The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945

by The New York Times

  A week later American opinion was shocked again by the death of the correspondent Ernie Pyle on the Pacific island of Ie Shima, where a Japanese sniper machine-gunned him as he covered the action. Truman found himself giving a second eulogy, this time for a man who told the story of the American fighting man “as American fighting men wanted it told.”

  By April 21 the German Army in the west, cooped up in the Ruhr pocket, had surrendered. The Soviet assault on Berlin began on April 16 and ended with German surrender of the city on May 2. On April 25 soldiers of Lt. General Courtney Hodge’s First Army met troops from Konev’s First Ukrainian Army near the town of Torgau on the River Elbe. Over the following two weeks, remaining pockets of German resistance were cleared. The concentration camps were liberated and the full horror of the system the Allies had been fighting was revealed to the occupation armies. Estimates of four million deaths at Auschwitz were published. At Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria, the American troops who liberated it could not be restrained from killing the guards.

  In Italy the long and difficult campaign up the peninsula also ended with a sudden Axis collapse. After building up his forces, the Allied commander in Italy, General Harold Alexander, launched the final campaign on April 9 and within three weeks had defeated what remained of Axis resistance, aided by Italian partisans who wanted to be seen as liberating their cities before the advancing Allied armies. On May 2 all Axis forces surrendered. The final collapse brought a violent end to Europe’s Fascist dictators. On April 28 Mussolini, together with his mistress, Clara Petacci, and other leading Fascists, tried to escape into Switzerland but they were caught by partisans, summarily tried and executed. Their bodies were taken to the Piazzale Loreto in Milan and strung up by their feet. A Times reporter, Milton Bracker, watched as the local population kicked and slashed the bodies. An Italian photographer took pictures and offered them to The Times office in Switzerland but they were sent from Geneva by the new radio-photo technique and published at once in New York, one of the major scoops of the war’s end.

  Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun, whom he married on April 28, committed suicide in his Berlin bunker on April 30, though Soviet officials claimed on May 4 that they could find no sign of the corpses. The evidence was good enough for the rest of the world, however. “Deep Satisfaction Is Felt by US Troops at Death” ran The Times headline. On May 7 German forces unconditionally surrendered to Eisenhower in a schoolhouse in the French city of Reims. Stalin wanted the ceremony in Berlin and on May 8 a second surrender document was signed there. On that day the American and British people celebrated victory in Europe. In New York, The Times’s electric newsboard carried the message “The War in Europe Is Ended.”

  APRIL 1, 1945

  U.S. AND BRITAIN REBUFF MOSCOW ON LUBLIN POLES

  By BERTRAM D. HULEN

  Special to The New York Times.

  WASHINGTON, March 31—The United States and Great Britain have refused a Russian appeal that the Soviet-supported Lublin Provisional Government in Warsaw be invited to the San Francisco conference of the United Nations on world security.

  It was revealed at the State Department today that the United States has joined the British in rejecting the appeal and in insisting on standing on the Yalta decision to broaden the base of the Warsaw Government by including democratic elements of many Polish groups in a new government.

  When asked concerning the matter, a State Department spokesman said that it was the hope of the American Government that the formation of the new provisional Polish Government of National Unity in conformity with the decisions of the Crimean conference would be completed in time to send a delegation to the San Francisco conference.

  In view of the current consultations respecting the formation of this new government, reorganized on a broader democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad in accordance with the Crimean agreement, he added, the United States Government did not agree to the extension of an invitation to the present provisional government now functioning at Warsaw.

  SOVIET GOVERNMENT INFORMED

  The Soviet Government was informed of our position along these lines after its appeal was received here. It is understood that we consulted with the British before sending our reply to Moscow.

  When Premier Stalin agreed at Yalta to the formation of a new Polish Government on broad lines inclusive of many Polish elements, it was felt that he had made an important concession to the United States, Great Britain and many Polish groups, and it was felt that he had made the concession in good faith.

  It was in that spirit that, after the Crimean conference, discussions were immediately begun in Moscow looking to the formation of a new, fully representative and democratic Polish Government, but the negotiations have dragged along and have bogged down over what is described as procedural details.

  In these circumstances and with the date of the San Francisco conference approaching, Premier Stalin made his appeal for the Lublin government to sit at San Francisco, it was stated.

  Previously the United States had refused a plea of the Polish Government-in-exile in London, which we and the British still recognize, to attend the San Francisco conference.

  Our position has been that the contemplated new Polish Government would attend that conference. For us to accept the Lublin Government now, it is felt, would mean the upsetting of the Yalta agreement on Poland.

  APRIL 2, 1945

  Heads of States Will Not Escape War Crime Penalties, Allies Decide

  United Nations Commission Puts Hitler At Top of First of Five Lists Now Ready—Plea of ‘Superior Orders’ to Be Insufficient

  By CLIFTON DANIEL

  By Cable to The New York Times.

  LONDON, April 1—The United Nations War Crimes Commission announced today that Adolf Hitler’s name headed one of five lists of war criminals that it had compiled and that enemy governmental leaders would not be immune from prosecution for war crimes.

  Another of the lists is devoted entirely to the Japanese. A sub-commission in Chungking is preparing a further list of Japanese suspects.

  As the liberation armies have marched forward, the commission reported, the number of cases that it has received from the war-crimes offices of individual countries has increased steadily with the flow of information. In announcing that the “names of major and obvious war criminals such as Hitler” were included in its first list, the commission officially refuted allegations that political personages would not be treated as criminals like their subordinates.

  “The commission early in its work assumed that no immunity attached to heads of States,” this statement said, “and it decided that the plea of superior orders of itself did not constitute justification for a war crime.” The latter question has long been a disputed point about the treatment of war criminals. The dispute whether heads of States could be tried as common criminals was reported to have led to the resignation of Herbert C. Pell as the American representative on the commission.

  At the same time the commission pointed out that under the Moscow declaration on the punishment of war criminals, the treatment of major criminals was reserved for future decision. Lesser criminals will be returned to the countries that were the scenes of their crimes to be judged by national courts.

  The commission did not disclose any names on the lists except Hitler’s, on the ground that publication of them would forewarn the wanted men. However, their names will be announced later.

  The first list catalogues German war criminals; the second, Italians; the third, Germans; the fourth, Japanese; the fifth, Albanians, Bulgarians, Hungarians and Rumanians. Further lists are being prepared and will be forwarded to the sixteen nations represented on the commission.

  APRIL 6, 1945

  KOISO CABINET OUT IN JAPANESE CRISIS

  Hirohito Asks Admiral Suzuki, Known as a ‘Moderate,’ to Form Government

  Racked by military defeats and a rising storm of criticism at home, Premier
Kuniaki Koiso’s Cabinet resigned en masse yesterday and Emperor Hirohito called on an elder statesman, Admiral Baron Kantaro Suzuki, to form Japan’s third wartime government, the Tokyo radio announced in a broadcast recorded by the Federal Communications Commission, The Associated Press reported.

  In facing the “gravity of the situation,” which Tokyo said forced Koiso and his Ministers to step down, Japan turned to a 77-year-old veteran of public service who had been considered a “moderate” in pre-war years. Suzuki, president of the Privy Council, has been looked upon as an opponent of the extreme Army clique’s program of conquest.

  The Japanese news agency Domei reported later that on Friday morning (Japanese time) Suzuki established his “Cabinet organization headquarters” at his Tokyo residence and set to work to form the new Cabinet.

  At 8 A.M., Domei said, former Premier Admiral Keisuke Okada called at Suzuki’s residence. An hour and a half later, the dispatch said, Admiral Koshiro Oikawa, Chief of the Naval General Staff, conferred with the new Premier and at 9:40 A.M., Field Marshal General Sugiyama, who resigned as War Minister in Koiso’s Cabinet, called on Suzuki to “confer on important matters.”

  The military disasters in the field and on the seas that have harassed Koiso since he took over the reins of the government from Premier Gen. Hideki Tojo nearly nine months ago made certain that his downfall was not far off.

  “In view of the gravity of the situation the Cabinet has decided to resign en bloc to open the way for a far more powerful administration,” a Tokyo communiqué said in announcing the fall of the Cabinet. “Premier Koiso accordingly tendered the collective resignation of his Cabinet to the throne today.”

  Close students of Japan predicted the succeeding Government would be a “moderate” one that might project peace feelers to the United States and its allies.

  Suzuki has been in retirement since he was wounded in the revolt by young Japanese Army officers in 1936.

  The collapse of the Koiso regime had been staved off for a time by his promise, fulfilled only last week, of forming a new “Sure Victory” political party that would include leading figures from all of Japan. Koiso’s downfall came at a time when Japan was faced with the most critical war situation it had known.

  American forces have secured footholds in the Volcano Islands, only 750 miles from Tokyo, and on Okinawa in the Ryukyus, closer yet, and remnants of the once mighty Imperial fleet are forced to hide out in home waters, subject to American air attacks.

  APRIL 7, 1945

  EPIDEMICS IMPERIL EUROPE, UNRRA SAYS

  Reports a Steady Rise In Diseases, With Typhus Presenting a ‘Grave Danger’

  Special to The New York Times.

  WASHINGTON, April 6—Although there has been no disastrous epidemic thus far in the war, the situation in Europe is regarded as threatening, says a report of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration’s Health Division.

  Absence of real disasters, says the report signed by Knud Stowman, chief of the Epidemiological Information Service, may be traced to the low endemic level of most diseases preceding the war and to the advance of preventive medicine.

  The report warns, however, that there are “grave potentialities” for epidemics because of the debilitated condition of peoples in many countries, the increase in refugee movements and the fluid state of civil administration.

  It says that “louse-borne typhus presents an immediate and grave danger for Europe,” causing severe epidemics in some areas; that diphtheria has become a “leading disease of the war” on that Continent, and that there also has been a steady increase in infantile paralysis, dysentery, tuberculosis, malaria and syphilis.

  The “new” disease of this war has been epidemic jaundice, the report says, adding:

  “From an obscure existence among the garrison of Malta and in a few German Army units, it assumed proportions to interfere occasionally with military operations and spread among the civilian population from the Libyan Desert to North Cape.

  A medical van in the London area is set-up to immunize children against diphtheria.

  “The disease is not really new, but was known in World War I, when at times it was confused with Weil’s disease. It occurred also among civilians in various countries, but had never been considered capable of setting up veritable epidemics.

  “Epidemic jaundice is clearly a virus disease of an extremely high degree of infectivity and capacity for covering distances. Since its potentialities are unknown and means of combating it have not so far been devised, this disease deserves to be closely watched.”

  The mortality rate has not been high so far, ranging from one a thousand to one a hundred.

  “The number of tuberculosis cases,” the report says, “has increased greatly in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and it has doubled in many parts of this area. Among these countries the Netherlands is undoubtedly the worst sufferer. In Italy the situation is likely to become worse than ever before and Poland faces an unprecedented calamity.”

  “In several ways,” the report concludes, “the outlook is darker than in 1918 because the destruction of buildings and displacement of persons is far more widespread than during World War I. But on the other hand, the endemic level was lower to start with in 1939 than in 1914, and the world is now better equipped to deal with many of the important infectious diseases.”

  APRIL 9, 1945

  3D ARMY OVERRUNS REICH ‘DEATH CAMP’

  4,000 at Extermination Center Slain

  WITH THE UNITED STATES THIRD ARMY, April 8 (AP)—A ghastly extermination center where prisoners said the Germans starved, clubbed and burned to death more than 4,000 European captives in the last eight months has been overrun by the Fourth Armored Division. The Americans seized the camp near Ohrdruf, nine miles south of Gotha, on April 4.

  Seventy-seven bodies of victims, said by prisoners to have been killed on April 2, the day before the Americans arrived, were found by Brig. Gen. William M.

  Hoge’s tankmen. The bodies included one of a man the prisoners said was a naturalized American flier of Polish extraction. He had been shot through the neck.

  Ashes and arms and legs of other victims were found around a crude woodland crematory two miles from the concentration camp.

  [The crematory consisted of railway tracks over a big pit, a Reuter dispatch said. Charred remains of ten bodies still lay heaped on top of the grill, and the pit below where a fire still was burning, was deep in human ashes. The United Press reported that surviving prisoners said some 2,000 of the captives were buried in a huge pit a mile from the camp.]

  Eighty prisoners who were liberated said those killed by the German SS [Elite Guard] troops operating the camp included Poles, Czechs, Russians, Belgians, Frenchmen, German Jews and German political prisoners.

  BUERGERMEISTER A SUICIDE

  Twenty-eight German civilians from the area were taken on a tour of the camp site by Col. Hayden Sears of Boston, commander of the Fourth Armored Division’s Combat Command A, which captured Ohrdruf. All denied knowledge of what had taken place at the camp. The Buergermeister of the town and his wife were found slashed to death—apparently suicides—after a similar tour yesterday.

  Liberated prisoners who hid in the woods said the last batch of victims numbering 150 was executed less than twenty-four hours before the Fourth Armored Division arrived. The bodies were stacked under a shed or left where they fell.

  ‘INHUMAN TREATMENT’ CHARGED

  WITH THE UNITED STATES SEVENTH ARMY, April 8 (AP)—Two United States Army lieutenants, who survived the horrors of the Gerolstein and Hammelburg prisoner-of-war camps in Germany, escaped in their fourth attempt and reached the American lines east of the Main River today, declaring they had been subjected to “utterly inhuman treatment” by their captors.

  One, a young West Point graduate of the class of 1943, and the other, an Arlington, Va., youth, broke away from their guards on a forced march toward a n
ew prison camp at Nuremberg as advancing American troops approached the older camps.

  French slave laborers supplied them with food as they made their way to the American lines. The West Pointer punctuated his story with the grim statement that the treatment they had received was “utterly inhuman” and he longed to get back into the lines to “kill Germans for what they did to our men.”

  PACKAGES USED AS BRIBES

  “The Germans even tried to use Red Cross packages addressed to us as bribes—holding them back from us, then offering us something from them to try to get us to talk. Not one American officer or man in any prison I have been in ever talked.

  “The Germans put me in solitary confinement for thirteen days trying to make me tell them who I was. They had a suspicion who my dad was, and his outfit, on which they had all the information, but I refused to tell them anything. I lost forty pounds.” The other lieutenant said he had lost thirty pounds.

  The names of the men who escaped could not be disclosed.

  “This is the happiest day of my life,” the escaped lieutenant said. “But we can never forget the horrors of those prison camps. Gerolstein should go down in history as a blot of shame on humanity.”

  The other lieutenant said, “What left searing scars on both of us was knowledge of the way our wounded prisoners lay untreated in hospitals.” Paper bandages but no drugs or antiseptics were used, both men said.

  American soldiers and survivors looking at the last victims of the Ohrdruf concentration camp.

  APRIL 13, 1945

  PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT IS DEAD

  LAST WORDS: ‘I HAVE TERRIFIC HEADACHE’