WAR correspondents had begun offering odds on which American unit would be first to encounter the Russians as the Allied armies drew ever closer in eastern Germany. Men in the 84th Division painted welcome signs with Cyrillic lettering, and the appearance in a 69th Division command post of two brigands in Cossack attire caused great excitement until their accents unmasked them as British reporters playing a practical joke. An American order suspended artillery fire beyond the Elbe for fear of hitting the Russians; it was rescinded after cheeky Wehrmacht troops exploited the lull to sunbathe along the east bank. SHAEF and Moscow adopted recognition signals to prevent fratricide: red flares and a single white stripe around tank turrets for Soviet forces, green flares and a double stripe for the Yanks. GI scouts with field glasses scanned the fens along the Mulde River in search of the counterparts they now called “GIvans.” A giddy report on April 23 identified a Russian tank, which closer scrutiny revealed as a grassy hummock with a clothesline strung across it.
East of Leipzig on the foggy morning of Wednesday, April 25, three patrols from First Army’s 69th Division ventured into the uplands beyond the Mulde, ignoring orders from the U.S. high command to remain within five miles of the river. At 11:30 A.M., in the farm hamlet of Leckwitz, one group of three dozen GIs encountered a solitary Soviet horseman with Asian features mounted on a small pony; the rider swiftly galloped away. Continuing two miles to the Elbe, near Strehla—some twenty-five miles beyond the Mulde—the men spied soldiers milling along the east bank, medals glinting on their chests. After commandeering a sailboat and using hands and rifle butts to paddle across, the Americans shook hands with their Russian comrades from the 175th Rifle Regiment, exchanging smiles and extravagant gestures. But a message radioed to the regimental command post confused Strehla with Groba, four miles south; when an Army reconnaissance plane took ground fire without spotting any Soviets, the report was discounted as erroneous.
Twenty miles north and two hours later, Second Lieutenant William D. Robertson, a slender young intelligence officer, drove into the tenth-century river town of Torgau with three enlisted men in his jeep. Black smoke curled from a burning glass factory. The streets, lined with chestnuts and hawthorns, stood empty except for a few freed slave laborers and two sedans of German soldiers blind drunk on champagne. Gunfire could be heard from the Elbe, just east.
Lacking either green flares or a radio, Robertson smashed the glass door of an apothecary shop on Mackensenplatz, where his men scavenged enough tempera paint to convert a bedsheet into a crude flag with five horizontal red stripes, and blue stars daubed onto a white field. Climbing to the battlements of the hulking Hartenfels Castle above the river, they unfurled their colors, bellowing, “Cease fire! American. Amerikanski. Russia. America.… We have no flares!”
After a brief, unnerving riposte of Soviet machine-gun fire that chewed at the castle walls, two Red Army soldiers could be seen creeping across the twisted girders of the demolished Elbe bridge. Robertson and his men pounded down the stairs to meet them halfway before crossing to the far bank for a shared meal of sardines and canteen cups filled with cognac. When afternoon shadows grew long, Robertson drove back to his battalion encampment in Wurzen, carrying four soldiers from the 173rd Rifle Regiment wedged into his jeep as proof of the rendezvous.
Thursday morning brought the full, overwrought merger of east and west. A flying column of fifteen jeeps packed with photographers and correspondents arrived in Torgau to find a scene “like an Iowa picnic,” in one lieutenant colonel’s description, albeit with promiscuous celebratory gunfire. Soviet soldiers had looted a nearby accordion factory and “Song of the Steppes” carried down the river. Half a dozen varnished shells from the Torgau Racing Club—the only river craft to be found—shuttled GIs and reporters to the east bank for black bread and apples washed down with vodka.
“The Russians all looked as if they hadn’t had time for a bath since Stalingrad,” Martha Gellhorn would later write, but their tunics were upholstered with “handsome enamel decorations for killing Germans.” Red Army teamsters “handled the horses … rather like the chariot races in Ben-Hur. The pack trains had everything on them: bedding [and] pots and pans and ammunition, and also women.” Above it all rose a “splendid Slavic roar and the clang of wheels on cobbles.” GIs traded cigarette lighters and nail clippers for the lacquered red stars on Soviet caps. Hundreds of freed Russian slave laborers, mostly women in colorful kerchiefs, waited along the west bank for a seat on a makeshift ferry to begin their long journey home.
At three P.M. the 69th Division commander, Major General Emil F. Reinhardt, stepped uneasily into a wobbly shell. A stout Russian mother sat in the bow with her baby in a carriage balanced across the gunwales. “Get that woman off the boat,” an Army officer shouted. “The general needs that boat.” Unwilling to budge, the woman sat as rigid as a ship’s figurehead until the coxswain swung out into the river with mother, child, and the squatting general as passengers. “Reinhardt’s still lucky,” a reporter quipped. “Washington had to stand.” On the far shore a Soviet general advanced to greet him with an outstretched hand.
* * *
An unbroken Allied line now stretched from the North Sea to the Urals, cutting Germany in half and reducing the Reich to shards of a state. So little was left to wreck that Eighth Air Force flew its last bombing raid on April 25, almost at the same hour as the Torgau junction. Fifteenth Air Force, flying from Italy, quit a day later. In the north, a German rump still hugged the North Sea and the Baltic, through Schleswig-Holstein and portions of Mecklenburg and Brandenburg. But this territory was no longer contiguous with Berlin: Soviet armies encircling the city from north and south had met at Ketzin, twenty miles west of the capital. This too occurred on April 25.
Nothing now could thwart the Soviet juggernaut of two and a half million troops and six thousand tanks, although in destroying some ninety German divisions a trio of Soviet army groups in just the three weeks after April 16 would suffer more than three hundred thousand casualties, a bloodletting that made Eisenhower’s aversion to Berlin seem prudent. The city’s final agony had begun, and with it the rape of at least ninety thousand German women. Many smeared themselves with mud or dotted their skin with red spots to simulate typhus. Russian soldiers defiled them anyway, then ripped out water faucets and unscrewed lightbulbs to carry home as plunder. German strangers shook hands in the dying capital and urged one another, “Bleib übrig”: Survive. A diarist described the city as “a hilly landscape of bricks, human beings buried beneath it, the stars above; the last moving things are the rats.”
In the south, the Reich had been reduced to swatches of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, plus a narrowing belt that stretched from the Black Forest through lower Bavaria to the Austrian Tirol and Salzburg. Patton crossed the Czech border and each day ticked off fifteen or twenty miles toward Linz; on April 23, the entire Third Army reported fewer than fifty casualties while capturing nine thousand German soldiers. Patch’s Seventh Army raced south from Nuremberg to seize intact a bridge over the Danube at Dillingen. Fleets of Sherman tanks led the breakneck pursuit, past grazing cows and farmers agape at their plows. The 10th Armored Division alone captured twenty-eight towns in a single day. Few signs of a National Redoubt could be detected.
“We are constantly suffering from misunderstandings with the French,” a recent SHAEF memo had lamented, and perhaps inevitably these final battles would be marred by another snarling brouhaha of the sort that had characterized the Franco-American confederation since the North African campaign. In southwest Germany, General Devers had meticulously choreographed the capture of Stuttgart with three goals in mind: to prevent the escape of the enemy’s Nineteenth Army; to expedite the U.S. attack into western Austria; and, secretly, to capture German atomic scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in remote Hechingen. On Devers’s order, French troops were to seize Stuttgart, but not until the U.S. VI Corps had outflanked the city to block escape routes south. Other American forces would then barrel through, sweeping into Austria before Nazi bitter-enders could cohere for a last stand.
General de Gaulle had other ideas. Washington and London had yet to specify a postwar French zone of occupation in Germany, and General de Lattre’s French First Army seemed relegated to a minor role in the coup de grâce about to befall the Third Reich. Stuttgart offered a wide door to the Danube, Bavaria, and Austria, which, in De Gaulle’s calculation, would “support our intentions as to the French zone of occupation.” Holding a large tract of Roman Catholic southern Germany could enhance French prestige and perhaps provide a French client state abutting Alsace.
With Deux Mètres urging him on, De Lattre deftly used one French corps to surround the southern half of the Black Forest and another to envelop Stuttgart from the south and east. French tanks rumbled into the city on April 21—“like a merry-go-round,” De Lattre reported—and two days later the occupation was complete. When Devers on April 24 ordered his French subordinate to stand clear, De Gaulle stepped in. “I order you to keep a French garrison in Stuttgart … until the French zone of occupation has been settled,” he told De Lattre. Moreover, French field commanders were to ignore both Devers and Eisenhower. “French forces,” De Gaulle said, “should be employed in accordance with the national interest of France, which is the only interest that they should serve.” De Lattre apologized to Devers, but declared that he could “answer only to the French government.” Seventh Army’s chief of staff complained in his diary, “Penny politics by penny people.”
“The good and upright Devers was angrier than I have ever seen him,” De Lattre’s chief of staff reported, particularly after much of the German Nineteenth Army—though reduced to just seventeen thousand men—scampered off. Insult soon followed injury. The U.S. VI Corps approached the Danube city of Ulm to find that De Lattre’s tanks had arrived ten hours earlier, forty-four miles outside the designated French sector. When Devers again protested—“This is an absurdity which cannot exist and must not exist”—De Lattre pleaded that the city held special significance for France as the battlefield where Napoléon had routed the Austrian army in 1805. Again ignoring orders to decamp, the French general pressed his attack until a tricolor flew above Ulm. “De Lattre,” Devers later concluded, “was trying to be Napoleon.”
This opéra bouffe now grew sinister. German civilians fled Stuttgart to seek American protection from predatory French colonial troops. An English woman married to a German claimed that “every female between twelve and eighty” in her village had been assaulted. “Hens and women,” she added, “were the main thing they were after.” The U.S. 100th Division warned General Patch, “Situation in Stuttgart worst imaginable.… Rape, pillage and plunder have been rampant.” A reporter asserted that thousands of women were herded into a tunnel and raped; a French commander was said to have responded, with a shrug: “What can you do with the Moroccans?”
After advising De Lattre that “Stuttgart is chaotic,” Devers drove into the city at nine A.M. on Friday, April 27, to see for himself. He found the dire reports to be “greatly exaggerated”—rather than fifty thousand women raped, the figure was “fewer than two thousand,” some of whom had been violated by rampaging foreign workers or renegade Germans. Seventh Army noted dryly, “French procedure in occupying a German city is traditionally different from that of American forces.”
Eisenhower now intervened. In a tart cable to De Gaulle on April 28, he promised to inform London and Washington that “I can no longer count with certainty upon the operational use of any French forces they may contemplate equipping in the future.” The new U.S. president, Harry S. Truman, added his own rebuke in a note to De Gaulle.
But with a war to finish, neither Devers nor the supreme commander wanted to prolong this Gallic distraction. French troops for the moment would remain in Stuttgart, where the execution of a few rapists apparently persuaded Devers that “conditions were very much better.” Patch’s legions meanwhile pressed south. American intelligence agents outflanked the French to arrest some of the German scientists they sought in Hechingen, although the top prize, the Nobel physicist Werner Heisenberg, had pedaled off to Bavaria on his bicycle the previous day and would not be snared for another week.
Bickering over the French occupation zone would continue until a formal settlement was signed in late June. In addition to a sector in Berlin, Paris received a stretch of the Rhineland as far north as Remagen, but not Karlsruhe, Wiesbaden, or Stuttgart, as De Gaulle desired. France and the United States, whose blood camaraderie dated to the American Revolution, would emerge from the war as wary allies, their mutual mistrust destined to shape postwar geopolitics for decades.
Devers coined the perfect epigraph. “For many months we have fought together,” he wrote De Lattre, “often on the same side.”
* * *
A final monstrosity awaited discovery by American soldiers, further confirming not only the Reich’s turpitude but the inexorable moral corrosion of war, which put even the righteous at risk.
Ten miles northwest of Munich, a former gunpowder factory of the Royal Bavarian Army had, in March 1933, received the first of 200,000 prisoners. In the next twelve years, nearly a quarter of them would be murdered there and at the 170 subcamps to which Dachau metastasized. By the evening of April 28, when swastika flags were lowered and white flags raised at the main compound, 31,000 inmates from forty-one nations remained behind the electrified fence. Another 13,000 had died in the previous four months, mostly from typhus and starvation.
On a chilly, sunless Sunday morning, April 29, the 45th Infantry Division, bound for Munich and badly frayed after vicious gunfights in Aschaffenburg and Nuremberg, arrived in Dachau town. “There are flower beds and trees, small shops, bicycles on the ground, churches with steeples, a mirror-like river,” an Army physician wrote. There was more, as I Company of the 157th Infantry discovered upon following a rail spur toward the prison compound. Thirty-nine train cars—gondolas, passenger carriages, and boxcars—sat on the siding. Either in the cars or scattered along the tracks lay 2,310 decomposing corpses, some naked, others in tattered blue-and-white camp livery; most were Poles who had starved to death after being forcibly evacuated from Buchenwald. While GIs wept at the sight, four Waffen-SS soldiers emerged from hiding with hands high. A lieutenant herded the men into a boxcar and then emptied his pistol into them. Another GI pumped rifle rounds into those still moaning. “You sons of bitches,” the lieutenant shrieked. “You sons of bitches.”
As the Americans made for a side gate of the camp, thousands of inmates stood baying at the fence in a great keening babel. A decrepit old man offered a GI a stained cigarette. “Take it,” another inmate said in English. “That’s the only thing the guy owns in this world. That’s his everything.” Other prisoners cornered kapos and suspected informers, clubbing them with shovels. Howling inmates pursued remaining Waffen-SS troops, some of whom were masquerading in prison garb. “They tore the Germans apart by hand,” a soldier reported. Rabbi Eichhorn, who arrived at Dachau that afternoon, wrote, “We stood aside and watched while these guards were beaten to death, beaten so badly that their bodies were ripped open.… We watched with less feeling than if a dog were being beaten.” Inmates desecrated dead and dying Germans with sticks and rocks, crushing skulls and severing fingers. One guard’s “body was strewn all over the place,” a witness reported, “arms out of sockets.” After entering the compound, soldiers from I Company herded several dozen Germans against the eight-foot stucco wall of a coal yard where, without warning, a gunner manning a light machine gun on a tripod opened fire. Others joined in with carbines and a Browning Automatic Rifle. By the time an officer halted the fusillade, seventeen victims lay dead. A battalion surgeon refused to treat the SS wounded.
At the same hour, the vanguard of the 42nd Infantry Division arrived at the main gate to be welcomed by the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei signage and, a brigadier general recounted, “a yelling, seething mass of prisoners who broke through the steel wire fence at several places.… In this process several were electrocuted.” Sixteen Germans were rousted from a guard tower near the Würm River canal. Witnesses subsequently disagreed on whether any resisted, but upon being disarmed and assembled in two ranks the men were gunned down by soldiers from both the 42nd and 45th Divisions. Seven bodies lay like bloody bundles on the canal bank, with others heaved into the water “amidst a roar unlike anything ever heard from human throats,” an Associated Press reporter wrote.
The rampage spent itself. Medics arrived, and grave diggers. “I haven’t the words to tell you how horrible it really is,” an Army nurse wrote her husband. Doctors and soldiers assumed a spectral appearance upon being dusted with DDT powder each time they emerged from the compound. The 45th Division commander, Major General Robert T. Frederick, among the Army’s most valiant combat soldiers and the recipient of eight Purple Hearts, found Dachau too unnerving to discuss. To subordinates who had not been inside the fence, Frederick advised, “I wouldn’t bother. It’s just a mess.”
The Seventh Army inspector general soon arrived to investigate the “alleged mistreatment of German guards.” Word of bloodletting also reached Eisenhower, who subsequently spoke with high-ground eloquence in demanding that every division, corps, and army in Europe investigate extrajudicial killings by U.S. forces. “America’s moral position will be undermined and her reputation for fair dealing debased,” Eisenhower said, “if criminal conduct … by her armed forces is condoned and unpunished by those of us responsible for defending her honor.”
At least twenty-eight SS men had been gunned down after surrendering at Dachau, the inspector general concluded; he recommended that four U.S. soldiers be court-martialed for murder. Others believed that the death toll was higher and the culpability wider. A judge advocate officer confirmed “a violation of the letter of international law, in that SS guards seem to have been shot without trial.” But not a single prosecution followed, just as little would come of Eisenhower’s call for a comprehensive legal accounting from his subordinates across Europe. General Patch rejected much of the inspector general’s report, citing “an apparent lack of comprehension” of battle stresses. General Haislip, who soon succeeded Patch as Seventh Army commander, noted “the unbalancing effects of the horrors and shock of Dachau on combat troops already fatigued by more than thirty days’ continuous action.”
No doubt. Yet here surely was victor’s justice, tinged with the sour smell of sanctimony, a reminder that honor and dishonor often traveled in trace across a battlefield, and that even a liberator could come home stained if not befouled.
In a letter to her family about treating Dachau survivors, Lieutenant Wandrey, the Seventh Army nurse, invoked a wrenching conundrum:
I’m on night duty with a hundred corpse-like patients, wrecks of humanity.… Many have tuberculosis, typhus, enterocolitis (constant diarrhea) and huge bed sores.… Patients wear just pajama shirts as they can’t get the bottoms down fast enough to use commodes.
God, where are you?
As a specially designated “Führer City,” Munich was known to Hitler’s regime as both the “Capital of the Movement” and the “Capital of German Art.” To the U.S. Army it was, in Eisenhower’s phrase, the “cradle of the Nazi beast.” But for three days German insurgents hoping to spare the city further destruction had battled SS troops with sufficient ardor to help prevent the demolition of bridges across the river Isar. Resupplied with 400,000 gallons of gasoline delivered by air on April 29, four American divisions fell on the Führer City the next day, lunging across ten Isar spans before noon to reach the ruined city center. “Window by window” shelling with 240mm howitzers further ruined the ruins, and by nightfall on Monday, April 30, Munich had fallen. Across the Feldherrnhalle, site of annual festivities commemorating the 1923 putsch, GIs found a confession painted in huge white letters: “I am ashamed to be German.”
Three hundred miles north on that same Monday, Soviet souvenir-hunters prowled through a morgue full of dead German soldiers near Berlin’s Tiergarten, plucking Iron Crosses and swastikas from field-gray tunics. Other Red Army troops prepared to celebrate May Day by roasting an ox in Pariserplatz. Terrified Berliners by the thousands crowded a shelter beneath the Anhalter train station, where excrement and urine had risen ankle-deep. A number of SS troops convened behind the Schultheiss brewery to shoot themselves, but resistance persisted here and there across the capital in what a Soviet writer called “post-mortal convulsions.”
Far below the Reich Chancellery, listed on Soviet maps as Objective 106, Hitler ate a late lunch with his two secretaries and his dietician. Dressed in a uniform jacket and black trousers, he then shook hands with his staff, murmuring a few words of farewell before retreating to his study. Eva Braun, wearing a blue dress trimmed in white, joined him at 3:30 P.M. Only a rattle of ventilator fans and the distant grumble of artillery broke the silence. Ten minutes later, aides opened the study door to find Braun slumped on a sofa, dead from cyanide. Next to her sat the lifeless Führer, a bullet hole from a Walther PPK 7.65mm pistol in his right temple.
Twelve years and four months after it began, the Thousand-Year Reich had ended. Humanity would require decades, perhaps centuries, to parse the regime’s inhumanity, and to comprehend how a narcissistic beerhall demagogue had wrecked a nation, a continent, and nearly a world. “Never in history has such ruination—physical and moral—been associated with the name of one man, the chief instigator of the most profound collapse of civilization in modern times,” wrote Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw. Stalin, upon hearing the news, would need but a moment to compose the Führer’s epitaph: “So—that’s the end of the bastard.”
Henchmen wrapped the two bodies in blankets, carried them up four flights to the shell-pocked garden, doused them in gasoline, and let them burn for three hours, a small, pleasing blaze within the larger conflagration. “The chief’s on fire,” a drunk SS bodyguard called down into the bunker. “Do you want to come and have a look?” A chauffeur later complained that the ventilation fans wafted a stench of seared flesh through the labyrinth. “We could not get away from it,” he said. “It smelled like burning bacon.”
* * *
Hitler’s death, like his life, would prove predicate to a lie. Rather than disclosing that he had died by his own hand in a squalid rat trap, German radio on Tuesday, May 1, announced that he had “fallen for Germany” while “fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism.” The Wehrmacht high command decreed that the Führer’s “faithful unto death” example was to be “binding for all soldiers.”
But collapse now came with gravitational certainty: the jig was up. The last Soviet shells fell on Berlin at three P.M. on Wednesday, May 2, followed by a silence more ominous for Germans than the din of battle. Defenseless and disemboweled, the city gave itself over to an occupation that was to last half a century.
Fifty miles due west along the Elbe, where Simpson’s Ninth Army held the American left wing, tens of thousands of “hysterical, screaming Germans” fled the pursuing Red Army. “I saw German soldiers pushing old women out of boats in which they were trying to cross the river,” wrote James Wellard, a Chicago newspaper reporter at Tangermünde. Some shinnied across a catwalk laid over a blown rail bridge, or built plank rafts for baggage and bicycles; others paddled skiffs or fashioned water wings from empty fuel cans even as Soviet artillery searched the shoreline and German rear guards with submachine guns fought within earshot. Refugees “kept leaping into the fast-moving river and kept being washed back on shore,” Wellard added. “Dead, dying, and living were scrambled.”
Simpson agreed to accept surrendering Wehrmacht troops only if they brought their own food, kitchens, and medical supplies. More than seventy thousand eventually reached the west bank, where they tossed their battle kit onto piles of rifles, pistols, and field glasses before making for the cages in long, singing columns. A German colonel reported that “quite a few people who were not able to cross the Elbe killed themselves.”
On every fighting front, similar dramas reached their operatic crescendos.
In Italy, an offensive by a million and a half Allied soldiers from twenty-six countries had broken through the Po river valley on April 23. Five days later Mussolini and his mistress, gunned down by partisans, were strung up by their heels from a rusty beam outside a Milan gas station. “You had the feeling,” wrote Philip Hamburger in The New Yorker, “as you have at the final curtain of a good play, that events could not have been otherwise.” Allied troops soon swept into Verona, Genoa, and Venice. On April 29, at Field Marshal Alexander’s palatial headquarters in Caserta, German emissaries capitulated unconditionally. The surrender of nearly one million men from Army Group C, effective at noon on May 2, brought to an end the Mediterranean struggle that had begun five years earlier.
Along the Continent’s northern lip, Canadian troops pressed into the Netherlands with the prodigal use of flamethrowers and a sense of urgency: the starving Dutch had been reduced to eating nettle soup, laundry starch, the occasional cat or dog, and 140 million tulip bulbs. It was said that night watchmen in an Amsterdam mortuary rattled their keys to keep rats off the corpses, and that the Dutch were using the same hinged-bottom coffins over and over.
Allied engineers also feared that German demolitionists would flood western Holland by blowing the sea dikes. Secret negotiations led to a truce and safe passage for relief supplies by air beginning April 29 and by road on May 2. The subsequent surrender by General Blaskowitz of Army Group H and “Fortress Holland” triggered national jubilation: bonfires, singing, and dancing by a vast orange throng, even though more than 200,000 civilians were suffering from malnutrition. “The people here are obviously making up for five years of repression,” wrote a British brigadier. Gray columns of captured Germans snaked toward Den Helder for embarkation on trawlers and sweeps, thence across the IJsselmeer for the long trudge to prison.
“They left like tramps and criminals,” wrote Marsland Gander, a scribe for the Daily Telegraph.
They were allowed ten horses and five carts for every 180 men.… Two bicycles among every 500 men could be retained for the purposes of delivering messages.… Every man was searched and stripped of loot before he stepped on board the evacuation craft, being allowed only one fountain pen and one wristwatch. The piles of discarded property on the quayside and in warehouses included bicycles, sewing machines, furniture, radio sets, cases of gin, clothing, scent.
“It was,” Gander added, “a time of fairy-tale gladness.”
Farther east, where four British divisions outflanked Bremen, the port had fallen on April 27 following a five-day gunfight. A Tommy found Germans “looting, drinking, [and] fighting among each other” in a city he deemed “among the most debauched places on the face of God’s earth.” Montgomery crossed the lower Elbe with his usual deliberation even as Eisenhower repeatedly hectored him to hurry—the Soviets were making for Denmark. It was a near-run thing: British tanks seized Lübeck on May 2, and paratroopers sprinted another forty miles to capture Wismar on the Baltic, sealing the Jutland Peninsula and blocking entry to Denmark just two hours before the Red Army arrived. Hamburg surrendered without a fight on May 3, as Ridgway’s XVIII Airborne Corps—screening Montgomery’s right flank—racked up a quarter of a million prisoners in two days.
Among Anglo-American armies, Patton’s Third was now the farthest east. Czech villages hoisted pretty archways over approach roads, with flower garlands and signs proclaiming, “Welcome Americans”; identical arches on the far side of town proclaimed, “Welcome Russians.” The British had urged that Third Army capture Prague, because, as Churchill cabled Truman, such a prize “might make the whole difference to the postwar situation in Czechoslovakia.” Eisenhower was tempted, despite Marshall’s warning that “I would be loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes.” But Stalin had heeded American requests to halt on the Elbe, and thus the supreme commander affirmed his earlier commitment to stop along a line between Pilzen and Karlsbad in Bohemia. Patton’s legions beat for Linz and Pilzen, ceding Salzburg to Seventh Army and Prague to the Soviets.
Austrian partisans seized Innsbruck on May 2, and two days later VI Corps clattered into the city during a snowstorm, camping in a golf resort hotel with tennis courts and a Viennese orchestra. Just before eleven A.M. on Friday, May 4, a patrol from the 411th Infantry crossed the Brenner Pass to clasp hands with comrades from Fifth Army, a juncture of the European and Italian theaters two terrible years in the making. At Innsbruck’s city hall, General Erich Brandenberger surrendered the dregs of his Nineteenth Army in an elaborate ceremony with a written American script that specified the positioning of flags, orderlies, bandsmen, and even pencils. U.S. officers tendered neither salutes nor handshakes, but permitted Brandenberger’s men to keep their pistols along with one rifle and ten rounds of ammunition for every ten soldiers to preserve “internal security.”
At almost the same hour, Devers arrived by staff car with Generals Patch, Haislip, and O’Daniel at a sculptor’s studio in a sylvan glade outside Haar, southeast of Munich. Plaster cast models and statuary ranging from the miniature to the monumental filled the studio, where Lieutenant General Hermann Foertsch stood at rigid attention, ready to surrender both his First Army and Army Group G. As Devers and his lieutenants took their seats at a table, Foertsch bowed slowly from the hips. After a brief discussion of surrender provisions, including how to notify far-flung German units in the Alps that their war was over, Devers reiterated that all Army Group G soldiers between Switzerland and Czechoslovakia would now become prisoners.
“This is unconditional surrender,” Devers said. “Do you understand that?”
For a full minute Foertsch remained as stiff as the statues around him, a witness recorded, “the muscles of his face working like those of a man about to have convulsions.” Then with a slight cant of his head he replied in precise English, “I can assure you, sir, there is no power left at my disposal to prevent it.”
* * *
Few locales were more freighted with Teutonic sentiment than Berchtesgaden, a remote Bavarian village eighty miles southeast of Munich. Hitler had retreated here after the failed 1923 putsch, and here, in a log hut, he had written the second volume of Mein Kampf. Brisk book sales had financed his beloved vacation home—later known as the Berghof—on the Obersalzberg slopes above the town, with views of the mountain where Charlemagne and his mystic army were said to slumber. Other Nazi cronies also bought houses here to create a bucolic enclave conducive to pastoral husbandry—Bormann kept one hundred beehives on his tract—or the plotting of world domination.
As a gift for the Führer’s fiftieth birthday, and also as a venue for diplomatic receptions, the regime had hired almost four thousand workers to build a lavish mountaintop château nearby, dubbed the Eagle’s Nest. It came with the requisite spectacular vistas, as well as a grand Carrara marble fireplace donated by Mussolini; a Gobelin tapestry covered the wall above the hearth, like a pelt. Visitors drove up a serpentine road through five tunnels bored through the granite mountain, then ascended another four hundred feet to the summit in an Otis elevator appointed with Venetian glass, green leather benches, and brass fittings.
RAF bombers on April 25 had roiled this little brown world with a punitive raid that badly battered the Bormann and Göring houses, as well as Hitler’s Berghof and an adjacent SS barracks. Emboldened German looters then rifled the Obersalzberg, stealing Himmler’s furniture and Bormann’s collection of a thousand watercolors and drawings. News of the Führer’s death inspired SS bodyguards to burn his personal effects on May 1, and then set fire to the house as Allied armies drew near.
Flames still licked from various ruins when two battalions of the 3rd Infantry Division tramped into Berchtesgaden through meadows spangled with wildflowers at four P.M. on May 4. Under orders from General O’Daniel, officers posted a heavy guard on bridges across the Saalach River, barring both the approaching French 2nd Armored and the 101st Airborne Divisions from entering the village. “You’ve had Paris and you’ve had Strasbourg,” the XV Corps commander, General Haislip, told a fuming General Leclerc. “You can’t expect Berchtesgaden as well.” GIs lowered a Nazi flag and tore it into two-inch shreds for souvenirs.
Despite bombing, arson, and plunder, soldiers still found much to pillage on the Obersalzberg. Table linen, teacups, and spoons monogrammed “A.H.” could be found in the Berghof cellars, as well as phonograph records, magazines dating to 1930, and the toilet seat from a green-tiled water closet. GIs pilfered light fixtures, bedsprings, and high-command situation maps for various theaters. An officer poking through Eva Braun’s closet remarked, “What impressed me most was the number of coat hangers in her wardrobes. There must have been more than two hundred of them.” A nearby guesthouse yielded an espresso machine, a beer tap, and deep-freeze ice cream tubs.
RAF bombs had spared the Eagle’s Nest, but suspected booby traps in the elevator shaft meant a long, steep climb to the summit. Scouts found a dining room with blackout curtains and twenty-six chairs, furniture and paneling of cembra pine, and a pristine kitchen with a butcher’s block that appeared never to have felt a cleaver’s bite. Mussolini’s fireplace was so enormous, a visitor wrote, that “an ox could turn on the spit.” Soon three thousand Allied soldiers a day would tramp up to the Eagle’s Nest as tourists, ten thousand on Sundays. Bored, gum-chewing paratroopers were pressed into duty as guides.
Göring’s booty proved especially vast and varied, much of it crammed into a warehouse with a large bank vault inside: eighteen thousand bottles of wine and liquor; five thousand Minox cameras the size of cigarette lighters; two dozen suitcases stuffed with women’s underwear; an impressive cache of pornographic movies; and a bulletproof, fourteen-passenger Mercedes sedan. In nearby rail tunnels and other repositories, paratroopers found much of his notorious art collection, said to be worth more than $500 million: hundreds of paintings by the likes of Rembrandt, Rubens, and Van Dyck, as well as a Vermeer forgery, Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery; terra-cotta saints, satyrs, and warriors; tapestries, antique furniture, gold chalices, porcelain figurines. An inn was converted into a temporary gallery with a placard outside that read: “Hermann Goering Art Collection—Through Courtesy of the 101st Airborne Division.” “Ah, war!” sighed Göring’s personal curator, who was seized along with the swag. “Goodbye, goodbye.”
The Reichsmarschall himself soon materialized, having offered his services to Eisenhower “in reorganizing the German Reich.” Arrested by the 36th Division thirty-five miles southeast of Salzburg, with an entourage of seventy-five vassals that included a chef, a butler, and a valet, Göring was fed fried chicken and photographed in front of a Texas Lone Star flag, his many chins cascading to the Iron Cross at his throat. To ward off SS assassins, he was permitted to keep four machine pistols overnight. “He is a fat slob, very anxious to talk about how the mistakes were Hitler’s and Ribbentrop’s,” General Dahlquist told his diary. Wearing sky-blue gloves, he claimed in a breezy session with correspondents that accounts of unpleasantries at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald were “merely propaganda reports.” “I am no prophet,” he added. “It is hard to say what will happen in the future.” His marshal’s baton, sixteen inches long and encrusted with 640 diamonds, twenty gold eagles, and twenty platinum crosses, became a prop to sell war bonds in the United States.
And then there was one. The last German headquarters still at large in the Alps was that of Field Marshal Kesselring, the Anglo-Americans’ longtime nemesis. Two reporters tracked down the OB West commander as he awaited the end of the war aboard a five-car train along the Austrian border. Assuming they were Eisenhower emissaries come to negotiate his personal surrender, Kesselring invited them to a lunch of ham, cabbage, potatoes, and beer. Upon discovering his error, Smiling Albert chuckled and muttered, “Well, bugger me.”
An American major subsequently invited Kesselring to move to the Berchtesgadener Hof, where he was given the finest room and permitted to keep his pistol, medals, and marshal’s baton—“Six of these I have left behind in the ruins of command posts,” he lamented—before being remanded to a more austere cell in Luxembourg where war-crimes interrogators awaited him. Asked before his departure to assess Hitler, the field marshal took a deep breath and replied, “Hitler was the most remarkable historical character I ever knew.”