Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (21 page)

The lack of shelter was compounded by a lack of blankets or proper clothing. Prisoners wore only what they had been wearing when captured, and in most cases had been separated from their standard army equipment. What they had left was ‘often beyond primitive. No coats, no caps, no jackets, in many cases only civil clothes and street shoes.’ In Heidesheim there were children of fourteen who had nothing to wear but their pyjamas. They had been arrested during the night as potential ‘Werewolves’ – he term used for fanatical last-ditch resisters – and taken straight to the camp in their nightclothes.
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If the lack of clothing and shelter was dire, then so was the lack of hygiene. Prisoners had nowhere to wash, and only an insufficient number of earth pits to use as toilets. According to those imprisoned at Rheinberg the camp ‘was nothing but a giant sewer, where each man just shat where he stood’. Parts of the camp at Bad Kreuznach were ‘literally a sea of urine’, in which soldiers were forced to sleep. Toilet paper was in such short supply that prisoners often used German banknotes instead, an act that caused few prisoners any consternation, since there were already rumours that German currency was to be taken out of circulation anyway.
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One of their greatest concerns was the lack of food. The huge concentration of prisoners meant that when the camp in Remagen was first opened daily rations were just a single loaf of bread between twenty-five men. This later rose to a loaf between ten, but it was still not enough to sustain life. In Bad Kreuznach there was no bread for six weeks, so that when it finally arrived it caused a sensation. Until then, the daily ration consisted of ‘three spoonfuls of vegetables, one spoon of fish, one or two prunes, one spoonful of marmalade and four to six biscuits’. In Bad Hersfeld the prisoners survived on only 800 calories per day, until a fifth of them became ‘skeletons’. To supplement their meagre diet prisoners were forced to forage for whatever edible weeds they could find growing in the camp, and reports of men cooking soups out of stinging nettles and dandelions over tiny camp fires are common. Many dug through the earth with tins in search of turnips, which they would then eat raw, leading to an outbreak of dysentery.
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The lack of water was an even greater problem. ‘For three and a half days we had no water at all,’ claimed George Weiss, a tank repairman.

We would drink our own urine. It tasted terrible, but what could we do? Some men got down on the ground and licked the ground to get some moisture. I was so weak I was already on my knees, when finally we got a little water to drink. I think I would have died without that water. But the Rhine was just outside the wire.
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At Bad Kreuznach there was only a single water tap for more than 56,000 men, and water had to be delivered to the perimeter fence each day by truck. In Büderich the five taps that served over 75,000 prisoners were turned on for only an hour each evening. When the American commander of the camp was asked why the prisoners were suffering such inhumane conditions, he allegedly answered: ‘So that they will lose their joy of soldiering once and for all.’
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It is unsurprising that such camps had a high mortality rate, especially amongst men already wounded and exhausted by battle. But exactly
how
high has been a subject of debate ever since. In his controversial book
Other Losses
James Bacque suggested that Roosevelt’s tasteless jokes about killing Germans were symptomatic of a culture of revenge throughout the US administration. He claimed that 800,000 German prisoners died in US captivity – a number that would put American vengeance on a par with some of the worst Soviet and Nazi atrocities of the war. This absurdly high figure has since been comprehensively discredited by academics in several countries, as have many of Bacque’s other claims.
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The official figure is more than 160 times smaller: according to the German government commission chaired by Erich Maschke, just 4,537 are supposed to have died in the
Rheinwiesenlager.
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Other academics entertain the possibility that the true number of deaths
might
have been substantially higher, especially when one takes into account the chaos of the time, which was never conducive to accurate record-keeping. But it is generally agreed that the figure cannot have exceeded 50 – 60,000 at the very outside.
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This does not mean to say that losses on the scale that Bacque suggests did not happen, only that Bacque was attributing them to the wrong theatre. The true horror, as usual, occurred not in the west but in the east.

Soviet-held Prisoners of War

If conditions for prisoners of the Western Allies were bad, those experienced by prisoners in the east were atrocious – so atrocious, in fact, that the comparison is hardly worth making. Everything that POWs experienced in the
Rheinwiesenlager
also happened in Soviet prison camps, but on a greater scale and for longer periods of time. In addition, German prisoners were usually force-marched to their places of captivity. These ‘death-marches’ often lasted for a week or more, during which time the prisoners were regularly denied food and water.

Of the 3 million prisoners taken by the Soviets during the war, more than a third died in captivity. In Yugoslavia the situation was proportionally even worse: around 80,000 prisoners of war were executed, starved, denied medical care or force-marched to their deaths – that is about two prisoners in every five. Such figures would have been inconceivable in the west. A glance at
Table 1
confirms that German soldiers were right to be so wary of capture by the Red Army or their associated partisans. Prisoners taken in the east were ninety times more likely to die than those taken in the west.

There are numerous reasons why the death toll amongst prisoners of war in the east was so high. To begin with, resources were far scarcer: the Soviets and their allies had relied heavily on the western powers to supply them with food and materials throughout the war, and it was to be expected that they should use these scarce supplies for their own people, and specifically their army, before getting round to feeding prisoners on the scraps that were left over. Transport and infrastructure were far more heavily damaged in the east than in the west, and the distances that had to be walked were far greater: tens of thousands of Axis prisoners died on forced marches across the vast Soviet and eastern European landscape. When one considers how bitter the Russian winters could be, it is unsurprising that more prisoners died from exposure in Soviet camps than in Western ones. But all of this is skating around the main issue. The principal reason why so many German prisoners died in Soviet captivity was because virtually no one who looked after them cared whether they lived or died.

Absolute hatred of Germany, and of Germans, was endemic in Soviet society during the war. Up until the spring of 1945 Soviet soldiers had been subjected to the most strident hate propaganda, which demonized Germans and Germany in every possible way. The Soviet army newspaper
Krasnaya Zvezda
carried poems by Alexei Surkov with titles like ‘I Hate’, whose last line claimed ‘I want to strangle every one of them.’
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Pravda
printed poems by Konstantin Simonov such as ‘Kill Him!’, published on the day that Voroshilovgrad fell, which exhorted Russian soldiers to

… kill a German, kill him soon –
And every time you see one, kill him.
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Other writers such as Mikhail Sholokhov and Vasily Grossman also wrote vitriolic stories and reports which were designed to increase Soviet hatred for all things German. But it was Ilya Ehrenburg who occupied a special place in the hearts of the Soviet soldiers. Ehrenburg’s inflammatory chants in
Krasnaya Zvezda
were printed and repeated so often that most soldiers knew them by heart.

The Germans are not human beings. From now on the word ‘German’ is for us the worst imaginable curse. From now on the word ‘German’ strikes us to the quick. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day … If you cannot kill your German with a bullet, kill him with your bayonet. If there is calm on your part of the front, or if you are waiting for the fighting, kill a German in the meantime … If you kill one German, kill another – there is nothing more joyful than a heap of German corpses.
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The dehumanization of Germans was a constant theme of Ehrenburg’s writings. As early as the summer of 1942 he claimed,

One can bear anything: the plague, and hunger and death. But one cannot bear the Germans … We cannot live as long as these grey-green slugs are alive. Today there are no books; today there are no stars in the sky; today there is only one thought: kill the Germans. Kill them all and dig them into the earth.
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These ‘grey-green slugs’ were at other times portrayed as scorpions, plague-carrying rats, rabid dogs and even bacteria.
²⁴
Just as Nazi propaganda had dehumanized the Slavs as
Untermenschen,
so had Soviet propaganda reduced all Germans to vermin.
²⁵

The bloodthirsty tone of such writings was not markedly different from some of those propagated in other countries, such as Philippe Viannay’s exhortation to kill Germans, collaborators and policemen in occupied France.
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But unlike the majority of Frenchmen, the Soviets possessed the capability to put their words into action on a vast scale. It has often been pointed out that such propaganda was a major cause of the ‘orgy of extermination’ that took place once the Red Army reached German soil.
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But it also contributed greatly to the treatment of German soldiers captured during battle. Since the Germans had shown so little humanity towards their own prisoners, many Russians felt they had the right to repay them in kind. Countless Germans were shot while or after surrendering, despite orders to the contrary, and countless more were killed by drunken Red Army soldiers who saw revenge as part of their victory celebrations. Occasionally Soviet soldiers took pot shots at the columns of German prisoners for fun – just as the Germans had done to Soviet prisoners in 1941.
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In Yugoslavia too, German prisoners were shot for the slightest misdemeanours, for their clothes and equipment, for revenge, or just for sport.
²⁹

We should remember that it was not only German soldiers who paid this price, although German prisoners were certainly the most numerous. Seventy thousand Italians were also taken prisoner by the Red Army, many of whom never returned.
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More than 309,000 Romanian soldiers went missing on the eastern front, though how many survived long enough to become prisoners is still not known.
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Nor were all the prisoners fighting men – indeed, it is often impossible to separate civilians and soldiers in the official statistics. In the aftermath of the war at least 600,000 Hungarians, civilians and soldiers alike, were scooped up by the Red Army for no better reason than that they were of the wrong nationality, and were sent to labour camps across the Soviet Union.
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The indignities endured by these hapless prisoners were every bit as bad as those experienced by forced labourers in Nazi Germany. The first thing that happened to them was that they were robbed. Watches, wedding rings and other valuables were most highly prized by Soviet soldiers, but successive groups of looters also took their military kit and even their clothes. ‘Woe betide anyone who wore riding boots,’ wrote Zoltan Toth, a Hungarian doctor who was captured after the fall of Budapest in February 1945. ‘If the Russians spotted a prisoner with usable boots, they took him out of the line, put a bullet through his head and pulled off his boots.’
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The looting of their few belongings signalled the beginning of a period of deprivation that would kill a third of them. Moreover, this deprivation was often deliberate. If prisoners of the Americans did not receive proper rations, this was usually only because of a failure of supply. Prisoners of the Soviets, by contrast, were often purposely denied food and water, first by the troops who captured them, then by the guards who transported them and finally by the staff of the camps where they ended up. A perfect example of this is given by Hans Schuetz, a soldier who was captured in east Germany by the Soviets at the very end of the war. During his long march eastwards into captivity many of the local people turned out with boxes of sandwiches or pitchers of milk. ‘However, the guards gave strict instructions not to touch anything. They shot into the pots and cans and into the sandwich piles. The milk and water soaked into the ground and the sandwiches burst into the air and fell into the dirt. We did not dare touch anything.’
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If the prisoners of the Americans had to queue for their water, prisoners of the Soviets occasionally had to steal it, or in winter make do with eating snow.
³⁵
While the Americans were unable to supply enough medicines to deal with outbreaks of sickness, Soviet doctors sometimes denied what medicines they had to prisoners, and, according to some, even used them as bargaining tools for extortion.
³⁶
No one in American camps was reduced to eating stray dogs and cats, as they were in Soviet gulags, or to using their bread as bait to catch rats for food.
³⁷
The starvation diet in Soviet camps was far worse than anything that prisoners of the Americans were forced to endure, and lasted not just days or weeks, but months. Zoltan Toth, who worked in a makeshift gulag medical centre in 1946, regularly saw bodies in the mortuary that had been cut open and their organs stolen – presumably to be eaten – just as they had been in Bergen-Belsen. When he reported this to the chief doctor his concerns were dismissed with the words, ‘If you had seen what went on here a year ago …’
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