The 101st was riding in DUKWs. Most GIs were riding on vehicles of every description, always heading east. A few infantry, however, were still slogging forward the same way they had crossed France and Belgium and the Rhineland-by foot. "We walked another twenty-five miles today," Sergeant Egger recorded on April 20. "Naturally the men were complaining, but I always preferred walking to fighting."
Sometimes they had to fight. On April 27, G Company came to Deggendorf, northeast of Munich. There were some Hitler Youth in the town of 15,000. They had machine guns and panzerfausts, and they let go. "The bullets sounded like angry bees overhead," Egger wrote. American artillery destroyed the hive. Later, in the by then destroyed town, one of his buddies said to him, "The thought of being killed by some fanatical thirteen-year-old scares the hell out of me. After coming this far I don't want to die now."
AS THE TOMMIES and GIs moved deeper into Germany, they made discoveries that brought on a great change in attitude towards Germany and its people. On April 11 the 3rd Armoured Division got into Nordhausen, on the southern side of the Harz Mountains. Captain Belton Cooper was near the van as the GIs worked their way into town. Suddenly "a strange apparition emerged from the side of one of the buildings. A tall frail-looking creature with striped pants and naked from the waist up. It appeared to be a human skeleton with little signs of flesh, if any. The skin appeared to be like a translucent plastic stretched over the rib cage and sucked with a powerful vacuum until it impinged to the backbone in the rear. I could not tell whether it was male or female. There was no face, merely a gaunt human skull staring out. The teeth were exposed in a broad grin and in place of eyes were merely dark sockets. I did not see how it was humanly possible for this pathetic creature to have enough strength to walk. As we proceeded down the road, we encountered more and more of these gaunt figures standing or sitting but most of them were sprawled on the road where they had collapsed."
Cooper came to a warehouse where German civilians were plundering. "The crowd was ravenous; they were pushing and shoving. They paid absolutely no attention to the poor pitiful wretches lying in the streets." Further on "we passed three large stacks of what appeared to be wastepaper and garbage piled in rows six feet high and four hundred feet long. The stench was overwhelming and as I looked I noticed that parts of the stack were moving. To my absolute horror, it dawned on me that these stacks contained the bodies of naked human beings. A few were still alive."
General Collins ordered that every civilian in Nordhausen must work around the clock until the bodies were buried. Bulldozers came forward to dig a mass grave. Later Cooper discovered the V-2 rocket factory where the slave labourers worked until they starved. East of Nordhausen he came across a schoolhouse with some trees around it. On closer examination it turned out to be a rocket assembly plant. The trees were aluminium fuel tanks piled on each other and covered with camouflage nets.
Lieutenant Hugh Carey, who became governor of New York in the 1980s, was at Nordhausen on April 11. Thirty years later he wrote,'"! stood with other American soldiers before Nordhausen. I inhaled the stench of death, and the barbaric, calculated cruelty. I made a vow as I stood there that as long as I live, I will fight for peace, for the rights of mankind and against any form of hate, bias and prejudice."
Eisenhower saw his first slave labour camp on April 13. It was Ohrdruf Nord, near the town of Gotha. He called it the shock of his life. He had never seen such degradation, had never imagined the bestiality man was capable of committing.
"Up to that time I had known about [Nazi crimes] only generally or through secondary sources," he wrote. Like so many men of his age, he was deeply suspicious of wartime propaganda. The reality was far worse than the stories and all but overwhelmed him. "I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda." That night he sent communications to Washington and London, urging the two governments to send newspaper editors, photographers, Congressmen, and members of Parliament to visit the camp and make a record. That was done.
Day after day over the next couple of weeks more camps were discovered. On April 15 Edward R. Murrow went to Buchenwald, just north of Weimar. Like every GI who saw one of the camps, Murrow feared that no one could believe what he saw. He gave a description on his CBS radio program. In his conclusion he said, "I have reported what I saw, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words. If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry."
Martha Gellhorn of The New York Times visited the main camp at Dachau. Then she flew out on a C-47 carrying liberated POWs to France. She talked to them about Dachau, which they had just seen. "No one will believe us," one soldier said. "We got to talk about it, see? We got to talk about it if anyone believes us or not."
ON APRIL 25, at Torgau on the Elbe River, a lieutenant from First Army, William D. Robinson, met a Red Army soldier. Germany was divided. A celebration ensued. Hundreds of Red Army soldiers found rowboats and rafts and came over to the American side. A factory in Torgau produced harmonicas and accordions, so there was music and dancing. Private Andy Rooney was there for Stars and Stripes. So was combat historian Sergeant Forrest Pogue, interviewing the GIs. They danced with female soldiers-reportedly the best snipers in the Red Army.
ON APRIL 27 the 12th Armoured Division approached Landsberg-am-Lech. Major Winters was one of the first to arrive. "The memory of starved, dazed men," he related, "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!'"
To the south. Third Army was penetrating Czechoslovakia (already assigned to the Russians for occupation) while Seventh Army raced eastwards past Munich and down into Austria (where no boundary lines had yet been set). Eisenhower urged the GIs to get as far into Austria as possible.
There wasn't much resistance.
As individuals, squads, companies, regiments, divisions, corps-as entire armies the Germans were surrendering. The crazies were still fighting, like chickens with their heads cut off, even though Hitler had shot himself on April 30. But most of the shooting was over. The dominant thought in every GI's head was home. On May 6 Don Williams of Stars and Stripes wrote an article that gave them the bad news: "No man or woman, no matter how long he or she has been in service, overseas or in combat, will be released from the Army if his or her services are required in the war against Japan." There would be a point system for demobilization: so many points for length of service, time already spent overseas, combat decorations, and the number of dependent children in the States. Soldiers deemed essential for war duties would either stay on as occupation troops or ship out for the invasion of Japan. "In the meantime," Williams wrote, "don't write home and tell your mother or sweetheart that you'll be home next week or next month. For most of you, it just ain't so."