The End

Soon afterwards on the late evening of 12 September, Party officials, Gestapo, police and fire-service joined the panic and fled, leaving the people of the city leaderless. Precisely at this juncture, the divisional staff of the 116th Panzer Division arrived, under the command of General Gerd Graf von Schwerin. In the absence of Party leaders, Schwerin took responsibility on 13 September for restoring order, not least to allow for troop movements. ‘Wild’ evacuation was halted. Citizens were directed into bunkers. Reckoning that the Americans were about to arrive, Schwerin left a note, written in English, informing the commanding officer of the US forces that he had stopped ‘the stupid evacuation’ of the population. At the time there were still between 20,000 and 30,000 people in the city, most of whom were in fact evacuated in the following days.

When German forces, unexpectedly, proved able for the time being to repel the American attack and prevent the occupation, the Nazi authorities seized upon Schwerin’s note, which had come into their hands, to cover their own lamentable failings. The matter was taken as far as Hitler himself. Schwerin was promptly dismissed, and Hitler ordered the utmost radicalism in the defence of the city. An investigation found, however, that Schwerin had acted properly within his responsibilities, and that the failure had plainly lain with the Party authorities. Schwerin was converted in fickle post-war memory into ‘the saviour of Aachen’. In fact, there had been no defiance of orders or humanitarian action on Schwerin’s part. He had undertaken no act of resistance. In crisis conditions he was simply carrying out to the best of his ability what he saw as his duty in line with the military demands of the regime.¹⁵

Goebbels noted ‘extraordinary difficulties’ in the evacuation of the territories close to the Westwall and the population of the border districts being ‘thrown here and there’, but saw this as unavoidable at such a time of crisis.¹⁶ A few days later, acknowledging that the situation in Aachen had become ‘critical’, he advocated the principle of ‘scorched earth’ in the question of evacuation. With the future of the nation at stake, little consideration could be given to the people of the area.¹⁷ Goebbels was put fully in the picture—if in a scarcely unbiased account—about the ‘desolate situation’ and the evacuation of Aachen by the Gauleiter of Cologne-Aachen, Josef Grohe (whose authority had been badly damaged by the flight of his subordinates). Party and Wehrmacht had stood at loggerheads. The Party had left the city. A general chaos had ensued. ‘Unprecedented scenes’ had taken place on the roads eastwards from Aachen. The situation there and in Trier—whose centre (including the great hall of Emperor Constantine dating from the early fourth century) had been badly damaged by bombs in mid-August, and which in the night of 13/14 September was under sustained artillery attack—had to be regarded as ‘extremely serious’.¹⁸

Speer, returning from a visit to the region, where he had been driven through the masses streaming away, echoed the accounts of the ‘debacle’.¹⁹ The troops he had seen were exhausted. The newly established Volksgrenadier divisions contained many older recruits who could not cope with the physical demands. There was a big drop in the effective strength of the fighting forces and a growing crisis of confidence. Party functionaries labelled officers in general ‘criminals of 20 July’ and blamed them for the military setbacks in both east and west; soldiers themselves dubbed officers ‘saboteurs of the war’ and accused them of lack of fighting spirit. The troops had been badly affected by the mishandling of the evacuation of Aachen. The trains had been stopped without any notice and women, children and old people had been forced to leave on foot. Columns of refugees were to be seen everywhere, sleeping in the open air and blocking roads. There was a chronic shortage of munitions, weapons and fuel.²⁰ In the report he sent to Hitler, Speer noted the contrast between soldiers in shabby and tattered uniforms and Party functionaries in their gold-braided peacetime uniforms, the sarcastically dubbed ‘Golden Pheasants’ (Goldfasane), who had not been visible in organizing the evacuation of Aachen’s inhabitants or helping to reduce the misery of the refugees.²¹

Xaver Dorsch, one of Speer’s leading subordinates, in charge of fortifications, and offering his own impressions of a visit to the area on 12–13 September, commented on the damaging impression left by the botched evacuation, and how striking it had been that so few Party functionaries had bothered about the refugees. The unnecessary evacuation could, he thought, lead to a catastrophe if the Allied advance continued during subsequent days. He feared disintegration in the army through the anger stirred up by Party officials blaming Wehrmacht officers for the retreat in France.²²

Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Security Police, left Himmler in no doubt about the disastrous situation when he wrote at length in mid-September about the mood of the population during the evacuation and occupation of the western border regions. The evacuation in Luxemburg—annexed to the Reich in August 1942 and attached to the domain of the Gauleiter of Koblenz-Trier, Gustav Simon—had been carried out in an atmosphere of total panic. The Gauleiter’s measures had been overhasty, and the civilian administration had broken down. Following Simon’s order to evacuate, fortification work on the Westwall had ceased and the workers had left. The mood of these workers had in any case been poor. They had been badly organized by the Party officials, who had then set the worst kind of example by merely supervising but not working themselves. The failings of the Gau administration were evident in the evacuation of 14,500 citizens in the Saarburg district, where there was panic and chaos. The transport laid on was hopelessly insufficient. The lucky ones left by special train, some of the women, children and sick by bus. But most trudged away by foot, in long, wretched columns who occupied the roads for days, their possessions trailing along in horse-drawn wagons. Clothing, shoes and blankets for the evacuees were in short supply.

As a result of the chaos, there was a good deal of anger directed at the Party. Many people refused to follow the Party’s orders to leave (which were often confused and contradictory); others could not find accommodation and came back. In Aachen, where thousands of citizens had defied the evacuation orders, pictures of the Fuhrer had been taken down and white bedsheets hung from windows in gestures of surrender. The Party had lost face through the flight of its functionaries. Organization was poor; women and children became separated in the evacuation. And there had been little sign of anything resembling a ‘people’s community’. Those with access to cars sped away, unconcerned for anyone else. It was every man for himself.²³

Kaltenbrunner listed some prominent individuals who had left Luxemburg and Trier prematurely to bring their families to safety. The Gauleiter himself and the District Leader (Kreisleiter) of Metz were among those noted as deserting their posts in a separate report to Himmler about the uncontrolled refugee movements in Lorraine, endangering troop movements. The railways had stopped running because the German personnel had fled, and the civilian administration had detonated essential installations before pulling out so there were electricity and water shortages and the telephones did not function. Russian prisoners of war had been left free to roam the countryside, posing a threat to security.²⁴

One officer, Lieutenant Julius Dufner, stationed at Kyllburg, a small spa town in the Eifel, in the Bitburg area just north of Trier, jotted his own first-hand account of the desolate conditions in his diary. ‘The war is lost!’ he stated baldly on 1 September. In Trier itself, he observed a day later, there was nothing more to be had. Fuel was in such short supply that vehicles would soon be unable to move. ‘We want to build a new Europe,’ he wrote, ‘we, the young people facing the old! But what are we? Famished, exhausted, and drained by madmen. Poor and tired, worn out and nerve-ridden. No, no, no! It’s not on any more.’ When reproachful citizens asked soldiers why they were retreating, they answered that they, too, wanted to go ‘home to the Reich’. It had all been a bluff, he wrote, alluding to the ‘miracle weapons’. That was what happened when an advertising boss—he meant Hitler—became supreme commander of the Wehrmacht. Files and papers were being destroyed in huge quantities. ‘Everything that seemed at one time indispensable is today valueless and nothing at all.’ Who was to blame for it all, the diarist asked. Not those in lowly places, was his answer, those who simply did not want to fight and die for a lost cause. Everything had become crystal clear. All that talk of the new Europe, of young and decrepit peoples, of Germanic leadership, of revolutionary zeal: it was ‘baloney’, a ‘swindle’. He would not have said such things out loud.

As enemy artillery started firing on Trier on the evening of 13 September, and the evacuation of the inhabitants began next day, hundreds of emergency workers—‘a column of wretched looking, careworn old men and also young lads from the Hitler Youth’—traipsed into the city through the rain to dig fortification ditches. These might have fended off Huns and Mongols, Dufner mused, but it seemed doubtful that they could hold up modern tanks. Few of the workers had anywhere to sleep. But there was no complaining, just resigned acceptance. It looked as if the last reserves were being summoned up. As Bitburg itself came under fire, officers still managed to celebrate the birthday of one of their comrades with fine Saar wine and Sekt.²⁵ It was a case of drink today; there might be no tomorrow.

Such partying with the enemy on the doorstep would have confirmed the widespread prejudice among Nazi functionaries, much of the civilian population and many frontline soldiers about the