Category: The Second World War
“Shocking evidence of German torture and murder had been emerging for many months as Allied armies overran crime scenes at Breedonck prison in Belgium, or in camps like Natzweiler in France and Majdanek in Poland. Yet not until the revelations of April 1945 did the vast criminality of the Nazi regime spark enduring outrage in the West. Hyperbolic propaganda about World War I atrocities ‘had left an enduring legacy of skepticism,’ the U.S. Army acknowledged; a survey in early December [1944] found that barely one-third of British citizens believed atrocity stories about the Germans. Graphic film footage from Europe had been suppressed because Hollywood worried about nauseating moviegoers or creating ill-will toward newsreel companies. But photography and eyewitness accounts from Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and other hellholes now filled newspapers and cinema screens. Warner Bros. and other studios collaborated with the Pentagon in releasing atrocity documentaries. By mid-April, another survey showed that more than four in five Britons were convinced that the Reich had done evil on a monumental scale. Even war-weary soldiers felt a new sense of purpose. ‘What kind of people are these that we are fighting?’ an anguished GI in the 8th Infantry Division asked after viewing Wöbbelin. If the answer to that question remained elusive, the corollaries—What kind of people are we? What kind of people should we be?—seemed ever clearer. Complete victory would require not only vanquishing the enemy on the battlefield, but also bearing witness to all that the war had revealed about the human heart. ‘Hardly any boy infantryman started his career as a moralist,’ wrote Lieutenant Paul Fussell, ‘but after the camps, a moral attitude was dominant and there was no disagreement on the main point.’ A rifleman in the 157th Infantry agreed. ‘I’ve been in the Army for thirty-nine months,’ he said. ‘I’ve been overseas in combat for twenty-three. I’d gladly go through it all again if I knew that things like this would be stopped.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light (emphasis in original)
“An intricate, awful world soon was revealed [at Buchenwald]: the cement cellar ‘strangling room,’ where the condemned were garroted and hung on forty-five wall hooks, those still struggling to be bashed with a wooden mallet; Block 46, where gruesome medical experiments were conducted; the dissecting room, where inmate tattoos were excised, tanned, and fashioned into lampshades, wall hangings, and a pair of gloves for the commandant’s wife. ‘Inmates were beaten with fists, sticks, clubs, dog whips, riding crops, rubber hoses, ox-tail whips, leather belts, rifle butts, shovels, spade handles, and rocks,’ an Army report noted. ‘Also they were bitten by dogs.’ Others were strung up by their hands for hours from tree boughs in a grove known to SS guards as the ‘singing forest’ because of the victims’ cries. Music blared from the loudspeakers to mask gunfire at the camp stables or rifle range by the execution squad, ‘Detail 99.’ The SS had murdered at least 56,000 inmates in Buchenwald and its subcamps. Many then were consigned to six brick ovens that could reduce a ‘charge’ of eighteen bodies to bone and ash in twenty minutes.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“For the U.S. Army, the camp at Buchenwald offered a uniquely searing epiphany of liberation because of its size and the clear evidence of systemic evil. Built in 1937 outside Weimar, a city that had once been home to Goethe, Schiller, and Franz Liszt, Buchenwald and its satellites had grown to more than 100,000 inmates by March 1945, with offenders categorized by triangle insignia on their uniforms: red for political prisoners, pink for homosexuals, green for criminals, yellow for Jews. Just after noon on April 11 [1945], a warning over the public address system advised, ‘All S.S. men leave the camp immediately.’ Sentries ‘ran with long strides into the forest,’ a witness reported, and at 3:15 p.m. a white flag rose above the camp. An hour later, outriders of the Third Army’s 6th Armored Division burst through the main gate, which stood beneath a large sign proclaiming Recht oder Unrecht, mein Vaterland. Right or wrong, my Fatherland. They found twenty-one thousand survivors from thirty-one nations—engineers, lawyers, professors, editors, and a thousand boys under age fourteen—living on six hundred calories a day. As one liberator said of the liberated, ‘They were so thin and so dried out that they might have been monkeys or plaster of Paris and you had to keep saying to yourself, these are human beings.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“On April 15 [1945] when the 11th Armored Division stumbled upon the Bergen-Belsen camp, fifty miles south of Hamburg . . . Over forty thousand men, women, and children jammed a compound designed for eight thousand; since January they had survived on watery soup, fourteen ounces of rye bread a day, and a kind of beet called magel-wurzel, normally used as livestock feed. But for the past four days they had received neither food nor water and were reduced to eating the hearts, livers, and kidneys of the dead. Plundered bodies lay in such numbers that it was ‘like trying to count the stars,’ a medic reported. Ten thousand corpses littered the camp: two thousand lined a pit on the southern perimeter and others were stacked four deep around the crude hospital. ‘Both inside and outside the huts,’ the British Army reported, ‘was an almost continuous carpet of dead bodies, human excreta, rags, and filth.’ One soldier recounted seeing ‘a woman squatting gnawing at a human thigh bone. . . . In war you see humanity at the end of its tether.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“Soldiers who in years of combat had seen things no man should ever see now gawked in disbelief at the iniquities confronting them. ‘There was no fat on them to decompose,’ Major Ralph Ingersoll wrote after viewing corpses at Landsberg. ‘You are repelled by the sight of your own leg, because in its shape it reminds you of one of those legs. It is a degenerating experience.’ At the Wöbbelin camp near Ludwigslust, General Gavin ordered local civilians to open the mass graves of camp victims and lift the dead into wagon beds lined with evergreen boughs; they were to be reinterred in graves dug on the town square. ‘Each body was pulled out, handed up and wrapped in a white sheet or tablecloth,’ an 82nd Airborne lieutenant wrote his sister. ‘We were united in a bond of shame that we had ever seen such things.’ Gavin arranged for a film crew to record the proceedings, and years later he wept while watching the footage. ‘It was a defining moment in our lives,’ a paratrooper said. ‘Who we were, what we believed in, and what we stood for.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“Nordhausen was overrun by the 3rd Armored and 104th Infantry Divisions, which found what one witness described as ‘a charnel house’ of several thousand corpses. ‘Men lay as they had starved, discolored and lying in indescribable human filth,’ a medic reported. ‘One hunched-down French boy was huddled up against a dead comrade, as if to keep warm.’ In nearby tunnels used to assemble V-weapons, GIs beat up a captured German scientist, then beat him up again for the benefit of a Signal Corps photographer. General Collins ordered two thousand German civilians to carry Nordhausen’s dead half a mile for burial in two dozen mass graves. ‘There is no greater shame for any German,’ Collins told them, ‘than to be a citizen of this town.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“As Allied forces had approached [Ohrdruf] from the west, Patton informed his diary, SS guards ‘had some of the slaves exhume the bodies and place them on a mammoth griddle composed of 60-centimeter railway tracks laid on brick foundations. They poured pitch on the bodies and then built a fire of pinewood and coal under them,’ leaving ‘bones, skulls, charred torsos.’ Most guards then fled, disguised in mufti, although a few were beaten or stabbed to death by vengeful inmates as the first Americans arrived. ‘You search the face to find what it is that is lacking, to find the mark of the beast,’ a reporter wrote after scrutinizing SS visages. The camp still reeked of feces and burned hair. Another burial trench dusted with lime ‘was almost filled with ash and human debris from which, here and there, emaciated limbs projected,’ wrote Osmar White, the Australian correspondent assigned to Third Army. ‘Patton,’ Bradley noted, ‘walked over to a corner and sickened.’ When a young GI giggled nervously, Eisenhower fixed him with a baleful eye. ‘Still having trouble hating them?’ he asked. To other troops gathered round him in the compound, the supreme commander said, ‘We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now at least he will know what he is fighting against.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“In [the Merkers mine] ‘Room No. 8,’ a chamber 150 feet long and 75 feet wide, more than 7,000 bags of gold and other loot recently transferred from Berlin—in some cases by double-decker bus—lay in neat rows under lights dangling beneath the twelve-foot ceiling. In addition to 8,307 gold bars and 55 crates of bullion, the repository included 3,682 sacks of German currency, 3,326 bags of gold coins—among them 711 filled with U.S. $20 gold pieces, each sack worth $25,000—8 bags of gold rings, and a pouch of platinum bars. At the back of the room, in more than 200 satchels, suitcases, and trunks, each tagged ‘Melmer’ after a kleptomaniacal SS captain named Bruno Melmer, were valuables stolen from concentration-camp victims: pearls, watch cases, gold toothcrowns, Passover cups, cigarette cases, spoons. Much of the metal had been hammered flat to save space. Other galleries and shafts nearby yielded two million volumes from Berlin libraries, 400 tons of patent records, 33 wooden cases of Goethe memorabilia from Weimar, paintings by Rubens and Goya, and costumes from the Berlin state theaters. ‘If these were the old free-booting days when a soldier kept his loot,’ [General] Bradley told [General] Patton, ‘you’d be the richest man in the world.’ Patton facetiously proposed converting the 250 tons of gold—most of the Reich’s reserve—into medallions ‘for every son of a bitch in the Third Army.’ Eventually valued by SHAEF in excess of half a billion dollars, the treasure in the Merkers shaft lay within what soon would become the Soviet occupation zone. There was not a moment to lose, and plans already had been made to spirit the booty to Frankfurt—in the American zone—using thirty ten-ton trucks guarded by two MP battalions, seven infantry platoons, and air cover from P-51 Mustangs. The artworks were to be wrapped in German army sheepskin coats, thousands of which were also found in the mine.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“ ‘I sincerely believe that I have served a criminal,’ [German Field Marshal] Model mused. ‘I led my soldiers in good conscience . . . but for a criminal government.’ Sealing his wedding ring and a letter to his wife inside an envelope, he walked to a gnarled oak tree. ‘You will bury me here,’ he told a subordinate, then blew his brains out with a Walther service revolver.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light (ellipsis in original)
“Fate is definite and there is no altering—the suit always fits.” – Major General Edward F. Witsell, United States Army Air Forces (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Guns at Last Light)
“Resistance to integrating combat regiments ran deep. ‘A colored soldier cannot think fast enough to fight in armor,’ [General] Patton told his diary, and some argued that teaching black riflemen to shoot white Germans would lead to the shooting of white Americans at home. ‘We were going to make liars out of the whites,’ a black soldier later said. Another wrote, ‘I am an American negro, doing my part for the American government to make the world safe for a democracy I have never known.’ For many white combat soldiers in Germany, the simple truth was voiced by an artillery forward observer in the 394th Infantry: ‘We were short-handed and they were welcome.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“Among those crossing the Rhine on March 12 [1945] was the 5th Platoon of Company K of the 394th Infantry Regiment. Singular only because they were black, these GI riflemen were among fifty-three platoons of ‘colored’ infantry mustered from volunteers to help remedy manpower shortages. Many had surrendered sergeant’s stripes earned as cooks, drivers, and laborers in black service battalions for the privilege of fighting as privates. ‘Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks’ kitchen,’ one black observer later said.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“All planning was not just likely to recoil ironically; it was almost certain to do so. Human beings were clearly not machines. They were mysterious congeries of twisted will and error, misapprehension and misrepresentation, and the expected could not be expected of them.” – Lieutenant Paul Fussell, 103rd Infantry Division, U.S. Army (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Guns at Last Light)
“ ‘Everybody shares the same universals—hope, love, humor, faith,’ Private First Class Richard E. Cowan of the 2nd Infantry Division had written his family in Kansas on December 5 [1944], his twenty-second birthday. Two weeks later he was dead, killed near Krinkelt after holding off German attackers with a machine gun long enough to cover his comrades’ escape. ‘It is such a bitter dose to have to take,’ his mother confessed after hearing the news, ‘and I am not a bit brave about it.’ Cowan would be awarded the Medal of Honor, one of thirty-two recognizing heroics in the Bulge. Like so many thousands of others, he would be interred . . . along with his last full measure of hope, love, humor, and faith.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“Nobody gets out of a rifle company. It’s a door that only opens one way, in. You leave when they carry you out.” – Lieutenant Paul Fussell, 103rd Infantry Division, U.S. Army (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Guns at Last Light)
“Selective Service exemptions for fathers were belatedly abolished: one million would be drafted in 1944-45. The average age of draftees had climbed from twenty-two in 1940 to twenty-six in 1944, and many new privates were over thirty-five. A ban on shipping eighteen-year-olds overseas was rescinded in August [1944]. Induction standards for ‘physically imperfect men,’ already loosened, were further relaxed in October. Draft examiners were advised that ‘such terms as “imbecile” and “moron” will not be used,’ but 330,000 inductees, some of whom could fairly be classified as at least dull-witted, were subsequently discharged for sundry mental defects.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“Eisenhower’s provost marshal estimated that in December eighteen thousand American deserters roamed the European theater, plus another ten thousand British absconders. The equivalent of a division of military fugitives was believed to be hiding in the Parisian demimonde, often joining forces with local black marketeers to peddle K rations for 75 cents from the tailgates of stolen Army trucks—hundreds of such vehicles vanished every day—or simply selling the entire deuce-and-a-half for $5,000. Eventually four thousand military policemen and detectives worked the streets of Paris. From September through December [1944] they arrested more than ten thousand people, including French civilians caught selling marijuana to soldiers. A five-story French army barracks on the Boulevard Mortier became a detention block capable of holding more than two thousand miscreants, while the merely AWOL were rounded up and trucked back to the front in lots of sixteen under MP guard. Many soldiers in an Army railway battalion in Paris were arrested and court-martialed en masse for pilferage; nearly two hundred of them drew prison sentences, some as long as fifty years—later commuted for those who agreed to combat duty. Still, the malfeasance and misconduct would thrive through the end of the war, to the point that Paris, the city of light, the city of learning, the city of love, earned yet another nickname: ‘Chicago-sur-Seine.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“A typical transaction cost three packs of Chesterfields, and a survey found that among soldiers who spent two days or more in Paris, two-thirds had intercourse at least once, often in what were called ‘Where am I?’ rooms. . . . Soldiers excused from duty while being treated for syphilis or gonorrhea were said to be ‘whores de combat,’ and the Good Conduct Ribbon became known as the ‘No-Clap Medal.’ Women who swapped sex for rations or chocolate were called ‘Hershey bars,’ while a brothel was a ‘house of horizontal refreshment.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“Most [combat exhaustion] patients were treated as temporarily disabled and kept close to the front, to preserve their self-respect and emotional links to their unit. Division clearing stations now usually included a psychiatrist . . . exhausted patients often were put into a deep sleep, sometimes for days, with ‘Blue 88s,’ sodium amytal or nembutal capsules. Of every one hundred exhaustion patients hospitalized in the European theater, ninety returned to duty in some capacity, although many were finished as killer riflemen. . . . neither competent treatment nor all the Blue 88s in Europe could efface war’s capacity to fracture men’s psyches. . . . Most experts concluded that soldiers wore out for good after 200 to 240 days of battle, although two psychologists monitoring the advance into Germany posited that a GI’s combat skills began to decline after a month of fighting, with many ‘close to a vegetative state’ after forty-five days.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“Great pains were taken to identify remains whenever possible. Innovative techniques allowed fingerprints to be lifted from bodies long buried and for hidden laundry marks to be extracted from shredded uniforms. Graves Registration artisans meticulously reconstructed mutilated faces with cosmetic wax so that Signal Corps photographs could be taken to help identify those without dogtags.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“If I am killed and go to hell it can’t be any worse than infantry combat.” – Unidentified American soldier (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Guns at Last Light)
“To a soldier named Frank Maddalena, who went missing in the [Hürtgen] forest in mid-November [1944], his wife, Natalie, mother of his two children, wrote from New York: ‘I see you everywhere—in the chair, behind me, in the shadows of the room.’ In another note she added, ‘Still no mail from you. I really don’t know what to think anymore. . . . When I walk alone, I seem to feel you sneaking up on me and putting your arms around me.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“German soldiers streamed toward the German frontier through Picardy and Belgium, Lorraine and the Ardennes, bellowing, ‘The Americans will be here in twenty minutes!’. . . . In what the OB West war diary called an ‘ignominious rout,’ Germans unable to find white flags surrendered by waving chickens.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“A dignified American woman with close-cropped gray hair, whose living room in Culoz was dominated by a large portrait of her painted by Picasso, sent a note to Seventh Army headquarters along with a fruitcake baked by her companion, Alice B. Toklas. ‘We have waited for you all so long and here you are,’ wrote Gertrude Stein. ‘I cannot tell you enough what it means to see you to hear you to have you here with us.’ (Of Stein’s prose, an American officer wrote: ‘I understand that she puts together a lot of repetitions which have significance only to those whose minds are in a higher sphere than mine.’)” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“Warm summer rain drenched the motley legions of liberation at dawn on Thursday, August 24 [1944], as three columns from the French 2nd Armored Division made ready for battle twenty miles southwest of Paris. Village women scurried through the bivouacs carrying urns of coffee and platters heaped with fried eggs and breakfast rolls. Soldiers finished shaving with ritualistic precision, then shouldered their weapons and swaggered into formation, ‘booming like bitterns throughout the wood,’ as an American colonel later wrote, ‘pounding their chests and screaming, “En avant!” ’ Tricolor pennants flew from three thousand vehicles named for Napoleonic triumphs or for French towns now unshackled, like Caen and Cherbourg. Each tank and scout car bore a white silhouette of France with the cross of Lorraine superimposed. The twelve thousand troops comprised not only French regulars, but sailors far from the sea, Lebanese Christian engineers, and Senegalese riflemen who until three weeks earlier had never set foot on European France. Also in the ranks could be found Spanish Republicans, Gaullists, monarchists, Jews, Muslims, Catholic reactionaries, animists, anarchists, antipapists, communists, socialists, freethinkers, and militant Quakers.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“On they marched, south, east, and west: past stone barns and mules hauling milk in copper urns, past shops that still peddled perfume and silk scarves, past collaborators with crude swastikas swabbed onto their shaved heads. When the trucks halted for a moment and GIs tumbled out to urinate in squirming echelons on the road shoulders, civilians rushed up to plead for cigarettes with two fingers pressed to the lips, a gesture described by Forrest Pogue as the French national salute. Others offered tricolor nosegays made from blue hydrangeas, red roses, and white asters. ‘Heep, heep, whoo-ray!’ the Frenchmen yelled, repeating phrases learned from doughboys a generation earlier. ‘I speeg Engless. Jees-Christ, cot-damn!’ Soldiers replied in schoolboy French or with handy phrases published in Stars and Stripes, among which was the French for ‘My wife doesn’t understand me.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“In the Guards Chapel at Wellington Barracks on Birdcage Walk, across from the former pig meadow and leper colony currently known as St. James’s Park, a full-throated congregation belted out the ‘Te Deum’ and prepared to take communion from the bishop of Maidstone. ‘To Thee all angels cry aloud,’ they sang, ‘the heavens and all the powers therein.’ At 11:10 a.m. [June 18, 1944] an annoying growl from those same heavens grew louder. Ernest Hemingway heard it in his Dorchester Hotel suite, where he was making pancakes with buckwheat flour and bourbon; from the window he looked for the telltale ‘white-hot bunghole’ of a jet engine. Pedestrians in Parliament Square heard it and fell flat, covering their heads. Clementine Churchill, the prime minister’s wife, heard it in Hyde Park, where she was visiting the gun battery in which her daughter Mary volunteered. The Guards Chapel congregation heard it and kept singing. Then they heard nothing—that most terrifying of all sounds—as the engine quit, the bunghole winked out, and the black cruciform [V-1 missile] fell. Through the chapel’s reinforced concrete roof it plummeted before detonating in a white blast that blew out walls, blew down support pillars, and stripped the leaves from St. James’s plane trees. A funnel of smoke curled fifteen hundred feet above the wrecked nave; rubble ten feet deep buried the pews even as six candles still guttered on the altar and the bishop stood unharmed. One hundred and twenty-one others were dead and as many more injured. Two thousand memorial plaques accumulated by Guards regiments during eons of war lay pulverized, although a mosaic donated by Queen Victoria remained intact: ‘Be thou faithful unto death and I will give thee a crown of life.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“Terror is broken by terror. Everything else is nonsense.” – Adolph Hitler (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Guns at Last Light)
“The Führer and his entourage flew from Berchtesgaden in four Focke-Wulf Condors to Metz, then drove 175 miles in armored cars to Margival. . . . This was Hitler’s first return to France since 1940, and he looked like a man who was losing a world war: eyes bloodshot and puffy from insomnia, skin sallow, the toothbrush mustache a bit bedraggled. Aides reported that even his passion for music had waned. ‘It is tragic that the Führer has so cut himself off from life and is leading an excessively unhealthy life,’ wrote his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Often he checked his own pulse, as if fingering mortality; a quack dubbed the Reich Injection Minister frequently administered sedatives or shots of a glandular concoction. He shunned bright lights and wore a cap with an enlarged visor to shield his eyes. ‘I always have the feeling of tipping to the right,’ he complained. He spoke of retirement, of a life devoted to reading, or meditating, or running a museum.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“How can one be expected to govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” – Charles De Gaulle (quoted by Rick Atkinson in The Guns at Last Light)