Schwerpunkt: From D-Day to the Fall of the Third Reich (45 page)

As Patton’s tanks hit the roads Hitler built for his Volk and their wagens, he raced across Germany. It took him just about three days to reach Frankfurt, Germany. We heard that in the process, he captured somewhere around 20,000 Kraut soldiers who all but begged to be captured. He reported that the German defenses were nowhere near what they had been even weeks before but still the Germans fight on. He moved his command post to some small Kraut town so he could finally say he was commanding his troops from German soil.

As we continued eastward through Germany, Bavaria and Austria, our troops began to encounter the first of the Nazi concentration camps where unspeakable horrors had been taking place. The Russians had reported finding a camp at Auschwitz in Poland but now we were finding even more of these ghastly places. Reports of piles of human skeletal remains, mass graves, gas chambers and barracks with living skeletons came in day after sickening day. If it had been only one person who reported what he had seen, no one would have believed him. But as it was, report after report came in about places with names such as Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, Mauthausen and a whole bunch more. It was becoming clear that this was a systematic atrocity which defies human rationality. Whatever empathy our soldiers may have had with the hard fighting, professional German soldiers, it evaporated when we saw what they were fighting for. There is no sympathy for the Germans anymore. The feeling now is they are getting what they deserve.

On April 25, 1945, the Americans and the Russians met in a small town on the Elbe River. This link up meant that the two fronts running through Germany were now secure and the war was all but over. We received a communiqué from Heinrich Himmler of all goddamn people, telling us he would surrender to us but not to the Russians. We told him to take a long walk off a short plank. There was not going to be any division between the Allieds at this late date and Germany would surrender unconditionally or we would continue fighting until its leader agreed. So the Russians continued their march to Berlin and five days later, they surrounded Hitler’s Chancery. Fighting continued by desperate Germans but it took only two more days for the Russians to overcome the German opposition. They flew their red flag with its hammer and sickle over the ruins of the Reichstag on May 2, 1945.

Ike really is a genius. He is so unassuming and political, but he really thinks of his men at all times. His decision to let the Russians get to Berlin before us meant that they sustained the casualties which we didn’t have to share in. We found out that in the battle for Berlin, the Russians lost more than a quarter million more men. As it was, we had enough trouble in the rest of Germany without worrying about Berlin itself. The records showed we had the Krauts outnumbered at greater than 3:1 and our air raids left most of Germany in rubble. But there were still remaining pockets of German resistance throughout the goddamn country which we were going to have to eliminate while the Russians duked it out with the hard core Krauts defending Berlin. With all this bad stuff electrifying the Germans, isn’t it time for them to pull the plug?

I just got a letter telling me that Harold’s 4th Infantry Division crossed the Rhine at the end of March and after securing a bridgehead across the second big river, the Main, they advanced southeast across Bavaria, and headed towards Miesbach.

April 30, 1945

Hello again Big Brother.

Just so you don’t have to waste valuable time tracking my whereabouts and can concentrate on getting this awful mess we call a war over with faster, I will tell you that I am over the Rhine River and in Krautland. It was a heck of a journey and I thought I was a goner, especially the day that a screaming meemie landed not even twenty yards away from me. Are you covered in sweat just thinking about that because I sure am. I still wake up at night and say a Thank You prayer to Great God Almighty Above. It didn’t go off like it should have. When it landed, it fizzled and broke open and then as Miss Scarlett said, “As God is my Witness…” a note fell out of it. I still have it and it says, “This for you is the best I can do.” It was a 250 pound dud, Frank. It must have been made by someone whose first loyalties obviously didn’t lie with the Jerries. Well whoever made that thing, he sure saved my kiester!

I’m now in a little town just this side of a bunch of mountains and lakes. The area is called Bavaria and the men wear those shorts, the proper name of which is “Lederhosen.” The women wear these low cut dresses that none of us can seem to get enough of. One guy got into some trouble because of that too.

There’s this other guy from Chicago in my unit. He’s a Mick from the South Side around 35th Street. As we went through village after village, we were seeing white flags hung out of almost every window. Seems the Volk have had enough of that rat Hitler and they are now welcoming us, sort of like liberators. While that was a pleasing surprise after all the hostility and fighting we’ve been through, the better part of it means that we’re finally getting to meet some women! Good old young German women! The young ones aren’t too bad looking either. I know, I know. The Rules against fraternization and all that. But when my buddy Danny got caught setting up a rendezvous with one of the young Frauleins, his looey told him that if he went through with it, the fine was $65, as the rule sets out. Danny says to him, “Listen Boy-o, Sir. That dame is cheap at twice the price.” And damn if he didn’t go out with her and damn if he didn’t have to fork over the $65 fine.

So besides the beautiful dames, Frank, the area is breathtaking and the march getting here wasn’t too bad. You would think the fighting would have been easing up because so many German soldiers we encountered did everything but throw themselves at us begging to be captured. Yet just when we’d think we were out of the woods, some German kid (and I do mean kid) would be in a tree or behind a house or around a corner and he’d start opening up on us. We hated to kill these misguided youths but they generally gave us no choice. I’m not about to die this close to the end, Frank. I can’t think this thing is going to go on another month and if I had my way, it’d be over yesterday. It’s so close I think I can almost taste it. I know you’ve been praying for me this whole time, Frank, but now I just want to go back home so say an extra prayer that I make it, ok Bro?

Love you and hope to see you back in Chicago in a month. But you got to buy the soda at Woolworths.

Harold

I’ll buy him a dozen sodas the second I see him back at home. I too can’t wait, though I’ll only get leave. I’m going to still be here for a while because I just re-upped. Somebody has to make sure the innocents are taken care of after we beat the shit out of Hitler, which was happening even as Harold wrote his letter. On May 1, 1945, a day that will live in famy or whatever the opposite of infamy is, we found out that that son of a bitch Hitler is dead. He died somehow, we don’t yet know the details but he was found in his bunker. I can only hope it was a slow, excruciating death since that bastard deserves only the worst. But still there was no word that a surrender was coming. Why the guy who was next in line didn’t call off the goddamn war the second Hitler breathed his last is a mystery to me. The fight was out of about 99% of the Krauts, but it wasn’t out of all of them yet and so the fighting still continued.

The guy who took over the helm was Admiral Karl Dönitz of the German Navy fame. He clearly wanted to end the war and made attempt after attempt to surrender to the Americans or British but because Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin had all previously agreed that none of them would seek out a separate peace, his offers were refused. It was to be an unconditional surrender to all Allieds or we’d keep beating the shit out of them. So while the Kraut politicians continued trying to save as much of their country as they could, various commanders surrendered their troops to the Allieds (well the Americans and British, not the Soviets) all during the next week.

Montgomery had accepted the surrender of all German troops west of the Elbe from Admiral von Friedeburg on May 4, 1945. General Horrocks who had come across what he called the “Horror Camps” during his march across Germany, accepted the surrender of German troops under General von Blumentritt in early May. He told us that von Blumentritt’s Chief of Staff tried to tell General Horrocks that it wasn’t the soldiers who were responsible for the concentration camps, it was the SS. General Horrocks said he saw regular German soldiers guarding the camps and told von Blumentritt’s man to sit down and shut up. He said the world would never forgive Germany for those camps.

On May 7, 1945 at 0241 in the morning, Hitler’s prior Chief of Staff, Alfred Jodl, signed the unconditional surrender document presented to him on behalf of the Allieds by General Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, General Walter Bedell Smith. With this document, all German forces on all fronts surrendered unconditionally. How Beetle didn’t jump across that table and wring that son of a bitch’s neck, I’ll never know. A Soviet general was there to sign for his country and a French general was there to sign for his but no one remembered to include the French so it took a while for the documents to be rewritten in French, but it took even longer to find a French flag. I heard they made one by tearing up strips of red, white and blue fabric but then sewed them in the wrong order so they had to rip it apart and re-sew it. I wonder how we could have forgotten them?

The war is over. I knew I’d be able to utter those words some day but I didn’t know when. Sometimes I thought it would have been before now and sometimes I thought it wouldn’t be this soon. But I’m uttering those beautiful words over and over now. Me and about a billion other people. The war is over but we still have so much work to do to get the world back into some semblance of order. I mean, just look at the tons of bombs dropped and the number of people killed, wounded and displaced. Look at the German people for Chrissakes. Who is going to run their country now and what are we going to do with the Nazi bastards still left standing? We’ll create an Occupation Army and see how the Jerries like being occupied. They sure did more than their share of occupying unwilling countries in the past. The difference is we’re not occupying Germany because of aspirations of conquest. We’re occupying it because their quest to conquer every square inch of Europe failed. And thank God it did.

Harold will be part of the Occupation Army until his enlistment is up. At least he won’t be redeployed to the Pacific to fight the Japs like a whole lot of other soldiers. The war is over but the war goes on.

Of course figures vary but it has been reported that World War II cost the lives of 4 million German soldiers. France lost 250,000, England lost almost 400,000, and the United States lost 300,000 soldiers killed in battle. The loss of Soviet soldiers stood at 13.5 million. These figures do not take into account the 7.5 million Soviet civilians killed nor the more than half a million French and Dutch citizens killed, the 3 million German civilians killed nor the 6 million Jews killed during the war.

Just less than 3 million Allied military personnel were called upon to participate in what Eisenhower called the Great Crusade to conquer Hitler’s Thousand Year Third Reich and they did it in less than one year. The Allieds advanced over 450 miles since June 6, 1944 and as they took control of one German city after another, Germany’s army was eventually destroyed.

On April 12, 1945 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died leaving the United States in the hands of a completely unprepared and unschooled Harry S. Truman. Roosevelt’s death gave Hitler the one last hope he had that Truman would be the one to sue for peace. This hope was dashed and his Thousand Year Reich in general, and the city of Berlin in particular, would lay in ruins around him. The Allieds were quickly approaching Berlin, so Hitler and Eva Braun, along with the whole Josefz Göbbels family, killed themselves to avoid death or capture at the hands of their enemies. Hitler’s last act was to fire Hermann Görring as his second in command and appoint Admiral Karl Dönitz. Dönitz tried to surrender only to the Americans and British and not to the Russians but any semblance of power he might have thought he held was quickly dispelled and he was informed that only an unconditional surrender to all Allied Authorities would be accepted. The surrender came on May 8, 1945 thus ending nearly six years of worldwide war, at least in the west. The war continued in the Pacific until August 14, 1945. An atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Japan surrendered less than one week later and the war was finally over on both fronts.

The Germans faced de-Nazification, disarmament and the Nüremburg trials for Nazi war criminals. European Jews who survived Hitler’s Final Solution emigrated by the thousands to the new Palestinian state of Israel. Returning German soldiers faced internment until their status as either Wehrmacht soldier or Nazi supporter could be determined. German POWs from England and America were returned to Germany though many chose to leave war-torn Germany to return to the country where they served out their war years. Many German POWs in Russia were not returned until the 1950s or even the 1960s.