[16.0] The Fall Of The Reich

* On 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler decided he'd had enough, and committed suicide. That did not completely stop the fighting in Europe, but over the next week the shooting gradually faded out, effectively ending with a formal surrender on 8 May. The Allies now restored order and put the surviving leaders of the Nazi regime on trial.

[16.1] THE STRUGGLE FOR BERLIN

* Despite the camaraderie between American and Soviet troops on the Elbe, tensions were evident under the surface. American General Patton felt that his armies should keep on going; there were Soviet generals who felt the same way. The generals did not determine policy. Marshal Budyonny told Stalin that he felt Soviet tanks should keep right on rolling until they reached the English Channel, but Stalin cut him off and mocked the idea. The Western Allies wanted Hitler defeated, and were not eager for a fight with Stalin. Stalin, on his part, knew that the Soviet Union had to rest and rebuild with whatever help he could still pry out of his allies. He also had detailed knowledge from his spies of the fearsome weapon the Americans were building in the New Mexico desert.

Stalin would rebuild, get the atomic bomb himself, and deal with the West on more equal terms later. The battle for Berlin also factored into that consideration. On 25 April, the Red Army captured the Max Planck Institute for Physics in the city, which had been a center for Nazi nuclear research. The physicists, led by Werner Heisenberg, had fled West to surrender to the British, but the Soviets captured some real trophies, in the form of 250 kilograms (400 pounds) of refined uranium and tonnes of unrefined uranium oxide. NKVD specialists descended on the institute to pick its bones clean. The institute was in a sector of Berlin marked for later occupation by the Western Allies, and the Soviets wanted to make sure that nothing was left behind.

In the meantime, Red Army artillery pounded the center of Berlin, while assault teams worked block by block, building by building, backed up by flame throwers, as well as antitank guns and armor firing into German strongpoints at point-blank range. The assault troops tunneled through buildings by blasting holes in walls or crept through sewers to infiltrate and compromise German positions.

The Soviets kept on creeping closer to the center of the city. If they encountered resistance in an area, they pounded it with Katyusha barrages to soften it up, grinding Berlin into rubble as they went. The rubble actually helped the defenders, allowing them to quickly set up strongpoints and roadblocks that had to be dug out with steel and blood. In fact, the Germans gradually began to destroy buildings themselves to set up obstacles to the Soviets.

Many of the Volkssturm surrendered under the pressure, but hardcore Waffen SS troops often persisted to the last man. About half of them weren't even Germans, instead being survivors of foreign Waffen SS units. They fought very hard, since they had signed up to fight the loathsome Bolshevik, and in the new European order of the near future their prospects were very dim anyway. SS death squads also did what they could to brace up less motivated troops, executing on the spot anyone who seemed to be less than enthusiastic about carrying on the struggle. Any civilian flying a white flag from a window was likely to be hanged immediately. The squads were manned by junior SS officers, blindly fanatical youngsters with no real combat experience.

Such disciplinary actions were not so easy when the potential victims were well armed and perfectly willing to shoot back. Along with the Volkssturm and Hitler Youth on the lines, there were also scarred combat veterans, survivors of Army Group Vistula who had fallen back on the city. The German Army had never had much liking for the SS; the dislike had been growing rapidly over the previous few months, since they found the SS much more willing to execute deserters, real or imagined, than to come to grips with the Red Army. German Army soldiers had little tolerance for being bullied by what amounted to overgrown Hitler Youth, and were more than a match for them. Major General Walter Mummert, commander of the Muncheburg panzer division, bluntly ordered the SS to stay out of his sector, saying his troops would shoot them on sight if they didn't.

A particular focus of the Red Army's drive into Berlin was the Tempelhof airport, in the south of the city, since Stalin wanted to make sure that Hitler couldn't fly out of the trap. The defenders resisted stubbornly, but the airfield finally fell at about midday on 26 April. Actually, if Hitler had wanted to escape, Tempelhof wasn't necessary. That same day, General Robert Ritter von Greim, the Luftwaffe commander in the Munich area, flew into Berlin with his lover, Hannah Reitsch, in a little Fieseler Storch lightplane. Greim had been ordered by the Fuehrer to come to Berlin in haste. He had been wounded by flak, but Reitsch took the controls and got the aircraft in to safety.

Reitsch had completely broken the mold of the Nazi stereotype that a woman's place was in the home and gotten away with it, having become a national celebrity. She had been awarded the Iron Cross First Class and was a personal confidante of the Fuehrer. She pleaded with Hitler to fly out of the city with her in the Storch and save himself, but he said he would remain in Berlin and die there. He asked her to join him in his fate, and she agreed.

The Red Army pushed into the city, crushing the defenders building by building, block by block. Many German troops surrendered but others fought on bitterly, shooting at Soviet troops from the windows of buildings or trying to ambush Red tanks with panzerfausts. The confusion of the fighting, aggravated by Stalin's pushiness and his insistence on throwing massive forces into the battle, led to a large number of friendly-fire casualties, particularly from artillery.

Red Army battalions were ground up and destroyed in the fighting, with new ones thrown in to replace them. Raw recruits were sent into the fight with little training, and even liberated Soviet prisoners were handed weapons and immediately put into the struggle. The Red Army was now breaking through the outer lines of Berlin's defenses, gradually pushing German forces into the core of the city around the Tiergarten, the great central park and zoo. Its eastern entrance was marked by the Brandenburg Gate. The Reichstag, the old German legislature building, was to the north of the gate, and his bunker was to the south. It was the last stand of the Third Reich.

* Elsewhere, German troops were giving up the fight. The British and the Americans were now encountering little opposition; when any was offered it was usually quickly overcome after a brief exchange of fire, some Germans being reluctant to give up without at least putting up a token show of resistance. Walter Model, in charge of Army Group B in the Ruhr, found his command disintegrating underneath him. That was too much of a catastrophe even for Model, and he shot himself on 21 April.

Ilya Ehrenberg wrote that the Germans were surrendering to the British and Americans "with fanatical persistence". Surprisingly, this comment was not mockery of the Germans but a display of bitter resentment over the fact that the Western Allies were having a much easier war. Stalin had even specifically complained about the disparity between German resistance from East to West in a message to Roosevelt on 7 April, hinting strongly that there was double-dealing behind it -- apparently oblivious to the fact that it was the Red Army's harshness that had forced the Germans to fight like trapped animals, and completely oblivious to the fact that Red Army tactical doctrine all but encouraged excessive losses of men.

The Germans had of course done much in the USSR to provoke Red Army brutality. A Berlin teenager recollected later how he was riding in a railroad car where the passengers were bitterly cursing their lot, when a grizzled and heavily decorated veteran sitting among them loudly told all of them to shut up. The veteran explained with staggering honesty that Germans had to fight to the last: "If others win the war, and if they do to us only a fraction of what we have done in the occupied territories, there won't be a single German left in a few weeks." Still, if the Soviets made it clear they were bent on slaughter, they could not be surprised if the Germans fought back tooth and nail to the last.

Stalin had figured out the logic of the situation by that time. In mid-April Soviet propaganda had abruptly reversed its line and began to encourage good treatment of German civilians and prisoners, leaving Ehrenberg hanging in the wind -- a condition that could have a literal interpretation in the Soviet Union. The change in policy made little difference to the frontoviki, who went on conducting themselves as they had, with some asking why they didn't see articles by Ehrenberg any more. It was likely only Ehrenberg's popularity with the troops that saved him from arrest.

In some cities in the south of the Reich, groups of Germans who had become disillusioned with Naziism, if they had ever had any sympathy for it, organized to take matters into their own hands. Rebel groups helped to hand Augsburg over to the Americans, though the rebels had less luck in Munich; the US Army entered the city to find a miniature civil war in progress that took a few days of violence and confusion to sort out.

German units facing the Red Army around Berlin were now only fighting to escape west and surrender to the British and Americans. To the north of the city all effective resistance to the Soviets had crumbled by 27 April. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the long-standing OKW chief of staff, paid a visit to the area and was enraged to find that German soldiers were falling back. Keitel called together Heinrici, who was trying to hold the line with Army Group Vistula, and General Hasso von Manteuffel, in command of the group's Third Panzer Army. They showed up, several of Manteuffel's staff officers being armed with submachine guns as if to suggest that an attempt to arrest their commanders might be unwise. Whether Keitel took the hint or not, he lit into Heinrici in a fury: "The Fuehrer ordered you to hold! He ordered you not to move! Yet you -- you ordered the retreat!"

Heinrici, unfazed, responded that unless he got substantial reinforcements there was no possibility of conducting an effective defense -- and so he would continue his retreat. He saw no sense in throwing away the lives of his troops for nothing. Keitel was beyond any such considerations of reason, shouting back: "There are no reserves left!" -- and then ordering Manteuffel: "You will hold your positions! You will turn your army around here and now!"

Heinrici replied: "As long as I am in command, I will not issue that order to Manteuffel."

Keitel went purple and raved at Heinrici, calling him a coward and a traitor, accusing him of being weak for not being willing to execute more of his men. Heinrici finally displayed a bit of irritation: "If you want these men sent to the rear to be shot, why don't you do it?"

Keitel, too choked with rage and frustration to say more, got into his staff car and left. Heinrici was sacked that evening, for whatever difference it made. Nobody was going to stand and fight in the north. Thanks to Heinrici's sensibility in disobeying orders, about 155,000 of his troops managed to escape and surrender to the British and Americans, with 140,000 men of the German 21st Army going into captivity alongside them.

To the southeast of the city the German 9th Army and elements of the 4th Panzer Army, which had been surrounded by Zhukov and Konev's pincers, were desperately trying to break out to the west. General Theodor Busse, commander of the 9th Army, received hysterical messages from Berlin, ordering him to come to the rescue of the city. Like Wenck, Busse ignored the orders. The trapped soldiers suffered heavily from Soviet artillery and attack planes, but managed to break through the ring on 30 April. They used the last available operational tank and joined up with Wenck's 12th Army on its rescue mission. Only about 30,000 troops of the 9th and 4th Panzer, a seventh of their original strength, and about 70,000 men of the 12th Army survived to surrender to the British and Americans.

[16.2] THE DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER

* As the Red Army converged on the center of Berlin, the struggle for the city entered its final phase. Stalin wanted the battle over by May Day, the traditional Communist holiday, regardless of the cost. As the Red Army squeezed the defenders into the Tiergarten area, life turned into a hell of explosions, destruction, and lunacy.

By that time, Hitler was close to the end of his rope. He was infuriated that day when a report came in over BBC radio that Heinrich Himmler had offered to surrender Germany to the Western Allies. Himmler was beyond the Fuehrer's reach, but he was able to capture Major General Hermann Fegelein, the SS liaison to headquarters, trying to get away in civilian clothes with his pregnant mistress. He seemed drunk and was loaded down with loot. Fegelein was worked over by the Gestapo, revealed that he knew of Himmler's schemes, and was promptly executed. If Hitler wasn't long for this world, he could at least cram in a bit more vindictiveness in the time he had left. He felt all the more vindictive because he realized that now even the SS was deserting him. He ordered Hanna Reitsch to fly out of Berlin with General Greim, who was to arrange for the arrest of Himmler and deal with him as well.

That done, Hitler turned his attention to more pleasant matters. His mistress, Eva Braun, had always wanted to marry him, but though he had little interest in other women he had refused to do so, feeling it would have diminished his stature as a self-made Teutonic demigod. Her relationship with him was so discreet that few outside the Fuehrer's immediate circle knew she existed. She was, however, totally devoted to him. When her sister Ilse, who had fled west in front of the advancing Soviets, suggested that the Fuehrer was leading the country into an abyss, Eva angrily told Ilse that she ought to be stood up against a wall and be shot. Hitler knew that Eva wanted legitimacy badly, and as she was clearly willing to die with him, even he could not deny her that while the world was falling down around him. They married that evening.

He then dictated his political testament, passing the Reich presidency and formal leadership to Admiral Doenitz, though the other prime contender for the position, Martin Bormann, was named Party Chancellor and executor of Hitler's will. This arrangement would almost certainly put Doenitz and Bormann at odds; even in his last hours, Hitler could not give up his instinct to play people off against each other. Those who had failed him, Goering and Himmler, were to be expelled from the Nazi Party.

Even Hitler acknowledged in the document that these instructions would likely be irrelevant in the order that followed him, though tiresomely true to form he finished with a blast against "international Jewry". The testament declared that Goebbels would be Reich Chancellor in the new order, but Goebbels, possibly recognizing the futility of the honor, for the first time refused to obey his Fuehrer and insisted that he would remain to the end.

* Hitler woke up on the morning of 29 April to be greeted with news of the death of Benito Mussolini and his mistress, who had been captured and shot by Italian partisans. That set the atmosphere for the rest of the day, which was characterized by the rumble of explosions above the bunker as the Soviets closed in. All the military news was bad, and there was little doubt that the Red Army would capture the bunker in two or three days. Once again Hitler was encouraged to flee Berlin; once again he refused.

The next morning, 30 April 1945, the Red Army began a final push to capture the Reichstag, which was defended by roughly 6,000 Germans, mostly fanatical SS troops. After a thorough bombardment, the 150th Division of the Third Shock Army went in.

While the drama above ground continued, events in the Fuehrer's bunker moved on to their final conclusion. Hitler ate lunch with his two secretaries at midday while Eva Hitler gave away her belongings. In mid-afternoon, the Fuehrer and his bride committed suicide in his private quarters; he swallowed a cyanide pill and shot himself, while she relied on the cyanide pill. Witnesses were impressed by the way that she had displayed no fear to the very end, exhibiting a sort of dignity and serenity beyond the reach of her husband.

Hitler, revolted by the way the corpses of Mussolini and his mistress had been strung up in public to be abused, had given orders that he and his wife's bodies be cremated. SS officers took the corpses to the surface and tried to burn them, though they couldn't build a proper pyre to make sure the bodies were reduced to ash. One of the SS guards ran downstairs to tell a colleague: "The chief's on fire. Do you want to come and have a look?"

With Hitler dead, the occupants of the bunker began to disperse. Martin Bormann tried to flee through the battleground in the city. He was reported killed but his body was not found, and rumors would linger for decades that he had escaped and was at large. A skeleton was found in Berlin in 1972 that was identified as his, and he was declared dead by a German court in 1973.

Both the defenders and the attackers in the fight for the Reichstag had other things on their mind than the fate of Hitler and Eva Braun. It was a nasty close-quarters struggle, with German and Soviet troops fighting it out for individual rooms with submachine guns and grenades. That evening, two Soviet soldiers, Mikhail Yegorov and Meliton Kantaria, experienced fighters who had fought in partisan ranks, managed to get to the roof of the building to plant a flag at 10:50 PM, symbolically proclaiming Soviet victory in the struggle. It was as powerful a symbol of victory to the Russians as the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima by the Marines was to the Americans.

[16.3] THE FALL OF BERLIN

* The shooting wasn't actually over at the time. The vicious fight for the Reichstag went on until sunrise the next morning, 1 May, when the surviving defenders finally gave up. In the meantime, SS troopers had blasted a hole in the wall between a subway tunnel and a neighboring canal to flood it and prevent the Soviets from using it to infiltrate German positions. The water flooded through 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) of tunnels that were full of civilians trying to hide out from the fighting.

The story has persisted that large numbers were drowned, but more detailed examination suggests that the tunnels flooded slowly, and not generally more than to waist height. Some wounded who were in the underground may have drowned, but the numbers of bodies seen floating in the water were probably casualties from other actions whose corpses just happened to be in the tunnel. There was no shortage of corpses in Berlin at the moment. The Soviets were worried that some of the Nazi brass were trying to escape at that time, and Red Army forces were fighting furiously to make sure no Germans got out of the encirclement of the city.

A few hours earlier, in the small hours of the morning, German General Krebs had come across the lines under a white flag and spoken with Chuikov. Krebs tried to brass it out with Chuikov, saying: "Today is the first of May, a great holiday for our two nations -- "

Chuikov dryly put Krebs in his place: "We have a great holiday today. How things are with you over there, it is less easy to say."

Krebs, brought down a notch, informed Chuikov that Hitler had committed suicide. Chuikov replied, lying through his teeth: "We know." That took Krebs back again, but he went on to ask for a cease-fire until the new Doenitz government could organize itself for a formal capitulation. Krebs was assuming that Chuikov had a level of authority that was well beyond what he actually had, and Krebs seemed to probing for a conditional capitulation when the Allies had agreed to settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender. Chuikov stalled Krebs and then phoned Zhukov to pass on the news. Zhukov then phoned Koba in turn. On hearing the news, Stalin replied: "So that's the end of the bastard. Too bad it was impossible to take him alive." Stalin, never at all trusting, sent Beria to provide confirmation.

Krebs finally tired of being strung along by the impassive Chuikov and went back to the bunker that afternoon. Having reached the end of his tether, Krebs committed suicide, as did Goebbels and his entire family, with his wife Magda Goebbels feeding their six children cyanide. An ineffectual attempt was made to burn the bodies.

The following morning, 2 May, Lieutenant General Helmuth Weidling, who had been appointed commandant of Berlin a week earlier, went to Chuikov's headquarters and surrendered the city. He wrote an order to be distributed to the troops:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

Weidling even recorded a message for Red Army sound trucks to shout at German units that continued to fight. Many surrendered, but some others kept right on shooting. It took the Soviets two more days to completely stamp out resistance.

* The fall of Berlin was a great triumph of the Soviet people. They had paid bitterly for it, suffering 300,000 casualties. However, the survivors had reason to celebrate and time to relax for once.

For the Berliners who had survived the battle, there was no reason to celebrate. Survival was a difficult prospect, and the future beyond mere survival was grim. The Soviet troops who had been fighting on the front lines proved surprisingly kindly. One German woman who watched the "Ivans" trying to learn how to ride captured bicycles found they reassuringly reminded her of overgrown kids -- not all that bad a way to describe a conscript private. However, kids tend to have weak concepts of ethics, and one Soviet officer warned a German that those who would come later were simply "pigs". He was perfectly correct. Everything that wasn't nailed down was looted; much of what was nailed down was trashed; the women were casually raped; and Soviet officers took no great care to stop the rampage, when they did not participate themselves.

There was, astonishingly for law-abiding Germans, even looting and fighting by the citizens. Some Berliners drank themselves into temporary oblivion, others huddled up and wept, or simply sank into dull passivity.

Soviet soldiers had found the corpses of Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels, his wife, and their six children. The Red Army had also recovered Hitler's remains, after a false alarm from a corpse found at the Reichs Chancellery, which turned out to be one of Hitler's manservants who looked a great deal like the Fuehrer. A SMERSH team was put in charge of the matter, sending a team of sappers into the Reichs Chancellery to check for booby-traps before entering themselves. The sappers, who were more afraid of the SMERSH team than booby traps, found that the Germans hadn't left any unpleasant surprises behind.

The Soviets kept quiet about these discoveries, telling the Western Allies they had found nothing, with Stalin even voicing suspicions to Western leaders that Hitler was still at large. Even Zhukov was given the cover story, and Koba, playing his games, repeatedly called him up, asked if he had found Hitler's body, and then demanded action when Zhukov said no. Zhukov didn't find out about the lie for twenty years, and the story didn't get out to the West for much longer. Hitler's and Eva Braun's remains were placed in a tomb at Magdeburg in East Germany until 1970, when the KGB, under orders by Soviet leadership who did not want the remains to ever be revered as relics, crushed up the bones and scattered them over a marsh. Some fragments that were believed to be Hitler's that survived after that time turned out under examination after the end of the century to be those of a young woman.

Hitler might have cheated Stalin's wrath, but there were other things Koba wanted in Berlin. The NKVD managed to seize over two tonnes of gold from the Reischbank, along with larger amounts of silver and piles of various currency notes, but the take there was disappointing. Most of the gold had been moved West to fall into the hands of the Western Allies.

[16.4] GERMANY SURRENDERS / OPERATION UNTHINKABLE

* The end of fighting in Berlin didn't quite end the war. The new Doenitz government sent emissaries to the British and Americans, with Doenitz clinging to the absurd hope that the Western Allies would betray the Soviets and make a deal with the Germans to present a common front against Bolshevism. He received in reply a brief, concise document that spelled out precisely what the Allies meant by "unconditional surrender", along with a demand that it be signed immediately. Doenitz thought it over, and resentfully caved in. The articles of surrender were signed in France by General Alfred Jodl on 7 May and went into effect on the evening of 8 May.

That was actually a preliminary document, with the Germans to sign a more formal document later. It led to a round of tedious bickerings over protocol and precedence between the British and Americans, the Soviets, and the French, but in the end everyone wanted the Germans to surrender, and the suspicions and irritations over touchy pride were set aside. The Germans formally surrendered just after midnight on 9 May 1945. Zhukov led the Allied team at the surrender ceremony. Zhukov danced at the celebration afterward, though not before the cameramen had been prudently asked to leave.

A formal surrender was a fine thing, since there was a German army of 100,000 men in Norway that had been ready and able to carry on the battle, but even that wasn't quite the last word. Germans units in the East continued to go on fighting in desperate attempts to stay out of Soviet hands. There was a short-lived squabble over the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic, where the German commander considered himself still at war with the USSR and fired on Soviet aircraft. After two days of air attacks, the Red Army landed a contingent of shock troops on the island and forced the Germans to surrender. It was the final real battle of the European war.

There had been nasty fighting in Prague as local partisans, assisted by elements of General Andrei Vlasov's ROA force, rose up against the Germans. The troops of the ROA faced a dim future, and they turned against their masters in hope of improving their standing. They soon were informed by Communist Czech partisan leaders that the ROA was still regarded as the enemy, and so on 9 May the ROA troops fled west along with German troops in hopes of finding sanctuary with the Americans. Left in control of Prague, the Czechs engaged in brutal reprisals against German civilians left among them. German women had their heads shaved and were gang-raped in public. German mothers were bound to their children with barbed wire and thrown in the Vltava (Moldau) River to drown; tens of thousands of corpses were pulled out of the water downstream.

As for the ROA, the Americans were not quite sure what to do with them. Some American officers suggested that the troops disperse and make their own way west, and many did. Vlasov, however, was arrested by the Americans, then handed over to the Soviets. He and 11 other ROA officers were hanged in 1946.

About 175,000 Germans surrendered in Yugoslavia, with about half of them to die of ill-treatment in captivity. Elsewhere, in French coastal towns still under German control, in Norway, in Denmark, the surrenders went more peacefully. A picture taken on 17 May in Denmark shows German troops tossing their weapons onto the back of the flatbed truck, appearing perfectly cheerful over the whole thing.

They might well be; to the end of the conflict, the Germans had lost a staggering 13.5 million men killed, wounded, taken prisoner, missing in action. Those who still had the ability to surrender were the lucky ones. It had been the Soviet Union that had inflicted most of those losses, almost 11 million of them. Soviet forces had lost about 8 million killed or missing in action; the butcher's bill for America and Britain combined was well under a million. The Soviet perception that they had won the war against the Reich was perfectly correct -- though their belittling of the real and honest sacrifices of their American and British Allies in assistance of their war effort was, if understandable, still unjust. The fact that the USSR hadn't lifted a finger to assist Britain in 1940, while Hitler was forming his plans for BARBAROSSA, was disregarded.

* They were really not Allies of the USSR by that time anyway. Now that the fighting had ended in Europe, they were effectively the Soviet Union's enemies. Churchill understood this; he was putting the brakes not merely on British but even German disarmament, and a few days after the German surrender, he ordered his military chiefs to come up with a plan for taking on the Red Army. The operation, codenamed UNTHINKABLE, was in principle to jump off on 1 July, the primary objective being to ensure proper Soviet treatment of Poland.

The reply was that UNTHINKABLE was just that, the Red Army outnumbering the Western Allies by 2.5 times or more, and was also a very thoroughly blooded combat organization that did not give up easily. The report demonstrated a solid understanding of the power of Stalin's forces:

BEGIN QUOTE:

END QUOTE

In addition, there was the obvious fact, to which Churchill was in some degree of denial, that the Americans were very unlikely to want anything to do with the scheme, having no vested interest in what Stalin did to Poland. Brooke wrote in his diary: "The idea is of course fantastic and the chances for success quite impossible!"

How much Churchill had expected that response is hard to say; given the name of the operation, it seems likely he was testing the waters, investigating options. He was still clearly discouraged, having not got the answer he had hoped for. More realistically, following the report on UNTHINKABLE, Churchill's military chiefs investigated what might be done if the Red Army decided to keep on driving west. The options there weren't particularly inspiring either, but that study was still a landmark of sorts -- being the first of many that the West would devise over the following decades to deal with the menacing threat to Europe from the Bear in the East.

[16.5] RESTORING ORDER

* With the shooting finally over, it was time to get Germany in order again. There were certain issues to deal with. Generals such as Kesselring and Keitel who were suspected of war crimes were arrested. Himmler was captured by the British but, having a good idea of his chances if he went on trial, committed suicide by taking cyanide.

The Doenitz government, holed up in Flensburg on the coast, was allowed to operate for the moment until the Allies figured out what to do next. Stalin suspected that even this limited acceptance of the Doenitz government hinted that the Western Allies were trying to strike a deal with the Nazis to sell out the USSR, and the Soviet government protested loudly -- not without some good reason. Newspapers in the US were indignant over the existence of the rump Nazi regime, asking why all senior German officials hadn't been rounded up.

The Soviets were in a particularly foul mood. Not long before his death, Roosevelt had decided Stalin was completely untrustworthy, and the new US president, Harry Truman, was increasingly suspicious of the USSR. Tensions with the Soviets were aggravated on 8 May 1945, when Truman ended Lend-Lease assistance to the USSR. The story is very murky; apparently Truman approved the action under a misunderstanding, and quickly countermanded it. It certainly made no sense to cut off aid to the USSR, while the Soviets were preparing to move against Japan. In any case, the Lend-Lease flotch did much to raise tensions between the US and USSR.

However, the hesitation in putting away the surviving Nazi regime ended before the end of the month. On 23 May, British troops swept in and arrested the Doenitz government, subjecting them to humiliatingly thorough searches to make sure they weren't concealing weapons or cyanide capsules. The Third Reich was history.

* With the fighting fading out, the Red Army did try to impose order on Berlin. The troops were told in indoctrination sessions to improve their behavior and the rapes and looting began to die down, if slowly. Soviet troops would still try to order Germans to hand over their watches at gunpoint, only to be told: "Watch already surrender!" Rape became much less necessary when German women, faced not only with their own starvation but that of their children, could be bought simply with a promise of some food. Soviet troops found that stable sexual relationships had homely charms of their own and acquired "occupation wives" -- a practice that enraged their real wives back in the USSR when the news filtered home.

The Soviets had half expected the Germans would mount a partisan campaign against the Red Army, much like the savage guerrilla war that Soviet partisans had conducted against the Germans. In October 1944, the Nazis had in fact created an underground resistance movement, the "Werewolves", to carry on the struggle. After the surrender, the Werewolves performed a few acts of terror, but there had never been much enthusiasm for the exercise, and the Werewolves were quickly suppressed. Former SS officers did, however, form a shadowy network that became known as "ODESSA (Organization Der Ehemaligen SS-Angehoerigen / Organization of Former SS Members)" -- though it seems its members didn't use that label -- that would linger on for decades, and be suspected of various acts of terror around the world.

Resistance was far more the exception than the rule. Once things settled down, the Germans proved to be model subjects, one Soviet marveling at their "docility and discipline". The Germans were sick of war; Naziism had been proven a bust; and traditional German respect for law, authority, and order worked against the spirit of terrorism. In fact, Berliners even converted old Nazi flags into Communist banners, a transformation of attitude that some jokers among them characterized as "Heil Stalin!"

Colonel General Nikolai Berzarin was now the formal commandant of Berlin. He was a very conscientious man, trying to keep Berliners fed and restore the city to working order, even dropping into messhalls to casually chat with the people. He would be later killed in a completely idiotic traffic accident; Berliners would mourn him, with rumors floating around that Berzarin had actually been murdered by the NKVD.

Worse would follow Berzarin. A German Communist named Walter Ulbricht, who had spent much of the war in the Soviet Union, was already on the scene, acting as Stalin's unquestioning servant. Eventually, Ulbricht would rise to the head of the Red East German regime established by the Soviets. Ulbricht was a master denouncer, and appallingly even Beria, a backstabber on a grand scale, called him a "scoundrel capable of killing his father and mother." The East Germans would build up a formidable internal security apparatus, the Stasi, acquiring much of its unpleasant capability from ex-Gestapo men, working under new management.

[16.6] DAY OF RECKONING

* As the new order emerged in a divided Germany, there remained the question of what to do with the leadership of the old order, now behind bars. British and American interrogators found that senior Wehrmacht officers tried to place all the blame for the crimes of the Reich on the Nazis and the SS. The officers tried to present themselves as simply misunderstood -- victims of bad decisions and unfortunate circumstances.

The record clearly showed that German generals had been happy enough to go along with Hitler's agenda when he was winning, turning a blind eye to the crimes of the regimes at best and aiding in them at worst, and had only turned against him when he started to lose. The interrogators, assembling the big picture from various remarks and readings between the lines, were appalled to find that the generals unconsciously but clearly said as much. It was a performance along the lines of that of a gang of bank robbers in jail going on about the stupid things they had done that got them caught, and never giving a moment's thought that maybe they shouldn't have been robbing banks in the first place.

Of the innermost Nazi circle, only Goering had been captured alive at the end of the war, Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler all having committed suicide. Rudolf Hess was already in captivity, due to his mad attempt to negotiate with the British in 1940. On 18 October 1945, a formal indictment was brought against 24 leaders of the old regime, including Goering and Hess, not to mention Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, and Keitel. The trial began in Nuremberg on 20 November.

The Nuremberg trials were unarguably one of the greatest legal shows in history. They were an opportunity not only to try the Nazi leadership, but also the regime itself and make its crimes apparent. The sentences were passed down on 30 September and 1 October 1946. Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to hang, while seven more were given prison terms, and three were acquitted. The condemned were executed on 16 October. Of course Goering had been sentenced to die, but he committed suicide by drinking poison just a few hours before he was to go to the gallows. Keitel was hanged, likely to the satisfaction of Wehrmacht veterans who regarded him as the "gravedigger" of the German Army.

Somewhat surprisingly, Ribbentrop and Rosenberg were executed as well, despite the fact that Ribbentrop had been regarded by most as an incompetent, and Rosenberg was clearly ineffectual. There would be further trials of Nazi officials and officers, some as late as the 1990s. Erich Koch was handed over to the Poles, but for whatever reason they decided not to execute him despite his enthusiasm for brutalities.

The trials brought senior Nazi leadership to the dock and found them wanting, but it is now generally seen that the net was loose. The Wehrmacht had widespread complicity in war crimes, and much of German civilian society was tainted by the slave labor system that had supported the Reich. It was simply not possible to bring every German or even most Germans who had committed crimes to justice; not only would it have required a massive effort, it would have led to trying to run a society where the number of people imprisoned rivaled the number left free.

The notion of a "Truth & Reconciliation Commission", as established in South Africa after the fall of apartheid there, would have been a good solution to the problem -- pursuing the big fish of the old regime while letting the little fish know they would be granted forgiveness if they came forward voluntarily and told what they knew. Many of the Reich's guilty would have gone unpunished under such a scheme, but the dirty secrets of the regime would have been revealed and the guilt made plain. That was a future concept, however, and it didn't happen in Germany. Still, although unreformed German Nazis and denialists linger even today, the mainstream of German society would come to see the era of devotion to Hitler, authoritarian rule, and military aggression as a black period in the nation's history.