Domestic Soldiers (30 page)

It was difficult for Helen to believe that the once seemingly invincible Germans didn’t have something more dastardly waiting in the wings or that the fight was nearly finished in Europe, but the skies over Britain would soon be peaceful once again. The last V-2 fell on Easter Sunday, 1 April, about five miles from Mitchell’s home in Kent, taking with it the last British civilian casualty of the war. In May, after the end of the war in Europe, Helen opened her newspaper and learned that the village next to hers had the distinction of being the heaviest-bombed area in Britain. Now, she understood the gravity of her experience. ‘Feel less stupid about cracking up,’ she told M-O, ‘as I had to hear most of [the bombs] all by myself.’

As the war began to wind down, Edie Rutherford looked forward to a joyful and restful Easter break. It was a ‘lovely morning’ when she went to work on Good Friday to tie up loose ends before the holiday, but ‘wind from a rainy quarter’ did not bode well for good weather. Indeed, Sunday and Monday were both washouts. ‘Horrid day,’ she noted on Monday, ‘cold wind, showery, dullish’. Although Edie and her husband had hoped to get out for a long walk, she didn’t dare ‘put my nose outdoors’ the entire weekend. Sid went down to the cinema to book seats for an evening show, but it seems others had similar designs: the queue seemed a half-mile long, and he came home empty-handed.

A week later, the weather had hardly improved, but the couple finally managed to book seats for Noël
Coward’s movie,
This Happy Breed
. Rutherford thought the tale of an ordinary British family living through the inter-war years ‘splendid’. It was a welcome diversion from the recent health problems her husband had been experiencing since the beginning of the year. Sid’s injuries from the First World War were catching up with him. Since January, Sid had suffered one illness after another. ‘My husband isn’t well,’ Edie wrote to M-O in March, ‘Feels life is a task too much for him. Drags wearily thru each day.’ He spent several days at home that winter, forcing Edie to give up her diary for the day as the typewriter always bothered him. Edie attributed some of Sid’s general lethargy to his recent commitment to quitting smoking – a decision she hoped would eventually aid his waning health – but she knew that his problems went much deeper. ‘He never is well, being a last war wreck,’ she confided. When Sid finally went to the doctor, he learned that his heart, liver, kidneys and right lung were in bad shape. Reporting his poor prognosis to Edie, he simply laughed it off, saying, ‘Well, [at least] I have a good pair of boots!’ She didn’t find it amusing. For years, doctors had told her husband that his body was ‘organically sound’ and the true trouble was that he was ‘just a nervous wreck’; to learn that his organs were beginning to shut down came as a heart-wrenching blow. That night, Edie’s ‘vivid imagination’ filled her with a feeling of impending doom and haunted her with images of widowhood.

A week after the cold and dreary weather of the Easter holiday, Irene Grant toddled out to her garden to enjoy the warm sunshine and delight in the wall-flowers that splashed cheerful colour across the small enclosure. Gathering strength from the warmth that surrounded her, for the first time in months Irene felt
well enough to brave a walk outside. She made her way slowly up the avenue, noting with pride that of all the little gardens peeking out from behind the stubby brick walls, hers was by far the best.

Days later, on Friday 13 April, Irene and her family were ‘profoundly shocked’ to learn of President Roosevelt’s death the day before. Irene felt his death deeply, as though she had lost a ‘personal friend’ and lamented that a champion of the people was now gone. Edie Rutherford noted his passing briefly in her diary, but seemed hardly moved, since, she argued, no one human being was ‘indispensable’. Helen Mitchell thought otherwise. She worried that no one could possibly ‘have his vision and give help so generously and amazingly as the Americans have done’ under Roosevelt’s leadership.

Although the pictures from the Yalta Conference in February had revealed a gaunt and sickly president, the news nonetheless also came as a shock to Natalie Tanner. She and her son, James, had been enjoying his Easter holiday together when word came through. Though the weather had been poor for most of the break, James and Natalie had nonetheless worked in the garden when the rain slackened, and made trips into Leeds for shopping, meals and movies. They had even found time, accompanying Hugh on a business trip to Newcastle one weekend, to enjoy James’ favourite pastime: watching the engines pull into the station and keeping a log of their numbers. The day they learned of Roosevelt’s death, mother and son went into Leeds for a movie and Natalie noted the pall of grief that hung over the city. She was convinced that Britons had far more respect for Roosevelt than did Americans and thus felt the loss more deeply. Certainly, all the women agreed, it was a
shame that Roosevelt had not lived to see the peace that seemed likely any day that April.

Roosevelt’s death was joyfully received by both the Japanese and Germans, who believed that the President’s passing would mean an armistice. Some Germans hoped that the Americans would join forces with them against the Russians, with whom tensions presaging the Cold War had been brewing for some time. But the illusion was short-lived; despite the fault lines developing between them, the Allies remained focused on an unconditional German surrender. The death of the President could not thwart this objective, especially as Allied troops rapidly closed in on Berlin from both the east and the west. The Soviet army had been threatening Berlin from the east for several months, and in early March, British and American troops were finally across the Rhine.

As Allied troops marched into Germany, the horror of the Holocaust was increasingly revealed. In their campaigns through Poland, the Red Army had been the first to encounter concentration camps in late 1944, and western Allies finally witnessed the evil first-hand when they overran the Natzwiller camp in Alsace on the German–French border. The camp had been evacuated before the Allies found it: storerooms were bursting with prisoners’ clothing and shoes, autopsy tables and gas chambers were still intact, but there was little power in these scenes. It seemed like a deserted lumber camp, a
New York Times
reporter noted in December 1944, ‘There were no prisoners, no screams, no burly guards, no taint of death in the air.’
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Soon, however, Allied troops would encounter the full extent of human suffering in the camps. On 11
April, Americans liberated 21,000 emaciated survivors of Buchenwald and, four days later, British troops came face-to-face with the horror that was Belsen. Journalists found they had few words to explain the almost incomprehensible conditions of these camps, the living and the dead. Nonetheless, they were all gripped by a conviction that they must attempt to tell the story. News reports and photographs began to filter into Britain.

On 19 April, though the BBC initially refused to allow the shocking and gut-wrenching report, Richard Dimbleby recounted his harrowing experience of Belsen. ‘I picked my way over corpse after corpse,’ he solemnly intoned and described the sad scene as it unfolded before him. A young girl, ‘a living skeleton’, peered out of a face of ‘yellow parchment’ and called out for medicine. ‘She was trying to cry but she hadn’t enough strength,’ he told his audience. Moving on, he encountered a pile of bodies that seemed so ‘utterly unreal and inhuman that I could have imagined they had never lived at all’. It was, Dimbleby recalled, ‘the most horrible day of my life’.
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Though Dimbleby’s report was more descriptive and haunting, it would be CBS reporter, Edward Murrow’s detail of his experience at Buchenwald on 16 April that received more press in Britain. Fighting down anger and physical revulsion at what he witnessed, he described, ‘rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised, though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise.’
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Edie Rutherford was ‘appalled’ when she heard the broadcast, but she couldn’t say she was surprised. For years, books had told the true story, she reminded M-O. Indeed, in December 1942, Murrow
himself had warned that Hitler’s regime was rounding up people for slaughter. ‘But folk would not be told then,’ Rutherford fumed. ‘Now they HAVE GOT to be told and HAVE GOT to listen.’

Natalie Tanner echoed Edie’s sentiments. Though most people in Leeds were exceedingly upset by the news, she noted with resentment and anger the apathy of most people towards the camps before the war. No one cared when Germans who opposed the Nazi regime before the war were thrown in concentration camps, she protested. Furthermore, ‘no one seemed to mind’ the reports coming out of the refugee camps of the gross maltreatment of Spanish Republicans during the civil war there in 1936–7. Still, Natalie reported with dismay, some simply could not believe the reports. As they had done for years, most sceptics argued that the ‘atrocity stories’ were simply trumped up, like the many reports of German abuses of women and children in Belgium during the First World War.

Alice Bridges heard first-hand about the conditions at Belsen from a soldier who had liberated the camp. The soldier reported images similar to those described in the media, but revealed a deeper, uncomfortable anger experienced by the liberators. ‘He saw corpses lying on top of each other to the height and width of houses,’ and reported cannibalism in the camp. Passing a chained SS guard, a fellow soldier said, ‘What’s he doing alive?’ Bridges’ friend pulled out his gun and shot him point blank.

Several months later, Edie Rutherford would confront the horror of the camps in person when a survivor walked into her office. He was a coal merchant from Prague and a friend of Edie’s boss. The man had spent thirty-nine months in a camp, where he saw his
mother and brother sent to the gas chambers. He told Edie of the numerous scars that criss-crossed his back from being lashed by the guards, only now beginning to heal. Once twelve stone, he walked into the office a meagre six-and-a-half stone (approximately forty kilos). Yet, she commented in amazement, he ‘can still smile and be courteous’. ‘It shows the human spirit is stronger than all,’ Edie declared.

On the same day that Dimbleby went on air describing Belsen, pictures were released in
The Times
showing the very same skeletons of living dead that Murrow and Dimbleby depicted. Helen Mitchell opened the paper that day and was ‘much shocked by horror pictures’. While reporters and soldiers on the ground were struggling with the question of the complicity of ‘ordinary’ Germans in the atrocities of the camps, Helen none-theless maintained that one could not blame them. ‘It is not the whole nation but
individuals
who do these things,’ she wrote in her diary. Irene Grant was clear to distinguish between ordinary German and Nazis. ‘The
SS
’, she insisted, ‘ought to be systematically shot. Nothing could ever eradicate these cruel natures and the world will be better without them.’ On the ground, although the Nazis were still the focus of the blame, the problem seemed more complicated. Murrow told a friend that he was certain that many Germans knew of Buchenwald’s purpose, but they stayed away out of fear. ‘The Nazis have succeeded in doing a much more thorough job of brutalizing than I would have believed possible,’ he confessed.
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Soon after Buchenwald and Belsen, newsreels of the camps were screened in cinemas across Britain. Some felt compelled to watch, others simply couldn’t bear it, and many wept. To avoid the disturbing pictures,
and finding the photographs ‘in the paper quite dreadful enough’, Nella Last refused to go to the cinema the last week of April. When she went to the movies the next week, however, someone requested the newsreels be played once again. Nella watched in horror. ‘What kept them alive for so long’, she sadly mused,

Though a frequent movie-goer, Natalie Tanner also made a point not to watch the footage. She believed the films demonstrated the difficult reality of the camps once and for all to sceptics, but she was uncomfortable with those who watched and reported on the atrocities in social circles with perhaps more enthusiasm than was respectful of the dead. ‘It’s a hard thing to say,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘but it’s quite obvious that certain sections of the German people enjoyed inflicting the torture.’ At the same time, Natalie thought, ‘Certain English people are getting a vicarious pleasure out of the pictures.’

Throughout late April, the Allies continued to discover camp upon gruesome camp. Ten days after Richard Dimbleby broadcast his experience at Belsen, Americans came upon the Third Reich’s original concentration camp, Dachau. Less than ten miles from Munich, Dachau had opened in March 1933 – the first year of Hitler’s reign – as a camp for political prisoners. When Americans entered the camp on 29 April, the now familiar scenes of walking skeletons and piles
of bodies played out once again. Few, however, could forget the railway cars lined up on the siding with thousands of decomposing bodies ‘piled up like the twisted branches of cut-down trees’.
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That day, 33,000 inmates were liberated, 2,500 of them Jews. Of those 2,500, fewer than 100 would be alive a month and a half later.

The day before Dachau’s liberation, Edie Rutherford noted the ‘fitting’ end of ‘Mussolini and Co.’. Italian partisans executed Mussolini, his mistress and several other supporters after they were caught attempting to escape to Germany. Their bodies were hung upside down from hooks at a petrol station in Milan. Anticipating messy legal battles after the war, Natalie Tanner was happy he was ‘liquidated without all the fuss of a trial’. Days later, on 1 May, it was announced on German radio that Hitler, too, was dead. The original reports said he died valiantly in the defence of Berlin, but it was soon discovered that he had taken his own life as Soviet troops closed in on his bunker. Natalie Tanner suspected as much. ‘If he is dead, I’m sure he didn’t die a hero’s death – he was probably bumped off or drowned himself,’ she wrote. With no body recovered, there were always qualifications – always
if
he is dead. So many rumours of Hitler’s demise had permeated throughout the war that people could hardly believe the news. On 2 May, Rutherford told M-O that she could ‘not accept that Hitler is dead’. Four days later, Edie wrote that she could not believe the news until his dead body was recovered. Nella Last’s son Cliff was convinced Hitler had slipped out of Germany and was on a submarine to Japan. Nor could any one in Nella’s social circle believe he was actually dead.