A World at Arms (159 page)

Those chances looked so slight by mid-April 1945 that some of the Nazi leaders wanted to try their hand at ending the war either for themselves or for the country. Many simply fled and tried to vanish; of these, some were caught by the German political or military police and summarily shot. A few attempted negotiated surrenders ,not of a front sector, like Wolff in Italy, but on a wider scale. The SS chief Himmler, of all people, imagined himself in such a role and made contact with the Swedish Count Falke Bernadotte, while at one point Göring thought of arranging an end to the war. All these soundings were met by the demand for unconditional surrender to all the Allies, and rumors about them which leaked out only served to enrage Hitler.

The advancing Russians were breaking into Berlin from north, east and south even as the spearheads of Zhukov’s and Konev’s Fronts met west of the city on April 25, the same day Konev’s troops came in contact with the Americans. The German capital was completely surrounded and at a time when the main defense force, the 9th Army, had itself been surrounded in a separate encirclement by the Red Army. Hitler’s frantic efforts to have the capital relieved had no substantial effect on operations. In hammer blows from all sides, Red Army units battered their way into the city, suffering substantial casualties but moving forward nevertheless. Hitler had decided to stay in the capital and commit suicide there if the relief schemes did not work.

What elements of the German armies near Berlin could escape not unreasonably tried to get away from the scene of horrendous disaster, not toward it, and inside the underground shelter Hitler and his entourage alternated between dreams of last-minute redemption and despair. The last garrison commander, General Helmuth Weidling, had been appointed to the post by Hitler right after he was supposed to have been shot for not handling his corps command the way Hitler wanted. He told Hitler that the last ammunition would run out on April 30. Since Hitler had by then implemented the earlier plan to have Dönitz and Kesselring direct the war in the northern and southern segments of remaining territory, he now had only his personal situation to tend to,
having also sent away many of those still at headquarters until the last moment.

The process of enveloping and penetrating the city had taken only a few days longer than Stalin had originally specified. As the leading American authority on the Eastern Front has put it: “The fighting in Berlin lasted as long as it did because a great metropolis, bombed out though it may be and no matter how amateurishly fortified, cannot quickly be taken even against a lame defense, particularly not by troops who know the war is over and intend to see their homes again.”
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As the fighting neared the immediate vicinity of the bunker which was used as Hitler’s headquarters, the Fuhrer married his mistress Eva Braun and dictated his political and private testaments on April 29. In the former he defended his policies, made nasty comments about his generals whom he blamed for the defeat,
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and called on any surviving Germans to continue his racial policies of slaughtering Jews. He appointed Dönitz as his successor.
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The following day, he and his new wife committed suicide. The bodies were located by the Russians soon after–there had not been enough gasoline for the complete destruction Hitler had ordered in his private testament–but for years the Soviet government pretended in public that Hitler might still be alive.
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The rest of the world was soon reassured on that point.
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Only the head of the Irish Free State, Eamon de Valera, thought the occasion called for a condolence visit to the German Legation in Dublin, a gesture he had not considered appropriate when Roosevelt died.
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Few others shared his sadness.
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The Berlin garrison–or rather what was left of it–was surrendered to the Red Army soon after the attempts of the last acting German army Chief of Staff, General Hans Krebs, to work out a broader surrender had failed.
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The battle for Berlin was over; according to one careful study, it had cost half a million people their lives or their health by the most conservative estimates.
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Even as the last of the defenders were marched off into captivity, Soviet patrols searched for fugitive Nazi leaders, while a group of German Communists led by Walter Ulbricht was flown in from Soviet exile to establish a new government in occupied Germany.

North and south of Berlin some fighting continued in the following days. The announcement that Hitler was dead finally convinced the commanders in Italy to surrender their units. In Bohemia, a final Soviet offensive drove into the remaining German Army Group in that area,
which had to surrender as part of the general capitulation. There the units organized by the former Red Army General Vlasov, recruited from among Soviet prisoners of war to fight alongside the Germans against the Soviet regime, became involved in the last struggles for Prague and fell into the hands of the Russians or were turned over to them by the Americans. Those who did not commit suicide were shot or sent to labor camps.
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The Czechoslovak government-in-exile of Benes was returned to Prague, but under circumstances which hardly promised a bright future.

THE END OF THE WAR IN EUROPE

In the north Admiral Dönitz had taken control of both what remnants of a government could be put together and the German armed forces which still controlled western Holland, all of Norway and Denmark, a substantial portion of north and small pieces of south Germany as well as portions of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The pieces of Italy were about to be surrendered. The admiral had been a dedicated adherent of Hitler and believed practically until the last minute that the tide could yet turn in Germany’s favor. His dedication to National Socialist ideas and his close identification with Hitler’s strategy in the last stages of the war
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made him a logical, not a surprising, choice by Hitler as his successor. And that in his own strange way Hitler had assessed Dönitz accurately can be seen in the insistence of the latter when in jail as a war criminal as late as January 1953 that he was still Germany’s legal chief of state; only a system in which all parties including the National Socialists were allowed to participate could legally choose a successor!
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When he took over the immediate heritage of Hitler at the beginning of May 1945, however, Dönitz realized that the war was lost.
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He hoped to end it in such a fashion as to rescue as many as possible of the soldiers of the Eastern Front from becoming prisoners of war of the Russians and to enable as many as possible of the civilians to flee west as well. As the Russians had refused the offer by General Krebs of a local surrender, so the Western Allies refused to allow Dönitz to surrender only to them but insisted that he surrender the armed forces to all three Allies.
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The Army Group in Italy and subsequently that in northwest Germany as well as the force in Holland could surrender in military capitulations similar to those of earlier surrenders on the Eastern Front. At the northern end of that front, the 3rd Panzer and 21st Armies surrendered to the Americans as they were squeezed between the advancing Second Belorussian Front and 21st Army Group, and some of the
German soldiers in the central sector also entered American POW cages. But the vast majority of those who had fought on the Eastern Front, over one and a quarter million, became Russian prisoners with the general surrender.
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That surrender was signed in two installments, once in Reims on May 7 and again in Berlin on May 9.
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These complications show up clearly both the common aims and the divergent perspectives of the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. All were agreed that this time the German military leaders must sign an unconditional surrender; there could be no pretence as after World War I that the army had not really been defeated, and there would be no civilians to blame afterwards for agreeing to give up. Furthermore, there was agreement that the Dönitz government would be utilized to assure an orderly and swift surrender. All were interested in getting the various isolated German garrisons from the French Atlantic ports to the Baltic as well as German submarines at sea to surrender rather than attempt last-ditchstands.
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But once that had been accomplished, those associated with the Dönitz government, if not already arrested, would be locked up (with some of them later tried as war criminals) on May 23, after Eisenhower had checked with London, Washington and Moscow. Dönitz himself and the remnants of his government and headquarters were all arrested by the British army, which controlled the area around Flensburg where it had been located.
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As Montgomery had written to Brooke on May 6, he would use a few Germans to help get most of the enemy into the POW cages and in the end put those Germans used in this process into the cages as well.
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In Austria the Soviet Union had already begun to implement the concept agreed upon by the Allies at the Moscow Conference, that the country would be revived as an independent state, by establishing a new government under the elderly Socialist Karl Renner, with the assumption that Austria would also be temporarily divided into four occupation zones and a four–power controlled capital in Vienna; their sponsorship of the Ulbricht group precluded a similar situation for Germany. The Austrians would eventually regain their unity and independence within ten years; the Germans, on the other hand, had no central institutions of their own once the Dönitz government had been arrested. With no civilian government in existence, the four Allied supreme commanders on June 5 in Berlin proclaimed the end of the German government and assumed all sovereign power for their governments to be exercised through the Allied Control Council. The Third Reich had come to an end and with it the German state founded by Otto von Bismarck less than three–quarters of a century earlier. Since the Germans had begun
the war with an attack on Poland, which they often referred to as a “state for a season,” it was perhaps appropriate that their own disappeared for decades from the map of Europe after less than one–tenth of the time from Poland’s becoming a kingdom in 1025 until its disappearance in the partition of 1795.

One of the three major Allied war leaders would not live to see its European end; another was thrown out of office soon after. President Roosevelt had won reelection to a fourth term in 1944, but the pressures of campaigning on top of the enormous pressures of the war had strained his health. Instead of some real opportunity for relaxation, there had been not only the continued drain of the war-with the Battle of the Bulge in December-but also the long trip to Yalta, which proved most exhausting.
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It was when reporting to the Congress after Yalta that Roosevelt for the first and only time made public reference to his physical handicap in explaining why he was sitting rather than standing during his speech. There followed the collapse of Allied unity over Poland and Stalin’s insulting messages about the surrender negotiations with German forces in Italy as well as the terrible fighting and heavy casualties on Iwo Jima. No wonder Oliver Lyttelton, who saw Roosevelt on March 29 as a member of the British delegation to the San Francisco Conference for the founding of the United Nations, telegraphed Churchill that he “was greatly shocked by his appearance.”
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In the first days of April, not only the current disputes with Stalin were on the President’s mind, but also the old one over the deal with Darlan. As we know that Roosevelt could still laugh uproariously over a very heavy maid’s hope that she might be reincarnated as a canary,
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he may have thought it amusing to recall being attacked for cooperating with a Fascist while currently under assault for working with Stalin. In any case, he authorized William Langer to have access to White House materials for his study of American policy toward Vichy on April 6.
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Always hopeful of a brighter future, Roosevelt wanted to steer the country to a peaceful world in which it would play a more constructive role than it had after World War I He hoped that it would participate in an international organization to which one by one the former colonies of the age of imperialism would be admitted as independent states; and he very much wanted the Philippines to be among the very first.
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On April 12, even while resting at Warm Springs he died.

President Roosevelt had guided the United States through the travails of the great depression and had given his people hope in desperate times. He had tried, but without success, to keep the country out of war by assisting others to defeat Germany and to stall off Japan. Driven into the war by the Tripartite Pact powers, he had set the basic priorities and
aims in the great conflict: the defeat of Germany first, an engagement of American troops against the Germans in 1942, the double thrust toward Japan in the Pacific, the direct thrust at Germany across the Channel, and the development of atomic weapons. He had selected the key figures in the American military and civilian war effort, and he had set the goal as the surrender of the country’s enemies. During hostilities, he had worked hard to prepare the American public for a new role in the post-war world, a world in which he hoped that a new international organization, the United Nations, would provide a framework for continued cooperation among those he considered the four great powers. And whatever the frictions and the troubles, he had striven to keep them working and fighting together during the ordeal of war. Now others would be called on to lead, but at least victory was in sight.

The new American President, Harry S. Truman, had been a follower of Roosevelt’s who had come to public attention through his chairmanship of a Senate committee checking war plants for waste and fraud. Himself a veteran of front-line fighting in World War I, he was not likely to make immediate or major changes in the war policies of his predecessor, though he had not been briefed on them in any systematic way before suddenly assuming the presidency. But he was a quick learner, very conscientious in his work, and with the self-confidence needed to make decisions.
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