CHAPTER ONE

CRUEL SPRING

Friday 20 April was Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Since seizing power in 1933 and making himself Führer of the German people, the anniversary had been celebrated throughout the Reich as a public holiday. Across Germany, the blood-red flag of the Nazi Party, with its crooked black swastika, had festooned private balconies and public buildings alike. Radio broadcasts had played special music and adulatory speeches, schoolchildren had enjoyed the day off, and at his Bavarian home at Obersalzberg outside Berchtesgaden Hitler had smiled paternally as blonde young girls presented him with posies of alpine flowers.

But today, as he turned fifty-six, the mood was distinctly unfestive. Josef Goebbels, the Führer’s fervently loyal minister of propaganda, tried to make the best of it all amid the mood of impending disaster. The German people, he announced that morning on the radio, should trust their leader to the bitter end. For this, Hitler himself was now making grim preparation. For weeks he had been in Berlin, living an underground existence in his neon-lit bunker deep below the Chancellery. It consisted of eighteen cramped rooms with a special suite that he shared with his mistress, Eva Braun.

Today, as elsewhere across Europe, it was a sunny spring day in the German capital and the lilacs were in bloom. But throughout the city housewives were desperately stocking up with food in preparation for the battle that everyone knew was coming. Overhead, the once vaunted and feared Luftwaffe was reduced to an impotent weapon, and American and British heavy bombers had been hitting the capital with impunity for months. Only the week before, they had sent the Foreign Ministry and the old Reich Chancellery itself up in flames. Now, overnight, knowing the significance of the date, they had returned for an even bigger raid, and all day the acrid smell of smoke hung heavy in the air. On the ground, Red Army forces had begun their final big offensive against the capital with two and a half million men and were rapidly approaching the eastern suburbs, threatening to surround the city completely. The thunder of heavy artillery was now audible even to those below ground.

Traditionally, the Führer was congratulated first on his birthday just after the stroke of midnight by his personal household staff. But this year he told them the situation was too somber for such ceremonies. Despite this, they persisted. Looking twenty years older than his actual age and his skin a deathly white, he trudged down the line of men and women and limply shook hands with each of them. Then, after sleeping a few hours, in the early afternoon he climbed the steps out of the bunker into the Chancellery garden to take Nazi salutes from selected army units and SS troops. About twenty teenage boys from the Hitler Youth who had been fighting against the Russians were also lined up.

Hitler was wearing his field-gray army uniform jacket with its Iron Cross, awarded for bravery during the First World War. Slowly, he walked down the line, pinching a few of the boys on the cheek and muttering words of encouragement. A newsreel camera recorded the event. Inadvertently, it also captured the violently shaking left hand that he kept firmly behind his back in an effort to conceal it, a mark of his rapid physical decline in recent months. “Here in Berlin,” Hitler told the teenagers, “we are facing the great, decisive battle . . . Our belief that we will win . . . has to remain unbroken. The situation can be compared with that of a patient believed to have reached the end. Yet he does not have to die. He can be saved with a new medication, discovered just in time to save him.”

What the miracle at this stage might be was anyone’s guess. Since the allied landings in France on D-Day the previous June, Hitler and Goebbels had constantly hinted at miracle weapons that would yet win the war, such as the V2 rocket or a new jet aircraft. The week before, it had even seemed that a political rather than a military miracle might save the Reich. Shortly before midnight on Thursday 12 April a BBC–Reuters flash had announced the sudden death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt at his private retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia.

Goebbels immediately phoned Hitler. “My Führer,” he exclaimed, “this is the miracle of the House of Brandenburg we have been waiting for. This is the turning point predicted in your horoscope!” The Minister of Propaganda was referring to a historical event well known to Hitler, with his megalomaniac habit of comparing himself to the great figures of German history. In 1762, King Frederick the Great of Prussia had been saved from defeat in the Seven Years’ War against Russia by the sudden death of Czarina Elizabeth. Hitler, who kept a portrait of Frederick in his bunker study, reacted to Goebbels’s news with delight. Soon, he told him, the Americans and the Red Army would be exchanging artillery barrages over the roof of the Chancellery.

The euphoria had been fleeting. Few of those now listening to Hitler’s promises in the garden placed much faith in his curiously defiant yet depressing message to the assembled faithful about a dying patient. Later that day, below ground again, he greeted assembled luminaries of the Reich–ministers and generals alike–who had come to give him their birthday wishes. He shook hands with each and exchanged a desultory few words. Then, the birthday ritual completed, they turned to the great decision of the day. Would Hitler stay in Berlin, or would he move south to Bavaria to lead some last-ditch resistance from his base at Berchtesgaden? This had long been the plan. Just ten days before, he had sent his servants south to prepare the way.

The decision was now urgent. The Red Army advance was so rapid and so close that it threatened to cut off all routes of escape out of the city. Worse, with the Russians advancing west, and the Americans moving rapidly east in central and southern Germany, the Reich faced being cut in two, with the route south to Bavaria being completely shut off. Everyone present argued that Hitler should quit his capital immediately. Earlier in the day, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, his military chief, had urged this course, but he had been rebuffed. “Keitel,” said Hitler, “I know what I want. I will fight on in front of, within, or behind Berlin.” Now, after further discussion, he relented a little by saying that he would leave the final decision to fate.

Yet, in truth, he had already made up his mind. In March, Eva Braun had arrived in Berlin from Berchtesgaden. Then, just a week ago, she had descended from her private apartment in the Chancellery to sleep with Hitler in the bunker. Gerda Christian, his senior private secretary, knew instinctively what this meant: Hitler would never flee to Bavaria. Instead, Berchtesgaden, in the shape of Eva Braun, had come to Berlin. Hitler’s mistress was a middle-class Catholic girl from Munich. Twenty-three years his junior, she had met him in the studios of his official photographer Heinrich Hoffman, where she was working as an assistant. Whatever else might be said about her, she was loyalty supreme. She would stay at his side until the bitter end.

Gerda Christian’s guess was confirmed later that evening when Hitler, as so often, ended his day by chatting with his secretaries in his study. He always liked the company of impressionable young women, and it was to women that he often revealed his deepest feelings. They too wanted to know if he would leave Berlin. If he did, he replied, he would feel like a Tibetan lama turning an empty prayer mill. “I must,” he insisted, “bring things to a head in Berlin–or go under!”¹

To all but the willfully blind, it was now obvious he would do both. Moreover, whatever he said or did in Berlin was increasingly irrelevant to the march of war throughout his beleaguered Reich and beyond.

Of all the bitter months of the war against Hitler, April 1945 was the hardest to bear. It was not just the weather, although this proved true to form, shifting treacherously between days of spring promise and the last gasps of a dying winter that fought back tenaciously with sleeting hard rain and flurries of snow that drove soldiers and civilians alike scurrying for warmth.

Nor was it the fear of allied victory slipping away at the last moment, like some perpetually distant and elusive prize. The end of Hitler’s Third Reich was now inevitable and visibly close. Hostile armies surrounded the Nazis in a tightening grip. In the flatlands of Northwest Europe British, American and Canadian armies had crossed the Rhine, the traditional guardian of Germany’s western frontier, and were pushing rapidly forward through Holland and towards the great North Sea ports of Bremen and Hamburg.

On the bountiful granary plains of eastern Germany, Stalin’s Red Army had crossed the Rivers Oder and Neisse to reach the outer suburbs of Berlin. Further south, the Soviet dictator’s forces were poised to link up with the Americans in the center of the country, and in Austria his troops had already taken Vienna. In southern Germany, American troops were driving rapidly up the Danube and deep into Bavaria, Nazism’s spiritual home, with its cities of Munich, the Nazi Party headquarters, and Nuremberg, site of the torch-lit rallies that had mesmerized the world just a few years before. In Italy, allied forces were finally poised to make their crucial breakout into the valley of the River Po with its arrow-straight roads pointing north to the Alps and the Reich beyond.

However, unbearably, despite all this, Hitler refused to surrender. Instead, his armies were fighting on with ferocious tenacity. Soldiers and civilians alike now knew that this would be a fight to the death, with all that this meant for them and for Europe. Liberation would come to millions, but at a price made painfully high because it seemed so needless. More soldiers and civilians would die. More houses would be destroyed by bomb and artillery shell. More fields and crops would be flooded by broken dams and dikes, ruining crops and tightening the grip of hunger that had already reduced millions to starvation. And more refugees would be sent on their way along desolate roads with their pathetic bundles of personal belongings slung on their backs or dragged in carts behind them. This, indeed, was a bittersweet month.

Globally, the end of the war looked no less dark. Japan, like its German ally, was battling back viciously to postpone the day of defeat. The island-hopping advance of the Americans in the Pacific had come to a bloody halt on rocky Okinawa, the last stop before the Japanese mainland. Here, 120,000 Japanese troops supported by 10,000 aircraft were making a suicidal last stand against an army of 155,000 Americans that stormed ashore on the first day of the month. Kamikaze pilots dive-bombed American warships and the Japanese Imperial Navy sent the Yamato, the largest battleship in the world, on a desperate last mission to ram as many enemy ships as it could. The battle would end eighty days later with the ritual suicide of the Japanese commander and his chief of staff, and with only 10,000 of the island’s defenders still alive. With 50,000 dead and wounded Americans, the fight for Okinawa offered a grim and worrying portent of what could still lay ahead before Japan surrendered.

Politically, too, the shadows were deepening. At his death, Roosevelt had yet to resolve the big question of how to deal with Stalin and the Soviet Union; while his successor, Harry Truman, was virtually unknown even to Americans and had little executive experience. Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, was by now full of dark foreboding about Soviet intentions in Europe and was already using the term “Iron Curtain” to describe a Europe divided between communism and democracy. Poland, for whose independence Britain had gone to war in 1939, was already in the grip of the communists. Would military victory turn to dust once the killing stopped?

More than anything, Robert Ellis wanted to sleep. All night he had clambered up the ridge dodging machine-gun and mortar fire. Physically and mentally, he was drained. Now, even though it was only early spring, the harsh Italian sun was scorching his skin. He crouched deeper into his foxhole to escape its relentless glare, but the ground was baked hard and his shelter was shallow.

Earth is the friend and final resting place of the combat infantryman. There he takes cover, shelters and sleeps, but it is also what he must capture and occupy. For six straight days, Ellis, of the Tenth Mountain Division, had been fighting in the last big push by the US Fifth Army to break out of the Apennine Mountains and into the valley of the River Po.

It lay below him now, its fertile green plain stretching far into the distance, representing both promise and threat. The grueling weeks of scrambling up and down rock-strewn hillsides braving withering enemy fire were over. But the river was wide and deep, a natural barrier for the retreating yet stubborn enemy. The last week’s fighting had been the heaviest and most costly thus far for the division. Three hundred and seventy men had been killed and some fourteen hundred wounded. In Ellis’s battalion alone, almost fifty men had perished in just two days of fighting. He knew all too well that many more men would die before victory came. It still seemed far away.

He was twenty years old. Home was Wooster, Ohio, where his parents had settled after years serving as Presbyterian missionaries in the Persian city of Urumia. They had arrived in Urumia during the First World War. “It was a battleground for Turkish and Russian troops, Kurdish tribesmen, Assyrians, Armenians and other native partisans,” he wrote. “Massacres and epidemics were the order of the day. My father’s medical services as a surgeon were desperately needed.”

In 1918, his parents narrowly escaped a massacre of Christian missionaries by Muslim Kurds. Already they had two small children, both boys. A daughter followed three years later. Robert had completed the family when he was born in 1924, finally arriving in the States in the mid-1930s for more formal schooling.

Now, Ellis was heading a machine-gun squad in Company F of the division’s 85th Regiment, having recently been promoted to sergeant. He had covered his helmet with burlap to reduce the reflection and make himself less of a target to the enemy, and had decided not to wear his sergeant’s stripes on his shoulder. Like most of his buddies, he assumed the Germans made special efforts to shoot officers and NCOs to disrupt the chain of command.

There had been enough death anyway, without drawing attention to yourself. Casualties were running high and one in particular came shockingly close. On the first day of the offensive, Bill Luth, one of his oldest friends in the division, had been killed. They went back together to training days in Colorado, where they had enjoyed one fabulous weekend’s leave with a couple of other buddies in Colorado Springs, singing fraternity and popular songs as they took the breathtaking drive over the mountains in full moonlight. Bill had come from Wisconsin, and Ellis had shared with him the cake his mother had sent for his nineteenth birthday, just two days before Bill’s own.

Now, Ellis wasn’t at all sure that he himself was going to make it. “The war may seem very close to the end,” he wrote to his parents, “but to the men here who watch their comrades die each day the end is far away.” Preying vividly on his mind was the final, heart-wrenching scene in All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1930s’ film version of Erich Maria Remarque’s great anti-war bestseller about the First World War. As he waits in his foxhole on the front, the armistice signed but not yet in effect, the soldier hero reaches out to touch a butterfly that has settled on a blade of grass only to be shot dead by an enemy sniper.

No one now was keen to be killed, and self-inflicted wounds, to provide an exit from the carnage, were not unusual. The risks did not diminish because victory was close. Over the last few days Ellis’s company, along with others of the division, had advanced slowly from hilltop to hilltop through deadly, often unsuspected minefields as well as towards murderous machine-gun fire that raked the slopes as men desperately scrambled for cover. Mortar and artillery fire also caused dreadful wounds.

“Men were spun to the ground by the impact of bullets,” writes one historian of a typical Tenth Division firefight in the Apennines, “sliced open by whirling jagged shards of shrapnel, atomized by direct bursts from artillery and mortar shells, catapulted into the air from the force of explosions, or thrown to the ground in agony, screaming with pain, clutching at torn limbs or spilled intestines, at jaws and genitals that had disappeared.”² German Schu mines, undetectable in their wooden boxes and scattered liberally over the landscape, invariably blew off their victims’ feet. In such savage and bitter fighting, where American soldiers saw friends killed or mortally wounded in terrible ways, prisoners, especially wounded ones, were sometimes simply shot. Ellis, like most young soldiers, was careful to self-censor his letters home about such matters.³

Round-the-clock marches had left him more exhausted than he had ever been before in his life. The previous day the regiment had captured the last great ridge before the Po Valley. Ahead of him he had glimpsed, on the horizon far to the northeast, the red tile roofs of Bologna. He had not slept for forty hours, but there was still no rest. At midnight his battalion started a rapid march to take control of a small town and then fought hard to capture another strategic ridge overlooking the valley. Now, as he desperately sought sleep, he was close to collapse and full of foreboding. Would he, like the soldier in the movie, die in his pathetic little foxhole at the final hour?

On this same April day, deep inside Germany, another river and its defenses confronted a young British commando, Captain Bryan Samain. His previous two years of military life had almost felt like a continuation of school. After his father died when he was only five, his almost penniless mother had sent him off to a Royal Masonic boarding school in Hertfordshire. But, unlike the other new boys, he didn’t mind being away from home. He was an only child–a younger sister had died before he even became aware of her–and he had already learned to be self-reliant. Nor did he unduly miss his mother. “In fact,” he recalled years later, “I never cried during those early, lonely days at school–even in the dormitory at night.”⁴

Life at the boys’ school was spartan and regimented, revolving mainly around a daily regime of sport and the weekly cadet corps, which was compulsory. “Great attention was paid to spit and polish,” he recorded, “with much green blanco being applied to webbing.” He had also learned to be a team player and to fit in. His father had been Protestant and a Freemason, but his mother was fiercely Catholic and had sent him to the school only because, as a Freemason’s son, there were no fees to pay. It meant that he was the only Roman Catholic there, but he was never bullied or taunted because hardly anyone knew about it. Instead, he camouflaged himself by attending the regular morning prayers and Sunday Church of England services like everyone else–even if, during the holidays, he went with his mother to the local Catholic church.

Home was originally in Chelmsford, Essex, but by now his mother had remarried and was moving from place to place in the Midlands, following her accountant husband in various war-related jobs. At first, after leaving school at fifteen, Bryan had fancied going on the stage, like his aunt Kit, who had played in several musicals and revues. But this youthful idea had been firmly quashed, and instead he had signed up in London as a trainee journalist. As his eighteenth birthday approached, he was working in Fleet Street for an Australian paper, the Sydney Daily Mirror.

He knew he would soon be conscripted. “Being ambitious,” he recalled, “I wanted to go for a commission rather than stay in the ranks.” He found out about the “Y” scheme of the Royal Marines, a short cut for potential officers from their volunteers, so one day he traveled to a recruiting office in Croydon, where he was interviewed by a tough-looking, leather-faced sergeant who grilled him about his school, his sporting abilities and his academic record. Above all, he was interested in the fact that Samain had passed the military-based “Certificate A” in the cadet corps. “You’ll do, lad,” he concluded.

So, on 14 January 1943, the day he turned eighteen, Bryan Samain had said goodbye to the aunts in Wimbledon with whom he had been lodging and took a train to the Royal Marines’ reception center in Devon. That had been just over two years ago, but now it felt like a lifetime away.

The day before, he had arrived in Luneberg. This picturesque medieval city, with its spas and gabled Gothic and Baroque façades, was one of the main hospital towns of Germany and was being used by the Wehrmacht for the treatment and convalescence of its wounded. It had been declared an open city and its undamaged houses provided comfortable shelter for the commandos. Like Ellis and the Americans in Italy, the British commandos were pausing for breath after a period of bitter fighting.

The term “commando” was first coined by the Boers to describe their irregular forces fighting the British in South Africa at the beginning of the century. Now, it was used for self-supporting allied units of about five hundred highly trained and mobile men. Although predominantly British, the commandos also boasted hundreds of men from the occupied countries of Europe, refugees from France, Belgium, Poland, Yugoslavia, and even Germany itself. Samain himself was conscious that his family background was French, his ancestors having been Huguenots who had fled into exile during the reign of Louis XIV. The commandos were trained to the peak of physical fitness, knew how to handle a variety of weapons and explosives, and were able to march at up to seven miles an hour for several hours.

“As expected,” wrote Samain, “the Commandos bristled with brave, larger-than-life characters–most of them volunteers, all of them keen to get to grips with the enemy. To wear the green beret of the Commandos, which I was now permitted to do, was a prized honor. To have to leave the Commandos, for whatever reason–when you were ‘Returned to Unit’ or RTU’d–was bitter personal reverse.” His own unit was part of the First Commando Brigade, advancing with Field Marshal Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group in northwest Germany.⁵

Less than a month before, they had taken part in the great allied crossing of the Rhine close to the city of Wesel. When Samain finally entered it, the town had been so thoroughly pulverized by Royal Air Force Lancaster bombers that he found the carefully prepared maps of German defensive positions virtually useless. In front of him stretched nothing but a maze of enormous craters, smashed-up landmarks and few passable roads. A British war correspondent who passed through the town at about the same time recorded,

Surely the horror of war, the sheer blanket ruthlessness of it, is shown more vividly in Wesel than in all the towns of Germany . . . there is nothing left except rubble, stinking with the dead beneath it and rotting in the hot afternoon sun . . . so great is the devastation, so great and complete the ruin, that we did not even see that most familiar sight . . . the men and women and children picking in the ruins for what they could find . . . Wesel had ceased to exist.⁶

As Samain and his troop advanced in single file through the ruins, he received a nasty foretaste of what was to come. Around him lay the bodies of countless Germans. All were apparently dead. But suddenly, as the marines’ commanding officer neared the corner of a street, one of the “corpses” stood up and fired a grenade launcher at point-blank range. It killed two of the commandos immediately, wounded the officer, and knocked everyone else off their feet.

Surprised, angry and fearful, the men retaliated by emptying their “Tommy” sub-machine-guns into the German. When they rolled over his corpse and looked more closely they were not surprised to find a member of the SS. To be sure nothing similar happened again, they then shot up every apparent corpse they could see. Samain would no longer take anything for granted.

His reaction was typical. There were too many stories of Germans fooling allied soldiers by playing dead to ignore, even if it meant that the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners was fraying at the seams. In the ten months of grueling fighting since the Normandy landings, allied soldiers had honed their instincts for survival. In France, Polish tank crews had driven straight over retreating Germans, giving them no chance either to escape or surrender.

Enemy snipers always received short shrift too, and sometimes it took little more than an arrogant reply from a captured German to trigger a killing. When one British commando lance-corporal–not in Samain’s troop–asked a surrendering German general to put his hands up, the Wehrmacht officer answered defiantly that he would surrender only to an officer of a similar rank. Unimpressed, the lance-corporal replied: “Well, this will equalise you,” and opened fire with his Tommy gun. His only punishment was to have to dig the grave for his victim. This was what was meant by the glib phrase “the sharp end of war.”⁷

Such shootings were the exception, not the rule, but the willing surrender of thousands of German soldiers witnessed by Samain and the other commandos only increased their ruthlessness towards those who continued with what seemed now like futile resistance. Beyond Wesel, one British unit found itself waging a fierce firefight for the possession of a tiny village. First, allied artillery pounded it into rubble, then the infantry moved in. They were met by concentrated machine-gun fire from the basement of a house while German riflemen picked off anyone trying to outflank it. Eventually, a full company of men was required to get close enough for one of their number to reach the back of the house and break in. As he did so, a German soldier rushed up the cellar steps and fired a magazine of bullets from his Schmeisser, killing the intruder instantly. “His death,” recorded a British lance-corporal, “was followed a split second later by that of the German as our lads cut him down. Going through the house, they threw grenades into each room and the cellar. No prisoners were taken and several Germans were bayoneted as they tried to surrender.”⁸

Montgomery’s men were now advancing across the traditional training grounds of the Wehrmacht that covered the vast expanses of the North German Plain. They were encountering not just fanatical yet inexperienced Hitler Youth contingents but the hardened staffs from the army training schools, marines and even grounded Luftwaffe pilots–all now being thrown into the battle to stem the allied advance. British troops were increasingly minded to call for air strikes or heavy shelling to blast aside roadblocks or last-ditch strongholds–anything to reduce the risk of hand-to-hand fighting and encountering death when victory was now certain. The Germans still fighting were prepared to die for their Führer. It was hardly surprising that most allied soldiers were often all too happy to oblige them.⁹

In Wesel, Samain and the other commandos slept in a deserted factory. The next morning, looking out of a window, they spotted a dozen weary German soldiers wheeling bicycles towards the factory. They were chatting casually among themselves and remained oblivious to the commandos’ presence. Samain’s troop, arms at the ready, watched them come closer and closer, but held their fire. The Germans passed by only a few feet away. Still the British held back. Only when the last of the soldiers finally turned his back on them did they open up. Thirty seconds later, twelve corpses lay spread-eagled on the road.

During the few days of rest that followed, the commandos were well fed and read mail and newspapers from England packed with reports of their exploits. Most were accurate, but highly colored. “Every time I visit these men,” observed one of the war correspondents, “there is an atmosphere of death.” Samain laughed like the others when he read this. What on earth did the reporter expect? Did he not know, he wrote, that “Death, at that time, was our business?”¹⁰

It was certainly his. The training he had received on joining the Royal Marines was designed, after all, to transform him into an efficient killing machine. At the basic training school at Lympstone in Devon, the civilian was knocked out of him by weeks of drilling, marching and square-bashing. He learned to shave and wash in ice-cold water, defecate sitting precariously on a long, trestle-supported pole perched over an earthen trench, keep his hair short, and always be immaculately turned out.

Hardened into a human machine, he was then taught everything there was to know about the handheld instrument he needed for the job, the rifle. He learned how it was put together, how to strip it, and how to fire it. The position, he was told, was lying down, legs well apart and heels flattened inwards to the ground. The same went for the Bren light machine-gun, a standard British infantry weapon double the weight of a rifle which delivered five hundred rounds a minute.

Above all, he learned how to use and almost to love the Thompson sub-machine-gun (the “Tommy” gun), an American-manufactured weapon specially issued to the commandos. In Hollywood movies, the Tommy gun was a free sprayer of bullets producing heaps of victims in one lengthy burst. But Samain learned that the proper way to fire it was in short, controlled bursts of two or three .45-caliber bullets at a time. It was essentially a close-quarters weapon, most effective within a range of fifty yards. It had become his personal weapon of choice, and he had carried his through Normandy and Holland, always firing single shots or short bursts, conserving his ammunition.

But he was also taught to survive without any weapons at all. His training included bouts with a professional wrestler, whose first act was to shake him by the hand and throw him over his shoulder–“just to make sure,” he quipped, “that you never bloody well trust anyone!” He went on to learn how to kill someone with his bare hands–one skill he had luckily never had to use–how to tackle a knife-wielding adversary, and how to disarm a weapon-carrying enemy soldier at close quarters.

His physical fitness was tested to extremes in the Welsh hills and Scottish Highlands, where he trekked mile after mile with a full pack on his back, practiced night-time attacks by canoe on lonely lochs, and “cat-crawled” on a rope strung high across rushing rivers. “The greatest thrill of all,” he said, “was the final ‘Tarzan’ or ‘death slide’ when you slid with the aid of a wet toggle (to prevent burning) down a long, taut rope that ran at an angle of 45 degrees from the top of a high tree to the ground below.”¹¹

In short, by the time he was allowed to wear the coveted green beret, Bryan Samain had been turned into a superbly fit, disciplined, thoroughly trained and skillful young army killer. Three short years before, he had been a fifteen-year-old schoolboy playing as an extra in the film Goodbye, Mr. Chips. The MGM studios were only a few miles from his school and he was one of the lucky ones chosen to take part. For three engrossing weeks he was taken by bus every morning to the studios at Denham, handed a costume, and rehearsed throughout the morning for scenes to be shot in the afternoon. The school was paid a guinea per day per head for their services. The heart-warming tale of an old schoolteacher looking back fondly over a long career while recalling pupils and colleagues was pure feel-good material, and featured not a single villain.

After Wesel and nineteen exhausting hours driving in the back of a truck along rough country roads in heavy drizzle and rain, Samain moved on to Osnabrück, a major industrial and railroad center en route to Lüneberg, and the largest German town so far taken by British forces. It was three-quarters blitzed, thousands of its citizens were cowering in cellars, and the town’s water supply, when it worked, mingled with raw sewage.

The main problem here was not fanatical SS resistance, although plenty of enemy snipers had to be picked off. Instead, the commandos found thousands of liberated slave laborers. Deported forcibly by the Nazis from all over Europe to work in factories and on farms, they were rioting and looting in a frenzy of celebration. Laughing Polish women were trying on fur coats, Frenchwomen looted stockings from shop windows, and men of every nationality scavenged wildly for food. Only after imposing a twenty-four-hour curfew did the marines finally manage to post guards on warehouses and bring some order to the city.¹²

Looting was almost universal. Nearby Hanover provided another vivid example. Allied military government officials arrived to find a city of half a million people with no water, no electricity and no working sewers. Even the restrained British official historian F.S.V. Donnison hints at scenes of horror: “It was a town of looting, drunkenness, rape and murder as forced labor broke from restraint,” he records. “Shots whistled by from drunken ‘slaves’ or left-behind snipers. Police were mobbed and their bodies strung from lampposts.” Only the brutal enforcement of law and order made possible the revival of basic services and the semblance of normal life.¹³

Now, however, in Lüneberg, everything appeared calm and peaceful. The commandos rested and prepared for the forthcoming crossing of the Elbe, the last important river barrier that stood in their way. There were hot baths and plenty of food. A cinema was rigged up, football matches were played between units, and in the comfortable middle-class house where he was billeted the padre discovered a cache of fine wine hidden in a secret room behind a cupboard, and champagne was enjoyed by all. All around, the town’s daily life continued much as usual while doctors and nurses carried on with their normal work. “It was strange,” recalled another British officer, “to wander round this lovely old city and meet on every street corner one’s hated enemy. Unarmed and engaged in the world-embracing task of ministering to the sick and wounded, they seemed harmless enough.”

Yet appearances were deceptive. All too close lay the dark underbelly of Hitler’s Third Reich. Next to a row of modern middle-class houses near the city center stood a small hospital made up of crude wooden huts. Packed inside, British soldiers found dozens of Russian slave laborers, both men and women. Most of them had been badly wounded in a recent RAF bombing raid on a nearby factory where they worked. Those who attempted to escape had been shot down by the SS. The morgue was filled to overflowing, and only a single doctor was on duty, helped by a solitary nurse. On dirty gray sheets, bathed in their own sweat and filth, the Russians lay gaunt and weak, too ill to move.

Samain had earlier witnessed similar misery on his final drive to the city. Traveling at speed along dusty rural roads, he more than once found himself held up for hours by crowds of displaced persons recently liberated from concentration or labor camps:

They would pass us on carts, in stolen German cars (which seemed to run out of petrol all too soon) and on the backs of horses. They drove cattle before them so they could eat; and on their backs were pots, pans, water bottles and old clothes. Every time they met us they cheered in a dozen different tongues, and when we looked at them closely we saw they were little more than walking skeletons, with ribs protruding pitifully from the flesh, faces lined and haggard, and eyes that told of a hundred sufferings.¹⁴

There were almost twelve million pairs of haunted eyes in those parts of Europe now being overrun by British and American troops. Many were Germans, fleeing in panic from the Russians or made homeless by allied bombing and shelling. But the vast majority were victims of the Nazis’ massive uprooting of Europeans from their native countries for racial, ideological or economic reasons. While some had moved voluntarily to Germany in search of work, most had been forcibly transported to labor for the Nazi war effort in factories and on farms.

Known as “displaced persons,” or DPs, this witches’ cauldron of the desperate and the dispossessed proved a headache to the advancing armies. They blocked roads, demanded to be fed and housed, and frequently vented their anger and desperation in bouts of looting and rioting. To take care of them, hundreds of trained civil affairs officers accompanied the forces in the field. But this military effort was seen as a purely short-term measure and everyone agreed that sooner rather than later civilians would have to take over. And those civilians already had their own organization. In November 1943, the allies had created a special relief and rehabilitation agency, known as UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency), to deal with just such a problem.

At least, that was the plan. But the well-meant intent behind it quickly ran into some unyielding realities. The agency was ill-organized, lacked experienced and competent staff, and was severely short of equipment–above all, its own transport and supplies. Of the two hundred teams requested by the military for use early in 1945, only eight were produced, and in the parts of Germany liberated by the British Army, UNRRA’s task was often taken over by the Red Cross. But in the American zone–where the vast majority of the DPs were located–UNRRA eventually managed to field a few dozen teams.

This stuttering effort was dismally apparent at UNRRA’s training center near Granville in Normandy. The town was a gray and austere old fortress on the west coast of the Cotentin Peninsula facing the Channel Islands, which were still occupied by the Germans in the spring of 1945. Headquartered in the city’s grand old Hotel Normandie, the center did not open until early March, and was both badly administered and located disconcertingly far from where its task was most urgent.

In fact, it was almost abandoned even before it began work. Hardly had the advance team arrived than the Germans launched a daring commando raid on the town from the Channel Islands. They stayed for only thirty minutes, but in that time they succeeded in killing about twenty allied officers and men and capturing fifteen prisoners. Four of these came from the UNRRA team.¹⁵

UNRRA survived this assault, but to the many relief workers from Britain and across Europe who had enthusiastically volunteered to work with the war’s human wreckage Granville proved a dispiriting and frustrating place. Day after day they scanned the noticeboards in vain, hoping to learn they had been assigned to a team for immediate dispatch to Germany. Meanwhile, the newspapers were filled with reports describing desperate scenes such as those being witnessed by Bryan Samain that cried out for action.

One of the relief workers waiting at Granville was a slight, dark-haired Englishwoman in her fifties with blue eyes, aquiline features and a voice like a rusty saw. Francesca Wilson was a veteran in helping the human debris of Europe’s twentieth-century upheavals. She had worked with Serbian refugees during the First World War, fed starving children in post-war Vienna, looked after Russian émigrés fleeing the Bolsheviks, assisted victims of the civil war in Spain, and given shelter in her own home to exiles from Hitler’s Germany. “The main force driving me,” she explained, “has been first of all a desire for adventure and new experience and later on a longing for an activity that would take me out of myself, out of the all too bookish world I had lived in when studying, and even when teaching.”¹⁶

There was plenty in her life and background to escape from. Born on New Year’s Day 1889 to a Quaker family in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, her father ran the family-owned hatter’s furrier’s factory down on the quayside by the River Tyne, a dark, smelly and fortress-like building that always frightened Francesca. It was full of ragged women sitting on benches and shouting or singing in loud voices while they stripped the rough hair from rabbits’ skins.

She had two older sisters and a younger brother, and the family was prosperous enough, but her parents led an austere, pious and thrifty life. “Every penny was accounted for,” she recalled, “and not a farthing spent in self-indulgence. They smoked no tobacco, drank no strong drink, walked to their work and to meetings or took a twopenny bus.” To the end of his life, her father took a cold bath each morning, and every Sunday he handed out slabs of chocolate to the inmates of the nearby Workhouse Hospital.

Like most Quakers of the day, he was an ardent Liberal and supporter of Gladstone as well as a convinced pacifist and internationalist. The only time Francesca ever saw him angry was at the time of the relief of Mafeking, when British troops broke the siege of the town by the Boers. The children’s governess had bought them Union Jack flags, red, white and blue sweets, and colored portraits of Generals Buller, Kitchener and Roberts. “Bursting with chauvinistic pride,” she recalled, “we decorated the breakfast room and prepared to eat our patriotic sweets.” But at that very moment her father entered the room, swept away all the trophies, and furiously flung the pictures and flags into the fire.

The family house itself was stern, dark and typically Victorian. A three-story stone building standing high on a quiet avenue with a magnificent view over the Tyne Valley and the hills beyond, it included six bedrooms, a schoolroom, and a top-floor nursery that stretched the full length of the house. The rooms were gloomy and claustrophobic, with heavy carpets and curtains, and lace hanging over the windows. There was much heavy furniture and many pictures in gold frames. The Wilsons enjoyed the services of a cook, a housemaid, a weekly char for the washing, and an occasional gardener.

When Francesca was only four years old her mother “defected” to the Plymouth Brethren, an even more strict and severe order whose followers believed in the literal truth of the Bible and abhorred any notion of evolution. After that, Mrs. Wilson became a more pious and religious figure than before, determined to keep her children as cloistered and as far away from worldly temptations as she could. The result was that, until the age of thirteen, Francesca was educated at home by a governess, who was also a member of the Brethren. But finally, at her father’s insistence, she was sent to the leading girls’ grammar school in the city. Here, the seeds of religious doubt grew rapidly. She had always been a bright and curious girl with little time for traditional feminine fripperies and soon she was going off by herself to the city’s Literary and Philosophical Institute to drink in lectures about Dante and other writers, or taking long solitary walks in the rain to contemplate her loss of religious faith. Her father, she recalled, rarely read a book.

At eighteen, she won a place at Newnham College as one of a small and elite group of female students at Cambridge. Life in the university town offered her a stimulating new world of experience and intellectual discovery. Her best friend was an atheist and, even though chaperoned, she was able to meet fascinating men of her own age with whom she could talk frankly about life and the world.

After her First World War work with refugees, she spent most of the interwar years as the senior history mistress at a school in Birmingham. But here, too, she chafed at her restricted life and wanted more. She had had at least one passionate affair during her years in Europe but had no desire to be tied down in a marriage. Instead, she created a family by giving shelter to a succession of homeless exiles. Most were Russian refugees from the Bolsheviks, and she adopted one of these, Misha Sokolov, as her son. Others were Germans who had fled the Nazis, including the future distinguished architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner.

After war broke out in 1939, she seized the chance to resume her front-line work with refugees and journeyed to Hungary to help Poles and Czechs who had fled their countries after the Nazi or Soviet takeovers. She documented these experiences in a book entitled In the Margins of Chaos.

This was the unpredictable terrain in which she flourished. “Like many spirited and capable people,” wrote her distinguished contemporary, the historian J.L. Hammond, “she enjoys flinging herself in situations that demand a high degree of resourcefulness, presence of mind, and the power of quick and effective action.”¹⁷

Francesca, as even her best friends admitted, was not the most practical of people, but she was creative and imaginative, and possessed boundless reserves of energy. Now, in Granville, she was impatient to get working. Every so often her face would break into a warm and welcoming smile. She loved being back in Europe and mixing with people from different nationalities, and she found it exhilarating talking with people who had worked so hard to see their countries freed from the Nazis. Only a year before, the Hotel Normandie, with its spacious terrace overlooking the sea, had been occupied by Wehrmacht troops, their laundry being washed and their meals cooked by the staff that were now looking after the UNRRA teams. Victory, she could see, was taking visible shape.

One by one, she met her fellow volunteers. Spending time in Granville didn’t bother her as much as it did the others. She was well aware of the center’s imperfections, but had already done most of her training in England so they hardly bothered her. For now, she was happy making friends and hearing accounts of life under German occupation. She was keen to liberate the deportees from enemy territory and get them back home. An adventure lay ahead, and she was looking forward to it.¹⁸

On this April Friday, too, a Canadian soldier named Reginald Roy was on the edge of the IJsselmeer–or what the Dutch used to call the Zuider Zee, or South Sea, to distinguish it from the North Sea, before they drained most of it dry. Canadian troops had reached the small community of Hoorst the day before after a rapid advance westward from Arnhem to cut the German forces in Holland in two.

It was a day of beautiful spring weather. The tulip fields were a mass of color and the grass tall, green and lush. There was no resistance as the Canadians rounded up fifty German prisoners without a single casualty. After almost a week of non-stop advance, sometimes up to twenty-five miles a day, it was time for a rest. Sleep came first, then the portable showers were brought in, weapons and vehicles were inspected, cleaned and repaired, and mail was distributed. Most of the men also seized the chance to write home with letters of their own. Receiving and sending mail was a fantastic morale booster and the army set a high priority on delivering it. Sometimes it was even brought to the men as they lay in slit trenches just yards away from the enemy.

Roy was a twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant in the Cape Breton Highlanders, one of the many regiments fighting with the First Canadian Army that formed the left-hand flank of Montgomery’s advance into Germany. He had even met the great British hero of El Alamein. It had happened a few weeks previously, during one of the prearranged publicity stunts so loved by the image-conscious British commander. Irreverently, Roy and his buddies referred to him as “God Almonty.” They had been warned he was coming and coached about what to do: they would be scattered in groups alongside the road, and as the great man passed in his jeep they would “spontaneously” and simultaneously raise a cheer and wave their helmets. Well in advance, Roy’s company was trucked to the chosen site, the vehicles were tucked away out of sight, and then he drilled his men thoroughly in their cheering.

When Monty duly arrived on schedule, the Canadians performed so well that he suddenly stopped in front of Roy and fired a barrage of questions at him. Where was he stationed? How long had he been there? When did he join up? Then he asked the average age of the men. Making a lightning guess, Roy replied, “Twenty-five, sir.” Delighted, Monty replied that this was exactly what he had hoped, before speeding off again along the road for more orchestrated stops.

But now, Reg was quickly devouring the three letters from his sister Joannie that were waiting for him. Then, in turn, he brought her up to date with an aerogram–a single sheet of thin blue paper that he folded in four, leaving just a small space to write her address. Two days earlier, the Cape Bretoners had liberated Barneveld in the central Netherlands, an agricultural town of a few thousand people. “What a welcome,” he enthused. “The town went mad–completely mad–with joy . . . Huge bands of men and women marched through the streets, arms linked and ten to fourteen abreast, singing their national anthem over and over. People everywhere were laughing, singing, shouting for joy. We were mobbed with kindness.”

Reg was overwhelmed by the abundant gratitude of the Dutch people. At one point he stopped at a house to brew himself some tea. When he asked the owner, an elderly woman, if she would care to join him, she dissolved into tears. “You can’t imagine,” he told his sister, “how good it makes you feel to bring such happiness to so many!”

The Highlanders, though, were not all about bringing joy; in fact, they were a notoriously rough-edged outfit. Recruited mostly from miners, fishermen, steelworkers and farmers from Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, on Canada’s harsh Atlantic coastline, they were a clannish bunch likely to resent anyone “from away,” meaning not born on the island. Most had recent Scottish or Irish ancestry, and a few were even Gaelic-speaking. Not for nothing was their Maple Leaf cap badge emblazoned with the Gaelic words: “Stol Na Fearail”–“the Breed of Manly Men.”

Roy’s own grandfather had left Scotland in the 1850s and arrived in Nova Scotia as a miner. His father had been a First World War sniper and pilot. But even with such a tough and military background, Roy found the men often hard to handle. “Out of the line,” he noted ruefully, “they were restless. Many liked the bottle a bit too much . . . and were somewhat quarrelsome.” Sectarian Catholic and Protestant rivalries also lay close to the surface and could often erupt abruptly and violently. But when they were well led, they proved fearsome fighters.

Not surprisingly, given their heritage, the Cape Bretoners were famous for their music. The day after liberating Barneveld, they piped their way through the streets followed again by an enormous crowd of enthusiastic townspeople.

For the Dutch everywhere, the arrival of the Canadians brought to an end five years of detested occupation and a regime that became harsher and more intolerable as time passed. Men were forcibly deported to Germany for labor, and underground resistance steadily grew. Increasingly savage reprisals and executions followed. Worse, a significant minority of the population actively collaborated with the Germans.

Liberation sparked spontaneous punishment of the guilty and a rough justice that caught many innocents in its grip. Resistance fighters, now free to emerge into the open and wearing their red, white and blue armbands, sped around the town on bicycles rounding up collaborators. Women who had slept with German soldiers had their hair shaved, were paraded around the streets and were slapped around by other women. A few local Dutch Nazis changed into civilian clothes and tried to slip out of town, but they were caught and forced to crawl on their hands and knees through the main streets to the prison, where they were shot.

Roy saw all of this with his own eyes. Never short of initiative, he promptly commandeered the apartment of one of the Nazis, including the sixteen-year-old maid, and made himself comfortable. Then, exhausted by the week’s fighting, he fell deeply asleep.¹⁹

Also on 20 April, but to the southeast, troops of the United States First Army entered Leipzig in Saxony, Germany’s fifth-largest city and a major industrial center. Here, Martin Luther had preached his first sermon, Johann Sebastian Bach lay buried, and Richard Wagner was baptized. The city was also the site of one of Germany’s most famous historic memorials, the massive three-hundred-foot stone monument built to celebrate the Battle of the Nations won against Napoleon’s forces after his retreat from Moscow.

Here, too, SS troops now fought on to the bitter end, some of them retreating into the cavernous base of the monument for a desperate firefight with the Americans. When the battle for the city was over, the GIs took some twelve thousand prisoners. At the Town Hall, they uncovered a macabre Wagnerian scene. In the Council Chamber, sprawled dead over tables with blood on the floor, lay three members of the Volkssturm, the German Home Guard. They had shot themselves. Next to one of them stood a half-empty bottle of cognac.

Upstairs, in the Lord Mayor’s luxuriously furnished oak-paneled office, they discovered an even more grisly spectacle. Slumped dead over his paper-strewn desk, his hands sprawled out on the blotting pad in front of him and an empty bottle beside him, lay Lord Mayor Alfred Freyberg. Facing the dead man on the wall was a large oil-painting of Hitler. Beneath it, spread-eagled on her back across a large leather sofa, lay the body of Freyberg’s wife, her head on the armrest and her feet stretched out on the floor as though she were taking a nap. In an adjacent armchair lay their dead eighteen-year-old daughter.

Three days before, they had all taken poison after a somber last supper, when it was obvious that the end had come to their Nazi dreams. At about ten o’clock, they went down to the cellar restaurant below the Town Hall and enjoyed champagne and sandwiches with a local high-ranking Nazi. Suddenly, Freyberg announced that they could not possibly survive the occupation of the city and formulated the suicide pact. When the shocked official protested that this was akin to deserting Germany in its hour of need, Freyberg simply shrugged his shoulders. “It’s all over,” he said, “Germany is beaten forever.” At midnight, he and his family went up to his office, locked the door, and carried out the pact.

Behind a closed door leading from the Mayor’s office the Americans found three more bodies: those of the City Treasurer, his wife, and their daughter, still wearing her nurse’s uniform. They, too, had taken poison. Outside, in an anteroom, lay the body of another Volkssturm member who had killed himself. Twenty- and fifty-mark notes lay scattered around his corpse.

Just outside the city, the Americans discovered a small concentration camp. The day before, SS guards had herded its three hundred inmates into one of the wooden barracks, doused it with petrol, and set it alight with grenades. Those who tried to escape from the blaze were shot. The buildings were still smoldering and corpses festooned the barbed-wire perimeter when the GIs arrived. Following what by now was becoming a grimly familiar routine across Germany, the city’s new burgermeister was ordered to supply caskets for the dead and to find people to dig the graves. He was also instructed to provide a cross and a wreath for each grave, and all city officials were required to attend the funerals, along with a hundred other prominent citizens. Several hundred DPs dropped flowers on the graves, as did some of the several hundred Germans who voluntarily joined the ceremony.²⁰

But the caretaker who had shown the Americans round the Town Hall seemed unmoved by all the deaths. When they had seen enough, he had simply locked the doors behind them and walked down the stairs. A little later, Hitler heard of the Mayor’s suicide pact and baldly declared it a “cowardly evasion of responsibility.”²¹

As British troops nudged forwards to the suburbs of Bremen and Hamburg in northern Germany, Hitler’s birthday saw US forces enter Nuremberg in the south.

Hitler had made Nazism a secular religion with himself as God and Nuremberg as its holy shrine. All six Nazi Party Rallies of the Third Reich had been held there, vast ritualized spectacles that were immortalized in Leni Riefenstahl’s famous documentary, Triumph of the Will. At first lasting four days, then extending to eight, each September they were attended by a quarter of a million people drawn from all over Germany and from every sector of German society. Some fifty thousand were members of the Hitler Youth or the German Girls’ League. Two thousand of them walked several hundred miles on a grueling “Adolf Hitler March” to reach the city.

The Rallies saw endless parades, displays of mass calisthenics, continuous music and singing, gala performances of Wagner, solemn ceremonies to honor the party’s “martyrs” killed in the failed 1923 Munich putsch, and military exercises. Their dramatic high point came on the evening of the “Day of the Political Leaders.” As darkness fell and 100,000 spectators took their seats, 110,000 men marched onto the review field and the space was suddenly lit by a ring of lights illuminating thousands of fluttering party banners. Then, at the instant Hitler entered the arena, one hundred and fifty searchlights shot their beams vertically into the night sky to produce a vast “cathedral of light.” It was, said one overawed spectator, “solemn and beautiful . . . like being inside a cathedral of ice.”²²

Hitler had deliberately selected Nuremberg because it was a virtually intact walled medieval city with a castle. Unsullied by modernism, it thus linked the Nazi Party with German history stretching back to the First Reich of the Middle Ages. The city, declared its Nazi Lord Mayor proudly, was the “most German of all German cities.” To emphasize the point, after the 1938 Anschluss with Austria, Hitler had the regalia of the old Holy Roman Empire–including Charlemagne’s bejeweled prayer book and several scepters and orbs–brought back to the city from Vienna, to which they had been removed in 1794 to save them from the marauding armies of Revolutionary France.

It was to Nuremberg, too, that the German Reichstag was summoned during the 1935 Rally to pass the infamous, anti-Semitic “Nuremberg Laws” that deprived Germany’s Jews of their basic civil rights and proclaimed illegal–through the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor”–all marriages between Germans and Jews. (This law was extended the next year to encompass Roma, Sinti and non-whites.) The city was also home to the Sturmer Publishing House, owned by Julius Streicher, a radical anti-Semite and one-time local Nazi Party Gauleiter (district party leader). His newspaper, Der Stürmer, had a circulation of hundreds of thousands and spewed out a diet of undiluted hatred against the Jews. “If one really wants to put an end to the continued prospering of this curse from heaven that is Jewish blood,” wrote Streicher on Christmas Day 1941, “there is only one way to do it: to eradicate this people, this Satan’s son, root and branch.”²³

The walled city was far too small for the enormous Rally crowds, so in 1934 Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect, had been commissioned to design a vast complex of buildings and parade grounds on the southeast edge of the city. Eventually covering some eleven acres, it included the Luitpold Arena, capable of holding some 150,000 people, the Congress Hall, seating 50,000, and the vast Zeppelin Field. This last was designed by Speer personally and was modeled on the Pergamon Altar. With a spectators’ tribune some three hundred meters long crowned by a gilded copper swastika, it held some hundred thousand people. A special railway station was constructed close by to deliver the vast crowds to its entrance. Nearby, a sprawling wooden city of halls, open-air theaters, bowling alleys and carousels was built for the Nazi organization Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy).

In all, the Rally grounds with their vast monumental buildings symbolized the two great, powerful myths of the Third Reich: first that of the Führer–the idea that Hitler was an instrument of Providence sent to save the German people; second, that of the Volksgemeinschaft, or national community, founded on shared feelings and experiences. The buildings were all designed so that Hitler would be the sole focus of attention and elevated well above the crowds. The central axis of the complex–the two-thousand-yard-long and sixty-yard-wide “Great Road”–was deliberately aligned by Speer with the city’s castle and old town. This again symbolically linked the Rallies, the Nazi Party and the Third Reich with the historic German past.²⁴

The shrine-like significance of Nuremberg to Hitler and the Nazis was not lost on allied propagandists. Newspapers, especially in the United States, made much of its impending capture, as did the US Army. “In view of its ranking position as Nazi Circus Town,” noted one US Army map of the city, “its importance cannot be exaggerated.” By the time of Hitler’s birthday, two-thirds of its 450,000 population had fled, 90 percent of the ancient city lay in ruins, and of its 65 listed artistic monuments, 32 had been completely destroyed and another 18 badly damaged.

But the local Gauleiter promised Hitler that he would fight to the death and there followed a grueling four-day battle. The city’s medieval half-timbered streets had already been largely obliterated and burned by allied bombers, with the heaviest raids taking place a few weeks earlier. Over six thousand people were killed and over three hundred thousand made homeless by the bombardments. Now, though, the city’s anti-aircraft guns were directed against the US infantrymen on the ground. Disguised as a house painter, Julius Streicher had fled three days before from his home in nearby Steinbach in a limousine driven by his wife followed by a truckload of personal belongings, leaving behind him an extensive library on Jewry, including hundreds of volumes in English. Streicher’s successor as Gauleiter of Franconia, as well as the Lord Mayor of the city, were both eventually found dead in Gestapo headquarters, where they had killed themselves.

The Americans faced hand-to-hand fighting through rubbled houses and cellars before finally breaching the old city walls. The next day, in the battered ruins of the Adolf Hitler Platz in the heart of the city, they raised Old Glory while a military band played “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Out on the Rally grounds sprawled a handful of dead Hitler Youth and Volkssturm conscripts who had attempted a futile last-ditch resistance. “Over the vast stadium,” announced Universal Studio’s weekly newsreel shown in cinemas across America, “Old Glory overshadows one of the world’s most hated symbols. Here, where once thousands of swastikas flew above goose-stepping troops parading before the Führer, and where he ranted to the assembled thousands, the troops Hitler once laughed at take over.”

In the wrecked city, order was only slowly restored. Few city employees took any notice of the order to return to work broadcast from loudspeakers mounted on the back of US Army trucks as they snaked and bumped their way along the narrow tracks cleared through the rubble.

Meanwhile, German civilians and freed forced laborers alike happily looted warehouses stacked with food, undeterred by the two hundred streetcar conductors drafted in by the Americans to act as temporary policemen. Reports of rape and robbery by GIs piled up on the desk of the army’s public safety officer. A few days later, watched by a legion of war reporters from around the world, the swastika over the Zeppelin Field was dynamited into smithereens by American troops.²⁵