Hellstorm Page #6

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The respite proved brief, however.

At ten oclock a heavy tremor ripped the Gustloff

as the bulkheads broke and the sea rushed in.

Within seconds, the big ship began to roll

on its side, then plunged beneath the waves.

When rescue ships later reached the scene,

they pulled from the icy waters a mere nine

hundred survivors. All else - roughly seven

to nine thousand men, women and children -

were lost.

As many more incidents would prove, the sinking

of the Gustloff was no mistake. In a deliberate

attempt to kill as many refugees as possible,

Soviet submarines struck again and again at

the slow-moving ships.

Soon after midnight on February 10th, an old

luxury liner, the General Stueben, was plowing

through the icy, black Baltic. Heavily weighed

down with refugees and wounded soldiers, the

ship was in the midst of its second such evacuation

in less than a fortnight. Just before one a.m.,

two torpedoes slammed into the ship's

side. As the Stuebens stern rose high out

of the water, hundreds leaped overboard, including

some who were torn to pieces by the still-turning

propellers. Within seven minutes, the ship

plunged beneath the waves, swiftly silencing

a final mass scream that seemed to arise from

a single voice. Of the 3,500 passengers aboard,

only a few hundred survived.

Goodrich:
Like some great wild animal, the

Red Army moved closer to the heart of Germany.

In countless German cities and towns the pattern

repeated itself. The bloody nightmare which

enveloped the Baltic coast was typical of

that which transpired wherever the Soviets

occupied German soil. In many places

- Silesia, Prussia, Pomerania, in the German communities

of Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, Poland, Hungary

- a similar horror had been in progress for weeks.

There, the ghastly atrocities actually

increased, as if Red soldiers were in a mad race

with one another to see who could destroy,

murder and, above all, who could rape the most.

Meanwhile, the American and British forces

punched through the German lines in the West.

Unlike the East Front, however, German soldiers were

well aware that the foes they faced in the west were

signatories of the Geneva Convention. Under

this agreement, captured or surrendering German

soldiers were protected by law. With the Red

Army roaring across Germany from the east,

many Germans secretly hoped that the Americans

might occupy what remained of the Reich before

the communists did. It was no

secret that Germans, high and low,

considered the Americans and

British the lesser of two evils.

Unfortunately, they

were not always right.

DEFEAT IN THE WES In the Spring of 1945, as Berliners prepared to

defend the capital from the encircling Soviet army,

Germans to the west also

fought to halt the Allied tide.

Unlike the howling savagery to the

east, fraught with nightmarish ferocity,

defeat in the west came methodically, relentlessly

and, judged by the standards of the east,

almost silently.

As the Western front crept closer, civilians

anxiously awaited the Allied arrival.

Unlike the terrified trekkers to the east, relatively

few Germans in the west abandoned their homes.

The racial and cultural ties with the enemy,

particularly the Americans, were simply too

strong to arouse the same

terror as the Soviets did.

Far from fleeing the advancing Allies,

many civilians actually ran to greet them.

Little did the Germans realize that

because of a decade of Jewish propaganda,

the Americans were perhaps even more hate

- filled than the Soviets.

Unlike the wild and almost unimaginable Red

Army, US military commanders might have easily

prevented crimes committed against

helpless civilians had they only willed it.

In most cases, however, they did not.

Leading the charge against the German people

was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man whose

hatred of all things German was well known.

In much the same vein as Stalin and Roosevelt,

Eisenhower advocated the outright massacre

of German army officers, Nazi Party members

and others. In all, according to the Allied

commander, at least 100,000 German leaders

should be "exterminated."

Not surprisingly, such sentiment from above

quickly filtered down. "The only good German

is a dead German," became the pervasive sentiment.

"Take no prisoners," was the tacit understanding.

By the tens of thousands, captured or surrendering

Germans were simply slaughtered on the spot.

As American forces swept toward Munich in

late April, 1945, most German guards at the

concentration camp near Dachau fled. Despite

signs at the gate warning, "No entrance -

typhus epidemic," several hundred German soldiers

were ordered to the prison to maintain order

and arrange the transfer of over

30,000 prisoners to the Allies.

When the Americans reached Dachau the following

day, they were horrified by what they saw.

Outside the prison sat rail cars

full of diseased and starved corpses.

Inside the camp, a room piled high with naked

and emaciated bodies was also discovered.

Unhinged by the nightmare, certain

that Dachau was proof of the atrocities

they had heard so much about in America,

officers turned their enraged troops loose

on the now disarmed German soldiers.

A US soldier:
The men were deliberately

wounding guards. A lot of guards were shot

in the legs so they couldnt move. They

were then turned over to the inmates.

One was beheaded with a bayonet.

Others were ripped apart limb by limb.

While the tortures were in progress, a lieutenant

forced over 300 captive Germans up against a wall,

planted two machine-guns, then ordered his

men to open fire. Those still alive when

the fusillade ended were forced to stand amid

the carnage while the machine-gunners reloaded.

In all, over five hundred helpless German

soldiers were slaughtered in cold blood.

As a final touch, the citizens of Dachau were

forced to bury the thousands of corpses in

the camp, thereby assuring the

death of many more from disease.

Few Americans noticed, because few cared,

but conditions in German cities and towns were

not much better than that at Dachau. Because

of the round-the-clock American and British

air attacks week after week, very little food

and almost no medicine was arriving anywhere

in Germany. Virtually none reached the numerous

concentration camps, where, during the last days,

disease and starvation swept

away the inmates by the thousands.

The incident at Dachau was merely one

of many massacres committed by US troops.

US Soldier:
We had been held up at a little

town. We were supposed to just walk through it,

and the Germans stopped us dead. We just

couldn't crack it. Eventually artillery came in,

sort of leveled the houses. They finally

surrendered, and they came out, and sort of lined up.

Per usual, no one knew what was going

on. We had a new battalion commander,

just graduated from West Point, and he lined

them up, and said, "I want you to shoot them."

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