Such patterns of behavior can be seen again in the battle for the fortress of Saint-Malo. When German troops were surrounded in the citadel there, the commandant, Colonel Andreas von Aulock, let it be known that “everyone should prepare to die and remind himself that you can only die once. It was a battle to the last, to the point where we were supposed to sacrifice ourselves.” That was how Georg Neher described the situation to a bunkmate in the U.S. POW camp Fort Hunt. “The day before we surrendered he ordered the sappers to lay landmines here and there. They weren’t aimed at the Americans, but us. Of course, we didn’t do that…. We had survived up until then and done ourselves proud on the battlefield, and now we were supposed to die a pathetic death. I would have rather thrown a grenade in the colonel’s bunker.” But to the soldiers’ relief, they determined that “Aulock wasn’t serious. It was all bluster. He never intended to die. He just said what he did so he would be mentioned a couple of times in the Wehrmacht reports and be promoted to general. He wanted to be interned as a general and a bearer of the [Iron Cross with] oak leaves.”619 Aulock achieved his ends. Reports of the colonel’s heroic persistence delighted Hitler, who remarked that Aulock should serve as a model for all other garrison commandants. Aulock got his Oak Leaves and the promise he would be promoted to major general. Ironically, due to a clerical error, it was Aulock’s brother Hans and not Aulock himself who ended up getting promoted.
Even high-ranking officers like this colonel did not fight to the bitter end, although some of them felt pangs of conscience about being captured alive by their enemies. “Strictly as a soldier, I have nothing to be ashamed of,” said Lieutenant General Wilhelm von Schlieben, the fortress commandant at Cherbourg, shortly after he was interned. “I simply say that things would have ended more happily, if I’d died.”620 It would have been a “historical deed,” Schlieben added, if he had thrown himself into the machine gun fire. Rear Admiral Walter Hennecke, one of Schlieben’s fellow POWs, reported that the latter had indeed tried to end it all. Hennecke had hindered his fellow officer by arguing “That’s tantamount to suicide. There is no point to it.”621
Colonel Hans Krug, who was captured by British landing forces in Normandy on June 6, 1944, had a mind-set similar to Schlieben’s:
KRUG: I am quite resigned to the fact that things went badly with me—only that I have been taken prisoner! I wonder whether I shall be blamed for that? Whether they won’t consider that I should have given my life. The order states: “Everyone surrendering a strongpoint will be sentenced to death. It is to be held to the last shot and the last man.”622
As British forces surrounded Krug’s bunker, he had called his division commander over a still functioning telephone connection and asked for instructions. But the commanding general refused: “ ‘Do whatever you consider right.’ I said: ‘Won’t you give an order, sir?’ ‘No, I can’t survey the situation.’ I said that to him too. He said: ‘No, you act according to your conscience!’” Krug was bewildered. He had accepted orders to defend his position to the last man, and now he was supposed to decide for himself. He didn’t know what to do, although the hopelessness of his military position was obvious. He later formulated his dilemma as follows: “If it affects the prestige of the FÜHRER and the REICH, then we shall carry out this order. Or isn’t it more important for me to save these valuable young lives from completely useless destruction.”623 In the end, Krug surrendered, but he continued to have pangs of conscience about not falling in battle.
