The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  “This is unconditional surrender,” Devers said. “Do you understand that?”

  For a full minute Foertsch remained as stiff as the statues around him, a witness recorded, “the muscles of his face working like those of a man about to have convulsions.” Then with a slight cant of his head he replied in precise English, “I can assure you, sir, there is no power left at my disposal to prevent it.”

  * * *

  Few locales were more freighted with Teutonic sentiment than Berchtesgaden, a remote Bavarian village eighty miles southeast of Munich. Hitler had retreated here after the failed 1923 putsch, and here, in a log hut, he had written the second volume of Mein Kampf. Brisk book sales had financed his beloved vacation home—later known as the Berghof—on the Obersalzberg slopes above the town, with views of the mountain where Charlemagne and his mystic army were said to slumber. Other Nazi cronies also bought houses here to create a bucolic enclave conducive to pastoral husbandry—Bormann kept one hundred beehives on his tract—or the plotting of world domination.

  As a gift for the Führer’s fiftieth birthday, and also as a venue for diplomatic receptions, the regime had hired almost four thousand workers to build a lavish mountaintop château nearby, dubbed the Eagle’s Nest. It came with the requisite spectacular vistas, as well as a grand Carrara marble fireplace donated by Mussolini; a Gobelin tapestry covered the wall above the hearth, like a pelt. Visitors drove up a serpentine road through five tunnels bored through the granite mountain, then ascended another four hundred feet to the summit in an Otis elevator appointed with Venetian glass, green leather benches, and brass fittings.

  RAF bombers on April 25 had roiled this little brown world with a punitive raid that badly battered the Bormann and Göring houses, as well as Hitler’s Berghof and an adjacent SS barracks. Emboldened German looters then rifled the Obersalzberg, stealing Himmler’s furniture and Bormann’s collection of a thousand watercolors and drawings. News of the Führer’s death inspired SS bodyguards to burn his personal effects on May 1, and then set fire to the house as Allied armies drew near.

  Flames still licked from various ruins when two battalions of the 3rd Infantry Division tramped into Berchtesgaden through meadows spangled with wildflowers at four P.M. on May 4. Under orders from General O’Daniel, officers posted a heavy guard on bridges across the Saalach River, barring both the approaching French 2nd Armored and the 101st Airborne Divisions from entering the village. “You’ve had Paris and you’ve had Strasbourg,” the XV Corps commander, General Haislip, told a fuming General Leclerc. “You can’t expect Berchtesgaden as well.” GIs lowered a Nazi flag and tore it into two-inch shreds for souvenirs.

  Despite bombing, arson, and plunder, soldiers still found much to pillage on the Obersalzberg. Table linen, teacups, and spoons monogrammed “A.H.” could be found in the Berghof cellars, as well as phonograph records, magazines dating to 1930, and the toilet seat from a green-tiled water closet. GIs pilfered light fixtures, bedsprings, and high-command situation maps for various theaters. An officer poking through Eva Braun’s closet remarked, “What impressed me most was the number of coat hangers in her wardrobes. There must have been more than two hundred of them.” A nearby guesthouse yielded an espresso machine, a beer tap, and deep-freeze ice cream tubs.

  RAF bombs had spared the Eagle’s Nest, but suspected booby traps in the elevator shaft meant a long, steep climb to the summit. Scouts found a dining room with blackout curtains and twenty-six chairs, furniture and paneling of cembra pine, and a pristine kitchen with a butcher’s block that appeared never to have felt a cleaver’s bite. Mussolini’s fireplace was so enormous, a visitor wrote, that “an ox could turn on the spit.” Soon three thousand Allied soldiers a day would tramp up to the Eagle’s Nest as tourists, ten thousand on Sundays. Bored, gum-chewing paratroopers were pressed into duty as guides.

  Göring’s booty proved especially vast and varied, much of it crammed into a warehouse with a large bank vault inside: eighteen thousand bottles of wine and liquor; five thousand Minox cameras the size of cigarette lighters; two dozen suitcases stuffed with women’s underwear; an impressive cache of pornographic movies; and a bulletproof, fourteen-passenger Mercedes sedan. In nearby rail tunnels and other repositories, paratroopers found much of his notorious art collection, said to be worth more than $500 million: hundreds of paintings by the likes of Rembrandt, Rubens, and Van Dyck, as well as a Vermeer forgery, Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery; terra-cotta saints, satyrs, and warriors; tapestries, antique furniture, gold chalices, porcelain figurines. An inn was converted into a temporary gallery with a placard outside that read: “Hermann Goering Art Collection—Through Courtesy of the 101st Airborne Division.” “Ah, war!” sighed Göring’s personal curator, who was seized along with the swag. “Goodbye, goodbye.”

  The Reichsmarschall himself soon materialized, having offered his services to Eisenhower “in reorganizing the German Reich.” Arrested by the 36th Division thirty-five miles southeast of Salzburg, with an entourage of seventy-five vassals that included a chef, a butler, and a valet, Göring was fed fried chicken and photographed in front of a Texas Lone Star flag, his many chins cascading to the Iron Cross at his throat. To ward off SS assassins, he was permitted to keep four machine pistols overnight. “He is a fat slob, very anxious to talk about how the mistakes were Hitler’s and Ribbentrop’s,” General Dahlquist told his diary. Wearing sky-blue gloves, he claimed in a breezy session with correspondents that accounts of unpleasantries at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald were “merely propaganda reports.” “I am no prophet,” he added. “It is hard to say what will happen in the future.” His marshal’s baton, sixteen inches long and encrusted with 640 diamonds, twenty gold eagles, and twenty platinum crosses, became a prop to sell war bonds in the United States.

  And then there was one. The last German headquarters still at large in the Alps was that of Field Marshal Kesselring, the Anglo-Americans’ longtime nemesis. Two reporters tracked down the OB West commander as he awaited the end of the war aboard a five-car train along the Austrian border. Assuming they were Eisenhower emissaries come to negotiate his personal surrender, Kesselring invited them to a lunch of ham, cabbage, potatoes, and beer. Upon discovering his error, Smiling Albert chuckled and muttered, “Well, bugger me.”

  An American major subsequently invited Kesselring to move to the Berchtesgadener Hof, where he was given the finest room and permitted to keep his pistol, medals, and marshal’s baton—“Six of these I have left behind in the ruins of command posts,” he lamented—before being remanded to a more austere cell in Luxembourg where war-crimes interrogators awaited him. Asked before his departure to assess Hitler, the field marshal took a deep breath and replied, “Hitler was the most remarkable historical character I ever knew.”

  A Great Silence

  FIELD Marshal Montgomery’s final wartime encampment crowned a hilltop on the Lüneburg Heath, thirty miles southeast of Hamburg in a landscape of beech, birch, and half-timbered farmhouses with blue- or pink-tinted plaster. “The lovely colors of the countryside spread away for miles, pools of dark green in the clumps of pine, purple in the heather,” wrote Alan Moorehead, who nonetheless considered this an “abode of witches and warlocks and sprites.” Tommies fished unconventionally in a nearby trout hatchery, with revolvers and grenades. The spires of two Lüneburg churches soared above the treetops to the north, and pathetic groans could be heard from local hospitals jammed with damaged German soldiers. A sign in an abandoned Luftwaffe barracks still insisted “Der Führer Hat Immer Recht”—The Führer Is Always Right—and a storage room there had yielded fine maps of England, Scotland, and the Soviet Union, reminders of the Reich’s foiled ambitions.

  At 11:30 A.M. on Thursday, May 3, a German sedan escorted by two British armored cars crawled past the village of Wendisch Evern. The small convoy halted beneath a Union Jack that had been hoisted over a trio of camouflaged caravans. Four officers stepped from the sedan, two in gray army greatcoats and two in
the long leather watch coats of German naval officers. The door of the middle caravan swung open and an elfin figure in battle dress and khaki trousers emerged, hands clasped behind his back in a pose of severest rectitude. Drawing themselves to attention, the four Germans snapped salutes, which Montgomery returned with the casual brush of a finger against his black beret.

  “Who are you?” he bellowed. “What do you want?” A slight, sallow officer in a high-peaked cap stepped forward to introduce himself as Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg. Under the Führer’s last political testament, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz had succeeded Hitler as head of state, or what remained of a state, in a provisional capital in Flensburg, near the Danish border. Admiral von Friedeburg had in turn succeeded Dönitz as commander-in-chief of the German navy, or what remained of a navy.

  “I have never heard of you,” Montgomery shouted. One British staff officer whispered to another, “He’s been rehearsing this all his life.”

  Undaunted, Friedeburg on Dönitz’s authority proposed surrendering the three German armies fleeing the Soviets between the Baltic and Berlin. “Certainly not,” Montgomery replied. “Those armies are fighting the Russians, so they must surrender to the Russians. The subject is closed.” He would accept only individual soldiers giving up with raised hands, “in the usual way.”

  After mulling the matter for a moment, the field marshal added, “Will you surrender to me all the German forces between Lübeck and the Dutch coast, and all supporting troops such as those in Denmark?” That would be a tactical battlefield surrender by enemies opposing 21st Army Group, not a strategic capitulation to undermine Moscow. When Friedeburg protested that he had no authority for such an arrangement, Montgomery cut him off. “I wonder,” he said, “if you really know what your position is?”

  Calling for a map, he quickly pointed out the catastrophe befallen German forces on every front, while delivering a tongue-lashing about concentration camps and the suffering caused by the Reich. “You had better go to lunch and think it over,” the field marshal said. He personally would “be delighted to continue fighting.” Escorted to a tent, the four Germans dined alone on a table laid with a white sheet. As his comrades nipped from bottles of red wine and cognac, Friedeburg wept—“an embarrassing scene,” Moorehead wrote—then agreed to take Montgomery’s counterproposal to the high command. He drove off at midafternoon, promising to return the following day.

  At five P.M. on a rainy Friday, May 4, the field marshal bounded into the Lüneburg press tent, “jaunty, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his light naval duffle-coat,” R. W. Thompson recorded. “Had a good tea?” Montgomery asked the reporters. “Forces to be surrendered total over a million chaps. No so bad, a million chaps. Good egg!” A colonel soon appeared to announce that Friedeburg and his delegation had returned. “Ha! He is back. He was to come back with the doings,” the field marshal said. “Tell them to wait.” For half an hour he rambled on, then popped to his feet. “And now we will attend the last act. These German officers have arrived back. We will go and see what their answer is.”

  The answer was yes. Friedeburg trudged into Montgomery’s caravan for a brief tête-à-tête, where he reported that Grand Admiral Dönitz—invariably called Donuts by Allied soldiers—had agreed to the British terms. Dönitz had also instructed Friedeburg to open negotiations with Eisenhower directly; the grand admiral clearly hoped that every hour of delay would allow thousands more Wehrmacht troops and German refugees to escape to the west. Eyes bright, Montgomery gestured to a photo on the wall. “Tell me,” he said, “is this a good likeness of Field Marshal Rundstedt? I always like to study my opponents.” Yes, Friedeburg said, the resemblance was excellent.

  At 6:20 P.M., the admiral emerged from the trailer and, bracketed by two British officers, walked fifty yards to a tent with the side flaps raised. Two BBC microphones sat on a square table covered with an army blanket. “It was a grey evening,” Moorehead wrote, “grey heather, grey heavy clouds, grey coats on the Germans and grey in their faces.” Montgomery arrived directly. “This,” he murmured to reporters, “is a great moment.”

  Friedeburg and his comrades rose from their chairs to salute stiffly. Montgomery took his chair, his biographer would write, “the simple, tortoiseshell-rimmed reading spectacles set upon the sharp foxish nose, with five rows of decorations below his lapel, the small gold chain linking the breast pockets of his battle dress, the bony, sinewy hands resting upon the table.” Holding a document titled “Instrument of Surrender,” he read aloud the seven paragraphs in his reedy voice, ending with “The decision of the Allied Powers will be final if any doubt or dispute arises as to the meaning or interpretation of the surrender terms.” Picking up a pen, he dipped it into an inkpot and told Friedeburg, “You will now sign the document.”

  Once all German signatures had been affixed, Montgomery added his own, then began to write “April,” crossed out the “A,” and dated the document “4 May 1945, 1830 hrs.” The capitulation would take effect the next morning at eight A.M. and remain valid until superseded by a general surrender to be signed under SHAEF auspices. He sat back with a sigh, removing his glasses. “That,” he said, “concludes the formal surrender.”

  “The tent flaps were let down,” R. W. Thompson reported, “and we walked away.” To commemorate what he now called “Victory Hill,” Montgomery ordered that an oak plaque be erected on the moor the next day. The marker was stolen within hours, but no one would forget what had transpired on Lüneburg Heath. Recounting the day’s events in a letter to Brooke before going to bed, the field marshal wrote, “It looks as if the British Empire part of the German war in Western Europe is over. I was persuaded to drink some champagne at dinner tonight.”

  * * *

  Foul weather on Saturday, May 5, spoiled plans to whisk Friedeburg to Reims for a quick end to the war. Instead, he flew to Brussels aboard a British plane before being driven south for 135 miles, arriving shortly after five P.M. at SHAEF’s headquarters in the redbrick Collège Moderne et Technique de Garçons, hard by the sooty rail yards. Humming to himself while putting on a fresh collar in the washroom, Friedeburg then walked into Beetle Smith’s second-floor office. Within twenty minutes, negotiations had collapsed.

  Smith and Major General Strong, who together had handled the Italian capitulation for Eisenhower two years earlier, flatly rejected the admiral’s proposed surrender of only those German forces making for the west. The supreme commander, they told Friedeburg, would “not in any circumstances” accept terms other than unconditional surrender to SHAEF and to the Soviet high command simultaneously. Germany’s predicament was hopeless, Smith added; he pointed to several theater maps strewn across his desk, including a phony plan, drawn for Friedeburg’s benefit, that showed attack arrows from east and west aimed at the Wehrmacht remnants in Bohemia and Yugoslavia. The admiral’s eyes again welled with tears, but he was adamant: authority for such a surrender could only come from Dönitz.

  Smith walked down the hall to find Eisenhower pacing his office and smoking one cigarette after another. Friedeburg would cable Dönitz, Smith told him, but no surrender was likely for hours, perhaps longer. The admiral had been placed under guard in a house on Rue Godinot and fortified with pork chops, mashed potatoes, and whiskey. “The let-down was horrible,” wrote Kay Summersby. “Everyone left in a gray mood.”

  Eisenhower stalked from the headquarters with Telek, his pet Scottie. Fuming, he returned to his château and tried to lose himself in William Colt MacDonald’s Cartridge Carnival, a pulp western ablaze with gunplay, cattle rustling, and crooked gambling. “I really expected some definite developments and went to bed early in anticipation of being waked up at 1, 2, 3 or 4 A.M.,” he wrote Mamie the next morning. “Nothing happened and as a result I was wide awake, very early—with nothing decent to read. The Wild Wests I have just now are terrible—I could write better ones, left-handed.”

  A new negotiator arrived in Reims at six o’clock on Sunday evening—General
Alfred Jodl, the OKW operations chief—with instructions from Dönitz to “find salvation in the west” by explaining “why we wish to make this separate surrender to the Americans.” Joining Friedeburg in Smith’s office, Jodl smugly assured the Anglo-Americans, “Eventually, you’ll have to fight the Russians.”

  After ninety minutes of haggling, Smith informed Eisenhower that Jodl and Friedeburg were plainly stalling. “You tell them,” the supreme commander snapped, “that forty-eight hours from midnight tonight, I will close my lines on the Western Front so no more Germans can get through. Whether they sign or not—no matter how much time they take.” In a radio message to Flensburg, Jodl told Dönitz, “Eisenhower insists that we sign today.… I see no alternative—chaos or signature.” The grand admiral complained of “sheer extortion” but gave his consent: “Full power to sign.”

  SHAEF typists for days had been hammering out surrender drafts in English, French, Russian, and German. A version intended to be final had been prepared in Reims on Saturday, but some considered it the wrong document. An earlier, authorized “instrument of surrender,” written by the European Advisory Commission the previous summer, had been approved subsequently by Washington, London, Moscow, and Paris. A slightly modified instrument, drafted after the Yalta conference, added a proviso empowering the victors to dismember Germany. But France had only recently been informed of this second, secret version, and now even Moscow seemed ambivalent.

  In the absence of firm instructions from the Combined Chiefs, Smith chose to ignore both variants. He opted instead for a third, abridged document, cribbed from a copy of the German surrender in Italy, which Stars and Stripes had just published. Revisions requested by Smith and others in Reims were adapted by a British officer who had been an actor and theater manager in civil life. At the frantic urging of the U.S. embassy in London, a “general enabling clause” was inserted, authorizing the Allies to impose additional military and political conditions as needed. A SHAEF captain painstakingly translated various amendments into German, pecking at a typewriter with a single finger.