CHAPTER THIRTY
VICTORY IN EUROPE
In the United States of America, in the city of Philadelphia, upon the exact spot where 169 years ago a group of brave Americans met and decided to fight for American independence, there stands a marker upon which is written these very same words: “Proclaim freedom throughout the world to the inhabitants thereof.”
—RABBI DAVID EICHHORN, SABBATH SERVICE, DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP, MAY 6, 1945
GIs read about Hitler’s death in the Stars and Stripes. [National Archives]
THE GERMANS WALKED INTO the Ecole Professionnelle et Technique de Garçons, a redbrick three-story building in Reims, and then strode along a corridor to a classroom on the ground floor. Fifty-four-year-old Alfred Jodl and Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg then stopped and squinted, momentarily blinded by the arc lights set up for a bank of film cameras in the crowded classroom.
The sharp-featured Jodl was one of Hitler’s most despicable generals, certainly no man of honor. Just one example of his venality was his signing of the infamous “Commando Order” of October 28, 1942, declaring that Allied commandos and partisans were to be shot rather than treated as POWs.
Jodl was told that the documents on a table before him were ready for his signature. It was 2:41 A.M. as he signed the formal surrender documents with a Sheaffer pen.
“I want to say a word,” said Jodl.
“Yes, of course,” replied Eisenhower’s chief of staff, fifty-year-old American general Walter Bedell Smith.
“With this signature,” stated Jodl, “the German people and the German armed forces are, for better or worse, delivered into the victor’s hands. In this war, which has lasted more than five years, both have achieved and suffered more than any other people in the world. In this hour I can only express the hope that the victor will treat them with generosity.”
They would be treated with immense generosity. But Jodl himself would not. He would be hanged for crimes against humanity in October 1946.
Not far from the classroom, General Dwight Eisenhower paced back and forth in his secretary’s office. Bedell Smith strode into the room. The surrender had been signed. Jodl and Friedeburg entered and walked to the middle of the room, clicked their heels, and saluted the Allied supreme commander.
Eisenhower stood stiffly. He had sworn that he would never shake hands with a Nazi and saw no reason to start doing so now.
“Do you understand the terms of the document of surrender you have just signed?”
“Ja, ja,” said Jodl.
“You will get details and instructions at a later date. And you will be expected to carry them out faithfully.”
Jodl nodded.
“That is all.”
Jodl bowed, saluted, and then marched out of the office.
Eisenhower was suddenly all smiles.
“Come on, let’s all have a picture!”
Later that morning, he sent a message to his bosses in Washington, the Combined Chiefs of Staff: “THE MISSION OF THIS ALLIED FORCE WAS FULFILLED AT 0241, LOCAL TIME, MAY 7, 1945, EISENHOWER.”
THE FOLLOWING DAY, May 8, 1945, the world learned of the German final surrender. There were intense and prolonged celebrations in many capitals to mark the end the most destructive war in human history. The men of evil, Churchill told the British nation, “are now prostrate before us.” Later that afternoon, after having lunched with the king at Buckingham Palace, Churchill was driven to Whitehall. When he stepped onto a balcony at the Ministry of Health, he could barely hear himself speak, so loud were the cheers of the crowds.
“This is your victory,” he shouted. “It is the victory of the cause of freedom in every land. In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this.”
WHILE CIVILIANS EMBRACED, kissed total strangers, and took to streets around the globe in euphoria, many infantrymen in Europe, brutalized and broken, sat alone with their grief or paced their rest areas in mournful silence. “There is V-E Day without but no peace within,” wrote the war’s most decorated infantrymen, Audie Murphy, of the 3rd Division, which had fought at the Thunderbirds’ shoulder all the way from Sicily. “People were damaged,” remembered Thunderbird Guy Prestia. “It was like we’d been in a car crash. There was trauma. It takes a while to get over that.”
News of the surrender reached the Thunderbirds that evening of May 8. “There was great relief,” recalled Sparks, “but no celebrations.” Although many of Sparks’s men had kept booze seized from the warehouse in Aschaffenburg, it was not a night of popping champagne corks and knocking back the best cognac. It was hard to believe, hard to accept that the killing and dying were finally over. There would be no more Anzios, Salernos, or Reipertswillers. Finally, after the death of 135,576 young Americans, Europe was free.
Few had fought so long and hard during the war, indeed any war, as Lieutenant Colonel Felix Sparks. “Boy I was goddamn glad when it was over,” he remembered. “I only weighed about 130 pounds. I was just skin and bones.”
Sparks had seen too much and waited too long for the end. For four years, he had planned for this day and had often wondered if he would ever see it. So many of his men were not there with him: The regiment had suffered 20,251 casualties since landing in Sicily. A total of 1,449 of his fellow Thunderbirds in the 157th Infantry Regiment had laid down their lives to liberate Europe from the greatest evil of modern times.
MARGUERITE HIGGINS LEARNED of the German surrender as she was interviewing 3rd Division troops in Salzburg, seventy miles south of Munich. “We all went out on a balcony to see artillery guns of the division flash in celebration into the sky,” she recalled. “Red and blue flares, tracer bullets, ack-ack guns, tank guns, fired into the midnight sky for the last time on this front.”
The noise echoed throughout the valley below, the explosions illuminating a jet-black sky, casting bright splashes on the mountain peaks and the deep valleys around Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s mountain retreat. There were tears in Higgins’s eyes.
The first woman to win a Pulitzer for foreign reporting, Higgins would later remember her World War II experiences with great affection, writing of the “human closeness and magnificence of character that danger sometimes provokes.… I have witnessed the awesomeness of man tried beyond endurance.”
“WAS IST AUS uns geworden?”
“What has become of us?”
That was the question a relieved twenty-year-old SS Corporal Johann Voss asked after the final fluttering roll of MG42s had sounded in Europe. The silver runes he had worn so proudly were now a “symbol of all wickedness.” Voss languished along with a staggering five million other Axis prisoners under Allied control in one of the many POW enclosures that dotted liberated Europe: an archipelago that was almost as vast as Hitler’s web of labor and concentration camps, where more than ten million civilians had died, including more than a million Jewish children, and where hundreds of thousands now struggled to recover from extreme malnutrition. “Our world has perished,” wrote Voss while in captivity. “A new world dawns, one in which our values are utterly discredited, and we will be met with hatred or distinct reserve for our past.”
The SS had committed staggering acts of atrocity. But they had not all been monsters. Voss’s unit, for example, would not be charged with a single war crime. His comrades in the 6th SS-Mountain Division, which had defeated Sparks and his men at Reipertswiller, had fought at the end to defend their country. Like their fellow Germans, they had paid a high price for their attraction to Hitler. The Fatherland lay in ruins; the dreams of a Germany restored to world power had been torched; most of their comrades had died.
In one Berlin suburb, women now outnumbered men by more than ten to one. Total losses, civilian and military, approached 10 percent of the 1939 population. More than five million German dead littered the battlefields of a devastated Europe, especially in the east. Ninety percent of all German combat deaths had in fact occurred fighting the Soviets, who had suffered and sacrificed most to defeat Hitler: an astounding 65 percent of all Allied fatalities.
Like many of his fellow SS warriors, Voss would never accept the International Military Tribunal’s declaration that the SS was a criminal organization. “The whole idea of considering a combat unit as a criminal gang is preposterous,” he would write. “It can only be seen as an act of revenge—by adding dishonor to the defeat. It also shows much ignorance of the spirit of the Waffen-SS.” The verdict, Voss believed, was “meant to rob us of our honor, the very last value of which a defeated enemy can be deprived. ‘Ehre verloren, alles verloren.’ (‘Honor lost, all lost.’) Unconditional surrender was not enough: humiliation had to be added to make the victory complete.”
Voss would be released from a POW camp in December 1946 and rejoin his immediate family, all of whom had survived the war. He was lucky indeed: He had never received an SS blood group tattoo in his armpit and was therefore not physically branded as a criminal for life.
EUROPEANS BEGAN THE painful process of healing, grieving, and dealing with the psychological trauma of so many days of war. Never had so many people been killed so quickly—more than nineteen million civilians in Europe alone. In Paris, one of Nazism’s ravaged survivors, Robert Antelme, slowly began to regain weight. Later that May, when his wife, Marguerite Duras, felt he was strong enough, she broke the news to him that his twenty-four-year-old sister, Marie-Louise, had died at the hands of the Nazis in Ravensbrück just days from the end of the war, one of about fifty thousand women who had succumbed there to despair, overwork, disease, and starvation. Later that summer, Duras also finally admitted that she was in love with another man. “I told him we had to get a divorce,” she recalled. “He asked if one day we might be together again. I said no.” Antelme still could not stop loving her. He was incapable now of hate.
Antelme had been but one of countless people caught up in the “crazy, hysterical madness” of World War II in Europe, in John Steinbeck’s words. He would later write one of the most powerful accounts of the war, The Human Race, about his time in captivity. It was his only book. There was no need for another. He died aged seventy-three in 1990 after a long illness, one of more than thirty thousand Europeans liberated from hell by Sparks and his men in 1945. “The world goes on being awash in wickedness, arrogance, mediocrity,” wrote one of his many friends. “But Antelme showed us that the business of living may be accomplished with goodness, with modesty, and with nobility.”
THEY DID NOT want it to resemble a Nazi parade, here where Hitler had addressed hundreds of thousands of hysterical followers at the height of his power. So they turned the microphone low. The colors of the Thunderbirds’ three regiments flapped gently in the breeze under bright sunshine as Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic chaplains addressed the five perfect rectangles of men filling only half of the vast King’s Plaza in Munich, flanked by eight tanks. A few hundred Germans watched from near a pile of rubble that had been cleared from the square. Then General Robert Frederick walked to a platform set up before the rows of Thunderbirds.
So few had lived to see the end. Nine out of ten men who had left America with the division had been wounded, killed, or taken prisoner by the time the guns fell silent in Europe for the second time in the twentieth century. The division’s initial number of men had been replaced seven times since July 10, 1943, when it had first landed in Sicily.
No American division had fought harder to liberate Europe. And the top brass knew it. General Alexander Patch, Seventh Army commander, described the Thunderbirds as the “best damned outfit in the U.S. Army.” The Germans also had great respect, having dubbed the National Guard unit the “Falcon Division.” Only at Reipertswiller had they managed to defeat it. High praise also came from none other than Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, arguably Germany’s finest World War II field commander: “The 45th is one of the two best Divisions I have ever encountered.” The other was the 3rd Division, which had fought so often at the Thunderbirds’ side, and had lost more men than any other division in Europe.
Few people would ever be aware of what the Thunderbirds had achieved or the extent of their losses: 3,650 men killed in action, 13,729 men wounded in action, and an astonishing 41,647 non-battle casualties—62,907 in all during their 511 days at war. Much of the glory and headlines in Europe had been grabbed by Patton’s Third Army after D-Day, June 6, and by other celebrated units, such as the 101st Airborne. The horrors of Anzio and Salerno had been forgotten in favor of the heroism of Omaha Beach and the American grit at the Battle of the Bulge. The disasters and bloody attrition of Italy and the Vosges did not square with the more reassuring narrative of inevitable victory.
Even senior Pentagon officials, visiting Munich that May of 1945, knew astonishingly little about the American division that had, in the words of historian Carlo D’Este, “distinguished itself as the most combat-experienced division in the US Army.” One such bureaucrat, a colonel, even made the mistake of asking a veteran which beach he had “come over,” assuming it had been in Normandy.
“Sir,” the insulted Thunderbird replied, “my outfit hit so many beaches that we forgot their names. One soldier out of my old company is still alive. The rest are buried at Salerno and Anzio and the Siegfried Line. Sir, I never saw Omaha or Utah beach. We were busy killing krauts. Anything else, sir?”
It is not known how the official reacted or whether he even stayed in Munich long enough that May to watch General Frederick address the entire 45th Division, gathered on Memorial Day in the King’s Plaza, the vast square at the center of the city.
“Today,” said Frederick, “in the very heart of a conquered Germany, we pause to pay tribute to our comrades who gave the fullest measure of the sacrifice for their country. We cannot bring them back, but we can do our part to insure the endurance of those principals for which they died.”*
As Frederick left the platform, he came across his chief of staff, Kenneth Wickham, who noticed there were tears in Frederick’s eyes.
“Oh God, how I hate war,” said Frederick.
* Frederick spent 551 days in combat and was decorated with twenty-eight U.S. and six foreign medals.