The German War (76 page)

After taking the eastern, Praga side of the Vistula, General Rokossovsky sent Polish volunteer units across on the night of 14–15 September, where they were mown down by the Germans, an action in which Peter Stölten took part. With no further assistance from the Soviets, no heavy weapons, far too few rifles, scant ammunition and food, the remaining insurgents stood no chance. The district of Mokotów fell on 27 September,
oliborz three days later. On 2 October, after frantic negotiations to secure German concessions regarding the treatment of their fighters and civilians, the Polish forces in the city centre finally agreed to capitulate. All fighting ceased that evening.
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Both Wilm Hosenfeld and Peter Stölten witnessed the Polish surrender. As Hosenfeld stood and watched the ‘endless columns of the insurgents’, he was astonished by their

proud bearing . . . Young people, only officers around my age, and not many of them . . . 10-year-old boys wearing their military caps with pride: they had done their duty as messengers and for them it was an honour to march into captivity alongside the men. Behind each squad of sixty men came the young girls and women . . . They sang patriotic songs and not one showed the terrible things they had gone through.

Throughout the sixty-three days of the rising, Hosenfeld had stuck to the official terminology, calling the insurgents ‘bandits’, describing the young female prisoners he wanted to save as misguided, and explaining all civilian support as coerced. Now that the German command had finally recognised them as a legitimate force to be accorded prisoner-of-war status, Hosenfeld felt free to express his full admiration: ‘What national spirit is and in what true spontaneous form it can express itself, when a people has endured five years of undeserved suffering, that one could experience here.’
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Stölten was no less moved by the Poles’ demonstration of ‘unbowed national pride’ as they marched into captivity, feeling that they had fully earned their military honour – ‘for, God is my witness, they fought better than we’. After fighting in Warsaw for forty-two days himself, Stölten felt he was watching an event which ‘put all the theatrical effects of a great tragedy in the shade’. Like Hosenfeld, what drew him to identify with the Poles was the fact that they manifested the values he believed in, in a purer, still more self-sacrificing form: ‘We’, he concluded, turning to the Germans, ‘are still not the people that incorporates bearing and nationalism, sacrificial courage and strength.’ The realisation that a defeated nation was still capable of heroic resistance also prompted him for the first time to see German occupation from the other side: ‘I too would not want to live under German administration,’ he wrote. Whereas on the battlefields of Normandy he had seen German ‘spirit’ vanquished by Allied ‘matérial’, here, he confirmed, it was German ‘matérial’ which had crushed Polish ‘spirit’. Having lived in the conviction that national will and unshakeable faith would triumph over matérial adversity, he could not accept this obvious lesson. ‘Is there any justice in history?’ he asked Dorothee, falling back temporarily on a mystery which he had rejected out of hand a few months earlier in Le Mans: ‘The thoughts of God are not our thoughts.’
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While Stölten’s unit was sent off to defend the hamlets of East Prussia, Wilm Hosenfeld returned to the centre of Warsaw, where his old garrison regiment was ordered to turn the front-line city into a ‘fortress’. The army and SS simultaneously busied themselves with fulfilling the Führer’s order to erase Warsaw from the face of the earth. The entire civilian population was forcibly evacuated. Hosenfeld’s first job was to take the German and neutral press on a tour of the ruins. It was the little things which brought the destruction home to him, like stumbling upon the piles of ruined costumes and musical scores in the rubble of the theatre. As he brooded on the destruction in his letters to Annemie, he asked, ‘Is it any different at home? What might Aachen look like now?’
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Hosenfeld had trouble finding houses to serve as billets and offices for the regiment’s new headquarters. While he was looking over a house in the Niepodległo
ci Avenue on 17 November, Hosenfeld came upon the skeletal figure of a Jew searching for food in the kitchen – and, after hearing him play Chopin, helped him to hide in the attic. That night, as Hosenfeld lay awake in the dark, he imagined conversations with his dead comrades. ‘It is incredibly comforting to speak with them,’ he told his wife. ‘I feel fully alive and held in this closed company . . . And then I see my loved ones at home, you and the children. I see the little ones asleep, the tired boys, the big girl and you with large, wakeful eyes looking into the night and coming to me.’ He was careful not to mention that he was hiding a Jew in case his letters were opened by the censor. Hosenfeld had previously hidden Jews in the sports stadium he had run before the uprising; this one turned out to be a well-known pianist, Władysław Szpilman, and for the next few weeks Hosenfeld regularly brought food to him, while the garrison used the lower floors of the house as offices. Meanwhile, Wilm Hosenfeld’s confidence returned and for the first time since the uprising had begun he felt that the Germans could hold the Soviets on the Vistula.
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The carpet-bombing of Peter Stölten’s Panzer-Lehr Division near Saint-Lô on 25 July marked the beginning of the American breakout of the Normandy peninsula. After three days of battle, the overstretched German divisions were unable to plug the gaps in their lines. As with the Soviet breakthrough in Belorussia, in Normandy too the Wehrmacht lacked sufficient mobile reserves to stop the Americans from developing enormous momentum. Avranches fell on 30 July and the next day the armoured divisions of Patton’s US 3rd Army captured the bridge at Pontaubault and poured into Brittany.
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On 7 August, the US 8th Corps laid siege to the port city of Brest. With its harbour and U-boat pens, it was a major German asset and Hans H. belonged to the 40,000 German troops defending it. The young Austrian paratrooper’s morale remained high, as he wrote to Maria back in her ticket office in Michelbeuern: ‘Now the Tommy is trying to kill us with bombs and artillery. But that doesn’t bother us much cos we’re sitting deep underground.’ They had enough to eat and drink – although the forced march across Brittany had cost Hans his rucksack; he had lost all of Maria’s letters, as well as his shaving gear and half a dozen socks. He was delighted to receive another eight letters from her in Brest. Writing back, Hans promised Maria that their love and luck would see them through: ‘I won’t let my courage sink. I have had luck, you are my luck-bringer. And I know you will continue to bring me luck.’ Hans’s letter left Brest by U-boat. It was to be his last. Brest held out for six weeks, and when it fell on 19 September, almost nothing in the city was left standing.
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On 15 August, the US 7th Army landed on the Mediterranean coast between Marseilles and Toulon under Major-General Alexander Patch. Whereas the best German forces had been concentrated in the north, in Army Group B, south-western France was occupied by the ill-equipped divisions of Johannes Blaskowitz’s Army Group G. Hitler immediately accepted that Blaskowitz would have to retreat, if he still could, eastwards towards Alsace-Lorraine, or risk being caught in a pincer between the armies of Patton and Patch.

After a day of alarms and inexplicable delays, Ernst Guicking set off on 17 August, driving one of the last trucks transporting the 19th Army’s field hospital no. 1089. At Avignon, the bridge was so badly damaged that, in order to reduce the weight, he had to leave half his load behind and then repeat the journey to Orange. Rumours of landings by paratroopers were rife, and the menacing air presence was constant. On 18 August he was stuck in the middle of another long bridge when it was bombed, and sat in his cab as he watched the bombs falling into the water. Along the road to Valence the column of vehicles carrying German wounded had to stop and fight off attacks by ‘terrorists’, as Ernst generally called the Maquis in his diary. Even now, in headlong flight from an overwhelming American force through hostile countryside held by the French Resistance, Guicking’s characteristic confidence did not desert him. Having seen his first American prisoners and learned that they had come from Grenoble to try and cut off the German retreat at the Rhône, Guicking remained optimistic: they ‘can only fire into the valley with artillery’, he wrote. ‘The infantry is too cowardly for open battle.’
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In the north, the German 7th Army was now caught in a pocket around Falaise. Surrounded on three sides, with only a narrow corridor to escape eastwards between Falaise and Argentan, the best German forces in the west were in danger of being completely encircled. Replacing Kluge with Walter Model – the ‘fireman’ who had just shored up the new defensive lines along the Vistula in the east – Hitler finally authorised a withdrawal. As many as half the remaining German forces, some 40,000–50,000 men, got through the gap before the British and Canadians were able to seal the pocket. They had to abandon almost all their armoured vehicles and heavy equipment. Between 10,000 and 15,000 German soldiers were killed. It was the first battle of encirclement that the Western Allies had fought since returning to the European continent and they were appalled by the carnage. When the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, visited the battlefield on foot, he experienced a similar sensation to Vasily Grossman at Bobruisk, recording that it ‘was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh’. Four days later, on 25 August, Paris was liberated.
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In the south, the Americans tried to cut off the German retreat eastwards and Blaskowitz’s army group had to rely on just one armoured division, the 11th Panzer, to cover the entire retreat of the 1st and 19th Armies from Montélimar. The tanks kept the road open long enough for most of the German troops to get through. The 27th of August found Ernst Guicking in Lyons, delivering wounded to the field hospitals, avoiding shoot-outs in the streets with ‘terrorists’ and rescuing engine parts from the strafed wreck of a hospital bus. ‘These swine take no notice of the Red Cross,’ he noted, though in fact his diary entries showed that such attacks were still rare. Every day of his retreat was accompanied by visits from ‘Jabos’, fighter-bombers, but most of the time they merely buzzed overhead. Guicking somehow found time to send a parcel of tobacco and two letters home, the parcel via the trusted route of a soldier going home on leave, the letters through the normal field post, which still functioned at least in the major towns along the line of retreat.
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On 3 September, Ernst Guicking crossed the Rhône, driving through the town of Dôle – ‘infested with terrorists’ – in moonlight. Besançon, Vesoul, Champagne and Épinal followed. By Remiremont, the bearings on the front wheel of Guicking’s vehicle were gone and had to be rebuilt out of scavenged parts. On 10 September Patch’s and Patton’s armies linked up, but the 11th Panzer Division continued to defend the German retreat. On 13 September, Guicking’s little convoy reached the pass in the western Vosges which marked the Franco-German border, where they were greeted by waving Hitler Youths. Guicking and his comrades waved back. ‘Now we stand on German soil,’ he jotted down that day. ‘A dreadful feeling.’ Exhausted and depressed by their retreat, relieved to have escaped, the men fell asleep in their vehicles. In spite of all Allied attempts to outflank it, the last-minute retreat of Blaskowitz’s army group had succeeded.
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In the north, Army Group B was also able to pull back, the last of its units crossing the Seine at the end of August. But it was no more able to defend the river barrier than the French and British had been when they had tried to regroup on the other bank of the river in June 1940. Brussels was abandoned by the Germans on 3 September and the key port city of Antwerp the following day. Now, as the Wehrmacht began falling back towards the German border, the German High Command ordered the hasty reactivation of the Belgian fortifications along the Albert Canal between Antwerp and Aachen and of the German West Wall from Aachen down to Trier and Saarbrücken. Instead of defending ‘Fortress Europe’ from the Channel to the Black Sea, the German armies had retreated beyond the former armistice line of Ghent–Mons–Sedan, which they had still held on 11 November 1918.
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