Jaspers clearly enjoyed the spectacle of the limp German resistance. It was not long before the Americans sought him out as a representative of the ‘other Germany’ and gave him responsibility for the university. Jaspers had none of the misgivings about the liberators that Germans felt elsewhere; when he delivered the principal speech on the reopening of parts of the university on 15 August, he dwelt on the experience of liberation. Most likely his attitude towards the Americans was one of heartfelt gratitude.
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The end of the war found the future mayor of Berlin and president of the Federal Republic Richard von Weizsäcker at a family chicken farm near Lindau on Lake Constance crammed full of family members, almost exclusively women. There was his sister, a refugee from East Prussia, whose husband had been missing since 1944 and was never to return; his aunt Olympia from Breslau, with her two daughters - both sons had been killed and her husband interned like his brother, the physicist Carl Friedrich. In the summer another pair joined them - his sister’s parents-in-law, the eighty-year-old Siegfried Eulenburg (who had commanded the First Foot in the Great War) and his wife. They had come from their estates in East Prussia in an old landau driven by three horses.
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The town of Pforzheim had suffered horribly in the bombing. With great interest Alfred Döblin, novelist and psychiatrist, watched people climbing on top of heaps of rubble: ‘What was their business there? Did they want to dig something out? They carried flowers in their hands. On the heap they set up crosses and signs. These were graves. They put down the flowers, knelt and said their prayers.’
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Another writer, Ernst Jünger, witnessed the scenes in Pforzheim that year. He too saw the walls of rubble, the white crosses and the flowers for those who had been buried alive.
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Baden was also an objective of French forces, and it was in the Black Forest that their behaviour got out of hand. The French were officially supposed to follow behind the Americans, but, with the backing of de Gaulle, the commander de Lattre de Tassigny disobeyed orders. De Gaulle had told him, ‘You must cross the Rhine even if the Americans are not agreeable . . . Karlsruhe and Stuttgart await you.’
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The French II Army Corps had taken Speyer before advancing to Karlsruhe. On 12 April they reached Baden-Baden before entering the Black Forest and heading for Freudenstadt. A further French army was to join them there after liberating Strasbourg. Whether the French commander was in some way influenced by the name of the town is not easy to say now, but Freudenstadt (it means ‘town of joy’), the so-called ‘pearl of the Black Forest’, was subjected to three days of killing, plunder, arson and rape.