1945 April

April. Friendly Germans. 11  million homeless. Roosevelt's death. Concentration camps - Belsen's pastor. Dead German cities. Suicides in Germany. Musso dead.

Easter Monday, April 2nd

To Teignmouth where met Wilfrid (Westall), Ruth and Nicholas, aet VI. Tea with double ices for small boys, then to see Wilfrid’s new church at Shaldon with 3 wc’s! Wilfrid said that as Hilary had not been baptized he should be called B1.

Thursday, April 5th

Home again. Train pretty crowded so good deal of standing in corridors, but punctual and home by two o’clock.

Sunday, April 8th

Correspondent who earlier reported in Rhineland Germans were showing a deep sense of guilt and fear has now visited villages and towns which have hardly been touched and reports that there is a positive friendliness to the invading troops among large sections of the population and certainly a complete lack of hostility. He thinks explanation is destruction of the S.S. and Gestapo from whom they feel so divorced that they have more in common with invaders….. He does not think non-fraternization is practical for British troops, or wise.

We must build on something somewhere. More and more conscious of the frightful material destruction of all that makes civilized life by air bombing and white hot heat of war in Germany. No efforts has been made in some towns for years to clear up bomb damage. No one who has not seen the destruction can have any conception of what it is like. “Talk about the bombing of London,” said a soldier on leave, “You don’t know what you are talking about.” Then, as Nora points out, it is not only houses, transport, towns, but the intellectual life of Europe and international relations – how will they be got going again?

Talk about sewing dragon’s teeth and reaping the whirlwind. All these myths and metaphors cannot express what Hitler has let loose upon Europe and upon Germany. No wonder Churchill said the other day that victory would come as deliverance, not as a triumph.

Monday, April 9th

More news of the problems created by imported labour - Russians, Poles, French trekking westward, homeless in their hundreds of thousands. There are believed to be 11 million of them.

Tuesday, April 10th

Political fireworks have started in preparation for the general election and much blasting and counter-blasting. Neither party has a particularly good record or one that will bear much inspection. A great pity that Churchill allowed himself to become a political apart from a national leader. Conservatives accused of being willing to sell out to Hitler, Labour of refusing to support rearmament. Present parliament ready for liquidation. Curious that it was elected on the Baldwin-Hoare swindle - “Support me and back collective security” - just when the Abyssinian war was starting.

Sunday, April 15th

Nora came in at eight o’clock on Friday to say that Roosevelt had died of a sudden stroke. He was a great man and a good one. He had Churchill’s courage and more than Churchill’s vision and understanding. We feel we have lost a great friend in this country. He saw the implications not only for Europe but for the rest of the world of the rise of Nazism in Germany and, when our leaders were talking of appeasement, he spoke as the defender of good faith in international relations and the champion of the democratic way of living. He saw the importance to America of the survival of democracy in Europe. After his election for the third time he brought forward lend-lease proposals and stores and ammunition poured in from the new world to the old. With Pearl Harbour he became our ally and Churchill and he worked together as a combination never seen before between this country and the U.S.A. By his broadcasts his voice became as familiar to us as our own leader’s, a clear and musical voice that gave pleasure to the ear. He died at the height of his powers and his death is a great loss to us, but his work for victory has been done, and Japan and Germany have both been beaten. His absence from the peace making will be a grievous loss, for his leadership of the U.S.A. was an assurance that this policy would continue…

Heard the cuckoo yesterday, April 14th, late compared with last year.

Monday, April 16th

Accounts of some of the concentration camps now overrun and the hardships the prisoners suffered in their march westward from the prison camps. After all the news about the concentration camps, Nora says that she does not want to meet any Germans.

Thursday, April 19th

Conditions in the concentration camps overrun near Weimar and Bremen are the chief things in the news. People who have not followed Nazism since 1934 very surprised at these revelations. Well fed German citizens have been rounded up from Weimar and taken to see housing conditions and the state of the living and the emaciated corpses of the dead, stripped naked and piled in heaps on lorries for the cremation ovens. I hope the British Conservatives who pooh-poohed atrocities at the concentration camps in the appeasement period 1936-9 are examining the photographs in the papers and listening to the recorded descriptions of the reporters on the news. The size of the camps so amazing – 80 thousand, 40 thousand and so on. They contained German politicals, slave labour of every nationality, Polish, French intellectuals and prisoners of war…. Most of them found stacked in the camps had died of starvation, but some had been shot. Methods of execution varied from hanging and shooting to injections of phenol. The coke supply for the crematoriums had given out and they were putting lime on the corpses and burying them in pits. Daily deaths were numbered in hundreds. Survivors were in some places too weak to walk, the could only crawl, and others could barely clap their hands when their deliverers arrived. The world will long remember these horrible, inhuman hellish dens of misery. The cameras will record them and the voices of those who lived in them will be preserved. The life lived in them had no connection with life as we know it at all. Even in their starvation and misery the inmates managed to give the children, of whom there were hundreds, a little extra food. Many of these were completely lost; their only identity was a number tattooed on their arms. In Belsen there were 28,000 women and 11,000 men and 500 children. Gutters were filled with the rotting dead and within sight of the children there was a pile of dead, naked women 80 yards long, 30 yards wide and four feet high. There were 50 births daily, with no water.

More details of these crimes against humanity itself, this turning of men again to beasts by these men beneath beasts themselves: “Men shall prey on one another like monsters of the deep”. How can these thousands ever be healed and return to a normal and quiet mind –“not all the soothing syrup in the world will medicine them”. How many people who have only heard the camps described will dream to-night, in how many minds will the thought occur, “but for the grace of God such camps might have existed in England’s green and pleasant land”. ”Never have British soldiers been filled with such cold fury” said one correspondent.

Next Monday there are to be unshaded lights in houses, from the black-out to the dim-out, from dim-out to freedom for the household. What a nuisance the black-out was, particularly in the first two winters of the war when everyone was on the alert to find light in the neighbours’ houses and police and wardens prowled.

For April the cheese ration reduced to 2oz per person per week.

Friday, April 20th

More descriptions of the dead German cities like Cologne, silent and full of dust and rubble, the waste and destruction of Plymouth or Exeter or Coventry applied to the whole of a city. The water mains are out all over the place and there are no pipes with which to repair them; there is no gas, and electric current and telephones have been restored only to a few essential services, including about 150 electric bakeries, for food is the most pressing problem for cities living from hand to mouth.

Only hope this destruction which we have been bound to carry out does not defeat its own ends. The German technicians captured in the Ruhr say it was the bombing of the past three years which finished them.

To-day the vulgar Fuhrer’s 56th birthday. The Russians 17 miles from Berlin….

Saturday, April 21st

Hilary asked to show his toys to a boy visitor replied, "I have not got many toys, but I have got a lot of nature” (rabbits, chicks, moths, a cat etc).

Went for a walk along the towpath to Hambleden lock. Asked Nora whether she had had a nice day; ”Yes,” she said, ”I thought more about birds than about Hitler.”

Sunday, April 22nd

When the correspondents dug out the pastor of the village of Belsen, he said he knew the S.S. did horrible things, but “What could anyone do? Preach against it? If he preached against it once his wife and children would be taken to a concentration camp. I had just seen one. Would I do anything that would send my wife and children to such a place? They dared not speak. If they tried to fight they would undoubtedly be shot. What could they do? They hated the S.S. but there was nothing they could do.”

The Bavarian peasants have not suffered greatly from the war. They are well fed, gentle and simple people. Can one draw up an indictment against them? Among them move the starved and filthy “displaced persons” trudging from the prison camps. Their responsibility was allowing Nazism to be born and bred. Once the hundreds of thousands of individuals had allowed them to reach power, those individuals were in the grip of gangsters, ruthless enemies if humanity, and could only repent at the cost of their lives and those of their dear ones and dependants. We have forgotten what it is like under a ruthless and efficient terrorism in control of the all the modern weapons of power from armoured cars to broadcasting. They had ample warning of what these gangsters would do. Knowing this they yet allowed them to get into to positions of control; they admired them. There is this mixture of brutality at the top and docility at the bottom in the German people.

 

Wednesday, April 25th

A landmark for Hilary. He was lent an old girl’s bicycle and cycled down to the town on it with me; then we went on the river in a double skiff and paddled all the way back from Temple Island with practically no stops – a notable achievement for 8 ½. I was not so pleased as he was with the bicycle as I had first to put on new brake blocks and then the front wheel punctured!

Thursday, April 26th

It looks as though from the fuel point of view next winter will be worse than last. The price of coke and coal is going up and a maximum has been fixed of 34cwt of coal and 2 tons of coke in two six monthly issues. There is wood here if only I could find some one to help me saw it up.

At Leipzig a correspondent wandered into the Town Hall, where some Volksturmers lay in their own blood where they had committed suicide.He found the caretaker in a cellar nearby and brought him back. With his keys he unlocked the Mayor’s room. In it were the Mayor at his desk, his wife and daughter, about 20, with a phial on the table. Out of this room was another in which the city treasurer in which his wife and daughter, in nurses uniform, had also committed suicide. The suicide of individuals matches the suicide of the German nation.

Friday, April 27th

To-night we were given the splendid and long-awaited news that an American patrol of four met the Russian advanced troops and Russian troops accompanied them back to the American divisional H.Q. Later high American officers visited the Russians 

We heard a record of a speech by Stalin to-night. It was interesting to hear his voice, a rather quiet light voice, different in tone from Churchill and Roosevelt, not to mention the ranting bellow of the Fuhrer.

Sunday, April 29th

The first of the dictators is the first to go - Mussolini reported captured by Italian patriots and shot with other high fascist officials in Milan. So ends the road he took exactly ten years ago when he invaded Abyssinia.

Monday, April 30th

Rumours from Sweden that Himmler and the Swedish intermediary, Count Bernadotte, head of the Red Cross, have met again, that he told Bernadotte that Germany was like a mad house, he was the only sane leader left, Goering was gibbering and thought he was a Roman, Hitler was raving mad and dying after drawing up a new town plan last week for London!

32,000 political and religious leaders released from the notorious Dachau camp, and a very nice bit of news – Eduard Heriot released by the Russians and flown to Moscow has once again been elected Mayor of his beloved Lyons in the first municipal elections after the war.

It is very silent of evenings and nights here now. The huge flights of bombers out and back have ceased and the house no longer vibrates to their engines..... A bitter N.E. wind after a spell of mild summer weather. The potatoes are frosted and everyone is shivering at school and complaining of lumbago and rheumatism