Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II

by Nicholas Best

  Their time had come in the early hours of April 28. With strips of white cloth tied around their left arms, Gerngross’s men had moved into position, soldiers as well as civilians, aiming to arrest Munich’s Gauleiter and seize control of the newspapers, radio stations, and key government buildings before the Americans arrived. They had been successful at first, taking over the radio stations and broadcasting a message of defiance to the city, urging everyone to join them in overthrowing the Nazis. Thousands had immediately come out on the streets to celebrate, convinced that Hitler must be dead and the war over.

  But the SS had stood firm. They had prevented the arrest of Munich’s Gauleiter and enabled him to make a rival broadcast, declaring that he was still in command and that Gerngross’s men would be shot as traitors. The plotters’ nerve had quickly failed. By lunchtime, Gerngross’s parents had been arrested and he himself had fled the city, escaping to the Alps in a hijacked car with SS license plates. His carefully planned coup had failed.

  Yet not for lack of support. It was only the SS who stood firm. While Gauleiter Paul Giesler had been on the radio, telling the people of Munich that they would never be deflected from their loyalty to Adolf Hitler, crews at the airfield had destroyed their aircraft and soldiers had thrown their weapons into the river. A whole division had considered defecting to Gerngross. It had been obvious from their reaction to the attempted coup that the ordinary people of Munich had no more stomach for the fight.

  The Americans arrived in the early hours of April 30 to find the city deeply divided as some Germans tried to fight on while the rest attempted to surrender. For the men of the Forty-fifth Division, advancing straight from Dachau:

  It was a question of pouring in heavy artillery fire, attacking behind smoke across city streets, dodging deadly fire from anti-aircraft guns or persistent machine guns – all the usual accompaniments the men had come to expect in clearing rubble-strewn German cities. Even as a big white streamer flew from the highest building in Munich, troops from the 45th Division were fighting from room to room in the SS caserne to dislodge diehard defenders.2

  Others had it easier. Wolfgang Robinow, a German-Jewish lieutenant in the Forty-second Division, encountered very little opposition as his platoon edged forward, but nevertheless found the experience stressful: “Even if we didn’t see anybody at all, we never knew what was hiding around the next corner. We didn’t have any dogs or tanks or anything like that. Just jeeps. My soldiers had rifles. I had a pistol. That’s all.”3

  By two o’clock that afternoon, Robinow’s men had reached the historic Marienplatz in the heart of Munich, where a crowd of civilians was waiting to welcome them. Raised a Protestant in Berlin, Robinow had learned of his Jewish ancestry for the first time when the Boy Scouts had become the Hitler Youth and he had been kicked out for not being Aryan. He was not impressed by the Germans now trying to be his friend in the Marienplatz:

  “Most of them were very old people who were too old for the Volkssturm. We were greeted as the great liberators of the city, which, to be honest, really made me angry at the time. This was, after all, the capital of the movement. It was where the Nazi party got its start and where its main propaganda organ the Völkischer Beobachter was headquartered. And now they were happy to be ‘liberated’?”4

  But at least they weren’t fighting. The Marienplatz police surrendered at once, saluting Robinow and handing over their weapons without a struggle. There was still sporadic shooting in other parts of the city as the afternoon wore on, but the historic heart of Munich fell to the Americans with barely a shot fired.

  * * *

  WHILE THE AMERICANS headed into Munich, war photographer Lee Miller was on her way to Dachau with her boyfriend. Driving south from Nuremburg, she and Dave Scherman had been advised to stop off at the camp first, before following the rest of the army to Munich.

  They were annoyed at missing the scoop at the camp. Miller and Scherman, also a photographer, were very good at their job, usually the first on the scene when there was anything unusual to be witnessed. They enjoyed a friendly rivalry with Marguerite Higgins, who complained that she always seemed to be arriving at a spot just as they were leaving. But Higgins had beaten them both to Dachau, one of the last big stories of the war. She was already long gone by the time they reached the town toward nightfall and drove up to the camp gates in Scherman’s drab green Chevrolet.

  Lee Miller was American, a society girl who had spent most of her time in Europe before the war. Choosing to spend the war years in England, she had found her vocation as a photojournalist, one of very few women photographers on the front line. In the past six weeks, she had been all over Germany with the U.S. Army, from Aachen and Cologne to Bonn, Frankfurt, and Heidelberg; from a Gestapo prison to a wrecked bridge over the Rhine and the concentration camp at Buchenwald. In the process, she had come to hate the Germans more than she had ever imagined possible, loathing them beyond all contempt for their cruelty and arrogance, their refusal to admit to any guilt, and their lack of concern for anybody’s suffering but their own. She already knew about the shrunken head and the lampshades made of tattooed skin in Buchenwald. She wondered what further horrors awaited as she and Scherman drove through the town of Dachau toward the forbidding barbed wire on the outskirts.

  The railway to the camp was lined with large, comfortable houses. White flags hung from the windows, the same windows that had looked out onto the tracks as the emaciated prisoners from Buchenwald arrived in overcrowded boxcars. The prisoners were still there, their bodies still spilling out of the cars as American medics gaped at the sight, wondering how to begin clearing up. Miller and Scherman captured the GIs’ horror on film and then moved into the camp to find themselves mobbed by cheerful inmates as they appeared.

  Dutch prisoners were celebrating Princess Juliana’s birthday. They had gathered in the square to cheer and sing the national anthem while others climbed onto the roofs and gave the victory salute. They didn’t have a Dutch flag, but they had managed to find strips of red, white, and blue material to make one. Miller took their photographs and joined the celebrations for a few minutes. Then she moved on to the brothel to photograph the women who had worked as prostitutes in return for shorter sentences. She took pictures of SS guards who had tried to escape by disguising themselves as prisoners, and captured a haunting shot of a dead guard half-submerged in the canal. She photographed the corpses piled up outside the crematorium and the gas chamber with its innocent notice announcing “Shower Baths” above the door. And she pictured the prisoners in their huts:

  The triple decker bunks, without blankets, or even straw, held two and three men per bunk who lay in bed, too weak to circulate the camp in victory and liberation marches or songs, although they mostly grinned and cheered, peering over the edge. In the few minutes it took me to take my pictures, two men were found dead, and were unceremoniously dragged out and thrown on the heap outside the block. Nobody seemed to mind except me. The doctor said it was too late for more than half the others in the building anyway. The bodies are just chucked out so that the wagon that makes the rounds every day can pick them up at the street corner, like garbage disposal.5

  The American troops in the camp had been encouraged, like Miller, to go everywhere and see everything, taking pictures with their own cameras so that they would have plenty of evidence to show people when they went back home. It was important that they should be believed when they went home. But the order had had to be rescinded, because the troops couldn’t take any more. So many had been overcome by Dachau, one way or another, that they were unable to do their jobs properly. It had just been decreed, therefore, that the huts and other buildings were to be off limits for the time being to everyone except medics and the press corps.

  Miller herself was only too glad to leave once she had her pictures. Loathing the Germans more than ever, she and Scherman put the camp behind them at length and set off down the autobahn for Munich. If Munich was where Nazism had begun, they wante
d to be there when the city fell, recording every wonderful moment with their cameras after what they had seen at Dachau: “The sight of the blue and white striped tatters shrouding the bestial death of the hundreds of starved and maimed men and women had left us gulping for air and for violence, and if Munich, the birthplace of this horror was falling we’d like to help.”

  * * *

  A FEW MILES from Dachau, in the little village of Unterbernbach, Victor Klemperer had been following the Americans’ progress for days, listening intently as bombs fell nearby and the sound of guns drew closer by the hour. As a Jew married to a German Gentile, he was longing for the Americans to arrive, if it meant that his personal nightmare would be over at last.

  Son of a rabbi, Klemperer had converted to Christianity before the Great War, in which he had served with distinction. Being Jewish had never been very important to him. He had always seen himself as German, first and foremost. But his patriotism hadn’t saved him from the race and citizenship laws introduced by the Nazis. He had lost his job as a university professor in Dresden before the war and had later been forced to move into the ghetto with his wife, Eva.

  Klemperer had spent the war working in a factory or at manual jobs, such as shoveling snow. He had watched with dismay as deportation orders were served on the Jewish community in Dresden—curt summonses to report immediately with one suitcase for resettlement in the east. With a good war record and an Aryan wife, Klemperer was a “privileged” Jew, one of the last to receive such a summons. But he had always known that it was only a matter of time. And that Jews bound for resettlement were never heard of again.

  But then something wonderful had happened. The Allies had bombed Dresden. More than seven hundred aircraft in two waves had carpeted the city, dropping a mix of high explosives and incendiaries, killing twenty-five thousand people and reducing one of the most beautiful places in Germany to a smoldering ruin. Klemperer had been separated from his wife in the confusion, running for the Jewish shelter as a bomb exploded nearby. He had found her again next morning, sitting on her suitcase near the Elbe. Dying for a cigarette to calm her nerves, yet without matches during the raid, she had thought seriously of getting a light from a body burning nearby.

  Kurt Vonnegut, an American prisoner of war in Dresden, had taken shelter during the raid in an underground abattoir named Slaughterhouse Five by the Germans. He had felt only shame for humanity as he helped them clear up their dead. But Dresden had been a legitimate target ahead of the Russian advance. Among the many buildings destroyed had been Gestapo headquarters, and with it all their files on the Jews. Assured by his friends that the files were gone, Klemperer had seized the opportunity to reinvent himself as a displaced German who had lost his identity card in the raid. Issued with temporary papers, yet afraid of being unmasked if he remained in Dresden, he had left with his wife to join the flow of refugees to the west, heading for Bavaria.

  They had ended up at Unterbernbach, just northwest of Dachau, where room had been found for them in an attic. They had been there for two weeks, waiting for the Americans to come. Klemperer had found it a fascinating experience as all manner of displaced Germans passed through the village, with widely differing views on the war and how it was likely to end. There had been two SS men who had demanded accommodation in the same house as Klemperer, threatening to evict anyone who opposed them. They had been followed by two other SS, who had been perfectly decent and well mannered. There had been the deputy burgomaster, loudly proclaiming that he had nothing to fear from the Americans, when everyone else said he had been the keenest Nazi in the village. There had been the Berliner, unaware that Klemperer was Jewish, who confided his anger at the way the Jews had been treated in Berlin; and the blond, blue-eyed, stern-looking schoolmistress, who seemed to Klemperer the epitome of everything the Nazis held dear. She had surprised him with her loathing for Nazis, complaining openly about the atrocities at Dachau, telling him that thirteen thousand people had died there in three months and that the rest were being released because they had nothing to eat.

  Everyone was waiting for the Americans to come, longing for the war to be over. The village’s electricity had been cut off, so they could no longer follow the war on the radio, but they only had to put their heads out of the window to hear the rattle of machine-gun fire and the distant sound of artillery toward Munich. Most of it had died away now, which suggested to Klemperer that the city must have fallen to the Americans. If so, the U.S. troops would be in Unterbernbach soon enough. The burgomaster had already taken the precaution of removing the Nazi swastika previously displayed so prominently on the gable above his office. He was delighted to see it come down, he told anyone prepared to listen, since he had never actually been a Nazi.

  * * *

  KLEMPERER HAD chosen not to emigrate before the war, but many other Jews had left Germany as soon as it became clear that the Nazis were there to stay. Private Henry Kissinger’s father had lost his teaching job in 1933, but had stuck it out for another five years before finally admitting defeat. He and his family had left Germany in August 1938, going to London first, and then to the United States. They had settled in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan, a place so full of German-Jewish immigrants that it was known to everyone else as the Fourth Reich.

  Henry was the older of the Kissingers’ two sons. He had grown up in Fürth, just outside Nuremberg. While Hitler strutted at his rallies and the SS goosestepped through the streets, Henry Kissinger had been a middle-class Jewish boy, living in a second-floor apartment on Matildenstrasse, in the heart of the Old Town. He had gone to school with German children at first, playing soccer with the other boys like everyone else. But then the Jews had been segregated, sent to their own school, and beaten up on the streets by gangs of Aryan youths looking for trouble. Kissinger and his brother had quickly learned to avoid trouble if they saw it coming, always crossing the road to escape groups of youths, stepping off the pavement and walking in the gutter rather than give anyone the chance to take offense. They had watched half-enviously as their erstwhile schoolfellows joined the Hitler Youth and had a high old time marching through the town together and singing patriotic songs.

  Kissinger had retained his habits in America at first, a Jew always stepping off the sidewalk if he saw a group of youths coming, steering well clear of trouble. But then he had remembered where he was, a free man in a free country. He had as much right to be on the sidewalk as anyone else. He had adapted readily to his new country, learning the mysteries of baseball and going to night school in order to pursue the American dream and become an accountant.

  He had been drafted in 1943, sent to boot camp in North Carolina, and sworn in as a U.S. citizen during his training. His new country had expected him to walk for miles in boots and attack dummies with a bayonet, but Kissinger had decided very early on that combat was not for him. His application for medical training had been rejected, but he had soon found a more congenial job in division intelligence. It was as interpreter/driver to the Eighty-fourth Infantry Division’s General Alexander Bolling that Private Kissinger found himself on German soil again at the beginning of 1945.

  His progress since then had been stellar. The Rhine town of Krefeld had fallen to the Americans in March. Without gas, water, power, or refuse collection, its population of two hundred thousand had been in dire straits after the hurried departure of the town’s Nazi administrators. Among the Americans brought in to replace them, Kissinger was the only one who could speak German. Still only a private, he had been put in charge of Krefeld, given the task of restoring order in the town and establishing a civilian administration. He had done it within a week.

  Kissinger had developed a taste for the work, solving intractable problems with a few minutes’ thought and rebuilding a broken organization from scratch. He had weeded out the remaining Nazis in Krefeld and arrested all the Gestapo he could find. Expecting them to be monsters, he had been surprised to discover that most were just “miserable little bureaucra
ts” looking to ingratiate themselves with their new masters. Wherever Kissinger went, Germans snapped to attention at his approach, the same Germans who had kicked him off the pavement when he was a boy in Fürth.

  Kissinger was enjoying that, yet without bitterness. His parents bore a lifelong grudge against Germany that he did not share, despite the humiliations of his youth. He found it impossible to hate the whole country. He kept his distance from the Germans and refused to fraternize, but he wasn’t looking for revenge. Kissinger saw himself as a liberator, not a conqueror, far more interested in solving Germany’s problems than in getting his own back. He was just there to get the country up and running again.

  He was planning to revisit his old home as soon as the war was over. He owed it to his parents to go back and see how it was. Nuremberg had taken a pasting from the Allied bombing, and probably Fürth, too. The first chance he got, Kissinger was going to take a Jeep and get over there, see if there was anyone left from the old days. Most of his friends had emigrated at the same time as the Kissingers, and the rest had disappeared into the concentration camps. There had been three thousand Jews living in Fürth when the Kissinger boys were growing up. There were only seventy left in the first full head count after the war.

  14

  ITALY

  IN SWITZERLAND, the two German officers bringing the Italian surrender terms from Caserta were on their way to Wehrmacht headquarters at Bolzano. In the small hours of April 30, Eugen Wenner and Viktor von Schweinitz were being driven through the night to the Austrian border at Buchs. A Wehrmacht car was waiting on the Austrian side to take them the rest of the way to Bolzano.