DISARMING THE WEHRMACHT
For thousands of German soldiers, surrender tragically did not automatically result in survival
“HE FETCHED TWO GLASSES AND IN RUSSIAN STYLE FILLED THEM TO THE BRIM WITH VODKA SO THAT WE COULD TOAST EACH OTHER.”
“Iclimbed up the cellar steps, opened the front door and stepped out onto the street … with a dirty white towel tied to a broomstick … the first of the Americans, a little guy, tore off all my medals which made gaping holes in my tunic … I wondered what would happen to me.” Henry Metelmann, a panzer crewman with 22 Panzerdivision wasn’t alone in pondering his fate as he went into captivity at the end of the war. The months leading up to the Nazi capitulation had seen mass surrender in the West in particular, with an average of 50,000 German troops a day throwing in the towel in April. One million more gave up in Italy and Austria on 2 May, and two days later another million joined them across northwestern Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.
A senior Danish police official in the town of Odder, Assistant Commissioner Lemvigh
Müller, found himself in charge of disarming the local German forces, “At a meeting, on the fourth evening after the announcement over the radio of the German surrender in Denmark, the local representatives of the liberation movement and I discussed … the detention and disarming of German forces in Odder. At midnight we were received by the German commander, Major Erdmann, at the Phoenix. The garrison at that time consisted of about 1,000 men. Major Erdmann told us that he had received no orders and that the radio announcement was probably an English lie … he declared that if the British or the Americans approached, he would march out of town … but if the Russians came the city would be levelled. On 7 May the commandant came to see me and informed me that his men would depart the next morning. Handguns with five shots per man were left with them, all other equipment was taken over by the Resistance.”
Disarmament
Under the command of their own officers for the most part, the mass of German soldiery destroyed what was left of their heavy equipment, spiking artillery guns, blowing up panzers and disabling aircraft. The favoured tactic for the latter was to remove the propeller or collapse the undercarriage. Machine-guns and rifles were often piled up and abandoned, as Norwegian SS volunteer, Ivar Corneliussen remembered, “We were in Austria when the war ended, in a small village … an officer came and told us the war was over. We collected all our weapons into a big heap and our officers told us that from this point on we were relieved of our oath.” As a last show of defiance many simply dumped their weapons, as Gefreiter Robert Vogt, of 352. Infanterie-division, recalled, “It was pointless. We were gambling with our lives for a lost cause … the war was lost. So, we threw our weapons into a stream.”
Personal papers and possessions were also destroyed, or buried in the hope of returning later to retrieve them. Those that kept medals, watches, and so on, soon found themselves relieved of them upon surrendering, just like Metelmann. Hendrik Verton a Dutch SS volunteer fighting in Breslau was one of them, “A Russian soldier tottered down the cellar steps … he was a little man, short and stocky … he grasped me to his breast … kissed me on both cheeks, declaring ‘Hitler kaput!’. He stole my watch, adding them to those already decorating his arms up to his elbows … and with a heavy heart I burned my Soldbuch with all the entries of my military service in it.”
Those who didn’t immediately go into captivity shared out any food, blankets and spare clothing they had and then either split up to try and head home or formed into columns to surrender enmasse. Some, like Bruno Friesen, a gunner in 7 Panzer-division, managed to melt back into the population, “I never surrendered, I was never a POW, I never attended de-nazification lectures. I just went back to my life.”
One thing Friesen, Metelmann and Vogt had in common was that they were glad it was over and they had survived, but the same could not be said for German troops in the east. There, fear of their fate drove millions of soldiers and civilians alike to head west in an attempt to surrender to the Western Allies and not the Red Army.
Surrender in the east
In the end some 800,000 Wehrmacht soldiers fell into Soviet hands at the end of the war to join 2,000,000 of their comrades captured earlier on. One of those facing this fate was
Günter Korschorrek, “Russia means nothing less than imprisonment in Siberia. A terrible word, it hammers away inside my head! We who have fought against the Soviets can imagine what awaits us in Siberia.” Transferred west, Korschorrek was lucky and lived.
According to the Soviets’ own admission some 381,067 Wehrmacht POWS would die in the gulags, although this is considered a huge underestimate with the true figure thought to be as many as 1,000,000 deaths from shooting, maltreatment, disease and starvation. However, not all German POWS falling into Soviet hands were treated badly. The highly-decorated panzer veteran Oberst Hans von Luck remembered what happened to him when a Soviet soldier tried to steal his watch and Knight’s Cross, “A young officer suddenly intervened ‘Stop! Don’t touch him, he’s a geroi [Russian for hero], a man to respect.’” Von Luck was then taken before a Red Army colonel,
“He fetched two glasses and in Russian style filled them to the brim with vodka so that we could toast each other.” A Luftwaffe fighter pilot had a similar experience on surrendering when marched in front of a group of Red Army officers, “The general stood up, put on his cap, gave an order to the other officers and they all raised their hands to me in military salute.”
In the west – the Rheinwiesenlager
From D-day onwards, the Americans and Anglocanadians were roughly capturing the same number of prisoners each, and processing them through removal by stages back to camps in the United Kingdom or North America. Treatment
was usually fair – although looting was rampant, as the Luftwaffe pilot Norbert Hannig found out after surrendering to a young Canadian officer, “May I have your pistol please, and the holster as well – as a souvenir you understand.” He was then fed a plate of steak and mashed potatoes before being handed over to the Americans. This was common practice at the war’s end as the sheer numbers of new prisoners were so great the British and Canadians stopped taking in their full share, leaving their American allies with the unenviable task of housing, feeding and guarding millions of former servicemen and women.
The American solution were the 19 Rheinwiesenlager – the Rhine meadow camps – built in occupied western Germany as temporary holding and processing stations. Officially termed Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosures (PWTES for short), they would end up holding as many as two million POWS throughout the summer in often extremely poor conditions. Each camp was built to the same design; open farmland was chosen, conveniently close to a railway line, and enclosed by barbed-wire.
The total camp area was sub-divided into ten to twelve smaller zones, each housing five to ten thousand men. Nearby farm buildings were used as the camp kitchen, hospital and administrative centres, and it was down to the prisoners themselves to provide doctors, cooks and work parties. Security was furnished mainly by former Wehrmacht field police who were given extra rations to man the wire. No accommodation was provided for POWS, forcing them to dig crude shelters and caves in the earth in which to sleep and shelter from the elements. Ivar Corneliussen witnessed the makeshift nature of the camps, “The Americans put us all into a POW camp, not that it was a proper camp, it was a big field with some barbed wire, and there was very little supervision, not many guards at all.”
The flood of prisoners soon overwhelmed the camps; Camp Remagen, for instance, was built for 100,000 POWS but held 184,000. With no shelter, and rations set at 1,200-1,500 calories per day per man – even though this often wasn’t met – malnutrition and disease soon set in and prisoners began to die. Unlike in Nazi camps this wasn’t official policy, but rather the unfortunate result of a system struggling to cope. To shield themselves from accusations of mistreatment, Dwight Eisenhower decreed that the men in the camps weren’t officially prisoners of war, but were instead ‘disarmed enemy forces’, meaning they weren’t covered under the Geneva Conventions. Regardless of the legal niceties, by the Allies’ own admission between three and six thousand prisoners died in the camps, although the true figure was probably quite a lot higher.
Processing and release
Screening of prisoners began immediately to ascertain their rank, branch of service, and any involvement in war crimes. Officers were subject to lengthy and repeated interrogations, and members of the Waffen-ss were also singled out for special treatment as Andreas Fleischer saw in his camp, “One day an American officer with a loudspeaker appeared and called out to us ‘All Wehrmacht men go over there to the left, and all Waffen-ss men to the right’. We all went where we were told, and it turned out there were more than 200 of us Waffen-ss – that shocked them, especially as the camp had a rule that the guard had to be doubled if there was even just one Waffen-ss man in it. American soldiers would then come up and stare at us through the wire like we were animals in a zoo.” Leo Wilm described what Waffen-ss membership could mean in the west, “During an interrogation by the Americans I was given a beating because I had been assigned to anti-partisan duties.” Harsh though this was, it was far worse in the east as one SS man described, “Most of the division was handed over by the Americans to the Russians and sent to the gulags. I had a friend who was with them … he once saw a Russian tank shoot down 500 SS men because they couldn’t work anymore, that was the rule, if you couldn’t work you were shot.” Another retold, “In one of the many camps I went through, I saw two men walking in step with one another. The Russian guards immediately grabbed them and checked for the blood group tattoo all Waffen-ss men had. They found it and shot them on the spot.”
Despite these cruelties in both east and west, prisoners began to be released within a few weeks of the end of the war. Female personnel and teenaged Hitler Youth were usually the first, swiftly followed by those deemed necessary to help rebuilding – farmers and miners being top of the list. Following French demands, over 180,000 POWS were sent to France as forced labour, but by the end of June 1945 several of the Rheinwiesenlager, including Remagen, were closed down. As for the east, by the end of 1946 the Soviet Union held fewer POWS than the United Kingdom, the United States and France combined, but it didn’t release the last of them until 1956.