A little girl says goodbye to a sixteen year old conscript before he is marched off to a Soviet prison camp, May 1945(1)
I came across this picture when reading Berlin – The Downfall by Antony Beevor. This is a powerhouse of a book that describes in the rudest detail the last days of Hitler’s Third Reich. In agonising and excruciating exactitude the assault of the Red Army on Berlin, hell bent on revenge and the increasingly desperate and demented response from the Bunker are laid down.
As with so many books that investigate and discuss warfare, photographic images are supplied. Very often these will be of a corpse or corpses, presented, I suppose, to bring home to the reader the brutal and final nature of warfare. Beevor’s book is no different and is amply laden with pictures of death and destruction, none I should hasten to add being additions of a gratuitous nature. All supplement and reinforce what the book is about.
However, it was the picture above that really struck a chord with me. All too often the lists of dead through conflict are presented to us as a testament to mankind’s seemingly inherent and uncontrollable need to devastate his neighbours. But the numbers in effect numb us. Even worse, we are now so inundated with imagery depicting decapitation, evisceration, murder and various other manifestations of death that unsurprisingly we are to a certain extent inured. Yes, we know that it is bad. We know it is wrong. But we cannot smell, taste or touch the cadaver, and in that sense, it screams silently at us at the injustice, the indecorous termination of his or her life. But it is remote.
This is why I am constantly drawn to pictures such as the one above. This is a picture of a nameless young girl bidding farewell to a young boy who has been captured by the Russians and is facing a bleak (and possibly short) future in a prison camp. It is the humanity – the living humanity that touches me.
Berlin in May 1945 would be about as close to a depiction of Hell on Earth as it is possible to get. The Russians had crossed the Oder on February 1st and with a mixture of determination, luck and rage plundered and pillaged their way into Berlin within a couple of months. Women and girls from the age of twelve up to and and including old age pensioners were raped. Young German boys were killed in order to prevent them from growing up to become SS soldiers. The devastation in the guise of righteous Communist retribution being meted out to the Germans was absolute. The cost to the Russians in exterminating National Socialism had been horrendous. It is estimated that over 20 million people died, their industries were decimated and the countryside ravaged. This does not excuse the Soviet crimes but does provide a frame of context.
The German response was confused and futile. This was a nation after all that had itself a creed of intense extermination: National Socialism. The ruins of Warsaw, Stalingrad and everywhere in between were testimony to that. Germany was in every sense reaping what she had sowed. A typical response by Hitler to the news that Soviet tanks were on the outskirts of Berlin included the formation of what he called the Panzerjagd Division. The purpose of this group would be to engage with and destroy the Russian T34s. All well and good one would suppose until it is realised that the companies were made up of Hitler Youth carrying two bazookas and riding bicycles. As Beevor aptly put it “Even the Japanese did not expect their Kamikazes to ride into battle on a bicycle”.
Hitler had decided to bolster his diminishing forces by conscripting children and old men in what was known as the Volkssturm. Members of these army groups were very often untrained and unarmed. Quite how they were meant to defend Berlin against the jubilant and experienced Russian forces is something of an enigma. Examples of the despair and need of the German forces are plentiful. For instance, there is the issue of rifles to a group of soldiers preparing to face an army of tanks. Rifles in themselves are not going to be much help, still less when it is noted that they only had five rounds each.
It is likely that the young boy in the picture above was a member of the Volkssturm. Being aged 16 means he would have been only 4 years old when the Nazis came to power. There is no way that he could be considered as culpable for the acts committed by the SS and Gestapo. His face is etched with grief. He will certainly be old enough to understand what awaits him as captive of a system arguably as brutal as the Nazis. He will have heard tales of off the cuff executions. No doubt during his surrender, he will have actually been confronted by those strange sounding and strange looking men from thousands of miles away to the east. The young boy will be wondering what lies ahead as he is forcibly removed from an environment that although ruined still seeps from every street corner the comfort of familiarity. He is sixteen years old. He is at that age where he is just about to cross over the cusp between childhood and adulthood. Looking at his face I believe he has been photographed just as his attempts at retaining an aura of masculinity succumb to the more immediate and honest fear redolent of all children. Try as he might, desperate as he is to retain an air of control; he cannot stop crying. He knows he may never return but he doesn’t want to let the young girl next to him in on his innermost fears.
The young girl is at a guess about 11 years old. Like the young conscript she will be only too aware of the destruction that her home has undergone. She will almost certainly understand that the foreign men now parading around her city are not to be trusted. But I suspect she does not understand how or why it has come to this. As she looks at the conscript, maybe she sees his fear and anxiety. She seems removed, but then how does a 11 year old tell a sixteen year old that it is going to be alright when she does not recall what constitutes ‘alright’. In reaching out to provide either physical or verbal reassurance she will need a frame of reference. At eleven years old and having a personal history of bombing, rationing, destitution and fear, what can she say to the conscript?
It seems the dehumanisation and the fear and hatred of the Slavic peoples that Nazi propaganda had fostered within its population had come home and would remain there for the next 50 years. It is an unfortunately habitual plotline that accompanies the history of warfare whereby many live by the sword but many, many more, through no direct fault of their own, die so.
(1) Picture and accompanying text reproduced from rear cover of: Beevor, A (2002). Berlin – The Downfall , 1945. Penguin/Viking Books, London. Note: the original picture has been ascribed to: BPK, Berlin
