Exorcising Hitler Read Free Page A

surprisingly swift, but it came to an equally surprising and abrupt halt after the falls of Paris and Brussels. In September 1944, attempts to seize a Rhine crossing at Arnhem failed disastrously. Although American troops had a fleeting opportunity to breach that barrier in Alsace, the moment quickly passed and German resistance stiffened noticeably. Thousands of British and American troops died during the autumn and early winter, hammering away at the unexpectedly tough German defences. Twenty-four thousand Americans were killed, wounded or captured between September and December during the fight for the Hürtgen Forest, just inside Germany. More than 2,000 of General Patton’s men died taking the eastern French city of Metz in the last week of November.
    Then, less than a month later, came the German counter-attack in the Ardennes (the so-called ‘Battle of the Bulge’). Some 19,000 American troops were killed, most during the first few days, and many more wounded or taken prisoner, the US Army’s worst losses of the entire war in Europe. There were also 100,000 German casualties in this shockingly violent, if ultimately unsuccessful attempt to show that the Wehrmacht still had teeth.
    Even after the Rhine was finally crossed at Remagen in early March 1945, Germany’s soldiers – many under or over age, or the desperate combings of hitherto exempt employment groups – made the Allies pay dear for every kilometre of the homeland they occupied. For a great deal of the time the Anglo-American (and by now Free French) forces had to fight village to village and house to house against stubborn resistance.
    Only after the surrender, in the second week of April, of more than a third of a million German soldiers in the critically important Ruhr industrial area, and the beginning of the Russians’ final advance on Berlin, did the Wehrmacht begin to collapse in any meaningful sense. And even then, in the east, where the fear of Russian vengeance was greater than despair, many Germans fought on grimly to the end. They fought for their capital, Berlin – the capture of which cost the Russians some 80,000 men – and so that their comrades, and any civilians who could do so, might manage to surrender to the Western Allies rather than to the Soviet forces.
    The brutal fate of German prisoners of war in Soviet hands was already well known (as was the even more savage treatment of Soviet troops by the Germans). As for Soviet behaviour towards civilians, many Red Army units had already gained a deserved reputation for rape, murder and pillage.
    Although most of those fighting for Germany had ceased to care about anything much beyond survival and saving what they could of their people and heritage, there were undoubtedly fanatics among the German population right to the end of the war and beyond. There were rumours on the Allied side of minutely organised resistance cells composed largely of brainwashed Nazi youth, of ‘stay-behind’ terror groups, and of a planned withdrawal by the regime’s rabid remnants into the near-impregnable so-called ‘Alpine Redoubt’, the mountainous region on the German/Austrian border.
    Some experience with so-called Werwolf resistance units in both east and west – and, most spectacularly, the organised assassination by a Nazi hit squad of the American-appointed High Burgomaster of the western German city of Aachen in March 1945 – caused the Allies, as they advanced inexorably into the heartlands of the Reich, to act with circumspection and not a little resentment of the native population. The Germans, it seemed, just would not admit defeat.
    Even though the supposed ‘Redoubt’ proved a chimera, there was enough evidence in individual acts of resistance – not forgetting the ghastly revelations of concentration camps and prisons captured during the Allied advance – to sour the average GI’s or Tommy’s view of the defeated. This would make for a nervous, unforgiving and sometimes