Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich

Chapter 8

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8 THERE CAN BE NO RETURN TO NORMALITY Speaking with a Military Government official in the peaceful town of Heidelberg in mid-May 1945,a correspondent for the NewYork Times, skeptical of the many reports of looting and violence by former displaced persons, suddenly heard a woman’s scream. Going outside, he saw a middle-aged woman “running down the tree-lined street with blood pouring from a gash in her arm. . . . She had been halted by a former Russian slave [laborer] who demanded her bicycle and who whipped out a stolen bayonet and slashed her when she refused to surrender it.” Although the specter of the Werwolf and a prolonged guerrilla resistance most alarmed Military Government officials, local detachment and intelligence reports indicated that the greatest actual violence and disorder emanated from the “wandering hordes” of DPs, especially noticeable in the countryside, at the end of the war. Since the Allied High Command estimated a total of six to eight million DPs in the western zones of occupation , with the largest concentration in the U.S. zone, American officials feared that they would sharpen the existing chaos,thus undermining the order and stability vital for a successful occupation.1 This was not a misplaced concern. Because of the continued Nazi re- ENDKAMPF 224 sistance to the very end of the war, the destruction of facilities and dislocation of civilian life was far greater than anticipated. Although in the first weeks and months of the occupation the German civilian populacehad generally remained obedient, the unexpectedly vast DP population and their impromptu migrations within Germany threatened to disrupt this fragile equilibrium. Military Government officials worried that these “swarms of migrant liberated foreigners who have only their bundles . ..[would], unless they receive some systematic care, aggravate the disorder by seizing what they need.” Indeed, American authorities openly conceded that the most difficult immediate problem was not control of the native population . . . but the rounding up and caring for the foreign slaves impressed into service of the Germans. . . . The sudden liberation of millions of half-starved, half-crazed pediculous [lice-infested] inmates of hundreds of labor camps threatened to swamp the machinery of the Military Government . . . . Thousands of displaced persons are roaming the highways, hiding in woods and on farms, and reports of looting and violence by these recently freed victims of German oppression are common. . . . Suddenly set free after months and years of back-breaking toil, near starvation, cruel and inhuman treatment, with the fear of death always in their hearts, these hapless, helpless humans’ first thought was revenge, and their first act was to set forth upon the highways, bound they knew not where. As much as they represented a human tragedy, though, a crucial fear of the Military Government centered on the consequences of their understandable desires for revenge. Allied military records for May and June 1945 made this worry starkly evident: charges of robbery, theft, and rape against Soviet and Polish DPs “exceeded by several hundred per cent the complaints against all other groups.”2 Given this reality, American officials fretted that the criminal actions of DPs might provoke the very chaos that lingering Nazi diehards desired. THOSE DAMNED POLES! In the chaos and breakdown of services that characterized the final days THERE CAN BE NO RETURN TO NORMALITY 225 of Nazi Germany, much of the theft and plundering committed by foreign workers aimed merely at securing the food necessary for survival. Nevertheless, to a considerable degree such actions also represented acts of revenge, some spontaneous, others planned, against both the Nazi regime in general and specific individual Germans. Although there existed a pent-up resentment at the years of mistreatment to which they had been subjected, many forced laborers reacted as well to the murderous frenzy of Nazi authorities at the end of the war. Their very existence an intolerable provocation racially, the instances of plundering by the dispossessed foreign (mostly eastern European) workers seemed to substantiate National Socialist ideology, and thus justify harsh police measures. Moreover, the occasional shoot-outs between German police and marauding bands of forced laborers confirmed the most frightening of Nazi racial anxieties: the eastern European “bandits” were now despoiling Germany itself. In those last days, the Gestapo and Security Police reacted with predictable harshness, often executing foreign workers immediately after arrest, sometimes shooting them even in the absence of plundering as a...