Inferno - Max Hastings [396]
Following Hitler’s death, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz assumed the mantle of Führer. He postured in that role for a fortnight, attempting to buy time for German forces to escape westward from the Russians by staging partial capitulations and seeking to parley with the Americans. SS general Karl Wolff had already concluded a unilateral negotiation for the surrender of his army in Italy, signed at Caserta on 29 April. German forces in northwest Germany, Holland and Denmark surrendered to Montgomery at Lüneburg Heath on 4 May. Resistance on the American fronts ended two days later, while the Red Army closed up to the Elbe. The dying continued to the end: Capt. Nikolai Belov, whose diary vividly described his experiences in action, had been wounded five times since 1941. On 5 May 1945 he was killed in action.
Patton’s army reached Pilsen and might have advanced to Prague, but the Russians insisted on taking the Czech capital themselves. They finally accomplished this on 11 May, after a disastrous uprising against the Germans by local partisans provoked a final spasm of bloodshed. Meanwhile, a delegation from Dönitz reached Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims on 5 May, seeking an exclusive surrender to the Americans. The supreme commander required a simultaneous and unconditional surrender on all fronts, which Gen. Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s senior military adviser, signed on 7 May. The eighth was celebrated by all the Western Allies as VE-Day. Stalin, however, insisted on a further ceremony in Berlin, at which the Russians were full parties. This took place on 8 May, and the ninth thereafter became Russia’s own appointed date of victory: in this, as in so much else, Stalin’s nation chose to march to its own step.
Sporadic exchanges of fire persisted in the east for many weeks, with NKVD troops killing Poles and Ukrainians who refused to accept the substitution of Soviet tyranny for that of the Nazis. British lieutenant David Fraser wrote: “There was still too much vile cruelty in the world for us to be able to say with true satisfaction, ‘Good is victorious.’ ” An American, Lt. Lyman Diercks, at Unterach near Salzburg in Austria, wrote: “Our celebration was low-key. An American in the town loaned us an American flag which we flew from a pole in the square. The elderly Austrian couple who owned the hotel cooked us a wonderful meal. She cried and said: ‘Maybe now my son will be able to come home from Russia where he is a prisoner.’ But he never did.” In the British lines, Corp. John Cropper described a sense of “instant relief—no wild cheering or running about. It was a case of thank God it’s all over and we were safe at last. We had nothing to celebrate with anyway, just compo tea and normal rations. It was as if you’d had an exhausting day and you flop down in a chair at the end of it.”
The American and British armies in Germany looted energetically and raped occasionally, but few men sought explicit revenge from the vanquished. The French, however, saw many scores to be paid. Maj. Albrecht Hamlin, CO of a U.S. civil affairs unit running Merzig (population 12,500), submitted a despairing report cataloguing wholesale acts of pillage following the arrival of a French cavalry unit: “Within an hour the city was in a state of complete confusion. The Chasseurs spread out … taking whatever houses they wished, ejecting civilians from their homes, impressing them on the street for forced labor, confiscating bicycles, automobiles, trucks, and general looting of houses and stores … The acts were manifestly committed as revenge upon the Germans. Reprimands to the officers were met with the repeated excuse that the