The Bitter Taste of Victory (8 page)

None the less Orwell’s irritation with the venomous German-hating of his compatriots did not lead him to sympathise with them now. When he caught the eyes of the defeated Germans he saw only a kind of beaten defiance. Like Erika Mann and Lee Miller, he thought that these Germans were more ashamed of losing the war than of the atrocities committed in their name. Most of the people he met claimed to have been forced to join the Nazi Party (NSDAP) against their will.

He was more sympathetic to the somewhat callously named ‘Displaced Persons’ who now thronged the streets of Germany wheeling carts filled with their few tatty possessions. In theory, the foreign workers whom the Nazis had deported from all over Europe were now free. However, in the absence of anywhere to live, they were attempting to find shelter in the ‘DP’ camps or beginning their desultory journey home, wandering through a hostile country where they were still under threat from shells and bombs. The Allied authorities had already made plans to shelter and repatriate these people but had not expected numbers to increase so quickly.

Already by 16 March 1945, the US Military Government had estimated that there were 58,000 DPs under its control; by the end of March this figure had grown to 250,000 and by 14 April it was over a million. A month later there would be 2 million DPs in Germany. Orwell was distressed to see that the DPs who initially welcomed the British and Americans as liberators quickly became disillusioned when they realised that their hunger was not a priority to an army still intent on winning the war.
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Orwell’s despondency about Germany was suddenly compounded by personal despair. A week into his trip he became very ill with a chest infection and was worried enough about his health to draw up notes for his literary executor. In fact, he began to recover but he now discovered that two days earlier his wife Eileen Blair had died in England. He
had known that she was going to hospital for a minor operation but had not realised it could have potentially fatal consequences. By the time he reached home he was too late to attend her funeral. Aged forty-one, he was left a widower with responsibility for their newly adopted son Richard. Unable fully to comprehend this personal bereavement, Orwell focused on returning to Europe, possibly preferring to think about loss on a bigger and therefore more manageable scale. ‘I want to go back and do some more reporting,’ he told a friend on 4 April, ‘and perhaps after a few weeks of bumping about in jeeps etc I shall feel better.’
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It was apparent to everyone that the war was now in its final phase. Most of the Anglo-Americans who toured Germany in April reflected on the problems of reconstruction. In London, waiting to return to Europe, Orwell wrote an article for the
Observer
insisting that a rural slum of the kind envisaged by Morgenthau would not help Europe. Germany was Europe’s problem and the rest of Europe had to realise that the impoverishment of one country would impact unfavourably on the world as a whole. He thought it was absurd to debate the ethics of bombing – ‘war itself is inhumane’ – and the important question concerned the ethics of reparations versus reconstruction.
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Germany was becoming more of a rural slum by the day, but still the high command failed to surrender. On 16 April a Soviet force comprising 2.5 million troops, 6,250 tanks and 42,000 artillery pieces and mortars began the assault on the remaining Wehrmacht defending the path to Berlin. It could only be a matter of weeks before the capital fell and in an article published on 22 April, Orwell, now back in Germany, observed that it was an understatement to say that the Germans knew they were beaten. Most regarded the war as a past event and its continuation as a lunacy in which they had no part and for which they need feel no responsibility. Some German civilians had even applied to the Military Government to provide them with anti-aircraft guns to keep the German planes away.
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The German resistance on the west bank of the Rhine had now been eliminated and in the area around Cologne, Gavin’s 82nd Airborne Division occupied one village and town after another. Generally the
Germans welcomed the Americans as liberators, grateful that they were not under the control of the Russians who were heard to be serial-raping women in the areas they conquered. ‘A girl’s been turned into a woman/ A woman turned into a corpse,’ wrote the novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had been one of the Russian soldiers to conquer Königsberg in January, describing the dead body of a small violated girl on a mattress.
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Gellhorn managed to catch up with Gavin’s division in the middle of April. After she left, the general wrote to say he was pining for her far more than he had expected and that he was beginning to lose interest in the war: ‘I have a feeling all day that for the first time in two years they can take the war and stuff it.’ He had come to realise that he had been treating the excitement of battle like a drug that he needed in periodic doses. Now, for once, he was content to sit and wait. ‘Today I feel like saying to hell with the war, what good is it anyway. I want to be with my Martha.’ She was, he informed her, the most wonderful and remarkable person ever to come into his life and he wished he could do something about it other than punching his typewriter.

In her absence he was busy trying to set up baby clinics, schools and shoe repair shops, beginning to reconstruct the country they were still bombing. After four years of seeing the German civilians as targets, Gavin and his fellow generals were now required to see them as needing help and nourishment. Once McClure’s Publicity and Psychological Warfare section had arrived, they would even be required to entertain the conquered nation with a view to demonstrating the superiority of the American way of life. Yet meanwhile the battle continued and Gavin was not alone in feeling at a loss. For most soldiers on the ground the sense of anti-climax was palpable. The war was ending piecemeal around them in one minor confrontation after another. There would be no great crash of victory, just more and more destruction until there was too much damage to continue.
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3

‘We were blind and unbelieving and slow’

Victory: April–May 1945

During the spring of 1945 a series of German concentration camps was liberated by the Western Allies. US troops entered Ohrdruf, Nordhausen and Buchenwald between 4 and 11 April and the British liberated Bergen-Belsen four days later. Visiting Ohrdruf, General George Patton looked down into a pit where arms, legs and ripped torsos stuck out of a pool of dank green water and had to rush behind a shed to vomit. At Buchenwald, American soldiers were shocked to find 700 emaciated children among the remaining 21,000 prisoners while at Bergen-Belsen the 60,000 inmates were even closer to death than anywhere else because the food distribution and medical services had ceased to function some days earlier. Here it was hard to distinguish some of the living prisoners from the corpses that surrounded them. Over 34,000 of the camp’s inmates had died since February and there were no facilities for burial, so rotting corpses were piled up around the camp. On 19 April, BBC journalist Richard Dimbleby broadcast a report describing his day in Belsen as the most horrible of his life: ‘I picked my way over corpse after corpse in the gloom . . . Some of the poor starved creatures . . . looked so utterly unreal and inhuman that I could have imagined that they had never lived at all.’
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The existence of the concentration camps had been known about since the 1930s and revelations about the Nazi atrocities had been
circulated after the Red Army liberated the extermination camps at Majdanek in July 1944 and Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1945. But it was only now that the full scale of organised mass murder became widely known to the British and American public.
²
The liberating troops toured the mass death chambers and crematoria with sickened awe and then set about reporting the horrors both to the press at home, and to the Germans who had lived beside these death factories for years apparently oblivious to what they contained. Patton forced the citizens of Weimar to tour the camp at Buchenwald, determined that they should recognise their complicity in crimes committed only metres from their homes.

On 29 April 1945 the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions entered the notorious camp at Dachau, liberating 32,000 inmates. Even before entering the camp, the soldiers were confronted with the stench of death. Hurrying to evacuate prisoners from Buchenwald as the Americans arrived, the SS (
Schutzstaffel
or elite Protection Squadron) had shipped a trainload of 2,000 to Dachau. Almost all had died of starvation on the way and the train of corpses now stood outside the gate. Opened in 1933, Dachau had originally housed political prisoners and the emphasis had been on forced labour rather than mass death, unlike the extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka.
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However, since 1940 Dachau had been overcrowded with prisoners from Eastern Europe, many of them Jews, and in the final months of the war food and water supplies had broken down after thousands of prisoners had been moved to Dachau from concentration camps nearer to the Allied lines. Where Buchenwald had one block in which fifty to a hundred people died each day, Dachau had six of these blocks. There were 1,500 emaciated corpses still piled up in the crematorium, which had run out of fuel some days earlier.
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For many of the liberators of Dachau, this would be the most scarring experience of the war. The US army newspaper
Stars and Stripes
reported that American soldiers and journalists had been ‘mobbed, kissed, thrown into the air and carried on shoulders through a sea of weeping, cheering, laughing prisoners’ in heart-rending scenes of emancipation. But the screams emanating from the prisoners were not necessarily screams of
joy as the reporter suggested. Within eighteen hours of the liberation of the camp, 135 former captives died as a result of illness and starvation. Some of the rescued inmates emerged from the middle of piles of rotting corpses and there was even one prisoner still alive on the death-train outside the camp. The shrieking was quickly followed by violence. An American soldier lent his bayonet to a prisoner to behead a guard; other guards were beaten to death with spades or shot.
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Lee Miller arrived the day after the troops. She was accompanied by Dave Scherman, who had long been her professional collaborator and had now become her lover and emotional crux in Roland Penrose’s absence. As they drove through the town of Dachau, the sun was shining and white sheets were hanging from the windows of sumptuous villas alongside the railway line that led to the camp. Before entering, they inspected the train of corpses, now surrounded by flies. Miller photographed the train from the siding, furiously and bemusedly documenting what she saw. Inside the camp they found survivors loading the dead onto cars for disposal or lying weakly in their bunks. In the few minutes it took Miller to take her photographs, two men were found dead and the corpses were dragged out and thrown on the heap outside the block. ‘Nobody seemed to mind except me,’ Miller observed in her article. She was disturbed to find that the Angora rabbits in the prison farm and the horses in the stables were well fed.
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Miller wrote to her editor at
Vogue
that Dachau contained all she would ever hear or close her ears to about a concentration camp. Even the empty dusty yards seemed to conjure visions of the thousands of condemned feet that had crossed them; ‘feet which ached and shuffled and stamped away the cold and shifted to relieve the pain and finally became useless except to walk them to the death chamber’. She fell on her knees in the middle of the miles of gravelled earth and felt the fierce pain of a tiny sharp stone on her kneecap, reflecting that hundreds of inmates had fallen like that every day and every night. If they could get up again they lived. If they were too weak they were left to join the piles of corpses in the crematorium.
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On 1 May, Hitler’s death was announced. According to the official German statement, he had died fighting Soviet troops. The German
government was now in the hands of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who had been the commander-in-chief of the German navy since 1943. Lee Miller heard the news while at Hitler’s private apartment at 16 Prinzregentenplatz in Munich, ten miles from Dachau, where she and Scherman had set up home with some American troops a few hours after leaving Dachau. Though spacious, the apartment was ordinary, lacking grace, charm, or intimacy. There was an out-of-tune Bechstein piano, an excellent radio, and linen and silver marked with the initials ‘AH’. Miller found that Hitler became ‘less fabulous and therefore more terrible’ now that he could be envisaged in a domestic setting. She made the most of the visual possibilities created by the combination of fascism and domesticity, photographing Scherman seated at Hitler’s desk and a GI reading
Mein Kampf
on Hitler’s bed. She also posed for what would soon be a famous photograph of her soaping herself in Hitler’s bath.
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Neither Miller nor Scherman had bathed for weeks and they appreciated the sudden luxury. But for Miller this was more than an act of cleansing. Composing the
mise en scene
for the photograph, she placed her army boots at the foot of the bath, rubbing the mud of Dachau into the white bathmat. Within the tableau, she was surveyed both by a photograph of Hitler, whose triumphant stance suggested he had just conquered the bathroom from behind the taps, and by a nude classical statuette, whose bent arm echoed Miller’s own more tentative pose.