38

On to Berlin!

AT THE END of the Yalta conference Churchill and Roosevelt left for the Middle East. On 15 February Churchill again met the US President aboard the heavy cruiser USS Quincy. As Churchill observed, ‘The President seemed placid and frail. I felt that he had a slender contract with life.’¹ He was right. Exhausted by the war, but with the end in sight, Roosevelt was in need of a rest. He travelled to the ‘Little White House’, his cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, for a fortnight of relaxation before the founding conference of the United Nations. At 1.00 p.m. on 12 April Roosevelt was in the living room of his cottage surrounded by friends and family, having his portrait painted. The conversation was lively, the atmosphere congenial.

The president turned to the artist, and having reminded her that they had only fifteen minutes left, suddenly announced, ‘I have a terrific pain in the back of my head’. He slumped forward unconscious, and died very shortly afterwards of a massive cerebral haemorrhage. Despite the fact that most Americans knew he was not a well man, suffering from polio since 1921, the president’s death was met with great shock and grief around the world – particularly among the GIs serving in Europe, whom he had brought through the Great Depression; they had barely known another president within their lifetimes. Many, hardened in combat, nevertheless broke down in tears.

The extent of FDR’s paralysis had been kept secret – he was never seen in a wheelchair in public, for example – but his declining health had not been obvious. His relative youth made the event more tragic – he was only sixty-three. He had been elected to the White House in November 1932, two months before Hitler came to power in Germany, when thirteen million Americans were unemployed. After twelve years in office, several of them under the added stress of steering his nation through a world conflict, Roosevelt was simply worn out. Harry Truman immediately acceded to the White House, but had only become vice-president on 20 January, replacing Henry A. Wallace, who thus missed being the thirty-third President of the United States by eighty-two days.

The day after Roosevelt’s death, the Red Army captured Vienna. Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group had fanned out, with Hodges’ US First Army advancing as the southern limb creeping around the Ruhr pocket. On 4 April, the encirclement was completed, with Hodges’ and Simpson’s armies linking up, whereupon Simpson and his army reverted to Bradley’s command. Field Marshal Model had placed the bulk of his Army Group ‘B’ in the Ruhr because he was convinced the Allies would aim straight for this important manufacturing heartland. Instead, his army group, which had given the Western Allies so much trouble since Normandy, was trapped in the Ruhr pocket and its 325,000 remaining soldiers became prisoners. Among the defenders of the Rhine pushed back towards the Ruhr was Hauptmann Otto Carius, who had received his Knight’s Cross from Himmler the previous year. Commanding a company of massive Jagdtigers (seventy-ton assault guns armed with a 128mm cannon), he surrendered his unit to US forces on 15 April.

Blind to military logic, Hitler had blamed Model for the failure in the Ardennes, and on 21 January issued an order overriding the field marshal’s authority, and asserting that in future all the divisions of Army Group ‘B’ would be personally responsible to him. By then, Hitler was making insane pronouncements. The capture of the Remagen bridge compounded Model’s ‘guilt’, and when, in early April, Model’s formation was surrounded in the Ruhr, Hitler’s malevolent response was to forbid surrender or attempts to break out, and order the destruction of the area’s economic infrastructure. Model saw this for what it was – a death sentence to future German generations – and for the first time in his life he deliberately disobeyed his Führer.

Instead of fighting on, he disbanded his army group, discharging from military service the oldest and youngest and granting the remainder permission to surrender or break out, which caused the ultra-loyal Goebbels to denounce the entire formation, Model included, as traitors to the Reich. This left any defence in the west up to ad hoc garrisons consisting of a few Wehrmacht professionals, armed police, roving SS squads, Luftwaffe Flak units, Volkssturm, Hitler Youth and a miscellany of menacing Nazi Party auxiliaries. Most coordinated resistance had broken down – some towns and cities resisted, many did not. Everything Model had stood for was in tatters, and the regime he had fought for disowned him. His conflicts of loyalty and fears of war crimes trials in Russia led him to shoot himself on 21 April. Ten years later, as his son Brigadier-General Hans-Georg Model, a retired Bundeswehr officer related to me, the field marshal’s remains were recovered from his lonely woodland grave and he now shares a military headstone with the anonymous Hermann Henschke in the Vossenack Soldiers’ Cemetery near to the Hürtgen Forest.²

At this stage SHAEF feared a large-scale last stand by SS fanatics from an ‘Alpine Redoubt’ in the mountains of Bavaria and Austria. This was National Socialist propaganda – the fruit of Himmler’s and Goebbels’ overactive imagination – but SHAEF’s G-2 Department, led by General Kenneth Strong, was determined not to be caught out a second time as they had been by the Ardennes attack. Noel Annan, the intelligence officer at SHAEF, recalled the rumours that ‘desperadoes in disguise, called werewolves, were said to be planning sabotage and assassinations; a werewolf headquarters was said to have been captured. Strong excused himself for taking these phantoms seriously by saying that after the Ardennes he would not risk another miscalculation of German resistance.’³ It gave the Russians an excuse – if one was needed – to execute or deport around 10,000 young German males, who may or may not have been complicit, but much (unnecessary as it turned out) Allied attention was thus shifted towards southern Germany.

Stores, currency and weapons were certainly secreted away and no doubt impressive quantities still lie concealed in salt mines and other hidden venues, providing plots for future novelists, but the werewolves amounted to little more than angry Hitler Youth scattering nails and glass on German roads. In reality, they were a distant echo of Churchill’s Auxiliary Units, set up in 1940 to sabotage and cause mayhem in a German-occupied Britain. Colonel-General Nikolai Berzarin, Soviet commandant of Berlin, died in suspicious circumstances, and Bremen’s US Military Police HQ blew up, which may have been an accident; a few unfortunate jeep crews were decapitated by wires stretched across country roads; the Allied governor of Aachen was assassinated; and one of Montgomery’s liaison officers, Major John Poston, was ambushed and killed on 21 April 1945, but these were isolated incidents rather than a coordinated national movement. In truth, German citizens were sick of war.

Meanwhile, another formation had arrived in Europe, the US Fifteenth Army, and Lieutenant-General Leonard Gerow was promoted from V Corps to command it. Its task from mid-January 1945 was rehabilitating, re-equipping and training various units of Bradley’s army group that had suffered heavy losses during the Ardennes campaign. The Fifteenth also processed all new units arriving into theatre and on 15 March it assumed command of the forces that were bottling up the German forces left behind in the French Atlantic ports. Later on, with Simpson’s Ninth, it contained and then helped capture the 325,000 Army Group ‘B’ soldiers trapped in the Ruhr pocket, later taking on responsibility for processing many displaced persons (DPs), the forced civilian labourers roaming the Reich, often armed, sometimes disease-ridden and frequently dangerous.

Most Wehrmacht prisoners were interned in nineteen Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine meadow camps), overseen by the US Army. These eventually held between one and two million German troops, until demobilised by September 1945. Controversially, they were not designated Prisoners of War (PW), but Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEF) and thus not subject to protection by the Geneva Convention. The huge numbers defeated US attempts at administration and prisoners were left to run their own camps, with maybe as many as 10,000 (one historian has alleged a million, which cannot be right) dying from starvation, disease, dehydration and exposure because of poor sanitation and the lack of buildings – most lived in Wehrmacht or GI-issued tentage.⁴

This may seem shocking in the twenty-first century (a 1969 US military review would admit grave shortcomings), but in the context of the concentration camps, personally witnessed by many GIs – when Patton toured the Ohrdruf prison camp, near Weimar with Bradley and Ike on 12 April, the tough-as-nails general allegedly vomited – ‘factories of murder’ as one still-distressed GI tried to explain to me, the vengeful mood was understandable.

On 18 April, war photographer Lee Miller had followed the US 2nd Infantry Division into Leipzig, where she came across a young infantry captain who had taken the surrender of the entire metropolis. This caused huge problems as his tiny force could not cope with the number of prisoners, or the daunting prospect of temporarily running a major city. He was Charles MacDonald, whom we first met dodging German bullets on 16 December.⁵ Ironically, the last Nazi diehards had dug in around the giant 300-foot memorial commemorating an earlier battle for Leipzig – the ‘Battle of the Nations’ which saw an earlier coalition of Russia, Prussia, Austria and Sweden beat Napoleon around the city in October 1813.

Nearby at the same time was Lieutenant-Colonel J. Strom Thurmond, the Civil Affairs officer who had landed by glider on D-Day with the 82nd Airborne Division. Recently awarded a Bronze Star, the former judge was totally unprepared for the scenes of horror when he entered Buchenwald concentration camp south-west of the city: ‘I had never seen such inhumane acts in my life. I couldn’t dream of treating men in such a manner,’ he recollected. The future Senator from South Carolina thought, ‘It was awful. It was very difficult to say what effect it has on anybody, but it’s an experience you never would forget’.⁶

Later on in April, the US First and Ninth Armies came level with the Elbe river, the demarcation zone between the Western and Russian forces agreed at Yalta, and Patton’s Third Army had stretched into western Czechoslovakia, Bavaria and northern Austria. Devers’ Sixth Army Group headed south-west, into Austria and northern Italy; the Black Forest and Baden were overrun by the French First Army. Meanwhile, the British and Canadians had moved north-east towards Hamburg, crossing the River Elbe and on towards Denmark and the Baltic. Much controversy exists as to whether American forces should have strayed beyond the Elbe, but this was never Eisenhower’s call to make.

Ike had formally communicated to Stalin on 28 March that he was not interested in taking Berlin. He and Bradley were subsequently much criticised by their fellow countrymen for holding off an attack on the German capital, but his many critics were (and remain) only vocal because of the gift of hindsight: in April 1945 the Cold War was still distant, and neither general wanted to be held responsible for the tens of thousands of GI casualties Berlin would have cost. Stalin’s 1 April response to Eisenhower was that he was not interested in Berlin either, stating, ‘Berlin has lost its strategic importance. Only secondary forces will be allotted to its capture … The main thrust by Soviet forces will begin in the second half of May.’ He lied, and on the same day, in what some historians have termed the world’s largest ‘April Fool’, the Russian leader immediately tasked Koniev and Zhukov, his two most competitive and aggressive field commanders, to seize the city, now knowing he had a free hand.

However, Eisenhower was not alone in failing to see the writing on the wall in terms of future East–West relations. At the end of April, with idle US forces on the Czech frontier, Ike proposed liberating Prague, alone of all the capitals of central Europe yet to be freed. Despite the fact that there were no Soviet troops within seventy miles of the Czech capital, Ike’s suggestion was met by violent protest from Stalin – Czechoslovakia was to be in the Soviet sphere of interest and Czech gratitude to America for its liberation would not be welcome in Moscow.⁷ When asked on 8 May by journalists, ‘General, why didn’t we take Prague?’ Patton observed without further comment, ‘I can tell you exactly why … Because we were ordered not to’, which told the world all it needed to know.⁸

Stalin was amazed that American incursions into southern Germany and up to the Czech border hadn’t met more resistance; in fact there was precious little German will, or the means with which to oppose the US Army – but the ever-paranoid Stalin thought otherwise. He assumed the Nazis and Americans were doing ‘some kind of a deal’ together at his expense. In one of the small patrols from the Russian and US armies that eventually made contact around noon on 25 April on the Elbe was PFC Igor Belousovitch of the US Sixty-Ninth Division, who could so easily have been one of the Russian Cossack detachment he met. His parents were Russians who had fled the Revolution, first to Shanghai, where Igor was born in 1922, then to America.⁹

The Russian troops, wearing fur hats and sporting their medals, glinting in the sun, on their combat tunics, marvelled at the American armour. Unaware that the Sherman tanks operated by many Red Army units had been built in the United States and shipped in convoys to the USSR, the Russians wondered why the US Army were using tanks manufactured by the Soviet people. Their leaders never told them about Lend-Lease.

The union of the armies meant that Germany was a Reich no longer. It had been sliced in two. The following day, 26 April, Major-Generals Emil Reinhardt and Vladimir Rusakov, commanders of the US 69th Infantry Division of Hodges’ First Army and the 58th Guards Rifle Division of General Aleksei Zhadov’s Russian Fifth Guards Army respectively, met formally at Torgau, south-west of Berlin. This was an important propaganda event for both sides, Soviet and American, and rare 35mm colour footage exists of the iconic moment ‘when East met West’, as the specially painted signboards proclaimed. The movie cameraman was Lieutenant-Colonel George Stevens, a Hollywood professional who had left the world of movies in 1942 to serve overseas. He formed SPECOU (the Special Coverage Unit of the US Army Signal Corps), better known as the Hollywood Irregulars, and his six hours of spectacular Second World War colour (not colourised) footage is unique, only seeing the light of day after his death in 1975.¹⁰

Adolf Hitler had celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday in the Berlin Reich Chancellery – where the final details of Herbstnebel had been decided – on 20 April, the last occasion that most of the old guard turned up to congratulate him. Earlier, on 16 April, Russian troops had forced their way across the River Oder and started punching their way through the final Wehrmacht positions protecting Berlin on the Seelow Heights. To take Berlin – ever since Stalingrad a Russian dream, whatever the US and British aspirations were – the Soviets had some 2.5 million troops available, equivalent to all the Western armies put together, 6,250 tanks and 7,500 aircraft. This was a prize to be attained regardless of human lives or material destruction.

By the 19th the defenders were streaming back and, on Hitler’s birthday, for the first time Russian guns could be heard bombarding the capital. The following day the first Soviet tanks began poking through the city’s outskirts. An unwelcome birthday present was the news that Nuremberg, symbolic cradle of the Third Reich and defended by 7,000 fanatics, had fallen to the US Seventh Army, with the Stars and Stripes flying over Adolf Hitler Platz that very day. Photographer Lee Miller stopped by its remains, levelled by the Allied air forces, where she felt, ‘This is the first German city or possession of any kind I feel sorry for having wrecked’ – but that was before she encountered Dachau.¹¹

On 25 April, Zhukov had closed his ring of steel around the capital: there was no way out. For many German and Russian soldiers this would be a fight to the death. There are many conspiracy theories as to what finally happened to the German leader, but it appears that, as the security situation deteriorated, Hitler and his entourage withdrew into the Führerbunker complex beneath the Chancellery. With the nearest Russian troops about two hundred yards away, after midnight on 29 April, Hitler married his long-term mistress Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony and the following day at about 3.30 p.m. the pair committed suicide, Hitler by gunshot, his new wife by poison. His death coincided with the capture by three US divisions of the birthplace of Nazism, Munich.

One of the few witnesses to Hitler’s last days was Hans Krebs, Model’s chief of staff at Army Group ‘B’ throughout the Ardennes; by April he had succeeded Guderian as Chief of the Army General Staff (OKH), the last of a long line of generals dating back to Gerhard von Scharnhorst, first appointed in 1808. Krebs later observed the suicide of the Goebbels family on 1 May, and blew out his own brains in the garden of the Führerbunker the following morning. Another individual skulking around Hitler’s headquarters was the odious Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke, who had commanded the 1st SS Division in the Ardennes and thus bore some responsibility for Malmedy and other massacres.

Mohnke had been wounded in an air raid and once recovered was charged with the defence of the Führerbunker. After his leader’s death, Mohnke tried to lead a group of headquarters staff to safety, but, finding Russian soldiers everywhere, surrendered on 2 May 1945.¹² The day also saw Soviet war photographer Yevgeny Khaldei taking his iconic images of Russian soldiers unfurling a huge Red Army flag from the roof of the Reichstag. Below lay a smoking city of dead cars and tanks, gun barrels split like celery, arranged on a canvas of corpses and rubble. Berlin had fallen.

To the north, Miles Dempsey’s Second Army captured Bremen on 26 April after a week of combat, and British and Canadian paratroopers reached the Baltic city of Wismar just ahead of Soviet forces on 2 May. Two days later Montgomery took the military surrender of all German forces in Holland, north-west Germany and Denmark on Lüneburg Heath, an area between the cities of Hamburg, Hanover and Bremen, taking effect on the 5th. On this day occurred one of the most bizarre incidents of the war, underlining the chaotic nature of the dying days of the Reich.

Sherman tanks of the US 12th Armored Division’s 23rd Tank Battalion liberated the idyllic Austrian castle, Schloss Itter, in the Tyrol. Its inhabitants were hostages of the Reich, including former French prime ministers Paul Reynaud and Eduard Daladier, a sister of de Gaulle and Generals Weygand and Gamelin. Their reverie of freedom was soon interrupted when diehard fanatics of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division arrived to execute the prisoners. As the Frenchmen and GIs prepared to fight for their lives, they were joined by a squad of Wehrmacht guards, led by two German officers, Major Gangl of the Wehrmacht and Hauptsturmführer Schrader of the SS, who took up arms with the Allies against their former colleagues. The motley coalition only narrowly prevailed against their would-be executioners with the help of local Austrian partisans.¹³

On 7 May at his headquarters in the Technical College of Reims, Eisenhower accepted the unconditional surrender of all German forces to the Western Allies and the Soviet Union; it was signed for SHAEF by Bedell Smith and for the Third Reich by General Alfred Jodl, with Russian and French witnesses, effective the following day, which was designated VE (Victory in Europe) Day. Susan Hibbert, a British sergeant working in SHAEF, then signalled the War Office in London: ‘The mission of this Allied Force was fulfilled at 02.41 a.m. local time, 7 May 1945’. The building, at 12 rue Franklin Roosevelt, now houses a fine little museum recording the event. As the Russians wanted their own surrender ceremony, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, as head of OKW and Jodl’s superior, signed an identical document to the one agreed at Reims, at Karlshorst, near Berlin, on 8 May, with Tedder acting for Eisenhower, witnessed by Carl Spaatz and de Lattre de Tassigny. It was 143 days after the Battle of the Bulge had begun.

In his last will and testament, Hitler appointed Grand Admiral Dönitz as his successor, who broadcast the news of his predecessor’s demise to the world on 1 May and set up a new German government in the Fatherland’s most northern city, Flensburg. It ran a mere sliver of territory (in reality no more than a Nazi theme park centred on the Naval Officers’ Academy at nearby Mürwik) until 23 May. Dönitz and company spent most of their three-week existence moving soldiers and civilians out of Russian clutches. With their arrest a brief power vacuum ensued until the dissolution of the Third Reich on 5 June, when the United States, Russia, Great Britain and France assumed direct control of the administration of Germany, with absolute powers. Only on 30 August did the Allied Control Commission, then running Germany (yet to be sub-divided into occupation zones), prohibit the wearing of German military uniform. The Nazi Party was formally disbanded on 10 October and on 12 November, the German Armed Forces. Thus, like the Bulge, it is perhaps difficult to state definitively when the Third Reich disappeared for good.

For some, the anxieties of war and peace continued for weeks. It was only on 29 May, twenty-one days after the surrender, that a letter reached Indianapolis, where Kurt Vonnegut, Sr, learned that his son, who had been listed as missing in action since 22 December, was alive; the younger Vonnegut had been liberated earlier by the Red Army. Meanwhile, Otto Skorzeny, the SS commando leader, had become ‘the most wanted man in Europe’, when identified as the brains behind the supposed December plan to kill Eisenhower. The six-foot-two-inch, scar-faced Austrian had become a mythical bogeyman to Allied troops but his capture descended into farce. When he presented himself at an American command post on 15 May, the sergeant at the desk shook his head, being too busy to book in prisoners. Nevertheless he provided a jeep to take the guest, in the full dress uniform of a Waffen-SS Obersturmbannführer, to divisional headquarters in Salzburg.

The driver of the jeep knew the name, pulled into a tavern and ordered a bottle of wine. ‘Skorzeny is it? If you are Skorzeny, you’d better take a drink. Tonight you’ll hang.’ Yet on reaching Salzburg, the GI left Skorzeny, still armed, outside a hotel and drove off to take lunch. The SS officer spent the rest of the day being passed between unsuspecting officers before it suddenly dawned on someone that Europe’s most wanted man was in their midst, whereupon he was arrested, disarmed, handcuffed and taken in a convoy of armoured cars, an automatic pressed against his heart throughout, to a higher HQ where he was paraded before the exploding flashlights of the world’s press. ‘It was thought best to keep Skorzeny with his hands manacled behind his back,’ reported the Daily Express. ‘When he was given a cigarette, it was lit for him and he had to have the ash shaken off him. A glass of water was held to his lips.’¹⁴ The war correspondents cowered in his presence; according to the New York Times, ‘Skorzeny certainly looks the part. He is striking in a tough way; a huge powerful figure. The Beast of Belsen [Josef Kramer, its Commandant, just arrested] is something out of a nursery in comparison.’¹⁵

Of the other attackers in the Bulge, the diminutive Hasso von Manteuffel had afterwards been given command of the Third Panzer Army on the Eastern Front, but managed to move his formation westwards before capitulating to British troops at Hagenow, south of Schwerin, on 3 May. Erich Brandenberger had gone on to lead the German Nineteenth Army, which he surrendered to General Edward H. Brooks of the US VI Corps, at Innsbruck on 5 May. After their unsuccessful defence of Vienna, the bulk of the 1st SS Panzer Division – minus their panzers – headed for the US–Soviet demarcation line at Enns in upper Austria.

Among those who crossed westwards before a 01.00 a.m. curfew on 9 May was Hans Hennecke, then Training Company commander, overseeing sixteen- and seventeen-year-old recruits. ‘We threw away our weapons, officers retained their pistols. It was night, we were anxious we would not cross in time. Some of my recruits had become children again in their fear. We knew what the Russians would do to us. At the checkpoint the Americans removed many of our decorations for souvenirs, which greatly offended us. They regarded us as walking Christmas trees, thinking our hard-won decorations were as festive baubles to be had for the taking,’ he remembered. Hennecke remained in American hands. His colleagues caught in the Soviet zone were never seen again.¹⁶ With him was his Kampfgruppe commander in the Bulge, Jochen Peiper, who kept his identity secret and subsequently escaped captivity. He was rearrested on 28 May, but not identified until 21 August. His army commander, Sepp Dietrich, turned himself over to Master Sergeant Herbert Kraus of the US 36th Infantry Division at Berchtesgaden on 8 May.

Another master sergeant, Forrest C. Pogue, remembered the last day of the European War, D+336, in the Czech city of Pilsen. As he recorded in his diary: ‘heard the official announcement of VE Day. Was glad I heard it in Czechoslovakia; one of the first of Germany’s victims … No blackouts: to many of the fellows, that was the best thing they had ever seen.’¹⁷