dead, scattered or captured. None was connected to Oppenhoff’s death until well after the war, when the British, who now controlled Aachen, reopened the case.
In fact, the Oppenhoff assassination, while it made a splash, did not represent any kind of yardstick by which to judge the Nazi guerrilla movement. The Lord Mayor’s murder had been undertaken only because of pressure from Berlin, not as a result of any local anti-collaborator groundswell. For the rest of the war, the Rhineland was as peaceful as could reasonably be expected. There were no more major acts of violence against the Allies or their appointed German officials.
In the Catholic, less pro-Nazi west of the country, the Werwolf movement was even feebler than elsewhere, but as the Anglo-American forces pushed further east into the centre and east central part of Germany, they found a more hostile environment in which planned and spontaneous guerrilla activity could thrive.
In another notorious case associated with Werwolf agitation, on 21 April two of British Field Marshal Montgomery’s liaison officers, Major Earle and Major Poston, were ambushed by a heavily armed Hitler Youth unit while driving their jeep through a rugged part of Lüneburg Heath. Only lightly armed, they were forced to ram their attackers’ machine-gun nest as a last resort. Thrown from their vehicle by the impact, they found themselves at the enemy’s mercy. Poston was promptly bayoneted, while, mysteriously, the wounded Earle was spared and transported back through enemy lines, first to a farmhouse and then to a German field hospital (where he would be rescued within twenty-four hours by advancing British troops). 22
Sporadic acts of sabotage and violence would continue to occur in the areas occupied by the Western Allies – the stringing of wires across country roads to decapitate jeep drivers was a favourite, though rarely successful, ploy – but broadly speaking the organised Werwolf movement took a serious, lasting form mainly in the Soviet- and Polish-occupied areas of Silesia, East Prussia and the Czech borderlands. Here the continuing guerrilla struggle was symptomatic not just of Nazi fanaticism but of a desperate resistance against rape, massacre and forced resettlement.
East of the Elbe, the greatest population movement since the fall of the Roman Empire was under way, driven by the advance of the Red Army and their vengeful Slavic brothers, who for nearly six years had suffered under a brutal German occupation.
Vengeance is never beautiful. In what was to follow, it was ugly beyond belief.
3
The Great Trek
In early 1945, the Allies began to advance once more on all fronts. The Soviets in particular made spectacular progress. They finally took what was left of Warsaw, once Hitler’s executioners and demolition squads had finished with it, pushing through pre-war Poland and into the historic eastern provinces of Germany – lands that had formed an integral part of the Reich since the Middle Ages.
The German population fled or was subjected to rape, pillage and forced expulsion. Among these refugees was sixteen-year-old Katherina Elliger, born in Upper Silesia, a traditionally culturally diverse region close to where Poland, the Czech lands and Germany met. As the fighting came closer, she and her mother fled into a nearby corner of the Czech lands, heading by a roundabout route for the home of Katherina’s uncle, which lay in the county of Glatz (Polish Kłosko, Czech Kladsko), a short way back across the German border in Lower Silesia. She later described what they found as they journeyed through the wooded landscape:
One evening, we arrived at a farm, which lay off the beaten track in a hollow . . . We entered the spacious hallway. Lights were burning inside. Around a large, round oak table knelt six or seven people. They were quite still and made no movement. Their heads had slumped forward. When we came closer, we saw that they had been nailed to the
In fact, the Oppenhoff assassination, while it made a splash, did not represent any kind of yardstick by which to judge the Nazi guerrilla movement. The Lord Mayor’s murder had been undertaken only because of pressure from Berlin, not as a result of any local anti-collaborator groundswell. For the rest of the war, the Rhineland was as peaceful as could reasonably be expected. There were no more major acts of violence against the Allies or their appointed German officials.
In the Catholic, less pro-Nazi west of the country, the Werwolf movement was even feebler than elsewhere, but as the Anglo-American forces pushed further east into the centre and east central part of Germany, they found a more hostile environment in which planned and spontaneous guerrilla activity could thrive.
In another notorious case associated with Werwolf agitation, on 21 April two of British Field Marshal Montgomery’s liaison officers, Major Earle and Major Poston, were ambushed by a heavily armed Hitler Youth unit while driving their jeep through a rugged part of Lüneburg Heath. Only lightly armed, they were forced to ram their attackers’ machine-gun nest as a last resort. Thrown from their vehicle by the impact, they found themselves at the enemy’s mercy. Poston was promptly bayoneted, while, mysteriously, the wounded Earle was spared and transported back through enemy lines, first to a farmhouse and then to a German field hospital (where he would be rescued within twenty-four hours by advancing British troops). 22
Sporadic acts of sabotage and violence would continue to occur in the areas occupied by the Western Allies – the stringing of wires across country roads to decapitate jeep drivers was a favourite, though rarely successful, ploy – but broadly speaking the organised Werwolf movement took a serious, lasting form mainly in the Soviet- and Polish-occupied areas of Silesia, East Prussia and the Czech borderlands. Here the continuing guerrilla struggle was symptomatic not just of Nazi fanaticism but of a desperate resistance against rape, massacre and forced resettlement.
East of the Elbe, the greatest population movement since the fall of the Roman Empire was under way, driven by the advance of the Red Army and their vengeful Slavic brothers, who for nearly six years had suffered under a brutal German occupation.
Vengeance is never beautiful. In what was to follow, it was ugly beyond belief.
3
The Great Trek
In early 1945, the Allies began to advance once more on all fronts. The Soviets in particular made spectacular progress. They finally took what was left of Warsaw, once Hitler’s executioners and demolition squads had finished with it, pushing through pre-war Poland and into the historic eastern provinces of Germany – lands that had formed an integral part of the Reich since the Middle Ages.
The German population fled or was subjected to rape, pillage and forced expulsion. Among these refugees was sixteen-year-old Katherina Elliger, born in Upper Silesia, a traditionally culturally diverse region close to where Poland, the Czech lands and Germany met. As the fighting came closer, she and her mother fled into a nearby corner of the Czech lands, heading by a roundabout route for the home of Katherina’s uncle, which lay in the county of Glatz (Polish Kłosko, Czech Kladsko), a short way back across the German border in Lower Silesia. She later described what they found as they journeyed through the wooded landscape:
One evening, we arrived at a farm, which lay off the beaten track in a hollow . . . We entered the spacious hallway. Lights were burning inside. Around a large, round oak table knelt six or seven people. They were quite still and made no movement. Their heads had slumped forward. When we came closer, we saw that they had been nailed to the
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