Dachau: The Harrowing of Hell

References and Notes

REFERENCES AND NOTES CHAPTER Back to School I. Guide to Assembly Center Administration for Refugees and Displaced Persons, Displaced Persons Branch, G-5 Division, SHAEF, July 1944· 2. My anxieties were without foundation. Many years later, I discovered that the Army had begun to make plans about DPs and refugees long before March 1945, shortly after the disastrous British experiences during the defeat of France and Belgium in 1940. The British believed that the Germans had deliberately terrorized civilians, causing them to flee in large numbers, block highways, and so prevent reinforcement of Allied armies. They also thought that the Germans used civilians to camouflage their own troop movements, so that the only way French and English soldiers could shoot at the Germans was by firing over the heads of the civilians-or through them. Allied tacticians wanted to be sure that this did not happen again. Furthermore, they hoped to use foreign workers in Germany as a disruptive force. This was attempted in 1944 when slave laborers were instructed by radio and air-dropped leaflets to flee from their factories and go into hiding. The effort was successful , and many of these DPS committed acts of sabotage helpful to the Allied cause. The military analysts developed plans for two different situations. The first covered the possibility of a slow, difficult advance into Germany , during which only relatively few DPs would be encountered. The other, the plan that was used, took into account what might happen if Germany collapsed quickly, with great numbers of civilians being liberated. It is likely that if plan number one had been used, DP teams would never have been assembled. The refugee movements in France and Belgium before 1945 reinforced the belief of the Allied command in the necessity for military control of civilians during the war-the DPs needed military protection for their own survival-and during the postliberation days in order to prevent vandalism and rioting, terror, chaos and revolution, all of which would constitute a danger to the DPs, refugees, and Allied troops. 281 Obviously the Army strategists did not share my apprehensions. I also learned that they were content to staff DP teams with company grade officers and enlisted men from combat units (Malcolm J. PROUDFOOT , European Refugees: 1939-52 [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1956], pp. 107-125). They had confidence in the abilities of these men to repair houses and plumbing; maintain vehicles, public utilities, and all sorts of equipment ; establish and operate facilities for mass housing and feeding; handle large-scale transportation; understand and administer curfews, detention centers, checkpoints, and roadblocks; guard restricted areas; maintain group discipline; exhibit an aggressive attitude toward procurement of supplies from the enemy; provide adequate and safe latrines; guarantee water purity; construct and manage group showers and dispensaries ; supervise warehouses; and sympathize with people exposed to harsh treatment by the Germans. 'Such talents and attitudes, essential for the survival of large numbers of people under adverse conditions, were readily available in the infantrymen in the field, hence G-5 could afford to wait till the last minute to form its teams. But in 1945, I did not realize that we possessed these endowments. Nobody told us we were special. CHAPTER 2 The Dragon's Teeth I. Years later I discovered the explanation. On November 9, 1918, a republic was established in Germany and World War I was considered lost (William L. SHIRER, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich [New York: Simon and Schuster, I¢O], p. 29). This explained the discrepancy between the date we celebrated for our Armistice Day-Veteran's Day-and the German date. Furthermore, Germany had sustained a military defeat, her allies had collapsed, and mutiny and revolt were widespread; despite this, the German military caste could not accept the thought of being conquered by the force of arms and so began to disseminate the idea of the "stab in the back"-that the defeat resulted from treachery at home and on the battlefront, not from Allied military conquest. This explained the meaning of the slogan. Later, Hitler exploited the myth in his quest for power and then commemorated the date as the time of "the greatest villainy of the century" (jacques DELARUE , The Gestapo [New York: Wm. Morrow Co., Inc., 1¢4], p. xxii). I suppose that the object of the sloganeer of 1945 was to suggest that the same thing was happening in World War II, hoping that a future tyrant would appear to capitalize...