The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (29 page)

five percent of the town was destroyed during this fighting, and tens of thousands of civilians were killed.

Hans Graf von Lehndorff was a surgeon from Inster- burg who had fled into Königsberg in January, and worked in a city hospital during the siege. The first days of the Russian arrival in April were worse than anything he had witnessed during the prolonged bombing and shelling of the city. His first glimpse of the invaders was on April 9, when he beheld a group of crouched soldiers “rummaging in a trunk. There was something frightening about the sight. I felt like some- one who had gone bear hunting and forgotten his gun.” Von Lehndorff, like so many of his countrymen, limned the Russians in bestial terms: bears, hyenas, baboons, or rats. “An attempt by my companion to talk to them had no effect. They reacted with short, growling noises and carried on their work [of looting] methodically…. My fountain pen vanished, money and papers flew all over the place. My shoes were too worn for them. They hurried away with a short-legged gait over ruins and through bomb craters to the other blocks and disap- peared in the doorways. Their way of moving with a set purpose was bewildering: if the situation demanded it, they used their hands and ran on all fours.” A fantasti- cal image of ape-men, on the rampage.

In Lehndorff’s hospital, the looting and raping that fol- lowed did exceed all imaginings. Soldiers descended on the hospital’s storeroom, and thoroughly destroyed its valuable contents. Patients on their cots were searched, prodded, some were raped. The nurses took refuge in the operating room, pretending to be en- gaged in delicate operations; it did them no good, as they were dragged away to suffer the now-inevitable gang rape. The arrival of Russian officers in the hospi- tal did nothing to stay the savagery: they happily joined in the raping, and dragged shrieking nurses along the corridors. “ What is it we are witnessing here?” von Lehndorff asked himself. “Is it not the animal reveng- ing itself on the human?…Moreover, this dull, growl- ing speech, from which the world seemed to have with- drawn itself long ago; and these maddened youngsters, fifteen and sixteen-year-olds, flinging themselves like wolves on the women without really knowing what it is all about.” When the soldiers discovered a menthol liqueur factory next door to the hospital, events took a turn for the worse. The alcohol stirred the men to new extremes: “Now something like a tide of rats flowed over us, worse than all the plagues of Egypt togeth- er.” The looting was now joined with wanton murder, while “on all sides, we heard the desperate screams of women: ‘Shoot me then! Shoot me!’ But the tormentors preferred a wrestling match to any actual use of their

guns. Soon, none of the women had any strength left to resist.”
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Variations on these scenes occurred across eastern Germany in the spring of 1945, triggering a gigantic outflow of Germans. About two million people fled the Red Army from East Prussia; 800,000 fled East Pomer- ania, 300,000 fled Brandenburg, a staggering three million people fled out of Silesia, over 200,000 fled the city of Danzig, and an additional one million Germans fled from their homes in occupied Poland.
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Between January and April, an exodus of truly biblical propor- tions occurred in eastern Germany that saw the mass migration of some seven and a half million people. In due course, as these lands became incorporated into Polish territory by the terms so breezily worked out by the great powers, those Germans who remained be- hind, perhaps five million people, faced intimidation, beatings, murder, and violence from Polish authorities and citizens. By 1950, there would be few signs left that these lands had ever been the home of twelve million Germans.

The brutality visited upon the Germans was by no means limited to the territory that was already assigned to fall under Polish control. As the Red Army fought its way, with extraordinary exertions, into the capital city of the

Third Reich, conquering soldiers continued their bar- baric, atavistic behavior. In Berlin, which was encircled by mid-April, Hitler shot himself in his bunker on April 30; aboveground, his people endured the arrival of the conquerors. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, the Berliner who had hoped that the end of the war might “liberate” Germany from the Nazis, recalled the fear triggered by Russian behavior:

These days have become dangerous to many. Panic prevails in the city. Dismay and terror. Wherever we go, there is pillaging, looting, violence. With unrestrained sexual lust our conqueror’s army has flung itself upon the women of Berlin.

We visit Hannelore Thiele, Heike’s friend and class- mate. She sits huddled on her couch. “One ought to kill oneself,” she moans. “ This is no way to live.” She covers her face with her hands and starts to cry. It is terrible to see her swollen eyes, terrible to look at her disfigured features.

“ Was it really that bad?” I ask.

She looks at me pitifully. “Seven,” she says. “Seven in a row. Like animals.”

Inge Zaun lives in Klein-Machnow. She is eighteen

years old and didn’t know anything about love. Now she knows everything. Over and over again, sixty times.

“How can you defend yourself?” she says impassively, almost indifferently. “ When they pound at the door and fire their guns senselessly. Each night a new one, each night others. The first time when they took me and forced my father to watch, I thought I would die.”

…” They rape our daughters, they rape our wives,” the men lament. “Not just once, but six times, ten times and twenty times.” There is no other talk in the city. No other thought either. Suicide is in the air….

“Honor lost, all lost,” a bewildered father says and hands a rope to his daughter who has been raped twelve times. Obediently she goes and hangs herself from the nearest window sash.
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For Germans, this widespread sexual violence came to serve as a sort of explanatory framework for their sto- ry of the Second World War. In West Germany, where millions of refugees finally found shelter and an end to their treks, it became common to argue that these events in the spring of 1945 somehow served to balance out the books: Germans had been cruel, this argument ran, but they had been victims as well. They had been

victims of a rampaging Asiatic army and a vile alien ideology. Even Germans who later accepted some de- gree of responsibility for Hitler’s atrocities could point to these travails of the spring of 1945 as if to say, we have paid our debt. Such claims have found little sym- pathy among Germany’s former victims. The atrocities of the Red Army can in no way be used to lessen the burden of guilt shared by all those millions of Germans who had applauded Hitler’s rise, spurred on the Ger- man conquest of the east, and sneered as millions were sent to the crematoria.
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Yet for all the later unseemly debates about victim- hood and the moral authority it bestows, the suffering of countless women in eastern Germany in 1945 was real enough. For them, the end of the war brought on a catastrophe so great, so unseemly, that it could only be met with a search for transcendence, withdrawal, or even death. An anonymous diarist in Berlin who wrote one of the most searing, terrible accounts of the abusive Russian treatment of German women had a “strange vision” one morning, while lying on her bat- tered, broken bedstead, in the room where she had been raped the night before. Her vision might stand as an epitaph for the millions of women who fell prey to these violent assaults.

It was as if I were flat on my bed and seeing myself lying there when a luminous white being rose from my body, a kind of angel, but without wings, that floated high into the air. Even now, as I’m writing this, I can still feel that sense of rising up and floating. Of course, it’s just fantasy, a pipe dream, a means of escape—my true self leaving my body behind, my poor, besmirched, abused body. Breaking away and floating off, unblemished, into a white beyond.
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5: A Strange, Enemy Country: America’s Germany

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GERMANY WILL NOT be occupied for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation.” This statement, made in the September 1944 directive

on the occupation of Germany to General Eisenhower by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, unambiguously asserted America’s intentions. “ Your aim is not oppression, but to prevent Germany from ever again becoming a threat to the peace of the world,” the directive continued. The occupation authorities must carry themselves like vic- tors: “ Your occupation and administration will be just, but firm and distant. You will strongly discourage frat- ernization between Allied troops and the German offi- cials and population.” Above all, Eisenhower was told, he would have supreme power to act in Germany as he saw fit. In a curious turn of phrase that suggests im- perial robes, the Joint Chiefs told Eisenhower he was “clothed with supreme legislative, executive and ju- dicial authority in the areas occupied by forces under your command.”
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Rarely if ever had a single American held so much power over so many millions of people as General Eisenhower was granted on the eve of Ameri- ca’s entry into Germany.

It had not been easy for American officials to draw up

this directive. Before D-Day, President Roosevelt had shown a maddening indifference toward the details of American occupation policy, and generally delegated the problem to his feuding cabinet officers and the lower echelons of the military. He even said, as late as October 1944 when American soldiers were already on German soil, “I dislike making detailed plans for a country which we do not yet occupy.”
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Such prevarica- tion opened the door to the machinations of his head- strong subordinates. Henry Morgenthau, the Treasury secretary, an old friend and neighbor of FDR’s from the clubby world of Dutchess County, New York, politics, made the best of the opportunity. Since 1943, Morgen- thau, unique among Roosevelt’s senior staff, had been pushing the president to adopt a more robust public criticism of Nazi Germany’s treatment of European Jews, and he had called, not very successfully, for more aggressive efforts to rescue Jewish refugees. By late summer of 1944, consumed with justifiable anger at Germany’s barbaric treatment of European peoples, he became the strongest voice in the cabinet for a severe postwar occupation policy. Evincing little hope that the defeat itself would be sufficient to change the Ger- man character, Morgenthau argued that the only way to halt the revival of postwar German aggression was to hobble permanently the German economy. Using his access and old personal ties to the president, Morgen-

thau in August began a concerted campaign to ensure that the United States publicly committed itself to a se- vere, punitive policy in Germany that would make im- possible any restoration of Germany’s military-indus- trial might. Roosevelt often seemed to be sympathetic to these views: welcoming his old friend back from a European trip, he told Morgenthau that “you either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in such a manner so that they can’t just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.”
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Roosevelt even rebuked Sec- retary of War Henry Stimson when the president got wind of an early draft of the War Department’s occu- pation handbook that was insufficiently harsh on Ger- many. The Germans, Roosevelt told Stimson, would not be treated like the liberated nations, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. “It is of the utmost importance that every person in Germany should realize that this time Germany is a defeated nation. I do not want them to starve to death but, as an example, if they need food to keep body and soul together beyond what they have, they should be fed three times a day with soup from Army soup kitchens. That will keep them perfectly healthy, and they will remember that experience all their lives.” The president concluded in words that re- veal the intensity of his antagonism for Germany at the close of the war: “ Too many people here and in Eng-

land hold the view that the German people as a whole are not responsible for what has taken place—that only a few Nazi leaders are responsible. That unfortunately is not based on fact. The German people as a whole must have it driven home to them that the whole na- tion has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.”
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Despite continued stiff resistance from Henry Stim- son, who was annoyed at Morgenthau’s meddling and opposed his economically suspect ideas, Morgenthau pressed ahead and prepared a detailed plan for the occupation that stressed the deindustrialization of Germany. It was entitled “Program to Prevent Germa- ny from Starting a World War III.” Morgenthau knew that he had an unrivaled opportunity to influence the course of American policy toward Germany, for on Sep- tember 14, he joined President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Quebec, where they had convened two days earlier to discuss problems of the postwar world. He brought a copy of his plan with him and pressed it on Roosevelt. The plan called for the complete demilitarization of Germany, and the destruction of industries “which are basic to military strength.” It urged a policy of territorial dismember- ment, envisioning East Prussia being given to Poland and a smaller chunk of valuable coal mining land in

the Saar given to France. In addition, the remaining German state would be subdivided into two separate states: a northern and a southern portion. The Ruhr and the Rhineland and the industrial cities within that region would be “stripped of all presently existing in- dustries,” with the bulk of industrial equipment being dismantled and shipped to Allied states as reparations. Once denuded, the area would fall under international trusteeship. Germany would be forced to pay Allied na- tions heavy reparations, the country’s assets would be seized, and some Germans would be enrolled in forced labor brigades in neighboring countries. Schools, uni- versities, and media outlets would be closed until en- tirely reformed by Allied occupiers. The Allies would create a political structure for the country that took power away from central government and gave it to the states; and they would not take any steps to restore or revive the German economy. Foreign trade would be strictly controlled and large agricultural states would be subdivided. The Allies would arrest and try war criminals and ban martial parades and uniforms. At Quebec, Morgenthau managed to persuade not only Roosevelt but even Churchill to sign off on the plan’s basic theses.
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