The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  They took vehicles, of all types, private and Army. Pvt. Norman Neitzke, who had come in at Haguenau, remembered the time his squad started to drive away in a German ambulance only to find that a German doctor with a pregnant woman was in the back trying to deliver a baby. The Americans hopped out.

  One morning Lieutenant Richey grabbed the camera of a German woman photographing the convoy. But instead of taking it, he threw it on the ground and shot it with his pistol. This earned him the nickname “The Camera Killer.”

  • • •

  Contact with the enemy picked up as the convoy moved southeast, but not in the sense of combat. The men began to see German soldiers in small groups, trying to surrender. Then larger groups. Finally, more field gray uniforms than anyone could have imagined existed.

  Easy Company was in the midst of a German army in disintegration. The supply system lay in ruins. All the German soldiers wanted was a safe entry into a P.O.W. cage. “I couldn’t get over the sensation of having the Germans, who only a short time ago had been so difficult to capture, come in from the hills like sheep and surrender,” Webster wrote. When the convoy reached the autobahn leading east to Munich, the road was reserved for Allied military traffic, the median for Germans marching west to captivity. Gordon Carson recalled that “as far as you could see in the median were German prisoners, fully armed. No one would stop to take their surrender. We just waved.”

  Webster called the sight of the Germans in the median “a tingling spectacle.” They came on “in huge blocks. We saw the unbelievable spectacle of two G.I.s keeping watch on some 2,500 enemy.” At that moment the men of the company realized that the German collapse was complete, that there would be no recovery this spring as there had been last fall.

  There was still some scattered, sporadic resistance. Every single bridge was destroyed by German engineers as the Allies approached. Occasionally a fanatic SS unit would fire from its side of the stream. It was more an irritant than a threat or danger. The Americans would bring forward some light artillery, drive the SS troops away, and wait for the engineers to repair the old or make a new bridge.

  Winters was struck by the German fanaticism, the discipline that led German engineers to blow their own bridges when the uselessness of the destruction was clear to any idiot, and “the total futility of the war. Here was a German army trying to surrender and walking north along the autobahn, while at the same time another group was blowing out the bridges to slow down the surrender.”

  • • •

  On April 29 the company stopped for the night at Buchloe, in the foothills of the Alps, near Landsberg. Here they saw their first concentration camp. It was a work camp, not an extermination camp, one of the half-dozen or more that were a part of the Dachau complex. But although it was relatively small and designed to produce war goods, it was so horrible that it was impossible to fathom the enormity of the evil. Prisoners in their striped pajamas, three-quarters starved, by the thousands; corpses, little more than skeletons, by the hundreds.

  Winters found stacks of huge wheels of cheese in the cellar of a building he was using for the battalion CP and ordered it distributed to the inmates. He radioed to regiment to describe the situation and ask for help.

  The company stayed in Buchloe for two nights. Thus it was present in the morning when the people of Landsberg turned out, carrying rakes, brooms, shovels, and marched off to the camp. General Taylor, it turned out, had been so incensed by the sight that he had declared martial law and ordered everyone from fourteen to eighty years of age to be rounded up and sent to the camp, to bury the bodies and clean up the place. That evening the crew came back down the road from the camp. Some were still vomiting.

  “The memory of starved, dazed men,” Winters wrote, “who dropped their eyes and heads when we looked at them through the chain-link fence, in the same manner that a beaten, mistreated dog would cringe, leaves feelings that cannot be described and will never be forgotten. The impact of seeing those people behind that fence left me saying, only to myself, ‘Now I know why I am here!’ ”

  * * *

  1. Writing of the G.I.s’ experience with the German people and of the effect of feeling that they were “just like us,” Glenn Gray points out, “The enemy could not have changed so quickly from a beast to a likable human being. Thus, the conclusion is nearly forced upon the G.I.s that they have been previously blinded by fear and hatred and the propaganda of their own government.” Gray, The Warriors, 152.

  2. Rapport and Northwood, Rendezvous with Destiny, 715.

  3. Rapport and Northwood, Rendezvous with Destiny, 723.

  17

  Drinking Hitler’s Champagne

  BERCHTESGADEN

  May 1–8, 1945

  ON THE FIRST TWO DAYS of May, the company drove south from Munich, moving slowly through streams of German soldiers walking in the opposite direction. Often there were more German soldiers with weapons going north than there were Americans going south. “We looked at each other with great curiosity,” Winters remembered. “I am sure both armies shared one thought—just let me alone. All I want is to get this over with and go home.”

  On May 3, Colonel Sink got orders to have the 506th ready to move out at 0930 the following day, objective Berchtesgaden.

  • • •

  Berchtesgaden was a magnet for the troops of all the armies in southern Germany, Austria, and northern Italy. South of Salzburg, the Bavarian mountain town of Berchtesgaden was Valhalla for the Nazi gods, lords, and masters. Hitler had a home there and a mountaintop stone retreat called the Aldershorst (Eagle’s Nest) 8,000 feet high. Thanks to a remarkable job of road building, cars could get to a parking place within a few hundred feet of the Aldershorst. There a shaft ran into the center of the mountain to an elevator which lifted into the Aldershorst. The walls of the elevator were gold leaf.

  It was to Berchtesgaden that the leaders of Europe had come in the late 1930s to be humiliated by Hitler. Daladier of France, Mussolini of Italy, Schuschnigg of Austria, Chamberlain of Britain, and others. They had feared Hitler, as had the whole world. Now that Hitler was dead, the fear was removed, but that only highlighted the fascination with Hitler and his favorite retreat, which seemed to hold one of the keys to his character.

  It was to Berchtesgaden that the highest-ranking Nazi leadership flocked, to be near their Führer. Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Martin Bormann had houses in the area. There was a fabulous apartment complex for the SS.

  It was to the Berchtesgaden area that much of the loot collected by the Nazis from all over Europe had come. The place was stuffed with money, in gold and in currency from a dozen countries, with art treasures (Goering’s collection alone contained five Rembrandts, a Van Gogh, a Renoir, and much more). It was bursting with booze, jewelry, fabulous cars.

  So Berchtesgaden was really two magnets: the symbolic home of Hitler’s mad lust for power, and the best looting possibilities in Europe. Everybody wanted to get there—French advancing side by side with the 101st, British coming up from Italy, German leaders who wanted to get their possessions, and every American in Europe.

  Easy Company got there first.

  • • •

  On May 4, the 101st moved out by convoy down the autobahn between Munich and Salzburg, with 2d Battalion in the lead. The Americans passed Rosenheim and the Chiem See. At Siegsdorf they turned right on the direct highway to Berchtesgaden. About 14 kilometers down the road, they ran into the tail of the French 2d Armored Division, the first division to enter Paris, with its famous commander Gen. Jacques Philippe Leclerc.

  The 2d Armored supposedly had been on the right flank of the 101st for the past week, but the Americans had not been able to keep in touch with it. The French were there one minute, gone the next. So far as the Americans could make out, they were looting their way through Germany. Whenever they got a truckload or two of loot, they’d send it back home to France. Now they were lusting to get into Berchtesgaden, only an hour’s drive or so up into the moun
tains to the south. But the French were stopped by a blown bridge over a deep ravine. They did not have bridging equipment, and some SS fanatics were holding out on the south side of the ravine, using automatic weapons and mortars.

  Easy Company and the remainder of 2d Battalion began mixing in with the French, everyone standing around watching a long-range, useless exchange of fire while waiting for the 101st engineers to come forward. Winters asked Sink if he wanted to send a platoon to outflank the German roadblock. “No,” Sink replied, “I don’t want anybody to get hurt.”

  That was sensible. There was no point to taking casualties at this stage of the war. But there was Berchtesgaden, just on the other side of the roadblock, almost in hand. Sink changed his mind. “Take the 2d Battalion back to the autobahn,” he told Winters, “and see if you can outflank this roadblock and get to Berchtesgaden.” If he succeeded, Sink wanted him to reserve the famous Berchtesgaden Hof for regimental HQ.

  Winters led the battalion on a backtrack to the autobahn, then east to Bad Reichenhall, where another blown bridge stopped the Americans for the night. The following morning, May 5, with Easy Company leading the way, the 2d Battalion drove unopposed to Berchtesgaden and took the town without having to fire a shot.

  It was like a fairy-tale land. The snowcapped mountains, the dark green woods, the tinkling icy creeks, the gingerbread houses, the quaint and colorful dress of the natives, provided a delight for the eye. The food, liquor, accommodations, and large number of Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht service women, plus camp followers of various types, provided a delight for the body.

  Accommodations were the first order of business. Winters and Lieutenant Welsh went to the Berchtesgaden Hof. As they walked in the front door of the hotel, they could see the backs of the service personnel disappear around the corner. They went into the main dining room, where they saw a waiter putting together a large set of silverware in a 4-foot-long velvet-lined case.

  There was no need for orders. Winters and Welsh simply walked toward the man, who took off. The Americans split the silverware between them. Forty-five years later, both men were still using the Berchtesgaden Hof’s silverware in their homes.

  After getting what he most wanted out of the place, Winters then put a double guard on the hotel “to stop further looting,” as he put it—with a straight face—in one of our interviews. But, he berated himself, “What a fool I was not to open the place to the 2d Battalion,” because when regimental and then divisional HQ arrived, they took everything movable.

  Winters picked one of the homes of Nazi officials, perched on the hillside climbing the valley out of Berchtesgaden, for his battalion HQ. He told Lieutenant Cowing, his S-4, to go to the place and tell the people they had fifteen minutes to get out. Cowing was a replacement officer who had joined up in mid-February, back in Haguenau. He had not been hardened by battle. He returned a few minutes later to tell Winters, “The people said no, they would not move out.”

  “Follow me,” Winters declared. He went to the front door, knocked, and when a woman answered, he announced, “We are moving in. Now!” And he and his staff did just that, as the Germans disappeared somewhere.

  “Did I feel guilty about this?” Winters asked himself in the interview. “Did my conscience bother me about taking over this beautiful home? No! We had been living in foxholes in Normandy, we had been in the mud at Holland, the snow in Bastogne. Just a few days earlier we’d seen a concentration camp. These people were the reason for all this suffering. I had no sympathy for their problem, nor did I feel that I owed them an explanation.”

  Nor did the enlisted men have the slightest problem, physical or psychological, in taking over the SS barracks, an Alpine-style apartment house block that was the latest thing in modern design, plumbing, and interior decoration. Officers and sergeants got sumptuous homes of Nazi officials perched on the mountainsides overlooking Berchtesgaden.

  Winters set up the guard around town, mainly to direct traffic and to gather up surrendering German troops to send them to P.O.W. cages in the rear. Private Heffron was thus in command at a crossroads when a convoy of thirty-one vehicles came down from the mountain. At its head was Gen. Theodor Tolsdorf, commander of the LXXXII Corps. He was quite a character, a thirty-five-year-old Prussian who had almost set the record for advancement in the Wehrmacht. He had been wounded eleven times and was known to his men as Tolsdorf the Mad because of his recklessness with their lives and his own. Of more interest to E Company men, he had been in command of the 340th Volksgrenadier Division on January 3 in the bitter fighting in the Bois Jacques and around Foy and Noville.

  Tolsdorf expected to surrender with full honors, then be allowed to live in a P.O.W. camp in considerable style. His convoy was loaded with personal baggage, liquor, cigars and cigarettes, along with plenty of accompanying girlfriends. Heffron was the first American the party encountered. He stopped the convoy; Tolsdorf said he wished to surrender; Heffron summoned a nearby 2nd lieutenant; Tolsdorf sent the lieutenant off to find someone of more suitable rank; Heffron, meanwhile, seized the opportunity to liberate General Tolsdorf’s Luger and briefcase. In the briefcase he found a couple of Iron Crosses and 500 pornographic photographs. He thought to himself, A kid from South Philly has a Kraut general surrender to him, that is pretty good.

  • • •

  Everyone was grabbing loot at a frantic pace. German soldiers were everywhere—Wehrmacht, Waffen SS, Luftwaffe, officers, noncoms, privates—looking for someone to surrender to, and Dog, Easy, and Fox Companies of the 506th were the first to get to them. From these soldiers, Webster wrote his parents on May 13, “we obtained pistols, knives, watches, fur-lined coats, camouflaged jump jackets. Most of the Germans take it in pretty good spirit, but once in a while we get an individual who does not want to be relieved of the excess weight of his watch. A pistol flashed in his face, however, can persuade anybody. I now have a Luger, two P-38’s, a Schmeissere machine pistol, two jump smocks, one camouflaged winter jacket, several Nazi flags about three feet by two, and a watch.”

  The Eagle’s Nest had been thoroughly worked over by the Army Air Force. The elevator to it had been put out of action. But to men who had been up and down Currahee innumerable times, the climb to the top was more a stroll than a challenge. Alton More was one of the first to get there. In the rubble, he found two of Hitler’s photo albums filled with pictures of the famous politicians of Europe who had been Hitler’s guests. An officer from the company demanded that More turn over the albums to him. More refused. The officer threatened to court-martial him.

  More was in Malarkey’s platoon. Malarkey ran to battalion HQ to see Winters. He explained the situation. Winters told his jeep driver to “take Malarkey back to his quarters and return with Private More and all his gear.” When More arrived, Winters made him a driver for Battalion HQ. Thus was More able to take the albums home with him to Casper, Wyoming.

  • • •

  With lodging taken care of, and having looted more than they could carry or could ever hope to get home, the next thing these young Americans needed was a set of wheels. No problem: in the vehicle parks in and around town there were German army trucks, sedans, Volkswagens, and more, while scattered through town and in the garages attached to the hillside homes were luxury automobiles. Sergeant Hale got a Mercedes fire engine, complete with bell, siren, and flashing blue lights. Sergeant Talbert got one of Hitler’s staff cars, with bulletproof doors and windows. Sergeant Carson got Hermann Goering’s car, “the most beautiful car I have ever seen. We were like kids jumping up and down. We were Kings of the Road. We found Captain Speirs. He immediately took over the wheel and off we went, through Berchtesgaden, through the mountain roads, through the country with its picture-book farms.”

  As more brass poured into Berchtesgaden on May 7 and 8, it was more difficult for a captain to hold on to a Mercedes. Speirs got orders to turn it over to regiment. Carson and Bill Howell were hanging around the car when Speirs delivered the sad message.


  Carson asked Howell if he thought those windows really were bulletproof. Howell wondered too. So they paced off ten yards from the left rear window, aimed their M-1s and fired. The window shattered into a thousand pieces. They gathered up the broken glass and walked away just as a captain from regiment came to pick up the car.

  Before Talbert turned over his Mercedes, he too did some experimenting. He was able to report to Winters that the windows were bulletproof, but that if you used armor-piercing ammo, it would get the job done. Winters thanked him for his research, agreeing that one never knew when this kind of information would come in handy.

  The men tried another experiment. They drained the water from the radiator of the Mercedes, to see if it could run without it. With a third luxury car, they decided that before turning it in they would see if it could survive a 30-meter crash, so they pushed it over a cliff.

  So the brass got luxury automobiles without windows or water, or wrecks (Talbert’s Mercedes burned out the engine trying to climb the road to the Eagle’s Nest). The men ended up with trucks, motorcycles, Volkswagens, scout cars, and the like, which were good enough, and anyway the fuel came as free as the vehicle. The Americans would just fill up and drive off.

  “It was a unique feeling,” Winters recalled. “You can’t imagine such power as we had. Whatever we wanted, we just took.”

  • • •

  With lodging and wheels taken care of, the next thing was liquor. Every cellar held some wine, but the greatest cache of all was discovered by one of the few nondrinkers in the battalion, Major Winters. On May 6, scouting on his own, he found Goering’s Officer’s Quarters and Club. In one room he found a dead German general, in full dress uniform, a bullet through his head, ear to ear, a pistol in his hand. He was a two-star general later identified as Kastner.