David Stafford - Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II

Copyright2007 by David Stafford

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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First eBook Edition: November 2007

ISBN: 978-0-316-02343-6

Also by David Stafford

Ten Days to D-Day: Countdown to the Liberation of Europe

Spies Beneath Berlin

Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets

Secret Agent: The True Story of the Special Operations Executive

Churchill and Secret Service

Camp X

For Ruth,

who survived,

and

in memory of

Sydney, who fought

Say no more than How will it be with me? for however it be thou wilt settle it well, and the issue shall be fortunate... if a great boar appear, thou wilt fight the greater fight; if evil men, thou wilt clear the earth of them. But if I die thus? Thou wilt die a good man, in the accomplishing of a noble deed.

EPICTETUS

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine...War is Hell.

GENERAL WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN

W ars do not end when the fighting stops, and military victory in itself is no guarantor of peace. The wounded continue to die. The dispossessed still seek a place to call home. Parents search for lost children among the ruins, and families and friends try desperately to reunite. Soldiers of the defeated forces face weeks, months and even years interned in prisoner-of-war camps often far distant from home. The victors do not suddenly turn their swords into plowshares. They hunt down enemy leaders, confront those who wish to continue the fight, and wrestle hard to establish law and order. Only then can peace come. For this requires more than the absence of conflict, and is harder to build than battering cities to rubble.

Histories of the Second World War in Europe invariably end with the surrender of German armies and the celebration of VE (Victory in Europe) Day on Tuesday, 8 May 1945 (or 9 May in the former Soviet Union). From a military perspective alone this is misleading, because fighting continued in some places well past that date. Yet even where conflict ceased, allied soldiers did not suddenly fling aside their weapons, celebrate wildly, and return home. On the contrary, for most of them, VE Day was merely a brief pause in the continuing and exhausting experience of being in uniform and under arms. Thanks to Adolf Hitlers manic vision, Europe in 1945 was a disaster zone, and the aftermath of war proved as demanding as battle itself.

It required the surrender of millions of enemy soldiers; the urgent quashing of looting, rioting and random violence; the robust and often severe restoration of law and order; the reestablishment of basic services such as electricity, gas, water and sewerage; the restoration of smashed roads, railways and telephone systems; the quest for the proceeds of the large-scale looting of European gold and art treasures; and, not least, the search for Nazi and Fascist leaders fleeing retribution and justice. The participants did not stop writing their diaries or letters home, and neither did they consider that their war was over; for one thing, those directly involved in the fighting expected to be transferred to the Far East to finish the conflict against the still-undefeated Japanese.

Nor did the fighting become less bitter as liberation dawned. Indeed, the final weeks of the war saw some of the cruelest moments of all, providing a terrible climax to a conflict already marked by brutality and death on a scale unprecedented in human history. Since D-Day in June 1944, allied armies had suffered a sequence of bitter setbacks that continually postponed the day of victory. When they finally entered the German heartland, Hitler made it clear that he would fight on to the bitter end. Referring to the armistice sought by Germany at the end of the First World War, he firmly told the Wehrmacht in his proclamation on Heroes Memorial Day11 March 1945that the year 1918 will not repeat itself. To rule this out, no price, not even destruction, was too high. A week later, he issued his so-called Nero Order. Nothing was to be kept for the enemy to use: mines were to be blown up, canals blocked, telecommunications wrecked, and Germanys cultural heritage destroyed.

Josef Goebbels, Hitlers propaganda minister, expressed the same chilling nihilism more pithily: If we have to leave the scene, he wrote in typically theatrical fashion, well shut the door so tight that no other government will ever open it again. What all this meant was that allied soldiers could expect a remorseless fight to the death.

As for civilians, liberation often marked the beginning and not the end of their tribulations, a bittersweet moment of exhilaration and despair. It was only with the overrunning of concentration camps such as Buchenwald, Belsen and Dachau in April 1945 that the full scale of Nazi atrocities became apparent to Western eyes. For the survivors, the trauma of returning home was just the start of a painful process of readaptation to normal life. While, for the thousands of Jews who discovered that they had no homes or families to go back to, the struggle now began in earnest to build their own new state of Israel. For civilians who had not been transported to the campsthe vast majority of EuropeansVE Day was little more than a moment of brief relief in a life of continuing hardship and daily struggle.

This was also a time of retribution and revenge. The Second World War precipitated the climax of two decades of ethnic rivalry and ideological conflict, and almost everywhere society trembled on the brink of civil war or serious disorder. The end of the fighting permitted the winners to vent their rage on those of their opponents who had collaborated with the enemy. This presented the liberating armies with another urgent problem in the wake of their hard-won triumphs.

It was only after the fighting stopped, moreover, that help could reach the millions of people transported and enslaved by the Nazis in their insatiable search for labor to run the war economy of the Third Reich. For the first time, the army of relief workers who descended on Europe were able truly to appreciate the full scale and depth of the human misery involved. They also confronted a vast new wave of refugees, some fleeing westwards ahead of Stalins armies, others deliberately uprooted from their homes in Central and Eastern Europe because they were ethnically German. This, the largest forced migration of peoples in European history, took little notice of the celebrations of VE Day and it, too, threatened a new round of instability and conflict.

Even in unoccupied Britain, a political tremor was about to throw the nations triumphant war leader, Winston Churchill, out of office. In the United States, the inexperienced new president, Harry Truman, struggled hard to master the complexities of the international power game for which he had been ill-prepared by his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is scarce wonder that historians have described the end of the war in Europe as little more than a semblance of peace, as a poisoned peace, or most recently as a case of no simple victory.

In Britain and the United States, the story of the Second World War is invariably told through its military campaigns. This is understandable. Neither country was occupied, and apart from British civilians affected by the German bombing of their cities, the war was most directly experienced by those who took part in the campaigns in Northwest Europe and Italy and the Far East. But the history of war is too important to be left to military historians alone, and in Europe the conflict had its greatest and most devastating impact on civilians. For most of them, it was not an affair of movement and battle but a daily degradation, in the course of which men and women were betrayed and humiliated, forced into daily acts of petty crime and self-abasement, in which everyone lost something and many lost everything.