Germany in Defeat

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GERMANY IN DEFEAT

Percy Knauth

Germany in Defeat was originally published in 1946 by Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

* * *

TO

the memory of my friend and teacher

RALPH W. BARNES

who died in the line of journalistic duty

at Bitolj, Yugoslavia, in dark days of the war

Table of Contents

Contents

Table of Contents 4

Preface 5

I. The Ruins 7

II. K. L. 24

III. Conversation with Youth 48

IV. A Little Man Named Müller 57

V. Surrender in Tyrol 63

VI. The Little Green Car 74

VII. The Church 86

VIII. Bombs Over the Land 98

IX. Berchtesgaden 107

X. The 20th of July 113

XI. Adolf Hitler 122

XII. Berlin 135

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 150

Preface

There probably could be no more devastating experience in a human lifetime than to be suddenly set down, coming from the security and plenty of America, in the utter physical and moral ruin of Germany today. It is a transition not only from a land where houses still have walls and panes of glass and running water and heat in the wintertime and a hot meal cooking on the stove to a land that has none of these things—it is a passage from a state of mind in which all these things seem normal and entirely essential to a life in which they seem like memories from a long-forgotten time, a life that does not even hold a hope of them, or, for that matter, any hope at all. For Germany is not only a ruined land (there are other ruined lands in Europe, some worse destroyed than Germany); it is also a defeated land, a nation that no longer calls its life its own.

When I arrived in Frankfurt-on-the-Main on March 18, 1945, I was about 28 hours away from New York—or three meals and a night’s sleep distant from my Connecticut home. Frankfurt was the first German city I had seen in four years. Berlin had been the last. On March 18, 1941, I left the German capital with my wife, homeward-bound after four years of newspaper work in Germany and Central Europe. That journey home was long and arduous. Six months were gone before we finally rounded into New York harbor and breathed the free air of America. Visas, difficulties in securing transportation, the birth of our first son, and two major campaigns of the Wehrmacht delayed our travel. We spent that summer in Switzerland, the listening post on Germany’s frontier from which I broadcast news for the Columbia Broadcasting System and wrote dispatches for the New York Times.

Those years had been eventful and, for the world, decisive. When I arrived in Berlin with a four-year education in Switzerland and Germany, plus a year and a half of reporting on a smalltown newspaper to back up my claims that I was fit material to become a foreign correspondent, the Axis was an embryo about to be born. The German pocket battleship Deutschland in that summer bombarded Almeria, giving me my first fearful sense of international crisis. Later, the death of Rudolf Carraciola, Germany’s best-beloved racing driver, was an occasion for national mourning and the world seemed on its normal plane again. But then came Mussolini, to visit Hitler and speak in the Olympic Stadium (with a bad cold that made his voice ridiculously human), and a trial blackout for Berlin. Once more the possibility of a war seemed something less than just a fairy tale, for now the sides were chosen: the Berlin-Rome Axis was born.

In March 1938 I visited my brother down in Weimar and had a carefree time. The world was calm again, or at least calm enough for people to persuade themselves that things would turn out all right in the end. And then one night a telephone call from Berlin: Get back up here, Austria is going to be invaded. Next day I saw the war parading southward past me as I drove north along the Autobahn—tanks, trucks, buses full of soldiers, guns, airplanes: the fledgling Wehrmacht on its first mission of aggrandizement. From that time on, the world was never normal again. September 1, 1939, was only the moment that all of us had so long awaited. It was almost a relief when the period of wishful thinking and appeasement ended.

By March 1941, like many others in the American press colony, I had had enough—enough of being bombed by British fliers to whom, in our hearts, we wished all luck as we took shelter from their bombs; enough of listening to Nazi propagandists telling us what we should write of Germany’s greatness; enough of being checked on day and night by the Gestapo shadowers. I had a wife now—a French girl who was interned when war broke out, released, and then interned again. The second time it took me three months to get her free, and when she got back to Berlin we married. When we discovered shortly after that a baby was on the way, we finally made up our minds that life was not worth living with the Berlin Blues; and so, still fearful lest at the last minute the Gestapo might catch up with my wife’s unauthorized news correspondent’s exit visa, we left Germany without a backward glance.

Now, four years later, I was there again. In the interim I had worked a year’s hitch in New York on the Times’ Sunday Section, had transferred to Time Magazine, where I wrote in the Foreign News department, and had done a stint in the Middle East, Turkey, Rumania, Bulgaria, and the Aegean Sea. In those four years I had never been able to tear my thoughts completely away from Germany; having seen that nation in the time of its greatest victories, I could not help wondering how the Germans thought and acted under the increasing pressure of reverses and inevitable defeat.

Last spring I got my chance to find out when I was sent into the Reich behind the invading Allied armies to report on Germany’s downfall for Time and Life magazines. For the opportunity given me by their editors to see the end in Germany I owe a debt of great professional gratitude. Much of what I saw has already been published in the pages of those two magazines. With their permission, for which I am likewise most grateful, I have used that material in this book, plus a great deal more which in those hectic days never got beyond the stage of hurried notes. I have written the book in the sincere hope that all of us will not too easily or too quickly forget how terrible are the wages of aggressive war.

Wilton, Connecticut, November, 1945

I. The Ruins

In the hush of early dawn, the city of Frankfurt-on-the-Main lay as still and lifeless as a medieval ruin. It was cold, and a drizzling rain shrouded all things in unrelieved gray. All up and down the street on which I stood, the houses were vacant, crumbling shells. Far down at one end, a line of U.S. Seventh Armored Division tanks crouched in the shelter of a wall, their hatches battened down, their crews somewhere invisibly asleep. Only one figure moved in all that silence: a sentry, helmeted and muffled against the cold and rain, shuffling slowly up the street, a colorless shadow in a ruined world.

Beyond the row of houses, in little gardens of flower beds and fruit trees, the fog of the night before still hung above the grass. I climbed the steep sides of a railroad embankment and walked along the tracks, rusty from long disuse, broken and twisted here and there by bombs. There was a line of freight cars, splintered and charred, their contents strewn about the ground. On two big flatcars there were mounted guns, their barrels sleek and dripping in the rain. Barrels, breeches, and all, they were still thickly coated with protective grease and factory-new. Frankfurt had fallen before they could be fired.

Across the river, flowing dark and smooth beneath a partly blown-up bridge, the gaunt skeleton of Frankfurt’s tall cathedral loomed spectrally over a façade of broken walls and empty windows. A jeep backfired somewhere, and I jumped, looking instinctively for cover. But there were no more shots in Frankfurt now. This city seemed a city of the dead.

The power and the glory of the Third Reich, the blocklike lines of marching soldiers, the cheering, waving crowds, and the arrogant leaders had vanished from Frankfurt like the frightening figures in an evil dream. No flags hung from the windows; only torn fragments of curtain, sodden with the rain. No blaring music, no shouting speeches came from the blank and empty houses; there was only the lonely twittering of birds to greet the dawn of the new day. It did not seem that human voices ever had been heard in all these ruins. It did not seem that Adolf Hitler’s voice had ever been heard here in this ghost town.

And yet it had been heard, in times that seemed to lie long ages in the past but had been only yesterday. I turned a corner and read, painted on a wall: Frankfurt Stands Firm! On the opposite corner, I saw another: Better Death Than Slavery! And as I walked along I saw still more: Victory or Death! Despite the Terror! and Hitler’s prideful boast: We Will Never Capitulate!

These were the slogans of the Nazis, still living on Frankfurt’s bombed and broken walls. This was the pride and glory of the Nazi Reich, and all around me was the fearful price that Germany had paid for its illusions. For the Nazis had meant to hold Frankfurt. It was a proud and ancient town of Germany, dating back to Roman days. It was a Nazi town, and it was full of symbols of old German glory: the place where the Holy Roman Emperors of the German Reich were crowned, the house in which Germany’s greatest poet, Goethe, had been born; the place where Germany’s first real political union had been planned a century ago. It was a town of military importance, too, with factories that manufactured vehicles and guns and airplane parts, with railroad lines that funneled traffic through big marshaling yards from central Germany to the whole southern sector of the Rhine.

The Nazis had meant to hold Frankfurt as they meant to hold the whole country, city by city, town by town, village by village, street by street. The cost was nothing to them, though it ruined Germany. Hitler himself, from his deep, bombproof shelter in Berlin where later he committed suicide, gave the order to blow up all the bridges on the Main and to defend Frankfurt to the last man, woman, or child. But when Frankfurt was attacked, its Nazi structure fell apart like rotten timbers. There was no Götterdämmerung in this old German city, no last heroic stand by garrison or people. There was only cowardice, confusion, and desertion. In its final hours Nazism showed in Frankfurt as in all of Germany how withered and corrupt its power and glory were.

Frankfurt looked like a dead city on that March morning when the sound of the last shot of its brief, inglorious siege had barely died; but there was life among the ruins still. In houses, rooms, or cellars left intact by the heavy air raids that had swept the city, some hundred and fifty thousand of Frankfurt’s normal five hundred and fifty thousand people still lived and thought and tried to put together the torn threads of their daily lives. From some of them, I heard the sorry story of the city’s fall.

The first real sign of the impending siege was the blowing of the bridges across the Main. The Americans had crossed the Rhine along its entire length, and Frankfurt and its hinterland no longer lay behind that protective river barrier. A week before the first enemy shells fell on the city, the Hitler Youth was mobilized to dig fortifications for the Volkssturm and the Army garrison. The boys, aged between twelve and sixteen years, marched off to Frankfurt’s outskirts, and many parents, seeing them go, made preparations for their own departure. For most of the Hitler Youths, it was the first stage in a long and weary trek, for when the soldiers left, they left with them. Frankfurt was a city without youth when it was captured.

In its last week as a Nazi city, Frankfurt went through its final agony. By Saturday, the Volkssturm was being called up and the panicky city administration, spurred by a Berlin broadcast by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reichs Propaganda Minister, were trying to halt the evacuation by proclaiming that all who left would be considered traitors. Highways and railroad trains going inland were jammed. Charcoal-burning trucks, horse-drawn wagons, pushcarts, baby carriages, and thousands of men, women, and children on foot clogged the roads. The air-raid sirens, wailing every time a flight of Allied planes came near, increased the panic. Looting began when foreign slave workers left their factories, abandoned by their German masters. Wehrmacht stores were plundered by foreigners and Germans alike in a last, wild search for food and all the goods that had been tightly rationed for so many years.

By the next day, Sunday, the Nazi city administration had given up the fight. The previous day’s proclamations were reversed: over the special network used to broadcast air-raid warnings to all the city’s people through radio sets in factories and cellars, came an order to evacuate Frankfurt completely. The mayor and all the city’s top officials left, by car, speeding past the crowding, struggling refugees along the road. Some Nazi organizations—Gestapo, Labor Front, and others—destroyed their records first. Others—local Ortsgruppen (Party headquarters)—senselessly wrecked their offices, destroying typewriters, furniture, and equipment yet leaving full stocks of ammunition and valuable papers behind.

Parts of the town began to burn. In the looted restaurant of the railroad station, a fire broke out that burned for many days. Police and fire departments ceased to function altogether, and anarchy descended on the town.

It was on this day that Helmut Lotz, a garrison soldier of Frankfurt, killed his wife and two small children and then killed himself, rather than send his family out on the road in obedience to the official order. Lotz, a tubercular Wehrmacht clerk, had managed to stay with his family all through the war. Now, in the final hours, he was to remain behind while they became enforced refugees. He never thought to disobey the order; he never stopped to think that in a few more days no Nazis would be giving orders any more in Frankfurt. He saw only one way out: to kill them and himself, and thus stay with them. He was a churchgoer and a firm believer. At his funeral, a week later, the pastor who consigned the bodies to the grave told me: There were true victims of senseless propaganda.

In those days, too, the Volkssturm was called up to battle-old men and others unfit for Army service. I got a notice to report on Sunday, one man told me. "That was on Friday. Saturday I brought my wife and children away to safety, to a village about twenty kilometers away. We rode out on our bicycles. Sunday morning I was supposed to report to Volkssturm headquarters. When I got there, they were all drunk and nobody was doing anything, so I got on my bicycle again and rode away."

For five days, from Sunday to Friday, when the Americans took the city, Frankfurt existed in this state of anarchy. There was no authority whatsoever. There was fighting in the suburbs, .at the one bridge that remained, half-intact, of all the bridges leading across the Main, and finally in central Frankfurt’s streets. The people lived by day and night down in their cellars. Some went out to loot food and clothing, and fought with foreign workers over the contents of stores and supply dumps. Most of them stayed in their cellars and prayed.

At the end of five days, a great and unaccustomed silence descended on the city. There were no air-raid sirens, no screams of bombs or whistles of shells. There was no crackle of machine guns any more, no roar of airplanes overhead. There was a silence like that of the tomb, and in this empty stillness Frankfurt’s people fearfully poked their heads above ground and looked out on their new and unknown world.

It was a rainy day, and cold. Smoke hung in the still, heavy air from fires still smoldering around the town. In the smoke and drizzle figures moved, helmeted, alert, with ready guns: American soldiers.

Frankfurt’s people did not know how to behave. The GIs who were now their masters had come across an ocean and fought their way through half a continent to take their town. No Nazi mayor or Gauleiter had ever told them what to do if they were conquered. The old, accustomed discipline was gone. No one knew where to turn; no one knew whence would come the orders that for so many years had set the patterns of their lives.

Thus Frankfurt fell. From now on, this ancient German city and modern stronghold of the Nazi government would live a life it never knew before: the life of a conquered people.

To a small, a very small group of Frankfurt’s people, the coming of the Americans was a true liberation. Dr. Wilhelm Hollbach, a white-haired man in his sixties, was one of these. He was a former editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, the last of Germany’s great liberal newspapers which the Nazis finally closed up in 1943, because of paper shortage. Dr. Hollbach knew what to do after Frankfurt was captured, because he had been in touch with Americans before, through channels to Switzerland. In the U.S. Army Military Government scheme, he was Frankfurt’s new mayor.

The Military Government and its German subordinates like Dr. Hollbach faced a monumental task. Frankfurt’s administrative structure had utterly ceased to exist. Not only that, but most of the essential papers for administrative work were gone—such vital things as food-ration lists, police records, and the gas, water, and electric supply files. And a hundred and fifty thousand Germans, plus some fifteen thousand newly freed foreign slave workers, had to be told what to do—of himself, no Frankfurt resident was capable of doing anything.

About two-thirds of Frankfurt’s built-up area was in ruins. Railroad lines leading in and out of town were cut, highways were jammed with military vehicles or refugees. Food and supplies would have to come from local stocks, but with the records destroyed many of these stocks could not immediately be found, and others were already seriously depleted by looting or by fire. There was no gas, no running water, no electric light, no transport system, no telephones, mail, or telegraph.

In these circumstances, the immediate personal concern of every resident of Frankfurt was food. In the first days there was literally none, because all normal sources of food were closed. Until the ration system could be put in working shape again, stores had to be closed; otherwise, although they might eat now, the people of Frankfurt would surely starve later.

Within a week, food became available, in small amounts. Here and there, stores were allowed to open, and on newly printed food cards people could purchase what there was to be had. It was not much. The rations were lower than they had been under the Nazis and very close to a starvation level, but they would have to do until Frankfurt could somehow, some time, be linked up with the larger economic structure of the conquered area. Per week and per person, people were able to buy:

One loaf of bread

125 grams of butter or lard (about 1/4 lb.)

125 grams of sugar or jam (about 1/4 lb.)

250 grams of meat or sausage (about 1/2 lb.)

For babies and the sick there was about a pint of milk per day. Vegetables there were none. Eggs there were none. Potatoes were so scarce as to be virtually unobtainable. Occasionally, if they were lucky, the people could buy a little rice or cereal, or some dried peas, and ersatz coffee.

With these rations, and with the stocks on hand, the city administration estimated Frankfurt could be fed for some six weeks. What would happen after that, nobody knew, but for the first time in their lives German people were thinking seriously and fearfully of starvation.

Daily life became an unremitting struggle. The residue of Frankfurt’s population had places to live, but that was about all. Many lived in cellars, the entrances to which were tunnels through the rubble of the collapsed houses above. Some were in parts of apartments, living in the one room left of three or four or five destroyed by bombs. On the outskirts of the city there were modern housing developments and private villas still intact; here lived the most fortunate. But even for them, with a secure roof over their head and perhaps glass still in the windows, life was reduced to the primitive. Modern cities are not built for catastrophes that destroy the water, light, gas, and sewage systems.

No running water meant that water had to be lugged in by hand. Frankfurt still had, here and there, old hand pumps in the streets, and one of the commonest sights in this and other bombed cities was the long queues of women and children, buckets in hand, awaiting their turn at the pump. Twice daily at least this trip had to be made, and sometimes the full buckets had to be carried for half a mile.

No electricity meant that lamps or candles would have to be used. Both had been scarce, and were precious now. When night fell on Frankfurt, the blackout was blacker than it had ever been, for lamps or candles had to be saved for emergencies.

No gas meant that cooking had to be done with wood or coal. How many modern apartments are equipped with stoves for either? There were few indeed in Frankfurt. Nor was there electricity to use for hot-plate cooking; those who had only a modern stove either got together with others who had old-fashioned ranges, or made crude fireplaces out of bricks and rubble and cooked outdoors.

Living in cellars was life reduced to the utmost in primitiveness, but in those cellars, wandering through Frankfurt, I saw surprising things. In their extremity, the people still tried to preserve a semblance of their former homes. Carpets were laid on the cold cement floors, curtains were hung on windows blacked out by the rubble piled high outside. Tables, chairs, and beds—if they were to be had—were down there, and flowers, and even, sometimes, a canary bird. Some of these cellars had been lived in for months, and would be lived in for months yet to come.

Most families were split up and scattered over all of Europe. The old and the young and the sick had been evacuated long before, when the big air raids started the destruction of the city. Husbands, fathers, sweethearts, brothers were in the Army, somewhere. Others had left in the last panicky flight before the Americans arrived. I saw no ‘teenage boys, few girls, fewer children. The people walking on the streets were mostly middle-aged, dazed, apathetic, concerned only with their life from day to day. The past was dead within them; for the future they had no thoughts whatsoever.

It is a shattering thing to see a city that is physically and morally so devastated. I walked and rode for days through Frankfurt, and it seemed to me that there was nothing whole left there, nothing at all. The ruins of the old part of the town, and of the business center, were monumental, even, in a way, majestic: block after block of such complete destruction that it seemed nothing could