The Second World War (130 page)
German troops looted without compunction, but Allied troops were little better. Sometimes it was justifiable, when soldiers were surrounded without rations, or when they seized blankets for warmth or sheets to act as snow camouflage. But more often it was the cynical opportunism of war. The damage to homes and communities was far worse. The town of St Vith was completely smashed and its survivors, like those of many other towns, were left with nothing.
The Ardennes Offensive constituted a major defeat for the Germans. They lost half their tanks and guns and suffered heavy casualties, with 12,652 killed, 38,600 wounded and 30,000 missing, most of whom were taken prisoner. The Americans in the battle of attrition lost 10,276 men killed, 47,493 wounded and 23,218 missing.
While the suffering of Belgian civilians was great, the majority of the Dutch fared far worse. Even those behind Allied lines were starving, as Canadian, British and American soldiers found from those begging or offering sex for food. The situation was made much worse by the flooding of arable land after dykes were destroyed as a defensive measure.
The Dutch north of the River Maas would remain under German control until the end of the war, in the grip of a famine exacerbated by their occupiers. When railwaymen went on strike to help the Allies at the time of Operation Market Garden, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian who headed the Reichskommissariat Niederlande, stopped the import of any food as a reprisal. The population was reduced to eating tulip bulbs and any sugar beet which the Germans had not taken. Children were paralysed by rickets, and malnutrition exposed everyone to disease, especially typhoid and diphtheria. Seyss-Inquart had achieved a reputation for brutality in Poland before he arrived
in Holland
just after its conquest in May 1940. After Greece, Holland was the most comprehensively looted country in western Europe. Already by October 1944, it had become clear that a man-made disaster was taking place.
The Dutch government-in-exile approached Churchill with a request that Sweden be allowed to send in food, but the prime minister was firmly opposed. He believed that the Germans would simply seize it for themselves. Both Eisenhower and the British chiefs of staff felt that this risk should be taken, and during the winter the Swedes delivered 20,000 tons of food by ship to Amsterdam. This effort kept many alive who would have otherwise starved to death, but it only scratched at the surface of the problem. The British chiefs of staff, although sympathetic, were not prepared to stop mining the German coast and allow free passage through the Kiel Canal.
Queen Wilhelmina, desperate to help her starving people, lobbied
Roosevelt and Churchill. She requested that, to avoid a colossal humanitarian disaster, Allied strategy should be changed, with an invasion of northern Holland instead of focusing on the Ruhr. But with large German forces which were likely to fight to the end, and which would probably flood even more of the country, it was decided that this would delay the defeat of Germany.
Finally, in April 1945, Churchill was sufficiently alarmed by reports of the radicalization of the Dutch population under Communist influence to press for all-out relief. The Germans would be warned that any attempt to stop or divert food supplies sent by ship or airdropped in northern Holland would be treated as a war crime. Roosevelt agreed, just two days before he died. But, by the time relief arrived, at least 22,000 Dutch civilians had died of starvation. The figure was probably far higher, if lack of resistance to disease is also taken into account.
That winter of snow, frost and waterlogged trenches was also terrible for Allied troops, even though they did not suffer from hunger. Exposure and trench foot accounted for almost as many casualties as enemy action. The Canadian First Army, after its very nasty time clearing the Scheldt estuary, found winter along the Maas almost as unpleasant and deadly, with the Germans defending dykes which were three to four metres high. ‘
For the attacking Canadians
the only other approach was across the sunken fields between the dykes “flat as the local beer” as one artillery punster put it. There really was no protection at all.’
Canadian units were dangerously under-strength because Mackenzie King’s government did not dare send soldiers abroad to fight against their will. The equivalent of five divisions remained in Canada guarding German prisoners of war, and little else. This of course provoked great resentment among those Canadian volunteers who shivered through that winter of mud and ice, the wettest since 1864. Sodden battledress and webbing equipment never dried out, boots simply rotted. Living conditions were unutterably squalid, as the stationary armies fouled their own nests and the countryside behind.
The morale of British troops was also low, partly out of war-weariness, cynicism and a desire not to be killed when the end was in sight. Desertion had become a major problem, with some 20,000 men absent from their units. Persuading soldiers to attack became increasingly difficult, especially when Student’s First Paratroop Army fought with such professionalism and aggression. Senior officers were all too aware of their own manpower problems, which although not as acute as those in Canadian formations were still grave enough. The Americans were scornful of the British reluctance to take casualties, while the British, like the Germans, criticized the Americans for refusing to undertake any attack without a
huge expenditure of shells first. But British infantry were also unwilling to advance without heavy gunfire in support. In fact all the Allies, both in the west and in the east, had developed a ‘
psychological dependence upon
artillery and air power’ the longer the war went on.
JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1945
I
n the first years of the war, whether in France in 1940 or in the Soviet Union a year later, many German soldiers wrote home: ‘
Thank God that
the war is not raging in our homeland.’ By January 1945, it had become abundantly clear that the onslaught which the Wehrmacht had inflicted on other countries was about to fall on their own. Hitler’s New Year broadcast lifted few spirits. He made no mention of the Ardennes, which indicated that the great offensive had failed. And little was said of the
Wunderwaffen
, that staple of Nazi attempts to maintain hope in the face of reality. Hitler’s delivery was so flat that many Germans thought that it had been pre-recorded or even faked. Deprived of reliable news, rumours of disaster increased.
Although Guderian, the army chief of staff, tried to warn Hitler of the impending explosion of the eastern front along the Vistula and into East Prussia, the Führer would not listen. He dismissed intelligence estimates of Soviet strength, which for once were quite accurate. From the Baltic to the Adriatic, the Red Army deployed 6.7 million men, more than twice the Axis forces in Operation Barbarossa.
Hitler’s most immediate concern was the Budapest and Lake Balaton front. Even with the threat from the east, every situation conference at his headquarters began with Hungary. Tolbukhin’s 3rd Ukrainian Front, under heavy pressure from Stalin, threw wave after wave of men against the defences south of Budapest. Stalin was determined that Churchill’s proposal in October to share influence in Hungary ‘50–50’ should be made redundant by force of arms.
A Hungarian officer described the dead Soviet soldiers mown down on a barbed-wire entanglement. One was still just alive. ‘
The young soldier
, with his shaven head and Mongolian cheekbones, is lying on his back. Only his mouth is moving. Both legs and lower arms are missing. The stumps are covered in a thick layer of soil, mixed with blood and leaf mould. I bend down close to him. “Budapesst… Budapesst,” he whispers in the throes of death. In my head one thought revolves: he may be having a vision of “Budapesst” as a city of rich spoils and beautiful women. Then, surprising even myself, I pull out my pistol, load it, press it against the dying man’s temple, and fire.’ But despite the countless casualties they
inflicted, the Germans and Hungarians knew they could not hold back the enemy flood.
Szálasi, the Arrow Cross dictator who replaced Admiral Horthy, had wanted to withdraw and declare Budapest an open city, but Hitler, who never wanted to abandon a capital city, had insisted that it be defended to the end. Szálasi’s main concern, however, was not so much to save the city as to avoid being stabbed in the back by a disloyal population. The German commander, Generaloberst Hans Friessner, who shared his concerns, called in an expert on counter-subversion in the form of SS Obergruppenführer Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch. The Hungarian general staff were not consulted, despite all previous agreements, and they were treated in an insultingly off-hand manner.
Hitler’s special envoy, Edmund Veesenmayer, insisted on the Führer’s instruction that Budapest should be defended to the last brick. It did not matter, he said, if Budapest was ‘
destroyed ten times
, so long as Vienna could thereby be defended’. Friessner, however, wanted to withdraw from Pest on the flat eastern bank of the Danube to defend Buda, with its hills and fortress high on the west bank. Hitler firmly refused. He replaced Friessner with General der Panzertruppen Hermann Balck.
Many citizens in Budapest had no idea that the city was in such danger. Radio Budapest had been playing Christmas carols for the last week as if nothing were amiss. Christmas trees were decorated with aluminium foil strips of ‘Window’ dropped by Allied bombers, while theatres and cinemas continued with performances as normal. On 26 December 1944, Budapest was surrounded. Forces from the 3rd Ukrainian Front had also reached beyond Lake Balaton to the south-west and to the city of Esztergom to the north-west. Altogether, 79,000 German and Hungarian troops were trapped in the twin cities of Buda on the west bank of the Danube and Pest on the east. German formations included the 8th
Florian Geyer
and 22nd
Maria Theresia
SS Cavalry Divisions, the Panzergrenadier Division
Feldherrnhalle
, the 13th Panzer Division and a lot of remnants, with even a punishment unit, the 500th Strafbataillon.
Hitler had reacted to the crisis on Christmas Day. The Hungarian oilfields offered his last source of fuel. So, to Guderian’s despair, he ordered the IV SS Panzer Corps, with the
Totenkopf
and
Wiking
Divisions, to re-deploy from north of Warsaw to break the encirclement.
In Pest, chaos ensued as soon as fighting began in the suburbs. Thousands of civilians tried to break out before it was too late, and many were caught in the crossfire. For the 50,000 Jews still in Budapest, the arrival of the Red Army promised deliverance, but few would survive even though Adolf Eichmann had flown out of the city on 23 December. No provision had been made for any of the civilian population. Soon people were
begging at army field kitchens. There was no water, gas or electricity. The lack of water led to a dangerous squalor as sewers became blocked.
Hungarian students and even schoolboys volunteered or were drafted into improvised units, such as the University Assault Battalion. But, apart from Panzerfaust rocket-propelled grenades, they had few weapons. Most hated the fascist Arrow Cross, many of whose members had fled, yet they could not bear to see their city fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks. At the same time, an increasing number of Hungarian regular army officers and soldiers began to defect to the Soviet side. Many were incorporated into Red Army companies, and in one case a whole battalion fought with the Soviets. To identify them as allies, they received armbands and cap-bands made out of strips from the red parachute silk taken from German ammunition containers.
Although many of the Arrow Cross had fled the city before the encirclement, 2,000 of their fanatical paramilitaries remained. These volunteers appeared to spend more time killing the Jews still in the city than fighting the enemy. Surprisingly, SS Obergruppenführer Pfeffer-Wildenbruch forbade German soldiers from participating in the killings, although other senior German officials welcomed the fact that Hungarians were taking on the task with brutal enthusiasm. An increasing number of starving Jews resorted to suicide. In the first week of January 1945, the Arrow Cross seized a number of Jews under Swedish protection on the grounds that, since the government in Stockholm did not recognize the Szálasi regime, they did not accept the documents issued in its name. The Arrow Cross rounded up these Jews, beat them senseless and later took them in groups to the Danube Embankment for execution.
On 14 January, Father Kun took a band of Arrow Cross to the Jewish hospital in Buda. They slaughtered patients, nurses and everyone else they found there, a total of 170 people. They carried out other mass killings, including even Hungarian officers who had opposed them. Apparently, a number of Father Kun’s gang raped some nuns.
On hearing of an Arrow Cross plan to attack the ghetto in Pest, Raoul Wallenberg sent a message to Generalmajor Gerhard Schmidhuber, the German commander, that he would be held responsible if he did not prevent the massacre. Schmidhuber sent Wehrmacht troops into the ghetto to forestall the Arrow Cross. A few days later, the ghetto was overrun by the Red Army.