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

by Rick Atkinson

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  Fanatical resistance in Paderborn caused General Collins to revise his attack. Early Saturday morning, March 31, he ordered the 3rd Armored Division to pivot twenty miles west, where the Ninth Army’s 2nd Armored Division was nearing Lippstadt. Here opposition promised to be lighter: the town now was defended mostly by Volkssturm militia with armbands for uniforms and ancient Czech rifles for weaponry. Beaten Wehrmacht columns from the Rhine trudged eastward through the streets, pushing their kit in barrows and stolen prams. A Nazi boss had combed a military hospital for engineers to sabotage bridges over the river Lippe using explosives found in a V-1 storage shed and bombs from an airfield magazine, but the job was botched and the spans in Lippstadt still stood. It was said that a German surgeon had begun removing the telltale blood group tattoos from the inner left arms of Waffen-SS soldiers, leaving a scar that resembled a bullet wound.

  Easter Sunday dawned bright and warm. Army chaplains in village churches near the American gun lines hastily celebrated the holy morning as howitzers popped away. “Every time a battery would fire the candles on the altar would flicker and the loosened window panes would rattle,” a paratrooper wrote his parents. “The church was crowded with GIs in their filthy combat clothes.” Pealing bells in Lippstadt also summoned the faithful, and pious Germans hurried to Mass even as exploding shells walked down Barbarossastrasse. The last garrison troops wobbled away on bicycles, and home guardsmen plundered their barracks for underwear and mattresses.

  At noon, observation planes reported vanguards of the 2nd and 3rd Armored Divisions approaching each other from west and east, respectively, the former led by a sergeant named Werner Osthelmer, who had emigrated from Lippstadt eight years earlier to open a butcher shop in Detroit. Shortly after four P.M. the columns met with back-slapping chortles to complete the Ruhr’s encirclement. Refugees and liberated slave laborers looted stores in downtown Lippstadt, smashing bank windows and lighting their cigarettes with hundred-mark notes.

  The “largest double envelopment in history,” in Eisenhower’s cock-a-hoop phrase, had thrown a cordon seventy-five miles wide by fifty miles deep around the Reich’s industrial core. Precisely who had been trapped within those four thousand square miles remained uncertain, although Allied intelligence believed the pocket contained shards of the Fifteenth and Fifth Panzer Armies, and two corps from the First Parachute Army. Among those snared was Field Marshal Model, whose Army Group B now faced extermination. Model had no appetite for last-ditch fighting among the Ruhr’s bombed factories, gutted cities, and slag pits, but Hitler forbade withdrawal on pain of death. Instead the field marshal was reduced to waiting for reinforcement by a new, largely imaginary Twelfth Army, while every uniformed Landser in his command was bundled into the Ruhr perimeter, including schoolboy fanatics in short pants, known as “Ascension Day Commandos” for their willingness to die. “All fear comes from the Devil,” Model wrote his wife in an Easter letter. “Courage and joy come from the Lord.… We all must die at some time or other.”

  To bring that day closer for his foe, Bradley ordered four corps to reduce the Ruhr Pocket. Ninth Army, now restored to 12th Army Group, would squeeze from the north, clearing one grimy, skeletonized city after another. Some were too enfeebled to resist, like Duisburg and Essen. Others fought on, like Hamm, which would take four days to smite senseless. First Army pressed from the south, in terrain less urban but more rugged, gnawing away four to six miles each day and freeing slave workers by the tens of thousands. Marching fire and thermite grenades usually proved irresistible to enemy holdouts; against one recalcitrant nest, at a Siegburg factory where German paratroopers used machine lathes to burrow into a deep subbasement, fifty flamethrowers encouraged surrender. After his 7th Armored Division captured the LXXXI Corps commander and twenty thousand soldiers, General Hasbrouck began a letter to his wife, then wrote, “There are so many interruptions from excited staff officers at higher headquarters that I will have to stop.”

  “What is there left to a commander in defeat?” Model asked his staff. “In ancient times, they took poison.” The Ruhrfestung, Fortress Ruhr, was shrinking by the hour. Ammunition and food stocks dwindled with the American capture of grain and flour reserves near Hamm. Contact with the high command grew spotty, and fatuous orders from Berlin were “scarcely read, much less passed on,” as Model’s chief of staff conceded. Probes of the U.S. perimeter revealed no weak points for a possible breakout. General Ridgway of XVIII Airborne Corps sent a letter through the lines, urging Model to emulate Robert E. Lee at Appomattox:

  Eighty years ago this month, his loyal command reduced in numbers, stripped of its means of effective fighting and completely surrounded by overwhelming forces, he chose an honorable capitulation. This same choice is now yours.

  The plea fell on deaf ears. Moscow had accused Model of complicity in a half-million deaths in Latvia early in the war, and he had no intention of facing Soviet justice. “A field marshal does not become a prisoner,” he declared. “Such a thing is just not possible.” Instead, he dispatched an aide to slip through the cordon to help the Model family flee westward from Dresden and to burn his personal papers. Then the field marshal ordered Army Group B disbanded, sparing himself the stigma of surrendering a unit that now no longer existed. “Have we done everything to justify our actions in the light of history?” he asked his chief of staff.

  With the pocket disintegrating, Model and three fugitive officers drove to the Düsseldorf racetrack before picking their way on a logging road through a thicket northeast of the ruined city. Swatting mosquitoes in the dark, they listened to a radio broadcast from Berlin in an Opel-Blitz signals truck and heard Goebbels condemn the “verrätische Ruhrarmee,” the treacherous army of the Ruhr.

  “I sincerely believe that I have served a criminal,” Model mused. “I led my solders in good conscience … but for a criminal government.” Sealing his wedding ring and a letter to his wife inside an envelope, he walked to a gnarled oak tree. “You will bury me here,” he told a subordinate, then blew his brains out with a Walther service revolver.

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  A B-26 crewman flying low over the Ruhr in April spied what he thought was “a dark plowed field.” On closer scrutiny, he reported, “it proved to be acres of massed humanity … packed together closer than a herd of cows.”

  Allied intelligence originally estimated that 80,000 Germans had been trapped in the Ruhr Pocket. On April 5, the figure jumped to 125,000. A day later Eisenhower told Marshall that he believed 150,000 were in the pocket, of whom “we will capture at least 100,000.” Those figures proved far too modest: in the event, 323,000 enemy prisoners would be taken from seven corps and nineteen divisions. This multitude, larger than those bagged at Stalingrad or Tunis, included twenty-four generals and a dry-shod admiral. “I had some nice days during my military career, yes, it was lots of fun,” a German commander told his interrogators. “But now I wish I were dead.”

  American planners had assumed a need for cages to hold 900,000 German prisoners by the end of June; instead, by mid-April the number exceeded 1.3 million, and the final Ruhr bonanza would sharply increase that tally. “We have prisoners like some people have mice,” Gavin complained to his daughter. A guard from the 78th Division who set out on foot with sixty-nine Germans in his custody reached a regimental stockade near Wuppertal with twelve hundred. Enemy troops throughout the pocket could be seen waving “handkerchiefs, bed sheets, table linen, shirts”—on this battlefield, a division history observed, “the predominant color was white.” One unit rode bicycles into captivity, maintaining a precise military alignment to the end. Another arrived aboard horse-drawn wagons, clip-clopping in parade formation. The men unhitched and groomed their teams, then turned them free into the fields as they themselves repaired to captivity.

  The official Army history described the surrendering rabble:

  Young men, old men, arrogant SS troops, dejected infantrymen, paunchy reservists, female nurses and technicia
ns, teenage members of the Hitler Youth, stiffly correct, monocled Prussians, enough to gladden the heart of a Hollywood casting director.… Some [came] carrying black bread and wine; others with musical instruments—accordions, guitars; a few bringing along wives or girlfriends in a mistaken hope that they might share their captivity.

  A single strand of barbed wire often sufficed for an enclosure. GI sentries cradled their carbines and stifled yawns. Within the cordon sat supermen by the acre. Singing sad soldier songs and reminiscing about better days, they scavenged the ground for cigarette butts and plucked the lice from their field-gray tunics.

  12. VICTORY

  Mark of the Beast

  FOR the final destruction of the Third Reich, General Bradley—newly awarded a fourth star, and now dubbed “Omar the Warmaker” by the Stars and Stripes newspaper—shifted his command post to Wiesbaden, just west of Frankfurt. Eisenhower joined him there on Wednesday evening, April 11, after a flight from Reims in a B-25 bomber. Early the next morning they squeezed into a Piper Cub and flew eighty miles northeast, following the autobahn trace to the market town of Hersfeld. Here Patton, who also had been promoted to four-star general, awaited them with an armored cavalry escort and a convoy of jeeps, including one adorned with the supreme commander’s five-star rank insignia. East they sped for twenty miles, through a lowland corridor known as the Fulda Gap, arriving at 10:30 A.M. in the Thuringian village of Merkers. A tank battalion guarded the entrance to a nineteenth-century potassium mine, where GIs had made a discovery that Patton believed Eisenhower should see.

  A photograph of the Führer still graced the timekeeper’s office wall in the mine mouth, and an exhortatory sign proclaimed, auf Deutsch, “Thy Strength Is Nothing: The People’s Strength Is All!” The XII Corps commander, General Eddy, led them onto a rickety freight elevator, and as they slowly descended the pitch-black shaft Patton quipped, “If that clothesline should part, promotions in the United States Army would be considerably stimulated.” Sixteen hundred feet down, the lift doors opened. A sentry snapped a salute, and upon recognizing his visitors exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” In a wide gallery Patton pointed to currency-engraving plates used by the Reichsbank, and stacked bales of money designated for the Wehrmacht. Eyeing the bills, Bradley said, “I doubt the German army will be meeting payrolls much longer.”

  Treasures already had been discovered in other mines: in a damp Siegen iron pit on April 2, soldiers found six enormous crates labeled “Aachen Cathedral,” which included a silver bust of Charlemagne imbedded with a fragment of the emperor’s skull. Other boxes in the Siegen lode held paintings by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Van Gogh, and the original manuscript of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. Yet no trove would surpass that found in the Merkers workings, as Eisenhower realized upon stepping through a hole blown in a bank-vault door by Army engineers using half a stick of dynamite.

  Here in “Room No. 8,” a chamber 150 feet long and 75 feet wide, more than 7,000 bags of gold and other loot recently transferred from Berlin—in some cases by double-decker bus—lay in neat rows under lights dangling beneath the twelve-foot ceiling. In addition to 8,307 gold bars and 55 crates of bullion, the repository included 3,682 sacks of German currency, 80 more of foreign currency, 3,326 bags of gold coins—among them 711 filled with U.S. $20 gold pieces, each sack worth $25,000—8 bags of gold rings, and a pouch of platinum bars. At the back of the room, in more than 200 satchels, suitcases, and trunks, each tagged “Melmer” after a kleptomaniacal SS captain named Bruno Melmer, were valuables stolen from concentration-camp victims: pearls, watch cases, gold tooth crowns, Passover cups, cigarette cases, spoons. Much of the metal had been hammered flat to save space. Other galleries and shafts nearby yielded two million volumes from Berlin libraries, 400 tons of patent records, 33 wooden cases of Goethe memorabilia from Weimar, paintings by Rubens and Goya, and costumes from the Berlin state theaters. “If these were the old free-booting days when a soldier kept his loot,” Bradley told Patton, “you’d be the richest man in the world.”

  Patton facetiously proposed converting the 250 tons of gold—most of the Reich’s reserve—into medallions “for every son of a bitch in the Third Army.” Eventually valued by SHAEF in excess of half a billion dollars, the treasure in the Merkers shaft lay within what soon would become the Soviet occupation zone. There was not a moment to lose, and plans already had been made to spirit the booty to Frankfurt—in the American zone—using thirty ten-ton trucks guarded by two MP battalions, seven infantry platoons, and air cover from P-51 Mustangs. The artworks were to be wrapped in German army sheepskin coats, thousands of which were also found in the mine.

  Similar removals were under way throughout the designated Soviet sector on grounds of “military necessity,” provoking shrill, ineffectual protests from Moscow that not only treasure but also equipment and skilled personnel were disappearing westward. Among those brought into the American fold were a thousand German chemists, engineers, physicists, physicians, and mathematicians, as well as various intellectual fruits, whisked away under a program code-named AIRMAIL. The haul included: 241 scientists from the Institute of Physics and Chemistry in Halle, along with new aircraft designs; 45 technical experts from an IG Farben plant in Bitterfeld, with 500 tons of potassium bichromate and 200 tons of potassium permanganate; and, from a Zeiss plant in Jena, 213 experts in radar and other disciplines, plus a new German bombsight. Other swag included ground-to-air missile designs, material supporting 340,000 German patents, and enough V-2 components to build seventy-five rockets.

  Patton had one more discovery to show Eisenhower. After a quick lunch at the XII Corps command post, the traveling party flew by small plane to Gotha to join another convoy for a ten-mile excursion to the south. A German deserter’s tale of an elaborate headquarters in remote Ohrdruf had intrigued Eisenhower the previous week, and he had authorized Patton to dispatch a flying column from the 4th Armored Division in hopes of capturing the enemy high command. By ill fortune, the raiders had just missed Field Marshal Kesselring, bagging only a few German soldiers masquerading as patients in a local hospital. The mysterious headquarters also proved disappointing: built inside huge underground tunnels in 1938, with telephone exchanges, carpeted offices, flush toilets, and a movie theater, the compound had never been used. Himmler had planned to refurbish the complex as a retreat for Hitler and present it to the Führer on April 20 for his fifty-sixth birthday.

  Yet the expedition had hardly been fruitless, because here the Americans liberated a concentration camp in Germany for the first time. Known as S-3 and opened the previous fall, Ohrdruf was among more than eighty satellite camps of a penal facility that soon would become even more notorious: Buchenwald. Bradley described the traveling party’s visit to S-3:

  We passed through the stockade. More than 3,200 naked, emaciated bodies had been flung into shallow graves. Others lay in the streets where they had fallen.… A guard showed us how the blood had congealed in the coarse black scabs where the starving prisoners had torn out the entrails of the dead for food.

  An inmate pointed out a gallows where condemned men were strangled with piano wire. Others had been murdered with a pistol shot to the nape of the neck. As Allied forces had approached from the west, Patton informed his diary, SS guards “had some of the slaves exhume the bodies and place them on a mammoth griddle composed of 60-centimeter railway tracks laid on brick foundations. They poured pitch on the bodies and then built a fire of pinewood and coal under them,” leaving “bones, skulls, charred torsos.” Most guards then fled, disguised in mufti, although a few were beaten or stabbed to death by vengeful inmates as the first Americans arrived. “You search the face to find what it is that is lacking, to find the mark of the beast,” a reporter wrote after scrutinizing SS visages. The camp still reeked of feces and burned hair. Another burial trench dusted with lime “was almost filled with ash and human debris from which, here and there, emaciated limbs projected,” wrote Osmar White, the Australian correspondent assigned t
o Third Army. “Patton,” Bradley noted, “walked over to a corner and sickened.”

  When a young GI giggled nervously, Eisenhower fixed him with a baleful eye. “Still having trouble hating them?” he asked. To other troops gathered round him in the compound, the supreme commander said, “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now at least he will know what he is fighting against.”

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  Eisenhower and Bradley agreed to spend Thursday night at the Third Army bivouac in Hersfeld. After supper they retired to Patton’s caravan with a sheaf of maps for a long discussion about where best to fling their armies. The destruction of Model’s Army Group B left a hole 125 miles wide in the center of the German front for exploitation by 12th Army Group, which now boasted 1.3 million soldiers in twelve corps and forty-eight divisions. Two obvious invasion routes veered north and south of the Harz Mountains, once the Ruhr was cleared: under 12th Army Group’s plan, Ninth Army would take the upper route, toward Magdeburg, and First Army the lower, across the Thüringen plain toward Leipzig. Third Army, already farther east on Bradley’s right wing, would allow her two sister armies to come abreast and then swing southeast, while Patch’s Seventh Army pivoted through lower Bavaria and Austria to shield Patton’s flank. The new Fifteenth Army, under General Gerow, would trail the combat legions to take up occupation duties.

  Despite great bounds now being made by all forces—Simpson’s Ninth Army had traveled 226 miles since jumping the Rhine—Eisenhower wanted the American line to advance no farther east than Chemnitz, near the Czech border. As for Berlin, he reiterated his determination to leave the city to the Soviets, who were about to launch their final assault on the capital.