Page 37 - The Kellner Affair Sample Pages

THE KELLNER AFFAIR: MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH
called Je suis partout (I am everywhere) to Je suis parti (I have left). Joseph Darnand, Laval’s head of the Milice ordered those still loyal to withdraw to the west in the direction of Sigmaringen, while the Milice in Paris was moved out of its headquarters by truck. Many tried to get to Germany, seemingly unaware that there, things would very soon get a lot worse. When they reached the Fatherland, they were often locked up in camps or prisons under appalling conditions.
Hitler had decreed that the Castle of Sigmaringen some twenty miles north of Lake Constance in Baden-Württemberg would be the new seat of the French government in exile. There, a French lawyer, petty aristocrat and collaborator named Fernand de Brinon whose Jewish wife had been Aryanized, established the Délégation française and the Commission gouvernementale française pour la défense des intérêts nationaux to little effect, although the enclave with its 6,000 displaced citizens tried to put on a good show by running a collabo radio station, press services and even hosted a German, an Italian and a Japanese Embassy. But Pétain refused to cooperate, and had to be physically escorted by one of Otto Abetz’s deputies to the eastern frontier of France. He arrived in Sigmaringen on September 7, 1944, but in a t of senile pique decided to fence-sit. He simply declined to collaborate further since he had been forced to leave France, as if that made any difference whatsoever.
Still, he was given special treatment such as personal menus, extra ration cards, a suite on the 7th oor of the castle and escorted walks. Laval whom the Germans continued to despise in spite of his Germanophile collusion was on the 6th oor. Dissatis ed with his accommodations, he spent most of his time preparing his defense for the trial in France that he knew was inevitable sometime after his just as inevitable capture – should he not be poisoned beforehand or done away with by a stray bullet. Fueled by wine and meat which was miraculously still available for this depraved elite, the entire menagerie quickly devolved into a degenerate zoo where plots, conspiracies, squabbles and vicious gossip that meant nothing to anyone but the involved, ruled the day.
And so the months passed in this strange disassociated bubble, as Germany was utterly crushed and the British, American and Soviet armies advanced on Berlin. On April 3, 1945, the US 9th Army captured a sixteen-year-old German soldier named Hans- Georg Henke in the village of Hüttenberg-Rechtenbach north of Frankfurt-am-Main. His father had died in 1938, his mother in 1944, leaving the remaining family destitute. He had joined the Luftwaffe at age 15 to support them, and was in an anti-aircraft squad when he and his comrades were steamrollered by the US forces. Heartbreaking pictures were taken of him, sobbing in a war-battered courtyard. Some sources state that he broke down because he was a young victim of Nazi propaganda and his entire world had just fallen to pieces, others that he was suffering from combat shock after being overrun by the Americans. But it doesn’t really matter. In the righteous anger and angry righteousness that
On April 3, 1945, American soldiers captured a teenage German soldier named Hans-Georg Henke in the village of Hüttenberg- Rechtenbach north of Frankfurt-am-Main. (Peter Larsen)
Suffering from combat shock, he broke down when he realized that everything he believed in had disintegrated around him and turned to dust. (Peter Larsen)
was par for the course in France after the Libération, the anguish of German soldiers who had been caught up in the German war machine was completely forgotten. And the utter debasement of this teenager who happened to be on the wrong side, is in stark contrast to the callous and unrepentant rst-class Vichy scamper to Sigmaringen. Like the warlords in Berlin, the deposed Vichystes had never cared one whit for the lot of cannon fodder such as Hans-Georg Henke.
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