Exorcising Hitler (29 page)

Minister Backe, the architect of the ‘Hunger Plan’, had concentrated during the winter of 1944–5 on feeding Berlin, above all other places.
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And until the dramatic Soviet advances of February–March 1945 robbed them of a large amount of Germany’s most productive agricultural land and the final crisis began, the Agriculture and Food Ministry had viewed the food situation in the Reich as ‘sufficient’. Nonetheless, a lot of secret planning had been undertaken to cope with ‘worst case’ scenarios.

With support from Hans Kehrl, Speer’s planning chief, Backe had also secretly been setting up small local plants to process the yeasty sulphite suds that were a by-product of cellulose manufacture. These had previously been sold to breweries, but could be turned into a food rich in protein and vitamins, a substitute for meat. According to figures from April 1945, just weeks before the end of the war, fifty such plants were in existence, capable of producing 20,000 tons a year – enough to supply the basic protein needs of ten million children. Likewise, Backe managed to get Hitler to sign an order that protected at least part of German agriculture’s stock of workhorses from the frantic depredations of the Wehrmacht – which had always used a lot of draught animals but during the final months of the war, when petrol all but ran out, started to requisition farmers’ horses as well on a large scale. This threat became severe even as the planting season for the crucial first post-war harvest approached.

So, during these final, bloody months of the Third Reich, the group of intelligent and highly competent technocrats around Speer and Backe – Backe being, so to speak, the ‘Speer’ of the food sector – knew, for all their loyalty to the Nazi state, that the war was lost. In general, they did their best, without endangering their own positions (not to mention their lives) by confronting the increasingly irrational Führer with this reality, to ensure that the inevitable end of Nazi Germany would not necessarily mean the end of the German people.

The weakness in these managers’ plans was that they presupposed, or at least were sustained by the hope, that after the war Germans would still control their own economy and food production. Until the end, both Speer and Backe also harboured delusions that the victorious enemy would not be able to dispense with their expert services. All these things would not – most emphatically not – prove to be the case.

To these looming operational and technical problems were added both the prospective hindrance of highly bureaucratic supervision by foreigners unacquainted with local conditions, and the threat of those same foreigners’ vengeful, punitive attitudes. This last factor alone would ensure things turned out even worse than feared for the conquered German population.

There seems little question that Backe’s and Speer’s efforts, in maintaining Germany’s food supply and war industries respectively, had kept the Nazi war machine in operation well beyond its expected functional life. The ‘miracles’ they had so famously performed during this final phase were, however, pointless except in prolonging the war and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands, probably millions more human beings – who might have stood a chance of survival had the Reich surrendered in, say, autumn 1944.

To the end, production had relentlessly continued wherever humanly (or inhumanly) possible. Labour shortages had been apparent in Germany from the beginning of the war, and had become more and more desperate as millions of German workers, many extremely valuable to the production effort, were sent to the front, their lives and their skills sacrificed to the insatiable needs of the Wehrmacht. They were replaced by foreign labour, either prisoners of war (constant at around 1.5 million) or conscripted civilians from the occupied countries. During the early years of the war, most of the foreigners working in Germany had been POWs, many from France, working on farms. However, by the autumn of 1944, when the brutally coercive labour programme organised by Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel, the ‘General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment’ (
Generalbevollmächtigter für den Arbeitseinsatz
), reached its height, 7.9 million foreign workers were employed in Germany, more than 20 per cent of the workforce.

It was bitterly ironic that in the systematically racist Nazi state, where homogeneity was close to a religion, foreigners had become a conspicuous feature of daily life to an extent that they had never before been in German history. In the armaments plants, more than a third of the workforce was of foreign origin, and in some sectors even more. Luftwaffe Marshal Erhard Milch, responsible for aircraft production at the height of the war, quipped that the Stuka Ju 87 was ‘80 percent manufactured by Russians’.
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With the arrival of peace, all those foreign industrial workers, concentration camp inmates, servants and POW farm labourers – at least eleven million in all throughout Germany and Austria at the beginning of 1945 – were suddenly free. Some stayed where they were, deciding there was safety in numbers or encouraged to do so by the Allies, who needed their work in the factories and services to keep basic industries going. But the rest ended up either wandering around defeated Germany or streaming home along the crowded, potholed roads and highways that had so recently been the scene of bloody battles and dramatic advances and retreats. These ‘displaced persons’ (DPs as they were universally known) had to be fed and housed by the newly installed occupation authorities until they could either be sent home or, if for some reason that was not possible or desirable, found permanent shelter and sustenance.

Colin MacInnes described ‘Sergeant Mac’ coming up against this stream of liberated but still scarred humanity as his unit pushed on into the heart of Germany at the very end of the war:

. . . I began to meet parties of civilians moving in the opposite direction to the Army. Some were in small groups on foot, and others in larger bands with belongings heaped on farm carts. It was some time before I realised they were our Allies – the freed prisoners-of-war and deported workers who were beginning their homeward trek. At first I’d taken them for Germans, and it wasn’t so much their dress and the delighted and rather solemn expression I began to notice on their faces that made me realise who they were. They went steadily on as if nothing on earth would stop them.

Then I began to overtake parties of Easterners moving along in the same direction as ourselves, in bodies that were even larger, often riding in a chain of wagons pulled by a tractor which carried a red flag. In some of the villages I passed, they seemed to have taken possession, and I saw whole communities camped in barns by the roadside, cooking themselves meals. I wondered what was happening to the farmers.

These three streams of traffic grew thicker and thicker: our lorries going north-east along the road, the eastern Allies pushing on beside us along the grass verge and the Westerners moving back in the opposite direction. It was as though a day of judgment had come, with the Germans fleeing hopelessly, and the victims rising up and setting out for separate paradises beyond the frontiers.
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The distinction between Germans, even displaced Germans, and DPs was clear. According to officials at SHAEF, DPs were defined as those individuals ‘obliged to leave their country or place of origin or former residence or who have been deported from there by action of the enemy because of race, religion or activities’. This distinction was especially clear when it came to the matter of feeding. All the Allies acknowledged that the many millions of human beings who had found themselves in Germany against their will as a result of forced emigration deserved to have their further suffering minimised – and their swift return home facilitated.

From the beginning, especially for those DPs who had experienced liberation while still in labour or concentration camps, medical help, however rough and ready, and food, at first from forces rations, was available on an ad hoc basis. For many, transport home was quickly arranged. By May 1945, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), founded with impressive foresight at Roosevelt’s behest two years earlier to cater for these eventualities, had already set up five hundred assembly centres for DPs. From these, almost one million DPs had already, officially, been repatriated, even before the end of the war.
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(This figure did not of course include the vast flood of self-directed returnees encountered by ‘Sergeant Mac’ on the roads of north-western Germany at this time.)

However, things were by no means perfect, especially for the several hundred thousand Jewish DPs in Germany at the end of the war, who, unlike Poles, most Russians, Yugoslavs and Western European prisoners and forced labourers, did not necessarily have anywhere to go. Their communities in Germany or Poland or Russia had been destroyed, many or even most of their relatives murdered, and for the moment the only places where they felt at home or, on a basic level, safe, were camps – sometimes new ones set up by the victors to accommodate them, sometimes even the same camps where they had been held by the Germans until liberated.

These Jewish DPs were often in very poor physical condition, starving and diseased. In mid-January 1945, after Reichsführer Himmler’s order to evacuate the camps in Poland of all but the sickest prisoners, many thousands had been herded on to the roads west. In the final horror that followed, which has gone down in infamy as the ‘Death March’, many, many died of exhaustion, hunger, or at the brutal hands of the guards who had accompanied them. The Allied soldiers found them – and tens of thousands of other prisoners – packed under the most appalling conditions into the by now obscenely overcrowded camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and their satellites during the course of April 1945.

The occupiers experienced pity, horror – but also, not infrequently, repulsion.

At Dachau, on the edge of suburban Munich,
Time
magazine’s correspondent Sidney Olson found boxcars in sidings, filled with corpses, many still showing whip marks on their bony buttocks and rumps, and further into the camp, ‘half covered by a brown tarpaulin . . . a stack about five feet high and about 20 feet wide of naked dead bodies, all of them emaciated’. That was the dead. Worse were the unwelcome attentions of the living, who were

. . . frantically, hysterically happy. They began to kiss us, and there is nothing you can do when a lot of hysterical, unshaven, lice-bitten, half-drunk, typhus-infected men want to kiss you. Nothing at all. You cannot hit them, and besides, they all kiss you at the same time. It is no good trying to explain that you are only a correspondent. A half-dozen of them were especially happy and it turned out they were very proud: they had killed two German soldiers themselves.
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At Bergen-Belsen near Celle, 700 kilometres to the north-west, which the British liberated on 15 April, some 10,000 bodies lay unburied when they entered the camp. Thirteen thousand more inmates died in the days and weeks that followed. A Jewish chaplain with the British Second Army, Leslie Hardman, described the condition of survivors there. He happened to enter the camp with two young British soldiers, who were carrying sacks of potatoes meant for the feeding of the liberated prisoners:

Almost as though they had emerged from the retreating shadows of dark corners, a number of wraithlike creatures came tottering towards us. As they drew closer they made frantic efforts to quicken their feeble pace. Their skeleton arms and legs made jerky, grotesque movements as they forced themselves forward. Their bodies, from their heads to their feet, looked like matchsticks. The two young Tommies, entering camp for the first time, must of thought they had walked into a supernatural world; all the gruesome and frightening tales they had heard as children – and, not so many years since, they had been children – rose up to greet them; the grisly spectacle which confronted them was too much. They dropped their heavy sacks and fled.
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No sooner had the young Tommies retreated than these images of living death, uttering thin, eerie cries, began fighting with the sacks and with each other to get at the precious raw potatoes within.

‘All I felt,’ said another British officer, in an alarmingly honest appraisal of his own reactions, ‘was horror, disgust, and I am ashamed to admit it, hate. Hate against the prisoners for looking as they did, for living as they did, for existing at all. It was quite unreasonable, but there it was, and it gave us one possible explanation of why the SS had done these things. Once having reduced their prisoners to such a state the only emotions the guards could feel were loathing, disgust and hate.’
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All the same, away from these absolute extremes of bearable experience, most Allied troops did what they could. The beginnings of a post-war network of refuges for such problematic DPs began to take shape. Towards the end of April 1945, Lieutenant Irving J. Smith, a Jewish-American officer, led his unit into the town of Tutzing, near the Starnberger See and about twenty miles south of Munich. There he found some survivors who had been evacuated from Dachau before the camp was liberated and forced to head south in what was essentially a ‘death march’. There were a thousand of them, ‘starving, almost raving maniacs, half paralysed with hunger and fear’.