Europe: A History (214 page)
After two years of defeats, the German Army finally reacted against Hitler. On 20 July 1944, at the Führer’s eastern HQ, his
Wolfschanze
near Rastenburg in East Prussia (now Kçtrzyn in Poland), an attempt was made to assassinate him. A bomb was left in a briefcase under the heavy oak table of the conference room. It exploded in the Führer’s presence; he escaped, badly shaken, with a damaged arm. It had been planted by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, a member of the Moltkes’ aristocratic Kreisau Circle. Its failure, and the horrible fate of the plotters, whose slow deaths on meat-hooks were filmed for the Führer’s enjoyment, discouraged other attempts. Large volumes are written about the German Resistance. The role of noble individuals and small groups, such as Pastor Bonhoeffer or the ‘White Rose’, is beyond question. But the fact is that they did not achieve their goals.
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By the time of the bomb plot, Germany’s immediate neighbours in Poland and France were both eagerly awaiting their freedom. The Soviet army was approaching the eastern suburbs of Warsaw. The American army was working its way round the western suburbs of Paris. Both cities were filled with various groups of resistance fighters directed mainly from London; both were straining at the leash
to rise against the Nazi oppressor. In Warsaw they were led by the underground AK, in Paris by the Free French.
Paris rose on 19 August. Despite poor intelligence, the idea was to mount attacks inside the city and accelerate the Americans’ final push. Parts of the French Resistance worked with the American Command, which had recognized their value in the battles since the Normandy landings. Assailed from all quarters, the German garrison pulled back—and the Americans struck. General Leclerc’s French armoured division, fighting under American command, was given the honour of spearheading the advance. The German garrison surrendered, having ignored the Führer’s order to leave no stone standing. On 25 August, with snipers still active, General de Gaulle walked magnificently erect down the Champs-élysées. The cathedral of Notre-Dame celebrated a great Te Deum. Despite the heavy loss of civilians, the population rejoiced. France’s pre-war Third Republic was restored; Paris was free.
Warsaw had risen on 1 August, almost three weeks before Paris. The plan was to co-ordinate attacks inside the city with the Soviets’ final push. But the Varsovians were not to share the Parisians’ success. The intelligence of the Polish Resistance was poor; and they found too late that the Soviet Command was not going to help. The Soviet generals had used the Polish Underground in all the battles since crossing the Polish frontier. But Stalin did not recognize independent forces; and he had no intention of letting Poland regain its freedom. Assailed from all quarters, the German garrison had began to withdraw. But then the Soviets suddenly halted on the very edge of the city. Foul treachery was afoot. Moscow Radio, which had called on Warsaw to rise, now denounced the leaders of the rising as ‘a gang of criminals’. Two German panzer divisions moved forward; and the garrison was given time to receive massive reinforcements from the most vicious formations of the Nazi reserves. General Berling’s Polish army, which was fighting under Soviet Command, was withdrawn from the Front for defying orders and trying to assist the rising. Berling himself was cashiered. Western attempts to supply Warsaw by air from Italy were hamstrung by the Soviets’ reluctance to let their planes land and refuel. Street by street, house by house, sewer by sewer, the insurgents were shelled, gunned, and dynamited on one bank of the Vistula, whilst Soviet soldiers sunbathed on the opposite bank. In one of several orgies of killing, in the suburb of Mokotów, Nazi troops massacred 40,000 helpless civilians in scenes reminiscent of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in the previous year. Weeks after the liberation of Paris, the Warsaw insurgents were still fighting on. They surrendered after sixty-three days, on 2 October, when their commander, General Bór, walked into German captivity.
2
Their only consolation was to be granted combatant status. Despite the sacrifice of 250,000 of its citizens, Warsaw remained unfree. Poland’s pre-war Republic was not restored. There was no Te Deum in the destroyed cathedral of St John. The remaining population was evacuated. In his fury, Hitler ordered that no stone of the rebel city was to be left standing. The demolition proceeded for three months, whilst the Soviet army, with its committee of Polish puppets in tow, watched
passively from across the river. They did not enter Warsaw’s empty, silent, snowbound ruins until 17 January 1945.
Despite the Normandy landings, the Western Allies encountered many setbacks. In Italy, Rome fell the day before D-Day, but only after the Allied armies had been bottled up for months at Monte Cassino. One week after D-Day the London blitz was resumed, with the dispatch first of the Vi flying bombs, the ‘doodlebugs’, and in September of the V2. An American landing on the French Riviera in August was poorly conceived and developed slowly. In the north, Brussels was freed amidst great rejoicing on 3 September. But the British scheme, under Operation Market Garden, to jump ahead and seize the Rhine bridges at Arnhem was a costly disaster. In the centre, in December, in the ‘Battle of the Bulge’, the Americans had to absorb the weight of the Wehrmacht’s last major armoured counter-attack in the Ardennes. At Bastogne, where the 101st Airborne was called on to surrender, the resources of the German Staff and their translators were finally overpowered by the American reply of ‘Nuts’. In the Mediterranean, the British army re-entered Greece in October, only to find itself with a civil war on its hands. Churchill did not hesitate to assist the government in Athens against communist attacks. Before it fell, the Reich was allowed to totter on the brink.
The terminal conquest of Germany in January to May 1945 took place amidst scenes never before experienced. In the West, British and American bombers were steadily reducing every major German city to hecatombs of rubble and corpses. Nazi officials vainly planned their last stand in the Alpine redoubts of Austria and Bavaria. In the East, millions of desperate German refugees were trekking westwards through the winter. Tens of thousands perished in the sinking of the
Wilhelm Gustloff
and other mercy ships, or on the deathly trail across the icebound waters of the Frisches Haff. The Führer’s last throw was to draft all German males above 14 into the so-called
Volkssturm
. Most of those schoolboys, invalids, and veterans were to die from the Soviet policy of killing anyone in German uniform. The compulsory evacuation of major cities such as Danzig or Breslau, and of concentration camps such as Auschwitz, were accompanied by death marches. German life in the East was coming to an end. [
DONHOFF
]
Zhukov’s offensive against Berlin was launched on 12 January 1945 from a range of some 400 miles. The Red Army cleared Poland when the Western allies were still well short of the Rhine. The fall of Budapest in mid-February permitted a two-pronged lunge which had Vienna as well as Berlin in its sights. In early March the Americans had a fortunate break, when German sappers failed to blow the last remaining bridge across the Rhine, at Remagen. Soon General Patton would come riding triumphantly out of this Western bridgehead even faster than Zhukov out of the East; his men would eventually meet up with the Soviets in the Torgau in Saxony on 23 April. The British, with Canadian and Polish support, had liberated the Netherlands, and were far advanced along the northern Plain. Berlin was cut off by a ring of Russian steel. From his bunker beneath the bomb-blasted debris, the Führer watched the Reich’s defences crumble.
When the Big Three met again at Yalta in Crimea from 4 to 11 February 1945,
the end was already close. Regarding Germany, they agreed on the establishment of four separate Allied occupation zones, on the destruction of the Reich’s military-industrial capacity, on the prosecution of war criminals, and on the need to guarantee Germans no more than ‘minimum subsistence’. Regarding Poland, they agreed that there should be ‘free and unfettered elections’, and that a Provisional Government should draw its members both from Stalin’s Lublin Committee and from the London Poles. On Japan, which worried the ailing Roosevelt most, they agreed that the USSR should enter the Pacific war two to three months after the end of hostilities in Europe. A secret protocol empowered the Soviets to reoccupy the Kurile Islands. These arrangements did not have the force of an international treaty; they were the private working guidelines of the Allied Powers, [
KEELHAUL
]
DÖNHOFF
M
ARION
, Countess Dönhoff was bom in 1909 at the family palace of Friedrichstein, twenty miles from Königsberg in East Prussia. The seventh child of a numerous brood, she followed the timeless routine of the semi-feudal East European aristocracy, unaware that their time was running out.
Friedrichstein in the 1900s still offered its residents all the beauties of nature and the benefits of privilege. Set amidst the lakes and forests and the sharp seasons of the East, it drew its children into a blissful round of horses, picnics, and libraries, of tutors, loving nannies, and distinguished guests. Marion’s mother, once a lady-in-waiting to the Empress at Potsdam, ran the house with a taste for the rigid etiquette and social hierarchy of the Kaiser’s court. She trained the servants to address her with ‘Most humbly, good morning, Your Excellency’. Marion’s father, Karl August, an easy-going globetrotter and sometime diplomat at the German embassies at St Petersburg and Washington, was a member of both the hereditary Prussian Senate and the elected German Reichstag. The style was one of public opulence, private austerity, and Lutheran piety.
The Dönhoffs, like many German noble families, had moved to the East in the Middle Ages. Their original home was at Dunehof on the Ruhr in Westphalia. Their second, also Dunehof. was set up in 1330 near Riga in Livonia, where they remained for eighteen generations. That senior Livonian branch of the family, usually known as Denhoff, became prominent Polish magnates—palatines, hetmans, starostas, and cardinals. The Prussian, Protestant Dönhoffs were descended from the Livonian Magnus Ernst von Dönhoff, sometime Polish ambassador to Saxony and Brandenburg, who settled near Königsberg in 1620. His son, Friedrich, bought the main estates by the Pregd in 1666. His grandson, Otto Magnus, governor of Memel and Prussian ambassador at the Treaty of Utrecht, built the pile of Friedrichstein in 1709–14.
Wars and disasters were taken in their stride on the Prussian frontier. In the Great Northern War, 40 per cent of East Prussia’s population died of plague. The revolutionary wars saw the entailing of the estate in 1791, the arrival of the French in 1807, the emancipation of the serfs in 1810, and the arrival of Kutuzov in 1813. In the First World War, having escaped from the Russian advance of August 1914, it greeted its saviour, Field Marshal von Hindenburg, in person.
At first the war of 1939 looked just like any other. Yet by the winter of 1944–5 it was clear that some final and total nemesis was at hand. Unlike any of its predecessors, the advancing Soviet army was intent on eradicating the Germanity of East Prussia once and for all. With all the adult males of her family dead, either killed on the Eastern Front or executed after the bomb-plot against Hitler, Marion Dönhoff had been left administering the estates of Friedrichstein and Quittainen alone. One night in January 1945 she mounted her horse, joined the flood of westbound refugees, and rode 1,000 miles in two months, all the way to Westphalia. (She paused only once, to stay with Bismarck’s daughter-in-law at Varzin in Pomerania.) The 600-year Eastern adventure of the Dönhoffs had come full circle. Friedrichstein, deserted, was annexed to the RSFSR.
The fate of Friedrichstein and of the Dönhoffs was repeated hundreds of times over right across Europe. The destruction which the Bolsheviks meted out to Russia’s own aristocracy in 1918–21 awaited the landed proprietors of every country which the Red Army entered, either in 1939–40 or in 1944–5. The old German families of Prussia, Bohemia, and the Baltic States were cast into the same abyss which engulfed the Polish families of Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine, and the Magyars of Slovakia and Croatia. Indeed, not just the aristocrats but entire populations of all classes were removed. The Soviet scourge destroyed not just privilege but centuries of culture.
1
At least Marion Dönhoff survived. After the war she worked as a journalist in Hamburg, becoming editor of
Die Zeit
in 1968 and its publisher in 1973. When she wrote her memoirs, she mused on the futility of revenge:
‘I also do not believe that hating those who have taken over one’s homeland … necessarily demonstrates love for the homeland. When I remember the woods and lakes of East Prussia, its wide meadows and old shaded avenues, I am convinced that they are still as incomparably lovely as they were when they were my home. Perhaps the highest form of love is loving without possessing.’
2
Just as doctors will debate the exact moment of human death, in heart, brain, lungs, or limbs, so it is with bodies politic. In the case of the Third Reich, the siege
of Berlin ensured suffocation; the suicide of the Führer on 30 April prevented all chance of recovery; the general surrender of 8/9 May marked the last twitch. The Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946 may be likened to the coroner’s court.
The siege of Berlin, as foreseen at Yalta, was left to the Soviet Army. The terminal phase lasted for three weeks from 20 April. Zhukov poured in reserves without counting the cost; he was probably to lose more men in this one operation than the US army lost in the whole of the war. As the noose tightened, various Nazi officials slipped out. Hitler’s deputy, Martin Bormann, left—never to be seen again. One of the last planes to take off disappeared with a cargo of Nazi archives. Berlin sold itself dearly: it was the Warsaw Rising in reverse. Eventually, Soviet soldiers hung the Red flag atop the shattered Reichstag.
In his bunker at the junction of the Wilhelmstrasse and Unter den Linden, the Führer lost all contact with outside events. ‘If the war is to be lost,’ he had remarked, ‘the nation will also perish.’
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His orders were transmitted into an unresponsive vacuum. On 29 April he went through a form of marriage with Eva Braun, who had declined the offer of escape. On the 30th the newly-weds died in a poison and pistol-shot suicide pact. They thereby avoided the fate of Mussolini and his mistress, who the previous day had been strung up by the feet in Milan. When the Hitlers died, the Russians were 200 yards away. The Führer left orders for the burning of the bodies in a petrol pit, and a brief will and testament: