CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“YOU LOST PEOPLE AS YOU GAINED YOUR FREEDOM”

Through the open window of his hotel bedroom, framed like a picture, Robert Reid could see wooded hills and snow-capped peaks. In the center rose a column of thick black smoke. As night fell, it assumed a reddish tinge as it caught and reflected the flames from a blazing fire beyond his sight. But the BBC man knew what it was. He was in Berchtesgaden, and someone, possibly a homeless deportee, had set fire to one of the buildings surrounding Hitler’s Berghof. As soon as War Report was shut down after VE Day, he had headed for home, like most other war correspondents. But instead of catching a military transport plane to be ferried sightless across Europe inside a freezing fuselage, he decided to play at being a tourist again, just as he and Vera had traveled in the carefree thirties on their continental tours. It was a nine-hundred-mile journey by jeep to Paris, but he planned to enjoy every minute of it.

Berchtesgaden was the first stop. French troops had reached the town first, but now the place was also swarming with US forces from General Patch’s Seventh Army. With a colleague and half a dozen American soldiers, Reid wound his way up the steep and winding bomb-shattered road through fir trees to scramble among the burned-out ruins of Hitler’s residence. It had been targeted by RAF Lancaster bombers a couple of weeks before, and the vast drawing room with its great plate-glass window overlooking the Untersberg Mountain (where legend had it that the Emperor Charlemagne lay ready one day to awake and restore the past glories of the German Empire) lay empty and desolate.

Here, unlike Hitler, Reid found nothing to fire his imagination. The scavengers and looters had done their work and there was only a charred and fire-blackened chamber with crumbling plaster and an empty window. As for the great terrace on which Hitler was so often photographed against the dramatic backdrop of the Alps, there remained just a heap of shattered stone, splintered trees, twisted metal, and the smell of a dead body trapped somewhere beneath.

Now, as he watched the smoke rise in the distance, Reid thought of the blaze as more than the result of a carelessly thrown match or deliberate arson. It seemed like the funeral pyre of a nation.

All around the vast complex, other top Nazis had built their homes, and the souvenir hunters and camera-clicking GIs were out in full force. Searchers had found a large part of Hermann Goering’s vast collection of stolen art. And everyone seemed to have some small remnant of Hitler’s Third Reich to take home, including Reid. In the corner of his room there was a pile of books. He picked up one, a big blue bound volume with the name “Edda” printed on it in gold lettering. Inside were hundreds of photographs of Goering’s daughter. He also uncovered half a dozen of Goering’s correspondence files, many of them with his scribbled comments and replies. In one, he read letters inviting friends to flee from allied “terror bombing” and stay with him at Karinhall. There were also instructions to the Reichsbank about the sale or purchase of foreign currency, as well as long lists of his art treasures. How these personal belongings of the second most powerful man in Hitler’s Reich had got there, Reid could not even guess.¹

The cameras were flashing in Munich, too, as he went to look at the famous Beer Hall where Hitler had mounted his failed putsch in 1923, with people singly or in groups having their pictures taken with a lot of laughter and smiling. Inside, hundreds of people waited silently and stolidly in line to have their jugs, steins and glasses filled with Bavarian beer. It was as though, thought Reid, they were in retreat from the completely topsy-turvy world outside.

Then he drove on through Germany to the Rhine. The roads were bathed in sunshine and heavy with the scent of spring blossom, but the physical wreckage of war was all too visible. Ruined houses, shattered railway stations, blackened factories and roofless churches scarred the landscape. Yet it was the human debris, the nomads of Europe, heading towards home in never-ending streams, that truly caught his attention:

Russian women in their white kerchiefs, patriarchal, bearded figures in quilted coats, broad-cheeked Mongols with copper skins, swarms of Italian soldiers in full tropical kit, their faces half hidden by their solar topees, German prisoners jumping down from trucks at one end of a village ready to go into captivity, with British and American prisoners of war clambering into trucks at the other end of the village street on the first lap of their journey home.2

Finally, he was in Paris again, shining and shimmering in the sunlight, with its crowded boulevards, smartly dressed women, khaki-clad tourists. Here he caught up with friends from the press last seen crouching in some foxhole or other, and yarned and swapped stories well into the night.

It was not his first return to the city after his famous Notre Dame recording: he had taken a forty-eight-hour leave there in February, when the city was liberated but France was still at war. Then he was drawn back to the cathedral out of curiosity, to see if he could find the pillar behind which he had sheltered and gaze at the bullet marks on the stone. Instead, he saw a young woman in her twenties standing mute and silent before the altar of a side chapel where two tall candles burned. Later, he saw her again, rapt and pensive before the figures of Christ and the Wise Men in the tableau of the Nativity. Here, he imagined, was some wife or girlfriend of one of the two million French prisoners of war still in Germany. What thoughts were passing through her mind? The bitter anguish of separation, fear, uncertainty, lost hopes? Such, he mused, were the tragedies of France.³

By the end of May, he was in a BBC studio in London being interviewed about his experiences with Patton’s men. “I came to love every one of them,” he told the listeners, saying he had seen the American troops learning by experience and rapidly adapting to conditions so that by the time they crossed the Rhine “those GIs were some of the toughest, cleverest fighting men . . . anywhere in the world.” Another thing that always impressed him about the Americans was their effective mixture of teamwork and individual initiative:

Time and time again, I came across instances of soldiers who had one particular job to do–some specialist job, such as reconnoitring a lane or a river crossing for engineering purposes. Then they’d suddenly come across a strongpoint held by the enemy. Technically it wasn’t their job to mop that strongpoint up, but knowing that [it] would have to be mopped up before anything further could be done, they’d sail in and finish the job themselves.

As for Patton, he was probably the “most colorful” soldier Reid had ever met. “I wouldn’t like to get in his way,” he laughed.

But what had struck him most, he told listeners, was the effect that the uncovering of atrocities had had on the normal GI. He quoted an American lieutenant who had overrun the Ohrdruf camp and told Reid that after seeing it, he would believe anything about the Germans. “The troops who went in there,” reported Reid, “were filled with a cold fury at what they saw and from that point onwards they really knew the sort of thing the United Nations [the allies] have been fighting.”

As for the problems of post-war Europe, he rated the fate of the displaced persons as close to the top of the list. After that came the reeducation of German children. He told a story to make his point. One day, he was talking to a girl about the same age as his own daughter. He asked her a couple of simple questions. Did she know anything about Britain or the United States? She admitted she knew very little. Who was Hitler? She answered that he was their leader, and the greatest man in the world. Reid then showed her a picture of Himmler. He, too, was the greatest man in the world, she replied. “Where did you learn this?” he asked. At home, from her father, came the reply. “Well,” Reid summed it up for the BBC listeners, “there was one warped and twisted young mind ready for the smoothing iron of democracy.” Germany was a whole nation of war-mongers. What were the victors going to do, he wondered, about reeducating it and starting all over again from the rock-bottom of decency?⁴

Purifying society of the taint of Nazism was much on the minds of the Dutch, too, as Reg Roy discovered when he returned to Delfzijl after the VE Day celebrations in London.

Liberation in the Netherlands was a passionate but bittersweet affair. The surrender of German forces in Northwest Europe, Denmark and Holland signed at Lüneberg on 4 May came into force the next morning. But when, wondered the nine million desperate and starving Dutch citizens in western Holland, would they finally set eyes on their liberators? The answer was 7 May, the day agreed between General Blaskowitz and General Foulkes for the Canadian forces to enter “Fortress Holland.”

However, over the intervening two days, tension steadily mounted. Authority remained in the hands of the Germans, their troops still roamed the streets, a curfew remained in force, and the frustrated Dutch resistance was forbidden to carry arms. “Do I feel free?” asked one Rotterdammer, summing up the national mood. “We still have to be inside, and when we put out the flag we are shot at. The Huns are everywhere.”⁵ In places, there was isolated shooting and the offices of the Dutch Nazis were looted, but everywhere the SS, unhappy about the surrender, remained a threat.

On the morning of Monday 7 May, as planned, allied soldiers crossed into western Holland and entered Utrecht, the first large city to greet the liberators. In Amsterdam, a huge crowd gathered expectantly on the Dam, the large square in the city center on which stood the huge Royal Palace with its dome and distinctive weather vane in the shape of a ship, the city’s symbol, built in the seventeenth century at the glorious height of the Dutch Republic’s maritime prosperity. Were they waiting for the Queen, who had already returned to her country, or for the Canadians? No one quite knew. In the meantime, people sang and danced to one of the city’s traditional barrel organs.

Suddenly, though, shots rang out from the windows of a building on the corner of the square. People fled in panic, and in a few minutes the square emptied of everyone–except for nineteen dead Dutch civilians and over a hundred wounded compatriots. The shots had come from the windows of the Grote Club, where a group of drunken German naval officers had been drowning their sorrows at the defeat of the Third Reich.

But there was little time for mourning. The next day–VE Day–Canadian troops finally reached the city. The sun was shining brilliantly as the first soldiers entered its outskirts amid a euphoria that astonished the liberators. “The Dutch are a staid race,” noted one of them, “but when they broke loose, they simply flung off all restraint.” As the first Canadians came into sight, they were mobbed. One transport officer recalled:

As the lorries entered the city, there was a small bridge followed by a sharp turn which necessitated each lorry slowing down to almost a stop. At this point, the people started to climb on the vehicles . . . Some stood, some sat, others just hung on where one would think they couldn’t hang on. There were on and in each ten tonner approximately one hundred and twenty-five people . . . even the dispatch riders were forced to put up with three or four people hanging on to their machines.6

Such ecstatic scenes were enacted all over western Holland over the next few days. One young woman from The Hague recalled:

I remember standing there, looking down the road. On the third day I saw a tank in the distance, with one soldier’s head above it, and the blood drained out of my body, and I thought: Here comes Liberation. And as the tank came nearer and nearer, I had no breath left, and the soldier stood up, and he was like a saint. There was a big hush all over the people, and it was suddenly broken by a big scream, as if it was out of the earth. And the people climbed on the tank, and took the soldier out, and they were crying. And we were running with the tanks and the jeeps, all the way into the city.7

Yet all was not joy. Among the delirious thousands lining the streets of Amsterdam was a young Jewish woman. Miraculously, she had survived by obtaining false papers, and had lived openly while concealing her true identity. Now, suddenly, she could go out in the streets and use her real name. Recently, she had been living on handouts from the central municipal kitchens–generally just a bowl of watery soup. Her mother had grown so weak on this diet that she could hardly walk. “The Canadians looked so brawny and healthy,” she recalled. “One of the first things [they] did was to go to the central kitchens and really spice up the soup we were fed, which was normally made with sugar beets and potato peelings. The next time we got soup, it was fantastic–it had meat and vegetables and rice in it.”

But too many mouths were absent for her to experience liberation as an undiluted joy. Most of Amsterdam’s Jews, including one of her own brothers, never came back from the camps, and 85 percent of all Dutch Jews perished in the gas chambers. “When you met other Jews,” she remembered of the days of liberation, “you didn’t dare ask about their families because it was likely they had been killed . . . You lost people as you gained your freedom.”⁸ The same was true for hundreds of other Dutch families whose sons, brothers, fathers or uncles had been shot by the Germans.

If thousands of Dutch suffered, however, an uncomfortably large minority actively collaborated with the Nazis, and the demand for retribution ran high. If liberation was to lead to democracy, then such elements had to be “cleansed” from the nation. Some 65,000 Dutch collaborators had already fled to Germany.

By the time Reg Roy returned to Delfzijl, the purging of collaborators from all positions of power and authority was well under way. The mass arrests of suspects by Dutch resistance forces started even before allied forces arrived, and between 120,000 and 150,000 men and women were rounded up. In part, this was to protect them from “blitz-justice” or mass lynchings, a reaction so feared by the Dutch government-in-exile that they alerted their secret representatives in the country to deal with it. So did the Roman Catholic Church. In September 1944, when the first allied troops crossed the border from Belgium, it asked priests to open their church buildings as places of refuge for suspected collaborators.

In the event, lynching on a massive scale was largely avoided. Yet in the Groningen area to which Roy returned, feelings ran particularly deep about those who had helped the Nazis. In the town of Winschoten, for example, a crowd dragged the Nazi-appointed Mayor from his office, threw him into the canal, and hurled his portrait of Adolf Hitler and the Dutch Nazi Party (NSB) leader Anton Mussert into the water after him. In the nearby town of Farnum, a mob simply murdered the Mayor, a man also appointed by the Nazis. Lower-level collaborators were humiliated by giving them dirty and menial tasks: Roy saw some of them at work in the Krasnopolsky Hotel when he went on leave to Amsterdam.

Across the Netherlands, special “cleansing committees” were hard at work. Yet only in the weeks after the liberation did the full scale of the problem dawn on the new government, and late in June the Prime Minister began to talk publicly of the “cancerous tumor in our nation.” This was when the wave of arrests crested, and suspects were crowded into hundreds of hastily erected internment camps. In the end, some fifty thousand collaborators were given prison sentences, and over a hundred and fifty were condemned to death. Of these, though, only forty were actually executed. Anton Mussert had been found by Canadian soldiers sitting in his office in The Hague. Just a week before, in a defiant mood, he had promised to fight to the death, but in the end he meekly allowed himself to be taken into custody. Exactly a year to the day later, he was executed after a trial for treason.

In and around Groningen, the arrested were held in schools, hotels, cafés, gymnasia and large barns. Some of these improvised camps contained no more than a few dozen internees, while larger ones housed several hundred. These were usually former barracks or compounds used by the Wehrmacht, the Dutch Labour Service or the Todt Organization. In Groningen alone, there were ten large camps, where, at exercise time, gaping spectators came to watch and jeer. There were several camps for women and their children, and the city even established a home especially for the children of NSB members. At the height of the arrest wave, the city had 18,000 internees–8,500 men, 6,500 women and 3,000 children, a proportion of the population considerably higher than the Dutch national average. Some camps were reasonably comfortable, but overall there was little and bad food, poor hygiene and plenty of dysentery and diarrhea. Conditions were so bad, indeed, that even as the Prime Minister was talking of the “cancerous tumor,” newspapers were denouncing them as too harsh.

But after the peak in June, the numbers rapidly declined, and by the end of the summer only twenty out of a hundred such camps were still open in Groningen Province.⁹ Nationally, both “restoration” and “renewal” became the order of the day. It was widely accepted that Dutch society had to be reformed, but in an orderly way, and this meant being more strict about who was purged and cooling the radical mood that had developed in the resistance. The first post-war Prime Minister Willem Schermerhorn said he had to find a way “to send it to bed, politically speaking.” By the end of the summer of 1945, this had been largely accomplished.¹⁰

The handling of collaborators was a domestic matter for the Dutch. For the Canadian Army, most of its immediate and urgent tasks involved medical relief, food supply and the repatriation of German prisoners of war. There were also some significant counterintelligence tasks to carry out, as remembered by one of the senior Canadian officers involved:

In the first three weeks, we managed to get about a hundred thousand German soldiers out of the Netherlands and back into Germany. At each prisoner sorting point, the faces of soldiers were scanned by a small group of Dutch underground members who could recognise enemy agents, collaborators and others who had served German intelligence. If the German soldier passed through the control point, he was home free and could go on to a demobilisation camp in his own country; if not, he was placed under arrest. Of course, not all those dressed in German uniform were soldiers. Some were Dutchmen trying to escape their own country.

His particular interrogation team could handle dozens of people a day. Yet, even then, he confessed, “it took until September to interrogate all the people arrested in our security area.”¹¹

But the departure of the Germans was only the beginning of a new story. There were 170,000 Canadian troops in the Netherlands on VE Day. How soon could they be shipped home? The Canadians were competing with hundreds of thousands of Americans also being sent home, and the demand for transatlantic shipping was so great that the queue stretched well into 1946. As they waited, and as the days and weeks stretched into months, impatience grew and morale and discipline began to fray. This problem affected relations with the Dutch. The Canadians arrived as knights, as saints, as liberators, but over the summer of 1945 they turned into occupiers.¹²

The Netherlands at the end of the war was an impoverished country. It had been systematically exploited by the Germans and the Hunger Winter had killed thousands, and left many more at a level of malnutrition from which they found it hard to recover. Railway service was rudimentary, there was no public road transport, and regular employment remained a distant prospect for many. It was hardly surprising that a thriving black market quickly took hold. Two of its main currencies were cigarettes and alcohol. The Canadians were well supplied with both. Troops were under orders not to sell or barter goods with civilians, but this was almost impossible to enforce. It cost a family in Canada a mere three dollars to send a soldier in the Netherlands a thousand cigarettes. On the black market, he could sell them for four hundred dollars or, more likely, barter them for goods and services. Many found it hard to resist the temptation.

Canadian soldiers possessed another highly prized asset. Most Dutch men who had survived the war were badly dressed, undernourished and poor. By contrast, the youthful Canadians possessed muscled good looks, the aura of heroes, an attractive New World courtesy towards women and plenty of food and money. “I don’t think we ever met a more willing female population than we did in Holland,” said one Canadian soldier of an army that also mixed with the British, the Italians, the French and the Belgians. “They were very warm . . . They seemed so much earthier than most girls we had met previously, and they didn’t get uptight about a lot of things.” For many in the Netherlands, the summer of 1945 was a wild and crazy time. “Let’s face it,” remembered one Dutch girl, “after what we had been through the Canadians looked delicious.” Gezelligheid, a Dutch word implying both coziness and companionability, was extended by whole families to their liberators.

Typical was the experience of one Canadian soldier in Groningen. He and a friend were out one night when they met two girls on the street. They began flirting and one of the girls took them back home to meet her parents, sister and brother. The Canadians quickly nipped back to their camp and returned with chocolate bars, tea, coffee and cigarettes, and they celebrated the liberation late into the night. As the soldiers left, the mother told them they could bring her their laundry. Soon, the daughter of the house was going out on regular dates with one of the Canadians. She spoke no English, and he knew no Dutch, but they managed to communicate with hand signs, smiles and “yes” and “no.” It was not long before he asked her to marry him and return with him to Canada. “I nearly fell over and said yes right away,” she recalled. “My father liked him, maybe because of the cigarettes.” They got the permission of the Mayor and the soldier’s commanding officer, each had a health check, and the girl was screened to see that she had not been a collaborator. For the wedding, they rented a café using cigarettes as currency, and hired four horse-drawn carriages for the wedding party. It was one of the first of many “war-bride” marriages in Groningen, and between four and five hundred people crowded into the local church.¹³

Fraternization between soldiers and civilian women in the weeks following liberation was intense, and inhibitions in the traditionally prudish Dutch society fell away. The fighting was over, but a new battlefront now loomed. By the summer of 1945, a medical officer in General Hoffmeister’s Fifth Division was confirming a sharp rise in VD rates among the troops. This was despite an efficient campaign to hand out contraceptives and warn the troops about the dangers of unprotected sex. “Perhaps,” noted the officer, “it was because the Dutch and Canadians get along well together.” There were no reports of rape in the area.

However, as the summer passed, popular resentment about the behavior of Canadian soldiers and Dutch girls began to rise, and the sight of their women arm in arm with the occupiers started to grate. “Dutch men were beaten militarily in 1940, sexually in 1945,” observed one Dutch journalist. Popular songs and doggerel reflected a new mood about the Canadians. “Meisje let op je zaak” (Girl, look after yourself) was a typical verse doing the rounds:

Many who collaborated with the Germans

Bear the stigma now;

Girl, you also are a traitor

Against the honour of the Netherlands!

People come and go;

Tommy will do so too

Don’t think that he’ll take you with him;

Girl, have you thought of that?

Then no Dutch boy

Will even look at you

Because, so to say,

You left him out in the cold.

Be good to our liberators;

Theirs is a great accomplishment,

But think, there are limits:

Girl, look after yourself!

A joke hinting at the number of girls who were “getting into trouble” also began to circulate. “In twenty years, when another world war breaks out, it will not be necessary to send a Canadian expeditionary force to the Netherlands. A few ships loaded with uniforms will be enough.”¹⁴

Other irritations began to arise as well. There were more brawls involving Canadian soldiers, too many cases of looting, too much evidence of Canadians playing the black market, more public drunkenness, too much speeding in army vehicles, too many accidents. By mid-summer, the liberators were beginning to wear out their welcome. That summer Vrij Nederland, an important wartime clandestine newspaper that was now legal, published an article on the sexuality of Canadian troops. “We will do anything for the Canadians,” it read, “but our girls must stay away from them . . . We will praise God when the Canadians have disappeared to Canada.”¹⁵

Canadian soldiers were beginning to feel the same way. It was time to go.

“At present, other than explore this new town we are in, I am just sitting on my hands, patiently waiting and wondering how soon the word will come for me to pack up and go. Every day is a day nearer, of course, but I hate this sitting around and doing nothing.”

It was early July, and Reg Roy was pouring out his frustrations to his parents in a six-page, handwritten letter. The Cape Bretoners had just moved to Bolsward, a small town of seven thousand inhabitants in Friesland. Like many Frisian communities, it owed its existence to shipping, but the steady draining and land reclamation of the Zuider Zee meant it now lay stranded, five miles inland.

Roy was impatient to get home and bored with being an occupier. Even the organized sports, the regular evening dances and the trips to historic sites did little to relieve the monotony of a routine filled with drill, the repairing of vehicles and the much-needed mending of equipment and personal clothing. Once he had even made it to Paris and hit the usual tourist spots, such as the Folies Bergère and Napoleon’s tomb. But the visit was all too brief and only made the Netherlands seem more quiet and provincial than ever. True enough, the transfer to Bolsward meant there were some new places to explore, but when all was said and done there was not much to see apart from the magnificent red-brick Town Hall with its elegant Baroque façade. “Tis an old town, and very quiet,” he told his parents.

Along with a fellow officer he was billeted in the private home of the local Mennonite minister. His room was nice enough, but the house had no electricity or hot water. The officers’ mess, though, was in a comfortable hotel, and at mealtimes he was served by local waiters. Still, time passed slowly, and he wondered a great deal about when he was likely to be shipped out. It did not look good for an early exit to British Columbia, where he was already sending money to his fiancée, Ardith, to buy furniture. There were several problems. One was that his division was second last in line of Canadians to leave for home, and top priority anyway was being given to returning prisoners of war and men who had volunteered for service in the Far East. He definitely was not one of those and could not wait to get out of uniform and back into civilian life. Precisely when you got to go depended, too, on the points system. He was not too badly placed on that front as he had 150 out of a possible score of 250. But here, too, there was a snag. Higher authority had decreed that the regiment should never have fewer than twenty-five officers at any one time. So even if he qualified for fast repatriation on points, if the Highlanders were low on officers, he would have to stay.

Getting home, he confessed to his sister a little later in July, had become “a real hot subject” that was getting more heated by the day. He was sitting in his ascetic little room, bashing away with two fingers on one of the foreign typewriters that the Highlanders had liberated from the Wehrmacht. This one was Italian, he noticed. In the background, Bing Crosby was crooning on the radio. All the division’s officers had recently been told that, because of the shipping problem, it would be “about next Easter” before the division returned home. With 26,000 men crossing the Atlantic to Canada every six weeks, Roy could see the problem. So far, out of the 170,000 Canadians in the country on VE Day, only 16,000 had left. “Li’lo Reggie may be out in the cold, cold ground,” he typed in the jokey style he liked to adopt with his older sister, “and that may mean I shall not be coming home until next Spring . . . S’help me, if I have to stay over here for any longer, I might as well take out citizenship papers.”

There was nothing he could do except silently howl and curse and get on with it. It was all harder to bear because he was anxious to go to college and term began in September. Before then, he would have to get back to Canada, be discharged, move to whichever college would accept him, and–not least–marry Ardith. “It is a poor system,” he wrote to his parents, “it makes me mad to think about it even.”

In the meantime, he enjoyed the packages his mother continued to send, just as she had during the war, packed with oranges, apples, cookies, tea, shorts and sweatshirts, and dozens of magazines. In return, he promised his father he would be returning with a couple of “Jerry” dress bayonets, a “lovely pair” of binoculars, and a Belgian Browning automatic that he secured with a bottle of Hiram Walker whisky. “I’ll be coming home with guns blazing, yunk, yunk,” he wrote. “ ‘Dead Eye’ Roy I wuz known as–or was it ‘Weakeyes,’ haw!” he joked.

He was also proud of some of the photographs snapped in Delfzijl. “They are really good,” he promised one and all, “and some are really grim.” He was thinking of the picture of his dead Highlander comrades on the battery wall, their bodies neatly wrapped up in cloth ready for burial. Already it seemed like quite a long time ago.¹⁶

Also in Northwest Europe waiting to move on was British commando Bryan Samain, still based at Eutin in Schleswig-Holstein.

Samain, like Reg Roy, was keen to take back some trophies of war. His chance came one day when a German walked into his office at the Eutin Town Hall. He was wearing a faded Luftwaffe uniform and spoke good English. He had a surprising tale to tell.

The man claimed to be a deserter who was picked up by the SS near Lübeck in 1943. They promised not to turn him in to the Luftwaffe, provided he looked after one of their secret supply stores, which he did for the rest of the war. It was hidden in the countryside near Eutin, concealed in the cellar of an old inn. He offered to take Samain out to see it.

Hopping into his jeep, Samain drove with the man about ten miles out of Eutin along small country roads. Sure enough, in the middle of what appeared to be a deserted hamlet, there were the ruins of an inn. The man led him to a large double trapdoor and down they clambered into a large cellar. It was packed with hundreds of boxes filled with expensive cameras and telescopic lenses. The cameras were all Contax IIIs, each worth a small fortune. In addition, there were dozens of pairs of Zeiss Ikon binoculars as well as crates filled with rolled-up oil paintings and carefully wrapped gold and silver plates.

It had all been scrupulously inventoried. The Luftwaffe man even produced the list carrying an official SS stamp. But what, wondered Samain, was really going on here? Was it truly an SS pile of loot, or was it some elaborate con by the self-proclaimed deserter? Unfortunately, he would never find out, because the whole affair was quickly passed on to more senior officers. But Samain and many of his fellow commandos each returned to Britain with a Contax III camera and a telescopic lens.

During his month as an occupier in Eutin, Samain encountered no serious problems with the local population. Indeed, one of his enduring memories was that from virtually day one of the surrender, German men and women of all ages and conditions were out in the streets clearing up debris, rubble and bomb damage wherever they could. But there was not too much time to observe this. Along with many other British units in Europe, the commandos were now slated for action in the Far East. In early June, he left with a small party of officers and men to drive the unit’s trucks and jeeps to Arromanches in Normandy before crossing the Channel back to England. Meanwhile, the rest of 45 Commando sailed to Tilbury out of Hamburg.

Samain was lucky, for throughout the rest of Germany law and order were in short supply. Violence by roaming groups of freed slave laborers troubled the country for months, and remnants of the Werewolves and diehard Nazis continued to cause problems. In remote areas, such as parts of Saxony and the Bavarian Alps, bands of Wehrmacht and SS troops carried out attacks and raids throughout the summer and autumn, until winter forced them out of their hiding-places.

The Werewolves proved less of a headache than allied intelligence had anticipated, but a few groups remained active well after VE Day, especially in Polish-occupied Silesia and the Sudetenland. Some caused trouble in the western zones of Germany, too. The allies had responded to the broadcasts of Radio Werewolf in April by promising that all active Werewolves would be hunted down, captured, judged and, if found guilty, shot. They kept to that promise, and in the weeks following VE Day scores of Germans were executed for sniping at allied soldiers or for illegally possessing weapons. In Schleswig-Holstein alone, the British executed a dozen Werewolves, with thirty more still awaiting the death penalty at the end of the summer. Over the next few months, allied counterintelligence investigated hundreds of other cases. Denmark proved a surprisingly rich terrain for Nazi resistance groups. Thousands of German refugees fleeing from the Russians sheltered in Jutland while waiting to reenter Germany. In mid-June, evidence emerged that the German Red Cross operating in Denmark was being used as a cover for widespread Nazi activity and for shielding wanted Germans. Both its chief executive and his deputy were arrested. In southwest Germany, a fanatical group of ex-SS men near Stuttgart launched several bombing attacks against “fraternizers” and denazification tribunals before it was rounded up at the end of the following year.¹⁷

On Thursday 14 June, British intelligence officers captured the last of the big-time Nazis.

Joachim von Ribbentrop was Hitler’s foreign minister and a one-time ambassador to Britain. Like many other top Nazis, he had fled north to Flensburg, where he offered his services to Admiral Doenitz. But Hitler’s successor chose instead Count Schwerin von Krosigk, a man he thought more likely to prove acceptable to the allies in case of any serious negotiation. Rejected, Ribbentrop made his way to Hamburg. Here, he first sought shelter with a wine merchant he had known in happier days a quarter of a century before when plying the same trade. But he was refused, so he found himself lodgings elsewhere in the city, registering under the name “Herr Reiser.” For the next month, he lived the life of a quiet and unobtrusive middle-aged man, taking regular strolls through the streets in an elegant double-breasted suit with a black trilby hat and dark sunglasses.

Meanwhile, British Army Field Security had taken over the city’s former Gestapo headquarters, which they found still equipped with telephone-tapping equipment. They were fully briefed on the names of all Nazi intelligence officials in the city–particularly former Abwehr agents–as well as Nazis on the automatic arrest list. Some of these had been officials employed by Goebbels’s propaganda machine in the studios of Radio Hamburg, from where William Joyce had frequently broadcast. By now, the British had taken control of the station and were busily denazifying it and getting it running again.

Although Ribbentrop’s wine merchant friend had refused him refuge, he kept news of the meeting to himself. But not so the merchant’s son, who went to the police to report Ribbentrop’s presence in the city. This proved a helpful hint, because for at least the previous two weeks rumors had been rampant that he had already been seized by the Russians.

A three-man field security team led by twenty-nine-year-old Lieutenant J.B. Adam of Paisley, a peacetime schoolteacher, eventually headed to a room on the fifth floor of an apartment block close to the main railway station. They knocked on the door, which was opened by an unkempt young brunette wearing a scanty negligée. Pushing her aside, the soldiers searched the rooms and found a man deeply asleep in bed. Adam shook him by the shoulder for a long time before he woke up. He blinked in the light, gazed incredulously at Adam, then without a word clambered out of bed.

“What is your name?” asked Adam.

“You know very well who I am,” answered Ribbentrop, before making a swift bow and adding ironically, “I congratulate you!”

He was carrying a tin of poison which he produced voluntarily before being searched. He was formally identified by both the wine merchant and his own sister, who had been picked up earlier. His son, captured the week before by the Americans in Bavaria, had given no clue as to his father’s whereabouts.

“I wanted to stay in Hamburg until British opinion had died down,” Ribbentrop told his interrogators. “Then I intended to give myself up and get a fair trial.” There was little mistaking the temper of British feeling about him. “This,” declared the Glasgow Evening Citizen, “is the man who, perhaps more than any other, was responsible for plunging the world into war. He was Hitler’s ‘evil genius.’ Warped with hatred of the British, he poured into his Führer’s mind the mistaken judgements which inflamed that megalomaniac and convinced him the world was his for the taking.”¹⁸

The day before Ribbentrop’s capture Herman Pister, the commandant of Buchenwald, along with several of his staff officers, had been found in a prisoner-of-war camp near Munich. American intelligence officers had been on his trail since he fled the camp in disguise shortly before US forces liberated the camp.

In Italy, a desperate search of another kind was under way.

After her heart-rending farewell to Alex von Stauffenberg at Capri, Fey von Hassell drove back with Detalmo to Rome.

The capital had slipped as comfortably into the new occupation as it had accommodated itself to its predecessor. Two days after the liberation of the city in June 1944, American officers replaced Germans on the fashionable dinner circuits, and the farewell dinner for Field Marshal Kesselring was quickly followed by the equally hospitable welcome to General Mark Clark. Yet relief that the city had been spared destruction soon gave way to a sobering recognition of the reality that Italy was one of the losers in the war.

VE Day was a somber, downbeat affair. The bars and restaurants were quiet, no more church bells than normal were rung, and while some flags appeared, just a few groups of young Italians paraded in the streets, trying, wrote one observer, “with almost pathetic desperation” to gate-crash the victory party. “But the victory is not theirs,” continued Philip Hamburger, an American war correspondent in the city, “and the enthusiasm is hollow.” Rome, he wrote, had accepted the news of peace itself “with the helpless and tired shrug of the defeated.” For what did peace mean, in practical terms? Little more than a dreary continuation of the misery of fantastic prices, black markets, unemployment, the struggle to regain national pride, and “the even more difficult struggle to get people to think for themselves after two decades of stupefaction.”

Personal problems now loomed larger than ever. Hamburger listed some of the typical demands that showered down on him. “How can a young man get to Turin to discover whether his parents survived the German occupation; does the American know someone who will deliver a letter to a lady’s husband, a Partisan, in Milan; please, will the United States permit Italians to leave home and settle in the United States.” On and on they went.¹⁹

Fey was soon to find out that she was only one of thousands with such problems that no one seemed able to solve. Her emotions were in turmoil. Everything in Rome was heart-achingly familiar, from the Pirzio-Birlio apartment and Detalmo’s family, to the streets and monuments she had loved when her father was German Ambassador there. Yet she now felt dislocated and adrift in a city that had not suffered as so many other places had. “It felt wrong,” she remembered. “There was no sign of the horror and destruction that had ravaged the rest of Europe.”²⁰ Detalmo tried hard to distract her, but he had not been party to her misery, and sharing her feelings with him proved impossible.

Above all, though, how could she return to normal peacetime life when her children were still missing? With the war finally over and the Nazis finished, it should have been the best of times, but for Fey it was “the worst time of all.”²¹

At least–as far as she knew–her children were still alive, and one day they might all become a family again. Others were not so lucky.

Joseph Goebbels and the Mayor of Leipzig were not the only Nazis to ensure that their children, like themselves, would not survive the collapse of Hitler’s Reich. Outside Erfurt, for example, the Americans reported the death of a man, his wife, six children and their nurse. The eldest of the children was aged eight, the youngest just two. “I believe it was their free will to die,” said the local doctor, implausibly. Sometimes, children were killed because of Goebbels’s dire promises about likely allied behavior towards the Germans, or because the prospect of life in defeat seemed too hard to contemplate. Near Schweinfurt, a young woman who heard that her husband had just been killed at the front poisoned her two small children, then shot herself. Margaret Bourke-White, a photographer for Life magazine, was profoundly shocked by the scene. “Making myself photograph these tiny pathetic bodies, victims of forces which should be utterly remote from the life of a child, was one of the most difficult jobs I have ever had,” she wrote.²²

From Rome, Fey and Detalmo tried frantically to trace the boys.²³ They pleaded with officials for permission to travel to Germany and search for them but always met with bureaucratic refusal. Travel was simply too chaotic and they enjoyed no priority. Ironically, despite all her hardships, because she was German and thus an enemy national, she was ineligible for any help from UNRRA–even if they had been able to give it.

Then, by chance, at the end of May, Detalmo met an American officer who was flying to Munich, and he agreed to carry letters to Fey’s mother, who was still living in the family home at Ebenhausen. Detalmo’s letter was written in English and reflected the exhaustion felt by millions of others when the guns fell silent:

My thoughts are not too clear. They shift from Christian patience to anarchic rebellion. I am not prepared to accept what has happened to us. If I still feel like fighting and working for a better world, it is only out of loyalty to the sacrifice of those who have shown us the way. Father [i.e. Ulrich von Hassell] has been a great example for us, and we are still under his shadow. It is as if an enduring monument has been raised inside our hearts.

Fey, he added, had shown enormous strength in surviving her ordeal. “I feel like marrying [her] anew,” he concluded. “I would marry her ten times if I had ten lives.”

In her letter, Fey asked her mother to start looking for the children. But she and Detalmo expected them to be found any day now. Above all, they refused to believe they were dead.

However, still no news came, and soon they resigned themselves to the fact that getting to Germany was impossible. It would be up to Fey’s mother to find her grandchildren.

Detalmo was now working as a private secretary to Italy’s first post-war prime minister, Ferruccio Parri, one of Italy’s leading wartime resistance leaders. When he was not busy with that, he and Fey prepared pamphlets and papers giving details of Corrado and Roberto along with their photographs. They sent them to the Italian, German and International Red Cross, to the American, British and French intelligence services, to Vatican Radio, to all the bishops and archbishops in Germany and Austria. Every leaflet was written in Italian, German, English, French and Russian. But there was no response and Fey increasingly had a sinking feeling. The children were so young, they would now have different names, and perhaps they were lost deep in the Russian zone of Germany or Austria. How could she ever hope to find them in the post-war chaos still engulfing the continent? To distract herself, she began to record everything that had happened to her in the camps.

Meanwhile, her mother had begun to search for the children. Her home in Ebenhausen, like thousands of others at the end of the war, consisted entirely of women. Living with her was her mother–the widow of Admiral von Tirpitz–her unmarried sister, and Fey’s sister Almuth. Neither of her sons had returned home. Hans-Dieter had been thrown into prison after the bomb plot before escaping ahead of the Russians to the French zone of occupation. His elder brother, Wolf Ulli, had last been heard of somewhere behind the Russian lines.

For Fey’s mother, too, though, it felt like mission impossible. All she knew was that eight months ago, her grandchildren had been taken from their mother at Innsbruck. How on earth was she to carry out a search in a country with no railway services, where the telephone lines were still down, and which was under strict military occupation so you needed a special permit for nearly everything? They were just two small boys, known by false names, among millions of other lost children and orphans in Europe’s wasteland. Nazi authority had melted away, and with it the centralized records that might give a clue to their whereabouts. Only the occupiers carried any authority, but they were overwhelmed by the confusion. Besides, they knew nothing about the boys.

Then, early in June, she had a sudden lucky break. While clearing up the debris and searching through buildings, the authorities in Munich found a dark blue abandoned BMW. They were able to identify it as the one confiscated from the von Hassells after the arrest of Fey’s father and returned it to the family. Now, at least, Fey’s mother had transport of her own. Next, she secured permits for the car, for travel and for petrol. Eventually, her quest led her to the office of Colonel Charles Keegan, the US military governor of Bavaria.

“Charley” Keegan was–in the words of one harsh critic–“a New York Irish politician-turned-soldier with a glad hand and glib gab,” and he would later be fired for letting too many ex-Nazis back into office. But Fey’s mother found him sympathetic and concerned. He was obviously shocked and disturbed by the chaos and anarchy that greeted him in Germany, and he wanted to help. Solemnly, he wrote out a note asking his subordinates to assist her.

It worked wonders. Armed with the note, she and Almuth carefully planned the route of their search. They relied mostly on rumors and gossip about other missing children in Gestapo hands that were spreading from town to town. They headed first for a children’s home in southern Bavaria, but the director there gave them short shrift, saying Fey’s children were definitely not among those in her care.

However, after this setback, they received a strong lead directing them to Bad Sachsa. It sounded promising because the Stauffenberg and Goerdeler children had just been located there. The only problem was that it lay just across the border in Czechoslovakia, and it was soon to be taken over from the Americans by the Russians. It took them two hard days’ driving to get there. By the time they arrived, it seemed they were too late. Three miles short of the town, they came upon a wooden barrier across the road. A friendly British sergeant on duty first tried to dissuade them from going on because of the Russians. But when Fey’s mother insisted, he persuaded her to leave Almuth behind because of what they might do to a young woman. He also told her to leave behind all her papers, money and jewelry, to abandon the car, and complete her journey on foot.

So Fey’s mother walked on alone. She was still wearing a black widow’s mourning veil in memory of her husband. Eventually, she reached the town, which was almost deserted because most of its German inhabitants had fled. In the Town Hall, she found the Mayor sitting in his office alone and desolate. She explained her mission and he leaped to his feet, took her to his old saloon car, and offered to drive her to the children’s home. They could only get there, he explained, when the Russians were changing their guard.

They managed to dodge a Russian patrol and reached a big stone building on a hilltop. Outside, sitting on the porch, they found a woman and a small child playing happily beside her. The woman was the director. She looked at the photographs Fey’s mother impatiently pushed in front of her. She was certain that she had never seen them, absolutely certain. “Who’s the little one?” asked Fey’s mother, pointing to the child. “One of the Goerdeler children,” came the reply. It was a dreadful blow.

Fey’s mother and sister returned exhausted and dispirited to Ebenhausen. What could they do next? Where were they to look? Germany was simply too big and they had no more leads.

Back in Rome, Fey sweated out June completely in the dark about her mother’s efforts. By now, she was desperate to get back to Brazzà. This was not just to escape the capital’s stifling summer heat, but to regain some sense of composure. She had always felt safe and happy there. Besides, she could throw herself into getting the estate back in shape and so take her mind off her worries. But here, too, there was a problem: word came through that Brazzà was now occupied by British officers. So she hung on in Rome. Still no word came of the children. As June turned into July, her spirits once again were ebbing away.