Endgame, 1945 by David Stafford

Author:David Stafford [STAFFORD, DAVID]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: HIS027100
ISBN: 9780316023436
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2007-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

In the vanguard of British forces moving up into Schleswig-Holstein and pushing the last Nazi government ever further north was commando Bryan Samain. Having crossed the Elbe, his brigade moved rapidly northeast. They bypassed Hamburg and on Wednesday 2 May entered the small port of Neustadt, on the Baltic, twenty miles north of Lübeck.

Along the way, Samain witnessed all the signs of a defeated nation. “We passed column after column of weary, travel-stained prisoners,” he recalled, “confused civilians, often in small family groups with women and children, carrying what was left of their belongings and walking on the side of the road in the opposite direction to us; all reminiscent of the familiar pictures of French families and other refugees seeking safety on the roads of France soon after the German breakthrough in 1940.”

At one point, the commandos stopped to help some released and exhausted British prisoners of war who had been walking for hours from their camp. One of them, a middle-aged officer, burst into tears when he saw them. “We offered him and his comrades an immediate ‘brew-up’ of tea and cigarettes,” recalled Samain, “whilst our unit cooks prepared egg and chips for them.”13

Other British units headed into Lübeck. Contrary to fears of desperate last-ditch resistance, they met only token opposition and a society in disintegration. In the nearby town of Molln, huge numbers of forced laborers had broken out of their camp and were roaming the streets and looting wine stores, so that wine literally ran in the gutters. A prisoner-of-war camp had been liberated and ecstatic RAF personnel had commandeered any transport they could find: some rode on top of great cart horses, others seized traps and gigs and with chalked slogans on their sides were happily heading to the rear.

In the midst of this carnival of chaos, thousands of bewildered and despondent but fully armed German soldiers simply sat by the roadside or wandered about aimlessly. “Soon,” remembered one British soldier, “the fields began to fill with vast herds of field-gray like cattle, silent, tired, and beaten. Panthers [tanks], all brand-new, were abandoned by their crews at cross-roads; gunners manning their 88s watched the tanks go by with their hands in their pockets. The SS was pretending to be something else, and trying to slip away without any idea where to go.”14

Some of the defeated enemy, though, had a very clear notion of where they should go. At the Baltic seaside resort of Travemunde, where SOE agent Fred Warner had spent many happy hours as a child, a British unit spotted a motorboat trying to slip out to sea. They stopped it with a burst of fire that put its guns out of commission. On board, they found a German major-general who admitted he was off to Scandinavia with his staff officers, his mistress, a large stock of cigars and thirty bottles of Kummel liqueur.

The vessel of another far better-known Nazi sybarite was also captured by British forces during the drive to Lübeck. Among the

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