FOR the final destruction of the Third Reich, General Bradley—newly awarded a fourth star, and now dubbed “Omar the Warmaker” by the Stars and Stripes newspaper—shifted his command post to Wiesbaden, just west of Frankfurt. Eisenhower joined him there on Wednesday evening, April 11, after a flight from Reims in a B-25 bomber. Early the next morning they squeezed into a Piper Cub and flew eighty miles northeast, following the autobahn trace to the market town of Hersfeld. Here Patton, who also had been promoted to four-star general, awaited them with an armored cavalry escort and a convoy of jeeps, including one adorned with the supreme commander’s five-star rank insignia. East they sped for twenty miles, through a lowland corridor known as the Fulda Gap, arriving at 10:30 A.M. in the Thuringian village of Merkers. A tank battalion guarded the entrance to a nineteenth-century potassium mine, where GIs had made a discovery that Patton believed Eisenhower should see.
A photograph of the Führer still graced the timekeeper’s office wall in the mine mouth, and an exhortatory sign proclaimed, auf Deutsch, “Thy Strength Is Nothing: The People’s Strength Is All!” The XII Corps commander, General Eddy, led them onto a rickety freight elevator, and as they slowly descended the pitch-black shaft Patton quipped, “If that clothesline should part, promotions in the United States Army would be considerably stimulated.” Sixteen hundred feet down, the lift doors opened. A sentry snapped a salute, and upon recognizing his visitors exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” In a wide gallery Patton pointed to currency-engraving plates used by the Reichsbank, and stacked bales of money designated for the Wehrmacht. Eyeing the bills, Bradley said, “I doubt the German army will be meeting payrolls much longer.”
Treasures already had been discovered in other mines: in a damp Siegen iron pit on April 2, soldiers found six enormous crates labeled “Aachen Cathedral,” which included a silver bust of Charlemagne imbedded with a fragment of the emperor’s skull. Other boxes in the Siegen lode held paintings by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Van Gogh, and the original manuscript of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. Yet no trove would surpass that found in the Merkers workings, as Eisenhower realized upon stepping through a hole blown in a bank-vault door by Army engineers using half a stick of dynamite.
Here in “Room No. 8,” a chamber 150 feet long and 75 feet wide, more than 7,000 bags of gold and other loot recently transferred from Berlin—in some cases by double-decker bus—lay in neat rows under lights dangling beneath the twelve-foot ceiling. In addition to 8,307 gold bars and 55 crates of bullion, the repository included 3,682 sacks of German currency, 80 more of foreign currency, 3,326 bags of gold coins—among them 711 filled with U.S. $20 gold pieces, each sack worth $25,000—8 bags of gold rings, and a pouch of platinum bars. At the back of the room, in more than 200 satchels, suitcases, and trunks, each tagged “Melmer” after a kleptomaniacal SS captain named Bruno Melmer, were valuables stolen from concentration-camp victims: pearls, watch cases, gold tooth crowns, Passover cups, cigarette cases, spoons. Much of the metal had been hammered flat to save space. Other galleries and shafts nearby yielded two million volumes from Berlin libraries, 400 tons of patent records, 33 wooden cases of Goethe memorabilia from Weimar, paintings by Rubens and Goya, and costumes from the Berlin state theaters. “If these were the old free-booting days when a soldier kept his loot,” Bradley told Patton, “you’d be the richest man in the world.”
Patton facetiously proposed converting the 250 tons of gold—most of the Reich’s reserve—into medallions “for every son of a bitch in the Third Army.” Eventually valued by SHAEF in excess of half a billion dollars, the treasure in the Merkers shaft lay within what soon would become the Soviet occupation zone. There was not a moment to lose, and plans already had been made to spirit the booty to Frankfurt—in the American zone—using thirty ten-ton trucks guarded by two MP battalions, seven infantry platoons, and air cover from P-51 Mustangs. The artworks were to be wrapped in German army sheepskin coats, thousands of which were also found in the mine.
Similar removals were under way throughout the designated Soviet sector on grounds of “military necessity,” provoking shrill, ineffectual protests from Moscow that not only treasure but also equipment and skilled personnel were disappearing westward. Among those brought into the American fold were a thousand German chemists, engineers, physicists, physicians, and mathematicians, as well as various intellectual fruits, whisked away under a program code-named AIRMAIL. The haul included: 241 scientists from the Institute of Physics and Chemistry in Halle, along with new aircraft designs; 45 technical experts from an IG Farben plant in Bitterfeld, with 500 tons of potassium bichromate and 200 tons of potassium permanganate; and, from a Zeiss plant in Jena, 213 experts in radar and other disciplines, plus a new German bombsight. Other swag included ground-to-air missile designs, material supporting 340,000 German patents, and enough V-2 components to build seventy-five rockets.
Patton had one more discovery to show Eisenhower. After a quick lunch at the XII Corps command post, the traveling party flew by small plane to Gotha to join another convoy for a ten-mile excursion to the south. A German deserter’s tale of an elaborate headquarters in remote Ohrdruf had intrigued Eisenhower the previous week, and he had authorized Patton to dispatch a flying column from the 4th Armored Division in hopes of capturing the enemy high command. By ill fortune, the raiders had just missed Field Marshal Kesselring, bagging only a few German soldiers masquerading as patients in a local hospital. The mysterious headquarters also proved disappointing: built inside huge underground tunnels in 1938, with telephone exchanges, carpeted offices, flush toilets, and a movie theater, the compound had never been used. Himmler had planned to refurbish the complex as a retreat for Hitler and present it to the Führer on April 20 for his fifty-sixth birthday.
Yet the expedition had hardly been fruitless, because here the Americans liberated a concentration camp in Germany for the first time. Known as S-3 and opened the previous fall, Ohrdruf was among more than eighty satellite camps of a penal facility that soon would become even more notorious: Buchenwald. Bradley described the traveling party’s visit to S-3:
We passed through the stockade. More than 3,200 naked, emaciated bodies had been flung into shallow graves. Others lay in the streets where they had fallen.… A guard showed us how the blood had congealed in the coarse black scabs where the starving prisoners had torn out the entrails of the dead for food.
An inmate pointed out a gallows where condemned men were strangled with piano wire. Others had been murdered with a pistol shot to the nape of the neck. As Allied forces had approached from the west, Patton informed his diary, SS guards “had some of the slaves exhume the bodies and place them on a mammoth griddle composed of 60-centimeter railway tracks laid on brick foundations. They poured pitch on the bodies and then built a fire of pinewood and coal under them,” leaving “bones, skulls, charred torsos.” Most guards then fled, disguised in mufti, although a few were beaten or stabbed to death by vengeful inmates as the first Americans arrived. “You search the face to find what it is that is lacking, to find the mark of the beast,” a reporter wrote after scrutinizing SS visages. The camp still reeked of feces and burned hair. Another burial trench dusted with lime “was almost filled with ash and human debris from which, here and there, emaciated limbs projected,” wrote Osmar White, the Australian correspondent assigned to Third Army. “Patton,” Bradley noted, “walked over to a corner and sickened.”
When a young GI giggled nervously, Eisenhower fixed him with a baleful eye. “Still having trouble hating them?” he asked. To other troops gathered round him in the compound, the supreme commander said, “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now at least he will know what he is fighting against.”
* * *
Eisenhower and Bradley agreed to spend Thursday night at the Third Army bivouac in Hersfeld. After supper they retired to Patton’s caravan with a sheaf of maps for a long discussion about where best to fling their armies. The destruction of Model’s Army Group B left a hole 125 miles wide in the center of the German front for exploitation by 12th Army Group, which now boasted 1.3 million soldiers in twelve corps and forty-eight divisions. Two obvious invasion routes veered north and south of the Harz Mountains, once the Ruhr was cleared: under 12th Army Group’s plan, Ninth Army would take the upper route, toward Magdeburg, and First Army the lower, across the Thüringen plain toward Leipzig. Third Army, already farther east on Bradley’s right wing, would allow her two sister armies to come abreast and then swing southeast, while Patch’s Seventh Army pivoted through lower Bavaria and Austria to shield Patton’s flank. The new Fifteenth Army, under General Gerow, would trail the combat legions to take up occupation duties.
Despite great bounds now being made by all forces—Simpson’s Ninth Army had traveled 226 miles since jumping the Rhine—Eisenhower wanted the American line to advance no farther east than Chemnitz, near the Czech border. As for Berlin, he reiterated his determination to leave the city to the Soviets, who were about to launch their final assault on the capital.
“Ike, I don’t know how you figure that one,” Patton said. “We had better take Berlin and quick, and go on to the Oder.”
Eisenhower shook his head. “It has no tactical or strategic value,” he said, with a hint of exasperation. Not only did an advance on Berlin risk colliding with the Red Army, but it would also hamper U.S. forces with even greater hordes of refugees and prisoners than those already burdening every field commander.
Another anxiety weighed on Eisenhower: he shared fears that the Nazi regime intended to retreat to a so-called National Redoubt in the Alps from which to wage a protracted guerrilla war or stage a sanguinary last stand. Either would allow Germans to claim that the Third Reich had never surrendered. How did a police state perish—with a supine whimper or a bloody bang? No one at SHAEF was sure, but Allied intelligence had convinced itself—and the supreme commander—that Hitler’s regime would seek to fight on in the mountains with Götterdämmerung theatricality.
As early as the fall of 1943, Allied planners had envisioned a final shootout in heavily fortified Alpine eyries. Eisenhower warned Marshall, in September 1944, that German fanatics “may attempt to carry on a long and bitter guerrilla warfare.” To Bradley in February he proposed training shock battalions to attack “nests of guerrillas which will have to be forcibly eradicated.” An impregnable mountain fortress at altitudes up to twelve thousand feet could extend from Salzburg in the east to Lake Constance in the west, and even into Italy through the Brenner Pass. British intelligence voiced doubts: a quarter-million Ultra intercepts during the war had given no hint of such plans except for a vague message to Tokyo in mid-March from the Japanese embassy in Bern alluding to possible “last battlegrounds or redoubts.” British agents in Austria found “no sign of preparations for organized resistance.” A War Department study in early April reported “no indications that any fortifications are being constructed in Bavaria or Austria to prevent an Allied ingress into the ‘redoubt area’ from the north.”
Far more credulous was Eisenhower’s intelligence chief, Major General Strong, who later explained that “after the Ardennes, I was taking no more chances with the Germans.” Convinced that it would be “true to German form to die together,” Strong in March issued a dire warning: Allied air reconnaissance of twenty Alpine locales showed extensive construction work, perhaps fortifications for a German resistance network he likened to the French maquis. “Some of the most important ministries and personalities of the Nazi regime,” he added, “are already established in the Redoubt area.” An excitable press also conjured Nazi diehards darting among the Alpine crags and cols. Collier’s magazine in late January told readers of a vast guerrilla training camp near the Führer’s vacation home in Berchtesgaden, and The New York Times suggested that the National Redoubt, with countless gun emplacements, would prove more obdurate than Cassino.
An OSS psychological portrait of Hitler, titled “His Life and Legend,” examined eight possible fates for the Führer, from natural death—“a remote possibility”—and escape to a neutral country—“extremely unlikely”—to capture, “the most unlikely possibility of all.” Suicide was deemed “the most plausible outcome,” but the study concluded that “in the end he might lock himself into this symbolic womb and defy the world to get him.” Other OSS assessments, fed by a gullible station in Switzerland, reported that food, arms, and ammunition had been stockpiled in Berchtesgaden for at least eighteen months; that 150 trucks brought more war matériel to the redoubt each day; that farmers in the Alpine region could feed 750,000 men 2,500 calories a day, although the diet would be “somewhat unbalanced, with an almost complete absence of sugar”; and that Redoubt factories were capable of making small arms and antitank guns, despite shortages of coke, lead, zinc, and explosives. General William J. Donovan, the director of the Office of Strategic Services, sent Roosevelt a personal memorandum in late March asserting that the Nazis had “made careful plans to go underground.”
The correspondent William L. Shirer wondered whether SHAEF intelligence had been “infiltrated by British and American mystery writers,” but no imaginations were more feverish than those in Seventh Army. “Vast stores of meat and canned goods are reported being cached in caves and subterranean warehouses in the Salzburg area,” Patch’s intelligence chief claimed on March 25. It was said that three to five long freight trains had added to the stockpiles each week since February 1, and that secret hydro-powered assembly plants could even produce Messerschmitt fighter planes. All this, a Seventh Army analysis warned in late March, could “create an elite force, predominately SS and mountain troops, of between 200,000 and 300,000 men … thoroughly imbued with the Nazi spirit.”
The truth was less flamboyant. The previous fall a Nazi gauleiter in the Tyrol, upon learning of OSS anxiety about a possible Alpine stronghold, resolved to encourage the American “redoubt psychosis” in hopes that Allied demands for unconditional surrender would soften if confronted by German intransigence. Thus did the tail wag the dog. Hitler in fact had evinced little interest in defensive warfare; not until spring were tank obstacles constructed in the northern Alps, along with a few field positions hastily cobbled together against a Soviet advance from Hungary. Kesselring dismissed any heroic stand in the mountains as “merest make-believe,” and captured German generals expressed genuine puzzlement about a redoubt, even when American interrogators in Wiesbaden dramatically unveiled a wall map depicting a secret “Valhalla.”
Hardly more credible was the so-called Werewolf movement. Conceived by Himmler as a paramilitary insurgency and named for a lycanthropic, flesh-eating character from a German novel about the Thirty Years’ War, the Werewolf commandos accomplished little more than to scribble a bit of graffiti—“Traitor, take care, the Werewolf is watching”—and assassinate the mayor of Aachen for collaboration. General Donovan briefly considered hiring Basque assassins to hunt down all Werewolves, but nothing came of it.
Yet at SHAEF the myth of the National Redoubt persisted almost to the end of the war. “We may be fighting one month from now and it may even be a year,” Bradley would caution visiting congressmen in late April; Smith told reporters that “possibly 100 to 125” German divisions could move into the Alps. SHAEF compiled a list of more than two hundred caves in southern Germany and Austria, and called for relentless air reconnaissance. Eisenhower had already ordered Devers’s army group to drive toward the mountains to prevent reinforcement of a redoubt, with assistance from the First Allied Airborne Army if necessary, and forces would be dispatched to Salzburg for the same purpose. Nearly three dozen U.S. and French divisions now flooded southern Germany and Austria.
Another intelligence summary from General Strong on April 22 cited “no less than 70 examples of underground construction” and other signs of Nazi resistance in the Alps, where fragments of one hundred divisions, including SS and panzer units, were believed to have congregated. Even if a well-organized defense appeared “increasingly dubious,” Strong wrote, “it seems that Hitler or one of his satellites will try to fight on in the south.” In the event, not until the last week of April would the Führer sign a directive calling for a mountainous Kernfestung—an inner fortress—as a “last bulwark of fanatical resistance.” That too was an illusion. “In the end,” a German general told his interrogators after the war, “the catastrophe was allowed to run its course.”
* * *
Shortly after midnight on Friday, April 13, Eisenhower and Bradley retired to their guest quarters in the Third Army encampment. Patton was skeptical of any redoubt, which he would call “so much hot air” and “a figment of the imagination,” but he now kept a carbine by his cot because of rumors that glider-borne German assassins might descend behind American lines. The approach of peace made him melancholy. “Sometimes I feel that I may be nearing the end of this life,” he would write Bea that week. “What else is there to do? Well, if I do get it, remember that I love you.” He continued to scribble battlefield poetry, as if to perpetuate the war in his imagination; Collier’s had just rejected an especially awful verse, “The Song of the Bayonet,” which began: “From the hot furnace, throbbing with passion / First was I stamped in the form to destroy.” To a friend he wrote:
War for me has not been difficult, but has been a pleasant adventure.… The best thing that could happen to me would be to get a clean hit in the last minute of the last fight and then flit around on a cloud and watch you tear my reputation to pieces.
Glancing at his wristwatch before going to bed, Patton found that it had stopped. He turned on the radio to learn the time, only to hear a flash bulletin released moments earlier. Forgoing all thought of sleep, he hurried from his caravan to tell Eisenhower and Bradley the fatal news.
* * *
Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man who had never fired a shot in anger and yet became the greatest soldier in the most devastating war in history, was dead. He had crossed over at the fag end of an existential struggle that would be won in part because of his ability to persuade other men to die for a transcendent cause. Churchill, who would sob like a child at the president’s passing, subsequently wrote that “he altered decisively and permanently the social axis, the moral axis, of mankind by involving the New World inexorably and irrevocably in the fortunes of the Old. His life must therefore be regarded as one of the most commanding events in human destiny.” Roosevelt’s chief of staff said simply, “How could a man die better?”
His passing came at the Little White House in Georgia; desperate for rest, he had traveled to Warm Springs with his stamp collection, aboard the presidential railcar Ferdinand Magellan. In his final hours on Thursday, Roosevelt posed for a portrait—the painter, after starting with his eyes, at one point reportedly stepped away from her easel to measure his nose—and signed into law a bill to expand the Commodity Credit Corporation. While preparing for lunch, he abruptly lifted his right hand to his forehead, then pitched forward from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was carried to a bedroom and dressed in pajamas. His blood pressure spiked to 300 over 190 and, two hours after being stricken, he stopped breathing. An injection of adrenaline to the heart had no effect. At 3:35P.M. he was pronounced dead. “Nothing worked,” his physician said. “And that was it.” The Secret Service tested his breakfast for poison and found none.
J. Austin Dillon, an Atlanta funeral-home director, arrived seven hours later at the clapboard house with gorgeous roses around the white-pillar porch. He waited until Eleanor Roosevelt emerged dry-eyed from the bedroom, where the first lady had bade her husband farewell. Dillon found the president beneath a sheet with a gauze sling tied beneath his chin to keep his mouth clamped shut. After placing the rigid body on an embalming table under several bright floor lamps, Dillon bathed Roosevelt’s face, shaved him, and then injected embalming fluid in the right carotid artery and jugular vein, slowly, to avoid swelling. More injections followed, down the femoral and radial arteries, six bottles in all, before the thoracic and abdominal cavities were aspirated and then each incision carefully sutured. “It was,” Dillon later confessed, “one of the most difficult cases in every respect.” After toiling for five hours, Dillon cleaned the president’s nails, daubed a touch of rouge on his cheeks, and dressed him in a double-breasted blue suit with a white shirt and a dark blue necktie. He summoned Roosevelt’s valet, Arthur Prettyman, who gently combed the president’s hair.
On Friday, the daily casualty list with next of kin published in the nation’s newspapers included this entry: “Army-Navy Dead: ROOSEVELT, Franklin D., commander-in-chief; wife, Mrs. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, the White House.” In Europe, Eisenhower decreed that “wearing of mourning badges, firing of salutes, dropping national and regimental colors and standards will be dispensed with in view of war conditions.” A lieutenant in the 15th Infantry told his diary, “This is a shock. He has been president since I was fourteen years old.”
Roosevelt had at last found the abiding rest he needed. How could a man die better?