“DEAR FATHERLAND, REST QUIETLY”

A REPORT ON THE COLLAPSE OF HITLER’S “THOUSAND YEARS”

MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE

An excerpt from The New York Times review, December 4, 1946 by Orville Prescott.

“Miss Bourke-White is one of the most distinguished of American photographers. Before the war she was a specialist in pictures of industry. During the war as a photographer for Life she took many of the best frontline pictures which appeared in that magazine, in Russia, in Italy and in France and Germany. She traveled by jeep, by plane and on foot wherever reporters were allowed to go, which often meant where shells were exploding and bullets flying. But she did not just take pictures. Miss Bourke-White is a good reporter as well as a photographer. She talked with all manner of men and with resourceful enterprise sought out representative and significant men. The present volume includes 128 of her excellent pictures of Germany in defeat, in addition to Miss Bourke-White's report on her investigations….

Few Uninfected With Nazism

“….Miss Bourke-White talked with hundreds of Germans. Among them she found a few, a pitiful few, who had not succumbed to the Nazi infection. Most of therm, did not admit or realize that there was any infection. They did not admit that Hitler was evil, that Germany had started the war, that they were aware of the torture and death camps, that they in any way shared responsibility for their government's and their nation's crimes. Many of them expected the Allies to finance Germany's recovery, to be responsible for German employment.

In Bremen Miss Bourke-White found an old friend, a German girl who had graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism. "Here will be somebody I can talk to," she thought. But the intelligent, American-educated girl turned out to be an ardent defender of Nazism and all its works. "We have believed in the party principles for centuries," she said. "Adolf Hitler never knowingly told a lie."

More disturbing, because of their greater power and influence and because of the respectful deference with which the Allies treated some of them, were the great industrial lords of the Ruhr. Miss Bourke-White talked with many of them, the men who had made Hitler's war machine possible and who had profited mightily in the process. And they were all just innocent business men uninterested in politics, worthy citizens who expected to continue to run their peaceable enterprises! If they are allowed to, and if the Allies do not foster a genuine democracy in Germany, the third World War will come sooner than we expect it. That is the underlying theme of ‘Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly.’ "

From the Kirkus Review, December 1, 1946.

An absorbing book to anyone interested-and concerned-with the problem of occupied Germany, today and tomorrow. On turning the last page one wishes that Margaret Bourke-White could have brought her material up to date, could have seen a Germany divided against itself, internally and through the occupying powers, could have visited the Nuremburg trials, could have spoken as authoritatively of today's Black Market, today's potentials of a revived Naziism, today's disintegration of the armies of occupation.  But-accepting this limitation, the book as she has written it out of her own immediate concern with Germany at the moment of defeat and soon thereafter, and the photographs and captions as they reemphasize the text--have implicit in it the whole of the subsequent and frightening developments. It is perhaps a less emotional, a more cerebral book than Purple Heart Valley; it is scrappy and episodic; but it carries a punch that too few books on the subject have carried. Once again the warning is there-don't forget too soon the grisly horrors for which all levels of German society were responsible. It is a challenge-perhaps too late-to the democracies to give Germany a positive program to replace Naziism, which she still feels is a dominating factor in the psychology of the German populace. It is a biting criticism of the Black Market that has engulfed all of Europe-and of our contribution to it. From concentration camps, not a few exceptions but the rule, near most of the industrial centers--to the interrelations with the occupying forces, she gives, in words and photographs, an unforgettable picture. It should be read. Will it?

Grade Level and Copyright

Grade Level is 8.3 using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test with three sample chapters.

First edition published by Simon and Schuster, 1946.

Electronic edition published by Ebooks for Students, Ltd., 2022.

This ebook is in the public domain, and is free of all copyright restrictions. It is also free of digital rights management protection so you can distribute copies to your students, their parents, and your colleagues.

See our other biographies, novels and popular history at ebooksforstudents.org. See our titles on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3brofzU.

Comments  or questions to support@ebooksforstudents.org or (202) 464-9126.

Table of Contents

FOREWORD

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER 1 — “Hitler Never Told a Lie”

CHAPTER 2 — Champagne Is a Military Necessity

CHAPTER 3 — A Last Look at George Patton

CHAPTER 4 — A Reporter’s Lot Is Not a Happy One

CHAPTER 5 — Death Seemed the Only Escape

CHAPTER 6 — The Fighting Ends

CHAPTER 7 — All the Threads Were Loose

CHAPTER 8 — On the Road to Frankfurt

CHAPTER 9 — April in Germany

CHAPTER 10 — Munich: Where It All Began

CHAPTER 11 — Krupp Suckles the Wehrmacht

CHAPTER 12 — Bomb Shelters Were Too Expensive

CHAPTER 13 — Waiting for the New Loans

CHAPTER 14 — Alles Kaput

CHAPTER 15 — Home Is Where the Heart Is

CHAPTER 16 — Hildegarde Again

CHAPTER 17 — In Kiel People Were Somber

CHAPTER 18 — How to Win Friends in Germany

CHAPTER 19 — The Black Market

CHAPTER 20 — Berlin: A River of Wanderers

EPILOGUE

DEDICATION

For M. J. P.

who died too soon

FOREWORD

This book is a description of Germany as I saw it in defeat and collapse. Perhaps because I am primarily a photographer, I have tried to give a candid picture rather than to suggest solutions to the problems I found there. If the book helps the reader to conclusions of his own, it will have repaid the work that went into it.

I am deeply indebted to the editors of LIFE who sent me on this assignment and who have granted me permission to reproduce the photographs in this book, to the understanding men and women in LIFE’S darkroom, and especially to Edward Stanley for his stubborn patience and expert assistance with the text, and for his fine captions. There are others, in Europe and in America, to whom I am also indebted. They are too many to be publicly acknowledged, but I hope they will understand my gratitude.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Section One. Faces: The German Look

Section Two. The Nazi Soul: Two Concentration Camps

Section Three. War’s End: A Holiday for Some

Section Four. Urban Germany: What Our Bombs Left

Section Five. The Future: Children in Germany

Section Six. Krupp: Where the War Cancer Grew

Section Seven. Berlin: People Without Boots

CHAPTER 1 — “Hitler Never Told a Lie”

THERE WAS one girl in Germany I never expected to find outside a concentration camp. She was Fräulein Hildegarde Roselius. I remembered her from her student days, when she came to New York to study journalism at Columbia University. I had not known her very well, but I had retained an impression of her energetic, outspoken personality. She was a big, vivid girl with long, powerful arms, a loud, bright laugh, and a habit of expressing her opinions on any subject that came up, volubly, in almost perfect English. I had considered it pleasantly, even amusingly, symbolic of what I supposed were her progressive ideas that, after having been graduated from Columbia, she carried back across the ocean the first gasoline filling station ever to be installed in her home town of Bremen.

It was through this gas pump that I got on Hildegarde’s track again. In the oldest section of Bremen, near the Rathaus and the wonderful old market, her father, who was the Kaffee-Hag king of Germany, had rebuilt an ancient street in faithful conformity with the rare twelfth-century buildings which stood nearby. Returning with her American diploma, his enthusiastic young daughter had set up her corner gas pump smack in the midst of this genuine and simulated medieval architecture.

When our armies occupied Bremen in the spring of ‘45, and I was able to get through to the ruined center of the town, by dint of constant searching and by orienting myself with the remains of the Rathaus and the Börse I located Böttscher Strasse. I had been there in peacetime to visit Hildegarde and her Bauhaus artist friends. Now I found little that was recognizable in the street that Kaffee-Hag had built. But on the third floor of what had been the artists’ “Club zu Bremen,” in the cloakroom, I found Hildegarde herself. She had changed from the apple-cheeked fräulein I had known in New York into a large raw-boned woman with a loud imperious voice.

Hildegarde was fortunate in her cloakroom, which contained the only set of windows in the entire building. By hanging white lace curtains at the leaded glass panes, and digging up other odds and ends of furnishings, she had converted the place into a reasonably comfortable sleeping-and-sitting room. But she was less lucky in her kitchen: the corner room (formerly the washroom) she was using for that purpose had lost its two outside walls, leaving the once wealthy heiress to do her cooking on a kind of open shelf hanging over the ruins below.

It is hard to tell who was the more surprised, she to see me there, or I to succeed in actually finding her in the midst of such difficult circumstances. She was overjoyed to meet an old college friend from America, and I was particularly happy to find a German with whom I could talk frankly. I had found the German character unbelievably baffling, and Hildegarde should be able to help. She did, indeed.

Throughout the Allied advance into Germany, all the Americans I knew were discussing how surprisingly few Germans were willing to accept any responsibility for either the rise of Nazism or the launching of war. Brought up as we had been in the democratic tradition, we found it hard to comprehend the way Germans divorced themselves from any responsibility for their government. The American GI, who had traveled through England, Africa, Italy and France without any notable effort to understand the people of those countries, adopted a more thoughtful attitude as soon as he entered Germany. I heard many serious discussions in which our soldiers really tried to figure out the Germans. This more analytical approach was due, I suppose, to an interest in what this creature was like who so recently had been shooting at us, and to a desire to find out what had induced him to start shooting in the first place. Countless times I heard our men say, after seeing the fertile fields and orchards so reminiscent of our own country, “Why did the Germans go to war when they had so much already?”

An American Major expressed the bewilderment of all of us at the general disclaimers of connection with Nazism when he commented, “The Germans act as though the Nazis were a strange race of Eskimos who came down from the North Pole and somehow invaded Germany.” Therefore, it was natural for me to remark to my old college acquaintance, “I have yet to find a German who will admit to being a Nazi.”

Hildegarde’s unexpected reply was: “You are now talking to a German who admits to being one.”

Well, there it was! I had at last found what I was looking for: a real Nazi who would admit it and, what was more, would talk openly and even proudly about it.

It was not always easy for me to keep silent, while we sat in that little lace-curtained room and Hildegarde told me of her worship of Adolf Hitler and her unquestioning acceptance of all his views. But I could gain more, I knew, by listening to her ideas than by interrupting with my own opposing opinions.

“The Führer had a strong manly handshake,” Hildegarde began, “the sort of handshake you like. A really good handshake. Everyone who met him liked him. He was very sincere, very frank. He believed in what he said. Adolf Hitler never knowingly told a lie.”

At least, I observed to myself, Hildegarde has picked up one Americanism, if it is no more than the species of laurel we bestow upon a national hero.

She had met Hitler first at a tea party at Winifred Wagner’s, but she had already heard a great deal about him from her father—“He knew my father well,” she said. Herr Roselius had met Hitler at an earlier tea party given by Cosima Wagner in 1929, and, impressed by the man’s “personality and sincerity,” had come home and announced to his daughter, “I think this man will play a very important role in Germany. I like him. He makes a very good impression on me.”

“Hitler tried hard to avoid war,” continued Hildegarde. “Every German knows that we are not guilty of starting the war.”

“Have they read Mein Kampf?” I broke in. “What about Hitler’s expansionist aims?”

“Expansionist aims are all right as long as they can be carried out on a fair basis: fair trade, and fair commercial relations.”

I checked my impulse to argue back and tell her the things I had seen with my own eyes in Czechoslovakia when the Germans marched in and appropriated that little democracy. Hildegarde went on to speak bitterly about the corrupting effect of foreign propaganda.

“Too many people have been listening to the foreign radio,” she said. “Radio propaganda raises doubts among the German people.”

This was a fine bouquet to hand our Allied propaganda radio, and I was eager to hear more. I had been associating with too many of our own cynical correspondents, I supposed, who were over-ready to be skeptical of our Allied propaganda efforts; the comments of a German graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism should be valuable. So I asked how our broadcasts had sounded to her.

“Why, I never listened to the American radio,” she replied indignantly. “It would not have been fair or square to the Führer!”

If this voluntary abstinence from sources of information seems remarkable in a student of journalism, her next comment was even more so.

“And even if I had listened, I wouldn’t have believed it. I know too much about propaganda. During World War I, Papa was in charge of German propaganda, so I know all about it. And I know America; I know how they handle advertising and all those things there. After all, I'm a journalist, I know those publicity techniques. No, if I had listened to the American radio, I wouldn’t have believed it anyway.”

“But it happens that it was the truth,” I interposed.

“You mean to say our radio didn’t tell the truth? Nonsense! Our German radio always gave the true news.”

It was an easy step to lead her into talking about who caused the war. “Oh, England actually started the war,” said Hildegarde. “England dropped the first bomb. Hitler made a very fair offer in regard to Poland. It was a silly thing in the first place for England to go to war about Poland. It was a very modest demand on the part of Germany—very modest. As to the ultimate responsibility, I don’t know which country was really at the back of starting the war: whether it was England, or whether it was Poland, or whether it was Russia who was really behind it.”

But anyway, not Germany, I noted, according to Hildegarde.

And then, expressing what I suppose was wishful thinking on the part of many Germans, she continued: “We always thought you didn’t really want to bomb us. We always had the impression you wanted us to fight Russia and weaken the Russians before they crushed us. You were shifting about from one viewpoint to another, so it was hard to be sure. But I always thought your bombings stopped for a while when the Russians had too much success.”

I was to meet this kind of thinking in one form or another again and again in Germany; even in defeat the Germans refused to give up the hope that sometime we would be fighting Russia for them.

“Why do you think America came into the war?” I asked.

“I think mostly for business reasons,” she replied. “Many of our people asked the same thing: why is America interested in a war in Europe? Our business men think America wanted more markets in Europe, and of course behind it all were the Jews. The Jews pushed America into the war out of a revenge feeling.”

It was when Hildegarde’s discussion reached the subject of the Jews that I found her remarks the most revealing. I had not realized how simply—and adroitly—Hitler had stretched his hand into the past to pluck out the prejudice that would serve him best.

“Well, it is quite reasonable,” Hildegarde said of anti-Semitism. “We felt the same way for seven or eight hundred years. We had no Jewish problem in Bremen. Up to 1880 the city had a law that no Jew was allowed to stay overnight. Even in recent years, out of four hundred thousand inhabitants, if we had two hundred Jewish families, it was much. The Jews were treated in a friendly way here, but we didn’t mix with them. This was the tradition of centuries. Of course, for a large city like Berlin there was a problem; there the Jews had to be dealt with.” And then Hildegarde smiled. “Here in Bremen we didn’t take the Jews so seriously. Our two hundred families didn’t have much of a chance anyway,” she paused, and added with a laugh, “if they didn’t behave the way the Bremen merchants wanted. So you see we had Nazism, practically speaking, always,” she concluded. “We have believed in the Party principles for centuries.”

Her creed given thus neatly, Hildegarde decided it was time for tea, and we went out into the kitchen to make it. It was not usual for a German to have either tea or fuel for cooking it, but Bremen was more fortunate than many other German cities. Here, where the Americans had put many people to work on the docks, coffee and tea were often obtainable from our men. Also, the fuel situation had been eased by an Army ruling permitting civilians to cut down every second tree.

Stoking her tiny stove with wood she had chopped herself, Hildegarde, in her substantial dress of navy blue wool, stood out incongruously against the background of devastation. Her kitchen, hanging insecurely, open to a panorama of wildly tossed ruins just beyond, gave the feeling of a small stage against which someone had lowered the wrong backdrop. Only the battered tower of the Martini-Kirche—church steeples somehow usually proved durable—was recognizable as the building it had once been.

Looking up for a moment, to say she hoped I would not be cold in her drafty kitchen, Hildegarde broke into a little laugh. “I don’t mean to be impolite,” she joked, “but it’s your own damn fault if you are cold.”

I did not retort, as I suppose I might have done, that my photographic flight over Bremen only that morning had yielded pictures of U-boats in all stages of completion, as well as a bombed airplane plant and some enormous submarine-assembly installations. Nor did I add that I had a particularly personal feeling about submarines, having been torpedoed myself earlier in the war by a German U-boat which undoubtedly had received its final assembly in this section of Germany. My memory was full of the many friends I had had among Allied fliers who had lost their liberty or lives through the necessity of knocking out just such war industries as the ones around Bremen.

Almost as though she had followed my thoughts, Hildegarde said, “You see that smashed house over there? A funny thing happened; everybody in Bremen was laughing about it. A tank full of water was left at the top. A parachutist came down. This poor fellow went right into it and had to be taken out by the Fire Company. It was last winter, and I think it was a rather cold bath for him.”

We carried our tea back into the cloakroom and Hildegarde set out two silver-edged cups, one chipped and one intact. “You will get our best cup,” she said merrily, and then she became serious as she told me another story about American airmen.

“There was one thing that raised resentment. That was the ‘Murder, Inc.’ business. Some of the parachute boys had on their slickers, ‘Murder, Inc.’ To the German people it meant that this was an American organization to murder. I was often asked about it. People would come to me and say ‘What do they mean by it? You have been to America, tell us.’ They were very angry. I said it must be some college joke. That raised lots of ill feeling; the people didn’t understand it. I knew from college they might do it for fun, but people would say, ‘Well, they shouldn’t joke about things like that.’”

Those poor unlucky fliers, I thought. The cards must certainly have been stacked against them, after that ill-advised gag.

“It has been a great blow to the young boys of Bremen that we lost the city. You must remember they were all in the Hitler Jugend. One of the bridges was held by five boys. To them it is a terrible shock that Hitler has lost the war. Probably we can’t convince other people of our ideas. But I have been a member of the Nazi Women’s League through it all, and I would do it over again.”

Here we are, I thought, moving into Germany with our well-equipped army, with service units for everything that rolls, flies, or breaks down. But we have no replacement parts for that philosophy which we set out to destroy. What are we bringing those Hitler Jugend who have lost their bridge and these women who have lost their hypnotic Führer? By what naïve arrogance can we assume that the liberated will automatically and conveniently love and adopt the democratic way of life, simply because their liberators love it?

“I believe that Germany could not have lost if it had not been for treachery somewhere,” said Hildegarde as I rose to leave. “There were too many Poles and foreigners, and too many people listening to the foreign radio. After all, democracy may be all right for Americans, but it is a very questionable thing for Germany.” I have seen much of this war and many times, in positions of hazard and peril, I have been badly frightened. But the terror that came to me after talking with this German girl was deeper and more lasting than anything to which I have yet been exposed. It is with me still.

SECTION I. FACES: THE GERMAN LOOK

CHAPTER 2 — Champagne Is a Military Necessity

THE SPIRE of Cologne Cathedral was a wonderful spot from which to take pictures. I was a little breathless after the stiff climb, as I peered out of the chinks in the masonry; but perhaps I would have been a little breathless anyway, for far below me, rippling against the edge of Greater Germany, flowed the Rhine. The river was still dangerous: its bank was thick with German soldiers, hidden, waiting, killing—keeping the watch on the Rhine.

Our progress toward the heart of Germany during the spring of ‘45 had been so swift that it took on increasingly the characteristics of a journey deep into the land beyond the Looking Glass—until, during the final weeks of the war, we reached that blurred greenish region beyond even the reflection of the lives we had known. Victors and vanquished were behaving in ways strange, unfamiliar, and upside-down, and the world seemed flowing with champagne. Champagne, as any GI will tell, you, is a military necessity. Perhaps the necessity had never been so urgent before.

When I met the three GIs celebrating outside the rubble-piled cathedral it was early March, and Cologne was ours as far as the river. From across the Rhine bands of fanatical Hitler Jugend still manned the ack-ack guns, even after many of their elders had fled, and mortar shells still whistled past the headless gargoyles to fall in Cathedral Square.

The chipped apostles over the west portal looked down placidly on a sign which had just been tacked up on the cathedral door: “YOU ARE NOW IN COLOGNE, COMPLIMENTS 1st. Bn. 36th Armd. Inf. Reg., Texas Spearhead.” There was some dispute about that credit line between the 104th, the “Timberwolf” Division, and the 3rd Armored Division, which had entered Cologne simultaneously. There was also considerable irritation exhibited by the Air Force which, after smashing Cologne flat, was learning that the ground forces now tended to consider the bomber boys strictly rear echelon. But to the imperturbable saints over the Gothic arched portals, even though some had lost noses and chins and several had dropped stone wing feathers, it was all the same. Bombers by the thousand had come and gone. A Kaiser and a Führer had come and gone. An army of occupation was coming; that would go, too. But in the deep vaults under the cathedral, Mass had been celebrated with regularity through the bombings and throughout all the long dark time.

The three soldiers on the unsteady rubble were, according to the sign on the door, my hosts. Just as any good host would do, catching sight of me with my camera and of Sergeant Asch who was helping me carry equipment, they called out, “Have some champagne.”

“We’ve got so much champagne we’re brushing our teeth in it,” said one of the soldiers. They actually were. The water system had been destroyed, and the champagne came in very handy.

“Come along with us,” invited another soldier. “We were just about to go and blow up a safe.”

“Bring her along,” cried the others.

All right, I thought. I’m through the looking glass now. I’m in a country where you brush your teeth in champagne. Anything can happen here.

We ran across Cathedral Square, passed the skeleton of the 4711 Cologne building, stooping low as we hurried through the open portion of the square, for the Germans had direct vision on us once we left the cathedral and were likely to drop in a mortar shell or two if they saw signs of life. As we dodged into the comparative shelter of Wallrath Platz one of the boys stopped dead in his tracks and exclaimed in a tone of exasperation, “Dynamite!”

“Dynamite?” I asked.

“For blowing up the safe,” he said. “We forgot to bring dynamite.”

The nearest place to get dynamite, they decided, was at the company CP where the demolition squad would surely be willing to lend some. While the soldier went off to the command post, which was somewhere under the ruins of the Dom Hotel, the rest of us sat On the edge of a small bomb crater beside what remained of the Deutsche-Amerika Travel Agency. One soldier wrestled with a cork; the foaming fountain he released gushed out with a strange and lovely pink. It turned out not to be champagne at all, but a sparkling red moselle, which none of us had ever tasted.

While we waited for dynamite, I had a chance to look around me and try to recall Wallrath Platz as I remembered it from my first trip to Europe. Groups of tourists had rested their cathedral-weary feet under the little tables in front of what was now the charred husk of the Café Monopol, while they gathered strength for a shopping expedition along Hohe Strasse. The sign marking Hohe Strasse still hung on the corner, but its fashionable shops had slid into rock-piles and dust. Now it was a hunting ground for soldiers after souvenirs and booty. I have never read of a war in which soldiers didn’t do some looting, and certainly this one was no exception. Cologne was the first great German city to be captured, and perhaps some of the looting that went on was due to curiosity. The GIs wanted to see what the houses looked like, how the enemy lived, what he had in his home. It was the land of the enemy and had been won from him by men who had hazarded their lives every foot of the way from Omaha Beach. They wanted some tangible evidence of their success, A man who has been bombed, shot at, and sniped at is not likely to have a very high regard for enemy property rights, especially if he suspects the property has been stolen from others in the first place. After the passion for “souvenirs” burned out, normal behavior toward property reasserted itself to a considerable degree.

“There’s vaults and vaults full of stuff under that street,” said one of the soldiers, in a slow Texas drawl. “There’s everything there that a person might want. We haven’t had a chance to go through the half of it yet.”

This was “new rubble” that surrounded us. After the early bombings of ‘42 and ‘43 the débris had been cleared away and the city had managed some kind of return to life. It was only the week before, during the last great raids of March 2 and 3, when Cologne was being “softened” for invasion, that most of the buildings still standing had slipped down into the streets, sweeping some four hundred Germans with them. It was then that the cathedral, hitherto relatively untouched, had received the three direct hits which choked the nave with rubble.

“You didn’t need to bomb the city again,” the people had told us when we entered Cologne. “We wanted to surrender, anyway. We were just waiting for the Americans to come in.”

The docility of the people puzzled us. The big-time Nazis had fled across the Rhine, and the civilians who remained were eager to please their new masters. 1

As we started again along the pathless waste of Hohe Strasse, equipped this time with dynamite, I decided that it took an infantryman, trained in finding his way on patrols by almost imperceptible signs, to guide us to the target. When we reached it, a stone pile looking exactly like any other stone pile, our leader stopped quite still and said in quiet desperation: “String!”

“Jeez. Yes, string,” chorused the others. “We forgot string.”

I wondered how string could help with the rubble problem. While one soldier went off on a string hunt, I learned that our amateur safe-crackers needed it to make a fuse.

At last, outfitted with string, dynamite, my cameras, flashbulbs, and a couple of torches, we let ourselves through a hole, down a ladder, through another hole, and down a precarious stairway, until we found ourselves in the third sub-basement below the street. By the illumination of our flashlights we discovered that we were in something that seemed a cross between Bloomingdale’s on bargain day and your grandmother’s attic. There were piles of folded lace curtains, boxes of damask tablecloths and napkins, chests of flat silver, suitcases of new and old clothes, and heaps of neatly folded, cheap red cotton flags with swastikas machine-stitched on in black.

Under and amidst all the linens and swastikas were rows of sleek dark bottles in crisp straw jackets. Some of the handsomest bottles turned out to be fruit juice. Not enough of the cases contained champagne, the exasperated GIs complained, but Sergeant Asch, who knew wines, observed that many of the wines were really fine vintages of the great wine years. This made everyone feel better.

“My wife would go for a set like this,” said the boy from Texas, holding up a lustrous yellow rayon luncheon-cloth embroidered lavishly with bluebirds. Next he unearthed a mammoth Nazi flag in heavy silk, ornately bordered with white fringed cord. He offered it to me and I accepted it willingly, as it was the only “souvenir” I saw that I wanted.

By now the place bore no resemblance to your grandmother’s attic. Each blaze of my flashbulbs showed weird glimpses of GIs searching through the confusion, uncorking bottles, poking their way from one cavelike chamber to the next. The boy from Texas led me through a hole in the wall into a fur vault hung with coats of seal and muskrat, moleskin jackets, fox capes. This was evidently a storage vault where townspeople brought their clothes for safety during the bombings.

“These are just old second-hand clothes,” said the soldier, dismissing the fur coats promptly. “Come through this hole—there’s another vault beyond. There are better furs there.”

As I squeezed my way through the hole I set my Rolleiflex at an approximate focus and took a shot into darkness. By the flare of the bulb I could see the GI standing up to his knees in bundles of white furs. I couldn’t tell whether they were fox or rabbit.

“You could pick up three thousand dollars here, easy,” said the boy. And, as I shot off another flashbulb, he added uneasily, “Or maybe you don’t need three thousand dollars.”

By that time the others had scrambled through the hole in the wall after us, and it was just a matter of minutes before the vault was churned up into a blizzard of furs as they embarked on a search for mink. They never found any, but one soldier held up one of those scrappy, nondescript little pieces that some women wear over evening gowns, and asked me if I wanted it. I was completely uninterested. As it weighed only about an ounce, he tucked it under his arm. (Months later, in Paris, I learned that it was platinum fox, appraised at two thousand dollars, and that the soldier had given it to a French actress for reasons which were quite clear in his mind at the time.)

It was confusing going through vault after vault in the darkness, and finally we all lost our way. When at last we saw a gap of light above us and climbed up toward it, we found we were coming out into an enclosed court at some little distance from the hole through which we had entered. The Texan had climbed out ahead of the rest of us, and he was already laying his piece of string over the rubble and running it toward the far end of the court. “Stand back of that stairway,” he called, and I realized that he was about to blow up the safe, which had been tumbled into the courtyard by bombings. Under other circumstances I might have had more confidence in his ability to handle dynamite; but with things as they were I was sure he would send us all crashing down into the whirlpool of drygoods below.

We had just time to flatten ourselves against the gate when the center of the courtyard rose with a roar and bricks and rubble dust flew in all directions. When the smoke cleared, the GIs were sitting flat on the ground, quite surprised; two of them were badly bruised, one had his cheek cut, but nobody was seriously hurt. When the boys examined the wreckage, they found nothing of any consequence. Whatever the safe may have contained had probably been carried across the river by fleeing Nazis.

While two of us were folding up the big banner in the middle of the Platz, the way people will fold a large tablecloth, a soft little “zing” hit the ground not far away. Then came a second “zing,” closer. The soldier said, “Snipers!” and pulled me under a jeep. It was almost one motion, almost a reflex, very quiet, very fast, very professional. I felt my head to make sure my helmet was on firmly. I was thoroughly tangled up in the big flag and wondered uncomfortably if the sight of our souvenir swastika had caught the sniper’s eye.

My companion had switched instantly to the habits of a trained infantryman. “Do what I do,” he ordered. “Run when I run.” He crawled out warily, crouched behind the jeep, dragged me out after him; and we ran full speed to the shelter of the battered arches of the Café Monopol.

“They’ll be throwing mortars in soon,” he remarked quite calmly. I noticed with some astonishment that he still carried a champagne bottle under his arm, and had begun automatically to tug at the cork.

But I had had enough champagne. And I was greatly disturbed because, if the Germans started mortaring the square, as they had a habit of doing late in the afternoon at about this time, they would catch Sergeant Asch and the other soldiers just as they were coming out. I was much relieved, therefore, when at last they appeared. We shouted a warning to them, and all of us piled into the jeep and left Wallrath Platz and Cathedral Square behind. But fast!

A few weeks later my huge Nazi flag, by that time elaborately autographed by war correspondents, famous pilots, and assorted notables, disappeared from my barracks bag, and I learned a fundamental lesson about loot; it is almost inevitably stolen from you.

CHAPTER 3 — A Last Look at George Patton

THE SLENDER, natty figure standing in the midst of the billowing red parachute silk was the awesome General Patton, whom I had come to photograph. Patton was at the peak of his dashing career then, and when I saw him he was dividing up a captured German artillery ‘chute in the hallway of his Luxembourg house at 3rd Army Headquarters, his kindly, rugged face looking out quizzically from the masses of scarlet silk.

“What’s this stuff good for? What can my wife and daughter do with it? Do you think it will make a dress?”

I thought it would make nice sofa pillows, and as I went into a little detail about how they might be made, the General cut out a couple of panels from the enormous ‘chute for me.

“Take as much as you want,” he urged. “And some of this white parachute cord. What can you do with that?” Well, you could edge the pillows with it, or make a cord for a bathrobe or housecoat, I suggested.

“Take some more. Isn’t it pretty stuff? The Germans have pretty good materials after all.”

This was an historic evening on which I found the General tangled up in the parachute silk for his family. It was March 24, 1945, the night of one of the early Rhine crossings; infantry and tanks which had reached the east bank in the initial crossing were beginning to push their way toward the heart of Germany. Shrouded by the longest fog screen ever laid by man, more crossings were due to support the first. Under the cover of darkness tanks and trucks were rolling up to the western banks, assault boats were gathering, and combat engineers were bringing up pontoons and bridge parts for the longest floating Bailey ever to be built during combat. While the acrid smoke settled into the hollows and gorges of the Rhine, and the men waited for the signal for that first fearsome plunge, their General—dividing up the red silk—was glancing frequently at his watch.

“Things have been going too smoothly,” said General Patton. “It makes me jittery when things go too well.”

As we walked from the hall into the living room, carrying in my cameras and flash equipment, the General’s aide was rolling up a movie screen and putting away the reels of the moving picture that had been shown that evening. Having an after-dinner movie is a regular custom with many American generals, and tonight General Patton had been seeing Betty Grable in technicolor.

Exactly like many less notable persons about to have their pictures taken, General Patton began consulting me earnestly about what he should wear. If I could have known that the General was going to be so concerned about his clothes, I would have been less worried about my own. The strictness of General Patton was legendary in regard to regulation attire for all men and officers under his command and it had distressed me considerably that the skirt to my uniform was two hundred miles away in the Paris Life office. I had nothing in which to visit the General except the slacks and field jacket in which I had been sleeping for several nights. They looked slept in, and I knew it.

Should the General wear his dress blouse, or his old battle jacket, he wondered. The battle jacket, of course, I decided unhesitatingly. In that case, I must promise not to shoot down far enough to show that his pants didn’t match, or he would have to run upstairs and change them. Should he be photographed in his steel helmet—the one he wore at the front—or this new shiny thing the boys had fixed up for him? I selected the helmet, since he wore it in battle, not guessing that the shiny helmet liner was soon to become famous, that special lacquer was to be flown in regularly for it, that soon there were to be three liners with two of them, periodically parked at rival ordnance companies for maintenance and fresh varnishing. In fact, by the time the General reached Berlin for the Victory Parade (where he stood beside an even more resplendent Marshal Zhukov, dazzlingly hung with medals), one ordnance company boasted of having applied seventeen layers of lacquer, but was overshadowed by the claim of the second, which had applied thirty-eight coats.

At last, attired to the satisfaction of everyone present, General Patton leaned against the mantel in front of my camera and turned his face away just enough so that his favorite profile, the left, would show. I watched to be careful that he turned his face away not too much, for I wanted the newly acquired third star on his helmet to show also.

It is always helpful when photographing a temperamental individual to have someone in the room to keep him absorbed in conversation. In this respect General Weyland, who had brought me there, proved of great assistance. Genial, talented General O. P. Weyland, head of the 19th Tactical Air Command, was one of General Patton’s warmest friends and his closest working partner. Both officers believed passionately in integrated ground and air support, and carried out this collaboration with outstanding success. I was making no effort to listen to their conversation, particularly since the discussion of two leading generals on the eve of one of the greatest breakthroughs in history might well be a matter of extreme confidence. Still, I could not help catching an occasional remark. The gist of Patton’s comments seemed to be: “All those 4th and 6th Armored boys need is to get across and have enough space to get into high gear.” There was a good deal about how his boys were to “keep high-tailing it forward,” and after each remark he glanced down at his watch.

“It will be in eight minutes now,” he said, and then suddenly, startling me out of my wits, he cried, “Put that camera higher up! Don’t show my jowls!”

And not waiting for me to raise the tripod, he plopped down in a chair, took off his helmet and leaned his cheek on his hand. Then squinting up goblinwise at me, he announced, “Now you can’t photograph my jowls.” It was a very hard position in which to photograph him at all, but I have learned that photographers get what they want faster if they don’t argue with generals.

“And don’t show the creases in my neck,” he added, after which he took up his discussion once more with General Weyland. This time it concerned the proposed junction between the 3rd and 7th Armies. “Now we’re going to surround one of our own armies again,” said General Patton, laughing at what was evidently one of his favorite little jokes. When he laughed his expression was lively and charming, and I took another picture.

“Stop taking pictures of my teeth,” he scolded. “Why are photographers always taking pictures of my teeth?” After eyeing me for a while to make sure that I was devoting myself to serious and therefore toothless expressions, he turned to his watch once more.

“Only three minutes now,” he said, and resumed his talk with General Weyland.

Having firmly decided that a low camera angle with a long focus lens would be the best way to photograph the General, I had been sneaking my tripod lower, inch by inch, hoping he wouldn’t notice and start worrying about his jowls again. Suddenly he looked at me and tucked his chin against his chest. “This is the only angle at which the little hair I have will show,” he said. Then, “The new crossing is due to start.” Glancing at his watch, “It has started!”

It was one minute past twelve. The three of us in that room in Luxembourg were silent, wondering how our men were faring up forward, in the smoke-filled darkness. We knew how those boys would be hopping into boat after boat, with no dramatics about it, no volunteering to be first or hanging back to be last. We knew how the reconnaissance units would be seeking out cellars closest to the river for first-aid stations, how the engineers would be floating pontoon sections for bridges, how the navy seamen, 250 miles from the nearest ocean, would be helping to ferry over the infantry, working as though sailors and soldiers had been functioning together all their lives.

General Patton had been puffing thoughtfully at his cigar. “They are crossing at a special place,” he said. “They are going over at the Lorelei Rock. I was always fascinated by the idea of that Rhine maiden sitting there singing to sailors; I always liked the legend.

I thought it was a nice idea to have the men cross where the Lorelei sat on the rock and sang.” He devoted himself to the cigar once more. “And then,” he added, “there was another reason. I picked a cliff that everybody would think unscalable. No one will expect our men to be able to climb the Lorelei Rock.” Catching the enemy off balance was General Patton’s fabulous talent, as General Weyland explained to me later.

Our men must have been scaling that cliff even while he was telling me about it, for it worked out as he had planned. No German thought that foot soldiers could climb the Lorelei Rock. But what we could not know until later was that during the first crucial moments an unlucky spluttering of machine guns—apt to lake place at any time at the front—had caught and sunk the first three boats. All the men in them were drowned; the Lorelei had fulfilled tradition and claimed her own.

“You can’t go home yet,” exclaimed General Patton, as I started to move my equipment toward the door. “I won’t be able to go to sleep, anyway. Things are going well, and I can’t sleep when things are going well.”

And, carrying my cameras back, he asked me, of all things, to give him a lesson in photography. He wanted to know why I kept changing lenses while I worked. So, setting up my baby Linhof on a tripod, I inserted a short-focus lens, tucked the General’s head under the camera cloth, and demonstrated how a wide angle conveniently includes a lot of territory but makes the scene look dizzy. Then, working him through the intermediate focal lengths, I ended with the telephoto, explaining how this lens magnifies distant objects and has its uses for portraiture as well, for it magnifies the subject’s features also. “Making them look nobler,” I emphasized. And adding in a stage whisper, “In spite of jowls,” I started to pack up the cameras again.

“Oh, you can’t go,” protested the General. “I’m having fun.” Bringing out a bottle of Bourbon, he poured drinks for the three of us.

“If I ran out of Bourbon and cigars,” he said, “I’d be a healthier man.”

“What will you do after the war?” I asked.

“Go back to my yacht. She’s a lovely boat.” She was called, I found, the When and If.

When General Weyland and I rose to leave, with finality this time, General Patton began begging General Weyland to let him fly a mission over the front the next morning. He wanted to go piggyback in a P47, that is, ride as an extra man in a one-passenger plane.

“You can’t go on any mission, General,” General Weyland said firmly. “That’s one thing we won’t let you do.”

But on the way home I found to my delight that I was to be allowed to go on one. “If it clears, we’ll have an L5 for you,” said General Weyland, “and you ought to be able to get some good pictures.”

At ten in the morning it cleared, and the L5 was ready. We had only meager reports of the Lorelei crossing, but the earlier push just downstream at Oppenheim was going remarkably well. Flowing over the bridge, which was not much more than forty-eight hours old, armored traffic and infantry had penetrated in a narrow tongue toward Frankfurt to a depth of forty miles. This was to be a day of spectacular advances along the whole Rhine front. General Patton’s instincts had been right when he was too elated to sleep. There was an electric excitement in the troops, and I felt it even at the airfield while the boys were gassing up the plane and strapping me into the observer’s seat in the little L5.

“You won’t have to worry too much about Jerry ack-ack,” the boys said.

“It’s our own ack-ack I’m worrying about,” replied my pilot. “Through all that smoke, when the boys hear any airplane motor, they’re pretty easy on the trigger finger.”

We flew over the vineyard-covered hills that flank the curving Moselle Valley. It was this course which the 3rd Army ground troops had followed only shortly before, going northward along the river channel and then turning south and following the left bank of the Rhine, preparing for the breakthrough at Worms and Ludwigshafen. Below us, staggered in sharp white lines across the dark hills, were ranks of concrete dragon’s teeth, the Siegfried Line tank traps which had failed to stop Patton’s tanks. We flew over the bomb-stippled rail junction at Bad Munster, where our medium bombers had hammered through the winter at the key to the rail system into the Saar Palatinate. Then we saw below us the delicate kite shapes of three Piper Cubs on the edge of a plowed field.

“That’s the 8th Corps cub strip,” said my pilot. “How about going down to get the latest poop before we stick our necks out?”

As we rolled to a stop, the Sergeant in charge of the strip ran up. “We came to inquire what is the current attitude up forward toward friendly L5s,” said my pilot.

“They got a couple of our own 47s up there this morning,” said the Sergeant. “The pilots jumped out and didn’t pull their ‘chutes.” Indicating two areas on our map showing our own artillery, he commented, “These two spots are hotter than firecrackers.”

My pilot ringed in red the areas to be avoided. “Been getting any enemy air?”

“Got eight Jerries in there this morning. Lost one of our fliers doing it. Oppenheim got attacked by 174 planes last night.”

“Been getting resistance on the ground?”

“It’s stiffening up now, sir,” replied the Sergeant; and we took off.

As we flew forward, we saw ahead of us a long feathered plume resting lightly between the hills. It was a minute before I realized that it was the smoke shroud over the Rhine. This was the historic fog screen it took so many tons of chemicals to make. Directly in front of us the smoke was coming up solidly, bouncing upward like a succession of cotton bundles. “That’s the new crossing,” called my pilot over his shoulder, as he spun me for a couple of turns directly above it.

Whatever might be going on below the smoke remained a mystery to us, for there was little wind. The Lorelei preserved her secret. For one brief moment a breeze lifted the edge of the veil,, and we caught a glimpse of a castle on a cliff, looking exactly as castles on the Rhine are supposed to look; and then the whole gorge was sealed from sight.

“Maybe we’ll have better luck at Oppenheim,” suggested the pilot, and we headed south toward the older crossing.

We cut our way over broad flat fields which were being used for colossal motor pools. To the left and right of the great highway it was possible to pick out all the component parts of a division: everything from supply trains to mobile guns, from medical jeeps to small aircraft, distributed in an even dotted pattern as far as the eye could reach. Flowing below us toward the Rhine were the endless traffic columns of the 4th and 6th Armored Divisions.

Just as we approached the town of Oppenheim—where, we had been told, the astonished inhabitants had simply stood in their front yards and stared, heedless of falling shells, at the incredible spectacle of the enemy crossing their uncrossable Rhine—the wind rose and blew the smoke away from the water. Below us, beautifully spaced between perpendicular smoke columns, were four bridges over the Rhine. Farthest downstream was the original bridge demolished by the Germans, next the two pontoons which the engineers had thrown together for the infantry’s rush crossing, farther upstream the floating Bailey, and above all, threaded like big beads through the water, was the mine net designed to catch and explode at a safe distance any mines which might be floated downstream toward the new bridges. Scurrying from one bank to the other were power launches and motorized ducks, each trailed by a widening golden feather which caught the dull sunbeams sifting through the smoke. This ferry service used its return trip to carry back the ever-increasing horde of prisoners. One of the ducks had capsized that morning, we learned later, when its load of German soldiers rushed in unison to one side of the barge to keep from getting wet in the spray of a passing launch. Our men had sent out boats to pick them up, but most of the panic-stricken prisoners were drowned.

This 11,000-foot Bailey, over which my pilot began flying in a series of slow rolls so I could catch it between the smoke columns, was a remarkable bridge. Part of it had been constructed on the shore as soon as the first toehold of a bridgehead was established. At the start of the crossing, simultaneously with the ferrying of men in assault boats, the Navy began towing armor over on the bridge parts, each Bailey section carrying a tank, which could roll into enemy territory at once. The 178th Engineers sent their A Company over in the remnants of the forward infantry; they set up covering machine guns on the opposite bank and began immediately to build toward the center. On the near bank, B Company was building, and farther upstream C Company constructed the middle section which, when it was finished, was floated down the current into place. Thus at no time was the whole battalion in one spot where it could be wiped out by a single strafing; and the world’s longest floating Bailey was completed in two nights and a day.

We had time for two full swings around the crossing, one at low and one at higher altitude, with several smaller turns in between, before the wind flattened the smoke over the river and the bridges with their moving armored traffic were blotted out.

“We’re living on the roads these days,” a Corporal in the 178th Engineer Combat Battalion told me later that day, after I got down on the ground. “Soon as we get through with one job and get back to our CP, they say ‘Here we go on another bridge.’ Our boys are just dropping from exhaustion.

“But the whole idea is to get so many crossings that the enemy can’t push them all back. While the infantry has the danger of going across once, we’ve had it twice already, with more to come—and most of our battalion are settled men with children. We get moved to all the hot spots: we’re a mobile unit. Our direct superior is Patton, and we believe we’re his favorite engineering battalion. We’re proud as blazes because we’ve got the reputation of always being on the spot.”

It was from this Engineering Corporal that I was able to reconstruct some of the details of the Lorelei crossing. “I never saw anything like the way planes came over in mass all day yesterday,” said the Corporal. “They seemed to be just skimming the earth. Those big jobs, C47s, coming up with supplies. It was a beautiful job of coordination. It was really rough for those pilots, flying missions over and over all day. I never heard a guy in the Engineers but said he was glad he wasn’t in the Air Force yesterday.

“And then that airplane crashed: there was a big flame and an explosion, and three men fell. They fell near our mess. We were all eating evening chow at six o’clock. Of course everybody lost his appetite right away. Up until that time it was all a sort of dream. And then these three men...it was a terrible thing. That plane had six men in it—only three landed safely. I went over to get them. I asked them to come over and eat. We had a little wine for them, and asked how the opposition was. They said ‘Pretty heavy.’ They made us realize we were really going into something.”

It was later that afternoon, when I joined a mess line filing toward a mobile field kitchen, that I picked up some details about General Patton in the Bulge. I had known that he had spent his odd moments during the previous winter reading Caesar’s Commentaries, knowing he would be fighting through the territory where Caesar had fought, but I had never before heard the story of his Christmas card. It was sent to all the troops in the Bulge while things were at their worst, when the weather was so bad that air support was impossible.

“It is useless to wish you a Merry Christmas,” began the message on the card. “I can only hope you will have a better 1945.”

“Of course that hit every man just right,” explained one of the boys to me. “Here we were, on Christmas Eve. Our packages had not come through, and then this little card arrived. It was sent down through the message center, one for each man; it came down like the order of the day, and it asked the men to pray for sunshine. Everybody had a lump in his throat when he got that thing. The prayer for sunshine was printed on a little card that you could put in your billfold.

“The weather had been so thick in the Bulge that even the birds were walking. You’d be surprised how these very cynical guys prayed like they had never prayed before. And then we had six swell days running, and of course the planes just came over in swarms all day long.

“But you had to be there to feel it. You just can’t talk about it.”

I asked these boys about the famed hospital-slapping incident. “The time we saw him in a hospital it wasn’t anything like that,” they said, and one of them went on to tell me about how General Patton had visited a gang of them in the 12th Evacuation Hospital during the drive on Metz.

“We had been putting up a road block, laying strings of mines; someone dropped a mine, and several of us were injured. Old Blood and Guts comes to the hospital and he wants to account for everybody. One boy had been hit by a grenade. ‘Well,’ says the General, ‘anybody who gets close enough to be hit by a hand grenade, that’s something.’ And another boy had been hit by a sniper, and the General bawls him out, and says it was his own fault for not ducking in time. Then he walks to the middle of the hospital tent and stands there—so erect, the way he always is—and says, ‘I want to get you boys home alive,’ and the men all have tears in their eyes. And everybody was proud, proud as Punch because he talked to every one of them.

“When he left the hospital, he took that shiny helmet liner off and said, ‘I take my hat off to the nation that produced such men as these.’ Well, it was a fine exit speech, good second-act curtain stuff. Whether he’s really sincere or whether it’s for publicity, we don’t know. But I never knew a man who worked under him and didn’t swear by him. He could knock me half silly, and I’d still think he was a swell guy.”

This day of historic advances, which had begun so dramatically for me with hearing from General Patton himself about the Lorelei Rock plan, ended for me somewhat as it had begun, in another encounter with the General. After my flight over the Rhine, I met my party in a jeep and began riding toward Darmstadt over the main highway, which by now was carrying swift moving columns of 3rd Army traffic forward. A total advance of thirty-eight miles had been made on this great day. Many areas had been crossed which there had not been time to occupy thoroughly; Germans were drifting back into some, trying to set up installations. Nobody seemed to know exactly where the front lines were, so it was a good idea to check now and then. At one of these check points I went into 8th Corps Command Post (it had moved ahead many miles since my pilot had landed at the Corps cub strip only that morning). The CP, known in army telephonese as ICEBERG, had been set up in temporary quarters in one of those overstuffed little German front parlors which were always being turned into “war rooms” with maps draped over the stiff Teutonic pictures, and field telephones hung over the edges of ponderous desks and armchairs.

I was making my inquiries in the vestibule when someone inside called my name. I went into the little parlor, and there stood General Patton, very neat and smart in boots and breeches, and wearing the helmet and battle jacket in which I had photographed him.

“We own the world up to here,” he said proudly, indicating the front on the map. Then he turned back to the officer with whom he had been consulting, and as I slipped out I heard him say, “Tell those boys just to go hightailing along. You see, I think this war is over now. I want my men to be up front, to share the glory.”

CHAPTER 4 — A Reporter’s Lot Is Not a Happy One

“CHOOSE A camp to end all press camps,” said Colonel Boyd. “Choose a camp to end all war correspondents. Remember the rule: pick your location between a couple of artillery positions and within at least 600 yards of the primary enemy objectives.”

These directions were intended as a sarcastic illustration of exactly what Sergeant Asch and I were supposed not to do. But we did not realize, until the Colonel was flying back for more war correspondents, how closely we had followed them.

When we returned to our camp from the Frankfurt airport we found our front porch and lawn covered with plaster which had been blown off the house by concussion, and discovered a single tank-tread in our front yard, the only recognizable fragment of the tank which had been parked there. We got out our chart of the city and figured out exactly where we were. We had followed Colonel Boyd’s directive to the letter: 600 yards from our kitchen stoop was the new bridge over the Main River, across which our infantry had been fighting for several days in an attempt to hold the small footing which had been established on the opposite bank. Three times the central Bailey span had been blown into the river by the enemy, and rebuilt at the cost of many lives. So perfectly was our press camp aligned with the bridgehead that the 88s which missed the bridge fell neatly within our yard.

The air was whispering with 88s by the time we had reached these conclusions, and we hurried indoors just in time to catch sight of three shadowy GI figures about to escape through the kitchen. They were dragging out sacks and scrubbing pails filled with wine bottles; it took only an instant to realize that they were cleaning out the whole block.

“Hey, this is our house,” we cried. “We’ve requisitioned it. We have a Mil-Gov sticker on the front door.”

“We haven’t done the house next door yet,” the boys said. “You can have whatever’s in their cellar.”

“That has been taken over by the Armored for a Battalion CP,” we protested. “We can’t take the wine supply away from a tank battalion!”

Realizing that they had completely cleaned out the cellar of what really was our house, the boys left a few, bottles on the kitchen table and took an embarrassed departure.

Sergeant Asch, quickly appraising the needs of the moment, hurried out in the jeep to explore the next block before the GI team got there. In less than a quarter of an hour he was back with enough wine to start off the press camp, and with a jeep-load of coal.

All along the line we were amazed at the lavish food stores which we found in German cellars and at the excellent wardrobes hanging in the closets of the homes we requisitioned. Always, in these well-stocked houses, there was ample evidence of the owner’s membership in the Nazi Party. Ever since we had occupied Cologne and had seen the women crawling out of the rubble piles in fur coats and silk stockings, we realized that the notion of a Germany starved into submission through food and goods shortages had been wishful thinking on our part. The hoarded loot of conquered countries had kept them comfortable, even though after defeat they were to know the starvation and suffering from cold which they had brought to other countries. But the looted clothes were smart and durable, and for months our soldiers, in quick forgetfulness, were to find delight in fräuleins dressed attractively enough to remind them of the girls back home.

The cellar of Heinrich Baehr, contractor, who was unwittingly our host, was even better stocked than most. The Baehrs had fled across the river, their neighbors told us, when the city was being shelled. That Herr Baehr was an enthusiastic Party adherent we knew by the framed certificates of merit we found in the cellar; that his wife had profited by the building contracts her loyal husband had received we knew by her clothes. She had two of everything: two fur coats, two quilted bed jackets, two pairs of riding boots, two brocaded evening wraps. She had so many monogrammed bed sheets and damask tablecloths that I felt sure all this linen was just one more investment for her husband’s money, as no single household could have used it all. We knew by the empty ring boxes strewn over the cellar floor that she must have invested in jewels as well.

After we had taken up residence in the Baehr home at 17 Waidman Strasse, the Germans started a thorough mortaring job on our block. It was rumored that the townspeople had wanted to surrender, and the burgomaster of Frankfurt had offered to do so, but the SS officers refused to allow it. As we had heard so frequently before, crowds of fanatical Hitler Jugend were manning the ack-ack guns—the dual purpose 88s—wicked weapons when they were fired horizontally against the invaders. By now our block was filled with tanks, and in the yard of each fine old house, enclosed by its beautiful wrought-iron fence, was a tank or halftrack. Our armored boys kept hammering at greater Frankfurt across the river, and the Hitler Jugend fired back at our tanks on Waidman Strasse. During this interchange of metal, Sergeant Asch and I spent a good deal of time down the cellar.

One day I unearthed a box of military medals, which the Sergeant applauded as a glorious find: all American soldiers were collecting German medals. In the next five minutes he discovered a coin collection, each item carefully wrapped and classified. Then I came across another box of medals, civilian ones this time, of an incredible variety: Arbeitsfront, Todt Engineering decorations, Volksopfer or National Sacrifice awards, May Day medals, Motherhood medals for child-bearing, Fatherhood medals for “Reliable Service,” Hitler Jugend medals for boys, Bund Deutscher Mädel’s badges for Hitler maidens. The need for such incentives must have been great for the authorities to produce them in this profusion. The civilian awards were of cheaper materials than the military decorations; studying them by dates we noticed that they became increasingly flimsy and trashy as the years progressed. We could almost read the collapse of Germany in the medals.

During let-ups in the shelling Sergeant Asch was a very busy man, getting the press camp ready for the return of Colonel Boyd with the other correspondents. We were also preparing to house a group of super-briefing officers, Air Force specialists from London who had helped select bombing targets and had apportioned the weights and types of the bomb loads to be dropped on each. These men were eager to see the results of their calculations at first hand, and were corralled by Colonel Boyd to conduct the correspondents through the Frankfurt factories as soon as the plants were captured.

In preparation for this influx Sergeant Asch requisitioned extra beds along Waidman Strasse, interviewed the few remaining civilian women on our block, picked out two who he thought would do for servants, and whisked them down to CIC headquarters. As soon as Counter Intelligence had screened them and made sure of the political purity required before they could be allowed to work for us, we engaged them at the rate of pay set by Military Government. One of the women we had hired did some scrounging in the Baehr cellar on her own, and came up the stairs dragging a bicycle. She asked the Sergeant if there was any reason why she shouldn’t take the wheel home, since the Baehrs had run away. He raised no objections, although we did a good deal of amused speculating on how neighborly the atmosphere would be on Waidman Strasse after the Baehrs came home and found who had appropriated their bicycle.

The Pandora’s box of a cellar seemed inexhaustible. Even when the rest of the press camp arrived, with its staff of bomb-damage experts and constant streams of newspaper people passing through the house, there was hardly a time when a war correspondent or an expert couldn’t go down the cellar with an excellent chance of finding and liberating almost anything he needed. This extended from major items like army swords, spiked helmets with the Imperial eagle, and similar trophies of the last World War, which were in demand for souvenirs, to minor articles like new zippers to replace jammed ones, darning thread, clothes brushes, or eau de cologne.

Sergeant Asch was busy breaking in the two servants preparatory to the eagerly awaited coming of Major Vessels and Don. Major Jay Vessels, Minneapolis newspaperman and former AP writer, prince among press camp managers, had attained unmatched popularity earlier in the war when he ran an Air Force rest camp in Naples for fliers on leave. He was extremely ingenious at solving all the unpredictable problems of housekeeping which attended the running of a press camp under war conditions, whether it was bedding down unexpected hordes of newsmen, overcoming faulty plumbing, or cutting out the drafts when shelling had broken all the windows.

Assisting him were Staff Sergeant Harry Cowe, ex-AP photographer; Sergeant Claude Farmer, ex-Anzio-infantryman, who seemed able to do anything that needed to be done; and PFC Don Jordan, a Harvard graduate who was something of an author and playwright by choice and a superior cook by instinct. Don could turn Army rations into astonishingly delicious dishes; the routine fig bar in the breakfast K-ration furnished raw materials for a dreamy pudding, and what went into the paper-thin, crinkled pancakes with ambrosia syrup that were plopped hot onto our breakfast plates, we grateful correspondents never knew.

In preparation for the arrival of Don, our chef, Sergeant Asch launched a program of making friends with the mess cooks and quartermasters of all nearby infantry and armored outfits. Out of their abundance they gave us cases of “ten-in-one” and other Army rations to stock our press camp. After a trip to one quartermaster, to whom he applied for a few cans of peas, the Sergeant came staggering home under a quarter of beef that must have weighed a hundred pounds.

While we were waiting for Don, Sergeant Asch directed the German servants in the preparation of meals for himself and me. One morning he told one of the women:

“We want cherries for breakfast; Bring up a jar of those big ones from the cellar.”

“The German people have not had such things as cherries,” objected the woman. “We’ve been eating plain black bread.”

“For that,” said Sergeant Asch, squaring his broad shoulders and gazing at her intently from his deep-set eyes, “for that, you have your Führer to thank.”

In the midst of our efforts to set up housekeeping we had two terrible days when the retreating Germans threw everything they had over to our side of the river. In the course of establishing the bridgehead, our 5th Infantry and 6th Armored were fighting block by block into Greater Frankfurt, while the 90th Infantry Division was cutting off escape routes and the 4th Armored was bypassing the city and rushing forward. Tenacious SS troops, Hitler’s Elite Guard, were making a desperate stand to hold fast to their shrinking portion of the city. During the last terrible night of resistance the Tank Battalion CP next door received eight direct hits, and we emerged from our cellar in the morning to find our yard littered with the tops of trees which had been cut off neatly just above our roof top, as though severed by a saw. We ran next door to see the tank boys. “How’s your house?” we asked.

“It’s kind of tore apart,” they said. But a timely descent to the coal cellar at the beginning of the barrage had saved the personnel.

“We were just like rabbits jumping hedgerows when it started,” one of the boys described it. “For my part, I’ll never go rabbit hunting again. I’ll know the way that rabbit feels when you start hunting him down. We thought every flak battery in town was centered on us last night.”

They were able, however, to give us the happy tidings that Greater Frankfurt had surrendered at last, and we could go across the river. I learned later that the tall handsome Corporal whom kind Colonel Black, C.O. of the 11th Regiment, 5th Infantry Division, sent to lead us through the fallen city was his best rifle man and had been detailed to protect me from snipers and keep me from touching anything that might be mined. “Never let that woman out of your sight,” the Corporal had been ordered.

It was hard to believe as we crossed the Main that we were really driving at last over this Bailey bridge which had been such an intimate and yet unseen part of our lives during the past few days. “Our men bloodied their noses plenty on this bridge,” said the Corporal.

As we entered the mangled ruin of Greater Frankfurt we had to drive carefully to avoid the twisted figures of the newly fallen dead. But it was the living in the devastated streets that first caught my eye. Most of them were women, and they were wandering around dazedly with their arms full of flowers. Rising between the skeletons of houses were magnolias and lilacs, filling the incongruous ruins with reminders of spring; and it seemed that these women, climbing up out of the darkness where they had hidden day and night from the terrible shellings, with their first glimpse of daylight were drawn irresistibly to the flowers. It was a sense of return to life that had impelled them to fill their arms with all the pink and purple boughs they could carry.

In the center of the city, under the famous old Rumpelmayer restaurant, a food riot was taking place in the cellar where the crowd had broken into the sugar. At the municipal icehouse quantities of frozen meat had been blown into the street by concussion; after the fighting had ceased, citizens of Frankfurt descended on the meat like maggots. An advance echelon of Military Government had sent guards to food stores to try to prevent looting, and as these MPs’ jeeps swung into the street a hundred Germans dropped quarters of beef before disappearing into the rubble.

We passed a moth-eaten old man who stopped us to explain that the horse he was leading was a military horse, and to inquire where he should take it. He was too dazed to understand that there was no German Army in Frankfurt any longer to lay claim to the horse.

An excited woman was posting a sign on the door of a bookstore, which stated that the premises had been inspected and passed by American Military Government. Actually this was not true, for there had not been time yet for any such procedure; but she was the proprietor, and German property owners were greatly alarmed about American soldiers’ looting. Next door was a camera shop, and inside it there was already a group of infantry boys, hacking open wooden packing cases, greatly annoyed to find that they all contained either developing trays and chemicals, or large quantities of optical mirrors for installation in cameras. They had not found one camera in the shop; the proprietor had either hidden his stock somewhere else or carried it with him.

The night before, we learned, the Nazis had put into effect a sweeping evacuation order. Broadcasts told the people that although life might be hard under present conditions, when the Americans came in they would not be able to live at all. American soldiers would rape their daughters. American soldiers sucked blood like vampires. Moreover, Hitler was promising to launch a “counter-death mist,” or last-minute offensive. The Gestapo promised to return and punish all who collaborated with the invader. The werewolves would come with fire and sword. Anyone who did not evacuate, it was announced officially, was a traitor.

Thousands of inhabitants risked being called traitors and remained. Some of them, finding their families divided, committed suicide rather than face the loneliness and confusion of the future. But thousands of others, with the traditional obedience of Germans, followed orders and streamed out of the town. This was one of the purposes behind the evacuation order: to choke the roads with people and slow up our tanks. It was noticeable that while the common citizens walked out on foot, the Party officials rode out in private cars, taking all the supplies they could carry with them.

Just before leaving, the Nazis had been swept by a sadistic lust for destruction. They set food stores on fire, threw hand grenades at typewriters, and burned a supply of thousands of cigarettes, rather than give them even to their own people. Even in their haste, they had found time to seek out the archives of the Frankfurter Zeitung, records which the editors had hidden away because of the newspaper’s anti-Fascist tendencies. Their last act had been to burn these papers.

Sergeant Asch drove our jeep through the almost unrecognizable streets to the great opera house. Far below its monumental ruins, in a labyrinth of stone passages, we found some rocky chambers where Sisters of the Convent of Almighty Passion and Love were living. Throughout the bombings these Lutheran nuns had nursed the sick and wounded.

“This may be the great chance for religion,” speculated the Sergeant. “The religious groups, Catholic and Protestant, seem to be the only organizations left to which anyone can turn during this formless period. It is too soon for politics. Maybe there will be a later turning against religion, when the famine starts in, especially if it is followed by chaos. Perhaps then people will doubt whether the church can solve their problems. That will be interesting to watch. But the fact remains that the religious groups seem to be the only ones who were able to keep some kind of integrity and organization during the rise of Fascism, and throughout the war.”

We climbed out of the underground caverns into the gargantuan snarl of twisted beams and rows of seats where the great theater had been. It was a difficult ascent, for a bomb had fallen directly into the center, tearing up the pit; but finally we arrived, breathless, on the remnants of the enormous stage. Sergeant Asch stood quietly for several moments on the buckled boards, and then he said, “It seems impossible when I think of it now. But the first play I wrote opened here in the State Theater. My stuff was always more popular in Europe than America, for some reason. And now here I am, a Jew. It feels strange to be coming back after that opening of my play fifteen years ago. There were thousands of Jews living in Frankfurt then. If the estimates that we hear are at all correct, there are no more than two hundred Jews left alive in this city today.”

Technical Sergeant Nathan Asch, immigrant from Poland, had served his adopted country with deep and grateful patriotism in World War I, in the U.S. Navy; and in the second war, at the age of forty, he had volunteered and flown proudly as machine gunner with B17 crews who were half his age. Like his father, Sholem Asch, author of The Nazarene, he is a sensitive and discerning writer. He has a benign, ugly face, with little yellow pouches under his deep and thoughtful eyes. He was as ingenious a jeep driver as a photographer could hope to have, and he was passionately eager to participate in all experiences shared by GIs.

My good fortune in having the talented Sergeant assigned to me temporarily as jeep driver was due to our mutual connection with USSTAF. Sergeant Asch had completed a number of bombing missions and was attached to the public relations division of the United States Strategic and Tactical Air Forces, and USSTAF, the heart of an extensive bombing-survey group, was my special accreditation: Life Magazine had assigned me to make a thorough-going series of photographs of the bomb damage inflicted by our Air Force on major German cities and industries.

The Sergeant’s and my youthful chief was shy Colonel Max Boyd, white light among PROs. He stood out spectacularly against the generally discouraging background of the Public Relations Division. The Colonel, who has now returned to the Associated Press, wangled jeeps, airplanes, and special briefing officers, improvised courier service and even good cooking for war correspondents, many of whom had a hard time. Among us, the men who handled the straight news had the greatest problems. The swift-moving front combined with the frequent lethargy of Public Relations to create a difficult situation. Each day the correspondents were forced to commute many miles forward, if they wanted to see with their own eyes what was happening, instead of being satisfied with routine releases. Then they must go all the tiresome way back to find communication centers to send out their stories. Even after the end of the war, when the Army set up in Frankfurt, from which all the news came, correspondents were housed in a rathole of a hotel in Wiesbaden, which forced them to waste two hours on the road—going and coming between Wiesbaden and Frankfurt each day—if they wanted to file stories. The mailroom, something a correspondent needs in order to receive cables from his office, closed down at six, and did not open until morning—that is, it opened if one of the enlisted men could find the key. Well, there are always some helpful and efficient individuals in all organizations, and we had a couple of hard-working Corporals (without whom we would have completely perished), one American WAC Captain, and one British woman Flight Lieutenant, whose memories shall be forever blessed.

SECTION II. THE NAZI SOUL: TWO CONCENTRATION CAMPS

CHAPTER 5 — Death Seemed the Only Escape

IT IS inaccurate to say, as the press releases did, that the doughboys of the 80th Division who fought their way into Kassel on April 4, 1945, conquered the city by house-to-house fighting. There were no recognizable houses left to fight from. It was by ruin-to-ruin combat that they silenced the dug-in tanks, mopped up the snipers, and finally conquered the town on the late afternoon of April 5.

Our little party of bomb-damage specialists entered during the first hour of surrender. We found the air over the city still blowing with yellow bomb dust from our last great “softening” raid and the crushed contours of the buildings deeply powdered with yellow ocher, as though a sandstorm had swept over the town. The eyes of civilians were red-lidded and running, and our own throats began contracting from the dust. Even the air had a tang of hot sand, that rare odor one sniffs when there has been a shower in the desert.

In the brownish light which distorted everything it seemed no more unnatural for the knot of GIs on a street corner to be wearing newly-liberated silk top hats, and flourishing German swords and the inevitable wine bottles, than for the two women across the street to come climbing out of a hole in the ground beautifully dressed in feather-trimmed hats and furs. In these first minutes of peace the women fell with loud cries on a body on the sidewalk, and even that terrible coincidence of being greeted by their own dead seemed part of the expected pattern.

Sporadic shells were still falling in the eastern outskirts of the city when our bomb-study group finally found the ruins of the Kassel Tank Factory, which had been a principal 8th Air Force target. In the low dull sunlight the deserted plant was an unforgettable picture of desolation. Flooded from recent rains, the factory floor was a lake, arched over with the merest indication of what had once been the roof. The machines were on little raised platforms, and covering each press and turning lathe was a flimsy makeshift canopy; we could read the story of German tenacity in these machines on their improvised islands.

In some partly buried office files we found a remarkable photograph taken during one of our raids, a truly terrible record of bombs exploding on the factory. It was later, when I reached Berlin, that I found there had been a staff of twelve photographers with the special duty of taking pictures during raids. This dozen were chosen from camera men who were under political disapproval and had been given their choice of this job, which would bring almost certain death, or the concentration camps. Eleven had been killed on duty.

Our Air Power Press Camp during this period of rapidly advancing front lines followed a routine of pushing through towns as they fell, until it seemed to us that people had always lived in the crevasses and ridges of a country like the surface of the moon. Schweinfurt, which fell one week after Kassel, was the grimmest of all. It had been pounded almost to extinction during the enormous raids on its ball-bearing factories, and whole blocks of the city were as formless as the spots on an ink blotter. Knowing we would find, as always, that there would be more houses left intact in the better-class districts than in other sections, we drove to the best residential quarter to try to find a place for a one-night press camp. Here the houses were all hung with the white surrender flags, made of pillowslips and tablecloths, which we were beginning to call the national banner of Germany. The nicest house was a strikingly modern one, designed, we learned, by the architect who lived in it. It had fine simple lines, and a sunporch opening charmingly on an enclosed garden with a square-cut lily pool.

Sergeant Asch, always major-domo of requisitioning, announced that he had decided not to take the house, suitable as it was. It was filled with women and children who would have nowhere else to go. So the Sergeant, Colonel Boyd, and I canvassed the block, and knocked at a house which we thought would do for our large press party. A distraught woman met us on the doorstep, and while she acquiesced—as of course she had to—in the matter of our requisitioning the house, she told us that some people had just died inside.

“What did they die from?” asked the Sergeant, fearing some contagious disease. °

“They are suicides,” she replied.

This was reason enough, naturally, to turn down the house as a press camp, so the Sergeant went on to the next block; and while the Colonel waited for me outside I forced myself to go in and try to find out what had caused this tragedy. The suicides, I learned, were the direct result of the current German radio campaign. During the retreat, German propaganda, with its tales of American soldiers who sucked the blood of little children and raped all women in their path, had such a profound effect on the people that many families were sitting around with guns, ready to annihilate themselves when the Americans came. The young wife of this house, hearing that her soldier husband had been killed on the outskirts of Schweinfurt just the day before, gave poison to her two little children and, after arranging their small bodies in the dismal front parlor, went down to the coal cellar and shot herself.

Making myself photograph those 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. Even more heart-rending was the scene in the cellar. The women in the house led me silently down into the total darkness of the basement. I had set my camera on an approximate focus, and I took time to send off only-one flashbulb. In its brief flare, the picture was indelibly printed on my mind. On a mattress between the furnace and the coal pile lay the mother; she had dressed herself entirely in black, perhaps with the idea of mourning, but apparently she had few black garments to choose from. She was clothed in black underwear, complete with long black stockings. The sight was so fantastic and so dreadful that I could hardly get up the cellar stairs and into the open air fast enough.

Out in the street GIs were piling all the radios of the neighborhood on the sidewalk, in compliance with an order by Military Government that radios must be temporarily taken away from civilians. The collection contained some surprisingly elaborate models, with inlaid cabinets naming by stations all the principal cities of Europe. Occasional jeep-loads of looters passed frequently enough so that the cluster of radios was being depleted at just about the same rate as it was being augmented by new additions.

By this time Sergeant Asch had our party established in a commodious though morbidly dark house, and when the Colonel and I arrived he was standing in the front parlor making one of his little speeches. The Sergeant always had a patriarchal manner, and tried to set the tone for each new press camp. I believe that he received a certain deep satisfaction from filling his managerial capacity admirably.

“Listen, everybody,” he was saying. “Leave this house alone. The woman who owns it was very dignified. It was unpleasant for her to have to give up her house, but she understood that this is war, and she faced it realistically. So I promised to leave everything as we found it.

“And that includes those little gold coffee cups with swastikas, in the glass case in the hall,” he added severely.

Helen Kirkpatrick, brilliant foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News had taken charge of cooking something hot and palatable out of our K-rations, and from the kitchen she threw in a remark now and then. Supper was almost ready, and since the house did not contain enough equipment for our large party, a group of us went along the block requisitioning extra plates, knives, forks and glasses. We were just returning from this expedition, loaded with borrowed tableware, when a medical jeep drew up beside us, and the two medics on the back seat asked if we had heard the news.

“What news?” we asked.

Their answer was so unexpected, so overwhelming, that it completely dwarfed the tragedies of Schweinfurt which we had just seen. Hearing the news as we did, against this background of the disintegration of Germany, it seemed like an evil omen for the future. The news was that President Roosevelt had died.

We had no way of knowing whether it was true or whether it could be what we all so deeply hoped, just another example of enemy propaganda. Yet with its single detail of a cerebral hemorrhage, it had the ring of truth. Back in our gloomy requisitioned house, over our heated-up K-rations, we tried, as all the people in the world were doing at that time, to foresee the impact of his death on the future. The war was rushing to its end now; the days of combat were almost over. More than ever, men of historic stature would be needed to help lead the way through the confusion that was bound to come with peace, and here, on the eve of victory, the victors were faced with a new insecurity. In that grim and remote town of Schweinfurt, with its foreboding of the twin futility of conquest and defeat, we all knew something bright and strong had gone out of the world.

“The worst of it,” said one reporter, “is that we don’t know what it’s going to mean. We have no clue yet as to what kind of president Truman will make.”

We all wondered when the war would end. Logically, it should have been over; there was no real reason for the Germans to go on fighting. Prisoners were being taken by the tens of thousands. During each day’s advance we caught up with whole cattle cars of German wounded, without mattresses, straw or food. Victory for the Reich could be only the dream of a madman. Perhaps it did still have a dreamlike reality for the Nazi leaders, for even while fleeing toward the Redoubt they still seemed able to inspire knots of fanatical SS troops and still more fanatical Hitler Jugend to fight and die at their hopeless defenses.

The front lines became more unpredictable than ever, with long finger-like pushes, and areas of unoccupied territory lying in between. Each time our little convoy of press jeeps started out on one of its scouting expeditions to a newly fallen sector, we had to skirt around large German-held pockets so vague in outline that getting exact information about them was difficult. I remember once near Gotha, when Sergeant Asch hailed an oil truck and asked for gas, the drivers gave us an earnest warning. “Take it careful for the next thirty miles. Don’t slow down for anybody, even on the Autobahn, and especially going through the woods. Those crazy SS troops—forty of them came down on us last night, and we lost the best captain we ever had. What we can’t understand is why the Krauts go on fighting when they know the jig is up.”

Skirting around these pockets, on such an erratic front, took considerable navigating skill. The Sergeant and the Colonel, despite all their other fine qualities, were like children at chess when it came to interpreting maps; so usually it was Helen Kirkpatrick who read the maps, charted our course, and drove the lead jeep. She loved to sail along so fast, however, that the Colonel was always in a dither, knowing that before the day was over her exuberant little jeep would disappear into the distance and leave the rest of our convoy far behind. Helen had learned to drive at the age of fourteen, when her father had allowed her to have a decrepit old car on the theory that the more often it broke down, the more she would learn about the motor. As a result, she knew better than any of us all the quirks and special features of a jeep—the extra gears which could be called on for almost perpendicular hills, and so on. It often seemed to me, moreover, that the habit which her father had encouraged, of looking at the insides of things, was partly responsible for her superior ability in looking inside the news.

At any rate, it always surprised and delighted GIs to see her driving the jeep so proficiently and gaily. I remember once when we stopped a soldier yelled, “Hello, Toots. Are you really an American girl? Then talk!”

“Talk?” inquired Helen. “What about?”

“About three minutes,” said the soldier.

“I’ll give you the Gettysburg Address,” said Helen. “How will that do?”

Before much longer, all of us believed, we would begin capturing some of the top Nazis who had been fleeing so consistently and successfully all spring. With the fall of Leipzig we caught up with the first sizable batch of these. But they had taken good care to see that death caught up with them first.

Early one Friday morning, April 20, Life’s Bill Walton hunted me up, his hair standing up from excitement in little fire-colored whorls.

“Hurry to the Rathaus before they clean it out,” he said. “The whole inside of it is like Madam Taussaud’s wax-works!”

We rushed in the jeep over the Zeppelin Bridge and past street cars filled with rocks. These had served as barricades the day before against the 2nd Division Infantry, fighting their way eastward into the city, pushing toward the 69th, who were entering from the south in tanks. We drew up before the Leipzig City Hall. Here the siege had been intense, and the deeper carvings of artillery were added to the ancient outlines of the fine old Rathaus.

Bill and I raced up three flights of stone steps, climbed over tumbled busts of Frederick the Great and a scattering of other fallen Prussians, and burst through a pair of padded, sound-proof doors. Inside was a Baroque office, hung with sentimental landscapes and furnished in the heavy style which represented the nineteenth-century German’s idea of luxury. Reclining on the ponderous leather furniture was a family group, so intimate, so lifelike, that it was hard to realize that these people were no longer living. Seated at the desk, head bowed on his hands as though he were resting, was Dr. Kurt Lisso. On the sofa was his daughter, and in the overstuffed armchair sat his wife. The documents for the whole family were laid out neatly on the desk, beside the bottle of Pyrimal by which they had evidently chosen to die. Dr. Lisso had been Stadtkammerer, Leipzig City Treasurer, with one of those low Party numbers which indicated that he was among the early faithful.

In a nearby room, seated in an equally lifelike circle, was Mayor Alfred Freiberg, Oberbürgermeister, with his wife and pretty daughter, Magdalena. Adjoining rooms held similarly peaceful and silent characters, of whom the most striking was the Commander of the Volkssturm in his fine uniform, with a portrait of Hitler beside him.

It was significant that in the presence of these suicides we felt none of the shocked sympathy with which we had faced the more moving tragedies of Schweinfurt. Those little children and that unhappy mother had been victims. But these people were the hawkers of Fascism, the hunters of soft jobs who had edged ever higher in their party posts; they were representative of the men and women who had been personally responsible for many of the evils of Fascism. And when their pyramid of mounting brutalities had begun to slide down on them, in that last dizzy downhill coast, they were still well-fed, well-clothed, housed in comfortable, luxurious buildings.

Their final look on the world must have been a dramatic one, with the Volkssturm and the Wehrmacht preparing a last defense below their office windows, fourth-floor windows high enough for an unimpeded view of American tanks and doughboys storming toward their refuge. How they selected their final minute we shall never know. But GI patrols, probing cautiously through the City Hall where every room might house pockets of resistance, found instead these quiet family groups, defeated at last.

The personal articles which the Lissos had brought to the Rathaus for their last weekend engagement with life were the sort that one might take for a similarly brief visit with friends. The women had the little things, nail scissors, cosmetics, a sewing kit, which women usually carry. And the Stadtkammerer, who evidently was suffering from a bad cold, had an orderly pile of clean handkerchiefs. Life’s war correspondent had a bad cold also. So the Lisso handkerchiefs found their way into the Walton, pocket.

Bill and I left the family circle after I had taken pictures, and walked down the stone stairs to the jeep. As we packed up the cameras, out of the courthouse filed a procession which indicated that we had recorded the ruling caste of Leipzig just in time. Walking past our jeep with the composed solemnity characteristic of their profession were the undertakers of Leipzig, bearing the former great on litters. As two men passed us, carrying between them the last of the Lissos, we heard one remark: “The fighting will be over only when Hitler takes the same way out.”

CHAPTER 6 — The Fighting Ends

SUDDENLY THE war was ending and no one knew what to do about it. The writers didn’t know what to write. The photographers were afraid they might be in the wrong spot at the final moment: a camera man has to be right there when it happens. I was in the right place, as it turned out, due less to foresight than to a fluke, and it was under singularly inconvenient circumstances that I recorded the dawn of peace.

“On V-E Day I was just paralyzed,” Bill Walton admitted to me after it was all over. “I couldn’t do a thing. I couldn’t even bring myself to take a drink.”

Ed Murrow, who had been warning the world for months, even years, that we were making no constructive plans for the peace, said, “When the war ended, I felt as though a plank had been pulled out from under me.”

Skeptical about the permanence of peace, he remarked prophetically (this was before the advent of the atom bomb), “We may have an opportunity in our lifetime to see the annihilation of humanity.” And—Ed has always been gloomy about the prospects of our making wise use of victory—he added: “This is the dusk of democracy in Europe.”

I think the person who had the most satisfactory program for his own personal future was a little crackpot German scientist who was discovered by a joint U.S.-British Military Control Party at the top of a mountain in Wallgau, near Garmisch. Over the course of years this little man had been recording cosmic rays, seeing that a photographic record was made every five minutes throughout the entire twenty-four hours. When the Allied Control Group arrived, he looked up briefly from his continuous cosmic record and, focusing on his conquerors through thick tarnished spectacles, set like milky blots in his triangular face, complained that he had only a two-day supply of photographic paper left. Through past years, the Reich Forschungs-Amt, the government Research Office, had kept him equipped with his special paper, but for some reason, he said plaintively, he had not been receiving supplies lately. His program was to go right on with his cosmic records, and our Para Military Control Party, who were operating under a super-secret investigating plan known only as GOLDCUP, found means to send the special paper to the top of the mountain. So this mild little scientist, absorbed in the study of a force far beyond the sphere of crumbling dictatorships and the spread of human wars, was able to take the hurdle from war to peace without a break in his devoted pursuit of the cosmic ray.

By May Day even the Nazi propagandists had felt impelled to admit in a broadcast to the German people: “The war is racing toward its end with giant steps.”

On May 2, Austrian villagers of Braunau, Hitler’s birthplace, met the tanks of our 13th Armored Division with flowers. On the very same day they were told over the Nazi radio that their first citizen had died “fighting the Bolshevik storm flood for the sake of the entire civilized world.”

During the same week the Hessische Post, a newspaper published by Psychological Warfare for liberated Germans in 1st Army territory, ran headlines which would have been considered cheap fantasy if anyone had invented them a year before. Their banner-head packed what was probably the biggest combined wallop for its particular readers in the history of journalism: “ADOLF HITLER IS DEAD—MUSSOLINI HAS BEEN HANGED—GÖRING RESIGNS—GOEBBELS SAID TO HAVE KILLED HIMSELF.”

With news of this magnitude, how could any mere photographer—lacking a celestial assignment such as the one which occupied the nights and days of the contented camera man on the Garmisch mountaintop—hope to rise to the demands of current events. Our hard-working editors in New York were undoubtedly feeling as jittery about transferring the march of history to print and paper as we were in the field. When they began cabling for a Victory cover which would express everything in one dazzling burst, only the blessed Bob Capa was able to withstand complete demoralization. The cables asked all Life photographers to strive for a cover picture that would symbolize victory over political tyranny, express the accumulated weariness of the doughboy, suggest his triumph in achievement, contain a hint of the Fascism which our armies had vanquished, and a tinge of the brighter hopes which lay ahead with peace. So Bob Capa just stopped everything and took personal snapshots.

His jeep driver had been pestering him for a picture to send home to his mother. I don’t know why it is always such an annoyance to a professional to have to make personal pictures of this sort. The routine which we pursue so zestfully in the course of our work becomes irritating when we are talked into taking the family snapshots which our acquaintances sometimes beg us to make for them. I suppose if we go on a busman’s holiday we want to have the fun of picking our own bus.

It took Capa to decide that there was no better time than this cosmic moment, with which no mortal photographer could cope, to take time out to do a favor for a friend. He was driving past the Nuremberg Sports Stadium where the Nazis had held gigantic spectacles to publicize the alleged supremacy of Aryan youth. His driver ran the jeep up to the shell-scarred podium where the greatest spellbinder of modern times had cast his evil charm on the masses, and here Bob said to him, “Jump out and stand under that swastika.”

It was a natural thing for the driver to raise his hand in a mock “Heil,” and for Capa to take a couple of shots against the mammoth shrapnel-battered swastika. The negatives were sent back to New York in a separate envelope marked “private pictures,” to be mailed to the Corporal’s mother. I don’t know whether personal copies of her son’s picture were ever mailed to her but she didn’t need them, because they blossomed forth on every newsstand after V-E Day.

That picture expressed everything: the vast stadium once consecrated to all we had been fighting against, its Nazi symbols scarred by our bombs and shells; the tired, victorious doughboy; and even the suggestion of a gag in that imitation of a “Heil”—a GI gag at the moment of victory. There is an indefinable mood that suffuses all fine pictures; this one had what a Victory cover required.

During those last days before the formal announcement of victory, I flew northward over the ruined cities of Schleswig-Holstein toward the Baltic ports, working on a series which Life ran soon afterward, to show the bombed face of Germany. The endless chain of pitted, gutted cities, seen in devastating sequence from the air, was a terrible commentary on the punishment an evil nation had brought on itself. Only rarely had a community escaped being hammered into wreckage. As we flew over this endless procession of urban cadavers, I wondered how much connection the German people saw between the war-mongering of their fatherland and the fate that had befallen them. Later, when I was able to spend more time on the ground talking with individual Germans, I was to find that few perceived any relationship.

Obviously it is impossible to do an aerial job and be on the ground at the same time, so a photographer might as well make the best of it, I kept telling myself. Absorbing as it was to get this moon’s-eye view of Germany’s leading cities, frequently I found it disquieting to be above the earth instead of on it. Things were happening in those crowded ruins that a photographer would never see again. Rags and tatters of the disintegrating German armies were trying vainly to escape in many directions. Uncounted masses of captured German soldiers were trudging toward the great prisoner-of-war enclosures. When my pilot and I flew over these PW concentrations, the effect was of a meadow of flowering buckwheat, so thickly did our conquered enemies populate the fields.

Every port was alive with boats packed with Germans who were trying to flee from the British and Americans and escape into Denmark, or trying to flee toward the British and Americans to escape the Russians. Later, with peace, when we were able to unload these boats, we found them clogged with the dead and dying and packed with military refugees who had been standing for days so wedged together that if a man lost his upright position he would be trampled underfoot and perhaps lose his life.

Every time we popped the plane down on an airstrip to get fuel, food, or lodging for the night, we heard stories from returning combat pilots about the waters far to the north, which were ablaze with burning ships and full of German soldiers rowing lifeboats and even swimming toward shore. Always, at each airstrip, we found a celebration in progress, honoring the peace which was expected, no one knew when, but soon. When we arrived at a Canadian fighter post north of Hamburg, my pilot and I found the fliers still recuperating from a spectacular celebration of the night before, in which they had shot off every Very pistol, every rocket, and every distress signal on the field. This was just the kind of photogenic celebration I had been looking for. I don’t know who was more disappointed—I for having missed it by twenty-four hours, or the Canadians, who would have loved to put on a repeat performance to get their pictures in Life, but couldn’t because they had not a single flare or rocket left.

Everywhere everyone was making bets on when V-E Day would come. I lost mine by sixty seconds, for peace officially began one minute after midnight, May 7, the day I had chosen.

May 7, however, was an eventful day. I took off early for Kiel with my pilot, Second Lieutenant Eddie Lyster. Eddie was an easy-going, gay young fellow with extra-fancy mustaches, whom the Air Force had lent me along with a cub, for my aerial bomb-survey work. We knew, before we started off, that Kiel was supposed to have surrendered, but we were not sure whether or not we could count on an airfield so far north. The RAF, we were told, intended to take over the Kiel airstrip, which was some little distance from the city itself; but from the meager information we were able to obtain we decided they had not yet done so.

As it happened, our cub was the first American plane to land at Kiel, although this was unintentional on our part. Circling over the incredibly cluttered Kiel harbor had used up a great deal of gas. Below us were wrecked E-boats and quantities of U-boats, rolled over on their sides and resting on the bottom. Among them (although we did not make these identifications until later, from the photographs) were the bombed Hamburg-American liner New York, the scuttled Admiral Scheer, and the heavy cruiser Hipper, which was camouflaged like a red house, with realistically painted windows.

As we flew along the rim of the harbor, our gas supply was so low that when Eddie spotted the airfield, some miles north of the city, he decided to make a try at landing there. There were many German planes on the ground, some wrecked and some apparently intact, and among them we could see just one plane with RAF markings. We had no way of telling whether this was a captured plane or whether it signified that the British had arrived. As we landed, therefore, Eddie left the motor running and gave me directions to throttle down a bit if the plane started to get away from me. Hopping out, he said, “But try to leave the motor running in case we have to get out of here in a hurry. Switch her off only if she starts to take off with you.” Then, pistol in hand, he disappeared toward the hangar.

The little cub was very light, the wind from the sea was very strong, and Eddie was gone for a long time. Uneasily I felt the plane edging along the runway. And despite my gradual throttling down, according to instructions, the cub was stubbornly picking up speed. I kept glancing back toward the hangar, and when Eddie still failed to appear, and the plane began racing along in earnest, I decided that it was better to be taken prisoner than to take off without my pilot. I switched off the engine.

Then Eddie reappeared, with an officer in British uniform. The RAF had indeed taken over. They had encountered no opposition. On the contrary, the Luftwaffe had met them in a state of semi-consciousness. Knowing that for them, at least, the war was over, they had spent the preceding night celebrating; the entire air and ground staffs had gone to work on the extensive liquor supplies in their barracks, and when the RAF arrived they found that the Luftwaffe, inconsiderately, had left not a drop for their captors.

When we reached Lübeck at twilight that night we learned that the war’s formal end had been announced by the Allied Powers. At fifty-nine minutes before one on the following morning, peace would officially begin. Lübeck was rollicking with parties. The British supplied Lügers and dress swords by the bushelful for anyone who wanted German souvenirs. The streets were full of merry Englishmen driving fantastically luxurious motorcars which Wehrmacht officers had abandoned along the roads—red-upholstered Mercedes, Benzes, Hispanos, Renaults, and other top-drawer limousines from various parts of Europe, which the Germans had acquired when the war was going their way.

V-E Day dawned over the fine old towers and bridges of Lübeck with a petal-like fragility. We flew over the marshes to the ruins of Bremen, and then followed the Weser toward the North Sea. With the world now officially at peace, we never gave a thought as to whether the vital information about the war’s ending had reached the inhabitants of the region toward which we were flying. We assumed everybody knew it. As we passed the giant concrete submarine pens at Vegesak, we had no means of knowing that this was as far as Allied Armies had fought their way; that the army of occupation was still thirty miles and the width of a river behind us. Recklessly we flew to and fro, over piers, docks and warships, doing a thorough photographic-mapping job on the harbor. We were circling over a large ship (study of the negatives proved it to be the Europa) when Eddie received a disagreeable surprise. I was too engrossed to catch the significance of it; but suddenly we were being shot at from some ack-ack emplacements near the sea at the far end of town.

With the first glint of a tracer, Eddie maneuvered the plane into such a rolling dive that I thought at first he was placing it in better photographing position. “That’s good,” I said to myself; and then I was no longer in position. “No, I’m not getting it,” I called to Eddie. He was much too busy with evasive action to pay any attention to me. By now, his swooping dive had swept us from our conspicuous height at one end of the city to roof-top level at the other. And here, as we swung in a constantly changing course around the Rathaus, throngs of people rushed out into the square waving white sheets and handkerchiefs.

Then all at once, even though I was virtually standing on my head, the significance of this dawned on me. The townspeople were surrendering to us. Here we were, the first peacetime Allied airplane to fly over Bremerhaven, and the citizens were handing us the town. I do not know of any graceful way to accept the surrender of a city from a Piper Cub, and Eddie certainly did not pause to consider the problem. Wisely and swiftly, since one could never know how many unpleasant Jugend youngsters or other die-hards were still waiting to be pried from their ack-ack emplacements, Eddie zigzagged the plane southward, and we side-skipped out of town.

Halfway back to Bremen we passed a C47, flying high and trailing a curtain of fluttering white flakes behind it. It was then we realized that we had been the first to bring the good news to Bremerhaven, for these snowflakes were leaflets being dropped to inform the German people below that World War II had come to an end.

CHAPTER 7 — All the Threads Were Loose

I KNOW of no way to convey the feeling of rising violence that we witnessed as we drove deeper into Germany: the waves of suicides, the women throwing themselves after their loved dead into newly dug graves, the passionate denunciations of friends and neighbors, the general lawlessness. Each street corner had its open tragedy; every life seemed shot through with its own individual terror. And over all hung the numbing realization that this newly conquered world was facing a sterile future.

In normal life one rarely sees violent emotion openly expressed; usually such torrents of fury and desperation as we were observing are released behind closed doors. But as we advanced through Germany during the course of this incredible spring, life was like a page of melodramatic fiction. Were these hysterical people in any way like Americans, we wondered? What was a German really like? What kind of people were these, whose acquiescence, either passive or criminal, had made it possible for such evil forces to grow? How deeply had the ferment in the secret depths of Hitler’s country eaten into the soul of the average man? If we could look beneath the surface of defeat, what sort of being would we uncover? Outwardly, the motives of the conquered were reduced now to three very simple ones. How shall I feed myself? Where can I get shelter? When will I find my lost family? But under these immediate problems of self-preservation all the other problems were waiting.

In the midst of chaos I was trying to take some pictures that might answer some of these questions. I was working on a series which Life’s editors, from the far heights of the Time and Life Building, were describing under the working title of “Faceless Fritz.” It seemed as though I were pursuing Fritz all over Germany, and yet I felt that I had never quite found him. Although my Fritz poked his varied features into a score of Life layouts, to me he was only partly visible.

Events were moving too fast to leave time for the considered essays which Life customarily featured. No one, neither we on the spot nor Life’s hard-pressed editors, could keep up with the furious pace of the news. Never had any of us lived through such a spring. I used to run-into our other Life photographers, who were as rushed and tormented and baffled as I was. There were eight of us spaced along the western front, which meant we had by far the biggest coverage of any single organization—in fact it was almost as large a total of photographers as that of all the other picture-and news-agencies put together. But all of us, whether photographers or reporters, were painfully aware of the utter impossibility of keeping up with such a torrent of news. We all felt frustrated when we tried to interpret the baffling human kaleidoscope which confronted us.

Sergeant Asch summed it up when he remarked repeatedly, “I can’t pick a thread out of this maze of threads. It is still too confused. The picture is blurred.”

Some rough outlines in this indistinct picture were filled in for us, early after the capture of Frankfurt, by a collection of Hitler’s little people whom we found behind bars in the jail at Frankfurt-Höchst. In this workers’ suburb, as soon as the top Nazis fled, the smaller ones had been clapped into jail by a remarkable organization calling itself the “Anti-Fascist Defense Committee.” This underground group, composed in fairly equal proportions of Social Democrats, Communists, and Catholic-Centrists, had banded together secretly two weeks before the Allied occupation. The arrival of the Americans at the borders of the city was their signal to round up and place under arrest all the Party officials they could find. They had anticipated Allied Army law to do this, although they had made the procedure as legal as they could, drawing up formal accusations which were documented and translated into the best English they could manage, in preparation for the coming of our Military Government.

In view of the trend our administration of Germany was taking, it was no surprise that this expression of co-operation with us did not have long to flourish. Military Government at first was puzzled by it, and for a time mildly pleased with it. But before long their habitual mistrust of any movement with the faintest political tinge—even one as diversely representative as the Anti-Fascist Committee endeavored to be—put an end to this group and similar committees found in several other cities. It is impossible to escape the suspicion that a strong bias against any tinge of Communism contributed to this mistrust, although the reasons customarily given were that these anti-Fascist groups were filled with political racketeers, that they were partly composed of opportunists who hoped to increase the following for their respective political parties. Probably there were some such opportunist “racketeers”; there were also, however, some courageous individuals who might have formed the nucleus of the new and more democratic era we once hoped we could encourage in post-war Germany.

The biggest catch of the Höchst Anti-Fascist Defense Committee was Prince August Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s fourth son, and a high Party member—Obergruppenführer—with the function of district treasurer. Prince “Auwi” was quickly moved out of his uncomfortable cell and back to the hunting lodge on his nearby Kronberg estate, where he was kept under house arrest, surrounded by his old family servants and a cluster of attentive royal relatives. After all, who had ever heard of keeping a Hohenzollern in jail? What happened to him later I never found out, although while the Prince was in Kronberg, Life’s writer Percy Knauth and I paid him a visit. He cringed from the camera, hid his face behind his hands, wailed “Do I have to put up with this?” and generally was a picture of outraged royalty.

At the time that Sergeant Asch and I visited the jail at Höchst, it had lost its royal prisoner but still contained an interesting and unsavory collection of characters. These people were waiting to be dealt with by our Counter Intelligence Corps and military judiciary units, through regular Army channels. One of the inmates, a small Party functionary named Emil Rothengatten, was so brutish in appearance that he seemed a symbolic Nazi ogre come to life. With one huge fist clenched on the table, the milky light from the single-grated window streaming over his enormous shoulders, his pig eyes cast down toward his giant-sized boots, he stood as stolid as a piece of suet.

“He was the fall-guy,” whispered Asch, who had been looking over Emil’s documents. “He was the one who helped the big-wigs escape, and then they didn’t want him. They didn’t even bother to take him along.”

In the next cell was a young man with a high intellectual forehead, fine eyes, and sensitively-shaped features. This was Jugend Führer Robert Martin, head of the Hitler Youth of Höchst.

“Sometimes they have the faces of poets and the souls of murderers,” said Asch.

It was partly in the character of murderer that Führer Martin had been arrested by the self-appointed jailers of Höchst. For with his mistress, who was now separated from her lover by the distance of three cells, he had done a terrible thing. The woman, Elsa Wartz, had held a position equivalent to his as head of the “Bund Deutscher Mädels,” the Hitler Maidens. This fancy pair had taken four hundred children away from the town and simply lost them. Now, in the double confusion of war and of flight from war, the townspeople had no way of finding their children.

“Every day more parents come,” said one of the guards, “and say ‘Where is my child?’ And nobody knows.”

“And the children went away singing, I suppose,” said Sergeant Asch.

The guard who had shown us the prisoners’ documents was a member of the civilian police, recently screened and added to the staff of our Counter Intelligence Corps. CIC, with their usual sagacity, knew a good anti-Fascist when they saw one and had put this man to work for them as a security guard.

“Not only does the directress of the Hitler Maidens share the terrible responsibility of losing the Jungvolk,” said the guard, “but she is guilty of other crimes against the families of all of us. And so is her father, as well.”

In the next cell was the father, Wilhelm Wartz, Nazi leader of a nearby working-class village, arrested for betraying many workers on charges that had placed them in concentration camps. Wartz sat in a daze on his cot, never even looking up as we passed.

But the behavior of his daughter was very different. At the unexpected sight of a woman in uniform who, I suppose, she hoped might intercede for her, she screamed out, “Please, please come to me. I want to talk to you. Tell them I didn’t do anything wrong.” As the security guard unlocked the door and took me inside the cell, she sank to her knees, and transferred her pleas to him. Beating him hysterically on the body with her clenched fists she began shrieking, “Listen, listen to me,” until suddenly he started to scream back at her, as though his grief were so fresh that he could not retain his impersonality any longer.

“I won’t listen to you,” he shouted. “Why should I listen? You didn’t listen to my people when they came.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she cried, rolling on the floor in a spasm of sobbing, “Please, oh, please listen.”

“There is no reason why I should listen to you,” said the guard. “Your time will come to explain things.”

“I’m not responsible,” she wept, throwing her arms around his knees.

“Look what happened to my wife,” he shouted, carried away now by hysteria as great as hers. “You denounced my wife.”

“I personally never did anything to your wife. I’m not responsible.”

“You all say that. One of your kind was responsible. Look what you did to the Jews.”

By now the guard was trying to step out of her grasp, and the woman, clinging even more tightly to his legs, was being dragged around the cell in a terrible way.

“You called blameless women ‘Jüdische Haren,’” cried the guard. “You attacked respectable young women.”

By now she had risen to her feet and was clinging to him, and the struggling couple went swaying together around the cell in complete forgetfulness of any spectators. It was all I could do to squeeze myself into corners and keep the camera from being knocked out of my hands.

She was choking her words out now, in a kind of droning rhythm, “I never did. It wasn’t I. It was others.”

And he was repeating over and over, in a monotonous chant of accusation, “You and others like you. You and others like you.” “Come, Peggy, come,” Sergeant Asch called to me from his post just outside the bars. “Come away. I can’t stand any more.”

It was out on the quiet roads, driving through the cool twilight from Höchst to Frankfurt, that we finally found our voices again.

“She ought just to be killed,” said Nathan Asch. “Why should she be tortured? It’s all so complicated,” he went on. “It’s hardly her fault. Here is a girl whose father was a Nazi. It’s the natural way for her to go—it’s the way she was brought up. If her parents had come to America, she’d probably have been a decent enough American girl.”

CHAPTER 8 — On the Road to Frankfurt

A GERMAN HAUSFRAU came running down the railroad tracks toward us. Her arms were so full of silk panties and undershirts that she was scattering a pink trail behind her, and she was laughing and crying at the same time.

“Germany is kaput! Might as well loot!” she shouted.

Sergeant Asch and I were driving the jeep along the Darmstadt-Frankfurt highway when we caught sight of the surging mob at the edge of a rye field. A German goods train, halted by air attack the night before as our armies moved in, was stalled on the tracks. It was still early in the morning, but hundreds of German citizens had already come out with bags, bicycles, and carts, equipped for pilfering. It was a scene of mass hysteria. Hundreds of people were suddenly filled with the stunning realization that they could have everything they put their hands on, for nothing.

This was an international crowd. Sergeant Asch, who speaks many languages, was able to catch shouted phrases as groups rushed past us. Newly freed Belgians, Dutch, Russians, French, and Poles, trekking their monotonous way westward, had been attracted by the crowd, and had rushed in and started crawling between the legs and over the shoulders of the plundering Germans. There was no fighting among the looters—only a passionate clawing toward the freight cars. The crowd was even gay; they were people of all nationalities laughing, looting together.

The Poles were radiant. One Polish woman, gathering up arm-loads of skirts and dress goods, looked up at me and said, “The Germans stole all this, anyway-” And taking up her words some Polish men, while they hacked away at packing cases, kept chanting through their handlebar mustaches, “The Germans stole all of this; the Germans stole it all.” There was a good deal of truth in this, for many of the clothes on this train bore French and Belgian labels.

By now the scene was rising to a pitch of frenzy. People were going mad with looting. A Russian, one eye black as though he had recently been beaten, forced his way forward, sobbing loudly, while great tears rolled down his battered face. The single door to each freight car no longer admitted enough of the crowd and men began hacking holes with axes in the sides of the train. Little knots of looters set up a chainbelt system to get goods out of the human whirlpool faster. Families with small daughters sent the little girls scrambling up between the ends of adjoining freight cars, where they could squirm down like monkeys toward the newly hacked holes and wriggle their way inside.

One freight car packed with women’s hats stood next to another filled entirely with hats for men. By the first, groups of plump giggling German girls were trying on one hat after another, all of them wide-brimmed gray ones and exactly alike. Their countless identical selections were then tied on the handlebars of their bicycles. Near them the men were enjoying a similar picnic with headgear, and one full-faced German strolled away with a pillar of eight felt hats on top of his head, all of them with tissue paper still around the brims. During the hat rush an American MP arrived. “Are you going to break it up?” we asked, for it was only last night in Darmstadt that we had heard from the Military Governor that stored goods would be confiscated and looting would be forbidden.

“No,” said the MP. “Let them have a good time.”

The crowd sacked the train in two hours. Finally, only a group of serious-faced Russian girls was left. They sat in a grave little circle around a pile of blue denim, trying on neat blue uniforms, which still bore price tags, and choosing only those which fitted best. They were too intent on the clothing to talk much, but I got one of them to tell me that they had been working in a cement factory, that the Germans had whipped them often, and that they were happy to be on their way home at last.

And soon they, too, were gone, leaving a dead waste of railroad tracks littered with broken boxes and wrapping paper and dotted with wide-brimmed hats, the one item too plentiful for even this huge crowd to absorb. It had been a brutish scene. “Let it be a lesson to us,” said Sergeant Asch, as we drove away from the ravaged freight cars along a highway bordered with wild flowers. “‘The Germans stole it all.’”

The Sergeant and I took time, before pressing on toward Frankfurt, to visit the ruins of a chemical factory in Darmstadt. This plant had been knocked out by a single bombing attack of fifty American planes. The higher executives had fled and the devastated plant had been left in charge of the Foreign Director. This high-sounding title seemed to indicate that he had directed trade with foreign countries, but we soon discovered that it meant he was in charge of forced foreign labor. Most of the work had been carried on by the slave laborers—Dutch, Russians, Belgians and Poles—who had lived, until our armies freed them, in nearby prison barracks. We learned that the owner of the factory was a Nazi Party member who lived in the biggest house in the most fashionable suburb on the outskirts of Darmstadt.

“Let’s call on him,” said Asch, turning the jeep around and heading it out through the rubble piles.

On our way through the wooded suburbs we had some misgivings. We had been warned against driving through woods because of snipers. The American advance had been so rapid that many wooded pockets like this one had been bypassed, and in some there were still remnants of fanatical SS bands. But we soon started passing civilians, which made us feel safer. From them we inquired our way. Everyone seemed to know where the president of the firm lived, so we pressed on until we found the house, which was a big mansion—indeed, still big, even though a direct bomb hit had smashed the center of the house, leaving little standing but the servants’ wing.

“Does me good to see the houses of the rich get it once in a while,” remarked the Sergeant. “It’s always the working-class quarters that seem to get the worst plastering.”

We entered a gate topped with wrought-iron unicorns, and knocked at the entrance to the servants’ quarters. The statuesque woman who opened the door was a vision of exquisite old age. Her hair was piled in marcelled snowy masses on top of her stately head, and her skin had the pink moistness characteristic of well-cared-for maturity. She stood quite still, voiceless and trembling, waiting for us to exercise the conquerors’ prerogative of searching the house. When we inquired for the owner it was some minutes before she could speak, because of her trembling. Then she managed to tell us in low-pitched German syllables that only the morning before he had been taken away by the Volkssturm. She didn’t know where he was by now. Yes, she was his wife.

We knew that the Volkssturm, the People’s Army, had forced all able-bodied men to join them in the retreat, with the hope of turning about for a desperate resistance stand against our Army. They must have been desperate indeed to have taken men as old as this woman’s husband.

She stepped back, a picture of mixed dignity and terror, waiting for us to start through the house. Beyond her we could see the enormous streamlined kitchen, equipped with stainless steel sinks and ovens and more electric fixtures than you would find in a medium-sized American hotel. To the left was the servants’ dining room, where a group of women, probably relatives, were seated at a meal laid on a table bright with silver and handwoven linen. To the right were doors to pantries and to cellars, in which it was reasonable to suppose there were supplies of champagne.

Suddenly Sergeant Asch said, “I can’t do it.” For my part, I had lost every vestige of interest in prying.

“Of course the infantry will find their way out here soon and make away with all the liquor, at least,” said the Sergeant. “But I just can’t walk in. Let’s get out of here.”

In silence we drove on along the highway through forests sparkling with anti-radar tinsel which our planes had dropped during air raids to confuse German airplane detectors. The tin-foil slivers lighted the fir boughs with such a glitter that we seemed to be driving between rows of silver-festooned Christmas trees. Under the dark firs were clusters of star anemones, and above the treetops the clean March wind blew white clouds across the brilliant sky.

From time to time we passed knots of the dispossessed, marching toward an uncertain freedom and pulling all they owned in childsized trundle carts. One of these groups was a Belgian family who had sewn colored cloth together to make a small Belgian flag which fluttered eloquently from their baby carriage. The oldest child carried the baby, for the carriage was needed for potatoes and rags. A few miles farther we passed a French family who had somehow acquired an enormous French flag. The man and wife, harnessed together like horses, pulled their two-wheeled wagon; behind them tagged their children; and as they trudged along, the huge tricolor floated gloriously over their heads, dwarfing and seeming to protect the little family group below.

The comparison between these people and the household we had just visited was inescapable. The Krupps, the Stinneses, the Goerings, and others like them had torn these families from their homes and forced them into a highly integrated war-shaped industrial machine. Holding the controls, these industrial families had supported the Fascist rise to power, had grown richer on slave labor, and many of them were still living in comparative comfort while those whom their system had made homeless were roaming the roads.

SECTION III. WAR’S END: A HOLIDAY FOR SOME

CHAPTER 9 — April in Germany

“WE DIDN’T know! We didn’t know!”

I first heard these words on a sunny afternoon in mid-April, 1945. They were repeated so often during the weeks to come, and all of us heard them with such monotonous frequency, that we came to regard them as a kind of national chant for Germany.

There was an air of unreality about that April day in Weimar, a feeling to which I found myself stubbornly clinging. I kept telling myself that I would believe the indescribably horrible sight in the courtyard before me only when I had a chance to look at my own photographs. Using the camera was almost a relief; it interposed a slight barrier between myself and the white horror in front of me.

This whiteness had the fragile translucence of snow, and I wished that under the bright April sun which shone from a clean blue sky it would all simply melt away. I longed for it to disappear, because while it was there I was reminded that men actually had done this thing—men with arms and legs and eyes and hearts not so very unlike our own. And it made me ashamed to be a member of the human race.

The several hundred other spectators who filed through the Buchenwald courtyard on that sunny April afternoon were equally unwilling to admit association with the human beings who had perpetrated these horrors. But their reluctance had a certain tinge of self-interest; for these were the citizens of Weimar, eager to plead their ignorance of the outrages.

When 3rd Army troops had occupied Buchenwald two days before, that tough old soldier, General Patton, had been so incensed at what he saw that he ordered his police to go through Weimar, of which Buchenwald is a suburb, and bring back one thousand civilians to make them see with their own eyes what their leaders had done. The MPs were so enraged that they brought back two thousand.

The newly freed inmates of the camp, dressed in their blue and White striped prison suits, scrambled to the top of the fences around the courtyard. From here these slave laborers and political prisoners waited to see German people forced to view the heap of their dead comrades. Women fainted or wept. Men covered their faces and turned their heads away. It was when the civilians began repeating, “We didn’t know! We didn’t know!” that the ex-prisoners were carried away with wrath.

“You did know,” they shouted. “Side by side we worked with you in the factories. At the risk of our lives we told you. But you did nothing.”

Of course they knew, as did almost all Germans.

Even during the short time that the two thousand unwilling Germans were in the courtyard, the white pile grew steadily higher. American Army medics, who began feeding the inmates as soon as Buchenwald was captured, were unable to stop the ravages of long suffering and mistreatment. Twelve hundred had died the month before, and people would continue to die there for some time to come. The ironical reason why the pile of naked bodies had been allowed to grow so high, instead of being burned according to regular concentration-camp practice, was that, because of the more pressing needs of the war, Buchenwald had run short of coal.

The presence of many familiar names among the inmates—all correspondents found people in the camp they had known elsewhere, or the relatives of people they had known—served to bring the tragedy closer to reality in our minds. I talked with Eddie Cantor’s cousin, a Holland-Dutch Jew, whose circuit of several concentration camps had finally brought him to Buchenwald, where he had spent one year wasting away in Barracks Number 58. But he was one of the lucky ones; he had sufficient physical stamina to react favorably to food and care, and he would live.

Buchenwald was an example of the key part the concentration-camp system played in Germany’s industrial scheme. I believe that during the war we vastly underestimated the importance of slave labor in Germany’s military resistance. Near Buchenwald was a V-bomb factory where many operations were carried on by forced labor from the concentration camp. Allied Air Force Intelligence knew the location of the prison barracks, which were so close to the factory that our pilots were briefed with especial care to avoid them. During repeated raids on the V-bomb plant, although some bombs inevitably fell close, the camp escaped actual hits for the most part. But although aerial photographs could show the location of Buchenwald, air reconnaissance could furnish no hint of the horrors which ground invasion revealed.

Years before the war the camps existed as what the Germans so appropriately called educational institutions. Their aim in the beginning, so they said, was political: to strangle independent thinking and handle the “race problem.” Probably it was with the growing need for armaments under Germany’s economy of aggression that their full industrial value was realized, although the German General Staff had included slave labor in its calculations before the Nazis came to power.

We know now that the camps were managed by personnel who had been given systematic training in cruelty in special schools for their specialized jobs, and that they were run according to a horrible law of diminishing returns. The slave laborers were fed as little as possible and worked until their strength fell below a certain level. Then by various devices—such as the prolonged daily roll call in which the weak ones were made to stand naked in rainy or snowy weather, or by other inexpensive means—the slaves were encouraged to die as fast as possible, in order to save upkeep.

If we had encountered just one camp run by a maniac, we would have considered it merely the work of madness. But at a certain stage in the advance of our armies we began meeting these camps everywhere; along the western front all Life’s photographers simultaneously began running into them: Dave Scherman tried to photograph Auschwitz until it made him sick; Florea struck Nordhausen; Vandivert took some unforgettable pictures at Gardelegen near Berlin, and George Rodger made a heart-rending record of Belsen. It was the wide prevalence of the system that testified to its vicious purpose.

A much smaller and less publicized place than those mentioned above brought home to me the full tragedy of the concentration camps. On the afternoon of the same day that Bill Walton and I had canvassed the City Hall, we had driven to the outskirts of Leipzig to hunt up an aircraft small-parts factory which had been an 8th Air Force bombing target. The Leipzig-Mochau plant, in a suburb called Erla, had been one of the units in the Leipzig aircraft complex.

We never found the aircraft factory that afternoon. For a time we became involved in a small pocket where the Germans had surrounded groups of American soldiers who were fighting their way out along the borders—although things were so confused that we did not comprehend the exact status of this area at the time. We did wonder, however, at the shells that were falling uncomfortably close, and were never quite sure whose they were. But soon our preoccupation with even the shelling was lost in a concern about something else. As we searched for the factory along a narrow country road bisecting plowed fields, we began to smell a peculiar odor, quite different from anything in our experience. We followed the smell until we saw, across a small meadow, a ten-foot barbed-wire fence which, curiously, seemed to surround nothing at all. Parking the jeep, we ran through a small gate into the enclosure, and found ourselves standing at the edge of an acre of bones.

There was no one there; that is, there was no living person. But flying grotesquely over the patch of skulls and charred ribs, from a tall slender flag-pole, was a white surrender flag. There was eloquent testimony that the men who had been there so recently had not willingly surrendered to death. Plunged into the four-foot wide barrier of closely meshed barbed wire were blackened human figures whose desperate attitudes showed their passionate attempts to break to freedom. Caught in the spiked coils, they had perished, flaming torches, as they tried to escape.

Nothing was left standing among the ashes, except the incongruous flag-pole at the far edge. Dotting the ghastly mottled carpet which covered the area were dozens of identical little graniteware basins and among them a scattering of spoons.

“Look at all the nails on the ground,” said Bill. “The building must have gone up so fast that all the nails popped out.” Then he sat down on his musette bag on the ground, and put his head in his hands.

Neither of us knew at the time how quickly people at home, and even some returned soldiers who had not seen these things, would begin to say that perhaps accounts had been exaggerated, that maybe the Germans were not so bad after all. But even though I did not realize how soon some people would disbelieve or forget, I had a deep conviction that an atrocity like this demanded to be recorded. So I forced myself to map the place with negatives.

We had been there in silence for almost an hour, I suppose, when an unexpected and moving thing took place. Survivors began drifting back. Bill and I were witness to unbearably pitiful scenes as those few people, coming back from different directions, recognized one another and ran to greet comrades still alive, falling into each other’s arms while standing up to their ankles in bones. Among the first to return were a Russian in a peasant sheepskin coat, a Czech wearing the letter T for Tschechoslovakei on his striped prison jacket, and a Pole, who, catching sight of the unburned but hand-grenaded body of a Polish comrade, sank down beside his dead friend, bowed with grief.

When finally eighteen had returned, the survivors decided that these were all who had escaped out of the three hundred whom the Germans had tried to destroy. Originally, we were told, there had been eight hundred, arrested because of political ideas considered impermissible by the Nazis, and confined to the Number Three Erla Work Camp as slave labor for the Leipzig-Mochau aircraft factory. When our armies advanced so close that the Nazi authorities knew Leipzig would soon fall, the Gestapo evacuated five hundred who were still strong enough to be herded on foot to work in another factory deeper in German-held territory. The plan had been to leave the weakest behind. But finally the Gestapo, knowing that political prisoners freed by the Americans were giving whatever useful intelligence they could to our army, decided to annihilate the remaining three hundred.

Bill got the story from the Czech. He was a barber, and to Bill and to me he was the hero of Number Three Erla Work Camp. Having a little more freedom than the others, since he was called upon to shave the SS guards, the barber got wind of the fact that a massacre was planned. The greatest barrier to the chances of escape, he knew, was the 800-volt charge in the barbed wire fence. He wrote a note which he wrapped around a stone and threw into the inner enclosure at night, warning his comrades of what was afoot, and informing them that he would short-circuit the fence. As soon as the evacuations began taking place, and the camp electrician had been evacuated with certain other staff members, the barber stole out at night, cut the wires, and short-circuited the fence. After throwing in a second note warning the inmates to escape at the first opportunity, he hid at the bottom of a deep bricked hole, coming out only to make sure the wires had not been repaired.

It is surprising how many places there were to hide even in a concentration camp. Some of the inmates managed to dig themselves into holes under the buildings. Unfortunately not enough of them, in their weakened condition, were able to understand the significance of the short-circuited wires, or more might have escaped. They had feared that fence too long.

On the morning that the Americans reached the outskirts of Leipzig, the guards had set out pails of steaming soup to lure the poor hungry wretches conveniently into the mess hall. The soup cans were still recognizable when Bill and I arrived.

After the prisoners were inside, the SS put blankets over the windows, threw in pails of flaming acetate solution, sprinkled the place with machine-gun fire, and tossed in hand grenades. The building must have gone up in a sheet of flame but, even then, many prisoners got as far as the door. We know this because the concentration of skulls was greatest where the door had been. A fair number even broke through the fence. But the Gestapo had previously brought up a couple of tanks manned by Hitler Jugend, and these ferocious youngsters shot down survivors as they ran across the meadow. We could see their bodies where they had fallen in the plowed earth.

Some of the victims were so close to freedom that it made my heart bleed to see them. A Polish professor, who, we were told, had been an aircraft technician, had squeezed halfway through the outer fence. The shriveled lower half of his body lay in cinders within the enclosure, with his charred crutch close by, but the fine intellectual bald head thrust through to the outside was still unmarred, with even the spectacles in place. He must have been much loved; the survivors shed many tears over him. Another half-intact figure had a silver cross hanging around his neck. The dead body was covered with blisters. The Czech knelt down, gently touched the crucifix, and said, “Blood on the cross.”

The barber started hunting through each hole and dugout, hoping against hope to find someone alive. Suddenly he jumped into a trench and, raising his clenched fist, cried, “My comrade. A Czech.” In the dim light at the entrance to the little underground tunnel I could just make out the face of his friend, the fine features streaked with blood. The Gestapo had evidently hunted out all who hid in holes, and machine-gunned them.

Then the barber began searching for some remembrance which he could carry back to the family of his friend. There was little to choose from, and finally he took the only thing he could find to carry away. What he did will sound strange—perhaps grotesque—when I describe it from so far away. But against this background I felt I was watching one of those rare acts prompted by deep inner sympathy. The man lifted out his comrade’s false teeth, and, looking up at me, said simply: “For the wife of my friend.”

I thought that I had seldom heard more moving words.

CHAPTER 10 — Munich: Where It All Began

WHEN THE celebrated Rainbow Division took over Munich on May Day, they quickly selected Hitler’s private apartment on Prinzregenten Platz for a Command Post. One of the first directives issued from their new CP was an invitation to a cocktail party in Adolf’s flat. I was escorted to this affair by my pilot, Eddie Lyster, and by a Captain in Military Government. It was an unprecedented experience for me to be guided through a souvenir’s paradise like Adolf’s apartment by an officer in Military Government. But the place had been gone over so thoroughly by the 42nd Division that only the heaviest of its movable objects remained.

I was, however, both startled and grateful when the Captain suddenly threw his arms around a tall metallic nude and started staggering downstairs under this crushing weight of symbolic German womanhood, which he placed in the jeep for me. Eddie took his cue from the Captain and, sighting an even heavier art object in the Führer’s parlor, a pair of dancing girls, grasped them by their unyielding bronze skirts and struggled downstairs with them. I wrapped the statues in a blanket, and when I had them packed in my barracks bag it took two strong men to lift it—not the easiest type of souvenir to cart around with one!

Major Vessels, efficient and gracious as ever, with Private Jordan and the rest of his able staff, had a wonderful house this time for the Air Power Press Camp. Sergeant Asch had chosen it in a suburb and had requisitioned it from a firmly documented Nazi. The house had big open porches smothered in fragrant white lilacs. It was surrounded with spectacular gardens and edged by a wood carpeted with pine needles and hepaticas, sloping to the River Esar. Asch had chosen a neighborhood where all the best people had lived; in the same block was a hideaway which had been occupied by Strength-through-Joy Ley.

When the Sergeant had arrived at the front gate to inspect the house, its owner, a wealthy antique-silver merchant, was already standing on the front porch wringing his hands. He had always hated the Nazis, he explained, and loved the Americans. He had only joined the Party to be able better to help his Jewish friends. Sergeant Asch followed current practice in allowing the family two hours to pack their personal effects. Bedding and mattresses they must not take; we would need them for the press. The wife and daughter packed clothes, while the man laid out on the library table a collection of letters which had been exchanged between his family and their American friends. With them he placed English translations, obviously prepared in anticipation of just such an emergency.

When the silver merchant and his wife and daughter got their suitcases as far as the front stoop, they took one last regretful look at the luxurious home they had enjoyed under Fascism for so long and, turning to Sergeant Asch, protested loudly: “We have no place to go. Where shall we go?” Nazis who had joined the Party to help the poor unfortunate Jews were the Sergeant’s specialty. With dignity he replied: “You are Germans. Go to your own people. Germans must help one another.” After they had disappeared down the drive, he added, “They’ve got a pretty daughter. They’ll do all right.”

While Eddie and I were in Munich, we circled above the city block by block. Eddie followed a marked chart of the city, while I referred constantly to the Baedeker tucked under the safety strap in my lap. Thus we could pick out from the plane each crumbled Nazi shrine: the Hofbräuhaus in the ruined Platzl, made famous by good beer; the Bürgerbräu, the beerhouse made famous by the sinister Nazi Putsch; the scarred cube of the new Braunhaus, the leveled lot where the old Braunhaus had been flattened into orange-brown dust.

The residential quarter around Hitler’s flat was in fairly good condition, although one bomb had fallen just outside the Führer’s window. Nearby were the homes of many of his friends. The house of Hofmann, Hitler’s personal photographer, seemed somewhat too modest compared with others in the same neighborhood and especially with that of Himmler’s mistress, which was almost over Hofmann’s back fence. Her home, moreover, had the added distinction of a pillbox in the front yard. In the two houses just across the street—a fact evidently unknown to the lady or her powerful lover—had been concealed the headquarters of the Bavarian resistance movement.

My pilot, for all his Mad Hatter ways when he was on the ground, was an accomplished flier who could roll over a photographic subject with such beautiful balance that even when I was upside down, I was hugged firmly but lightly to my seat. In a steep spin, the least unbalance builds a pressure which is paralyzing and makes manipulating a camera impossible. With Eddie Lyster, I worked with as much ease as though I were shooting inside a studio.

Eddie, who had been flying giant troop transports, complained from time to time that our little plane was no faster than a jeep if we had the wind against us. I didn’t care how long it took us between spots since, when we reached our objective; the tiny maneuverable plane was ideal for airplane photography. We lived a gypsy life in that cub, with a couple of jerry-cans of gas under the seat, so we could land on a country road or edge of a field to refuel, during our long cross-country trips. We hedge-hopped in the little plane over the length and breadth of occupied Germany, photographing practically every major city and bombed industrial center, from altitudes that varied from twenty feet to two miles.

When Eddie and I flew north and landed at Brunswick, I found we were at the home of the Rolleiflex camera. It was good to hear that the factory was being operated by our Army, because both of my Rolleiflexes had reached such a state of disintegration that I would have discarded them long ago if there had been any possibility of replacing them—I was getting only one picture out of every three or four I shot. After all, the camera had gone through the entire war and received considerable punishment on many fronts. It had long been impossible for our home office to buy much equipment for us in America, for during the war there was little to be had. Photographers were finding it equally impossible to buy from GIs in Germany, for any sums, although we often tried. When soldiers were in the field, their “liberated” cameras were cherished souvenirs, and it was only when they reached the larger cities, where unbelievably profitable black markets flourished, that photographic equipment began to filter out of their hands.

Sometimes the boys did funny but unfortunate things. One soldier who came on a cache of fifty Rolleiflexes, having the exaggerated idea which so many people have of the value of lenses, pried them all out, leaving the working parts of the cameras behind. Too late—after he had reached Paris—he found that he had rendered both the cameras and their lenses useless.

It was irritating to a professional, whose own equipment had worn down to the point of complete unreliability, to pass jeepfuls of men decorated like Christmas trees with Contaxes, Leicas, and Rollicords, and not a single one for sale for hard cash offers. However, we all preferred seeing cameras in the hands of GIs who, we felt, deserved them (if anyone can be said to deserve loot) to finding them in the possession of certain officers who made incredibly large hauls. I was never able to confirm the story of the Brigadier General who sent home five hundred Leicas when his unit occupied a large photographic plant near Weimar, but it was a persistent rumor. However, I did see many Colonels in possession of equipment so highly specialized that frequently they didn’t even know how to open their fine cameras. Whenever the lucky man with cameras had a genuine interest in photography, I was glad he had something that would contribute to his hobby. But often it was someone who knew just enough about a camera to be able to pack it and send it home to his children. I could only hope that he had bright youngsters.

Since I had had no luck in replacing my wornout Rolleiflexes either by liberation or by purchase from liberators, I pinned great hopes on Brunswick, where the Army was starting to manufacture cameras for their own personnel; and the Signal Corps very kindly gave me one of these new ones. But the Signal Corps might as well have kept the Rolleiflex. I dispatched it to our Paris office, where I had made arrangements to have it synchronized for flash work, and sent it by the safest route I knew: in the sealed and sacred press bag on a courier plane. An Army courier has the same inviolability as the U.S. mails; but the camera never reached its destination. It may possibly have reached Paris: that I was never able to check. The probability is that it did, for any good camera at that time was bringing one thousand dollars on the Paris black market.

Later even a box of old clothes I sent back from Berlin was stolen while en route by Army courier (of course, clothes were bringing fabulous sums by then in both France and Germany), and routine press and mail sacks finally became subject to frequent and inexplicable disappearances. The Hitler statues, incidentally, never reached their destination, either. I have not missed them. They would have made me feel, I think, like those persons who take pieces of hangman’s rope for souvenirs.

It was not surprising, perhaps, that we heard a great deal about the Russians’ spiriting away of industrial equipment, and their alleged kidnapping of struggling, protesting scientists, while American and British behavior, whether on a national or individual scale, was always referred to in the most respectful terms. It was an undiscussed but interesting point that all over occupied Germany the hasty dipping into an area’s assets was conducted like a race up to the very moment of the reshuffling of the occupational zones. The handling of the Rolleiflex factory was a pint-sized example: here the objective seemed to be to get as many cameras as possible off the assembly line before this area, originally captured by the Americans, should fall into the newly delineated British zone, under the SHAEF occupation plan.

At Brunswick the Americans had some production hurdles to overcome, for when the Army occupied the factory they found that though it contained a large quantity of half-completed cameras, the inside mechanical parts were missing. After an exhaustive search the parts were turned up at the bottom of a deep salt mine, along with stacks of Party files, soap, historical records, and gas masks. Through Military Government the Army hired as many civilian technicians as they could get, and under the supervision of the Signal Corps production was rushed full tilt until the British took over.

All over Germany there were similar dashes, up to the very moment that a zone changed hands. Perhaps the most feverish scrounging was carried on in the field of scientific and industrial discoveries, extending even to flesh-and-blood scientists. It would seem that the Russians did not have the monopoly customarily claimed for them, of secretly whisking scientists away; for the shipping to America of experts—including synthetic-rubber technicians, opticians from Zeiss, and university researchers—went on, even though behind a curtain of silence. Of course, coincidentally with these proceedings there were many joint U.S.-British investigation teams hard at work, co-operating on a host of scientific projects. These were top-secret missions, but even more secret, during those early days, was this quasi-legal inter-Allied looting.

An observant American officer remarked to me: “To all outward appearances the British and American specialists were very cordial to one another. But did you get the undercurrent? The competition was very keen. The British had the jump on us. They gave their representatives high commissions. Ours had only civilian status and had to go through ‘channels.’ Theirs could move where they liked: they had enough rank so they could get around easily. Ours had only U.S. tabs on their shoulders. But the British were even more efficient when it was a question of getting their men out before the Russians came in.”

This international race was engendered partly by the competition between nations which alliance in the war never entirely erased, and also by the necessity of getting at German scientific records before the Germans destroyed them. Many of our teams of experts, briefed for months before they entered Germany, knew exactly what they were looking for, and usually where to look for it. Scientific secrets have become one of the great prizes of war and with the development of atomic energy the scientists themselves have come into that category.

SECTION IV. URBAN GERMANY: WHAT OUR BOMBS LEFT

CHAPTER 11 — Krupp Suckles the Wehrmacht

THE RUHR RIVER winds through a golden and gray checkerboard of wheat fields and steel mills in the richest coal basin of Europe. The sun seldom shines clearly in the Ruhr. Coke ovens and steel mills spread an endless veil over waterways, workers’ villages and cabbage fields. Even now, with so many factories lying in smudges on the ground, the smokestacks and collieries which rim the horizon with their fretwork are beginning once more to darken the sky. If we, the victors, turn our backs on this smoking skyline, and leave unsupervised this land which we have subdued at such an immense cost in life and work, there is a great danger that the stains in the sky above the furnaces and coke mills may thicken into the war clouds of World War III.

Just south of Essen the Ruhr widens into Lake Baldenai, an idyllic body of water, bordered with woods and grain fields; and above the lake, on the top of the highest hill, is the Villa Hügel, the Krupp family mansion. The very name of Krupp echoes the crunch of a military boot on gravel. Five generations of Krupps throughout five wars have been to the German Army what the engine room is to a battleship. Without Krupp the German Army could not have lived or become the terrible and evil force that it was.

Friedrich Krupp, who founded the Cast Steel Works at Essen in 1810, began building the firm and family fortunes on arms manufacture. His son Alfred sold Krupp guns to both sides in the Austro-Prussian War in 1866. He equipped the Prussian Army in 1870 for the Franco-Prussian War. Under his grandson Friedrich Alfred, Krupp steel entered ocean warfare when the Krupps began building battleships. During World War I his great-granddaughter Bertha gave her name to the Kaiser’s biggest gun; and as World War II was drawing to a close it was the founder’s great-great-grandson Alfried who rolled the toughest tank steels for Hitler’s armies.

Krupp was more to Germany than just another steel plant. As wars grew bigger and more scientific, Krupp was the experimental laboratory for the Generals. Army officers married into the Krupp family and became business representatives of the company. Krupp executives filtered into the Army and became ballistics experts. The Government was ready to finance the Krupps when they needed it during the leaner years; and Krupp co-operated during the rise of Hitler. Krupp devised a simple universal workers’ tax which helped finance the Nazi treasury. The weapons of war are now shifting to nuclear physics; but during the Krupp reign, war’s backbone was steel, and for more than a century the Krupps and the German Army, hand in hand, molded military history. What they have cost the world in blood and treasure is past measuring, but the lives number in millions and the treasure in hundreds of billions.

The most noted of the Krupps was Alfred, old Friedrich’s son. In 1871 he decided that the time had come to move into a mansion more fitting to the Krupp dynasty. For twenty-five years he had insisted on living within the factory gates, most of that time in the original ancestral cabin beside which his father had erected the first mill and melting, furnace. There was no middle ground in the living arrangements of Alfred Krupp. He stepped from the house in the plant into the Villa Hügel, or House on the Hill, a mansion of one hundred and seventy-seven rooms. The mausoleum-type architecture and the details of interior decoration and plumbing he planned himself. In the gigantic twin cubes of masonry which make up the Villa Hügel he designed the gold fixtures of his solid-marble bathtub, styled the doorknobs, laid out four stories of music rooms and guest suites, connected the floors with elevators, and topped all with a colossal skylight arched over a ballroom sixty-five feet high.

The final effect was a cross between Versailles and Valhalla. The Villa Hügel had its own private railway station, large enough to accommodate two private railroad trains, Mr. Krupp’s and the Kaiser’s. A special bedroom suite was designed by the armament king for his imperial friend, with a sitting room furnished in dull red brocade and a sleeping chamber hung with tapestries depicting the Garden of Eden. When Kaiser Wilhelm I (and later Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was also a frequent house guest) opened his royal eyes after a restful night at Hügel, he could lie in bed and study, in the priceless needlework which covered his bedroom walls, the life story of Adam, the first recorded Jew.

Either one Emperor or the other was present at all important Krupp family events. Kaiser Wilhelm II, at the marriage of Alfred’s eldest granddaughter, ruled that her bridegroom should take the name of Krupp so that armament’s greatest name would be perpetuated. It is because of this edict that the present head of the firm, now held as a war criminal, a Krupp only on his mother’s side, bears the name of Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Haibach.

When the Villa Hügel was requisitioned to billet men of the American Army, it was a terrible moment for Krupp’s major-domo, Herr Dohrmann. Casting a watchful eye over the breakfast tray of the King of Roumania, choosing table wines for visiting Prussian admirals or foreign diplomats, making sure the Shah of Persia had enough blankets on his bed at night—these had been happier services. However, he was the perfect retainer. There was no household emergency his varied experiences had not fitted him to meet smoothly and efficiently, so even when the house guests represented an occupying army, he did his best.

As a matter of fact, with the arrival of the Americans Herr Dohrmann found himself faring better than his master, for Alfried Krupp was placed under house arrest and held for interrogation. Dohrmann was not merely not arrested, but he continued to receive his weekly wages—a SHAEF directive states that when an occupying unit takes over an establishment’s help, it may pay the same wage rate as the former employer.

Thus for several weeks Dohrmann continued to receive his four hundred sixty marks a month; Wilhelmina, the chief cook who had worked for the Krupp household since the age of fourteen (and who performed miracles with the rations which our Army provided), drew her three hundred marks; and the Zimmermädchen received the one hundred twenty per month which Mr. Krupp had paid his housemaids. Major Peter Messer, ex-English teacher from New Haven, who administered the Villa, simply took the Krupp payroll and turned it over to the Finance Department, and the Army paid. The pay did not mean as much to the staff as did the rations and the temporary security which the arrangement provided. But what must have meant most of all, at least to loyal Herr Dohrmann, was the excellent job that was done in running the Villa Hügel, and the conscientious care taken of the house.

When I arrived in ruined Essen to do a picture series for Life, I drove out to the Villa Hügel hoping to find a place to stay. On the grand staircase of the salon I found Major Willis Biggs, an Engineering officer from Chicago, supervising preparations for the expected influx of scientists and financiers—the Villa had been requisitioned to billet a task force of experts. Major Biggs looked like a plump child playing house, in his one-piece coveralls, with his chubby face and bald head an unbroken pink from his housekeeping activities. When he learned I had no home, he said, “We’re looking for customers.” And he installed me at once in Herr Krupp’s own suite, ordering up sheets for the spacious Krupp bed, and towels for the gold-fitted bathroom; Herr Krupp by this time had been moved into the servants’ quarters.

It took me less time to unpack my limited supply of clothes than it did to choose which of the twenty walnut wardrobes I should hang them in. These had sliding doors of exquisitely matched woods, and lined a dressing room two stories high. The lofty ceiling was painted with a goddess rocking dangerously on a crescent moon, her hair pinned back—as one might expect—with a star; and just under her was a balcony, carved with foxes and hounds, running completely around the dressing room.

I never was able to discover the purposes of all the gold levers for the showers, the multiple goosenecked water taps for the handbowls and toothbrush bowl, and the other extensive accessories in the Krupp bathroom. But the gold-and-marble tub I put to use at once. After the heavy bombings, running water in Germany was not easy to find, and to find water not only running but also hot was indeed a rarity. Later I learned that old Alfred Krupp was responsible for this beautiful hot water, just as he was for the faucets. When he built Hügel, he devised an installation which took water from the Ruhr and converted it to steam in a plant by the river bank. The steam-pipes ran up the hill to the big house, sunk under the driveways. He had bestowed the same attention to detail on the bathtub itself: at one end a seat had been carved out of the solid marble slab. Undoubtedly he must have enjoyed sitting on that half-submerged marble bench, reflecting that the water which gushed so hot from his golden faucets had already accomplished a chore in melting the ice from his driveways.

Down in the cavernous drawing room I found Major Biggs supervising the laying of a Spanish rug, which measured just under one hundred feet in length and weighed two thousand four hundred pounds. Alfried Krupp had worried a great deal about this rug during the bombings, the servants told Major Biggs. He was afraid the house would be burned down with the rug inside, and all through the war he planned to move it to some place of greater safety, but never succeeded in getting this done. As Major Biggs commented, “You can’t just roll up a rug and carry it away when it weighs a ton and a fifth.” Old Alfred hadn’t planned on having wars fought at home.

Major Biggs and Lieutenant Frederick Wittig, his man Friday, were very busy for the next few days getting Hügel ready for the first contingent of scientists and financial experts. Lieutenant Wittig had been an assistant manager of the New Yorker Hotel, and he and the Major began by turning the ballroom under its vast skylight into an “Information Room” for the specialists. They moved out quantities of brocaded sofas to make room for desks and typewriters, they hung charts and maps over the family portraits, and set up a number of bulletin boards for the graphs and diagrams which the experts would use as they evaluated Ruhr industry and Reich finance.

Next they had enormous tablecloths brought out for the hundred-foot dining-room table, where the experts would have mess. They unpacked and counted the silver tableware and the gold ice-cream spoons, connected the automatic potato-masher and the yard-wide electric frying machines, and set up the electric ice-cream freezer. For the recreation of the enlisted men assigned to guard duty at Hügel, they filled the steam-heated swimming pool. For recreation for the officers and experts they unlocked the cases of music rolls, and had the self-propelled organ put back in shape.

Lieutenant Wittig, in the grateful presence of Herr Dohrmann, listed the entire contents of the Silver Room: the coffee service presented by Kaiser Wilhelm, with his profile engraved on each bowl and pitcher; the silver cup presented by Adolf Hitler, with his profile inlaid in a medallion; the Cowes regatta trophy presented by King George V in 1901, and the many other impressive racing trophies—some as big as beer barrels—won by the Krupp yacht Germania.

After inventory, Lieutenant Wittig locked the double doors of the Silver Room. There was to be no looting at Villa Hügel. And, later, there was only one infraction of this rule—by an individual so much higher in rank than these officers that no one could do anything about it but gasp.

Soon the scientific “Target Teams” began to arrive. Some of the men were members of the Army, many were civilians in uniform, borrowed from private industry by the War Department, and accredited to the Army. In the first wave, our best-known scientist was Victor Conquest, the originator of powdered eggs, who had come to study German synthetic foods. One of his finds was a sort of margarine made from petroleum, which he pronounced waxy but edible. William W. Farr, an ordnance expert, arrived from the War Department to investigate recoilless weapons. Commander Pettijohn came from the Navy to explore details of new and radical submarine parts. Other specialists arrived to find out everything the Germans knew about rockets, atabrine, new fuels, and space lattices of silicates. In some fields the Hügel specialists unearthed new and secret discoveries—some practical, and some not yet developed. In other branches of science they reached the gratifying conclusion that the enemy knew no more, or even less, than we. But this investigation was important, whether it was with silica resins, where the Germans did much original research; in extrusion processes for screws and bolts, where our enemy was far behind; in the world of paint, where Germany developed a remarkable radar-resisting coating—though one no better than our own; or in infra-red detection, in which field the Germans developed but did not have time to put into production a locater so sensitive that it would detect a soldier at night in a foxhole two thousand feet away.

In addition to the various teams of scientists and the “Finance Investigation Unit for External Assets” who were billeted at Hügel, there were transient house guests. One of these was aide-de-camp to Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. He came twice, and when he brought two wheels and a set of tires on his second visit, we realized how thoroughly he had “G-2’d” the situation on his first. He had apparently listed the make, condition, and motor-block number of every car in Herr Krupp’s garage (there were seven, including two enormous Meybachs); and he returned with instructions not to step on the toes of any of the Allied Commanders, but to bring back three Mercedes-Benzes if possible. His arrangements for motorcars went through higher echelons than those at Hügel, and I heard that he left without the two big supercharged Mercedes limousines but with the medium-sized Mercedes sedan, which had needed the two wheels and four tires.

Not far from the garage were the servants’ quarters where Alfried Krupp was under house arrest. Quantities of his well-tailored clothes and a large collection of novels had been moved into the little yellow clapboard house where he was quartered, and at almost any hour of the day a housemaid or waiter from the Great House could be seen walking down the drive with a hot dish or a tray for young Herr Krupp. He was being held “incommunicado,” but for weeks no definite directives were issued as to how the embarrassing prisoner was to be treated. Until somebody remembered to take out his private telephone he had communication, not with the outside world, exactly, but with his estate and his factory, which was really all he needed to keep an eye on his interests. When the phone was removed, a gloomy creature with a briefcase managed to slip in and spend occasional nights in the servants’ quarters with his boss. This was Mr. Karl Eberhardt, the financial manager of the company, who was apparently pulling all possible strings to get the Krupp factories going again. No one knew just how Mr. Eberhardt got the gasoline or the permits for his extensive business trips, as journeying from one city to another was firmly restricted at this time. No one knew how the brunette from Düsseldorf got her gasoline or permit, either. For Alfried Krupp’s girlfriend Alexis, a tall arrogant beauty reputed to be “very rich,” got into the servants’ quarters to see him, too.

In fact, Alfried Krupp had almost everything he needed to make his house arrest comfortable, except enough cigarettes. But remedying the shortage was easy, even though he was a chain smoker. He had had a number of copies of his official family biography printed in English, and he began passing them out to the enlisted men detailed to guard the grounds. I don’t know the exact exchange rate for each copy of The Krupps: 150 Years of Krupp History, but I suppose if the volume was autographed it brought about a carton of American cigarettes. Some of his inscriptions were lengthy and flowery, and they all dealt with the dignity of family. In the flyleaf of the book he gave to one of his guards, he wrote: “Tradition, honestly kept by men, families, and nations, is one of the monuments of their grandfathers’ pioneer work—yesterday, today, and, I hope, tomorrow.”

In addition to having one hundred and fifty years of Krupp family history to read, the enlisted men also had the family boathouse to enjoy. This was set in a little park at the foot of the estate, where the Ruhr River widened into Lake Baldenai. Through the park ran a pleasant network of paths, and in former days the Krupps had allowed the general public occasional access to these wooded walks, for a small admission charge. Now, during the occupation, the surface of the lake was always lively with little racing sculls which Special Services had corralled for the men.

Beyond the little woods and lining both sides of Lake Baldenai were billowing wheat fields which the enlisted men found extremely convenient, since the fraternization rules were so slow in being modified. A recent directive from their commanding general stated in vivid detail that the soldiers were forbidden “to give gum to babies” and that they must not “initiate a smile or return a salute.” I don’t know whether the GIs or the fräuleins initiated the smiles, but smiles and wheat were frequently blended together.

It was the duty of the MPs to see that the General’s directive was being followed, and in order to do this they patrolled the waterfront in small boats. This was a strenuous assignment, since the fraternizers often had small boats also, and more than one MP came home exhausted at night, saying he was “going to be all shoulders after that job.” A solution for this situation was found, but it raised a loud cry from the enlisted men, who felt unfair advantage was being taken of them. The MPs were finally given a motorboat.

CHAPTER 12 — Bomb Shelters Were Too Expensive

UNDER THE Krupp mansion was a network of shelters carved out of solid rock. Some chambers were fitted with furniture and electric lights, and one of them contained a bed for Herr Krupp, and a library. There were installations of tracks, and mine cars which could move out rubble, in case of a direct hit. And in no case could a Krupp get trapped underground, because there were several exits through the side of the hill, as well as one up into the kitchen.

This shelter interested me particularly because I had noticed a singular difference between Essen and other cities. Bremen had enormous bunkers, so well built that citizens within reach when the alarm sounded could be nearly certain of coming through the raid alive. I had seen bunkers in Cologne of such massive construction that they had withstood six direct hits. Frankfurt, Schweinfurt, Ludwigshafen—one could call the roll of industrial cities and find that all had huge bunkers of reinforced concrete where people lived, miserably no doubt, but in almost complete security from bombs. These remarkable structures all over Germany were so well planned that they included ventilating systems, lighting installations, and often even movie theaters. The type of reinforced concrete they used was so superior that “T”-Force sent over a commission of American construction men to study it.

But the City of Essen, with its enormous Krupp Armament Works, had not even one adequate shelter to protect its workers. The Krupps’ much-publicized interest in workers’ welfare ceased at the time their workers needed it most—and when other German war-industries were investing heavily in bomb protection.

It seems inconsistent that a steel plant making armaments should have ignored the necessity of protecting their workmen against that very warfare about which they knew so much. The people at Essen huddled into cellars and basements while the Krupp “Air Raid Protection Section,” a committee which had no real power, drew up plans; but when appeals were made for bunkers, the projects were rejected as being “too expensive.”

There may have been more than the motive of economy behind this. The manufacture of steel is a twenty-four-hour process; interruptions impair the “heat.” Perhaps the Krupps did not want their workers running to the shelters too often. The possibility that production schedules were involved seems to be substantiated by the way the intervals of warning were shortened, as the bombings grew more furious. In 1944, Krupp workers told me, so little warning was given that frequently the people saw bombs dropping around them and only afterward heard the “acute” alarm.

The crane runners in the open-hearth plants had the hardest time. Sometimes they would be caught in a place from which they had to walk one hundred feet over open steel construction before they could get down and dash under some sort of shelter. In some Krupp mills, workmen leaped into the foundry pits; in others, they were grateful for bombs which had fallen before, as they could dive into the craters and pull loose steel sheets over their heads. When communications became so disrupted that the Krupps could no longer ship out their steel, the workers were thankful for the accumulation of extra ingots and armor plate which they could pile on top of their makeshift shelters.

In the midst of these difficulties, the Krupp executives still had time to draw up an extensive rubble-removal program which they planned to put into effect as soon as the war was over. They estimated that it would take two years to sort the wreckage and glean usable fragments like piping and tiles. An overhead railroad would be built to a valley where they would dump six square miles of waste; for six continuous years they planned to move waste scrap at the rate of two thousand tons a night.

During the final war years, when the bombings increased in fury, life for a Krupp worker must have been dreadful almost beyond imagination. One of the metallurgists told me that after each big bombing “in the center of the city, you couldn’t tell where the houses were or where the streets had been. I just walked by the sun. And then the fumes. All the city is black after an attack like that. You can’t see more than two blocks ahead, and your eyes get red and swollen from the smoke.” The skilled workmen, he told me, became more discouraged than anyone else because so much time was stolen away from their specialized tasks by the constant need for rebuilding. “You work all the time,” he said, “during the danger. Then every two or three days everything is destroyed. You lose courage.”

Finally it all seemed so senseless, he said, that the men just wanted to collect the wood scrap, and build big fires that they could stay around all day. But still they kept working. The ingenuity which went into steel manufacture in these very badly damaged plants was tremendous. Metallurgical shortcuts were devised; speeds in processing were stepped up. During my photographing in the Krupp mills, after the war was over, I saw electric furnaces housed under structures that looked like chicken sheds, constructed both to handle the fumes and keep the light of the molten metal from the sky„ For patching the blackout was a relentless necessity. Even near-misses meant flying fragments which caused light leaks and with a damaged blackout, each pouring of the heat could act as a direction finder for successive waves of bombers.

However, the constant need to mend the blackout, so insistent at the Krupp factory, was spared the Krupps at home. I don’t know the total tonnage that fell on the homes of Herr Krupp’s workers, but it was enormous. On Hügel buildings, only two bombs fell: a five-hundred-pounder which demolished the racing stables, and a small bomb which hit the greenhouses. Anyway, the Krupp family, like the other big Ruhr families, had an estate in the south where they could retreat if the bombings became intolerable.

At my request, Herr Alfried Krupp was allowed to leave the servants’ quarters and spend one hour in his big house. I wanted to photograph him under the family portraits which lined the Grand Salon. He was haughty about having his picture taken for an American magazine, but under the circumstances complied with my request. (On an earlier trip to Germany, before Life Magazine was in existence, the editors of Fortune had tried very hard to get permission for me to photograph the Essen works, but had given up after six months of repeated refusals from the Krupps.)

Alfried Krupp had a look of bred-out aristocracy with no morals. He was thirty-eight years old, and handsome in a bloodless way. As I took his picture, I questioned him about slave laborers in the Ruhr, to whom he referred by the prettier term of “foreign workers.” Although he did not seem to care whether or not he convinced me, he said that most of them had come voluntarily, and had been quite well off, as they had been fed more than German labor had.

This was an even taller story than most of the tales I heard. When I asked why the slaves had been so well fed, he replied, “To keep them satisfied. Of course,” he added, “war is difficult. When transportation of food became disrupted, then there was less for everyone. But the only real inconvenience the foreign workers suffered was when their barracks were burned down by the bombings.”

It was a pity that it was not until after this interview that I learned the details of the punishment camp in nearby Mülheim for those foreign laborers who refused to work for the enemy, or heard about the Polish girls who were snatched from Warsaw stores where they were shopping, or parks where they were walking, and sent off to the Ruhr without a chance to go home, or about the Russian slave workers who were killed wholesale while the Ruhr was being encircled because the Germans were afraid that when the war was lost the Russians might loot. And it was only later that our soldiers found the shell pits containing the remains of some of Herr Krupp’s pampered foreign workers. When these Czechs, Poles, and Italians had passed their peak of usefulness, the Essen Gestapo had its own convenient method of disposing of them. People lined around a shell hole, facing inward, and then shot in the head, tend to topple forward, so that burying them is easy. The Gestapo had a gunman named Paschen, who took such pleasure in these assignments that they were usually reserved for him. One of his big jobs was disposing of seventy people at once. He shot them while their hands were tied together with telephone wire. Paschen had a twisted face that looked as if it had not been properly finished. He wept great tears when CIC arrested him.

But, of course, there was never any need for Steelman Krupp to meet Triggerman Paschen, on either a social or a business basis. The Arbeitsfront handled everything in Essen. It parceled out the slave labor as needed, deducted the Government’s percentage of their wages, collected from the slave workers for their “light, food, and lodgings,” and took them off Herr Krupp’s hands when their specific jobs were done. All this was the responsibility of Arbeitsfront and so, as usual, the Ruhr industrialists had an excuse when it came to unpleasant charges.

In, one way Alfried Krupp was lucky to be under house arrest when the Essen shell holes were found. He was not called upon to help dig out bodies. When similar discoveries were made in other Ruhr cities, leading citizens were frequently required to attend and assist. When a particularly large cache was uncovered near Duisburg, while a watermain was being repaired, the Mayor of Duisburg was requested to help dig out the victims and give them a decent burial.

Although these developments came too late for me to ask Herr. Krupp how much he knew of them, I asked him, as I asked many Germans in those days, to express an opinion on the concentration camps.

He shrugged his patrician shoulders. “There might have been a few madmen...” he paused, “a few psychopaths...” He paused and started again. “The people at the top wouldn’t have liked the way their instructions were carried out.” Another long pause, and he went on once more, “Yes, there might have been a few of them, maniacs or madmen, who misinterpreted the instructions.”

Yes, he had heard rumors. That much he did not deny.

“In our country,” I said, “we have public-spirited citizens who will protest when something happens which they think is not right. If you and others like you heard these rumors, why didn’t you investigate?”

“The SS would have said it wasn’t my duty.”

I had seen all I wanted to see of Alfried Krupp, and he was taken back to the servants’ quarters.

Our group of financial and technical experts at Hügel was growing steadily larger. It changed a great-deal, as new units of investigators replaced others who moved on to different parts of Germany. At one time we had with us two very eminent members of the Economic Division of the Control Council: one, a titled Englishman, the other, an American General who had been a Wall Street executive in civilian life. We used to do a good deal of talking around the long Krupp dinner table about what constituted a war criminal. We had just launched on one of these discussions one morning when these two important gentlemen joined us at breakfast. We had been carrying on our discussion with the tacit assumption that Herr Krupp was more guilty than the common German soldier.

“They are deNazifying washer-women and clerks, but most of the big-shot industrialists have not been touched,” said Ernst Ophuls, one of the finance experts. “They are the greatest war criminals in the Ruhr, yet they are running free.”

“That’s a very dangerous theory,” broke in the eminent English member of the Control Council, with the air of a curate instructing the young. “What’s the matter with those chaps? They’re no Nazis.”

That was certainly a conversation-stopper. Ophuls was a mere Major and could say no more when the General gave him no support. The fact that correspondents later bestowed upon the General the non-military title of “Revolving-Door Smith” (his real name was not Smith) is perhaps illuminating.

Not far from Villa Hügel, in the Essen suburb of Werden, were the homes of a number of the Krupp executives. One of these, Dr. Houdremont, formerly technical director of the plant, was acting as its head in the enforced absence of Alfried Krupp. He is a brilliant scientist whose books on metallurgy are well known in America and other countries, a cultured and witty man, passionately fond of music, original in his manner of speaking, and hospitable. I was only sorry that he should have left his native land of Luxembourg twenty years ago to come to Germany and work for the Krupps.

But, “Why all the hate against Krupp?” asked Dr. Houdremont when I talked with him. “We are treated worse than any other plant. It is unjust!”

He leaned forward on the sofa, adjusted his heavy-rimmed spectacles, and chose his words carefully.

“We really cared only for our peacetime materials, our locomotives, and parts for textile machinery. Herr Krupp did not want to make war materials. The very thought made him sad. Besides, we thought we were doing what England wanted. We thought England wanted armament in Germany as insurance against Russia.”

From this is it was only one step farther for Houdremont to say, “Why didn’t the English send men in against Hitler when he occupied the Rhineland in ‘36?” This tendency to place on England the responsibility for Hitler’s rise was becoming so widespread that I heard it from German women on street corners, and I heard it even from American soldiers coming back home from Germany.

“The responsibility for everything that is bad is always put on us,” Dr. Houdremont continued. “But we were very antiquated in the war-material department. We just made steel. It was impossible for us to control where our steel was used, and what it was used for. We had no way of telling where our steel went.”

I could have told him where his steel went, because I had seen it from Africa to the western front. I had seen its tank tracks in the Russian plains, had encountered it from Cassino to Cologne. But by now Dr. Houdremont was explaining his idea of our functions as the occupying power. “All you have to do is control the political handful at the top. Then there won’t be any wars. And then you don’t have to control industry.”

He spoke very strongly about the fate of his former boss. “I can’t see why they imprisoned that young man.” (A few months later Dr. Houdremont was also arrested.) “You couldn’t make a single reproach against Mr. Krupp. And that fine man, his father! Herr Gustav Krupp was a very old man. His brain was in heaven during the last years of Hitler.”

Where the brain of Herr Gustav Krupp resided during the early ‘30s, I am not in a position to say. But it was sufficiently earthbound for him to have announced, through his Board of Directors, in 1934: “We are once more free to pursue the manufacture of arms of which we had been deprived by the Versailles Treaty.” And as early as 1933, in an annual report, he stated: “The national rebirth of our people has filled the German nation with a new faith. The mismanagement of political parties has been abolished. Class warfare and its decaying effect has been ended.

“Filled with happiness, we stand behind the Führer of a united nation.”

Eminent Englishmen and Revolving-Door Generals, please note.

SECTION V. THE FUTURE: CHILDREN IN GERMANY

CHAPTER 13 — Waiting for the New Loans

“THERE’S BEEN a lot of skullduggery here in the Ruhr,” one of the financial bloodhounds of the Control Council Group at Villa Hügel reported one morning at breakfast. “The First Families all have their cloaks and their dummies, and they’re past masters at hiding their assets. The ownership is so intricate it’s distributed from hell to breakfast.”

For years the Germans had been confusing the account books with German thoroughness, hoping that if ever they should be faced with an international auditing, the unraveling task would be impossible. It was for this purpose that the Finance Investigation Unit had come to the Ruhr. It required global detective work simply to find out who owned what, for in the neutral countries fictions of ownership had been established that almost accomplished what the Germans had set out to do. Behind the intricate web of corporate holdings in the Ruhr was a mere handful of families, the Krupps, the Tengelmanns, the Haniels, the flicks—the list would hardly exceed a dozen. The holdings of these key families formed a rich blanket which covered everything in the Ruhr from the mine to the finished product and stretched over utilities, transportation, and banks. Their interests reached far beyond the borders of Germany and extended into most of the countries of the outside world. An Essen corporation, the sleuths from Hügel would find, was actually owned by another corporation in Bavaria. They would track its ownership through a company in Sweden, another in Roumania, and finally would smell out a still more distant ownership in South America. After this dodging across oceans, the company would turn up in Essen once more, as the personal property of industrialist Flick, or steel-baron Mannesmann.

It was to collect the files, investigate the top men, and find out where the threads of ownership led, that the Finance Division of the Allied Control Council were working out of Essen. The investigators came from banks, investment houses, and the Department of Justice; like the scientific investigators, some were civilians accredited to the Army, and others were Allied Army officers who had volunteered for the job where they believed their background of finance would be most valuable. I was impressed by the diligence and farsightedness of some of the younger officers in this group of investigators. Among them were men who had volunteered out of a strongly patriotic conviction that a major requirement for future peace was exposure of these hidden ownerships with their war-making potentialities. Their recommendations were often brilliant; but, inevitably, were sometimes lost in confusion, or even in actual obstructionism in high echelons.

After World War I, no attempt was made to uncover the hidden assets of the Reich, and there was no talk of scrapping German industry. Aside from the west bank of the Rhine and the Saar Basin, Germany was not occupied. Alarmists who began in the middle ‘30s to point out the danger of Germany’s rebuilding and rearming were greeted for the most part with skepticism, or accused of chauvinism. How could Germany rearm, it was argued. She did not have the foreign exchange to obtain the necessary raw materials. But Germany’s licensing and patent agreements were bringing in foreign exchange, and she was building favorable balances by means of clearing agreements, and barter. The fact that Germany had actual ownership in foreign factories was overlooked. And now that we have won World War II, there is some danger of our overlooking the same fact today.

The Reich industrialists had a great deal to gain by the ascendancy of a Führer with avowed expansionist aims, although in the end Hitler got away from them. However, many of the big German industrialists did not find it necessary to become Nazis in the sense of joining the Party, and today these men are careful to point out to anyone who will listen that they were never actual card-holding Party members.

Following the financial network of the Ruhr through to the end brings the disquieting conclusion that we in America and England helped to finance World War II. After the end of World War I, independent German steel-manufacturing groups formed the Vereinigte Stahlwerke, which they organized in order to create a huge integrated property that could borrow money outside of Germany. To this concern England and America, through banks and investment trusts, lent money to rehabilitate German industry. We lent to Vereinigte Stahlwerke and other German enterprises almost twice as much as Germany had paid us, on paper and in cash, in reparations.

The Krupps came in for their gravy after the last war, and were eagerly hoping to do so again. This was made very clear to me by Dr. Bernhardt Jansen, one of their directors. Dr. Jansen had a home in Werden, not far from the Villa Hügel. When I called to see him, he began discussing the financial situation at once, his heavy plump face creased with an almost ludicrous eagerness.

“We’re waiting anxiously,” he said, “to contact those friends with whom we were never at war.”

“Are you getting anywhere?” I asked.

“We can only hope,” he said, and went on to tell me that after the last World War the Krupp Company had received a loan of twenty million dollars through Goldman Sachs.

“We could use it right now,” he added wistfully. “If only we could talk to some of those people, or to some real business men in banks in London, everything would be much easier now.”

Dr. Jansen asked his wife to bring me some tea—some of the good tea of which they still had a little but which they usually saved for Sundays. While the tea was brewing, he went on to tell me how “decidedly unpopular” the war really was in Germany. “By this war,” said Dr. Jansen, “we lost many of our old customers.”

As we sat over our cups of tea, I heard a great deal about what Dr. Jansen had done to help the Jews. There had been some Jews and half-Jews on the Krupp Board of Directors. “I tried to keep these men on the Board as long as possible,” said Dr. Jansen, “until the Party forbade it.” The inventor of stainless steel was a Jew, and also the Krupp representative for foreign countries.

“He is still in Sweden. In 1935 I was able to help him take his whole capital to Sweden,” said Dr. Jansen, “leaving, of course, one-third here for taxes.”

I was glad that Dr. Jansen had saved a Jew. I was interested, also, that through philanthropy the Krupp Company had maintained a toehold in a neutral country. Perhaps I was unjustly cynical in this, but during my travels through Germany I had failed to find many Jews of small means whose friends had been able to save them. And I could not forget those Jews I had seen, in lifeless, naked piles of anonymity, who had no friends on Boards of Directors, and who had no assets to move into Sweden.

After my interesting talk with Dr. Jansen I drove to Düsseldorf to call on Dr. Rohland, technical director of the Vereinigte Stahlwerke. The name of Walter Rohland is little known outside Germany. The reason for this is that he skyrocketed to importance through the personal favor of Hitler just after the war began. Hitler made him head of the Reichs Vereinigung Eisen, created to increase armament output, and so great was his authority that to Germans engaged in industry his name ranked next to Göring’s. Dr. Rohland was the czar of the German iron and steel industry. He directed the war industries, allocated raw materials, stated what output was to be expected of each plant, made most of the important decisions about armament manufacture. If a plant wanted to put on a new wing, or add a new department, permission must first be asked of Dr. Rohland. If Dr. Rohland said a thing was to be done a certain way, it was done that way. His colleagues in steel considered him selfish and personally ambitious. He was hated and feared—but obeyed.

This formidable creature was overwhelmingly cordial when I arrived. He loved America, he told me, and had spent many happy days in Canton, Ohio. He spoke fair English and he smiled a great deal. He seemed to be remarkably busy. His office was humming with assistants and stenographers. This I found a bit puzzling, since at this early stage nothing in the nature of a go-ahead had been given to the steel industry. He had just returned from one of his trips, a fact which was still more puzzling to me, since gasoline and travel permits were very hard to get. He took me into his inner office and served me hot coffee at once; there was no need to wait even while it was being made. He pushed a button; a secretary came in with coffee. I was impressed by this, because coffee for Germans is even rarer than gasoline. He started out the conversation on such a familiar note that it made me feel at home at once. Dr. Rohland had saved a Jew. He had done even more than that: he had joined the Party to be better able to help his Jewish friends. Moreover, he had ever so many friends in England and America, so many, in fact, that he handed me a sheaf of mimeographed copies of letters he and they had exchanged.

With a fairly rich experience in the field of American advertising and publicity, I have seldom seen a more extensive public-relations job than Dr. Walter Rohland had done on Dr. Rohland. His mimeograph department must have been pretty busy. The most impressive document in all this paper work was a four-page composition, entitled “My Personal Opinion About the War.” In this, he concluded that “war only destroys the social welfare of mankind,” and he was careful to stress that when it comes to responsibility for war, “only the political authorities are guilty,” never the industrialists.

But the letters were the most interesting. He had copied an astonishing number of them, almost fifty. They began in 1936 and ran up to the very threshold of war. They were addressed to his friends in the Iron and Steel Institute in London and to various American steel executives, in Republic, U.S. Steel, and other companies, and in Union Carbon and Carbide. In these letters Dr. Rohland proposed exchanging everything: exchanging visiting scientists, exchanging groups of workmen, exchanging data on steel, exchanging even the children 03’ leading industrial families. The purpose of these exchanges between Germany and England or America was to “strengthen cultural understanding” and “to make a bridge between our two countries.” It seemed to me that he had been a little too eager to make these swaps, especially since his proposals continued up to the very fortnight that war broke out. One proposition, made as late as 1939, suggested an exchange of his own children with those of an official of Union Carbon and Carbide (who did not bite, I may add). I wondered whether he was striving for culture or hostages.

In the light of later events, there is no doubt that Dr. Rohland had set out on a serialized suspicion-lulling program. Dr. Rohland’s was one of many voices, and his reached an important audience: the British steel manufacturers. The plan was to drown out with words of international friendship the sounds of ingots being hammered into guntubes and steel sheets being rolled into tank armor. When the appeasement quartet, Chamberlain, Hitler, Daladier and Mussolini, met at Munich to do their historic job of carving up a democracy, Dr. Rohland did not stop to use the mails. He sent telegrams of congratulations to his British steel friends: everyone could rejoice that “the four great statesmen of Munich have jointly secured the peace of Europe for generations to come.” And in case any of his Iron and Steel Institute friends might miss the point, he followed up his telegrams with letters emphasizing that “Munich gave such good results...that the peace is secured for generations.” In his long view over generations he even out-muniched. Munich, which aspired only to “peace in our time.” He got good answers to his handouts, too. One of his British steel friends, thanking him for his “charming telegram,” wrote: “I must send you just a few lines to tell you how much we, like you, rejoice at this happy ending to the past dark days of anxiety.”

While Dr. Rohland was busy carrying on this tony correspondence about international friendship, he must have been even busier channeling his steel through the armament plants and airplane factories. In his high post with Vereinigte Stahlwerke he was in a position to know his country’s war schedule.

As the opening day of World War II drew closer, his correspondence with the Iron and Steel Institute in London grew ever more feverishly cordial. Up to the last days of peace, he was going through the motions of making plans to visit his British friends. His letters contained postscripts from Mrs. Rohland to their wives, sending greetings, and referring pleasantly to past exchanges of hospitality. The last letter on file from the Iron and Steel Institute, written on August 22, 1939, contains some lines that Dr. Rohland and his colleagues might well have studied closely.

“Much is likely to happen in the next few weeks,” wrote the Institute’s Secretary, K. Headlam-Morley. “You will know this country well enough to realize that there will be no hesitation here in fulfilling our obligations to our Allies whatever the cost, and that, though we should regret the necessity, we should not fear the result. We wonder however sometimes whether that is fully realized in all quarters.” Then there were the usual courteous expressions of personal friendship, after which the letter closed on a warning note. “It is essential to realize that we all are determined to keep absolutely all the engagements on which we have entered with eyes fully open. Bluff can go too far...”

I had only to look out of Dr. Rohland’s window at the ruins of Düsseldorf to see that bluff had gone too far. It seemed to me that

Dr. Rohland had gone too far, also. In his desperate effort to present a dazzling roll call of his Allied friends, I thought he had copied at least one letter too many.

“For whom were these copies prepared?” I asked.

Dr. Rohland did not answer my question directly, but indicated that he hoped they would make a good impression on Military Government and on any American or British officers who might visit him. (And perhaps they did, for although his chief subordinates had already been arrested at the beginning of the occupation, Dr. Rohland kept his liberty for another half-year.)

As I rose to leave, Dr. Rohland’s face looked a little tired underneath the perpetual smile that he tried to impose upon it. For a moment the smile faded, and I thought I saw the real Walter Rohland. His expression showed more than mere anxiety. I suppose it was fear.

CHAPTER 14 — Alles Kaput

THOSE WERE glorious times,” said Herr Schuppener, “but since 1912 everything has gone down, down, down.”

Herr Hermann Schuppener was the private librarian to the old Krupp couple, the Gustav Krupp von Bohlens, now in their Salzburg retreat in the south. The year 1912, which he remembered with such nostalgia, was the year of the great Krupp Tournament. All the elderly citizens of Essen and Düsseldorf and all the older Krupp executives remembered it with equal vividness. The pageant was an entire year in preparation; it was planned to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Krupp Cast-Steel Works.

For twelve months artists in Düsseldorf were engaged in designing costumes for the pageant. Krupp executives were learning to balance on horseback in their chainmail suits. Workmen at the plant were kept busy smoothing off and fitting the metal joints of the costumes. Directors, who all had leading parts, were coming home bruised from armored rehearsals on horseback. Five-year-old Alfried Krupp had an ermine-bordered suit and his pony had a gold-burnished saddle. The final dress rehearsal was a thrilling event, attended by crowds of ordinary people who might not get a good view the next day when Kaiser Wilhelm arrived, along with the Imperial Chancellor, various European Kings, and all the Admirals and Generals of Germany.

“I didn’t have a chance to see this magnificent sight myself,” Herr Schuppener told me wistfully, “because there were all the letters, the messages, and all the telegrams of congratulations. And the many presents; and all of these had to be recorded and catalogued.”

The pageant symbolized the birth of the Krupp Works in circumstances of imperial splendor. In addition to having an Emperor in their invited audience, the Krupps arranged to have one in their cast of characters as well. To enhance the founding of the firm still more, the Krupp Company pushed back its origin three hundred years. To Emperor Maximilian I in the sixteenth century, it seemed, there came a vision of the future of Krupp. This vision appeared somewhat incongruously in the midst of a tournament in which knights (the perspiring Krupp executives and members of the Board of Directors) jousted before ladies (Big Bertha and her chosen friends). As the Emperor went into a trance it was revealed to him that one day there would be a great armament works making guns for future generations still unborn.

Only one thing went wrong. It could hardly have been more unfortunate or more ill-timed. On the morning of the pageant, after the Kaiser, the Kings, and the Admirals had arrived, and while Herr Gustav Krupp was giving them a welcoming speech in the factory administration building, word came of a terrible accident. There had been an explosion at the mines and 240 men were killed. The festivities had to be called off.

In later years the Krupps, growing either more sophisticated or more sensitive, tried to hush up references to the Tournament. One Krupp employee who wrote jokingly about it was discharged, and a book containing some gossipy paragraphs about the pageant was withdrawn from circulation and all possible copies painstakingly run down and confiscated.

Our group of scientific and financial bloodhounds had a good time at Hügel. At the end of each day,-after eating Cook Wilhelmina’s excellent ice cream from the gold ice-cream spoons, and enjoying fine Moselle or Niersteiner that Herr Dohrmann selected for us from the wine cellar, we would regroup for the evening’s ritual: the flower parade. Probably never again shall I see so many financiers picking flowers. Our group varied each evening, depending on the current influx of experts, but there were three steady flower pickers in the magnificent Krupp gardens, all three young and brilliant cartel-sleuths: Major Ernst Ophuls, former San Francisco Vice-President of the Bank of America; Major James MacQuade, former CPA for the City of London, and Jim Martin, former professor at St. John’s College, and now with the U.S. Department of Justice.

Flower pickers and all, we were delighted the day we heard that Field Marshal Montgomery and four Generals were coming to pay us a call. The Field Marshal was visiting Essen to inspect the ruins of the Krupp Works, and afterward would drop in at the Villa for tea. Major Messer, the efficient and thoughtful administrator of Hügel, had a delicate problem. He realized that some of the guests would appreciate having a drink more stimulating than tea, but the Field Marshal’s abstemiousness regarding both liquor and tobacco was well known. The Major’s decision was to issue a directive that none of us was to smoke during the tea party, and that wine would be served, but nothing stronger. We would have a museum wine chosen by Herr Dohrmann, chocolate cake by Wilhelmina, floral arrangements by Bourke-White.

At noon of the great day, the Field Marshal was greeted in front of the Essenerhof by a color guard of the 507th Parachute Division, headed by Colonel Edson Raff. Colonel Raff is a remarkable young officer, who made the first of many jumps with his men in Tunisia (it is my understanding that this was the first Allied combat jump of the war), and is the author of the book, I Jumped to Fight. Next the Field Marshal proceeded to the prize Krupp ruin, the gun shop, where in the midst of a caved-in roof lay some of the world’s biggest guntubes. He inspected with particular interest a mammoth gun designed to ride on double railroad tracks and fire projectiles with an enormous piercing power, penetrating a minimum of twenty-five meters of rock or five meters of fortification concrete. This gun, if it had been completed, would have been a twin to the historic gun of the battle for Sevastopol. (The Sevastopol gun had been commenced in the winter of 1940-41, actually half a year before Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, and had been created with the fortifications of Sevastopol specifically in mind.) The Field Marshal climbed over a litter of large guntubes designed for a new supertank, which, fortunately, was not completed at the time when supertanks would have counted. Of course, atomic bombs have spelled the end of supertanks, but during the last year of the war, when the Germans were trying to push them through, they would have been potent weapons if they had ever reached the battlefield.

In the heat-treating department, Field Marshal Montgomery walked between stacks of navy plates and scattered slabs of rolled ingots, ready to be cut, heat-treated and “superhardened” into tank armor. In this frightfully wrecked plant, thousands of tons of steel had been heat-treated each month throughout most of the war, which meant a steady yield of finished navy plate and tank armor. With great effort and ingenuity the work was kept going through the difficulties created by bombings. Finally one great night raid in October ‘44 demolished the entire water system, which is vital for steel production. From then on until the war’s end, the steel industry of the central Ruhr lay in almost complete idleness.

After having completed the plant inspection, the Field Marshal proceeded to Hügel, where we had a large reception for him. He sat happily in the Krupp study with his one British and three American Generals, and while they sipped Pfalz Wine, vintage of 1914, he poured tea for himself and ate heartily of peanut-butter sandwiches and Wilhelmina’s cake. Then, with his escort of Generals, he made a tour of the castle, inspecting everything from the beautifully rigged ship model of the Germania in its glass case to the Kaiser’s gold-plated bathroom. On the way out he stopped to autograph the guest book in the vestibule.

“What’s the date?” he asked as he wrote his name.

“The third, sir,” said Major Messer.

We were all amused when we noticed later that the Field Marshal, adjusted as he must have been to thinking in most precise terms, to synchronizing whole armies according to intricate schedules, had put down “3rd May,” when it was the 3rd of June.

It was after this august party had left that we learned the unthinkable had happened. For weeks we had lived at Hügel, in the midst of all the luxuries, all the portable souvenirs, without so much as a gold ice-cream spoon’s finding its way into an expert’s or officer’s or enlisted man’s pocket. But on the grand tour of Generals through the castle one of them, an American who was wearing two stars, caught sight of a little goatskin rug on the floor of the Kaiser’s bathroom. Picking it up was obviously impossible in the company of so much other rank. When he reached the hall he motioned to his aide, and the aide, carrying out his commanding officer’s instructions, rolled up the Kaiser’s bathmat and carried it away under his arm.

The resentment in the Airborne—the 17th Airborne were responsible for running Hügel—as this news spread was based not so much on the incident itself as on the fact that the looting General was, as they put it, “no more front echelon than corps.” In the ethical code of most soldiers, combat carries with it the right to loot. “That Big Wheel never heard a gun fired,” said the men, “unless it was in a parade.”

Shortly after that tea party, our residence at Hügel was broken up. The Americans were moving out, the British were taking over the Ruhr, the Hard Coal Commission was taking over Hügel, and our days in the Krupp castle were at an end. Many changes were to be made by the new occupying unit. Alfried Krupp was to go to jail; he was called for a little later by a moving van and taken away to solitary confinement. Herr Dohrmann would be retained for only a short while, to get things reorganized at Hügel. The other house servants were dismissed.

Majors Messer and Biggs, with Lieutenant Wittig, their efficient administration now completed, turned over the keys of the castle to the new contingent of British who were moving in. The Hidden Assets investigators transferred their billet to Düsseldorf, and offered me a home with them.

We were all sad to leave. Our group had been unusually congenial, and there had been a kind of magic about Hügel, with its dark echoes of a dying era.

The morning after our mass departure I drove back to Hügel to pick up some flashbulbs I had forgotten. During the night, as the new unit moved in, something in the nature of a tornado had swept through the castle. Knickknacks, books, dinner plates, victrola records—everything conveniently movable had been looted. I don’t know just why a sort of honor among thieves should have prevailed so strongly in our group, and not among the newcomers. Somehow, moving into these hospitable surroundings, with the recent pressures of war gratefully removed, and with responsible officers taking the lead, we all seemed to graduate and become civilized human beings again. Our record, unblemished except for the incident of the General’s goat rug, was something in which all of us had taken pride.

Herr Dohrmann came out to bid me goodbye. Usually so impassive, he was in a state of terrible agitation. He had just come from checking the bedrooms. Two British Brigadiers were expected that day, and he had fixed up the Kaiser’s suite for one and Mr. Krupp’s suite for the other. During the quarter-hour when he had turned his back the soap and towels had been taken from the bathrooms, and the sheets had vanished from the beds. An entire world was dissolving for Herr Dohrmann, and he knew it well. The looting of the soap and sheets were to him what the splitting of the atom was to the Krupp cannon-makers. Together, the Krupp Dynasty and the Krupp Housemaster had reached the end of the road. He stood, a spare and aging figure under the great stone portico, twisting his thin hands. As I climbed into the jeep, I could hear him repeating over and over, “Alles kaput! Alles kaput!”

CHAPTER 15 — Home Is Where the Heart Is

THE MAN from Missouri was very nervous. He ran to overtake me in the corridor as he saw me leaving the French Director’s office in the Röchling Steel Works in Saarbrücken. His heavy German accent made his English difficult to understand, and there were permanent lines of worry between his eyes. He was in a great hurry to show me his American passport, and as he searched in his pocket for it with his left hand, he managed somehow to start shaking hands with me with his right. He kept pumping my hand until I thought I would never be able to free it from his moist grasp.

“All that is necessary is to tell them I was detained by events of war, is it not so?”

I couldn’t catch the drift of this, and he rushed on to say, “The Military Government wanted to tell me my citizenship had expired. That was because you are supposed to go back every two years to America for keeping your passport good. But I said to them ‘No, I was not able to get back.’”

I had managed to free my hand by now, and I took a look at his passport. He was Eugene Pracht of St. Genevieve, Missouri, a naturalized American citizen, who had come back to the homeland with his wife, also a naturalized American, and his son, who had been born in St. Louis. Mr. Pracht’s specialty was lime, he told me. He had been a superintendent in the St. Genevieve Lime and Quarry Corporation, and had also worked in the drafting department of Babcock and Wilcox in Ohio, designing boilers. Then, after coming back to Germany with his family, he “got mixed up in the war situation and couldn’t get home.”

Like some of the greater industrial figures in Germany, Mr. Pracht was ready with his handout. He had photostated copies of a seven-year-old blurb about himself in a cement-and-lime trade magazine called Rock Products. This had been written on the occasion of his breaking away from St. Genevieve to go back to Saarbrücken, and it was the kind of flattering farewell that might have been expected: how much his lime-and-cement friends would miss him; what a fine fellow he had been; and so on.

Mr. Pracht had held a very nice job during the war. His post as technical expert on lime at the Röchling Steel Works had mushroomed during the German occupation of France; between 1941 and 1944 he had spent most of his time actually in France. This was because his boss, Herr Hohlshuh, at the Röchling Works, had been a German Iron and Steel Director for eastern France.

It was an interesting detail that the French industrialist who had been assistant to Herr Hohlshuh then was the same French director who had been sent back to Germany to manage Röchling now. And as new director of Röchling, he chose his old boss to serve directly under him. Thus the German steel director during the occupation of France became the assistant to the French steel director during the occupation of Saarland. The two had simply reversed their positions as their respective countries alternated between defeat and victory. After this exchange, Herr Hohlshuh and Monsieur Georges Thedrel continued to work amicably together as before, and Mr. Pracht, the naturalized American, worked quite smoothly with both of them, just as before.

I was interested in learning what I could about how well the French and Germans had co-operated when the Germans were on French soil. I had been given previous accounts of French foreign labor in Germany, and had been told that among the various nationalities the Germans could count on the best help from the French. French laborers were fed the best of all the workers, paid the most, and allowed to send home their earnings through the Reichsbank, an unthinkable privilege for any other type of slave labor. Also, the French were better organized to bargain. In Essen, for example, they dealt with Arbeitsfront through a Betriebs Obermann, an overseer who acted as a “man of confidence” between the French labor and the Germans. In one dramatic instance about which I was told, after a furious bombing had started fires which threatened a large quantity of machinery, the factory superintendent rushed to the “man of confidence” and secured a squad of French prisoners of war who, according to the German superintendent, “worked like nobody’s business” and saved the machinery.

I thought Mr. Pracht with his experience in occupied France should be able to throw light on how the French in their own occupied plants co-operated with the Germans. “We got along swell,” said Mr. Pracht. “There was real collaboration.” During the German occupation of France, Mr. Pracht’s particular area had been Lorraine, where lime has important applications in ore refining and in certain steel processes. He had found his experience with the French very pleasant indeed. “All those people in the lime plants were very nice,” Mr. Pracht told me. “I improved some of their furnaces. I improved some of their products; they appreciated it. They were turning out burnt lime for making steel—that is, for the ore plants in Lorraine. The people in eastern France and western Germany have to work together.”

While Mr. Pracht and I were talking, Herr Hohlshuh came down the corridor and he too started shaking my hand as though he would never let it go. I was beginning to see why British Military Government had issued a directive against shaking hands with Germans, and I resolved to obey if myself in the future. Herr Hohlshuh’s hand was as dry as the skin on his face: I had seldom seen a forehead and cheeks so threaded with tiny wrinkles. Herr Hohlshuh, though without Mr. Pracht’s advantage of American citizenship, spoke better English, and told me more about how the Germans got along with the French during their occupation.

“Technicians always get along,” he said. “Technical people always understand one another. There was wonderful collaboration in France between the German and French engineers.”

“Yes, wonderful,” Mr. Pracht parroted his boss. “Good collaboration—it is the best way.”

“They were no trouble at all, the French,” said Herr Hohlshuh. “They produced everything we could reasonably expect.” I was sure there must be a reverse side to this coin, for I knew of many French fliers—some of them were personal friends of mine—who had been rescued by the courageous French underground and shuttled away to fight against the Germans once more. There must have been some counterpart in the industrial picture. But naturally I could not expect to hear about this from Herr Hohlshuh or Mr. Pracht.

“Always we could get along with the French,” affirmed Mr. Pracht, “as long as we were polite with them, and nice.”

There was no doubt that Mr. Pracht had been very polite and nice to everyone on both sides of all fences, and so had his wife. This hospitable couple had been so polite and nice to the Americans who occupied the Saar with the first wave that they had achieved results at once. Whereas most good houses were immediately requisitioned for reasons of military necessity (and the necessity was very real in a place like Saarbrücken, even more grimly flattened than most German cities), still the Prachts had kept their home to themselves. They had an “off limits” sign in the yard, a tangible sign of success with the authorities. There was wine in their cellar (that was really a miracle) and packs of Chesterfields on each little coffee table in their well-furnished living room.

Mrs. Pracht, although she had been an American citizen for fewer years than her husband, spoke better English than he. She was overjoyed to see an American woman. She was longing to get back to her friends in the United States; what did I know about the possibilities?

“Do you really expect to get back to America?” I asked.

“We have to,” said Mrs. Pracht. “Our house is there.”

“Another house!”

“I have property in the United States in St. Genevieve, Missouri,” said Mr. Pracht, with a good deal of pride. “I had it rented all through the war. The bank took care of it. My house rented for forty dollars a month. The bank took care of renting, and of repairs—everything. I have never heard from them. Mail doesn’t move yet.”

“But there are ways,” said Mrs. Pracht.

“What ways?” I asked.

“We gave a letter to a very nice American Captain in the Heavy Field Artillery,” said Mrs. Pracht, and then added hastily, “Well, you know,” it is illegal, but the Captain found men going back.” There was no doubt that in the mind of Mrs. Pracht they were already rocking in their wicker chairs on their front porch in St. Genevieve, their experience in wartime Germany just an interesting memory to tell their neighbors.

“How are your friends from Missouri going to feel about all this?” I asked.

“What else could we do?” said Mrs. Pracht. “We never would have thought a war would break out. Just considering the family life, it would have been much easier over there in America. At best, we would have been together and not had all the worries.”

“And not had that affair over Walter,” added her husband. “Only sixteen and a half, our son is, and they tried to pick him up. What a trouble we had to keep Walter out of the Volkssturm!”

“And with the baby to think of,” said Mrs. Pracht. “How could I travel with such a little baby? What would you have done?”

I knew that return to America had been made practical and convenient for people like that. After the war had broken out, there was excellent train service provided to take them from Germany to an embarkation point in Italy. And later, when Italy herself was in the war, there were American planes to fly them from Berlin to Portugal. In 1940 the American Consulate had warned naturalized Americans of German birth to go back to the United States or risk losing their citizenship.

I knew further that in 1938 Germany had made a great effort to get its German-born back to the fatherland, whether or not they were naturalized Americans. Technicians were in particular demand as were students who might be able to broadcast for the German government. When the situation became tense, in 1938, the German Consulate gave orders for Germans to return, even acrobats who were touring the United States. That was the big year for the flow back to Germany, and the “re-immigrants,” as they were called, were treated particularly well and given a “special-facilities letter” which they could carry everywhere in Germany. I thought it significant that 1938 should have been the year that the Prachts abandoned Missouri for Saarland, and I found it-particularly interesting that they should not have heeded the American Consulate’s warnings to come home—for I felt sure they must have received them. Without my asking her, Mrs. Pracht seemed to feel the necessity of explaining.

“In January, 1940, when I took my little daughter to the Consulate to be registered, they talked to me about going back. But I didn’t know why we should want to go through all the trouble and hardship, when we didn’t believe war was really coming.”

“You thought that Germany would win,” I said.

“Just knowing that America decided the last war,” said Mr. Pracht, “I thought that Hitler would keep out of a war that involved America.”

“What would you have done?” said Mrs. Pracht. “It all came so unexpectedly.”

“I had to do something to keep my family alive,” said Mr. Pracht.

“Even working against your adopted country during a war?”

“What could I do?” Mr. Pracht repeated. “Because I was an engineer, I was always invited here and there. All I did was to help make machinery for general rolling of steel and ingots. All for general purposes.”

Mrs. Pracht kept nervously passing me the cigarettes, never noticing when I still held a lighted one in my hand. She kept telling me that she so hoped I would accept their hospitality for the night. I could have the nice guest room all to myself, and it had a private bath. I had seen both the guest room and the bath, and they were indeed very nice. The bath was tiled in a dark maroon and matched the thick silk quilts on the guest bed; the bath towels were ecru, monogrammed in red. But I was more interested in keeping the conversation on the uses of the products from the steel plants where Mr. Pracht had worked.

Yes, he knew a good deal of steel went into ammunition. But sometimes metal was used for food cans. Or just for I-beams, for structural purposes only.

“We never really knew what that stuff was used for,” said Mr. Pracht.

“And think of all the hardships we went through,” said Mrs. Pracht. “When Saarbrücken was being bombed last October 5, the whole city was completely destroyed. And we were lying in the shelter.”

“And then the way the Gestapo would listen,” said Mr. Pracht. “They had a microphone on a long pole and they would lift it up to the bedroom windows to hear what people were saying.”

I found this a fascinating detail, and when I questioned them about it I learned that it had been something of a comfort to have Papa in the house. Papa Kremer, Mr. Pracht’s father-in-law, was first assistant in the Justice Department, a Party member, of course, working immediately under the civil court judge.

“That must have helped you,” I said.

“We didn’t have any advantages. We didn’t have any disadvantages,” said Mrs. Pracht. “Except for the affair with Walter when they tried to pick him up, they left us alone.”

Leaving the Prachts alone was exactly what I proposed to do also. There were not many roofs under which to spend the night in Saarland, but still I did not think I wished to stay in the Prachts’ maroon-and-ecru guest room. Keeping my hands firmly in my pockets, to prevent any farewell handshakings, I said goodbye.

It was growing dark as I headed out of the town, but I could still make out the outlines of the Rochling’s Eisen and Stahlwerke. It was a large plant, and must have produced a good deal of steel up to the time of the last great bombings. I doubted whether even a lime technician would believe all that steel went for I-beams and food cans. But then, it was Eugene Pracht, not I, who was from Missouri.

CHAPTER 16 — Hildegarde Again

ALL through the time I spent in the Ruhr the recollection of my talk with Hildegarde Roselius puzzled and worried me. It seemed so strange that this educated and intelligent woman, who had been an interesting person in New York, should prove such an ardent and unrepentant Nazi. Perhaps in some way I had misunderstood her and had been unjust. It worried me, and a few weeks after the end of the war, when I was driving through Bremen on my way to Kiel, I stopped at Number Three Bottscher Strasse to call on her again.

“I have something quite special for you,” said Hildegarde, ushering me into her cloakroom-apartment. “See, a surprise—a princess!”

Hildegarde’s royal refugee, who had come from Bavaria on foot, with an occasional lift by truck, was Princess Marie Adelheide Reuss zu Lippe. She was related to the royal families of Great Britain and Holland through one of those typically complicated relationships of European royalty. She boasted distant kinship with an English queen and, more closely, with the present Prince Bernhard zu Lippe-Biesterfeld of the Netherlands.

During her long journey on the roads from south to north Germany, this royal hitchhiker had learned some of the ropes. When she finally arrived at the outskirts of Bremen, night was falling and, rather than try to make her way on foot through the almost unrecognizable streets, she had hunted up the nearest unit of American soldiers.

“I said to them ‘Will you kindly arrest me?’” the Princess said.

“‘Why do you want to be arrested?’ they asked.

“I explained that it was only a half-hour until curfew, and it would be too late to find my friend that night. I introduced myself, and said I would have no place to stay. ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘a princess!’ And they were very happy and gave me a nice room to myself and, best of all, a wonderful breakfast. They gave me eggs made with some wonderful powder, and your American flakes of corn out of a little box. They were very nice, and then they helped me find my friend Hildegarde.”

Since the Princess’s arrival, she and Hildegarde had been busy gathering blackberries on the moor. The two women were happy in the possession of some extra sugar which the Princess had been allotted, not because of her royal status, but because she was a refugee.

“We are four persons living here,” said Hildegarde. “We get half a pound of sugar per month each. But the Princess got an extra pound because she came as a refugee, so we are able to make jam.” In fact, my arrival had come during the boiling-down procedure, which was being conducted in the shelf-like kitchen, where they were stewing the berries.

“Could you find enough blackberries?” I asked.

“You couldn’t make up a wholesale business with it,” said Hildegarde, “but we will have about twenty bottles of juice, besides the jam.”

Sitting in Hildegarde’s little cloakroom, discussing the amount of jam obtainable from berries picked on the moor and from the extra sugar rationed to refugees, the Princess was just a tired middle-aged woman. Her face in its frame of bobbed gray hair had a soft charm, and her features wore a perpetual expression of piteousness, as though to say, “How can this have happened to me? I am a Princess.”

She told me how she had made her way to Berlin during the bombings to see her son, who was severely wounded. “During my four weeks there I never left my helmet aside,” she said. “It was the phosphorus bombs that were the worst. When a whole street is burning, the flames take the oxygen out of the air. A fire storm arises, and you can’t breathe any more. You just fall down in the street and are suffocated. I have seen that myself in Berlin. One time I was trying to get to the house of a friend, and I saw many people very far down the street, crossing the street and falling down. Later on, they had to put walls all round the place because they couldn’t bury all the bodies.”

“You know,” broke in Hildegarde, “after the bombings, it was funny how I lost all sense of time. It is coming back. If you had asked me anything four months ago, I could have given facts but not in regard to time.”

“It’s the sounds you never forget,” said the Princess. “In the night when you are awake, you hear the moo of a cow and you think it is a siren.”

The door opened while we were talking and another of Hildegarde’s house guests came in, one of two refugee artists for whom beds had been set up in an alcove of her cloakroom. The newcomer was a small mouse-colored painter named Josef Goetz, who in happier days had been a member of a Nazi-sponsored artists’ circle in Berlin. The most prominent name in this Berlin circle had been that of Breker, the sculptor, whose horses and men of the bulging-muscle school were so popular with the National Socialists that Hitler had built him a studio.

Little Josef Goetz, unlike his more famous friend, had contented himself with crayon portraits or prettified landscapes, and I was astonished to find that in devastated Bremen he was already doing a rushing business. When I expressed my surprise that artists should find such quick employment, Hildegarde said, “Why, certainly! People are buying pictures. People who are fixing up their homes may want a landscape or flower piece. Many persons want their portraits painted. Josef has been here only six weeks and already four people have ordered portraits. The daughter of a North German-Lloyd captain came in only yesterday, for a portrait to give her fiancé on his birthday. And last week we had a very pretty young lady, Fräulein Rea Grieme, whose father is a coffee importer and who has an uncle in the Bronx. You see, due to restrictions on photography, people are not allowed to have cameras and take snapshots. So naturally people like to be painted.”

I was amused at this new conception of the artists’ pinch-hitting for the photographers.

Doing portraits brought the artist, I found, a return of two to three hundred marks for a picture in ink, and eight hundred marks for a portrait in oil.

“All the Americans want to be painted,” Hildegarde told me. In nearby Wopswede, a suburb of Bremen where Herr Rorselius had sponsored artists in pre-war days, the portrait painters were doing a booming business with the 175th Infantry Regiment. Men of the 29th Division, always referred to by its members as “The Dandy Fifth,” considered themselves lucky to be stationed in the picturesque artists’ colony. One young girl painter, according to Hildegarde, was “so busy doing portraits” that she had painted eleven soldiers in just the past fortnight, at fees ranging between thirty and forty dollars each. Wopswede also specialized in handwoven tapestries, dyed from plant colors, and Fräu Heinrich Vogler, the dean of the colony, was now engaged in weaving the regimental crest of “The Dandy Fifth” into a tapestry which one of the officers had ordered for his home in the South. This art piece would set him back thirty-five dollars.

Here in Bremen, the Kaffee-Hag business was starting up, too. The factory was already operating on a small scale under our plan of operation by which food industries were given preferential licensing. Whereas pre-war Kaffee-Hag had been made of cereals like rye or bran, the factory was now using Ersatz, Hildegarde informed me, made of carrots when they could get them, but principally ground-up turnips. Defeat must taste bitter to Germans, I thought, when even their substitutes for coffee must be made of Ersatz, and even the Ersatz must be made of turnips.

“I think there is one great mistake the Allies can make,” volunteered Hildegarde. “It would be to permit unemployment in Europe.”

How readily, I reflected, the conquered were willing to hand over all responsibilities to us; especially the employment problem, with which we might have to contend in our own country.

“The soundest thing America could do would be to make a good air base in Bremen. It would be good for everybody, would be good for Germans and good for Americans. I don’t mean for military purposes, but for commerce. Keeping security depends not on ‘Big Three’ agreements, not on political discussions, but on sound private business. As soon as American capital is interested in Germany, and as soon as Germans are indebted to America, then we will have a foundation for sound international relations.”

Many Germans seemed to think we were moving into their country simply to finance it.

Hildegarde interrupted my thoughts with some remarks about the Nazi Party: “The Party always held up good war morals,” she said, as though taking it for granted that this party line would appeal to me as it did to her. “The split of last July 20 could never have taken place without underground propaganda. Many people didn’t think it fair to the Führer. He had a difficult war on his hands. People should have saved their political differences until after the war was won.”

Hildegarde sat silent for several moments, her serious expression heightened by the tautness of her face with its high cheekbones, her straight hair combed back. Then she leaned forward: “Now may I ask you a question?” she inquired. “Do you think we would have lost the war if you had not corrupted our morals? If we had stayed a united nation?”

“Yes,” I said, “because of the bombs.”

“Bombs do not break a people’s spirit,” she answered. “I have seen many men break down temporarily with their nerves, and I have seen them crying, but it was over after an hour and they started right on again. I believe the Germans could not have lost the war without internal moral disintegration.

“Germans are all talking about this. Some say, ‘It was steel against bodies.’ Others say, ‘No, it was lack of morale.’ And one young woman said to me, ‘I would go through all this bombing again if it would make us win the war.’”

Hildegarde rose from her chair and began emptying the two pails which stood in the middle of the apartment to catch the drip from the ceiling “—it had been raining heavily.

“Everything is a mess,” said the Princess, getting up to help her hostess replace the pails and standing back to judge the two spots where the drip was heaviest. “A little rain is all right, but two days of rain, that the roof cannot stand. We have had a lake in here on the floor.”

The two women sat down again and Hildegarde said she hoped it would not be long before we sent over some good books and magazines. “If you go into a bookstore you find some medical books, maybe, or works on psychology. You find all the stuff in which the ordinary person is not interested. You could specialize in out-of-the-way subjects, but you can’t find a good detective story or novel. The only new things we get are the newspapers and bulletins which the Allies are publishing in German for us to read. Germans read all about the concentration camps. And they all say ‘Why get so excited about it, after bombing innocent women and children?’”

“Have you seen the pictures?” I inquired.

“Oh yes,” replied Hildegarde. “We’ve all seen the pictures. The newspapers you give us are full of them.

“Just yesterday I was in a shop which sold hosiery, and there was a picture of a concentration camp on the counter. Three women came in and announced, ‘We have just come from a concentration camp. We ought to be served first.’ They wanted all kinds of things, shirts, stockings, and drawers. A little girl pointed to the picture and said, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been in a concentration camp. These women look well enough dressed. I would like to have privileges, too.

With memory of Buchenwald still fresh in my mind, Hildegarde’s talk left me speechless. This I had not foreseen: that after it was all over, after the sufferers had finally regained their freedom, there would be resentment of them. What a refinement of punishment, that people returning from concentration camps and receiving their pathetic little extra privileges should have to endure the envious gibes of their neighbors. Of course I had no data on these particular women in the hosiery shop, but the little girl’s chatter (obviously a repetition of much-heard talk among grownups) was an ugly warning of black years still to come for those who had already suffered.

“Those people from concentration camps really are behaving very badly,” continued Hildegarde. “I tried to buy some flowers yesterday, and they actually wanted all the flowers. They said, ‘We have a right to buy flowers first. We come from a concentration camp.’ The other day I went all the way to Bremerhaven just to buy some fish. I couldn’t get fish because the fisherman’s house was burned out. I had to wait four hours in the station for a train, and I drank a very bad coffee. Two women sitting at the next table had been in a concentration camp. One was well dressed; the other, apparently a bit of a parvenu, said, ‘Now here I have been in a concentration camp for two years just for the sake of getting a monthly allowance of two hundred marks and an extra ration card. How shall I ever live on that?’

“Other people at nearby tables resented that. We were all very much agreed that this woman was rightly put into a concentration camp. Of course, there may have been people innocently convicted,” Hildegarde concluded in a tolerant tone. “But I think there were many people justly convicted. On the whole, I am suspicious. We are simply swamped with people who come from concentration camps. If things were so very bad, and if so many people were killed, I really wonder where they all come from now.”

I needn’t have worried about my reactions the first time I saw Hildegarde. I had not been mistaken in my judgment.

SECTION VI. KRUPP: WHERE THE WAR CANCER GREW

CHAPTER 17 — In Kiel People Were Somber

“GOING to Kiel? Oh, don’t, dear lady. Kiel is a place to get away from.”

I was driving north from Lüneburg and had picked up a trim young Captain who was going as far as Plön. He was a member of a famous old British regiment, the East Riding Yeomanry, stationed in the far northern portion of Schleswig-Holstein with the British Army of Occupation.

“The people are somber, sullen, dilapidated, depressed. The whole place is broken to blazes. It’s all but rubbed out—not that that it isn’t the finest medicine, the Germans could have had.”

The Captain feared that the German people had not learned their lesson, however, and that they would not draw a moral, particularly now that the non-fraternization ban had been lifted. There was a particularly unfortunate coupling of ideas in the wording of the order, he felt, with its statement that the ban could be raised now that National Socialist elements had been eliminated.

“That certainly gave the Germans something to pat themselves on the back about,” said the Captain. “They’ve been a very haughty lot up here in the north since the non-fraternization directive was abandoned. They have the option now whether they speak to you or not. Before that they did everything in their power to make you speak to them. We think the High Command dropped a brick when they dropped that one.”

The country was growing flatter as we drove farther north, and was dotted with charming lakes. Wooded patches were giving way to low reedy marshes, and from time to time our road ran through acres of heather, rich reddish-purple in its mid-August prime.

“There’s only one thing left in Kiel that’s of any interest,” said the Captain, “and that’s Ingeline.”

“What’s Ingeline?”

“It’s a vapor that burns under the sea and makes a submarine outpace a destroyer. It’s that new fuel their Professor Walther has developed—he’s the Walther of the Walther pistol. The submarine goes out under normal propulsion, and then when it gets to the zone of operation, it turns on the Ingeline. They use the stuff as a booster, like jet in an airplane, only for attack. They were a bit too late with it, though. They needed only a few weeks, but then the war ended.”

While I was at the Krupp plant I had heard about the Walther turbine, which Krupp metallurgists had been working to perfect. It was not much bigger than an automobile engine. With the new fuel the submarine could triple its underwater speed. The new fuel carried its own oxygen, Krupp scientists told me. Just as heavy water has an extra atom of hydrogen, the Walther fuel carries an extra atom of oxygen. However, the corrosion and wear on the turbine shovels was so heavy that the lifetime of the turbine was only two hours, and it was practical to use it for only eight or ten minutes at a time before giving it a drying treatment.

“All they need,” said the Captain, “is to have a chap like Walther put an atomic warhead on a torpedo, and we’ve had it, haven’t we? He’s a bit of a menace. But they’ve already had him in London to tell the Admiralty what he knows. And there’s been a guard clapped on his factory, of course. They say that a man was just cleaning up in it the other day, and a drop of this stuff fell on him from a pipe and he went alight like a torch and burned to death.

“Walther is an odd bird. Simply a scientist. He doesn’t care anything about politics—all he’s interested in are his incredible inventions. He’s a man who turns out fabulous schemes all day long. Yes, Professor Walther is quite a big noise.”

I dropped the Captain near the Schloss, the ancient castle overlooking the twin lakes of Plön, and drove on toward Kiel. I decided to hunt up the Professor—not to quiz him about his scientific discoveries, which I was sure would be beyond me, but to find out whether anyone so important in Hitler’s war machine could really be “simply a scientist” and completely unconscious of politics.

As I drove into Kiel, the city seemed to me even more grim from the ground than it had from the air when I had flown over it just before V-E Day. It was indeed “all but rubbed out,” and to make it even drearier, rain was falling. The Captain had warned me that Kiel had a climate “worse than London.” In the dismal drizzle people were scrounging through the wreckage, hunting for firewood. As I stopped in the central square to find out where Dr. Walther lived, I watched a girl tugging an awkward piece which, when she finally dislodged it from the rubble, turned out to be a table. It had begun to pour by then, so she simply set up the table at the edge of the street and sat under it, waiting for the rain to let up.

In their home on the outskirts of the city the Walthers were better off. A bomb had damaged one end of the roof, but Dr. Walther had simply replaced the entire roof with submarine plates.

The scientist had a fleshy figure, a fleshy face, and thick black hair combed back from his forehead in a pompadour. He was about forty five years old, and there was nothing remarkable about his appearance. His wife, however, was extraordinary. She looked like the female Nazi villain in the movies, with bushy eyebrows overhanging a handsome face. She was thirty-six years old, and as cold as a cobra. Her name was Ingeborg.

“Then your wife must have been your inspiration when you were developing Ingeline,” I said.

“Yes, my husband named it after me,” said Ingeborg, not waiting for him to reply. “I wish I had invented it,” she added enviously.

Ingeborg had studied in London, and upon returning to Germany with the rise of the Führer she was given a high position in the women’s Nazi youth movement. She had been sports director, or, as she called it, “sporting director.”

“It was very nice,” said Ingeborg. “I was working in the Arbeitsdienst. It was the ‘Working Girls’ Service,’ but there were all sorts of girls from the higher classes. It was a system introduced by National Socialism. The girls were all very nice.”

She had been sorry to give up her social work, but in her five years of marriage she had had four children, who kept her very busy.

“What did you think of Hitler’s social program?” I asked.

“All the people had food, money, and dwellings,” said Ingeborg. “The Führer wanted the best for the German nation.”

“Economic development is very slow now,” said Dr. Walther. “The Allies are very slow about cleaning up the streets.”

“Maybe it is not the main objective of the Allies to start economic development or clean up the streets,” I said.

“We could start economic development much faster but we are not allowed,” said Dr. Walther.

“Did you expect to win the war?” I asked.

“I hoped,” said Ingeborg, “but we had too many enemies.”

“We hoped,” said her husband, “but after Stalingrad I knew we would lose. Up to Stalingrad we only went forward. After Stalingrad I saw we could go back, too.”

“And during the war food was rare,” said Ingeborg.

“And now it will be worse,” her husband said, “with twelve million Germans coming from the East, from Polish and Czech territory. Millions of Germans are going to die this winter. What is happening to Germans now is worse than the concentration camps.”

“You have said that Hitler wanted the best for the German nation,” I said. “Why do you think putting Jews in concentration camps was for the good of the German nation?”

“Why, I don’t share that opinion,” said Professor Walther.

“I don’t like Jews,” his wife said.

“Oh my dear, you have some Jewish friends!”

“Oh never,” she answered. “There were a couple of Jewish girls in my school. They weren’t bad girls, but they were not my friends.” “There are differences between all men,” said Professor Walther, “you must admit it. There are differences even in my factory: I am the director, the others are the workers. All men of European origin are a family—their feelings are similar. But why should the Indians and Chinese be lumped in with us?”

“And why all this talk about punishment for us?” said Ingeborg. “Why punish? We have tried only to make our country strong, and raise the standard of living.”

“Who started the war?” I addressed my question to the Professor.

“I can’t answer,” Dr. Walther said. “You are my guest.”

CHAPTER 18 — How to Win Friends in Germany

“I MET my American soldier in the street,” said Reni Weteck, a young fräulein who had an American beau. “I was walking in the rain with a parachute,” Reni still got some of her English words charmingly mixed, “and he was walking with a comrade along Onkle Tom’s Hutte. He came up and asked if he could go with me a little.”

Reni and her friends had been attending one of the many English-language classes which started up all over Berlin with the first rumors of the coming four-power occupation. These were well attended even before the American and British soldiers had had time to move into their respective zones. With the arrival of the soldiers, dancing classes also flowered all over Berlin. In any section of the devastated city there appeared signs reading: “Learn Social Dancing,” and bearing the added legend “French Spoken,” “Russian Spoken” or “English Spoken,” depending on the zone in which they were located. On seeing Reni I felt that she already knew how to dance. She had a cute little figure, almost but not quite plump, lots of black curly hair, freckles on her tiny nose, and cunning dimples.

Reni was delighted with her young American—she called him her fiancé. Since the day she had met Fred in the rain under her “parachute,” the Corporal had been calling regularly. The engineering unit with which he was stationed was in Wansee, on the far outskirts of the city, but still he managed it twice a week even if he had to walk. When she lent him her bicycle he came every day. In fact, it was surprising how many American soldiers began appearing in the streets of Berlin on girls’ bicycles.

Reni’s mother was pleased with Fred, too. American boys were so nice around the house, always wanting to come out in the kitchen and help with the dishes, and puttering around with all sorts of little household chores. And then Fred lived in Jacksonville, Florida. She had always wanted to go to Florida, and she hoped after they were married and in America they would send for her to take care of the baby. Reni’s mother gained considerable prestige with her neighbors through the faithful visits of Fred. Driving along Onkle Tom’s Hutte in a jeep one day, and seeing Fräu Weteck in a food line, I stopped for a few moments to talk. She had been standing most of the morning in an extremely long queue, waiting for herrings.

“Naturally we would rather have meat than herrings,” said Fräu Weteck. “On our meat tickets we got herrings the last time.”

When we mentioned her daughter, all the other women standing near us in line who were fortunate enough to have daughters going about with Americans joined the conversation. The vital subject with all of them was how soon the returning soldiers would be allowed to send for the daughters.

“They sent for them—after the first World War,” said an anxious-faced woman. “We feel we should get some good information about whether it is possible or not.” Her house was occupied by soldiers, although she and her daughter had access to the back yard and were allowed to come and cultivate their garden. There were several Americans, she told us, who were very sincere and really wanted to marry her daughter.

“All these girls who went to America the last time were very happy,” said a little stoop-shouldered woman. The mothers in the food line began expressing hopes that the soldiers who were returning to America would be permitted to write to the German girls, and one woman reached into her blouse and pulled out a letter which she had received from an American soldier after World War I.

The women who had daughters “engaged” to Americans formed a proud little clique in the food queue. The mother with very high standing in this group was a rather handsome woman whose daughter was betrothed to an American Captain. “He is on his way home now,” said the woman, “and my daughter is dreaming of him all the time. He told her that he would come back and show her the whole world.” Through my mind flashed the Nazi slogan which ended “…tomorrow—the whole world.”

After this I made a point of dropping in from time to time at the Wetecks’ attractive little flat on Onkle Tom’s Hutte, half hoping to encounter Reni’s fiancé. I always just missed him, and in a way I was secretly relieved, for I would have hated to embarrass the boy.

In the course of all these calls I learned a good deal about Reni and her work. She made hand-colored greeting cards, and she was now enjoying a large trade with the Americans, chiefly in birthday greetings, for which she was paid one mark twenty-five pfennigs each. During the last ten months of the war she had had to work in a factory, when Göring had ordered all artists into industry. Reni would have been put behind a machine if she had not made friends with the factory manager, who thoughtfully placed her in the drafting room instead. Reni’s specialty nowadays was turning out sketches of an animal which could not quite be called a colt but bore a pleasing resemblance to that animal. For these she received twenty marks, or two dollars. Her little library was full of animal picture books. “Fred tells me there are lots of animals in Florida,” said Reni. Her dimples were very pretty when she went on, “He tells me I must wait for him.”

“Do you think he really will be able to send for you?”

Her dimples disappeared. “I can only hope. Two years I shall wait for him. And then if nothing would happen, at least I would always have a very good souvenir.”

I think she meant memory, for her English vocabulary was still so new. But then she may have meant souvenir.

The American boys liked the German girls not only because they could count on the stability of their affections, but because they looked so healthy and clean and dressed so attractively. Although I never did catch up with Fred from Jacksonville, I heard a lot about German girls from my current jeep driver. “They’re smart,” he said. “Their mothers are smart. The mothers say, ‘Get one boy and stick to him.’ Of course they know they’ll get more chocolate and cigarettes that way. But most always the German girl is a one-man girl. Until you leave town, of course, and then she’ll get another soldier. But if you say you’re coming back in three weeks or so, she’ll most often wait, and not go shopping around. But a French girl, you turn the corner and she is gone. German girls are more attractive, too.” Too often our soldiers forgot that the clothes, soap, and food which produced this attractiveness had been looted from the other countries of Europe.

The soldiers’ friendliness toward German women was more than reciprocated. For obvious reasons (of which the PX was the most important) the Americans were preferred to the men of any of the other occupying armies. The French, for instance, suffered somewhat by comparison, without our weekly PX ration of soap and chocolate. “Do the French soldiers help the girls? No, we have not seen it yet,” German women in the French-occupied Saar were saying with considerable exasperation. That these Frenchmen would have liked to “help the girls” I felt quite sure, for I often heard them say: “We did not fight against the women. Only the men.”

The large number of our soldiers who asked their chaplains about the marriage laws was an indication that Reni’s “engagement” was by no means an unusual case. There were many girls like her whose wishful thinking ran beyond chocolate bars and cigarettes. The future was dark for a German girl. That tiny chance of marrying an American and coming to the United States was a lodestar at which to gaze. It might happen; after World War I it had happened. One might he the princess in the fairy tale!

To German women unlucky enough to be outside the American zone of occupation, the American soldier was a mythical creature of almost Olympian stature. I heard about this from a line of rubble-passers in the Russian-occupied sector of Berlin. These women, forming one of the many human conveyor belts which were organized to clean up the city, passed their pails of broken bricks from hand to hand with such studied slow motion that I felt they had calculated the minimum speed at which they could work and still draw their 72 pfennigs an hour. When I asked them how they and their daughters liked the American soldiers, they set down their pails in order to have both hands free for making gestures of longing and anguish. “Wonderful! But we see them drive by here,” they said wistfully, “and they never stop. We know of them only by hearsay.”

British soldiers were looked upon with a good deal of favor, naturally, by German mothers, although their available rations placed them a notch below the Americans. The British soldier, however, was closer to home and had a chance of getting there on leave more often; therefore, according to some reports, he was sometimes a little harder to hook. In the British sector, dogs were beau catchers. A British Tommy would always stop and talk to a girl who walked with a dog.

Not all German mothers were eager to push their daughters into fraternization, but the exceptions were rare. The only ones I happened to encounter were among those few persons who had been strong in the underground resistance movement. Those with whom I talked were in Hamburg, and were trade unionists. While it was hard to find these people from the resistance movement, they existed, and were usually workers who were also strong trade unionists. Some were Social Democrats who had met consistently since 1933, under the guise of some such organization as a singing club. Others were Communists.

Communist Detleff still walked with a curious little hop from step to step, a souvenir of the fifty-seven days he had spent in a concentration camp with his feet and hands tied together. His head was still twisted to one side from the nine days during which he had been clamped to a wall, suspended from his wrists, with a block under his chin. He owed his life to the fact that the guards threw him out when they believed he was dying. Detleff took me to see a group of women who had circulated resistance leaflets, usually during air raids, when their movements would attract a minimum of attention. When I asked these mothers if they would be willing for their daughters to go out with American soldiers, they said, “Impossible.”

“They could only talk with gestures,” one mother explained. “As long as they couldn’t talk, it could never be the real thing. If you cannot know a man’s mind you would never be able to judge his character.”

It was no accident that these people who had shown strength of character in one direction should now show it in another. They had integrity. Neither the Nazi persecutions nor the material advantages dangled before them by the Nazis had wrecked their dignity as men and women. I had been traveling through a German world which had collapsed morally as well as physically; it made me happy to find these few fine people who judged boy-friends for their daughters by some yardstick other than a chocolate bar.

The preoccupation with American food products could be found among people on a much higher economic level than the women who were rubble-passers or those who were forced to stand in food lines waiting for herrings. While I was in the Ruhr, I dropped in to see the Letixerant family. Herr Letixerant, under a comfortable house arrest at the time, had previously been one of Dr. Rohland’s highly placed steelmen, a technical director of Bochumer Verein plant for making gunsteels. Fräu Letixerant, when I arrived, was reclining on a sofa under a silk quilted robe.

“I am sorry to intrude when Fräu Letixerant is ill,” I said. “What is the trouble?”

“Mama needs more fats,” Herr Letixerant and his daughter burst out together.

At this cue Fräu Letixerant sat up straight on the sofa and, pointing a smooth white hand dramatically in my direction, exclaimed, “You must bring us fat! You must bring us butter!”

When I asked if she remembered Göring’s famous slogan, “guns before butter,” the whole family conveniently lost its ability to make conversation in English.

In the Frankfurt cemetery Life’s Percy Knauth and I met still another kind of German. This was Professor Emma Koch, who had studied for three years in New York, and was now a supervising teacher in a large girls’ school. Frankfurt was in ruins, and the rigid lines of Professor Koch’s world had collapsed also. All she had left to her were the ideas she had received from those above her, ideas which she was now passing alone to her pupils. She was much like an automobile engine racing in neutral.

“I am one of the Volksgenossen,” she said, “one of the simple German people, and I have no interest in politics. I am completely out of politics.

“But America must understand the terrible problem that Germans face. The great problem is the Bolshevik menace,” she said, in a sharp, school-teacher’s manner, her pale blue eyes peering at us intently through rimless spectacles. “Whenever the Americans and the British come in,” she said, “Communism comes also. It’s your democratic system. Stalin will have an easy time. You give equal votes to all parties, under that democracy of yours, so of course there will be Bolshevism.”

She talked with such rapidity, and with such a lecturing manner, that it was difficult for Percy or me to interrupt with questions.

“There’s only one thing for America to do,” she said. “Feed the Germans, and feed them plenty. Keep alive the middle class. If

America does not supply food, they’ll all turn to Bolshevism. What have they to lose?”

She justified Germany’s “racial solutions” by the fact that in America millions of colored citizens are excluded from full participation in our democratic culture.

“In America people were discussing openly the dangers of mixing races, and when I came back to Germany they were talking about the same thing. So it can’t seem wrong to you.”

What no one had ever told Professor Koch is that in America most of us are ashamed of the deal we give our colored citizens; and no one has ever suggested concentration-camp tortures to kill all the Negroes.

A long time ago Professor Koch could have taken another path, but it was too late now. I supposed she would remain a German civil servant, discontented to the end, but I did not think she could ever understand the enormity of the German crime against humanity. Be that as it may, I am sure she meant to be honest and kind; she was just too old to learn non-German definitions for those words. Now she can only worry and stew, fret and be apprehensive of Communism.

All over Germany there must be other teachers, who no longer know what to teach their pupils, and mothers who even if they wished otherwise cannot help passing on to their children something of the Führer adoration for which we have given them no substitute. Many German women undoubtedly feel as did the young woman student who had been helped to escape to Switzerland and who insisted on returning to Germany. When a friend said, “What Germany is doing is a crime,” she cried hysterically, “Don’t say that, don’t say that! I must go back. There is nothing left for us but the Führer!”

The next generation of German youth is already being born. That they should be won over to democracy is more important to us than any reparations we can exact from them.

CHAPTER 19 — The Black Market

THERE WAS very little left of the Tiergarten as I remembered it. The grass had grown rank and wild and the trees were shell-scarred beyond all recognition of the beeches and lindens they had been. Even their remaining stumps were disappearing under the axes of civilian squads of woodcutters whom Military Government had put to work to ease the fuel shortage. However, the semi-circular stone bench on the corner opposite the Brandenburg Gate was still there, and on it sat a line of elderly ladies, each as prim and correct-looking as a maiden aunt.

I stood with my back to the old ladies, and looked past the Russian and English street signs toward the crippled horses over the Brandenburg Gate. I was thinking: “Well, here we are in the heart of Berlin now. I suppose this means we have won the war.” I was trying to recall in my mind the somber buildings that had once made this entrance to Unter den Linden so impressive and stately, when I felt a little tug on my sleeve.

Turning around I saw one of the little old ladies furtively opening her neat black coat to show me something she held inside. It was a striped silk blouse, ever so little worn at the elbows. Encouraged by her bold example, the other women rose from the bench and filed up to me, each eager to show me secretively some little article.

“What does the Fräulein want?” they asked.

“What do you have?”

One had a newish black leather pocketbook, another a piece of imitation-silk underwear, another had a pair of white kid gloves carefully preserved in tissue paper, the kind you might save from your daughter’s first communion.

“How much?” I asked.

“A little butter.” “A little lard.” “A little sugar,” breathed the women in a soft chorus.

“Do you want a coat? A plush coat?” A very thin, very assertive man, was pushing his way through the circle of women as he talked. “It is a fine coat.”

“How old?”

“Just like new. And lined with silk. My wife is just the same size as you; she is a handsome woman, too. She is twenty years younger than I am.”

“How old is the coat?”

“You know that a smart woman takes care of her clothes. The coat is like new, and clean.”

“How much?”

The man thought carefully, and then replied that the price should be four pounds of lard or margarine, including some cigarettes.

“How many cigarettes?”

This took several minutes to decide, and while he made calculations on his fingers I noticed how big his hat was for his lean head, and how the women stood by enviously watching this transaction in which they wished so much to participate.

Finally he answered, “Two hundred cigarettes. If you want to see the coat, it will take only five minutes.”

“Here come the police,” murmured the women, melting away.

“I will give you the address of my house and go there and wait for you,” urged the man, keeping his eye on the British Tommy striding towards us across the street. “No, I shall wait for you on that street corner,” and he vanished.

“You are being watched,” said the British soldier.

“I’m not dealing on the black market, just finding out about it,” I said.

“You are being watched by our MPs across the street.” He was friendly, but firm.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m with the press.”

“Well, we thought we ought to tip you off,” said the soldier doubtfully, and went back to his post.

I was not interested in any further negotiations for a plush coat, but I was greatly interested in learning more of the workings of the black market, so I gladly accepted the invitation of a jeepful of American soldiers who were going over to Potsdam to investigate the current prices in watches. Now that American and British MPs were clamping down in their respective sectors, Potsdam, which lay in the Russian zone, was the Mecca of Allied soldiers who wanted to sell things. Soon the Russians, too, were to enforce penalties against German civilians caught trading in Allied goods of any kind; but Potsdam still had an open black market where buyers, sellers, and lookers-on met regularly from four to ten in the evening.

There were four men in the jeep: a Captain and his driver in front, who squeezed me in with them, and a PFC and a Corporal in back. The three GIs had already disposed of their watches to Russian soldiers for four hundred dollars each, but the Captain still had his wrist watch to sell. He had come to Berlin on leave, and had only one day to do a great many things. He had already gone souvenir-hunting through the Chancellery, where he had found a few sheets of Adolf Hitler’s personal stationery; and he had visited the dugout where Adolf and Eva were supposed to have spent their final hours. Now he had just a little time left to sell his watch. “I figured I wasn’t well enough off to go around wearing a four-hundred-dollar watch,” said the Captain.

The jeep driver, after selling his own wrist watch, had written home for eight more which he hoped would arrive before the prices dropped further. When Allied troops first arrived, a twenty-one-jewel watch with a sweep second-hand brought six hundred dollars, and a seventeen-jewel watch brought five hundred. But now the prices were falling, and almost every Russian you saw had a watch as good as your own, and some wore two or three. However, the demand for watches in the Red Army still seemed inexhaustible.

There were various theories about why the Russians had so much money to spend. The official one was that Soviet soldiers were given the greater part of three years’ pay when they reached Berlin, as this was the first place where they had an opportunity to buy anything with it. Some people said that this accumulated pay was part of a reparations plan, and that the Russians were rotating their soldiers as a kind of reward after fighting. The legend was that these soldiers were brought into Germany, paid there, given a chance to buy things, and then sent back and replaced with another batch.

In Berlin’s complicated system of buying and barter, each nationality had its special objectives. Germans would trade almost anything for food and cigarettes. Russians wanted the watches, dress materials, and consumer goods which their country had not manufactured during the war. Americans were after cameras, wine, and financial profit.

As we drove toward Potsdam the boys told me that whatever the trading situation was now, it was only a pale shadow of what it had been two months before, when our troops had first taken over their zones of occupation.

“Those were the days when you got a Leica for two packs of cigarettes,” said the PFC from the back seat.

“I knew a guy that drives a staff car,” said the jeep driver. “He made seventeen thousand dollars in the first month. He made it in cognac, cigarettes, and liberated cars. My buddy saw the money and he knows he made it. My buddy’s the only man I ever heard of who doesn’t want to go home. He says he wants to stay over here one more year and clean up all the business.”

“I’m going to make fourteen hundred dollars and then quit,” said the Corporal.

The choice of fourteen hundred dollars bore a complicated relation to the pay a GI draws, the sums he can change legally into dollars and send home, and the assumption that he would have to pay income tax on his black market earnings if he sent them home in too large quantity. But before I managed to get all this clearly explained to me we had arrived in Potsdam.

At Sans Souci, where Frederick the Great had built his soldiers’ city with the French name and the Prussian spirit, we stopped to ask an old man where the black market was located.

“Down in Wilhelmplatz,” he said, showing teeth as brown as the leather buttons on his jacket.

I handed him two cigarettes for his information. He looked at them in wonder, took off his cap, and placing them carefully in the crown, said, “That is something very rare.”

At Wilhelmplatz we parked at the curb and sat quietly in the jeep, while the Captain dangled his wrist over the edge to give a tantalizing glimpse of his watch. It was nearly four o’clock and a crowd was beginning to gather composed largely of German civilians, but with a few Russian and a few American soldiers here and there. On the fringe nearest us stood three Russian WACs in trim skirts and high-buttoned jackets with leather boots coming up to their knees. The girls were hesitating over some sturdy-looking underwear which a German woman was trying hard to sell them. Just beyond, a GI was examining a stamp album.

“That’s a wise man, putting his money in stamps,” said the jeep driver. “He’s really operating on a commercial basis if he’s buying stamps in a big way. He won’t have any trouble with the exchange. He’ll get his money home easy.”

“I know a guy buys nothing but gold,” said the PFC. “Bracelets and wedding rings.”

“I wouldn’t take anybody’s wedding ring,” said the jeep driver. “That’s really rough.”

The crowd was thickening, and beginning to clot into those tight little knots of three or four persons with their heads together, which I had learned to recognize anywhere in Europe as a sign of the black market. Near us an interesting little transaction was carried on at the edge of a manhole. A small man with a piece of adhesive tape pasted over his upper lip popped out of the manhole with a five-gallon can of gas, poured some out into a liter-sized pitcher, received a fistful of marks—I couldn’t see how many—and disappeared into the manhole again. I noticed that this was “white gas” or ordinary colorless gasoline, not our Allied Army “pink gas.” It was very dangerous for Germans to deal in pink gas; if they were caught with it in their cars the penalties were heavy.

In the next moment a Russian officer came up to inquire about the Captain’s watch. It was a very good watch, of the shockproof, waterproof variety, but its very excellence was a disadvantage here because no one had the special wrench required to open up the back. Current practice among Russian watch shoppers was to open up the back, listen to the mechanism, and count the number of visible jewels in the works. However, the American and the Russian did a quick bargaining job on their fingers, the Captain indicating that there were twenty-one jewels, and the Russian indicating that he would pay thirty-two hundred marks. Both were pleased with the deal.

The main business of the day was now accomplished. The jeep driver pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and was just about to light one when a crowd of German women swooped down on our jeep. Each woman stretched out a long eager arm toward us, and in each skinny hand was a hundred-mark note. In a flash the driver’s cigarette pack had been exchanged for one hundred marks.

“Why, that’s ten dollars,” I heard the Captain gasp beside me.

“Chocolate, chocolate,” begged the women, waving their hundred-mark notes in our faces.

“Holy smoke,” said the Captain. “A hundred marks for a chocolate bar!”

Cigarettes and candy bars and hundred-mark notes changed hands so fast that the boys did not have time to count their money. They had just drawn their PX rations, so they had a supply that must have brought in several hundred dollars. As word seeped through the crowd that there was chocolate, more and more women surged toward our jeep, until they were clustered around us like hornets, waving their thin arms and pleading for cigarettes and chocolate. Finally the last cigarette pack and the last candy bar were gone, except for one little stick of peanut brittle. A woman standing close by, who apparently had only a fifty-mark note, got her companion to club with her so together they could make the purchase. As the driver backed the jeep around and started away, I could see the two women on the curb, trying to make an equitable division of that candy bar down to the last peanut.

In the black market there is a complex intermediate world where the middleman takes his slice of the profit. In Berlin, the headquarters for cigarette jobbers was under the Femina. At night the Femina dance floor was thronged with American and British officers, a scattering of Russian WACs and Red Army officers, and hordes of German taxi-dancers, but its deep basement came to life only in the daytime. If you visited the Femina cellar at noon, you could watch the black marketeers sorting cigarettes and currency into three mounting piles: Allied invasion marks, the less desirable German marks, and the very desirable American cigarettes. Through these cigarette-liaison men who met in the Femina basement the American cigarettes which had been bought for ten dollars a pack skyrocketed to fifteen; when they reached their ultimate consumer they would bring the equivalent of twenty dollars a pack.

To the Germans our Army cigarettes were known as “armies” and possessed a purchasing power that far transcended money. Ten “armies” would buy two bread tickets, which meant six pounds of bread. (Some German black marketeers specialized in bread ration tickets.) Two “armies” taken to a food shop in the city would buy a little bag of potatoes, or a small piece of cooking fat. In the country, where cigarettes were truly a rarity, a handful of “armies” would purchase a considerable quantity of food.

The whole of Europe has become one vast black market. Nowhere in Europe does the system of marketing and distribution exist as it was known before the war. During their push across the rest of Europe, the Nazis organized the countries they occupied on such a thorough racketeer basis that even the German Army found it had to buy on the black market. The Balkans are a black-market morass; Spain is in it so deeply that Franco has guaranteed to the Spanish Army leaders the continuance of the black market because “all ranks of the Spanish Army are interested in it.” In France honesty pays such a poor return that people in normal business simply cannot make ends meet. Anyone connected with food stores who can siphon some of his wares out into the black market wins magnificent returns, while ordinary job-holders draw on their savings, as long as they have any, to eke out their food ration.

An average French mother mends her children’s clothes, which she can have no hope of replacing, after the garments have worn too thin to hold the stitches. But the daughters of bakers and butchers and dealers connected with the food market crowd into the salons of the great Parisian dressmakers and buy smart little tailleurs, sometimes two and three at a time, for 30,000 francs apiece. ($600 when I watched, in the autumn of 1945.) In Europe, unless you actually live on the land, it is sell and buy on the black market or go famished and threadbare.

Paris was full of strange post-war deals when I visited it on a short vacation from my assignment in Germany. One of the most mysterious of these transactions was something I heard discussed in the bar of the Georges V. The Georges V Hotel had been requisitioned for high Allied personnel: Colonels, Generals, and VIPs (Very Important People). The American Colonel who invited me into the bar was bubbling joyfully between martinis over a triangular business deal which he had just concluded with the British Colonel and the French private banker who were seated at the next little table. They had been discussing it in his room all afternoon.

“It’s colossal,” said the American Colonel. “I’m going to make some money for a change, if you don’t mind. It involves hundreds of thousands of francs. Just the three of us are in on it—my friend the British Colonel, this Frenchman, and I.”

He introduced me to his new partners, and in the short chat I had with the French banker I thought he made some startling observations. Learning that I had just come from Germany, he expressed great concern about what might be happening to the German bankers. “You can’t let the big bankers down,” he said, “or you will have Bolshevism.” He was an ardent monarchist and had dedicated himself to the task of placing a “pure Bourbon” on the throne of France, because, according to his belief, “the only democratic future for France is with the monarchy.”

When the Frenchman turned back to his British companion, I said to the American, “Doesn’t it seem to you that maybe there’s a little more politics here than you care to get mixed up with?”

“Oh, it’s only commercial,” said the Colonel from Oregon. “This Frenchman is big stuff. I checked on him. He’s only interested in making money.”

I knew that while a man was still in uniform he was not supposed to be engaged in profit-making. Perhaps the Colonel was a little uncomfortable about it, too, for he hastened to say, “It has nothing to do with the Army. It is colossal. It’s so big it staggers the imagination. I’ll be back in sixty days in civilian clothes.”

Naturally, I was not told the details of this “colossal” deal, but there had been references to working through Switzerland which gave me some clue. The funds of many financiers, Germans as well as others, found refuge in Switzerland and other neutral countries during the war; Now, with post-war conditions so unstable, arbitrage, or the juggling of margins of profit on currency transfers, promised tempting returns. That an American Colonel could plan to enter a deal involving “hundreds of thousands of francs”—whatever the details may have been—while he still wore eagles on his shoulders, was deeply shocking to me.

In the moral code of many GIs there were some things permissible to combat men who had fought their way into enemy territory which were not considered fitting for the “feather merchants” who arrived on Cook’s tours after the shooting was over. This distinction between the combat men and the “feather merchants” was at the basis of the resentment over the VIP PX. This super-fine Post Exchange for Very Important Persons was set up in Berlin during the time of the Potsdam Conference and almost anything a VIP desired, from whiskey to a wrist watch, could be bought there, more cheaply that at home because it was tax-free.

“All the time we were overseas I tried to get a watch from our PX and couldn’t get it,” a staff-car driver told me. “And then I saw these traveling firemen go into the VIP PX, bring out good watches that they’d bought for $20 and sell them for $600.” (Watch prices were at their peak in those early days of the Potsdam Conference.)

“But the VIP that really got me sore was the one who goes to this high-class PX and buys a fifth of VO for two dollars. I tried to buy it off him for twenty but he turned me down. But he gets me to drive him to the Tiergarten and he sells it for one hundred and fifty dollars.”

“What did you say to him?” I asked.

“He was a visiting official from the state of New York. He had an assimilated rank of Brigadier General. I couldn’t say anything to him.”

In an effort to curb GI sales on the black market, the authorities passed a ruling that no more than two hundred dollars’ worth of marks could be changed at one time, and these only if they came from a legitimate source. What was a legitimate source? Your pay, of course. And the money you won at gambling was “legitimate.” But so many men began winning exactly two hundred dollars at poker that it was not considered advisable to appear before the same finance officer with your winnings more than once. Drivers who traveled between cities had an advantage because they could change “poker winnings” at every Army finance office they passed. There were still further refinements of legality. Your watch was “personal property”; you could do with it what you liked. Selling quartermaster supplies was “illegal.” Selling your own PX cigarettes was merely “unethical.” But the cigarettes your girlfriend sent you from home, what were they: “illegal,” “unethical,” “personal property,” or in a class with your “poker winnings?”

One morning, shortly before I left Berlin to start back to America, I was having an early breakfast with the drivers in the Group Control Motor Pool. Most of the men were going home soon. Therefore, finding a way to get their money home was the main problem on their minds. Here they were in Berlin with their pockets simply bursting with money and nothing but uncertainty about whether they were going to get it home.

“Nobody knows what is going to happen about it,” one of the drivers told me. “Of course, everybody is vitally interested. One of the fellows went home three days ago. He is going to let us know what the score is.”

All the men were sure of was that they were allowed to send home “unencumbered pay plus ten percent.” That meant that after a man’s allotments and insurance payments to his wife were deducted, and he had—for example—$45 or $46 left of his pay, he would be allowed to send home $50.

“And that’s only five chocolate bars,” said one of the men.

We were finishing our coffee; several men reached automatically into their pockets for their cigarettes and this raised a great laugh, for not a man in the room had any.

“Who’s going to commit himself on the cigarette question?” said a driver.

“I’m going to deal on the black market as long as I have two feet to stand on,” somebody answered.

“The way I figure it,” one of the boys said, very slowly and thoughtfully, “is that the black market is what pays the GIs back for what they went through in the war.”

Somehow this remark made me very sad. We had let our boys go through the war with too little comprehension of what the fight was for. If, after it was all over, they thought only that “the black market is what pays GIs back for what they went through in the war,” something, somewhere, is very wrong.

CHAPTER 20 — Berlin: A River of Wanderers

“NOBODY WILL give me a place,” complained the old man with the shining black fiber suitcase. He was very old, and he was a figure of dignity in his long black coat and neatly combed white beard. He was trying to make his way on to the incredibly crowded train for Halle, amid the mass of human beings who surged with their backpacks, pushcarts, briefcases and bicycles along the platform of the broken Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin.

“Nobody will give me a place,” he said. “I have been thrown off three times.”

“You shouldn’t let yourself be thrown off,” said some luckier travelers within earshot, looking on from their precarious perches on the outside of the packed car, where they clung thick as monkeys.

“I could stand up there on the sill of that coach window,” suggested the old man, “if somebody would give me a hand.”

“No, that won’t work,” said the conductor, who was swinging authoritatively past through the crowd. “A signal post comes along, and you are knocked off.”

Immediately the old man began addressing his appeals to the conductor. “You give space to others, but you don’t find any place for me.”

“That is typical,” said the conductor. “Always the other ones. Everyone is thinking only of himself. How selfish the world is growing these days!”

The gaunt shell of the Anhalter Bahnhof, with remnants of roof clinging like scraps of lace high up on the towering arches, lent a certain somber majesty to the scene of confusion and frustration below. These wandering masses of people were displaced Germans; they wanted to go everywhere, and for every imaginable reason. There were German soldiers who, like all other soldiers, wanted to go home. There were people who had no homes planning to move in on their relatives, refugees leaving the cities because they hoped to find more food in the country, refugees coming back from the country and hoping to regain their apartments in the city. Parents were hunting for their children, wives were hunting for their in-laws, and daughters were searching for their mothers. So many people were struggling to climb up the sides of the cars and get themselves and their baggage installed that it was a surprise to see one girl equally intent on trying to get down.

“Why does this woman want to come down?” complained people near her. She was stepping on their legs and hands in her efforts to descend.

“My father hasn’t shown up,” said the girl. “Open the door. I must step down on the door.”

Even I, an outsider in this contest, could see it would be disastrous to open the door, for the people bottled inside would come frothing out like freshly uncorked beer.

“Is it so hard to open the door?” she complained. “Here you, take my bags.”

This appeal was addressed to no one in particular, and received no particular response; but by sheer force of her persistence, she managed to get a kind of conveyor belt in motion, as she passed her things, and then herself, from person to person down the side of the car.

“My God, how many small things she carries,” wailed the people in her path.

“And how does this disturb the train, I ask you?” she retorted crisply, making her way from shoulder to shoulder to the platform.

An almost invisible gap on the long step of the train was filled by a one-legged German soldier who had been standing by, quietly looking for such an opportunity. With a single motion he swung himself into place, hung his crutch on the door handle, and twined his leg in some way known best to himself into the under-carriage of the car. The addition of a passenger was an unpleasant surprise to the plump man who held the next place on the step. He had previously had enough room to sit with a wooden case between his knees. His loud protests attracted a group on the platform, where people were always ready with suggestions and comments.

“Stick your legs in there,” said the kibitzers, pointing out a space between the spring and the car.

“One big bump and my legs will be cut off,” protested the plump gentleman.

“Listen to him,” said the bystanders. “He begrudges a soldier his place.”

The needs of the soldiers, most of whom were herded into cars especially reserved for them, with only the overflow having to cling to the outsides, were being ministered to by two or three German Red Cross girls. These girls made their way up and down the long platforms, collecting what they could from the German civilians to give to the soldiers.

“Has somebody got a piece of bread? Some fruit for the soldiers?” one of the Red Cross girls called out as she made her tireless way from one knot of travelers to another. “Has anybody a cigarette for a soldier?”

The girl was more successful at raising money than in getting food, and periodically she paused in the midst of soldier groups to empty her apron pockets of their accumulated mixture of black bread and Reichsmarks.

“Who has nothing at all?” she inquired of a group of bedraggled-looking soldiers. “Please don’t say you have nothing if you still have something left, or you will eat the slice of bread someone else needs.”

“We all want to eat,” chanted the girl, as she continued soliciting along the platform. “One slice of bread less, if we can give one to a soldier.”

“It’s awfully sad now,” commented some bystanders, who had been watching me as I used my camera now and then. “Foreigners taking pictures of us and sending them to the newspapers.”

The Red Cross girl had paused by one of the cars reserved for the German prisoners of war, and was handing her supplies bit by bit through windows crowded with unshaven faces under rusty green caps.

“You’ve already had a piece of bread,” she reproved one soldier who was pushing his companions aside.

“But I didn’t get the piece of apple.”

“Then we gave you something else with your bread.”

“He has a whole gas mask full of food, and wants still more,” said the soldiers near him.

“Comrades, this doesn’t make a very good impression,” she said.

I was startled to hear one of the German soldiers say, “I would like to shoot her!” and then I realized that he was not speaking of the Red Cross girl but was pointing at me, where I stood on the sidelines taking photographs. His remark made me uncomfortable, so I walked a short distance away. In the next moment something resembling a wind storm began sweeping along the platform. Like dust before a breeze all the people on the platform began running toward the front end of the train. I ran too, or rather, I was carried along in the mob, and when I finally managed to fight my way out to a clear stretch of track I watched a remarkable drama.

It was the approach of the locomotive. This was the last chance for those on the platform to get aboard. Within seconds, the steaming machine lost its appearance of a locomotive and began to resemble a wool sock covered with field-ticks. It was astonishing how agile some of the passengers were, not only in springing on, themselves, but in getting their pushcarts and bicycles tied on also.

The conductor assumed a central role in this episode. “There’s no more space,” he kept shouting. “As you see, everything is filled up. If something happens here I will be responsible.”

A woman in an imitation leopard-skin coat had almost succeeded in diving into the engineer’s box when the conductor caught her at it. “You can’t go in there,” he cried. “Come down at once. If someone bums up here, I am the one who is guilty.” “Let me get up on the tender then.” “The tender is reserved for our soldiers,” said the conductor. “They must get home.”

The lady in the fur coat was not easily discouraged. She grabbed the passenger nearest to her and started pulling herself up by his hair. At this, the conductor had endured quite enough, and he commanded the leopard woman to get off the train.

“Always the same picture,” he repeated. “Everybody wants to look after himself. Nobody cares for his fellow man.”

The engine began gathering steam. White swirls licked up around the bare legs of the girls and rose, hissing, to envelop the entire human cargo on the locomotive. As the engine wheels started turning, I noticed a boy who clung in a peculiar leapfrog position to a small metal footplate at the head of the locomotive. With both feet on this plate, his hands grasping something above his head, his knees spread wide to maintain his balance, he faced a journey of an indefinite number of hours. No one ever knew how long the trip to Halle would last. In pre-war days, it would have been about three hours; now it sometimes took a full twenty-four. And even when Halle was reached, it was just one small step toward the varied destinations of the passengers. Halle is a large railroad junction, one of the few still usable in Germany’s much-bombed railroad net. Therefore, whether the passengers were bound north for Hamburg, southeast for Leipzig or Dresden, or southwest in their passionate endeavor to reach the American zone—which to displaced Germans was the Promised Land—still Halle was only a waypoint where they would re-enact the same battle to get aboard some moving conveyance.

The long train was rushing past now, and the people clinging to the top and sides lost their identity as human beings and began to resemble barnacles. As the train gathered speed it might have been a chain of old boat hulls, whipping into the distance. I turned back to the station platforms and found them as thickly studded with humanity as they had been before the train had carried anyone away.

“We are going to stay here for sure,” a weary-looking woman in a plaid headscarf remarked, seating herself and her three children on the edge of the platform opposite the strategic spot where the locomotive had come in today and might be hoped to come tomorrow. She removed some bundles of clothes and a cooking pot from their little wagon, so she could settle the smallest child there; the baby cart was becoming the universal carryall of Germany.

This family was among the thousands of Germans whom the Poles were expelling wholesale. They had spent weeks on the roads in Pomerania, the mother told me, and had somehow drifted as far north as Rostock, where they had spent two weeks in a camp for fugitives. From there it had taken another eighteen days to reach Berlin. They had planned to move into Berlin, but found they would not be allowed to stay; the authorities, I knew, were doing all they could to keep refugees from streaming in to this already overcrowded city.

As I talked with her, I found that the small family group had worked out a sort of system in their living. They had left Pomerania with a small supply of potatoes in the baby cart, and as these were depleted it was not impossible—although it was very difficult—to build up the stock again. In the open country people were not so selfish as they were here in the cities, and someone could always be found who would give them a handful of potatoes or vegetables, if he had anything himself from which to give. Usually the family slept in the woods, though they preferred a barn when they could find one.

The two older children were big enough to help gather firewood while the mother built a small fireplace of stones on which she could set the cooking pot. Having only one pot was hard, for she had to wash the children’s clothes and every single little thing in the same pot in which she cooked the food. The children were getting skin diseases, and she was terribly afraid of their catching typhus. Now that they had learned they could not stop in Berlin, their next port of call would be Hamburg. The woman’s oldest daughter had a one-room flat in Hamburg—or had had, according to a letter the mother had received long ago. Maybe she would be able to find her daughter there, and maybe her daughter would still have the flat. I did not add to her worries by describing what I had seen of gutted Hamburg; but from her hopeless tone, I think the mother knew. It was just that there was nowhere to go, and beating their way along the roads and rails was the only thing they thought of to do.

It was a surprise, when I turned from the family with their single cooking pot, to see the next couple on the platform open up a beautifully equipped luncheon case and bring out a package of sandwiches, some cold tea in a cognac bottle, and an odd-looking violet pudding, for which they carried plates and spoons. The woman wore one of those plush coats imitating fur, which are so common among middle-class Germans, and the man was in high-laced shoes and herringbone knickers. He was so eager to show me his credentials and identification papers that I was sure he had something on his conscience. The paper read: “We certify that Herr Christoph Beyer is employed by us as the head of our kitchen. The present trip to Erfurt in Thüringen has been agreed to by us.” It was signed by executives of the power plant where he worked, the Elektro Werke Aktien Gesellschaft.

It was easy to tell why these people should be so well dressed, for they had access to food which they could trade for everything they needed, Herr Beyer was so secretive about the purposes of his trip that I felt sure one of those mysterious black-market negotiations was in progress in which the head of the kitchen for a power plant could hold a strong hand.

The subtle odor of the black market hung around another woman, who sat a little farther down the platform. She had planted herself sternly on a large suitcase, liberally surrounded with bags and bundles, and in her tweed suit, high halo-shaped hat, and shoes only slightly turned over at the heels, she was one of the best-dressed women on the platform. Her name was Adelheide Planner, she told me, and she had come to Berlin to “buy things.” She had gone to the big Siemens Electrical Works, where she found she was unable to buy even a hot plate.

A shopping trip like this in such desperate times seemed a little odd to me, so I inquired “Was it worth coming all the way to Berlin for a hot plate?”

“I had expected to buy up five hundred of them,” she said, “but nothing can be bought here, and the trunk I am sitting on is empty.”

When she added that her husband had directed her to try to pick up some little machines for sharpening razor blades, I was more sure than ever that the Planner family were on the black market; for small useful articles like this possessed a high trading value. With money worth so little, a small handy item like a razor blade sharpener was a more convenient medium of exchange than a suitcase full of cash.

Seated next to Fräu Planner was a gentle-faced bespectacled man who was poking the track idly with his walking stick; his striped trousers pronounced him an ex-inmate of a concentration camp, and proclaimed his unworldliness, too, for most men would have acquired something to wear in place of the hated penitentiary pants.

“Why did they put you in a concentration camp?” I asked.

“Because I predicted all that would happen because of the war,” he replied. “It is all written in the Bible. All that is going to happen is written there. Mine was the voice that cried it out to the world, so the Gestapo took me away.”

The Bible expert was a Prussian named Richard Blask. Vague as his predictions of doom were, they were sufficiently irritating to the authorities to bring about his imprisonment in Sachsenhausen at the beginning of the war. While I was talking with him, a bright-haired blonde, dressed vividly in a green sweater over a cobalt-blue dress, came up and followed the conversation with such attention that I wondered if she could be interested in religion.

“You are a very good-hearted man,” she said, when there was a pause in the conversation. “I can see that at once.”

“I am a Christian,” said Richard Blask, “and live only in the Bible.”

“There is a special car on the train to Halle reserved just for people from concentration camps,” said the blonde. “There was one compartment in it today with only seven people. When I tried to get in, they said, ‘No, there is no place,’ but you, how did it happen that you did not go in it?”

“My colleague didn’t show up,” replied Blask. “I shall wait for him here, as he will surely find me in time for the train tomorrow.”

“Is your colleague from a concentration camp, too?”

“Yes,” said Richard Blask. “He is a Bible expert also.”

In a practiced way the blonde clinched her arrangements to travel in this desirable company. “I am going off to get a comrade of mine,” she announced, and promising to be back soon with her girlfriend, she started toward the other end of the platform.

“She’ll get lots of advantages now,” said Fräu Planner sullenly, “traveling with a man from a concentration camp.”

The next day I returned at noon to the Anhalter Bahnhof, to watch once more the departure of the train for Halle. I found the station even more crowded than it had been the day before, and the people milling on the platform seemed even more desperate about their chances to board the train. A new rule had been passed; people no longer would be allowed to travel on the tops or outsides of the cars. Yesterday’s train had met with a serious accident. One of the cars, an old-type wagon-lits, was a few inches higher than the rest of the train, and when it passed under a bridge seventeen people clinging to its curved roof were swept to death. The German authorities had been begging for some time for an Army guard at the station to keep the crowds in check, and as a consequence of this disaster some American soldiers had been sent to the station.

The GIs were having a difficult time. “We keep telling them to get off,” the Sergeant told me. “When they don’t get off we yank their baggage off, and then they turn right around and get on again at the back of the train.

“There’s that same bird again,” he said, and running to the side of the train yelling, “Back up! Get off!” he pulled a man off the window ledge by the seat of his pants. The German removed so abruptly was a neat little man with a tiny mustache. Unsolicited by us, he immediately produced his identification papers to show that he was an official of the Reichsbank and was going to Leipzig to get his winter clothes.

“That’s the first time I ever grabbed a bank official by the seat of his pants,” said the Sergeant.

The crowd was growing more desperate. It was becoming increasingly difficult for the GIs to keep the cars cleared. From time to time they fired a warning shot into the air. Suddenly there was a quick succession of shots, then an uproar on the platform.

“Oh, mein Gott. That was bad.”

“Just dummy ammunition.”

“No, it was real. I saw them loading their guns.”

I asked a GI Corporal what had happened. “Stray bullet got one of the guys,” he said.

A group of German prisoners in their rusty green uniforms stood quietly on the edge of the track, watching the GIs clear a space around the casualty. I wondered if they would show resentment at this expression of American Army authority, but they were discussing the incident with the professional attitude of one soldier to another.

“The American soldier has done what he had to do,” I overheard.

“Twice the man was urged to get down, and twice he got back up again.”

When the American ambulance squad arrived and hurried across the tracks to take care of the wounded man, their comments became admiring.

“That’s a good litter,” said one of the German soldiers.

“He will get into an American hospital and he will be well fed,” the group agreed.

One of the German soldiers, his cheekbones protruding sharply from his tight-drawn face and his thin arms showing through his tattered sleeves, said longingly: “I was hurt once. I stayed in a hospital for a whole year, and it was wonderful. Just see what I look like now. Things were different then.”

This young German, looking back and remembering his life as a soldier, found that the happiest year he could remember under Hitler was the year he had spent in a hospital.

SECTION VII. BERLIN PEOPLE WITHOUT BOOTS

EPILOGUE

THIS, THEN, was Germany after the whirlwind had been reaped, a bottomless pit of malevolence and malignance. Cities and people were broken ruins together, but the venom the Nazis had distilled was virulent yet and held the power to hurt and to poison all men it touched. It touched Americans as well as Germans and it was frightening to see.

It was no accident that the few good people I found were those who stood against tyranny over any other human being, people who had the democratic idea in their hearts. They were so few, so pitiably few. They were not the teachers, as one might hope, not the scientists, not those who had studied in America, not the great industrialists who might be expected to have a world view. No, the men who shared responsibility for the whirlwind, who sat unprotesting as the wind was sown, these men denied responsibility. And we, the victors, were treating them in a way that almost made it seem we didn’t believe too deeply in democracy ourselves.

Women not so different from Hildegarde, Ingeborg, and Emma Koch, the teacher, will be bringing up the children of Germany, the next generation. And we have given them nothing to replace their Hitler-worship. To be sure, we have given them a few “de-Nazified” textbooks, but that is nothing more than the merest promise of something greater. We turned our backs on our greatest opportunity to do something constructive with the youth of Germany. We had no plan, no desire, no willingness, it seemed, to teach a democratic way of life. We poured out lives and boundless treasure to win a mechanical victory and now we had no patience for the things of the spirit which alone can save us from another far greater catastrophe. It was time to go home.

The driver of a staff car told me, with bitterness, of two congressmen whom he had driven when they visited Berlin. They asked to be taken at once to the black market, even before going to their billets. As soon as they saw the crowd they whipped open their suitcases. One sold a blue pinstripe suit for $500. The other had an extra pair of trousers with his gray herringbone tweed. He got $600.

I could not blame the boys who wanted to go home with their pitiful pocketings of black market money. They had the best examples. I could only blame Americans for understanding too little, for taking part too little in the affairs of a world now shrunken to our doorstep. We had let our boys go off to war with so little comprehension of what the fight was for. Men who are ordered to put their lives in hazard should be asked to take this risk only for the highest purposes. They deserve to know what these purposes are, and to know they will be fulfilled after the victory.

We did not bring democracy to Germany, although we talked a lot about it. Even now it is not too late, because democracy isn’t something a nation tools up for: it lives in its citizens, in the way they live with their fellow men. We can make up for time lost and wasted and we-can give to the Germans, and to others as well, something more than techniques. Unless we do, this war will be without meaning for us, and some of the hope for a good world will die down in the hearts of men everywhere.

Darien, Connecticut