Exorcising Hitler (32 page)

Rations for the prisoners were never generous, but slowly improved. Despite the chronic grain shortages in Germany and all over the continent, there arrived, after a few weeks, a real red letter day. As one former prisoner wrote later:

The teams that bring the rations for the thousand-man units are hauling strange loads. We have seen nothing like this so far. Among the usual cans and cartons they carry white paper sacks, with square objects in them. As soon as the carriers turn into the camp, the first curious prisoners start stalking them. – Hey, mates! What you got in those sacks? – But their mates tell them nothing. They just grin – a bit slyly, a bit meaningfully, and they just keep hauling their mysterious cargo on towards the distribution point.

But the haulers’ path is soon crowded with more and more curious men; finally, there are so many snuffling around the load that, inevitably, the veil of secrecy can’t be maintained. Someone suddenly says just one simple word. Shyly, almost incredulously, with a voice filled with awe, he says it:

Bread!

A second voice joins his: Bread! – a third cries out: Bread! The news spreads through the camp like wildfire: Bread!

Admittedly, there was only a quarter of a loaf per ten men, but it was a powerful moment, a sign of things slowly changing. However, the American position regarding the three million or so German personnel in their custody at the end of the war throughout Europe was clearly put by Major General Robert L. Littlejohn, Chief Quartermaster (European Theatre of Operations): ‘Definitely I do not intend to go along with a ration that will cause prisoners to starve to death, or throw them into our hospitals. Neither do I intend to be a party to a ration that will make the Germans fat.’
¹⁷

Large-scale discharges of prisoners began, in fact, just two weeks after the official end of the war. On 23 May 1945, by order of General Eisenhower, women, under-age soldiers and representatives of various professional groups deemed crucial to the post-war survival of Germany were, subject to their not being politically or criminally tainted, proclaimed eligible for release (these groups included farmers, miners, railway workers and officials and telephone engineers).
¹⁸

The releases were then temporarily halted, a result of the French government’s demand that some of the Americans’ captives be handed over to them as forced labour. A kind of human reparation, their job would be to clear mines and rebuild factories, utilities and infrastructure damaged and destroyed in France as a result of occupation and the consequent fighting during the liberation.

Around 740,000 German POWs would be handed over to the French. The French, in fact, took over the camps in the middle Rhine valley as part of their zone in July, so that many would spend up to two or three years as their effective slaves (though by no means always under harsh conditions).
¹⁹
It should be noted that the Americans agreed, on request by the French later that summer, to supply sufficient rations for these German prisoners, even though they were technically no longer their responsibility. When pressured by the French, the Americans even continued with this provision of supplies well into 1946 – hardly the action of a nation with the vindictive intention of starving a defeated enemy.
²⁰

At least half a million, but perhaps as many as a million, German troops were unfortunate enough to suffer the undoubted privations and horrors of these improvised open-air camps. As for how many died in total? The general figure estimated is usually around 1 per cent, but plausible estimates up to 5 per cent have been made.
²¹
Particularly if the latter figure is more accurate, this was much higher than it should have been, and a stain on America’s reputation.

All the same, to give some idea of how much of an anomaly the Rhine Meadows cages represented, these are the generally accepted mortality rates for soldiers taken prisoner, nation by nation, during the Second World War:

Since the mortality rates for German POWs sent to camps in America (a total of 380,000) amounted to no more than 0.02 per cent
²³
(one in five hundred – less than the rate for the equivalent civilian age group within Germany itself), it is not hard to see that fatalities ascribed to the Rhine Meadow cages were, relatively speaking, strongly disproportionate, especially since they existed for a space of just three to four months – but they were much less lethal than falling into Russian, Yugoslav, Polish or even French hands.

The almost equally significant point about the Rhine cages was, in fact, political. What happened there went, for a start, completely against what Allied propaganda had said would happen when encouraging German troops to surrender. The leaflets dropped over German lines in the previous weeks and months were often made up as official-looking ‘safe conducts’ (
Passierscheine
), which seemed to entitle the surrendering German soldier to some kind of guaranteed special treatment. They varied slightly in details, but the leaflet numbered ZG61 was typical. The Allies printed 67,345,800 of this one, and dropped 65,750,000. Tens of millions of other forms of the
Passierschein
were also
dropped between D-Day and April 1945.

The leaflet, impressively printed in either red or green, bore the name and facsimile signature of General Eisenhower and instructions addressed to American troops: ‘The German soldier who carries this safe conduct is using it as a sign of his genuine wish to give himself up. He is to be disarmed, to be well looked after, to receive food and medical attention as required and to be removed from the danger zone as soon as possible.’
The text on the reverse featured prominently the ‘Basic Principles of International Law regarding Prisoners of War’:

BASIC PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW REGARDING PRISONERS OF WAR

(According to the Hague Convention, 1907, and the Geneva Convention, 1929)

1. From the moment of surrender, German soldiers are regarded as P.O.W.s and come under the protection of the Geneva Convention. Accordingly, their military honour is fully respected.

2. P.O.W.s must be taken to assembly points as soon as possible, which are far enough from the danger zone to safeguard their personal security.

3. P.O.W.s receive the same rations, qualitatively and quantitatively, as members of the Allied armies, and, if sick or wounded, are treated in the same hospitals as Allied troops.

4. Decorations and valuables are to be left with the P.O.W.s. Money may be taken only by officers of the assembly points and receipts must be given.

5. Sleeping quarters, accommodation, bunks and other installations in P.O.W. camps must be equal to those of Allied garrison troops.

6. According to the Geneva Convention, P.O.W.s must not become subject of reprisals nor be exposed to public curiosity. After the end of the war they must be sent home as soon as possible.

Soldiers in the meaning of the Hague Convention (IV, 1907) are: All armed persons, who wear uniforms or any insignias which can be recognized from a distance.

RULES FOR SURRENDER

To prevent misunderstanding when surrendering, the following procedure is advisable: Lay down arms, take off helmet and belt, raise your hands and wave a handkerchief or this leaflet.

A bilingual version, with a French translation of the ‘safe conduct’ instruction, was dropped over areas of the front where Free French forces were serving.
²⁴

The clash between brute realism, not to mention cynicism, and the letter of the Geneva and Hague conventions, applied to the Allies’ handling of the defeated civilian population as well as the military. If anyone in Germany had expected the arrival of the Allies to bring not just an end to violence but a rapid improvement in the supply of food, fuel and other necessities, they were to be terribly disappointed. That disappointment was to last not months but years.

Part of the problem was certainly dislike and vindictiveness on the part of victors against vanquished – that silent but eloquent language of enforced deprivation – of that there can be little doubt. Most of the shortages, economic sclerosis and mass suffering, were, however, probably inevitable. If the Allies had treated the Germans no differently from the other ‘liberated’ nations of Europe – they could not possibly have treated them
better
, by any rational measure – would the country’s and the people’s experience in the immediate post-war period have been less gruelling? The question is hard to answer, but worth considering.

And then, of course, there were the political consequences. Just as many German soldiers – but by no means all – felt themselves to be victims of American brutality in the Rhine Meadows cages and similar camps, so, in short order, millions of German civilians inevitably developed a strong sense of victimhood, arising from their suffering during the Allied invasion of Germany and the consequent months and years. Years of punishment, and, as many saw it, unjust persecution.

The massive bombing of German cities and, in the last phase of the war, the destruction of the country’s transport system and other infrastructure by bombing and strafing, had helped spread war weariness among the civilian population. It had also created a lasting reservoir of resentment and defiance that carried on into the post-war years. The Allies accused the German nation of atrocities, but what about their own?

In mid-May 1945, the stalwartly anti-Nazi (though socially conservative) Tilli Wolff-Mönckeberg, for instance, complained not just about the pettifogging arrogance of the British after they captured her native Hamburg, but their hypocrisy in:

. . . proclaiming to the whole world that only Germany could have sunk so low in such abysmal cruelty and bestiality, that they themselves are pure and beyond reproach. And
who
destroyed our beautiful cities, regardless of human life, of women, children or old people?
Who
poured down poisonous phosphorous during the terror raids on unfortunate fugitives, driving them like living torches into the rivers?
Who
dive-bombed harmless peasants, women and children, in low-level attacks, and machine-gunned the defenceless population?
Who
was it, I ask you? We are all the same, all equally guilty . . .
²⁵

Similar attitudes were widespread, and became even more so when the Allies’ less-than-perfect wartime behaviour was followed by equally, if not more, flawed attitudes and actions after peace broke out and they had the whole of Germany to rule.

Fritz Mann, the German POW who had chronicled first the privations of the Gummersbach valley camp and then the Remagen-Sinzig cage, had helped conquer thousands of square miles of Europe and Eurasia, and had been part of the occupation force in Holland, France, Poland, the Balkans and Russia, with all that implied.

Nevertheless, like Tilli Wolff-Mönckeberg, Mann resented the Allied assumptions of superiority. He saw himself and most of his fellow Germans as victims, equal in this respect to the formerly Nazi-occupied populations and the DPs. His dreadful experiences at the Americans’ hands in the Rhine cages merely confirmed him in this view. Finally released in July 1945, one of the lucky ones not handed over to the French for forced reconstruction labour, he hitched a lift in an American jeep that was headed for his home town. His benefactors were three American soldiers and an older American woman in uniform, who spoke some German. Having casually discussed his experiences in the Rhine Meadows – which he is keen to tell us they did not believe – and the extent of his ‘travels’ with the Wehrmacht before that, they arrive on the shattered outskirts of his home city, known in the text only as ‘F’. The woman gestures at the shattered ruins: