CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

MONDAY, 16 JULY 1945

With his somber “iron curtain” telegram to Truman, Churchill had tried to persuade the President that together they should reach a rapid understanding with Moscow. And for that, he felt strongly, it was vital to have a personal meeting as soon as possible. He hoped that it might be held in London, but if not, then he could envisage some none-too-wrecked city in western Germany.

In the end, however, both men had to yield to Stalin’s insistence that it take place in Potsdam, on the outskirts of Hitler’s ruined capital, on territory occupied by the Red Army. Deciding on this venue took almost a month–and then, instead of the meeting taking place in June, as Churchill had hoped, it was finally scheduled for the middle of July, more than two months after Germany’s surrender. This was because the allied commanders-in-chief did not meet until early June to assume supreme authority in Germany officially, and it took them another month after that to set up the Allied Control Council that was supposed to coordinate policy for the whole of the country.

In the meantime, Churchill’s anxiety for Europe’s future steadily grew. It was a relief to have Truman support him in his robust stand against Tito’s grab for Trieste, but when the Prime Minister met with his chiefs of staff in early June, he was consumed with pessimism. “Winston gave a long and very gloomy review of the situation in Europe,” noted Field Marshal Brooke in his diary. “Never in his life had he been more worried about the situation in Europe.”

Yet, on the eve of Potsdam, confusion reigned, and a desperate situation was emerging in Germany. A week before the conference opened, General Montgomery sent a warning of the unfolding crisis in the British zone, which included the most heavily industrialized and densely populated regions of the country. He had twenty million Germans to feed, he pointed out, plus uncounted millions of displaced persons and at least two million war veterans. Virtually every major town was a ruin, and country roads were regularly cut off by roadblocks. There was no sign of any serious resistance to the British, but many identity papers were proving false and the occupation was facing serious problems. Not the least of these was the ban on fraternization. This, he thought, should be lifted at once. “We cannot reeducate twenty million people,” he insisted, “if we are never to speak to them.”

Above all, though, loomed the future of the economy during the next few months, especially the supply of food and fuel. What would happen here depended heavily on how the four allies would manage their four-power control. They had won the war against Hitler, but now they faced another struggle that was almost as tough–the “Battle of Winter.” Would they fight this together or divided? Was there to be one Germany or two? “There is in fact,” reported Montgomery gloomily, “a complete ‘wall’ between the Russian zone and the zones of the western allies.” A SHAEF intelligence report confirmed this: “We have very little evidence,” it stated, “from which to assess Russian policy towards the part of Germany which they occupy.”¹

On Monday 16 July, the American and British Pacific fleets launched their first combined naval action against the Japanese mainland with hundreds of carrier-borne aircraft raiding in and around Tokyo. Meanwhile, three of the biggest US battleships, the Iowa, the Wisconsin and the Missouri, poured hundreds of sixteen-inch shells into the port of Muroran on southern Hokkaido from less than a mile offshore, and fleets of Super-Fortresses struck at numerous other targets. Japan’s cities were now ablaze, but Emperor Hirohito still went on the radio to exhort his air force to fight on with all its power to ensure the safety of the throne. There was little sign of peace in the Pacific.

In Britain, however, a peacetime mood was definitely taking hold. For most of the war, city streetlights had remained firmly switched off, but on 15 July, for the first time in six years, London’s lights were turned on in a blaze of splendor and thousands of people flooded into the West End and Piccadilly Circus to enjoy the spectacle. That weekend, crowds braved severe thunderstorms and lightning strikes to flock into the capital’s mainline train stations, determined to enjoy an escape from the city. Many queued for hours to board packed trains, and seaside resorts became severely overcrowded because dozens of hotels requisitioned for wartime purposes remained closed for business. But those who persisted were rewarded: England’s Channel coast was bathed in sunshine and enjoyed temperatures in the mid-eighties. At Hastings, the holiday makers cheered when illuminations along the resort’s three-mile-long seafront were switched on at dusk.

Across the Channel, though, much of Europe still felt far from peace. Belgium was embroiled in bitter controversy over the future of King Leopold, who had refused to go into exile during the war and was accused of having been too friendly to the Germans. In Austria, wartime debris and rubbish lay six feet high in the streets and typhus had taken hold. France enjoyed three days of Bastille Day celebrations, the first to be celebrated in freedom since 1939. There was a march down the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe headed by General de Lattre de Tassigny, commander of the First French Army, followed by fireworks and street dances into the early hours. But the mood was darkened by growing disquiet over the rough justice still being handed out to collaborators, as well as the execution of “small fry.” Meanwhile, Paris itself was preparing for the biggest fish of all–Marshal Pétain. His trial for treason was due to begin the following week.

Francesca Wilson enjoyed Bastille Day. On Saturday 14 July, she was in a small village with a company of French soldiers who had been invited in by the Americans to help with transport. The French were billeted in an old Bavarian inn with a dance hall and Francesca joined in the dancing while the commandant of the troops, a white-haired, elderly man, kissed the girls and “gave jollity and sanction” to the occasion.

Francesca had recently moved from Feldafing to another camp in Bavaria called Föhrenwald, just a few miles away. But in almost every respect it felt like a world away. In 1939, the Nazis had built a model village to house workers in a large munitions plant hidden in the nearby pine woods. It was a classic example of Nazi workers’ welfare, with well-designed houses and carefully laid-out streets, and was well equipped with modern kitchens, laundry, baths, a hospital, canteen and theater. By the end of the war, it housed mainly slave laborers. When Francesca arrived, it was well on its way to becoming one of the largest displaced persons’ camps in Germany, with over five thousand inhabitants.

She found it a far happier place than Feldafing, which remained an essentially tragic camp peopled with Holocaust survivors with unsmiling faces and haunted eyes. At Föhrenwald, she responded warmly to Lieutenant Harkness, the camp’s quick-witted, energetic and firm young American commandant. He had fought with Patch’s Seventh Army in North Africa and Italy and taken part in the conquest of Bavaria. “I told him at once,” she wrote, “that we would not interfere with his administration of the camp, and from that moment on, work with him was easy and light-hearted.”²

The camp’s accommodations and the nature of its inhabitants helped as well. Instead of huge impersonal barracks and dormitories, people were living as families in houses, much as they had at home, with each street peopled by a different nationality, so that genuine small neighborhoods developed. There were about a dozen national groups. Strictly speaking, some of them should not have been there because they belonged to “enemy” groups, such as Austrians, Hungarians, and the German-speaking Volksdeutsch from Yugoslavia, but the military had put them in the camp to get them out of neighboring villages. They caused little trouble with the other groups, especially when forced to cooperate on solving practical problems, which made Francesca think of the camp as a “little United Nations.”

It was not without its problems, however. To keep its high-grade services running, it needed a fairly large staff of German technicians, and for a while this provided cover for SS men on the run along the escapers’ highway from Munich to Switzerland. But Germans in the village who were keen to ingratiate themselves with the Americans turned them in, and over thirty were caught.

Francesca witnessed one such catch. A pale young German with unkempt hair was standing in the commandant’s office. He was accused of being in the SS. “Take off your shirt,” ordered Harkness quietly. The young man did as he was told. “Lift up your arm,” commanded the American. When he did so, the small “0” tattooed just above his armpit was revealed. “That’s his blood type,” explained Harkness. “We’ve caught thousands that way. Hitler made the job very simple for us.” Already, some ten thousand ex-SS men were crowded behind barbed wire at Dachau.

What Francesca really enjoyed at Föhrenwald was working with its eight hundred children. The Americans had not had time to set up any special services for them, so happily left that up to the UNRRA team. Francesca busied herself going about the camp, talking to its occupants about the children’s needs, finding teachers, and helping establish schools in six different languages–Polish, Estonian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Serb and German. The kindergarten and nursery schools proved exceptionally good, and one in particular enchanted Francesca. It was run by a young Estonian woman with a genius for handling small children. Whenever she found that dealing with the occupants’ insoluble problems got too much for her, Francesca would escape from her office and watch the woman singing and playing with the children under the pine trees. “She cast a spell over [them],” she wrote. “They sang and they danced, they were bears one minute and birds the next–even babies of two joined in and tried to imitate her gestures.”³

It was all very innocent and hopeful, a bright spot in an otherwise somber landscape because there were always chilling signs to remind Francesca of how the innocent world of children had been infected by Nazism. One day she went into Munich to search for infant-school textbooks to use in the camp. She found a series that looked promising in beautifully bound covers. But then she opened one and read a math question: “Germany has 100,000 epileptics and 250,000 mental defectives. It costs 2.50 marks a day to keep each of them. How many babies could go to nursery school at a cost of 1 mark daily for the same sum?” In the end, all existing textbooks had to be scrapped and new ones introduced before German schools were allowed to reopen.

Francesca also helped organize entertainment in the camp. The Cossacks had their choir and dancers, the Estonians their folk songs, the Hungarians their waltzes and jazz players, the Austrians good singers. But the star was a Polish violinist named Kasimir Koszelinski, who prewar had played in the highly admired Busch Quartet, then hid a Jew in his Warsaw apartment and played in secret to raise money for the resistance before being caught and sent as a slave laborer to Germany. While he was there, a factory director who had heard him play professionally in Italy before the war gave him a sinecure at the Föhrenwald munitions works. Now, he was playing every Sunday to the camp’s freed but still imprisoned inmates.

The Föhrenwald hospital was run by Hungarians, most of whom had fled Budapest in November 1944 when the Fascist leader Ferenc Szálasi took power after Hitler’s forces entered the country and Adolf Eichmann arrived to “cleanse” the country of its Jews. They were all specialists, with their own lab technicians and X-ray personnel. In Francesca’s words, writing before the establishment of Britain’s National Health Service, they transformed the hospital into “the kind of Utopian Health Centre we hope one day to have in England.”⁴ She made her own contribution to the camp’s health by breaking through military red tape and getting milk, vitamins, chocolate and cod-liver oil for the children.

It was all too good to last. One day, an American colonel arrived and ordered the “enemy” DPs to be evacuated because the Austrians, Hungarians and Yugoslav Volksdeutsch were a German responsibility and so should be dispersed to German villages. The decree was put into effect almost immediately: the offending groups were driven out of the camp in trucks and dumped into villages all over Upper Bavaria. For days, Francesca was besieged with piteous tales of no beds for the children, no cooking utensils and no work. In the British zone there were plenty of Quaker relief workers ready and willing to look after ex-enemy civilians and ethnic German expellees, but there was no such service in the American zone. For these victims of war, the struggle back to normality was still far from over.

Even worse was the sudden removal of several Lithuanian and Polish families to make way for an unexpected influx of stateless Jews. The Lithuanians, including almost a hundred children and babies, were removed to a dismal barracks with broken windows, beds full of bugs and no drinking water. The Poles had just got their school and kindergarten up and running in Föhrenwald. It made Francesca furious. “I hate the army,” she stormed at the red-faced captain in charge of the move. “Why don’t you go and fight someone? Why do you meddle with civilians?”

UNRRA’s relations with the army had never been clearly defined, but despite Francesca’s fury she knew that without the military the situation would have been much worse. Only they, at this stage, had the muscle and the money to organize food supplies. UNRRA’s own sources of food were slated for allied countries where starvation was an imminent threat, such as Greece and Yugoslavia, not Germany. And even as she was protesting, her agency’s director-general was announcing in Rome that it had been forced to impose severe cutbacks on its imports of supplies into Europe. These included clothing, textiles, fuel, raw materials and essential foodstuffs, such as fats and tinned fish. The problem was no longer one of shipping, as it had been up to now, but hoarding by suppliers anxious about the coming winter.⁵

The happy Föhrenwald camp was a rarity in the usually depressing world of DP camps in the summer of 1945. Millions of inmates were still awaiting repatriation in miserable conditions and food was short. Living amid helpless German civilians, many DPs seized the opportunity to find food, alcohol and women, and sometimes to wreak revenge on their former captors. Cases of murder, rape and looting grew. By July, many DP camps in the British zone were surrounded by barbed wire and sentries, and curfews had been imposed on their inmates.

It even became necessary to rearm the German police. “The Germans,” noted one report, “have lost faith in our ability to maintain law and order.” There was also violence in the camps between different national groups and among various political groupings. The situation worsened when representatives from the new communist regimes of Eastern Europe, as well as Soviet army officers, urged inmates to return home. Ten days before the Potsdam Conference, there was a fracas in one camp when a Soviet guard shot dead a Russian DP and in turn was lynched by an infuriated mob.⁶

Cape Bretoner Reg Roy was still stranded on the northern shores of the Zuider Zee. But on Friday 13 July, he received a triple boost to his morale. First, a bundle of parcels arrived from his mother packed with tea and magazines. Then, a new officer joined the regiment, raising his hopes that this might allow his early return home. Finally, he got some eagerly awaited leave.

On Monday 16 July, he went off for three days’ rest in Amsterdam. It was his first visit to the “Venice of the North,” and he was anxious to get there because so many of his buddies had enthused about its pleasures. He trucked it, crossing the twenty-two-mile dead-straight causeway across the mouth of the Zuider Zee and checking into the city’s top hotel, the Krasnopolsky, which stood on the Dam, the great square in the center of town. The hotel had been taken over by the Canadian Army for officers on leave. “Boy oh Boy [is] it lovely,” gushed Roy. “Hot water and everything.” There were dozens of clubs, lots of dances, plenty of cinemas, and he took a boat tour of the city’s canals. But the shops were bare and pitiful to see. Still, the people were friendly and he met a very nice “gal”–“and I do mean nice,” he emphasized to his parents. “We had a lovely time together. Ah my,” he added, remembering Ardith, “will I be glad to see my one and only again.”

To top it off, when he got back from Amsterdam he learned he was about to be shipped back to Canada almost straight away. “Yep, I am now de-frosted,” he typed home ecstatically, “I’ll be home in time to taste some of that corn on the cob, to say nothing of Xmas and such.”⁷

On the day that Roy arrived in Amsterdam, Robert Ellis sat down in Italy to tell his parents that he, too, was bound for home. But this good news was merely the wrapping round his long-feared nightmare package: official confirmation that the Tenth Mountain Division would soon be bound for the Pacific. The dreaded news had come through just two days before. In addition, he learned that, to fight the Japanese, they would be converted into a regular infantry division.⁸

His regiment was now in Florence, having arrived there late on the night of Saturday 14 July. His mood could not have been more different from that of Francesca Wilson enjoying the Bastille Day celebrations in Bavaria or of Reg Roy anticipating his leave in Amsterdam. Ironically, his camp was located in a city park right across the street from the GI University that Ellis had once hoped to attend. Now, instead of enjoying its courses, he spent his brief time in the city cleaning his weapons, turning in his equipment, exchanging his heavy woolen uniform for a lighter cotton one, making other preparations for his return to the States, and seeing old friends. He could look forward to three weeks’ leave when he got there and hoped to see Pat, his erstwhile and possibly future girlfriend, while staying with his parents.

Five days later, he wrote his last letter home from Europe and boarded an ancient Italian train bound for Naples. Although he was packed in a boxcar with two dozen others, and it was boiling hot with the temperature reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the train took thirty-four hours to travel just 260 miles, and fighting the Japanese was now a confirmed future date, he felt happy. “We were going home,” he wrote, “and there was a marvelous feeling of comradeship . . . we laughed and shared memories throughout the trip.” As they rattled through Italy, the debris of war was all too visible. The plain below Rome was littered with tanks, shell casings and already-crumbling fox-holes. Towns were battered and the people hungry, poverty-stricken and sometimes living in caves. At night, the men in the boxcar sang spirituals and hymns.

They reached Naples in the moonlight and stayed there for the next ten days, waiting to be shipped out. The city was a ruin and Ellis was repeatedly approached by impoverished swarms of children pimping for their sisters, mothers or aunts. One day, rambling around the city, he stumbled on a huge line of GIs waiting outside a brothel in a dingy alley. As he tried to imagine how anyone could enjoy a woman who had just had sex with dozens of others, he heard someone playing a hauntingly beautiful piano piece by Rachmaninov. The music was coming from a half-ruined building, where a young Italian man was sitting at an undamaged grand piano. For a few minutes Ellis watched and listened, as if in a dream. Then he moved on.

On the last day of July, he boarded the Marine Fox, a small troopship, along with the rest of the 85th Regiment, and finally they cast off from Europe. Italy had cost his company and division dear. Only one of its officers who had left the States six months before returned home on the ship. In just over a hundred days of combat, the division lost almost a thousand men killed and over four thousand wounded. But Robert Ellis, just turned twenty-one, survived.

As Ellis was preparing to leave northeast Italy, Fey von Hassell was still trying to return to Brazzà. Rome’s summer heat was becoming unbearable and she still had not traced her children.⁹ Then, luck intervened. In the middle of July she learned that the head of the British Mediterranean Air Force was visiting Rome. Her father had known him when he was air attaché at the British Embassy before the war, so Detalmo phoned him at his suite in the Grand Hotel and they were invited over for drinks. It was a friendly and convivial evening, and the very next morning the two of them found themselves boarding a military plane bound for Brazzà. A British staff car met them and soon Fey was being driven through the familiar and comforting landscape of Friuli. As they drove up the drive to the gravel courtyard, the domestic staff ran out warmly to greet them.

She was finally home, but the house was still full of British officers, so for the moment she and Detalmo were billeted in a spare bedroom in a nearby house. That evening, they were invited over to the main house for drinks. It felt bizarre to be a guest in her own home, but soon she got used to what became a pleasant evening ritual punctuated with lots of good British humor. The officers enjoyed nicknames like “Pussy” and “Sweetie,” and relations grew even friendlier when she was invited to ride with them each morning. The British had captured some horses from a retreating Austrian regiment and stabled them at Brazzà.

Over the next few weeks, she came to love the long morning rides through the park and into the rolling countryside. But her fraternization with the new occupiers of Brazzà did not go unnoticed. In an echo of the reaction inspired by her friendliness with German officers less than a year before, some of her neighbors and friends disapproved. After all, she had lost her father and her children were missing, so to some her behavior seemed frivolous. “But what did they know,” she responded with characteristic defiance, “about being cooped up in barracks and cattle cars for months, worrying about one’s very survival from one day to the next?”¹⁰

Soon, she could feel her old energy and vigor returning. Discreetly, though, no one talked about the one item that still dominated her thoughts: the fate of her children. She remained completely in the dark about her mother’s efforts to find them because she had heard nothing from Germany since the fighting stopped. Occasionally, great waves of depression about their fate would overwhelm her and she would retreat to her room until they passed. As July ended, she still had no idea where they were.

By this time, British commando Bryan Samain was already back home.¹¹ After shipping out of Europe in early June, 45 Commando was sent to Petworth House in Sussex, the marshaling area for all commando units, where they spent their time rekitting to make up for the losses of personal equipment suffered since landing in Normandy. In mid-June, he took two weeks’ leave and headed straight for London and his pretty WAAF girlfriend. “We were very much in love at the time,” he said. He was surprised to find the capital still living in a wartime atmosphere, and at Piccadilly underground station they had to step over beds and sleeping bodies strewn along the platform as though air raids were still a threat.

An added annoyance came on Thursday 5 July, polling day for the general election. This provided the British people with a chance not only to pass judgment on Churchill’s leadership in the war but to make their voices heard about the peace ahead. Ironically, the battle-hardened Samain was still only twenty years old and thus ineligible to vote, which was pretty galling. “Too young to vote but not too young to fight,” he thought–although he kept his feelings to himself and did not share them with his comrades, nor they with him, for that matter.

After a few blissful days in London, he went to stay with his parents, and when his leave ended he returned to Petworth and a billet with a policeman and his wife in Eastbourne. Here, he and the other commandos did keep-fit exercises and tactical training on the South Downs. Everyone knew that they were bound next for the Far East: probably, rumor had it, for the massive planned invasion of Malaya. Shortly afterwards, he was sent on a jungle training course in the New Forest, which sounded exotic, but turned out to be little more than an elaborate game of hide and seek among the oaks and ferns. It was, he thought, a “complete washout.” In mid-July, still in Eastbourne, he was nevertheless preparing himself to fight the Japanese.

In Berlin, Leonard Linton was gradually shifting his attention from occupation duties to finding out more about Red Army troop dispositions in and around the city. He, too, now received the “Dear John” letter so familiar to soldiers serving at the front and far from home. Even before he read the letter, he knew what it was. As he impatiently tore open the envelope, the engagement ring he had given his girlfriend before leaving for Europe fell out onto the floor.¹²

The scenes of utter physical devastation that had greeted him when he arrived in the city told him and the world a story of the irrevocable end of Hitler’s Third Reich. This was Germany’s “Stunde Null” (Zero Hour), the moment when the historical slate was wiped clean and everything started fresh and new again, untainted by the past. At least, that was one version of what happened. Few were more keen to push it than the German communists and their Soviet backers.

Within days of Hitler’s suicide, a plane had landed in Berlin carrying the top German communists, who had spent the war in exile in Moscow. Immediately, the Red Army began placing communists and their supporters in influential positions throughout their zone of Germany as well as in every sector of Berlin. From the very beginning, the distribution of food supplies was linked to supervision by “People’s Committees,” and before Western forces arrived in the city the Soviets authorized the formation of “anti-fascist” political parties and appointed mayors to each of the capital’s boroughs.

Two months later, in mid-July, when the Western allies formally took control of their sectors of Berlin, they faced a fait accompli. Only the “reddest” of boroughs–such as working-class Wedding–had communist mayors, but that made little difference to the reality on the ground. Wilmersdorf, in the British sector, was a solid middle-class and conservative district and the appointed Mayor was a former member of the old right-wing German People’s Party. But his deputy, his chief of police and his education councillor were all communists. On Saturday 14 July, the four main political parties approved by the Soviets agreed to form an “anti-fascist” bloc in the city. Stalin’s forces had militarily conquered Hitler’s capital and thoroughly ransacked and looted it ever since. Now they were well on the way to completing their victory by taking political control, too. The future of the city, and of the rest of Europe, hung in the balance.¹³

Soviet willingness to deal with the Germans contrasted sharply with the attitude of Western allies. Nonfraternization with the enemy had been a firm SHAEF rule since they had crossed the German frontier some ten months before. But once Germany surrendered, the policy made little sense, and for the next two months SHAEF, in the words of one of the later official histories of the United States Army, “wrestled with itself, trying desperately to enforce [it] and just as desperately, to get rid of it.”¹⁴

Increasingly, the ban was criticized as being both unenforceable and ill-judged, and Montgomery was not the only person becoming exasperated. How else, critics asked, were the allies to rebuild Germany if not by talking, working and socializing with the population? Especially for those Germans who had opposed Hitler and the Nazis and suffered as a consequence, the ban seemed inexplicable. To find themselves treated as outcasts, as something less than human, threatened to remove all incentives to cooperate in building a new, peaceful and democratic Germany. As one British officer reported, a young German typist working for him had pleaded: “Can some British soldier be allowed to talk to me; I cannot bear this silence.”¹⁵

Meanwhile, soldiers continued to be arrested for breaking the ban, and even a handful of US generals were investigated for violating it. Nearly all the offenses involved women. Often, the procedures disintegrated into farce. How, for example, were the authorities to distinguish between a German woman and an allied DP, especially when both spoke German? One bureaucratic wag suggested that allied women should simply be made to wear an armband in their national colors! One American unit tried issuing buttons to the DPs, prompting its newspaper to run the headline: “Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button?” Soon, a joke began to do the rounds in Frankfurt, where Eisenhower’s heavily guarded headquarters was surrounded by a perimeter of barbed wire. The Americans were a people, said the joke, who built concentration camps and then voluntarily put themselves inside.

Early in June, SHAEF partially accepted defeat and announced that the contraction of venereal disease by troops would not be used, either directly or indirectly, as evidence of fraternization.¹⁶ However, a difficult situation was then made even trickier when US soldiers were granted permission to speak to small children while this remained an offense for British and Canadian soldiers.

But it was the arrival of allied troops in Berlin that finally forced a radical reversal. The Russians had no ban on their troops being friendly to civilians, and the contrast between the two halves of the city became glaringly absurd. “The discovery that there is a nightclub in Berlin where Russians dance with German women,” reported The Times in sober criticism, “has given new life to the hard-worked topic of fraternization.”¹⁷ Politically, it was now obvious that nonfraternization was hurting the Western allies.

In early July, Montgomery’s headquarters produced a highly self-critical report on the situation in the British zone of occupation. So far, it observed, the Germans had learned little from the allies except that they disliked them, and they had been offered virtually nothing in the way of newspapers, political activity or other publications. Willy-nilly, the allies had taken on a good deal of direct rule. So long as they continued to do that, the Germans would be content to sit back, watch and criticize. Overall, the report observed, “the nonfraternization order is becoming a boomerang.”¹⁸

Yet the real pressure to relax the frat ban came from what The Times’s correspondent in the German capital referred to coyly as “biological pressure.” By this, he meant the impossibility of preventing young, virile, fit and eager allied soldiers from having sex with willing German women. Finally, realism won out: the British cabinet got involved and met to review the ban. While it came to no conclusion itself, it agreed to let the military authorities in Germany make their own decision.¹⁹

As the Supreme Commander of allied forces, the final decision lay with Eisenhower who had taken a hard line on the ban from the start. How would American wives feel, he fretted constantly, about seeing photographs of relaxed GIs consorting with smiling German women? Would he be bombarded by a barrage of hostile comment in the press? But finally, on Sunday 15 July, he caved in. From now on, he decreed, conversations between allied forces and adult Germans in streets and public places were permitted. A similar decision was made for allied forces in Austria.

The transformation was immediate. A correspondent for the New York Times reported on a scene on the Rhine:

There was a new watch on the Rhine today–by handholding American GIs and German girls taking advantage of the relaxed restrictions . . . In the hot sunshine of a Sunday afternoon they sat on grassy riverbanks, chugged up and down stream in American boats, and zipped around streets with the zest of a child diving into a box of candy previously accessible only by stealth.

Quibbles remained about details, but to all intents and purposes, the policy was now dead and buried.²⁰

Eisenhower made his momentous decision at SHAEF headquarters in Frankfurt. The building it occupied was the perfect symbol of the allies’ destruction of Germany’s military-industrial war machine. Between 1928 and 1931 I.G. Farben, the giant chemical cartel that provided much of the industrial muscle–and exploited thousands of the slave laborers–for Hitler’s Third Reich, had constructed a graceful, ultra-modern glass and concrete headquarters designed by the Bauhaus architect Hans Poelzig in the west end of the city. It escaped allied bombing and stood intact. Rumor had it that this was either because Eisenhower already had his eye on it or because of secret contacts between German and American chemical companies. The more plausible answer, however, was that as an administrative headquarters filled with desks rather than a factory producing chemicals, it was a low-priority bombing target. Whatever the reason, Eisenhower was now occupying the company’s former gigantic boardroom. “It should really belong to a sultan or to a movie star,” he joked.²¹

But the great SHAEF spectacular was coming to an end. Once the allies had organized the occupation machinery for each of their zones in Germany, Eisenhower’s supreme command would be over. Early in June, the Allied Control Council in Berlin assumed full control of Germany. Eisenhower’s job was now to shift what had been combined tasks to the separate allied commands.

When that moment came, matters such as fuel, transportation, civil affairs, displaced persons, war criminals, psychological warfare, intelligence, censorship, communications and prisoners of war would be turned over to separate British, French and American commands. The I.G. Farben building would become the headquarters of US forces in Europe, with Eisenhower still as their commanding general. Field Marshal Montgomery would head up the British Army of the Rhine, and General Koening was to be chief of the French occupation forces. Marshal Zhukov assumed a similar role for the Soviets. Throughout July, as thousands of allied troops were redeployed out of Europe, either to the Pacific or home, SHAEF responsibilities and personnel were reassigned to their national commands.

On 13 July, in the officers’ club of the great Frankfurt building, Eisenhower addressed his entire staff to thank them for their work. “United in a common cause,” read his final order of the day,

the men and women of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Norway joined with the British Commonwealth of Nations and the United States of America to form a truly Allied team, which in conjunction with the mighty Red Army smashed and obliterated Nazi aggression . . . I pay tribute to every individual who so freely and unselfishly contributed to the limit of his or her ability.²²

The following morning, at one minute past midnight, SHAEF formally ceased to exist.

Also in mid-July, the Chicago Daily News published a startling revelation. For weeks, speculation had been mounting about the exact whereabouts of the top Nazis captured by the British and Americans, and the press had even begun to print stories about their life of “luxury and ease” behind bars. Now, the Chicago newspaper broke the news that they were all being kept at the “Palace” Hotel at Bad Mondorf in Luxembourg, a spa town on the border with France and a mere four miles from the River Mosel and the German frontier. The town was small, easy to guard and possessed ideal accommodation for the prisoners in the six-story Grand (note, not Palace) Hotel, which was reached by a single narrow road. It was temporary home not just to the Nazi grandees, however, but to others who had thrown in their lot with the regime. Among them was Prince Philipp of Hesse, who had accompanied Fey von Hassell on her journey across the Alps.

The hotel did not live up to its name, however. In reality, it provided a shabby and spartan existence for the forty or so Nazis being held there for suspected war crimes. The building had been stripped of its furniture and carpets, was surrounded by two high barbed-wire fences, and the prisoners slept in bunks on straw mattresses. The war was over, and Hitler dead, but the allies remained worried about Nazi Werewolves and possible rescue attempts by SS fanatics. (The dramatic rescue of Mussolini from his mountain prison in 1943 was still fresh in the memory.) So every effort was made to keep the location secret. But once the news was out, Colonel Burton Andrus, the US commander of “Ashcan”–the derogatory code name for the hotel-prison–decided to make the best of it.

On Monday 16 July, he invited members of the world’s press to visit Bad Mondorf and see the situation for themselves. “We stand for no mollycoddling here,” he told them. “These men are in jail. We have certain rules and these rules are obeyed.” The prisoners had a strict regime and diet: breakfast of cereal, soup and coffee was at seven-thirty; lunch was at midday, and provided pea soup, beef hash, and spinach; at the six-thirty supper they were given powdered eggs, potatoes and tea. All, emphasized Andrus, were standard rations for prisoners of war. This, though, did not prevent Radio Moscow from deliberately and shamelessly misrepresenting the facts to suggest that the Western powers were now cuddling up to Hitler’s henchmen. The Nazi war leaders, it claimed, were “getting even fatter and more insolent. These notorious war criminals rest in Luxembourg after their sanguinary carnage . . . Nothing but the finest vintage and finest foods will do for them. Servants noiselessly bring delicious wines on silver trays . . . and the latest automobiles are theirs to drive around the grounds.”²³

That same day, President Harry Truman and Prime Minister Winston Churchill were both in Berlin, each having flown in separately the night before for the opening of the Potsdam Conference. Truman had arrived in Antwerp on board the US cruiser Augusta to be greeted by Eisenhower and other allied dignitaries before flying from Brussels to the German capital. Churchill had a bumpy flight from Hendaye, a French seaside resort close to the Spanish frontier, where he had spent a few days at a nearby chateau painting and bathing in the Atlantic to recover from the exertions of the recent election campaign. The results were still not known, as the ballots of service personnel overseas were yet to be counted.

Once in Berlin, Churchill was housed in the Villa Urbig, a handsome rose-pink stone house with a lawn sloping down to a lake in the suburb of Babelsberg. Its tree-lined streets and comfortable villas had housed many movie stars and producers working in the nearby UFA studios. But Churchill’s house, it was rumored, had once belonged to Hjalmar Schacht, the former Reichsbank president who had joined Fey von Hassell in the last journey of the Prominente across the Brenner into Italy.²⁴

Churchill woke up to a baking-hot day–“hotter than Hendaye,” he grumbled to his wife, Clementine, in a letter–and spent the morning at Truman’s residence four hundred yards up the road. The US delegation’s house had been the home of a famous German publisher, who had moved in with his family at the start of the battle for Berlin because he thought it would be safer than their previous residence. It was not. His daughters were raped by Red Army soldiers in front of him and his wife, the furniture was smashed, and late in May they were all ordered out at an hour’s notice. The Russians then refurbished the house with furniture and carpets taken from elsewhere.

This was the first face-to-face encounter between Churchill and Truman. Already, however, they had taken each other’s measure in many transatlantic telegrams that revealed increasing friendliness and respect. The conference was due to start that morning, but Stalin had not yet turned up, and its opening was postponed until the next day.

Mary, Churchill’s youngest daughter, was accompanying him. When he emerged from the meeting with Truman, they walked back together to Churchill’s residence. The Prime Minister told his daughter that he liked Truman, felt they talked the same language, and was sure he could work with him. “I nearly wept for joy and thankfulness,” Mary recorded, “it seemed like divine providence.”²⁵ Truman at first seemed less sure, noting in his diary that night that Churchill “gave me a lot of hooey about how great my country is and how he loved Roosevelt and how he intended to love me.” But later he claimed that he liked Churchill from the start.

With time on their hands, the two men separately decided to tour the conquered city. Truman went first, clambering into the back seat of a Chrysler convertible with his chief of staff and secretary of state. As they drove down the autobahn into the city, they passed a seemingly endless procession of men, women and children carrying pathetic bundles. Ejected from their homes by the Russians, they reminded Truman of his Confederate grandmother and her family, who had been forced off their Missouri farm by the “Yankees.” There were millions like her, he thought, in Europe.

Entering the city, they could smell the stench of corpses. They crossed the battle-torn wasteland of the Tiergarten, which was still strewn with wrecked tanks and other vehicles and completely denuded of its trees. They saw a scarecrow of a woman searching for sticks to make a cooking fire. Along the Sieges Allee (Victory Alley), they spotted a lone garden seat standing miraculously upright. It still bore its sign, “Nicht für Juden” (Not for Jews).

Briefly, they stopped to look at the blackened and ruined shell of the Reichstag. “They brought it on themselves,” Truman thought, and imagined what Hitler might have done to Washington, DC. Then they drove through the Brandenburg Gate into the Soviet sector, along Unter den Linden, and turned into the Wilhelmstrasse and the wreckage of Hitler’s Chancellery. Several accompanying FBI men jumped from the Chrysler’s running board as if to escort the President inside the building, but he refused to enter. He did not want to give the impression to the Germans that he was “gloating” over their defeat, he explained. Yet he had little sympathy for the defeated enemy. That night, back in Potsdam, he wrote in his diary that the ruin of Berlin was “Hitler’s Folly. He overreached himself by trying to take in too much territory. He had no morals and his people backed him up.”²⁶

Later, it was Churchill’s turn. Wearing a lightweight military uniform, he was accompanied by his daughter, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and a small party from the British delegation. Unlike Truman, however, he showed no reluctance to get out and look around. At the Brandenburg Gate, he left the car to take a closer look at the walls of the Reichstag. People stood dumbfounded as if unable to believe their eyes. “It’s Churchill–see the cigar,” whispered someone, and women held up their children to see him. Grim-faced, and showing no incli-nation to fraternize, Churchill simply ignored them.

At the Chancellery, he clambered over the debris while Soviet guides showed him around. For security reasons, no notice had been issued about his visit, but there was the usual gaping crowd of onlookers hanging around outside the ruined building. They began to cheer, except for one old man who shook his head disapprovingly. “My hate had died with their surrender,” wrote Churchill later, “and I was much moved by their haggard looks and threadbare clothes.”

For quite a while, he toured through the empty halls and shattered galleries of the building. “It was frightfully hot milling about in such a crowd,” complained one of Churchill’s group in his diary, “stumbling over the dusty debris with which all the rooms and passages were littered.” Broken glass covered the floors, Iron Crosses lay randomly strewn about, Hitler’s desk had been upended, and the map of the world he had hoped to dominate hung in tatters on the wall. “It was a horrible and macabre place,” recorded another member of the group, “its evil spirit hanging over the grim city it had destroyed.” Olive Christopher, one of Churchill’s junior secretaries, noted that both of the great chandeliers in the entrance hall were down. “If one stands very quietly and listens,” she wrote, “one can hear the plop, plop of water dripping through. A slight breeze makes a piece of paper flap and a bit of plaster falls off the wall.”

Then Churchill was taken to the bunker. Guided by a torch, he carefully descended the flights of steps to the room where Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves. The air was dank and sour, and already water was beginning to flood some of the lower rooms. In Braun’s room there was a vase with a wooden branch still in it–the poignant remains of a spray of spring blossom she must have plucked from the garden just hours before her suicide. “Hitler’s room is just a heap of ruins,” noted an overawed Olive Christopher, “and this was where the people who planned our destruction lived and worked.”

Churchill did not linger long. After a brief glance, he climbed into the welcome fresh air of the garden. The guide pointed to the spot littered with rusty petrol cans where the bodies had been burned and gave the Prime Minister the best first-hand account available of what exactly had happened during those final few moments of Hitler’s Reich. Churchill listened intently, cigar in hand. Then he paused for a moment, and without saying a word abruptly turned away with a look of disgust on his face. Spotting a wrecked chair near by, he tested it with his hand and sat down to wait for the others. “Hitler,” he mused, “must have come out here to get some air, and heard the guns getting nearer and nearer.” When they left the building, he drove straight back to Potsdam. He had had enough of death and destruction.²⁷

That very day, though, several thousand miles to the west, a terrible new weapon was being born. At 5:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m. in Berlin–at the Alamogordo test site in the desert of New Mexico, a tremendous pure white flash lit up the sky, followed by a massive shock wave and a mushroom cloud of billowing white smoke surrounded by a spectral glow of blue. The temperature at its center was more than ten thousand times that at the sun’s surface. Windows were shattered more than two hundred miles away. The world’s first atomic bomb had been successfully tested. The news was waiting for Truman when he got back from his tour of Hitler’s ruins.