Aidan Crawley - The Rise of Western Germany

The Rise of Western Germany: 1945-1972

Aidan Crawley

Copyright Aidan Crawley 1973

The right of Aidan Crawley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

First published in the United Kingdom in 1973 by Collins Ltd.

This edition published in 2018 by Sharpe Books.

Table of Contents

Chapter One Prelude to Defeat

Not until Russian guns reverberated across the Oder in January, 1945, did the ordinary people of Germany feel the first, chill presentiment of defeat. Although General Zhukov was overrunning East Prussia and General Eisenhower was fighting his way towards the Rhine, although the German offensive in the Ardennes had failed, the public still listened to what their radio told them. Their Minister of Propaganda, Dr Goebbels, was so convincing that he almost compelled them to have faith in a secret weapon the successor to the V1 and V2 that would turn the scale in Germanys favour.

Even the ten thousand British and American air force prisoners at Stalag Luft 3, a camp near Sagan in Silesia, did not dare to believe that the collapse was imminent until they heard, on 23rd January, the sound of Russian guns twenty miles to the east. Apparently Hitler felt that prisoners were valuable in the desperate game he was playing, for on the evening of the 26th the camp was informed that everyone would start marching westwards in a few hours time. No arrangements had been made for food or billets, and as it was bitterly cold, with the temperature frequently dropping to forty degrees of frost at night, the men knew that they would have a struggle to keep alive. Furthermore they would have to carry their own food. A large consignment of Red Cross parcels had arrived at the camp a few days earlier so we spent the next few hours making sledges with wood taken from the walls, floors and ceilings of our barracks, wrote one of the prisoners.

At intervals through the night we quit the camp, company by company, stopping at the Food Store on our way out. Not everything in a Red Cross parcel was useful for a march, so we rifled half a dozen parcels to fill one with what was most useful chocolate, coffee and cigarettes were the best currency for barter and had priority. As a result, by the time the tail of the column reached the gate they were confronted by an extraordinary sight. The snow around the Food Store for hundreds of yards was literally carpeted with discarded tins and already a stream of civilians from Sagan were scavenging all they could carry. Thousands more tins had been tossed into a little compound which held sixty Russian prisoners who sang to us as we passed by. They told us they had never seen so much food in their lives before.

As soon as the column of ten thousand British and American airmen reached the main roads it was literally engulfed by refugees. Some had already travelled many hundreds of miles from east Prussia and even the Ukraine which, until this year, had retained a colony of many thousands of German families. What surprised us most was the way they travelled, wrote the same prisoner. There was not a car, lorry or even a bicycle to be seen only a seemingly endless line of covered wagons and carts drawn by horses or mules. We were suddenly back a hundred years, living again the scenes described so vividly by Sergeant Burgoyne in his diary of the retreat of Napoleons army from Moscow which many of us had just been reading. For this was not merely a retreat, but the migration of a vast peasant population. Each wagon represented a family or the remnants of a family with the old couple, shrouded in black shawls, sitting motionless on the driving seat, small grandchildren and pregnant mothers lying on the mattresses in the cart behind and the elder children walking alongside the spare mules and horses which were tethered to the wagons end.

They were a pitiful sight, frozen, hungry, shoes and clothes falling apart, dragging themselves along to an unknown destination, hoping only that it might be beyond the reach of the Russian army. It was so cold that even in the daytime any drink mixed with cold water froze solid before it was possible to carry it to ones mouth. At night men and women could keep alive only by huddling together in a wagon or, if they were lucky, in the aisles of a church. Those who fell asleep in the snow were dead within a few minutes.

Yet their fellow countrymen gave these fugitives no welcome. Every village in Silesia had already received its quota of refugees from the west who had been evacuated earlier in the war as the result of allied bombing. The inhabitants of these villages wanted no further overcrowding. It had not yet sunk into their consciousness that within days they themselves would have to move. As the wagons rattled slowly down a village street, doors were slammed and windows hastily shut. On the pavement stood only the burgomaster and the village elders determined to see that the column did not stop. When night fell and the refugees could go no farther village officials would herd them into the main square or perhaps into a churchyard, and stand guard to see that no one escaped.

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At the time we prisoners did not know how vast the migration was, or that we were a part of its vanguard. Literally millions of people were on the move. We did realise, however, that we were seeing the disintegration of Germany. Within an hour of taking the road prisoners and refugees had become indistinguishable. We were bound together by one common thought to keep together so as to keep alive. Frostbite took toll of our guards, who were mainly middle-aged reservists, and many fell out that first morning. Those who could still walk trudged along, their backs bent, their eyes fixed on the snow at their feet. When their weapons became too heavy they put them on our sledges, which was generally the last they saw of them. The refugees gladly let us climb on to their wagons and, as they had nothing with which to barter, we gave them what food we could spare.

The people we met in the villages were beginning to be afraid. When we went into their houses to barter twenty cigarettes for a loaf of bread, five for a pound of potatoes the family would crowd round and ply us with questions. How far away were the Russians? How were they behaving? Should the villagers stay where they were or join the column? Occasionally an officer or a brown-shirted burgomaster would call us terror bombers or child murderers and shout out that we were not allowed to talk to civilians. Once a guard knocked from a womans hand a cup of tea she was handing me. She turned on him like a viper and said that her son was a prisoner in England and was being well treated. She would give me tea whatever he might do.

The S.S. were dreaded by the German civilians almost as much as the Russians. Some S.S. commanders were such fanatical Nazis that even now they were prepared to carry out Hitlers orders and execute summarily anyone guilty of defeatism, which meant refusing to burn food stocks, blow up road bridges or prepare for last ditch resistance. Detachments of S.S. were constantly retreating through our column and sometimes they would threaten to shoot if we did not get out of their way. One day three of them strode up to a group of us brandishing revolvers and accusing us of stealing a goose they had cooked for supper. Fortunately not a trace of it could be found. We ourselves never saw an S.S. unit larger than a platoon and mostly they seemed weary and dispirited. Twice I watched an S.S. corporal go to a house and ask for water and each time the housewife, having seen his uniform, slammed the door in his face. He meekly retreated.

The great trek of which we formed part meant more than the disintegration of the comfortable village life of Eastern Germany. It was also the end of an aristocratic tradition which had begun with the forcible conversion of the Prussian Slavs by the Teutonic knights in the thirteenth century. The Junkers had survived the First World War and both under the Weimar republic and under Hitler had resumed their traditional role of forming a bastion against the Poles and the Slavs to the east of them. Now we saw their splendour crumbling away. One evening we came to a town called Muskau whose neat avenues and imposing buildings suggested a principality. At one end stood a vast palace which, we learned, belonged to the family Von Arnim. Count von Arnim himself was at home and although I did not meet him we all felt his authority. For the first time on the march we were provided with billets, occupying his riding school, stables, pottery, laundry and a glass factory in the town whose furnaces were still alight and seemed to frozen prisoners the nearest thing to paradise they could imagine. The vast stables housed a unique collection of carriages and coaches dating from the sixteenth century; some of the loose boxes which had been built for race-horses, were equipped with hot and cold water both of which were still running; the house was a museum of pictures and furniture.