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for frostbite, he was sent to command a platoon in a battle group north-east of Stettin. Discipline was visibly collapsing. There were increasingly bitter wrangles between the fanatics, determined to fight to the end, and those who recognized the futility of doing so. They were suddenly ordered aboard open rail trucks, and shipped south into Saxony, under Schörner’s ruthless command. They called the field-marshal “the soldiers’ claw,” because he was not above personally arresting stragglers and herding them back into battle. Deserters were being shot daily—Schörner had executed three battalion commanders in a week for alleged dereliction of duty—but in mid-April Schwemmer decided that he would take the risk. He knew the Americans had already overrun Blankenburg, where his wife was living. The sergeant and a few others slipped away across the Oder bridge. They marched in formed ranks, to give an impression of moving under orders, and begged overnight shelter in houses they passed. The fugitives made one attempt to surrender, advancing with hands in the air towards Americans whom they encountered near Linz. They were met by machine-gun fire, which killed a twelve-year-old boy. After that, Schwemmer simply took to the countryside like tens of thousands of others. He walked and walked, until at last he became the first soldier from Blankenburg to reach home, a distinction for which he was deeply grateful.

In the path of Konev’s armies, sixteen-year-old Corporal Helmut Fromm from Heidelberg was playing “Indians.” He manned a periscope in his unit’s positions beside a sniper, occasionally raising a helmet on a stick above the parapet to draw Russian fire. A sniper needed a counter-signature on his scorecard, to qualify for the special leave granted to a man who achieved at least twenty confirmed kills. Once, to relieve the monotony, they put a round just in front of a horse, which bolted. Another time, they took a long shot at a cycling Russian who fell off, scrambled to his feet and ran away carrying the bicycle. If it sounds fantastic to imagine German soldiers behaving so childishly in the days before the last stand of Hitler’s Reich, consider their age: many of these “men” were indeed children, who laughed at the things children laughed at. They were adult only in their candidacy for death.

On 5 April, Victor Klemperer sat in the darkness of a train to Munich, listening to the conversation of his fellow travellers. One young man said that his own father, who had believed passionately in victory, now no longer did so. “Only Bolshevism and international Jewry are the victors,” grumbled the passenger. A young woman whose husband was fighting in Breslau announced that she still trusted the Führer, and believed that victory would come.

A delegation of diplomats from the Japanese embassy in Berlin visited von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, demanding to know what steps he proposed to take for their safety. They received scant satisfaction. The British intercepted a signal to Tokyo from the Japanese minister in Lisbon, setting out a somewhat ambitious diplomatic plan for his country: “It is my belief that the only means by which Japan, confronted as she is by the present unparalleled national crisis, can bring about a turn for the better in her fortunes is by a radical re-orientation of her policy towards the USSR. The collapse of the German army is now unmistakably only a matter of time.” The minister suggested that Japan should seek a bilateral treaty with Stalin.

Captain Walter Schaefer-Kuhnert of 9th Panzer Division spent the last days of his war supporting a Volksgrenadier unit—“hopeless people,” he observed, with professional contempt. One morning in his captured jeep he found himself driving in the middle of a massive column of American armour. “My God,” he thought, “we haven’t got that many tanks in our entire army.” His driver accelerated away, and they saw astonished GI faces staring after their field-grey uniforms. Finally, the Germans abandoned the vehicle and found a path on foot back to their battery. “It