Exorcising Hitler by Frederick Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

Anglo-Americans’ sweeping on into the heart of Germany before Hitler had a chance to organise his resistance.
    However, in the west the Germans also rallied. Allied forces, weary after a three-month war of movement, operating at the end of long and vulnerable supply lines, came up against the natural barriers of the Rhine and the Vosges and Ardennes forests. They began once more to pay a high price for every kilometre of ground gained. When the British attempted an airborne attack across the lower Rhine at Arnhem during the third week of September, it was a heroic – and bloody – failure, the Allies’ first major setback since D-Day.
    Advances elsewhere were modest. The first major German population centre to fall was the landmark city of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle). Here Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, had been crowned eleven and a half centuries earlier, and here he and his successor were buried. Aachen lay a mere twenty kilometres north-west of Roetgen.
    General Courtney Hodges’ First Army began its efforts to surround Aachen on 1 October. In September the city’s commander, Lieutenant General von Schwerin – a sophisticated, humane officer with close connections to the 20 July plot against Hitler – had privately expressed his desire to give up this cultural jewel without a fight. He hoped thereby to preserve both Aachen and precious men and military resources that would be better employed elsewhere – but in the event, as the Americans drew near, he was replaced by the more pliable Colonel Gerhard Wilck.
    Although he later claimed to have shared many of von Schwerin’s doubts, Wilck showed little sign of this at the time. He rapidly organised a ruthless defence and called on his troops and the remaining civilians in a series of radio broadcasts to show ‘unshakeable belief in our right and our victory’ and fight to the very end. 15 As a result, it would take the Americans almost three weeks of savage house-to-house fighting, until 21 October, and around 5,000 casualties on either side, to overcome the garrison’s bitter resistance. By this time the ancient cathedral city lay in ruins, scarcely recognisable, with up to 85 per cent of its buildings destroyed. 16
    Hodges had rejected advice to simply push on past Aachen, preferring instead the symbolically powerful but militarily less significant gesture of siege and conquest (the fierceness of the German defence, with a hardbitten SS group at its heart, also related to Aachen’s position as the first major city threatened by the Allied advance).
    Hodges’ decision cost the Allies dear in casualties and time. 17 The final fall of Aachen, moreover, provided them with a challenge – that of administering at short notice a large (if at first mostly depopulated) German town – one that would invite disaster and opportunity almost in equal measure.
     
    If taking Aachen had been hard, being an occupying presence in the city and its surrounding area was fairly painless.
    As in Roetgen, the locals proved remarkably accepting of their conquered status. They were even quite friendly. This was not entirely unpredictable. Before the destruction of Weimar democracy in 1933, the left bank of the Rhine had been one of the least pro-Nazi areas of the Reich, giving most of its votes to the Catholic Centre Party and only around 20 per cent to the Nazis. Moreover, as an intelligence report for the G-5 of the US First Army noted, civilians in Aachen had good reason to hate the Nazis, who had carried out the forced evacuation of the city in brutal fashion. 18 Not until the spring, when the Allies reached the key Rhineland military and administrative centre of Koblenz, Prussian since 1815 and long a major fortified town, with a substantial population of Prussianised ‘soldiers and bureaucrats’, would they encounter something approaching a Nazi stronghold in western Germany. 19
    What would not prove so easy, as Aachen’s new masters discovered almost immediately,