The Bitter Taste of Victory (9 page)

There is no simple message in Miller’s picture but by juxtaposing the clumsy brutality of her muddy boots with the pomp of the military leadership and the classical beauty both of the sculpture and of her own, huddled and fragile naked figure, she was asking how these incongruous elements could have come together. The Nazi leadership had been famous for finding a place for art within the torture chamber and the battlefield. Already, there were frequent tales of the concentration camp commandants who went home from a day of gassing Jews to listen to Beethoven. ‘He shouts stab deeper in earth you there you others you sing and you play,’ the poet Paul Celan memorably observed in his poem ‘
Todesfuge
’ (‘Death Fugue’); ‘he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete.’ By bringing the statue into the frame with Hitler, Miller was undermining the notion that art
could be redemptive simply through its purity or detachment.
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She was also investigating the way that she, like the Nazi high command, could cross easily in a single day from the mud of the death camp to the neat cleanliness of a bathroom, continuing with the trivial routines of everyday life.

Over the course of the next year one journalist after another would be troubled by the ordinariness of the Nazi leaders; they did not seem that different from anyone else. It was this in part that Miller was demonstrating with her photograph, revealing a world in which it had become possible to leave the most unimaginably horrible of scenes to bathe in an innocuous bathroom. In the process she was asking if the mud that she had trampled into Hitler’s bathmat was mud that now besmirched the whole world; if she, an ‘Aryan’-looking young woman, whose eyes carefully avoided the gaze of the camera, was implicated in the responsibility for the skeletal figures she had left behind at Dachau.

Shortly after hearing the news of Hitler’s death, Miller and Scherman visited the square stucco villa of the Führer’s lover, Eva Braun, and Miller napped on Eva’s bed, finding it comfortable but macabre to doze on the pillow of a dead couple and be glad of their demise. Here again Miller was exploring the sensual experience of being Hitler. Having lain naked in his bath, she was now experiencing the smell of his pillow against her face, the lumps of his mattress beneath her body. In his bath and his bed there was physical proof of Hitler’s banal ordinariness; Miller knew as few others could that the apparent embodiment of evil had also taken corporeal form. This was difficult and dangerous knowledge and Miller observed herself grinding her teeth and snarling, filled with hate and despair. It took greater effort to write about than to photograph the scenes she was witnessing. She struggled with writing even in easy circumstances and now Scherman had to provide her with reassurance, sex and cognac as she sat up late into the night agonising over her articles.

The war in Europe was effectively over but the Allies were still waiting for the Germans to surrender. By 3 May, Berlin had fallen to the Russians. The previous day the German forces in Italy had capitulated
and James Gavin had received the surrender of the entire German 21
^st
Army (some 150,000 men) at Ludwigslust, Germany.
¹⁰
Occupying Ludwigslust, Gavin ordered all the town’s inhabitants over the age of ten to view the repulsive remains of the nearby camp at Wöbellin. He then made the grander residents of Ludwigslust rebury the dead from the camp in a park in front of the main palace, observed by the town’s entire populace.

Gavin’s actions here were typical. Now that the behaviour of the Germans in the concentration camps had been revealed, it seemed absurd to be setting up schools and clinics for them. Were the Germans really entitled to reconstruction, even once they were denazified? And could you change the mentality of a population capable of carrying out deeds like these with such apparently calm functionality? Too busy, exhausted and appalled to answer these questions, Allied generals could only demand that the Germans should come to share their confusion by confronting their own misdeeds.

From Ludwigslust, Gavin wrote to Gellhorn, still longing for her and wondering when they were next going to meet. He had received a wire from her a few days earlier from Paris but had just heard that she was in Germany. Gavin was hoping that she was coming to find him, but in fact she was on her way to Dachau where she arrived on 3 May.

In a single day at Dachau, Gellhorn lost her new-found enthusiasm for life. ‘I did not know, realise, find out, care, understand what was happening,’ she wrote in disbelief. Years later she said that she had lost her youth at Dachau and was never able to hope again. ‘It is as if I walked into Dachau and there fell over a cliff and suffered a lifelong concussion, without recognising it.’ She was frightened by the surviving inhabitants: skeletons sitting in the sun, searching themselves for lice, who seemed to have no age or recognisable face. ‘No expression shows itself on a face that is only yellowish stubbly skin stretched across bone.’ Talking to a Polish doctor who had been a prisoner in Dachau for five years, she learnt about the experiments conducted within the prison. The camp scientists had killed 600 people testing to see how long pilots could survive when shot down over water, leaving the victims for several hours in great vats of sea water eight degrees
below zero. In an article published in June, Gellhorn told the readers of
Collier’s
that they bore some guilt for the scenes she had witnessed; it had taken the Americans twelve years to open the gates of Dachau. ‘We were blind and unbelieving and slow, and that we can never be again.’
¹¹

Gellhorn did not go to find Gavin in Ludwigslust. She was not ready for ordinary happiness. Instead she went to Bergen-Belsen, where she watched bulldozers burying the heaped corpses, and then flew to Paris from Regensburg, travelling in a C-47 aircraft carrying American POWs. Waiting for the plane, the passengers sat in the shade under the wings. When they were invited to board they ran onto the aircraft as though escaping from a fire. Gellhorn did not look out of the windows as they flew away from a country that at that moment she wished to leave behind for ever.

On 7 May the Germans surrendered at last in a schoolhouse in Reims. Symbolically, the Allied victory was undermined by the continued absence of Hitler’s body. The newspapers announced that an initial search in Berlin had failed to locate his corpse so the Russians were still hunting the capital for his remains. It was just about possible that the German leader had escaped and was waiting to attempt to resurrect the Fatherland. In fact the Russians had found and identified the body on 5 May but were keeping the discovery of his suicide secret, partly to fuel the rumour that Hitler was hiding in Bavaria (US-occupied territory) and partly to promote Stalin’s propaganda that the West secretly wanted to do a deal with the Nazis.
¹²

Initially, the occupied towns had been administered by the troops who had conquered them. Several makeshift governments had been established, usually led by the Bürgermeister, or head of the local government, unless he was a known Nazi. Curfews were imposed by the Allies and radios, weapons and cameras confiscated. Because at this stage the Occupation was so arbitrary, the nature of the occupying regime varied radically from town to town. In general, the Russians and the French (who had gone beyond their remit in seizing towns throughout the territory of Baden) were more punitive than the British and the Americans, having suffered more on their own soil.
¹³
Now the four
Allies began to assign more formal occupation governments, though the official zones had not yet been finally allocated.

The eighth of May was VE Day, celebrating Victory in Europe. Gellhorn spent it in her Paris hotel crying in the arms of a French acquaintance and talking about Dachau. In Germany the next day, Marlene Dietrich made her first trip to a concentration camp. She had heard rumours during the war that her sister Liesel was in Belsen, although she was neither Jewish nor an obvious enemy of the Nazis. Now General Bradley arranged for Dietrich to travel to Belsen in his army plane, but she did not make it into the camp. Talking to British army captain Arnold Horwell (assistant commandant of the liberated camp), Dietrich learnt that her sister and her husband Georg Willi had in fact simply lived in the town of Belsen and had worked closely with the Nazis in charge of the concentration camp. Georg Willi had even run the cinema at Belsen for the SS. Horwell reported to his wife that he had given Dietrich enough details about the camp ‘to make her almost sick’. Liesel had spent her childhood following around her adored younger sister, so terrified of displeasing her that she frequently made mistakes just through trying too hard. Now she had directed her efforts into pleasing the wrong superiors and Dietrich would never forgive her. She ensured that Horwell did his best to save Liesel and her husband from jail but after that she disappeared from Liesel’s life. In the future, she would deny that she had ever had a sister.
¹⁴

Dietrich was unusual among early Allied visitors to the liberated camps in apportioning guilt solely to the Germans. For Gellhorn and Miller, being on the ‘right side’ was not enough. If Germany was Europe and America’s dilemma then since the opening of the concentration camps it had also become a personal dilemma for them as well. The question facing them now was how to redeem the horrors they had witnessed. Would trying and punishing the Nazis be enough or would the whole world remain guilty in some way? There was also the question of what to do with all their hatred. Neither could acclimatise to watching Allied commanders such as Gavin helping the unrepentant Germans. They
sought refuge in writing their reports, with Miller insisting to the readers of
Vogue
that Dachau was close enough to the town that there could be no doubt that the inhabitants knew what was happening. ‘The railway siding into the camp runs past quite a few swell villas and the last train of dead and semi-dead deportees was long enough to extend past them.’
¹⁵

At the end of April 1945, George Orwell had reported in the
Observer
that as he drove through the cherry-fringed winding roads of the German countryside he was asking himself one question over and over again: ‘It is to what extent can the so obviously simple and gentle peasants who troop to church on Sunday mornings in decent black be responsible for the horrors of the Nazis?’ For Orwell the question had two possible answers: the ordinary Germans might or might not be guilty. For Martha Gellhorn there could be no doubt of their collective guilt. Now on the west bank of the Rhine with Gavin, she complained scornfully to readers of
Collier’s
that no one in Germany admitted to being a Nazi. There may have been some in the next village; that town a dozen miles away had been a ‘veritable hotbed’ of Nazism; round here everyone had been busy hiding Jews. Unwittingly echoing Erika Mann, Gellhorn suggested that it should be set to music, so that the Germans could sing a ‘We were never Nazis!’ refrain.
¹⁶

Gellhorn was not impressed by the spectacle of a whole nation passing the buck and she was especially unimpressed by the day–night divide. By day the Americans were the answer to the German prayer; by night the Germans took pot shots at Americans and burned down the houses of Germans who had accepted posts in the Military Government. A few months earlier, Gellhorn had been angry about the scale of destruction wrought by the Allies. But she had been hardened by her experience at Dachau and so was dismissive of Germans who complained about their own suffering under the bombs. ‘Our soldiers say, “They asked for it,”’ when they surveyed the ruined cities. This was now Gellhorn’s answer as well.
¹⁷

Fuelled by rage, Gellhorn saw all the Germans as a single homogeneous mass. She made no distinctions of class or politics, forgetting or ignoring the fact that there had even been some surviving Jews
cowering from the bombs alongside their persecutors. She also saw the Germans’ humility before their conquerors as more conniving than it might have been. For many of the Germans, what manifested itself as sycophancy was driven by fear. During the war they had been informed by Nazi propaganda that the British or Americans would castrate all Germans once defeated and would waste no time in implementing the Morgenthau Plan, turning Germany into a giant farm. Distrustful and anxious as well as hungry and often ill, the inhabitants of the bombed cities could not do much more than assert their compliance and beg for compassion from their occupiers.

In a radio broadcast made to the Germans from the US on 10 May, Thomas Mann reiterated the message of collective guilt propounded by Miller and Gellhorn. Though Mann’s tone was more sorrowful than angry – he was not snarling with hate like Miller – he had no doubt that all his former countrymen were implicated in Germany’s guilt. Like Miller and Gellhorn, Mann took the dilemma of Germany personally; all the more personally in his case because, unlike Dietrich, he did not separate himself from the Germans. Beginning a discussion that would culminate in
Doctor Faustus
, Mann lamented that as the bells of victory boomed and glasses clinked, he and his compatriots had to lower their heads in shame. He was ashamed that Germany had failed to free itself from National Socialism: to bring about its liberation with the sound of bells and the music of Beethoven, rather than waiting to be liberated from outside.