Authors: JOACHIM FEST
Our destination was not, in fact, Paris, but a small place not far from the French capital called Attichy, which at this late stage of the war had acquired some notoriety as an assembly camp for what would soon be hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of war. As we climbed down from the trucks in front of the camp, French civilians pushed toward us from all sides. They spat at us or cheered the women who struck us with their fists, while the American guards formed a cordon to stop the attacks. That was the beginning of the “heroic Resistance,” said one of my neighbors, who, after we had passed through the camp gate, introduced himself as a French teacher from Hanover.
What stays in my mind from Attichy, more than anything else, is Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, which at our arrival thundered from all the loudspeakers, and was still doing so nine days later when we left: day and night without stopping and with an annoying click after the sixty-fourth bar. The music was interrupted for every announcement, after which the gramophone needle was dropped onto the scratchy record again by a half-deaf GI. There was also talk in the camp of an organized squad of “Irreconcilables,” as they called themselves, who quite unceremoniously killed any prisoner who made a disparaging remark about Hitler or the war. The squad would throw him into the huge, open cesspool and push him back into it every time he bobbed up.
Eight days later, shortly before we were moved from Attichy, I got into conversation with a prisoner who had caught my attention, because I thought I knew him. Indeed, it turned out he had belonged to the group from which I had been separated in Landau. I told him about my capture, the deployments from Arnhem to Remagen, and asked whether he knew Reinhold Buck. He said they had not been friends, but that he had admired Buck from a distance. “He was a genius,” he said. “I heard him play furiously and masterfully on the violin.” I asked him why he was using the past tense. “Oh, Buck,” he said, “he’s dead! And if I’m right he was only about two hundred yards away from you when he was dying, a bit to the east of the farmhouse where you were taken prisoner.” When he saw my shock, he went on to say that Buck had bled to death in a two-man foxhole. That’s what was said, anyway. He had been shot through the thigh, no one knew how, and had evidently not known how to apply a tourniquet to the wound. In a leather bag in his trouser pocket they had found a little Beethoven badge.
I was stunned and couldn’t speak, so he tried to say something comforting. “You can be reassured,” he said encouragingly, “I saw it with my own eyes. Buck lay there very peacefully.”
I still remember my reply. “I didn’t want to hear that!” I said. “Buck didn’t want to die. And I didn’t want to hear about his death being peaceful—not someone like him. I’d rather hear how he struggled to tie up his leg to his very last breath.” Until we were moved on, if I found myself anywhere near that prisoner, I avoided him as best I could.
1
The Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD) was a compulsory six-month public service required of all Germans, male and female, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five.
2
The Nazis revived this old term for a local militia, which had not been used in centuries, to designate their final defense “force”; scraping the very bottom of their manpower barrel, it swept up all males between the ages of sixteen (sometimes even younger) and eighty (including older) to make a last stand against the Allied forces, who commanded vastly superior firepower.
3
Seich
is literally “piss,” meaning rubbish, nonsense when applied to speech.
4
This is an example of an important distinction still in existence, even in the officer corps; those with a broad liberal education or
Bildung
set themselves apart from the others, the less educated. They also have more in common with those who have and show
Bildung
than with other members of their own social class.
5
Georg Trakl (1887–1914), a major lyrical talent, was drafted as a military pharmacist in the First World War. He is presumed to have committed suicide after seeing the effects of the war on the battlefield and in a military hospital.
6
Since all civilian means of communication had ceased to exist, these search messages were the only way to find out whether someone was still alive after the bombing raids and evacuations.
7
This is the famous bridge at Remagen which was the only major structure across the Rhine still standing at this point and thus hotly contested by the warring parties; it had the highest strategic value, especially for the Allies.
NINE
•
The Escape
At midnight, after a three-hour drive, the convoy of trucks came to a halt with a squealing of brakes. Glancing out, we saw sheds and warehouses on one side, on the other a large field picked out by gleaming searchlights. About two hundred soldiers, their guns at the ready, were running around in front of the convoy and shouting the already familiar “Come on!,” “Let’s go!,” or “Hurry up!”
We had hardly jumped down when we saw, about thirty yards away, a two-winged gate, the entrance to a broad field surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence. Working under searchlights, a unit of pioneers was engaged in erecting watchtowers at intervals of 150 yards. Then the highest-ranking prisoner, a lieutenant colonel, was summoned to a group of American officers who had arrived shortly before and ordered to lead the almost ten thousand
prisoners into the camp. “Where are the barracks?” asked the staff officer. “Or do you at least have tarpaulins and blankets?” At that a young, wiry American officer pushed to the front and called out in a caustic voice, “This isn’t a hotel!” He waved his submachine gun in the air as he spoke. “But we have the key to lock the gate. Warn your people against trying to escape! Our soldiers have orders to shoot without warning! Do you understand?” The lieutenant colonel raised his hand to his cap and ordered us to march to the barbed-wire gate. The helmeted American soldiers cocked their guns as loudly as they could and stood shoulder to shoulder on both sides.
We stood on the fenced-in piece of land for about six hours until it began to grow light. Thick banks of fog surrounded us and, when they cleared, a flat-topped hill became visible to the west, dominated by a cathedral with three towers. Hardly had the picture taken shape, however, when it disappeared again in the sleet that set in. As far as I remember, it fell on us for almost three days. During this time, hungry and freezing, we measured out the course of the camp streets and dug ditches for the future pipes. We were also divided into companies. Anyone who was recognized as a member of the SS was taken away to a quickly laid-out special camp; there, as if at a command, the arrivals squatted down and stared straight ahead with an expression of defiant sacrifice. Sleet and snow kept falling and at the morning wake-up call the field was strewn with many humped white mounds, which began to move in the dawn light and gradually began to take on human shape.
On the third day a column of trucks drove through the camp gates and at regular intervals bedsteads, blankets, washbowls, and other necessaries were thrown off their backs. Already, by the following day, the shelters for the prisoners had largely been put up and the watchtowers around the camp erected. At the same time we were divided into work parties of varying sizes, each of which had its sphere of activities within the depot. I was assigned to the hall for office supplies, with its tall scaffolds of shelves that carried all kinds of blackboards, typewriters, adding machines, writing implements—more than three thousand different items. In other halls were stored uniforms, vehicle parts, leather gear, and everything needed by an army, with the exception of arms.
On the afternoon of the first day under canvas there was a camp assembly. On the broad middle street between the rows of tents stood the commandant, Captain John F. Donaldson, escorted by the wiry officer with the cutting voice, who introduced himself as Lieutenant Bernard P. Dillon, and a second lieutenant, Charles W. Powers. At a little distance from them First Sergeant Don D. Driffel, First Sergeant John S. Walker, and Sergeant Paul F. Geary, as well as other NCOs and privates, had taken up position. After a short address broadcast over the camp loudspeakers—in which he spoke mainly about work, discipline, and obeying orders—Captain Donaldson inspected some of the ranks. Every twenty yards or so he stopped and addressed a prisoner, with a corporal in his entourage taking notes. As chance had it, the captain also stopped in front of my group and asked
me my age, rank, and where I had been taken prisoner. Before he went on, he instructed his clerk to note everything down.
The next day I was called to the headquarters hut outside the camp gate. On my arrival I found three prisoners who had likewise been summoned by Captain Donaldson. He asked me basically the same questions as during the assembly, only he took much more time and also inquired about my family, my education, and my father’s profession. In the middle of the conversation he interrupted himself and called over an interpreter, because after only one and a half years of school lessons my English was not sufficient for more complicated conversations. When he dismissed me, he advised me to improve my English, because he would like to have me as an assistant at his headquarters. He added something like “Don’t worry, it will all turn out for the best.”
The captain was a tall, elegant man. He was bald and his face was dominated by a twirled mustache to which cream was evidently applied and whose ends came to needle points, giving his appearance an eccentric touch. He clearly attached great importance to measured movements, and his speech, too, sounded altogether refined. At the same time his deep bass testified to a great—almost civilian—warmth. Never, at any rate, did he take advantage of his rank by using a peremptory tone, and there was nothing strained about his authority. He soon displayed a noticeable liking for me and once, after I got into a quite nonsensical argument with him about the admiration of both the Germans and many foreigners
for Hitler, the always anxiously muttering First Sergeant Driffel admonished me not to forget the “paternal affection” that Captain Donaldson felt for me: otherwise, my privileges could come to a rapid end.
As far as personal matters were concerned, Donaldson was altogether discreet, so that in the almost two years in which he was my superior I never found out where he lived or anything about his family or what he did in civilian life or how he would have answered those questions which he put to me. He seemed to prefer topics of culture and politics in the wide sense over all other subjects. Once he discovered my love of music, he quizzed me about it in long evening conversations. It was the same with my literary preferences and how I had come to the history of ancient Rome or the Florence of the Renaissance, although it was evident that he found incomprehensible a mind that developed such abstruse tastes. He was surprised that I knew nothing about Dreiser, Faulkner, or Hemingway—names I heard from him for the first time—and concluded from that how shockingly removed from the civilized nations Germany had become under the Nazis. When we knew each other better, he wanted to know details about my family, about my brother who had died in the war, my other siblings and friends. I remained silent, however, about my parents’ difficulties, because I felt that to describe them would be to make myself appear self-important. Instead, I told him about friends who had fled Germany, about harassment in our neighborhood at home, and about the pressures of living in a dictatorship.
I enjoyed my duties with Captain Donaldson and—taking to heart his advice about learning English—got hold of a volume of the Army Pocket Books series called
The Loom of Language
. At first, because a reasonable probationary period had been agreed at headquarters, I had enough time, particularly during night duty, to work my way through it, page by page. Sometimes the captain looked over my shoulder and explained unusual expressions with a few words on the origin of an idiom or metaphor.
On May 11, 1945, when I went to the camp gate, I saw agitated prisoners crowding around the noticeboard where the orders of the commander and occasionally important news items were posted. The reports that aroused such an unusual degree of interest were taken from various newspapers and stated that, after capitulation to the Western powers in nearby Rheims, the Wehrmacht had now laid down its arms to all the victorious powers in Karlshorst.
1
Already from a distance one could see there was a fierce debate taking place; as I came up one of the prisoners was just saying to a group standing there: “Well, it’s over at last! It was high time!” The majority of them looked at him without saying a word.
A few yards away stood a German sergeant, who had repeatedly behaved in such an overbearing way that it was clear he thought the time for ordering people around was not yet over. He shouted at the soldier, “What does
‘at last’ mean? That we’ve lost the war? Is that what you wanted?” He glanced around, looking for approval. The man he had addressed, who was already walking away, turned around, went right up to the sergeant, and replied, straight to his face in a soft but unintimidated voice, “No! But that the damned war is over!” A corporal joined in and bellowed over the heads of the others, “It was an idiotic war anyway! From the start! Who believed in victory?” Another shouted into the growing confusion, “The Führer’s genius! Dear Lord!” And soon everyone was shouting at everyone else, some men even came to blows, and again and again the words “idiotic war” and “the Führer’s greatness” were repeated. It showed how sensitive the subject still was.
At any rate, one could read from the men’s faces that in many cases the acquired reflexes continued to work. In not a few there was reflected a disbelieving shock at the openness with which some expressed themselves about the Hitler years. Then the corporal who had first used the phrase “idiotic war” walked off, shaking with laughter. The overbearing sergeant shouted after him: “Traitor! Crook!” As neither word had any effect, there followed “Deserter!” But the corporal, a man of about fifty, didn’t turn around. He simply raised his arms in the air and waved them from side to side, and repeated, laughing contemptuously, “Yeah, yeah! The Führer’s genius!’