The Second World War (125 page)

Germans retreating from Belorussia after the collapse of Army Group Centre had few illusions about the fate of civilians who had been friendly to them. A medical Obergefreiter who had escaped just in time to avoid encirclement wondered: ‘
What will have happened
to the poor people who had to stay behind, by that I mean the locals?’ German soldiers knew well that the NKVD and SMERSh would arrive just behind the fighting troops to interrogate civilians to see who had collaborated.

During the Soviet advance into Romania, an officer recorded that the company had consisted almost entirely of Ukrainian peasants from the regions that had been under the ‘temporary occupation’ of the enemy. ‘
Most of them had no desire
to fight and had to be forced to do this. I remember walking through the trench. Everybody was digging except for one soldier who was supposed to be digging the fire position for the Maxim. He was standing there doing nothing. I asked him what the matter was. He fell on his knees in front of me and began to whine: “Have mercy on me! I’ve got three kids. I want to live!” What could I say? All of us understood that an infantry soldier at the front had only two possible fates: to the hospital, or to the grave.’ This officer, like most in the Red Army, was convinced that successful companies depended entirely on a core of Russian or Siberian soldiers. ‘I would always select a couple of men from among the reliable Russian soldiers before an attack, and when the company got up to attack these soldiers would stay in the trench and kick out all those who were trying to hide and avoid going forward.’

Well to the rear, vengeance on a mass scale was being carried out against ethnic minorities who had welcomed the Germans in 1941 and 1942. In December 1943, Beria had deported 200,000 Crimean Tatars to Uzbeki-stan. Some 20,000 of these Muslims had served in German uniform so the remaining 90 per cent had to suffer, although many others had fought well
in the Red Army. They had been rounded up on 18 May and given no time to prepare. Some 7,000 died on the journey and many times that number died in exile through starvation. Some 390,000 Chechens were also rounded up, and delivered to railheads in Lend–Lease Studebaker trucks intended for the Red Army. Some 78,000 of them are said to have died on the journey. Stalin had started with his own peoples before he began on his enemies and the Poles, who were allies, at least in theory.

Stalin and his generals were uneasy about the fighting qualities of the new intakes because German resistance was stiffening. In the battles for the Carpathian mountain range to defend eastern Hungary and Slovakia, the troops of Hitler’s last ally surprised Soviet veterans, especially after the sudden collapse of the Romanian army. ‘
The Hungarians were actually
a big problem for us in Transylvania,’ a Red Army officer recorded. ‘They fought with great courage to the last bullet and the last man. They would never surrender.’

Malinovsky, with his reinforced 2nd Ukrainian Front, tried to conduct a large encirclement in eastern Hungary. In what was called the Debrecen Operation, a bold strike which began on 6 October was thwarted by a counter-attack two weeks later with III Panzer Corps and XVII Corps. Malinovsky, on Stavka urging, launched another attack to the south near Szeged and towards Budapest, breaking through the Hungarian Third Army. But Malinovsky’s considerable forces were halted short of the capital by another counter-attack with three panzer divisions and the Panzergrenadier Division
Feldherrnhalle
. It became increasingly clear that the battle for Budapest would become one of the most violent of the war.

Following the defections of Romania and Bulgaria, Admiral Horthy, the Regent of Hungary, made secret contacts with the Soviet Union. Molotov demanded that Hungary should immediately declare war on Germany. On 11 October, Horthy’s representatives signed the agreement in Moscow. Four days later, Horthy informed the German envoy in Budapest and made an announcement of the armistice in a broadcast. The Germans, already informed of Horthy’s moves, reacted quickly. On Hitler’s orders, Otto Skorzeny, the SS commando leader who had rescued Mussolini, had already prepared to seize Horthy in his residence, the Citadel, which overlooked the Danube. The Germans would replace him with Ferenc Szálasi, the ferociously anti-semitic leader of the Nazi-inspired Arrow Cross movement.

Operation Panzerfaust, as it was called, would be overseen by Obergruppenführer von dem Bach-Zelewski, who had just finished his murderous task in Warsaw. Skorzeny persuaded Bach-Zelewski not to repeat the same heavy-handed tactics, and avoid smashing the Citadel into submission.
Instead, on the morning of 15 October, just before Horthy’s announcement of the armistice, Skorzeny’s SS commandos managed to kidnap Horthy’s son in a street ambush after a shoot-out with his bodyguards. Miklós Horthy was trussed up, flown to Vienna and transferred to Mauthausen concentration camp, which already contained such
Prominenten
as Francisco Largo Caballero, the former prime minister of the Spanish Republic.

Horthy was told bluntly that, if he persisted with his ‘treason’, his son would be executed. The admiral, although in a state of nervous collapse at the threat, went ahead with his broadcast. Arrow Cross stormtroopers seized the building immediately afterwards and put out a denial, insisting on Hungary’s determination to fight on. Ferenc Szálasi took power later that afternoon. Horthy was given little option. He was brought back to Germany in protective custody.

Horthy had put a stop to Eichmann’s deportation of Jews in the summer, by which time 437,402 had been killed, mostly at Auschwitz. But even though Himmler was halting the mass extermination programme with the approach of the Red Army, the remaining Jews were rounded up for slave labour and forced to march to Germany because of a lack of rolling stock. Tormented, beaten and clubbed to death by SS and Arrow Cross guards, many thousands died on the way. Although Szálasi stopped these death marches in November, more than 60,000 Jews remained prisoners in a tiny ghetto in Budapest. Most of his followers were now determined to embark on their own ‘Final Solution to the Jewish question’. The notorious Arrow Cross activist Father Alfréd Kun, who later admitted to 500 murders, used to give the command: ‘
In the name of Christ–Fire
!’

Arrow Cross militia, some of them aged from fourteen to sixteen years old, would seize groups of Jews from the ghetto, force them to strip to their underclothes and march them barefoot through the freezing streets to the Danube embankments of the city for execution. In many cases, their firing was so inaccurate that a number of victims managed to jump into the icy river and swim away. On one occasion a German officer halted a mass killing and sent the Jews home, but this was probably no more than a temporary reprieve.

Although some NCOs of the Hungarian Gendarmerie joined the 4,000 Arrow Cross militiamen in torturing and murdering Jews, others helped them. There were even a few members of the Arrow Cross itself who helped Jews escape, proving that one can never make sweeping generalizations. The efforts of one of them, Dr Ara Jerezian, later received full acknowledgement from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel.

The greatest operation to save Jews was mounted by the Swede Raoul Wallenberg who, despite having no more than semi-official status in Hungary, issued tens of thousands of documents stating that the bearer
was under the protection of the Swedish government. Later, during the siege, the Arrow Cross invaded the Swedish embassy and murdered several of its staff in revenge for their activities. Along with the Swedes, the Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, the Portuguese diplomat Carlos Branquinho, the International Red Cross and the papal nuncio issued their own protection papers to help other Hungarian Jews escape.

The embassies of El Salvador and Nicaragua provided several hundred certificates of citizenship, but the most extraordinary bluff emerged from the Spanish embassy. The Spanish chargé d’affaires, Angel Sanz-Briz, knew that the Szálasi regime was desperate to be recognized by his government. He encouraged its members in this illusion, while taking on the Arrow Cross even more robustly than the Swedish embassy. Sanz-Briz was forced to leave, but he handed over to a new ‘chargé d’affaires’, Giorgio Perlasca, who was in fact an Italian anti-Fascist. Perlasca assembled 5,000 Jews in safe houses under Spanish protection, while Franco’s government in Madrid had no idea of what was being done in its name. An even braver confidence trick was carried out by Miksa Domonkos, a member of the Jewish Council, who forged safe conducts in the name of a superintendent of Gendarmerie. All these
attempts to save
lives took on a greater urgency as the Red Army advanced on Budapest, and the Arrow Cross became more deadly.

On 18 October, just as the First Army was securing Aachen, Eisenhower presided over a conference to discuss strategic options in Brussels at 21st Army Group headquarters. This was rather a pointed choice of location, since Montgomery had angered his American colleagues by failing to attend the previous one on 22 September at SHAEF headquarters in Versailles. He had sent in his place Lieutenant General Freddy de Guingand, his much liked chief of staff and ‘genial peacemaker’ as Bradley put it. This time Monty could not avoid attending.

One option was to sit out the winter, waiting until more divisions arrived from the United States and a good reserve of supplies built up, having arrived through Antwerp once it was open. The other was to launch a major offensive in November using the resources available. Inaction in the west was unthinkable simply because of what Stalin would say about the Allies’ reluctance to fight. Montgomery’s renewed argument for a major push north of the Ruhr was again overruled. Eisenhower, strongly backed by Bradley, wanted a double thrust, with First and Ninth Armies on the northern side, and Patton’s Third Army attacking in the Saar. Montgomery was told to swing south from Nijmegen between the Rhine and the Maas. This concentration of forces north and south of the Ardennes would leave a very weakly held sector in the middle. To cover this part of the front,
Bradley brought in Major General Troy Middleton’s VIII Corps, which had been finishing off in Brittany.

Aachen itself was not cleared until the end of the third week in October. On 30 October,
Cologne
received a virtual coup de grâce from Harris’s bombers in another heavy raid. The destruction of the Reichsbahn meant that there were insufficient trains to evacuate those left in the ruins. The city then saw the only example of civilian armed resistance against the Nazis, when Communists and foreign workers seized weapons from isolated policemen. Fighting an urban guerrilla war, they attacked the police and even managed to kill the local head of the Gestapo, until a vicious retaliation wiped them out.

Allied bombing intensified. The RAF and USAAF no longer had a great deal to fear from the Luftwaffe, although Spaatz was worried that the new Me 262 jet fighters would suddenly appear and blast his bombers from the sky. Approximately
60 per cent of all the bombs dropped on Germany
fell in the last nine months of the war. Hitler’s armaments minister Albert Speer acknowledged that the damage to Germany’s economic infrastructure ‘
only became insurmountable
during the autumn of 1944, largely as a consequence of the systematic destruction of the transport and communications network through a relentless Allied bombing campaign that had begun in October’. And despite Harris’s scepticism, Spaatz’s oil plan against refineries and benzol plants was also having a marked effect on Wehrmacht operations, especially the Luftwaffe’s. Only arms production held up, largely thanks to Speer’s energy and talents.

In fact Harris’s determination to keep bombing the Ruhr, an area target, also succeeded in knocking out so many benzol plants there that there were none left in operation by November. The difference between the strategy of the RAF and the American Eighth Air Force was more one of presentation than effect. While the USAAF always defined its operations as precision bombing, the reality was very different. ‘Marshalling yards’ given as a target was really a euphemism for hitting the whole of the adjacent city. Largely because of the bad visibility during winter months, more than 70 per cent of Eighth Air Force bombs were delivered ‘blind’, almost exactly the same as Bomber Command. Harris simply made no bones about bombing cities, and despised anybody who was squeamish on the subject. Where he was proved totally wrong was in his repeated claims that bombing alone could end the war.

Since the dark days of 1942, Britain had invested so much in Bomber Command, financially, industrially and in sacrificed lives, to create this bludgeon that an almost unstoppable momentum had developed. It continued even though many of its attacks towards the end of the war bore little military logic, let alone moral justification. The obsessive Harris had
made it a point of honour that no German city or town of any size should be left standing by the time the war ended. On 27 November, Freiburg on the edge of the Black Forest was bombed, leaving 3,000 dead and the medieval city centre destroyed. It was a communications centre behind the front and thus a legitimate target under the original Pointblank directive, but whether it shortened the war by a day, by an hour or a single minute is far from certain.

Like the concentrated use of artillery, bombing revealed a disconcerting paradox about democracies. Because of intense pressure at home, in the press and from public opinion, commanders were compelled to minimize their own losses. And so they resorted to the maximum application of high explosive, which inevitably killed more civilians. Many Germans cried to the heavens for vengeance. The V-1 had not brought Britain to its knees, the V-2 did not appear to be changing the course of the war either, so rumours were spread of a V-3. ‘
The prayer for our Führer
and the people is also a weapon,’ wrote a woman. ‘The Lord God cannot abandon our Führer.’

On 8 November General Patton, refusing to wait any longer for the weather to improve, began the Third Army’s offensive in the Saar without air support. ‘
At 05.15, the artillery preparation
woke me,’ he wrote in his diary that day. ‘The discharge of over 400 guns sounded like the slamming of doors in an empty house.’ His XX Corps began a major assault on the fortress city of Metz. The sky cleared and the fighter-bombers went in, but torrential rain had swollen the River Moselle to unprecedented levels. Patton told Bradley how one of his engineer companies had taken two days of frustration and hard work to connect a pontoon bridge across the fast-flowing river. One of the first vehicles across, a tank destroyer, snagged on a cable which then snapped. The bridge broke loose and swung downstream. ‘
The whole damn company
sat down in the mud’, Patton related, ‘and bawled like babies.’