Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (18 page)

To pretend that the German people were not aware of all these foreigners in their midst, or the conditions that they were forced to endure, would be a nonsense – although many Germans in the immediate aftermath of the war tried to do exactly that. At their peak, foreign workers made up around 20 per cent of the workforce in Germany, and in certain industries, such as armaments and aircraft manufacture, often 40 per cent or more.
⁴
Germans worked alongside these people and saw how they were treated – indeed, many Germans smuggled food to them either out of a wish to help or as a way of making money out of them.

By the end of the war, most Germans were well aware of the situation, and fear of what these millions of foreigners might do once they were liberated began to mount. In Hamburg a special emergency guard was formed by party members at the end of 1944 in case of a rising by foreign workers. In Augsburg there were stories that new labourers had arrived carrying concealed weapons.
⁵
In Berlin there were rumours that the foreigners were sending information to the enemy, and acting as a ‘Trojan horse’ within Germany.
⁶
Many foreign workers deliberately encouraged these fears: French prisoners of war joked that they were the ‘advance parachutists’ of the invasion force, and Polish workers taunted Germans with the story of ‘lists’ that had been made of Germans who were to be killed after victory.
⁷
Given the atmosphere of fear and resentment that existed between Germans and foreign labourers it was only a matter of time before serious confrontations between the two began to materialize.

Revenge of Slave Labourers

The backlash began almost as soon as the Allies entered Germany. In the early days of the invasion British, French and American troops all reported incidents of looting and disorder by liberated foreigners, but were often powerless to stop them. ‘Looting is rampant,’ claimed Captain Reuben Seddon of the British Civil Affairs Commission after crossing the Rhine in early April 1945. ‘Russians, Poles, French and civilians are all having the time of their lives, and it’s got to stop, the sooner the better.’
⁸
Further east the situation was even worse. According to the new military governor in the town of Schwerin in Mecklenburg, ’D.P.s were roaming around in their thousands, murdering, raping, looting - in short, away from the main streets, law did not exist.’
⁹
In Berlin in May a gang of a hundred DPs held up a train in Anhalt railway station in a scene like something from a Western.
¹⁰

Many put such behaviour down to a combination of high spirits and a wish to express their justifiable frustration and anger at the Nazi regime.
¹¹
But there was a wildness to the celebrations of liberated labourers that frightened both the German population and the Allies. For years they had been mistreated, segregated from the opposite sex, denied adequate food, and kept away from alcohol: many now made up for lost time by embarking on a Bacchic quest for food, alcohol and sex at any cost. Labour camps that had segregated men and women for years soon became a ‘shambles’ where people ‘defecated all over’ and began openly ‘fornicating in the dorms’.
¹²
A sapper named Derek Henry later described the scenes he witnessed when he was called to maintain law and order at a former labour camp near the village of Nordhemmern near Minden on 11 April.

There were both men and women inmates, and as we went into the huts they crowded around us. Most of them were drunk on home-made Vodka which they thrust upon us, some were having sex openly on the bunks, others were singing and dancing. They tried to get us to join in, fortunately we had our rifles with us … The DPs were in a filthy state, their huts stank to high heaven but we had to taste their home made vodka which they poured on the table top, then set it alight to prove how strong it was.

Later, according to Henry, a Polish inmate ‘offered me his female companion for the night: an offer I declined’.
¹³

Alcohol, especially, played a huge part in the disorders that occurred in the wake of the liberation. In Hanau hundreds of Russians drank industrial alcohol which killed at least twenty and left more than 200 semi-paralysed.
¹⁴
In Wolfsburg hundreds of labourers who used to work in the city’s Volkswagen plant broke into both the city arsenal and the local vermouth factory. As one American company commander who was called in to help disarm the mob remembers, ‘Some of them were so drunk they’d stand on dikes or up on buildings and fire a gun and it’d knock ’em flat on their back.‘
¹⁵
When the journalist Alan Moorehead drove into the village of Steyerberg in the Weser valley, he came across villagers and refugees looting a wine cellar stocked with ‘the most beautiful wine I have ever seen’. Most of them were drunk or ‘half-demented’, and they plundered and smashed bottles until the cellar was empty except for the slush of broken glass and Chateau Lafite 1891 that lay ‘ankle deep’ on the floor.
¹⁶

Some of the wildest scenes occurred in Hanover. During the chaos of the liberation, tens of thousands of former forced labourers rampaged through the town looting liquor stores and setting fire to buildings. When the remnants of the German police tried to intervene they were overwhelmed, beaten and hung from the city’s lamp posts.
¹⁷
Some former forced labourers rounded up German civilians to do the work that they themselves would have been forced to do in previous weeks – such as burying the bodies of 200 Russian officers shot by the SS – and ‘lashed them with sticks or beat them with weapon stocks’ while they worked.
¹⁸
Others sought out the women of the city and raped them in their homes and even in the streets. According to a British battery commander stationed in the town, one group of drunken Russians ’seized an abandoned German 88mm gun, dragged it around and, to their obvious pleasure, loosed off rounds at whatever took their fancy, prominent buildings or houses getting in their way’.
¹⁹

In June 1945, after the city had been under Allied control for ten weeks, the British war reporter Leonard Mosley arrived to find Hanover still in a state of near-chaos. The new military government had managed to get the electricity, gas and water supplies working again, had cleared roads through the rubble and had recruited a German mayor and a makeshift police force, but had still not managed to impose anything close to law and order. ‘The problem was too much. No scratch police-force of this kind could keep order among over 100,000 foreign slaves who were tasting their first real freedom for years.’
²⁰

The extent of the problem was demonstrated when the military governor drove Mosley from the Rathaus to his living quarters a few miles away. On the journey the car was halted five times by full-scale riots that filled the street, which the military governor himself, Major G. H. Lamb, would break up by repeatedly firing his pistol into the air. ‘This is the sort of thing that goes on all day,’ he reportedly told Mosley. ‘Looting, fighting, rape, murder – what a town!’
²¹

Much of the looting and violence in Hanover appeared to be occurring just for the sake of it. In one of the most telling eyewitness reports of the postwar chaos Mosley described the frantic looting of warehouses on the outskirts of the city:

Someone once told me that when the looting fever is in a man he will kill or maim to get something, even if that ‘something’ isn’t worth stealing, and Hanover confirmed it. We saw one crowd on that short journey which had just broken into a storehouse; there were Germans as well as foreign workers among the milling mass of screaming people; they burst through doors and windows and then came out, their arms full – of door knobs! It was a store for door knobs, and what these people could want with such objects, in a city where half the doors no longer existed, is beyond me; yet they not only looted those door knobs, but they fought over them. They kicked and scratched and beat with iron bars those who had more door knobs than themselves. I saw one foreign worker trip up a girl, tear the door knobs from her arms, and then kick her repeatedly in the face and body until she was covered with blood. Then he raced off down the street. Halfway down, he seemed to come to his senses; he looked down at the objects he was carrying, and then with a visible gesture of distaste he flung them all away.
²²

In the early days of the liberation such scenes were ubiquitous. Since most of the German policemen had fled, or been deposed, the local population had no choice but to turn to the Allied soldiers for help, but there were simply not enough to go round. In Hanover the military government enlisted Allied prisoners of war into temporary police forces, but such men were hopelessly inexperienced at police work and often had their own axe to grind against local Germans.
²³
In all the major cities German policemen were recruited, but here too there was a lack of experience. For obvious reasons the Allies did not allow them to carry arms – consequently they were not much of a match against rioting DPs and the growing gangs of armed foreigners.
²⁴

A story told by one British lieutenant demonstrates the powerlessness of Allied soldiers to deal with the highly charged atmosphere that existed at the time, as well as the moral gap between the attitudes of those who had been personally violated by the Nazis and those who had not. In May 1945 Ray Hunting was travelling along a quiet country road near the city of Wesel when he witnessed an event that would stay with him for the rest of his life.

I saw two men ahead: a Russian making his way to Wesel and an old German with a walking stick, moving slowly towards the Station. As we approached, the men stopped, the Russian apparently asking the time, because the old man removed a chained pocket watch from his waistcoat pocket. In a combined movement, the Russian snatched the watch and plunged a long-bladed knife into the German’s chest. The old man staggered and fell backwards into the ditch. When we drew up, his feet were in the air and his trouser legs slipped down, showing two thin white calves.

The Russian had pulled out the knife and was calmly wiping the blood from the blade on the old man’s coat when I rammed the muzzle of my revolver into his ribs. When the Russian was standing on the road with his hands in the air, I gave the revolver to Patrick whilst I jumped down into the ditch to help the victim. The old man was dead. The Russian, an inarticulate brute, looked down at me kneeling by the body without a trace of emotion or remorse.

I took possession of the knife and watch, then pushed him into the back of the truck and sat facing him with the revolver. We went to the Military Government Office to hand him over to Captain Grubb, but he was out. We took the prisoner to the
Kaserne,
so he could be dealt with in accordance with Soviet law.

I flung the prisoner into the Leaders’ Room by the scruff of the neck, and accused him of murder, producing the knife and watch. One of the Leaders, who identified himself as the Administrator (the Russian word is the same as in English), came forward.

‘You say this man killed a German?’ he asked with a smile. I showed him the murder weapon. He moved across to a colleague and removed a red star badge from his cap, then pinned it on the murderer’s breast and kissed him on the cheek! The murderer of the old man, wearing his decoration, slipped out of the room and lost himself among the hundreds in the barracks. I never set eyes on him again.
²⁵

The Military Control of DPs

In an effort to bring an end to this anarchy, the Allied military governments in each of the zones of Germany were forced to introduce radical measures. The first thing they did was to round up as many of the newly freed prisoners and labourers as they could, and put them back under lock and key – an act that caused anger and consternation amongst many of those whose only wish was to make their way home to their own countries. A strict curfew was announced, which in some areas was as early as 6 p.m., and anyone found leaving their camp at night was liable to be arrested or even shot. The threat of violence was often the only way to impose order. For example, when Major A. G. Moon took control of the military government in Buxtehude he immediately informed the population of the local DP centres that anyone caught looting would be shot. As a consequence there was very little trouble in this area.
²⁶
Later, in August, the British military government in north-west Germany made the shooting of looters official policy.
²⁷
The American military government in Hesse also warned that anyone caught rioting over food shortages would be subject to the death penalty.
²⁸
There is little difference between announcements like this and those made by the Nazis themselves, and indeed it was perhaps the semblance of continuity between the two systems of control which made the announcement so effective.
²⁹

Since it was obvious that the threat to law and order would remain so long as the foreign prisoners were still in Germany, the Allies set about repatriating DPs as fast as they were able. There was much debate over who should be given priority. British and American POWs and members of resistance organizations had a valid claim for special treatment. This had to be weighed against the impatience of the Soviet authorities to have their citizens returned to them, especially since there were still thousands of liberated Allied prisoners being held behind Soviet lines. Others argued that the most unruly elements should be sent home first, in order to re-establish law and order. The logistical difficulties of transporting these people through Europe’s destroyed rail networks were compounded by the fact that many of the DPs themselves did not actually want to be repatriated. Many of the Jews, Poles and Balts now regarded themselves as stateless, and therefore as having no home to go to. Other groups, particularly Russians, Ukrainians and Yugoslavs, did not wish to be repatriated because they feared what punishments they might be subjected to once they got home. Many of these people had endured unimaginable hardships, and despite the end of the war appeared to have little to look forward to.