CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Collapse in the West

EISENHOWER’S DECISION

THE SEIZURE of the bridge at Remagen, one of the most melodramatic episodes of the Allied campaign, was followed by a march to victory on the Western Front that ended in anticlimax, for reasons that were inescapable. Bradley’s forces staged their breakout from the Remagen bridgehead on 25 March, almost three weeks after the crossing was taken. Here again, caution had prevailed. After a slow start, making four or five miles a day, the pace of the advance quickened. German resistance was slight. Bradley, who had never achieved a successful envelopment, now became passionately committed to encircling the Ruhr and at last making the massive capture of Germans which had eluded his armies since Normandy. His plan was that the U.S. First Army, pushing up from the south, should link with Simpson’s Ninth, swinging south-east from Wesel. It seemed to some observers strange that, after Eisenhower had repeatedly asserted the primacy of Berlin as the focus of all Allied hopes and aspirations since June 1944, the Americans should now throw overwhelming force behind a limited operation 250 miles west of the capital. The Ruhr’s strategic and industrial importance stemmed from its production of raw steel rather than finished munitions. At this stage of the war, it was implausible that any steel leaving the presses could be converted into weapons in time to be employed by the Wehrmacht. Russell Weigley is among the fiercest American critics of Bradley’s decision to concentrate on the Ruhr, “whose strategic significance was . . . essentially nil.” Yet Bradley judged the capture of the remains of Army Group B, his adversary since Normandy, as the most substantial objective for his armies. In the light of subsequent events, he may have been right.

Some Allied units encountered stubborn local resistance. There was an unhappy episode on 30 March: as the U.S. 3rd Armored Division barrelled confidently eastwards, tanks from the SS Panzer Training School at Paderborn struck hard at the American column. A Tiger smashed into the jeep of the division’s commander, the much admired Maurice Rose. The general was trapped on the road. He reached down to his waist, apparently to unbuckle his pistol belt to surrender. A German shot him. It was fancifully suggested that Rose had been deliberately killed because he was Jewish, indeed a rabbi’s son. In truth, the general was merely a victim of the chance of battle.

In the days that followed, the Americans fought some fierce little battles with Germans seeking to escape capture, but nothing seriously impeded their advance. Whatever delays some spearheads suffered, overall American casualties were small, and armoured columns ate up the miles eastwards. In the first days of April, Bradley committed eighteen American divisions to tighten the Ruhr noose on 317,000 men, the ruins of Army Group B. As the Americans closed in, dogged German resistance persisted. Ridgway dispatched one of his officers to Model’s headquarters under a flag of truce, proposing surrender. Model declined, declaring that his oath to the Führer required him to fight to the end. Ridgway told the German colonel who brought this message to his CP that he was free to return to his own lines. The colonel responded prudently that he would prefer to become a prisoner of war. Lieutenant Rolf-Helmut Schröder, a staff officer at Model’s HQ, found himself carrying orders to corps commanders for renewed attacks. One general said furiously: “This is all nonsense—it’s crazy!” Schröder shrugged apologetically: “I don’t make the plans—I just bring them from Army headquarters.” The other corps commander seized the operation orders which the young officer brought and tossed them into the wastepaper basket.

When the Germans in the Ruhr pocket finally abandoned the struggle on 18 April, the principal challenge for the Americans was to marshal their captives and put them into PoW cages. Flying in a B-26 high above the battlefield on 25 April, Lieutenant Robert Burger saw below him “what looked like a dark plowed field . . . To my disbelief, it proved to be acres of massed humanity. There must have been hundreds of thousands of German PoWs packed together closer than a herd of cows. How they were fed or kept clean, I will never know. This was probably the largest audience I will ever have—as we flew over, all those captives’ eyes looked up. I don’t doubt some of them were ones that formerly shot at us.”

Since advancing out of the Remagen bridgehead, it had taken a month to complete the Ruhr envelopment. Ninth Army suffered around 2,500 casualties of all kinds, and First Army some three times that number. Model, Army Group B’s commander, walked away into a forest and shot himself on 21 April.

BECAUSE DWIGHT EISENHOWER presented a benign face to the world, even his commanders sometimes underestimated the pressures upon him, the relentless tensions under which he laboured. In mid-March, some of his staff feared that he was close to a nervous breakdown, a condition only slightly ameliorated by a forty-eight-hour break in the South of France. When Ike’s son John arrived in Europe, assigned as an infantry platoon leader, Bradley insisted that the boy should instead be given a staff job. The previous autumn, the son of General “Sandy” Patch had been killed in action while serving with his father’s own U.S. Seventh Army. The blow devastated Patch, and for some time rendered him all but unfit for his duties. Eisenhower’s subordinates were desperate to ensure that no such emotional burden was laid upon the Supreme Commander. To John Eisenhower’s deep embarrassment, he was kept out of combat. His father now faced decisions as important as any since Normandy.

Montgomery abruptly informed SHAEF on 27 March that he intended to drive for the Elbe, with the British Second Army’s left wing touching Hamburg and the American Ninth Army’s right brushing Magdeburg: “My headquarters will move to Wesel–Münster–Wiedenbrück–Herford–Hanover—thence by autobahn to Berlin, I hope.” This signal infuriated Eisenhower. Next day in his headquarters at Rheims, he received a message from Marshall in Washington warning of the importance of clarifying demarcation lines with the Russians, to avoid any danger of an embarrassing, perhaps dangerous collision when the Eastern and Western allies met. The two communications forced upon Eisenhower some immediate decisions. He dealt first with the British field-marshal. Beyond arrogating to himself the Supreme Commander’s authority to make strategic choices, Montgomery’s assumption that the U.S. Ninth Army would remain under his command seemed intolerable. Eisenhower signalled 21st Army Group that, with the Rhine crossing operation complete, Ninth Army would revert to 12th Army Group’s command on 2 April. Omar Bradley thus became master of 1.3 million men in four armies. Eisenhower decreed that Bradley’s forces should address the main axis of advance eastwards. The 21st Army Group would fulfil a subsidiary role, covering the Americans’ left flank, while Devers’s 6th Army Group performed the same function on the right. It is unlikely that it cost the Supreme Commander much pain to give orders that would distress Montgomery.

Eisenhower’s next action roused the fury of Churchill and has provoked controversy for sixty years. Without further reference to his political and military superiors, on his own initiative he sent a personal message to Stalin stating that his armies had no intention of advancing to Berlin. SHAEF hoped, he said, that the Anglo-Americans would meet the Russians on an axis Erfurt–Leipzig–Dresden—which meant around the Elbe, at least forty miles west of Berlin. He copied his cable to the Combined Chiefs of Staff.

Churchill personally telephoned Eisenhower on 29 March to express his dismay that a field commander should have communicated so vital a decision direct to Stalin, without prior reference to the Anglo-American leadership. The British prime minister asserted his strong belief in the importance of Berlin as the final destination of the Anglo-American armies. Yet the American Supreme Commander no longer felt obliged to display the deference to the British prime minister which had seemed appropriate a year or two earlier. Churchill was visibly weary and audibly testy. Eisenhower was well aware that the wishes of the British government no longer exercised decisive influence where it mattered—in Washington. “The PM is increasingly vexatious,” Eisenhower told Bradley. “He imagines himself to be a military tactician.” Churchill said to Brooke: “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.”

One line in Eisenhower’s signal to the combined Chiefs of Staff has remained the focus of fierce debate since 1945. He asserted blandly that “Berlin has lost much of its former military importance.” He made plain that he had no intention of assaulting Germany’s capital, unless he was instructed to do so. “I am the first to admit that a war is waged in pursuance of political aims,” he wrote on 7 April, “and if the chiefs of staff should decide that the Allied effort to take Berlin outweighs purely military considerations, I would cheerfully readjust my plans and my thinking so as to carry out such an operation.” No such decision was forthcoming. Marshall endorsed Eisenhower’s decision, overriding the remonstrations of the British. The dying Roosevelt did not intervene.

Back in November 1943, the president had asserted that “there would definitely be a race for Berlin. We may have to put United States divisions into Berlin as soon as possible.” The president sketched a plan for the post-war occupation of Germany, in which the capital stood in the American zone. By April 1945, Roosevelt’s 1943 Berlin vision had evaporated. This was a reflection of the president’s unwillingness to intervene in issues of military strategy, save on the largest questions; his failing health; circumstances on the German battlefield which had been quite unforeseeable sixteen months earlier, with the Russians further forward than anyone had envisioned; the reluctance of the U.S. Chiefs of Staff to make military decisions for political purposes; and the desire of the U.S. State Department to conciliate Moscow.

At the time of Eisenhower’s exchanges with London and Washington, however, Bradley had no more knowledge than Montgomery of Eisenhower’s decision—and it was overwhelmingly a personal one—to forswear any attempt to reach Hitler’s capital. On 3 April, 12th Army Group’s commander was still telling his own generals that for the last big advance of the war Ninth Army would head for Berlin, while First Army struck south-east for Leipzig. On 4 April, Simpson was ordered to “exploit any opportunity for seizing a bridgehead over the Elbe and be prepared to continue to advance on Berlin or to the north-east.” As late as 8 April, Eisenhower visited Major-General Alexander Bolling, commanding the 84th Division in Hanover, and asked him where he was headed next. “General . . . We have a clear go to Berlin and nothing can stop us,” responded Bolling. “Keep going,” said Eisenhower encouragingly, putting a hand on Bolling’s shoulder. “I wish you all the luck in the world and don’t let anybody stop you.” It seems extravagant to interpret this with hindsight, as Bolling did at the time, as a tactical mandate to drive for Hitler’s capital; rather, these were simply a commander’s loose words of encouragement to a junior subordinate. The conversation reflects the somewhat insouciant manner in which Eisenhower seemed to his generals to address the Berlin issue, together with his familiar imprecision of military purpose.

More than one major historian of the campaign has voiced the suspicion that, if American rather than British troops had occupied the Allied left flank, natural focus of a push for Berlin, Eisenhower would have unleashed them towards Hitler’s capital. As it was, so deep had become his loathing of Montgomery, so determined was he to frustrate the field-marshal’s “efforts to make sure that the Americans—and me in particular—got no credit” for the campaign, that he set his face against any course that would enable Montgomery to lead a triumphal march on Berlin. Stephen Ambrose, the Supreme Commander’s biographer, has suggested that if Bradley had commanded in the north “Eisenhower might well have sent him to Berlin.” Yet it seems implausible to suppose that Eisenhower’s last big decision of the war was founded upon personal animosity, real though this was. He was still much troubled about the possibility that the enemy would make a last stand in south Germany, at the mythical “Alpine Redoubt” which preoccupied SHAEF intelligence.

There was a much more substantial issue. If the Germans defended Berlin with the desperation they had displayed in other last-ditch actions, Allied casualties would be enormous. When Eisenhower asked Bradley for his estimate of American losses in a drive for Berlin, 12th Army Group’s commander suggested a figure of 100,000. This estimate does not seem unrealistic—it amounts to barely one-third of the casualties actually sustained by the Russians. It is true that in early April the Americans overestimated Germany’s residual capacity to sustain the campaign. Yet it is striking that U.S. casualties in April 1945 declined only slightly against those of February, as the Germans maintained disorganized but often fanatical resistance. It is plausible that Germany’s soldiers would have resisted an Anglo-American assault on Berlin much less vigorously than the Soviet one. But it would have been rash for Eisenhower to make any such assumption while Hitler lived, or indeed for history to do so.

When Russian forces were already within thirty miles of the city, while the nearest Americans were still four times that distance away, wherein lay the virtue of a commitment to conclude the Western allied campaign with a bloodbath? Berlin stood more than a hundred miles inside the designated, unalterable Soviet occupation zone of Germany. What would Eisenhower have said to the mother or husband of an American or British soldier killed in a battle for Hitler’s capital, which at best would have yielded only a symbolic triumph for the Western allies? Was any symbol worth tens of thousands of American and British lives? “I decided,” he wrote in his post-war memoirs, “that [Berlin] was not the most logical nor the most desirable objective for the forces of Western Allies.”

Eisenhower’s decision provoked the wrath of his subordinate commanders at the time, and the censure of posterity informed by the Cold War. Robert E. Murphy, the influential American diplomat acting as political adviser to Eisenhower and the German Control Commission, expressed his dismay in a letter to Washington on 14 April. “Apparently,” Murphy wrote, “there is on the part of some of our officers no particular eagerness to occupy Berlin first . . . One thing seems to be that what is left of Berlin may be tenaciously defended house by house, brick by brick. I have suggested the modest opinion that there should be a certain political advantage in the capture of Berlin, even though the military advantage may be insignificant.” To put the matter bluntly—which, surprisingly, none of the Anglo-Americans engaged in this debate did at the time—somebody had to assume responsibility for capturing or killing Adolf Hitler, as well as securing his capital. Militarily, the fate of the Führer was merely incidental to the defeat of Germany, but he could hardly be permitted to depart into retirement in Buenos Aires. Once again, it was Stalin alone who knew exactly what he wanted—Hitler’s capture alive, for the greatest of all show trials.

There is no doubt that the Anglo-Americans could have reached the Ber-lin area swiftly, whatever uncertainties persist about what might have happened once they had done so. Eisenhower’s decision seemed to his critics to mark the nadir of an advance dominated by cautious and unimaginative strategic leadership since he had assumed command of the Allied ground forces on 1 September 1944. For the Americans and British, the new policy ensured an anticlimactic end to the greatest military campaign in the history of the world. The occupation of Bremen and Hamburg, Munich and Stuttgart scarcely offered the peerless drama of a march through the streets of Hitler’s conquered capital.

Churchill’s anger that Berlin was to be forsaken as a prize reflected the deeper grief which haunted the last months of his war, that Hitler’s dominance of eastern Europe was now to be supplanted by that of Stalin. Yet the Washington administration refused to share the British prime minister’s fear of the Russians. Staff-Sergeant Henry Kissinger said, half a century later:

If you look at the world geopolitically, the mistakes were avoidable. But if you look at them as Americans did in 1945, when they were trying to escape history, they were understandable. America was determined not to do what other nations had always done after winning wars—grab as much as they could. There was no excuse for the way Roosevelt treated Churchill. FDR was naive. But one must make allowances for the spirit of the time. If Roosevelt had resisted Soviet demands, a big slice of the U.S. intellectual community would have accused him of provoking Stalin.

If the Allies had identified seizure of Berlin and Anglo-American liberation of large tracts of eastern Europe as vital war aims early in 1944, it would have been necessary for the U.S. and British governments to order Eisenhower to pursue his advance across north-west Europe in a wholly different spirit, with vastly greater urgency. Washington and London would have needed to assert a political agenda for the last months of the conflict. Instead, from beginning to end, the SHAEF Supreme Commander’s orders were explicitly military in character, directed towards the destruction of the Nazi regime. Stalin’s suspicion, indeed paranoia, about American intentions was prompted by disbelief that any great nation could conduct a war without political ambitions, when those of the Soviet Union now dominated its military strategy.

Yet even before Roosevelt’s health failed, America’s conduct of the war was overwhelmingly determined by her Chiefs of Staff, military men. It was impossible, in the last weeks of war, abruptly to invite the army commanders in the field to adopt different priorities. And who in Washington was going to do this, in the last weeks of a dying president, or the first days of a novice one? No military action undertaken by the Anglo-Americans in the spring of 1945 could have undone the decisions of the Teheran and Yalta conferences about the Soviet occupation zone in Germany, to which Churchill had acceded. No belated Anglo-American military success could snatch the east European nations from communist tyranny, because the Russians already occupied them. It is true that geographical limits had not been agreed at Yalta for Allied military operations, because no one could guess in February where the armies’ respective advances might end. This was why Eisenhower felt obliged to signal Stalin at the end of March about his intentions. But wherein lay the purpose of losing American and British lives to gain territory destined to become the responsibility of the Red Army? Millions of Germans were fleeing in terror from the Russians, and praying to be occupied by the Western allies. This was, however, a problem for the vanquished, rather than for the victors.

The Allies had tacitly, and in considerable degree explicitly, conceded Stalin’s claims to a blood price, in recognition of Russia’s sacrifice. Even in the last year of war, the Red Army had accepted casualties many times those of the Americans and British, to complete the destruction of the Third Reich. If the Western allies had dashed for Berlin, the Russians would unquestionably have pre-empted them. Stalin would never have stood by while the Anglo-Americans occupied Hitler’s capital. Zhukov and Konev had held their line on the Oder since the end of January, when the Americans were still struggling above the Roer. If the Americans and British had made a rush for Berlin, exactly the kind of messy, perhaps politically disastrous collision Marshall feared could have taken place between the Russians and Anglo-Americans. Eisenhower’s last major decision of the campaign lacked any Pattonesque “lust for glory.” But it was surely the correct one. No Western military action in April 1945 would have changed the post-war settlement. The manner in which Eisenhower allowed the momentous decision to trickle down among his commanders, almost as an afterthought, scarcely suggested the behaviour of a man who was making an important considered judgement, conscious of history’s eyes upon him. Yet Eisenhower’s forbearance about Berlin highlighted his political common sense, together with his rare gift for bearing responsibility, which is too readily taken for granted in a man who had risen from the rank of colonel to five-star general in less than three years.

Staff-Sergeant Henry Kissinger observed: “America doesn’t produce great generals. Eisenhower was the manager of an alliance. If Rommel had commanded the Allied armies, he might have got to Berlin in one go. But what did we have to gain by haste?” It is impossible to share the view of Cornelius Ryan and others that Eisenhower made an historic blunder in April 1945 by declining to drive for Berlin. The die was cast. Churchill’s anguish about the plight of eastern Europe caused him to clutch at unrealistic hopes in April 1945. Even if the British prime minister possessed an historic vision lacking at the summits of U.S. power in those days, it was Churchill and not Eisenhower who displayed naivety about the options open to the Western allied forces to frustrate Soviet imperialism in arms, unless they were prepared to go to war with Stalin.

Among Eisenhower’s last big operational decisions of the campaign, one was indeed political. Montgomery was ordered to abandon his earlier task of covering the American left flank and to strike fast for the Baltic coast at Lübeck, to “seal off the Danish peninsula.” There were real fears that the Soviets might aspire to seize Denmark. Simpson’s U.S. Ninth Army would march east towards the Elbe river. The remainder of the American armies would swing south, to take southern Germany and address Hitler’s Alpine Redoubt, where large enemy forces including many SS fanatics were reported to be gathering. The Alpine Redoubt was, of course, a myth, and it was bizarre in the extreme that SHAEF intelligence embraced it. But it is impossible to argue that the Allied turn southwards made any significant adverse impact upon the last days of the campaign, as the remains of the German Army crumbled in their path. The U.S. Seventh Army drove south on a route that finally took it to Munich and the Brenner Pass. Patton’s Third Army advanced in a great sweep which embraced Chemnitz, western Czechoslovakia and northern Austria. Hodges’s First Army attacked south of the Harz Mountains, towards Halle and Leipzig, while Simpson’s Ninth took an easterly line through Brunswick and Magdeburg which led, at last, to the historic junction with the Russians.

DRIVING TO THE ELBE

LATE ON THE afternoon of 11 April, the 67th Armored Regiment became the first American unit to reach the Elbe, after travelling almost sixty miles in a single day. They found themselves shooting their way through the streets of Schönebeck, south-east of Magdeburg, while other elements of 2nd Armored Division disposed of desultory resistance in the western suburbs of that city. Within a few hours, the Americans had thrown a bridge across the river and established forces on the eastern bank. The colonel of one American regiment, oblivious of Eisenhower’s intentions, told his men exultantly: “You are on your way to Berlin.” Many senior officers still shared this delusion, and the Supreme Commander seemed in no hurry to disabuse them. Only on 12 April did he inform Patton of his decision that most of the Allied armies would stop at the Elbe, unless there were local tactical reasons to advance a little further. Third Army would halt on a north–south line parallel with the river in western Czechoslovakia and northern Austria.

Yet although the Americans quickly secured several Elbe crossing points, incredibly the Germans continued to counter-attack. As late as 14 April, Ninth Army felt obliged to pull back from one of its bridgeheads under fierce enemy pressure, after taking more than 300 casualties. Eisenhower repeatedly checked the great joy-ride of Patton’s Third Army to ensure that, to the very end, his forces maintained a more or less straight frontage. In the south, the Germans’ Army Group G simply disintegrated in the face of Devers’s 6th Army Group.

“There was little that was cheerful or exhilarating about the last stages of the war,” wrote Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder at SHAEF. The final Anglo-American drive across Germany offered few moments of glory, and many foolish little battles which wasted men’s lives even more pitiably than all war wastes lives. For instance, as tanks of the U.S. 12th Armored Division entered the little town of Boxberg on 12 April, at first they encountered only a few snipers. When the column was halfway down the main street, however, enemy troops armed with fausts and small arms began to fire upon them from upper storeys. This was a battalion of officer cadets who were “young, tough and smart,” Colonel Richard Gordon reported. The Americans hastily withdrew. “Then we converged the fire of our tanks, artillery and infantry on the town, and blasted it down,” said Gordon.

A routine was established across the breadth of the American and British fronts. A tank column clattered across the countryside until it approached a town or village. Then vehicles halted, and officers peered forward through their binoculars. Any sign of movement provoked a radio call: “Put one through the window.” A brisk succession of tank or howitzer shells smashed into the buildings, throwing up dust and smoke. Then the liberators pushed on, unless the town was unfortunate enough to be defended by SS or Hitler Jugend, in which case absolute devastation followed. Many communities pleaded with combatants of both armies to be spared from destruction. Allied officers often enlisted the services of local burgomasters to telephone ahead to the next village on the road, warning its people to put out white flags or face the consequences. Only Nazi fanatics remained heedless and allowed their own people to pay the price.

“The leading vehicle got knocked out sooner or later, and nobody enjoyed the ‘honour’ of leading the regiment,” Lieutenant-Colonel Tony Leakey of the British 5th Royal Tanks wrote wearily. Once, all four tanks of his point troop were knocked out approaching a German strongpoint. Their lieutenant rallied the men who bailed out of the stricken Shermans, and they stormed the enemy position with personal weapons. There was much resentment in the unit that no one received a “gong” for this notable display of determination. As Leakey’s tanks approached Bremen, “it was the same drill—keep going on the one road until the leading vehicle brewed up. Once, it was a scout car of recce troop, the crew killed, a young officer who’d joined three months before.” The road was mined, and the enemy had taken up positions on both sides: “The infantry got a bloody nose, lost a number of men and had to withdraw. The leading tank hit a mine and promptly brewed up. The crew was killed. At this stage of the war, nobody was very keen to earn medals.”

For men who had survived years of battle, it seemed especially cruel to meet death now. Lieutenant Kingsley Field’s entire troop of the King’s Own was destroyed by a single German tank in the space of a few minutes near Gock. “It seemed a stupid time to die,” wrote Flight-Lieutenant Richard Hough, an RAF Typhoon pilot. OKH in Berlin signalled to all army groups on 18 April: “On the Elbe front a weakish assault troop of ours without effort brought in 40 American prisoners. The Americans surrendered for the reason that they had no idea of letting themselves be shot dead so near the end of the war. This fact is to be notified to the troops . . . German actions must prove to [the Americans] that their campaign is no pleasure trip through Germany.”

In that final phase on the Western Front, the confrontation between reasonable men who aspired to behave in a reasonable way and unreasonable, often hysterical men and children willing to embrace death became more painful than ever. In the history of the Second World War, much has been written about the “fanatical” performance of the Japanese soldier. Yet Japan surrendered without fighting a battle for its homeland. It was Germans who fought to the last in the rubble of their own towns and villages, some of Hitler’s soldiers who displayed a fanaticism matching and perhaps surpassing that of the armies of Nippon. Kesselring sent a withering signal to LXXXII Corps on 18 April, alleging that its resistance around Nuremberg had been crippled by “a deficiency of leadership, initiative and resource, for which responsibility must be brought home to individuals.” This was a familiar Nazi figure of speech for selecting scapegoats for military failure to be shot.

Among the Allied armies, even in these days of victory, no man could assure himself of safety. Private Ralph Gordon of First Army’s 18th Infantry was vastly relieved that after the Hürtgen Forest nightmare he and his friend Pete were posted from a rifle company to the regimental supply column. On 31 March, Pete took forward a jeep-load of ammunition without troubling to put on his helmet. He was hit in the head by shrapnel and died of wounds a fortnight later. Gordon “felt like I could kill every Jerry left in the country.” Andy, a close friend of both men, appeased his rage by evicting the German occupants from the houses around their positions, telling them to sleep in the fields. A fortnight later, Gordon saw his old rifle company advancing in column up the road into the town of Hochstedt, among them an old buddy named Ben. “Take it easy, kid,” his friend called after him. C Company met Germans, and Ben was fatally hit in the chest. It was just three weeks before the end. In Lieutenant Howard Randall’s battalion of the 417th Infantry, a newly arrived lieutenant refused to risk his neck by going on patrol in the last days. This officer was transferred to Civil Affairs. Another lieutenant sought to diminish the risks of reconnaissance by placing German civilians in front of his own riflemen as they approached built-up areas.

As the advancing Allies entered German towns and villages thus far untouched by war, some sensitive men felt uncomfortable about their intrusion upon communities which looked close kin to their own, occupied by people who seemed not unlike those among whom they lived and worked back home. A squeamish Civil Affairs officer with the U.S. 30th Division complained in a report:

Consideration was not given to sick and elderly people, and mothers with very young children. The attitude of higher command seemed to be that these people . . . should be made to feel the full significance of war and what their troops had done to other people. There were many complaints as to looting by troops, and a number of rape cases . . . The taking of personal belongings was rampant. The turning-in of arms, cameras etc was conducted, in my opinion, in a thoroughly disorganized and disgraceful manner.

A German woman handed Corporal Werner Kleeman the dogtags of a GI she sought to report for raping her. Kleeman threw them away: “I didn’t want to get the boy into trouble.”

As men of the British 7th Somersets ran into a farmyard in the face of desultory German fire, weapons cocked and grenades in hand, a company sergeant-major kicked open a door and found himself confronted by some forty small German children, together with two teachers. They were all standing at attention, hands held high, staring fixedly ahead without even a tear on their frozen faces. After the first shock, the British soldiers and the German children gazed silently at each other for a few seconds, then the conquerors moved on. Lieutenant-Colonel Ferdinand Chesarek of the 28th Field Artillery drove up to an airfield where Germans were running briskly from plane to plane, throwing thermite bombs into the cockpits. “Christ almighty, what confusion—all those wagons, guns, troops, trucks and everything else. All these armed Germans mixed up with us. Everything was so crazy.” One night a British sentry woke Captain Andrew Wilson of the Buffs to report the capture of a prisoner who had stumbled into their tank leaguer. A torch beam revealed a German sergeant-major, who protested vehemently that he possessed a leave pass to proceed home and could not legitimately be detained.

A contemporary British report identified three causes for sluggish forward movement: enemy resistance; difficulty of supply and repair; and “the desire of soldiers to enjoy ‘the fruits of victory.’ ” Bing, one of 13 Para’s Alsatian dogs which had jumped at the Rhine in special harnesses, disappeared one morning and was found hopelessly drunk in a German wine cellar. Loot had become the chief preoccupation of some men. “Did he have a Luger? Did he have a Luger?” a captain in Private Charles Felix’s battalion demanded, almost jumping up and down with excitement, when he heard that his men had captured a German officer.

Lieutenant Howard Randall’s company commander invited him to ride into the neighbouring town, which they found deathly quiet, the house windows draped in white flags. Outside the timbered town hall, they left one man to guard the jeep while the other four Americans wandered inside, pistols drawn, and made their way to the mayor’s office. They met two white-haired men and an elderly woman, who pointed nervously to an immense heap of cameras, binoculars and weapons, obviously collected from the local population. The Americans kept pistols pointed at the Germans, who maintained an icy composure, while with their spare hands they delved into the hoard. “The captain suddenly spotted a handsome Leica camera and made a dive for it . . . Then I saw a nice blue-black pistol . . . I swooped down and grabbed it, and then some beautiful ceremonial knives. I grabbed them all and stuffed them hurriedly into my jacket pockets. The situation had become ludicrous. The three unruffled Germans never said a word, while the four of us were scrambling all over the floor.” After the Americans left, it was a week before the town was formally occupied. When they returned, they found that SS men had hanged the mayor for displaying white flags.

A frightened German woman approached the British lines with a pretty girl and said to an officer: “Please do not let your men rape my daughter.” Dr. David Tibbs drew himself up in the approved stance of an affronted English gentleman and said stiffly: “Madam, these are British soldiers.” Yet while nothing remotely resembling the Russian orgy took place on the Western Front, many Allied soldiers seized the opportunities granted to them for easy sexual intercourse, whether through rape or some marginally less brutal arrangement. During street fighting in Bremen, a young officer of the KOSB lost two men of his platoon. He found them reclining comfortably on bunks in a shelter by the railway station teeming with German civilians: “As though this was not enough, each had lying beside him his rifle . . . and a German fräulein. It was not clear whether fear or bribery with ration chocolate or cigarettes had induced these girls to submit to the Jocks.”

“The Germans were very hungry. The girls would get at my riflemen for a tin of sardines,” observed Major Bill Deedes. An officer of 52nd (Lowland) Division was shocked to come upon two German women “being shagged in relays by American soldiers.” A post-war U.S. Army report on military discipline concluded that in north-west Europe: “Rape became a large problem . . . A considerable percentage of offences is directly attributable to faulty unit leadership . . . [Men’s orientation for war] included propaganda of hatred towards the Germans. This made it easy for the soldier to justify looting, assault, burglary, robbery and even rape. The theory was that the fighting soldier must hate the enemy . . . Its application complicated the problem of military justice.” It seems an awkward reflection on the administration of justice in 1944–45 that more than 40 per cent of all death sentences passed in the ETO were imposed upon African-American soldiers, though these constituted a tiny proportion of U.S. Army strength.

Sergeant Colin McInnes gazed in awe at the shambles to which occupying troops had reduced a German house. “We were struck at once by the tremendous physical energy of the looters,” he wrote.

Furniture was upended and flung about in heaps in a way that made movement from room to room as difficult as rock-climbing. Anything of glass was smashed, walls had their paper torn from them or were splashed with ink, wood was gouged out of cupboards and tables, upholstery had been sliced open on the seats and arms of chairs and sofas, and curtains were ripped to tatters. It seemed that all this expressed a hatred of organized life, and a yearning for primitive chaos on as large a scale as possible.

A British war correspondent was bemused one morning to hear a ferocious din emerging from a house. He entered, and beheld a cluster of men manically smashing a grand piano with axes.

In “Red” Thompson’s platoon of the U.S. 346th Infantry, the last fatality of the war was caused by a mortar bomb which fell on the head of their most dedicated looter, a man who emptied the drawers of every house he entered. Some men refused to loot at all, not on moral grounds, but constrained by fear of German booby traps. A few men plundered systematically, in planned pursuit of objects of value. Fortunes were made in Germany in 1945, by men sufficiently cool and acquisitive to choose their plunder judiciously, and with the rank or transport facilities to carry it away. Some British Special Air Service groups, profiting from the latitude they were granted about their own movements, devoted the last days of the war to systematic safe-blowing. Most soldiers, however, merely grabbed any artefact to hand, in the manner of warriors since time immemorial. They groped for tangible compensation for having risked their lives, and cherished the licence granted by dispensation from the customary laws of property. The Anglo-Americans were a great deal less brutal than the Russians, but they seized enemy property with almost equal abandon.

Lieutenant Tom Flanagan of the British 4th KOSB was appalled to see one of his men snatch a blanket from an old woman, observing: “You’ll not be wanting that, missus.” The man then grabbed an eiderdown and a watch. The young platoon commander sought to intervene, but his sergeant said firmly: “You’ll be wanted at company headquarters, sir. I’ll deal with this.” Flanagan wrote: “I left . . . trying hard not to believe what I had just witnessed. Those men were behaving as I had always imagined German soldiers to behave, not like the image I held of ‘Tommy Atkins’ who was kind, tolerant, easily put upon, considerate to old folk and especially good with children. This conflict of fact and imagery confused me. My innocence had taken another blow.”

The French Army, and especially its colonial troops, behaved with savage indiscipline in Germany, in some places perpetrating excesses on an almost Soviet scale. The French were indulged in some degree, because their thirst for vengeance against the Germans seemed understandable. General de Gaulle had fiercely insisted upon the French right to enter Germany in arms, and Churchill persuaded Stalin to accede to de Gaulle’s demands for a designated occupation zone. French troops on the ground played out the role of victors with a ruthlessness which dismayed some of their allies.

The Americans and British behaved better than many victorious armies in history, but less well than the official record suggests. If rape was far less widespread than in the east, it was certainly not unknown. Looting was almost universal, mitigated only by spasms of bourgeois conscience on the part of the thieves. “Pitiable middle-aged lady in the house,” wrote Corporal Stan Proctor of 43rd (Wessex) Division in his diary for 26 April, describing his billet, “and we found a young man hiding in what was left of the loft. It was her son, a deserter from a Hitler Youth unit. We had to hand him over to our police. He was a good-looking and quiet young chap. There was a photo of him in his Hitler Youth uniform which I took with me as a reminder of what somebody like Hitler can do to people. We also took two nice wireless sets from the house. I suppose we looked on them as spoils of war, but the lady was upset. I was ashamed of what we did.” In 21st Army Group throughout the campaign, just seventy-two men faced disciplinary charges for looting, against 2,792 charged with being improperly dressed.

Even before they reached the concentration camps, men of the liberating armies were disgusted by their encounters with foreign prisoners of the Nazis, human skeletons scavenging across the countryside of Germany. “The countryfolk and their houses and farms are well cared for,” wrote a British officer. “Only their slaves look miserably underfed and clothed.” An escaped Canadian pilot approached 2nd Fife & Forfar Yeomanry one day, carrying a slave labourer he had met, who was dressed in two sacks and so weak that he could only mutter: “Polski.” British medics could not get food into him. The man lay moaning on a stretcher until he was placed in an ambulance. This was already occupied by a captured German officer who had lost a foot. The German spat upon the Pole. The British dumped the German in a ditch.

Outside the town of Büdingen near Frankfurt, a handful of SS mounted a last-ditch resistance, quickly suppressed by the Americans. The local Nazi officials fled. The grandfather of Helmut Lott, a teenage evacuee living in the town, returned home bearing a Party official’s brown tunic and breeches as mementoes. His grandmother took one look and threw the uniform on the fire, demanding of her husband: “Are you crazy?” There was shelling during the night, which caused the fearful inhabitants to spend the night in their cellars. Next morning, however, a large crowd turned out on the streets to greet their occupiers respectfully. “Everybody was wearing their Sunday best, to demonstrate the whiteness of their consciences,” observed Lott drily. The first vehicle that appeared in the main street, however, was not a tank but a red sports car full of laughing GIs. The people of Büdingen found this ridiculous, and faintly humiliating. “We thought: what is this?” said Lott. “These people are supposed to be occupying us, but they look as if they are on an excursion to the seaside.”

In their turn, the Allies were bewildered by German behaviour. The whole nation seemed in denial of any responsibility for the war, and for the crimes of the Nazis. “The attitude of civilians was really rather typical of the master race,” observed a report by the 2nd Battalion, Warwickshire Regiment. “They seemed to expect us to treat them in the politest possible manner. You would think from their behaviour that they had won this war. They only started to show any respect at all when we made it clear that we meant business.” Some Americans were likewise bewildered to find that the Germans in towns they seized, while not hostile, were resentful of Allied interference in their normal lives. Even while firing continued, some enemy civilians voiced protests. “It sure makes you feel silly,” observed Lieutenant Darrigo of Novotan Heights, Connecticut, “crouching or dashing around trying to get a shot at a sniper, while a civilian peddles by on his bike and a woman and child just tag along watching.”

Private Denis Christian of 6 Commando was bemused to be reprimanded by the owner of the house in which he was billeted for failing to clean the bath. His unit’s German interpreter subjected the British to a lecture about “how Germany had only lost the war because it lacked oil.” A teenage girl whom 13 Para met in Graven not only spoke good English, but assured them severely that the Wehrmacht would soon retake the area. The Führer would then punish the Allies for daring to invade the fatherland. The English soldiers respected the girl’s courage, but were horrified by the depth of Nazi indoctrination which the encounter revealed. The battalion’s colonel, Peter Luard, announced flatly that the battalion would take no SS prisoners. When two Waffen SS indeed fell into their hands, an officer simply took them behind a tank and shot them. “With hindsight, it seemed very shocking,” said Lieutenant Peter Downward. “Yet the SS were so truculent.”

“A woman of a house in which I was billeted entered the room, looked at the wreckage and burst into tears with the words ‘Es ist alles kaputt und es war so schön,’ ” Captain David Chudleigh reported to his division headquarters early in April, in disgust rather than sympathy.

Even after I had carefully explained to her what the war was all about, and that what she was suffering was little in comparison with what she and her kind had inflicted on the world for more than five years, the only reaction was a flood of tears. I do not believe her horizons were any broader for my efforts. A few minutes later this woman pointed out the body of a German soldier lying in the garden, and asked me to take it away and bury it, but not in her garden. Considering that she was a woman (of a sort), her indifference to the fate of one of her countrymen was astonishing. A long-term educational programme is obviously needed here.

Sergeant Robert Brookshire of the 609th Tank Destroyer Battalion was riding in a jeep flagged down by a tearful German woman waving a handkerchief. She was a teacher and told the soldiers desperately: “Some of my pupils, young boys, are up this hill in a cabin, armed with rifles, and have vowed that they will fire at Americans until they are killed. Will you please not shoot them, but come with me and try to convince them to surrender?” Between them, the German teacher and the American NCO induced the sheepish fourteen-year-olds to file out of the building without their weapons. Brookshire was always a reluctant killer. About the same time, he suddenly found himself confronted by six Germans. He froze, thinking his end had come. Then the Germans laid down their weapons. “Why didn’t you kill them?” asked a buddy. Brookshire said: “Because I somehow knew that if I did, I’d never see my young daughter again.”

As the U.S. 743rd Tank Battalion was mopping up near Lemgo, it came upon a German general outside a large house, at the head of 500 men, “lined up at attention, guns piled in one part of the courtyard, equipment piled neatly in another.” The American unit suffered its last fatal casualty of the war in the battle for Magdeburg on 17 April. A faust hit a Sherman turret, killing the gunner and wounding the commander and loader. It was fired by a German woman. Aschaffenburg earned a reputation as one of very few towns—Hameln was another—where local civilians fought energetically against Third Army. “There was some of the hardest fighting of the war in that town,” recorded an American officer. “Hitler had said that every man, woman and child should fight . . . this town was the only place where that was really carried out. Everybody fought the Americans.” In the ruins of Aschaffenburg, men of XV Corps found the bodies of boys of twelve and thirteen, who had chosen to die fighting for their Führer.

In Friesoythe on 12 April, it was reported that the commanding officer of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders of Canada had been shot in the back by a civilian. The Canadian divisional commander, Christopher Vokes, was already angered by other incidents in which civilians had fired upon his men. He ordered the entire town bulldozed in retribution. Only when this process had been completed was it learned that in reality the Argylls’ colonel had been killed by a German soldier with a Schmeisser.

The 21st Army Group faced spasms of hard fighting. Second Fife & Forfar Yeomanry fought one of hundreds of similar tiny actions on 5 April, at Glissen. Lieutenant Frank Fuller was leading the battalion, and as they approached the town could see little sign of enemy defences. “No washing,” his operator reported laconically over the radio. Then they spotted enemy infantry in ditches. The tanks pulled off the road, making way for the infantry to move forward. A faust hit Fuller’s tank. The young officer bailed out. He was promptly hit by machine-gun fire, as was his gunner. His shaken wireless-operator came on the air and announced that he was remaining in the turret. The rest of the crew were dead. After an hour of fighting, the surviving Germans raised their hands. They proved to be very young members of 12th SS Panzer, who were taken to the rear. The British always hated the Hitler Jugend Division. “Fanaticism is nasty,” said Captain “Dim” Robbins. “They were absolute sods—incredibly arrogant, even as prisoners,” in the words of Corporal Patrick Hennessy. On this occasion, however, a British officer observed bitterly that the young prisoners were “blubbering.” Their action had changed nothing, save to delay the advance an hour or so and to kill a young officer and three men. A comrade noticed Fuller’s body, “just recognizable,” lying in a ditch as he drove past. He remembered that the lieutenant was newly married.

Two days later, Major William Steel-Brownlie drove his tank round the corner of a German village at 30 m.p.h., to ram full-tilt a large chest-of-drawers which a German family was struggling to remove from a burning house. “Clothing and underwear were caught up and whirled round in the tracks.” His machine-gunner hosed a handful of German defenders fleeing the scene: “Was it cruel to batter retreating troops? There was always the thought that they might be reorganized and waiting for us next day or the day after, as well as thoughts about Frank Fuller and many like him. Not far away was another family rescuing furniture from their burning home, but in the circumstances one’s reaction was simply: so what?”

“Once we got into Germany, we could do anything, knock down anything,” said Captain David Fraser. “There were very few inhibitions. We were told: ‘If you need to burn a village—burn it.’ ” On 12 April, the British director of military intelligence reported on the mood of civilians in the path of the armies: “Germans are becoming increasingly bitter at bombing of targets of negligible military value, and caution us against appointment of Jewish burgomeisters which [they say] is a pyschological mistake and which militates against co-operation of German civilian population.”

As the advance gathered pace, at last for some men exhilaration overcame fear. Charles Farrell, a Scots Guards squadron commander, thought as he drove his Sherman across Germany of Christopher Marlowe’s line: “Is it not passing brave to be a king and ride in triumph through Persepolis?” At Rathau on the Aller, the CO of 5th Royal Tanks advanced on foot to take a cautious look into the town before his tanks moved in. He encountered one of his own officers, a huge Welshman named John Gwilliam who later captained his country’s rugby team, “carrying a small German soldier by the scruff of his neck, not unlike a cat with a mouse.” The colonel said: “Why not shoot him?” Gwilliam replied in his mighty Welsh voice: “Oh no, sir. Much too small.”

A British tank officer glimpsed some tiny figures beside a wood half a mile away, from which a German half-track had just emerged. He fired a few rounds of high explosive from his gun, then followed up with a long burst of Besa machine-gun fire. Trees caught fire. He saw survivors start to move towards the tanks, hands held high. “To my horror, they were civilians,” wrote William Steel-Brownlie, “followed by a horse and cart on which were piled all kinds of household goods. They were children, a boy and a girl, holding hands and running as hard as they could over the rough ploughed earth. They came right up to the tank, looked up at me, and the small boy said in English: ‘You have killed my father.’ There was nothing I could say.”

On 14 April, the Canadians at last secured the Dutch town of Arnhem, which had caused such bitter grief to the Allies six months earlier. But First Canadian Army was still making slow headway against the German opposition among the bleakly familiar rivers and canals of Holland. Montgomery, pushing north-eastwards to cut off Denmark from the Russians, was suddenly urged by SHAEF to hasten. On 8 April, the British XII Corps got into a fight around Lüneburg which persisted for four days. Ritchie’s men finally reached the Elbe on 19 April, and Hamburg only on the 23rd. They gazed in awe at the vast port city, reduced to rubble by Allied bombing. After a series of bitter actions, XXX Corps finally secured Bremen on the 26th. Eisenhower offered no congratulations to 21st Army Group. He believed, surely rightly, that the British did not try very hard in this last phase of the campaign. “In Germany it was a swan—a slow swan,” said Lieutenant Roy Dixon. “Nobody wanted to get killed at the last minute, so nobody wanted to take any unnecessary risks.” Bill Deedes said: “War is a very fatiguing experience. It works relentlessly upon the nervous system. By the end, we were all incredibly tired. In Hanover, I found that I no longer had the energy to discipline my soldiers for getting drunk.”

On the evening of 14 April, the British approached the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. Guards hung out white sheets from their towers in surrender. Belsen’s prisoners saw, and rejoiced as they watched the night sky lit by artillery fire. Viktor Mamontov, the eighteen-year-old from Leningrad who had survived two years in some of the most terrible camps in Germany, believed himself to be dying. He was now among those who stumbled out of the barracks in ecstasy. The guards on the watchtowers opened fire on the prisoners. Mamontov fell, hit in the leg. When he saw the Germans fire again and again upon wounded men who moved, he lay motionless. He remained where he had been hit hour after hour: “Until the very last moment, I thought I would die.” At last next morning the British tanks came. For hours, the prisoners had to tend each other, until medical teams arrived. Those who could still walk smashed open the food store. Mamontov contracted typhus, and spent the next six months in hospital. He lost all his hair, and weighed just eighty-seven pounds. He was disgusted that the British executed only seven of Belsen’s German staff.

America’s legendary broadcaster Ed Murrow contrasted the healthy, well-fed Germans he saw ploughing the nearby fields with the human skeletons of Buchenwald liberated by the U.S. Third Army. He described the heaped corpses, the paralysis of the near-dead. “I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it,” said the great reporter. “For most of it I have no words.” R. W. Thompson of the Sunday Times wrote from Belsen: “When you gaze upon the human body distorted beyond recognition, and come to the point where there is literally no difference between the living and the dead, you are beyond shocking because you are beyond normal standards.” At Dachau, in an outburst of spontaneous rage the American liberators summarily executed twenty-one guards, including seventeen SS.

The British buried 23,000 bodies on the site of Belsen, and evacuated a further 28,900 people, of whom 2,006 were already dead. One of the doctors who went to the camp in British uniform was by birth a German Jew. This man, Dr. A. R. Horwell, wrote to his wife: “The phrase ‘that’s what we are fighting for’ never had so deep meaning for me . . .” Horwell watched each mass grave being filled in, and a sign placed on it “Grave No. 8 1000 bodies. 30 April 1945.” A few days later, in a British officers’ mess, he was deeply moved to find himself among a group “where there is no sign of discrimination, and where the Jewish padres were the most honoured guests. It made me realise it again: it was worthwhile to be in this war, it is an honour and distinction to wear this uniform.” His wife had expressed her fears for his safety among the German people. He responded: “darling love, I must restrain myself, for fear to become too emotional. I can’t help it, darling; it is a great thing to be back here after all these years—and after all these immense sufferings inflicted upon us and our people, to be here with the victorious army . . . I am very happy tonight, and sad at the same time. Happy, because I have survived, one of the few to see this day; and sad, because I am of the few—so few.” “At Belsen, I felt a curious elation,” said Dr. David Tibbs. “Looking at all these terrible things, I thought: ‘Here is the justification for this war, for all the lives we have lost, for everything we’ve been through.’ ”

At 1640 on the afternoon of 25 April, a reconnaissance group of the U.S. 69th Division met men of the Soviet 58th Guards Division at Torgau on the Elbe. The scenes of warm greetings between allies, filmed by a host of cameramen and screened in cinemas across the Western world, masked a much harsher reality. “Take no initiative in organizing friendly meetings,” a stern order from the Soviet front commanders warned all units. “Where meetings do take place, behave in a friendly way, but inform commanders immediately, and give no information about operational plans or unit objectives.” An American corps commander found his Soviet counterpart eager to toast the armies of Roosevelt, and sought in vain to convince the Russian that Roosevelt was dead. Beria’s representatives were soon reporting instances of “suspicious remarks” by Americans, including that of a U.S. officer who allegedly spoke disrespectfully about the competence of Soviet artillerymen. A British officer complained to the Russians about the treatment of some liberated British prisoners who were savagely interrogated by the Red Army before being thrown into a pigsty with German PoWs. The Russians replied icily that this letter was “grossly impolite, and that if any further such communications were received, they would not be answered.”

Yet statesmanship demanded a loftier vision of the junction at Torgau between the crusaders for freedom and the agents of tyranny. “After long journeys, toils and victories across the land and oceans; across many deadly battlefields, the Armies of the great Allies have traversed Germany and have joined hands together,” said Churchill in a broadcast that night. “Now, their task will be the destruction of all remnants of German military resistance, the rooting out of the Nazi power and the subjugation of Hitler’s Reich.” Field-Marshal von Paulus, surveying the ruin of his country from a Soviet prison cell, observed contemptuously: “If the British and Americans had not dilly-dallied so much, we could have got this whole thing over a great deal sooner.”

ELEVENTH HOUR

BETWEEN THE ELBE and the Oder, the civilians of Hitler’s shrunken dominions awaited their fate in a curious state of submission, even paralysis. “Berlin never seemed so peaceful to me as in the April days before the commencement of the battle,” wrote Paul von Stemann, the Danish journalist, “girls dressed up for spring, little real work left to do, streets empty of traffic.” Robert Ley, Hitler’s labour minister, penned an article for Der Angriff, extolling the virtues of a society which had shed possessions and worries, was no longer encumbered with all the petty responsibilities of peacetime life and property. “Thus we are marching towards victory,” wrote Ley, “stripped of all gratuitous ballast, and without the burden of materialistic baggage.” Soviet pilots flying over Berlin described an uncanny stillness on the eastern side, with trains and trams standing idle, factory chimneys dead, while from the far suburbs of the city an endless stream of cars and carts and people on foot moved westward.

Hans Siwik, the Hitler Jugend leader who had escaped from East Prussia, called at the Reich Chancellery to see some old comrades from the days when he served with Hitler’s personal SS bodyguard. Otto Günsche, the Führer’s SS adjutant, ventured a notable banality to his old comrade: “Things are not going too well.” When Siwik saw Hitler, whom he had revered so deeply for so long, he was appalled by the senile, broken figure before him. He received a perfunctory handshake and was disturbed to notice that the hand was ice-cold. The atmosphere around the Chancellery and the bunker was fevered, and on every side Siwik heard words of mistrust, bitterness, recrimination. It was plain that the end was close. “It all seemed so unjust,” he said. Siwik was one among many of his fellow countrymen still incapable of comprehending what the Third Reich, in which he had been a minute but eager cog, had brought upon the world.

Even some sophisticated Germans remained remarkably naive about the prospect before them. Many who could have fled did not do so. “We pretended that, having been through these years of anguish and humiliation, we now wanted to witness the final and total destruction of the evil,” recorded von Stemann. “Perhaps we were motivated by a vain and boyish pride to show that we could make it. Perhaps we had more unrealistic fantasies. None of us expected the end to come as it did. I believe we had a vision of a Cecil B. de Mille picturesque and well-planned parade of the Allied leaders, moving in a great cortège past the Siegssaule and through the Brandenburg gate.”

Kertzendorf, the lovely mansion south of Berlin owned by Freddy Horstmann, a portly, moustachioed former diplomat, had been destroyed by bombing. Horstmann remained in the gardener’s cottage, crowded with art treasures salvaged from the big house. He awaited the arrival of the British and Americans with equanimity, confident of patronage from prominent Allied acquaintances. “They are all my friends,” he declared expansively. A former ambassador in Lisbon and Brussels, Horstmann had abandoned government service when told that his promotion would require a divorce from his half-Jewish wife Lally. An indolent sophisticate who lived in great style on the family newspaper fortune, he had endured the war by simply denying its reality. Horstmann and his friends agreed sagely that there could be no battle for Berlin, for the means no longer existed to defend the city. A friend arriving to stay in the spring of 1945 apologized for having been obliged to abandon a camembert cheese on his train when it was strafed. “Ach, a camembert!” said Horstmann regretfully. “What a pity. When shall I ever eat a camembert again?” He never did so, for he died in a Russian labour camp.

Until days before the Russians arrived, at great country houses around Berlin there were still liveried servants, fine wines and candle-lit dinners at the tables of the doomed Prussian nobility. The gravel of their drives was raked, the gardens tended by large staffs of prisoners, doing duty for family retainers absent at the front. “The participants appeared to take it all for granted, and behaved as if this life would go on for ever,” wrote Paul von Stemann. “Most families had lived on their estates for hundreds of years, but were soon to join the stream of refugees, leaving the splendours behind to be looted and vandalised.” At a big party one night in the house of his married daughter, General Geyr von Schweppenburg, former Panzergruppe commander in Normandy, lost his temper and denounced the reckless frivolity of dancing while Germany stood on the brink of catastrophe. The young guests ignored his outburst. They partied on far into the night. In Berlin itself, von Stemann observed that “dancing became uninhibited, drink for intoxication not enjoyment. Love became sex.” Many people of both sexes became fiercely determined not to face the last act as virgins.

There was a Cuban dance band, which had appeared from no one knew where, performing nightly in the basement of a ruin in the Tiergarten. The Cubans became fashionable. Money seemed suddenly irrelevant, supplanted by barter. Unexpected stocks of coffee, cigarettes and cognac were unearthed. Half a kilo of coffee could be exchanged for twenty litres of petrol. There was heavy traffic in false identity papers and car number plates. Fatalism, lassitude gained sway everywhere outside the ranks of those soldiers preparing to fight their last battle. Prisoners of war alleged to be clearing city bomb rubble sat idle by fires lit in the debris, apparently unsupervised. Unarmed soldiers and deserters wandered the streets, with little effective interference from the military police. The Third Reich’s deadly grip was loosening, its lifeblood seeping away into the horror-soaked soil of Germany. Labour gangs began to build defensive barricades in the suburbs. Berliners observed that they would hold up the Russians for exactly sixty-five minutes: an hour laughing, followed by five minutes sweeping the pathetic obstacles aside.

“The Berliners carried on forced by fear,” wrote von Stemann. “They were frightened all the time: of their own secret police; of the bombers; of the Russians; and of the revenge of millions of forced labourers. They were frightened of their own past, and knew it would catch up with them.” Yet despite all the preparations, there were welcome rumours among the inhabitants that the capital would not be defended at all. For a few brief weeks, Berliners thought themselves fortunate people, as elsewhere across Germany people fled for their lives in their millions.

Ilse Bayer, twenty-five-year-old daughter of a Berlin haulage contractor, was the wife of a naval petty officer based at Swinemünde on the Baltic. Through January and February, she had found refugees from East Prussia knocking on the door of her billet. Now, it was her own turn to become a fugitive. On the afternoon of 12 March, a secretary from naval headquarters ran down their street, warning families of an impending air attack. Frau Bayer scooped up her two younger children in her arms, while the eldest ran in front of her to a shelter. The bombing seemed to last an eternity. At one point, an admiral appeared and wanted to evict all the civilians from the shelter, since it stood on Kriegsmarine property. No one heeded him.

The Bayers emerged at last to find flames everywhere, their own home in ruins, the ships alongside the quays burning fiercely. Ilse believed that her husband Walter was at sea, but suddenly she saw him standing there in front of her. “I almost clawed him to see if he was real.” The commanding officer of his destroyer, an uncommonly humane man, had sent Bayer ashore in a launch to retrieve his family. His wife found herself struggling desperately to get her small children, utterly distraught, up the side of the destroyer from the pitching boat. Next afternoon, the navy landed the refugees amid the ruins of Kiel. The Bayers were fortunate to find a lodging with an elderly couple in a village a few miles outside the city, where the children cried themselves to sleep. In the days that followed, there were renewed flashes of terror, when the roads were strafed by passing fighter-bombers, “which killed a lot of people at that time.” But the Bayer family rejoiced in their unexpected good fortune. They lived.

Eleonore von Joest, who had trekked from East Prussia to Berlin in January, found herself once more on the road in April with her mother, seven children, a housemaid and a Polish farmworker called Miron. They could hear gunfire from both east and west as their carts plodded slowly onwards towards Holstein. They hoped desperately that the western ones were closer. This second trek proved even more frightening for the women than the first from East Prussia, because of constant strafing by American and British aircraft. All along the roadside lay dead horses, wrecked carts, dead people. The brilliant sunlit spring weather mocked their terror. They reached Holstein on 5 May, after a journey of almost 200 miles.

One day in April, Klaus Fischer and his mother were walking past the old Lamsdorfer bridge in Jena when they saw soldiers working on it, laying cables in a trench, then carefully replacing the cobblestones on top of them. They were preparing the bridge for demolition, and indeed destroyed it hours before the Russians arrived. With meticulous efficiency even amid disaster, the city fathers arranged for Jena’s streetcars to be divided, half placed on each side of the river before the bridge was blown. Everyone prepared for the end in different ways. Henner Pflug fell into conversation on a train with a young Waffen SS man. “Surely it’s all over,” said Pflug. The soldier said defiantly: “Oh we’ll lick the Russians yet!” But then he added impulsively that he had two spare shirts. Would Pflug like them? “I shan’t be needing them any more.” The civilian took the shirts, and the two men parted.

Lieutenant Rolf-Helmut Schröder served briefly on the staff of General Walter Botsch, commanding LIII Corps near Bonn. Day after day, Schröder’s principal duty was to move pins on the map, to mark Allied advances which German forces were impotent to arrest. He watched Russian prisoners digging emplacements to house guns which had long ago been destroyed west of the Rhine. One day Schröder ran into the command bunker pursued by a barrage of exploding grenades, and indeed carrying in the back of his head a fragment from one of them. “The Americans are here,” he announced tersely. In a room adjoining the military operations centre, he glimpsed a cluster of Nazi Party officials, policemen and women, all very drunk—“a bad memory.” His general hastily put on his overcoat inside out, so that the red lapels of high command were invisible. The staff wrecked the radio equipment, then decamped. In a few moments, the bunker was almost empty. The young officer was bemused when a civilian entered. It was the local museum director, who also happened to be the uncle of his girlfriend. “Herr Schröder!” exclaimed the visitor. “What are you doing here?” The lieutenant shrugged: “Waiting to die.” “Don’t you know your general’s done a bunk?”

Schröder escaped on foot to his family home in Westphalia. Under a railway embankment on the edge of Hagen, his own town, he met two German tanks, waiting for the Americans. “We’ve got thirty rounds between us,” said one of the commanders. “When they’re gone, we’re finished.” To his mother’s consternation, Schröder arrived home with a fellow officer, his driver and batman. They all put on civilian clothes, and Schröder buried his pistol. But he soon realized that escape was impracticable. He dressed once more in his uniform, and surrendered to two American NCOs. One said: “This is all crap—let him go home.” But the other American insisted that Schröder must be held, removed his Iron Cross and started him on the journey to a PoW camp.

Late in March after his unit was overrun, Helmut Schmidt decided to try to get back to his wife in Hamburg, rather than allow himself to be taken prisoner. He and two other men set off eastwards from the American front, walking by night and hiding by day. At first, they received considerable help and kindness from German peasants. As they reached the north German plain, fear of Allied reprisals made local people become progressively more reluctant to shelter fugitive soldiers. They spent several nights huddled beneath bushes under the stars. At last, Schmidt reached his family.

When Sergeant George Schwemmer of 10th SS Panzer was discharged from the hospital where he had spent February being treated for frostbite, he was sent to command a platoon in a battle group north-east of Stettin. Discipline was visibly collapsing. There were increasingly bitter wrangles between the fanatics, determined to fight to the end, and those who recognized the futility of doing so. They were suddenly ordered aboard open rail trucks, and shipped south into Saxony, under Schörner’s ruthless command. They called the field-marshal “the soldiers’ claw,” because he was not above personally arresting stragglers and herding them back into battle. Deserters were being shot daily—Schörner had executed three battalion commanders in a week for alleged dereliction of duty—but in mid-April Schwemmer decided that he would take the risk. He knew the Americans had already overrun Blankenburg, where his wife was living. The sergeant and a few others slipped away across the Oder bridge. They marched in formed ranks, to give an impression of moving under orders, and begged overnight shelter in houses they passed. The fugitives made one attempt to surrender, advancing with hands in the air towards Americans whom they encountered near Linz. They were met by machine-gun fire, which killed a twelve-year-old boy. After that, Schwemmer simply took to the countryside like tens of thousands of others. He walked and walked, until at last he became the first soldier from Blankenburg to reach home, a distinction for which he was deeply grateful.

In the path of Konev’s armies, sixteen-year-old Corporal Helmut Fromm from Heidelberg was playing “Indians.” He manned a periscope in his unit’s positions beside a sniper, occasionally raising a helmet on a stick above the parapet to draw Russian fire. A sniper needed a counter-signature on his scorecard, to qualify for the special leave granted to a man who achieved at least twenty confirmed kills. Once, to relieve the monotony, they put a round just in front of a horse, which bolted. Another time, they took a long shot at a cycling Russian who fell off, scrambled to his feet and ran away carrying the bicycle. If it sounds fantastic to imagine German soldiers behaving so childishly in the days before the last stand of Hitler’s Reich, consider their age: many of these “men” were indeed children, who laughed at the things children laughed at. They were adult only in their candidacy for death.

On 5 April, Victor Klemperer sat in the darkness of a train to Munich, listening to the conversation of his fellow travellers. One young man said that his own father, who had believed passionately in victory, now no longer did so. “Only Bolshevism and international Jewry are the victors,” grumbled the passenger. A young woman whose husband was fighting in Breslau announced that she still trusted the Führer, and believed that victory would come.

A delegation of diplomats from the Japanese embassy in Berlin visited von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, demanding to know what steps he proposed to take for their safety. They received scant satisfaction. The British intercepted a signal to Tokyo from the Japanese minister in Lisbon, setting out a somewhat ambitious diplomatic plan for his country: “It is my belief that the only means by which Japan, confronted as she is by the present unparalleled national crisis, can bring about a turn for the better in her fortunes is by a radical re-orientation of her policy towards the USSR. The collapse of the German army is now unmistakably only a matter of time.” The minister suggested that Japan should seek a bilateral treaty with Stalin.

Captain Walter Schaefer-Kuhnert of 9th Panzer Division spent the last days of his war supporting a Volksgrenadier unit—“hopeless people,” he observed, with professional contempt. One morning in his captured jeep he found himself driving in the middle of a massive column of American armour. “My God,” he thought, “we haven’t got that many tanks in our entire army.” His driver accelerated away, and they saw astonished GI faces staring after their field-grey uniforms. Finally, the Germans abandoned the vehicle and found a path on foot back to their battery. “It was rubbish to say that we fought to the end because of fear of the SS,” he said. “We did so because fighting men understand that they must stick together.” Even in the extremities of March and April, the gunner officer felt proud of the fact that some men who had been allowed home on leave as far afield as Silesia returned to the unit for its final battles.

The Russians had encircled the synthetic-oil plant in Silesia where sixteen-year-old Hans Moser had served with a flak battery back at the end of January. Moser and his young comrades watched while NCOs blew up their guns. A huge baulk of timber flew high into the air, landing almost on the top of the teenager, who thought his last hour had come. They were then given three minutes in which to pack a ration-bag and waterbottle apiece and marched away through driving snow towards the distant train station. Men and boys soon started falling out in the freezing cold. Moser suffered frostbite. In Niesse, a baker’s wife allowed him to put his feet in her stove to thaw out. “Are the Russians coming?” she asked fearfully. “No, no,” said the boy stoutly, because he could not face telling her the truth. He trudged onwards. By the wayside, he saw a neat fence beside a churchyard, with a notice proclaiming: “Joseph Eichendorff is buried here.” The great nineteenth-century lyrical poet was one of Moser’s idols. The teenager yearned to make a pilgrimage to the grave. But he did not dare to linger.

One icy night, he and his dwindling body of young companions encountered a terrible vision. A column of shrunken men in striped clothes came past, escorted by SS men with lanterns and dogs. “Who are these people?” he asked a guard. “Jews and gangsters,” said the man tersely. Later, they heard shots, and came upon some of the prisoners lying dead by the road, falling snow already thick upon their bodies. For hours afterwards, they found themselves passing the corpses of prisoners and refugees, many of them old people. One dead face haunted his sleep for months afterwards, a tall man who had been shot in the back of the neck. The bullet had forced open his jaws. The man stared vacantly upwards, eyes and mouth wide open. Once, the gunners saw two elderly German civilians towing on their sled a concentration-camp prisoner who had collapsed. One of the young Luftwaffe men asked the couple roughly: “Why are you bothering to help this gangster?” Moser said nothing, and indeed felt nothing: “We were immersed in our own worries. We just wanted to get home.”

As they crossed into Czechoslovakia, the tension, even hatred, among local people was palpable: “The Czechs were stirring.” Military police patrols questioned every male traveller constantly, searching out deserters. Their party possessed only a single written movement order to cover them all, so they clung together. At Prague, they found a train westwards. At last, after weeks on the road, he reached home in Nuremberg. When the Russians overran his position, Moser had been officially reported “missing.” Now, when he banged the knocker of the family house clad in his white snow smock, his mother opened the door and screamed. She thought he was a ghost.

Even elite units such as the Grossdeutschland were no longer willing to fight. Captain Mackert, one of its battalion commanders, described his shock when men began to flee under Soviet attack even when he drew his pistol upon them: “All my attempts to keep the company together failed . . . The men would rather be shot than stay in their positions.” Mackert was left only with one NCO, two wireless-operators and a runner. He never saw his soldiers again.

It is an extraordinary reflection of the fashion in which weapons and ammunition continued to the end to reach some units—and especially the favoured SS—that as late as 13 April at Wiener Neustadt 1st SS Panzer received a delivery of ten new Mark IV tanks. The division’s paper strength before its final battles was 10,552 men. Yet its morale was no better than that of the Grossdeutschland. “The atmosphere was truly hopeless,” said Werner Sternebeck, “the issue of orders sluggish, inconsistent and lacking conviction . . . We were facing our last battle, and with our 17 Panzer IVs and Panzer Vs, we could only delay the impending collapse.”

At the makeshift hospital in the school of a small town in Schleswig-Holstein where sixteen-year-old Melany Borck worked as a nurse, the last days were awful. There were few doctors. The men were riddled with lice. Those with families in eastern Germany were desperate for news of them, of which there was none. Drugs had run out. They were reduced to boiling birch-bark to make a primitive antiseptic. Melany administered anaesthetic by holding an ether pad over a man’s mouth. Once, in her pathetic ignorance, she overdid the process so that a patient remained unconscious for eight hours. Beyond the casualties laid in rows on straw palliasses in the classrooms and corridors, others remained in bunks on the hospital train which had brought them, because there was nowhere else. At the beginning, the girl had found working at the hospital rewarding. For the first time in her life, she was treated as an adult rather than as a child. But when she found herself reliving the last battle for Pillau through the fevered nightmares of a dying man whose hand she held, the memory haunted her. Even after many months on the wards, she still found it hard to look upon shattered limbs, the ruins of so much youth.

“We’re retreating again,” Corporal Helmut Fromm of Ninth Army wrote in his diary on 19 April, on the road thirty-five miles south-east of Berlin in front of Konev’s tanks, “nobody knows where to. The columns of men stumble along these dusty roads, horses dragging our grenade-launchers. The infantry pulled back past us while we were still in action. Our tanks are on the same road . . . Just now at least there is no air attack, but shells are falling right and left. I am filthier than any pig, we’ve nothing hot to eat, I’m smoking my last cigarette. How long can this go on?”

Piotr Tareczynski, a thirty-two-year-old Polish gunner officer, crossed the Oder with his PoW column in darkness, over a bridge being prepared for demolition. Stettin, some fifteen miles northwards, was being bombed. “The flares being dropped by aircraft made it look as if a pink blanket was suspended above the city.” Next day, as they passed among prosperous farms, he pondered the likely fate of their inhabitants: “The time for settling accounts was approaching fast. Nemesis was at their door. Those farmers still viewed us as enemies, though we were hardly able to walk. They were afraid of us. To them, we were living proof of Germany’s crimes against humanity.” There were many belated deaths from Allied strafing. The neighbouring column of PoWs to that of British airman Trevor Peacock was attacked by RAF Typhoons, whose rockets and cannon inflicted some eighty casualties. Lieutenant Philip Dark, a British naval officer captured at St. Nazaire, watched in impotent horror as RAF Tempests swept down on his group. “One’s nerves, after those three years, were in a poor state. It had been a cotton-wool existence. I noticed a body lying flat in the ditch as I upped and ran . . . I thought ‘You silly bloody fools!’ Being shot up by one’s own boys, what irony!”

In the last weeks, there was a belated rush of killings in the concentration camps. Some enemies of the Third Reich seemed in danger of surviving its demise, and the Nazis hastened to eliminate them. At Dachau on 9 April, Johann Georg Elser, the communist who had tried to assassinate Hitler in November 1939, was executed. At Flossenburg the same day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Admiral Canaris and his Chief-of-Staff General Hans Oster were hanged, likewise Hans von Dohnanyi in Sachsenhausen. Thus too died many less famous names.

Never had the contrast been more brutally drawn between the experience of the Eastern and Western Fronts. As the last act of the battle for Germany approached, the American and British armies were advancing against only spasmodic resistance, suffering few casualties, knowing that their task was all but completed. Even after the shocking confrontation with the reality of the concentration camps, most of Eisenhower’s soldiers had no thought for vengeance. They were preoccupied with their own survival, and with going home. The Western allies were ending the war as they had begun it, with anger in the hearts only of individuals with special reason to harbour it. Most men felt some pity for the vanquished. They succumbed to passion only when confronted with the most conspicuously impenitent or murderous Nazis.

Yet in the east, six million Russian soldiers were preparing for the day of triumph and retribution which they had been promised for so long. Their victory was not in doubt, but they now faced some of the Second World War’s most savage encounters upon the battlefield. In the east, the last act was among the most terrible, as the Russians faced Germans ready to fight with the fanaticism of despair, amid a society collapsing into hysteria. Adolf Hitler had led one of the most educated and cultured societies on earth to a moral, political and military abyss. He now sought to ensure that as many as possible of his own people accompanied him over the brink.