Heavings

As the first U.S. armor rumbled into the first German town, Roetgen, Germans froze and stared. Then a German made a tentative V-sign. A woman started to cry. Finally a Hausfrau approached with an offering--a skirtful of green apples. Against orders, the G.I.s passed out chocolate.

It was like that in half a dozen little forest towns along the border, as fear gave way to sullenness and sullenness to little offers of assistance. But in Wallendorf, frenzied civilian snipers picked off the first patrols, shot down rescuing medical corpsmen. Wallendorf was burned to the ground.

Beyond the battle lines, under the hard official crust, the Reich was heaving. From Berlin came persistent stories of peace riots. There were frequent killings in the streets. Travelers to Bern and Stockholm now began to report that Germans might revolt. The Russian radio broadcast easy lessons in disarming police patrols. Said Moscow: "A hefty stick will get you a revolver; to get a rifle and a few grenades with the help of a pistol is no work of art." Himmler announced appointment of a new police chief for Berlin.

Trials went on of men suspected of a hand in the July attempt on Hitler's life. Dr. Carl Goerdeler, onetime Oberbuerger-meister of Leipzig, and said to be the ringleader, was hanged with six others. One of them was Adam von Trott zu Solz, a Foreign Office man who had spent the summer trying to make Allied contacts in Stockholm. Trott had a plan for overthrowing Hitler, but he wanted assurance that Germans would be rewarded with something better than unconditional surrender. The Nazis talked of trying (and hanging) Hjalmar Schacht, passed sentence of death in absentia on General Walther von Seydlitz, head of Moscow's League of German Officers.

Bombs on Buchenwalde. According to Goebbels, Allied bombs fell on the Buchenwalde concentration camp near Weimar, killing Ernst Thaelmann, pre-Hitler Communist leader, Dr. Rudolf Breitscheid, Social Democratic Prussian Minister of the Interior in the days of the Weimar Republic. According to the Allies, no raid was made on Weimar that day. According to neutrals, the Luftwaffe did the job, destroyed some 7,500 inmates. But few doubted that 58-year-old Thaelmann, who polled five million votes for President in 1932 and has spent eleven years in concentration camps, was dead. Himmler's purge of every name--right, left and center--which might conceivably rally anti-Nazi Germans was not yet done.

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