"There Was Such a Feeling of Joy"

By Otto Friedrich

May 8, 1945--V-E day--was a day for which millions of people had fought and worked and prayed and died. Yet, ironically, it was a day on which little of substance actually happened. There were speeches, cheers and parades, but the German surrender had been signed early on May 7, and almost all the fighting had ended well before that. "We play softball every afternoon," a member of the U.S. 667th Field Artillery Battalion, at a German village near the Czech border, wrote in his diary. "I've had a shower, two movies and a U.S.O. show." Wrote one of his buddies: "V-E day. Just another day. Didn't seem to make a hell of a lot of difference."

It did make a hell of a lot of difference, of course, for it meant that the bloodiest war Europe had ever known was finished. "In all our long history, we have never seen a greater day than this," Winston Churchill told the crowds in Parliament Square. "This is a solemn but glorious hour," said President Harry Truman. "We join in offering our thanks to the Providence which has guided and sustained us through the dark days of adversity."

In retrospect, the outcome should have appeared inevitable--perhaps ever since the Allied invasion of North Africa in late 1942, probably since the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in 1943, almost certainly since D-day and the Normandy break out and the liberation of Paris in the summer of 1944. The Allied advantage in troops and weapons meant that it was only a matter of time before the Germans were defeated.

Yet making the inevitable an accomplished fact kept taking thousands of lives. Hitler's last big offensive, the Battle of the Bulge, crashed through U.S. lines in the snow-covered Ardennes Forest just before Christmas of 1944. When the battle was over, the Germans had suffered more than 100,000 casualties, the Allies 81 ,000. From then on, the German retreat never really stopped. U.S. forces seized the Remagen bridge and swarmed across the Rhine in March. Frankfurt fell, then Karlsruhe. The Soviets took Vienna on April 13.

The day before in Washington, at about 5 p.m., Vice President Truman had been summoned to the White House. "Harry," Eleanor Roosevelt said as she greeted him, "the President is dead." Truman found himself unable to speak for a moment. Then he said, "Is there anything I can do for you?" She answered, "Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now."

Truman could hardly disagree. He felt, he said later that week, "like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me." Within hours of his swearing in, he had to confront secrets and controversies that as Vice President he had never heard of. He learned that U.S. scientists were about to test something known as an atom bomb, that the Allies had already decided how Germany was to be divided up among them, that Joseph Stalin and Churchill were bitterly at odds about who would rule Poland. And he had to address the diplomats assembling in San Francisco to create an organization to be called the United Nations. "You are to be the architects of the better world," he told them by radio. "In your hands rests our future."

"My Fuehrer, I congratulate you," said Hitler's dwarfish Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who had just ordered champagne. "Roosevelt is dead! It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us."

Hitler by now lived and worked entirely underground, in a hidden mausoleum known as the Fuehrerbunker. Dug in next to the Reich Chancellery in central Berlin, the bunker was nearly 60 ft. below street level; its earth-covered roof was 16 ft. thick (but leaky). It had 30 rooms, their concrete walls painted battleship gray. A staff of about 500 came and went. Here the Fuehrer ate, slept, gave orders, shouted, raged. "Hitler never saw another sunrise or sunset after January," said an aide.

The dictator's physical condition was terrible. His head wobbled strangely, his left arm hung slackly, his hands trembled uncontrollably. He had never fully recovered from the bomb attack by rebellious army officers the previous July, which had left him partly deaf. Haggard and exhausted, he received large daily injections of vitamins, hormones and morphine. Recalls Ernst-Guenther Schenck, now 81, a physician who was in the bunker to the end: "He looked like a man carrying a mountain on his shoulders. He was hunched, drawn into himself like a turtle. His face was a mask, gray and yellow. His glaring eyes were bloodshot, with large dark pouches from lack of sleep. His left hand, holding his glasses, kept trembling and banging against a table. He pressed his left thigh against the table to suppress the twitching of his leg."

By mid-April a Red Army force of 2.5 million had advanced to the Oder River, scarcely 50 miles east of Berlin. Meanwhile, the U.S. Ninth Army had nearly reached the Elbe, about 50 miles to the west. Hitler talked of leaving Berlin by April 20, his 56th birthday, of flying south to organize an invulnerable redoubt in the Alpine forests of Bavaria. But then came fits of wild euphoria, when he ordered his shattered forces to counterattack. "The Russians have overextended themselves so much that the decisive battle can be won at Berlin," he declared. Then came fits of despair, when he vowed to die in his besieged capital. "Should this fateful battle of the German people under my leadership fail," he said, "then the German people do not deserve to exist."

At his field headquarters near the Elbe, Lieut. General William Simpson was working on his plans to seize Berlin. There was little evidence of German opposition. Simpson's U.S. 2nd Armored and 83rd Infantry divisions would race right up the autobahn to the capital. Then Lieut. General Omar Bradley summoned him back to headquarters in Wiesbaden. "You have to stop right where you are," Bradley said. "You can't go any farther. You must pull back across the Elbe."

"Where in hell did this come from?" said Simpson. "I could be in Berlin in 24 hours!" Bradley: "I just got it from Ike."

It was probably one of Dwight Eisenhower's worst miscalculations, though he never admitted it. Berlin "was politically and psychologically important as the symbol of remaining German power," the Allied Commander wrote later. "I decided, however, that it was not the logical or the most desirable objective ... To sustain a strong force at such a distance from our major bases along the Rhine would have meant the practical immobilization of units along the remainder of the front. This I felt to be more than unwise; it was stupid."

After capturing Leipzig, the U.S. First Army drew to a halt along the Mulde River, a tributary of the Elbe, Lieut. Albert Kotzebue of the 273rd Infantry Regiment was told to take 35 men and explore the narrow strip of land between the two rivers to see if he could establish contact with the Soviets. But he was ordered not to go more than two miles to the east.

Kotzebue went much farther, all the way to the Elbe. On the far side of the river, just after noon on April 25, he spotted soldiers. Through his field glasses, they looked like Russians. "Amerikansky!" he shouted, but they did not answer. He fired two green flares, the agreed upon sign of recognition between the two sides. The strangers made no response.

Kotzebue saw some boats chained together on his side of the river. He detonated a grenade to break apart the chains. Then he and five of his men set forth, paddling with boards and rifle butts. Three Russians slid down the bank to meet them. They all shook hands and slapped one another's backs. This was a historic moment, they said. But when Kotzebue reported to headquarters, his commander was furious at his disobedience and ordered that the whole encounter be kept secret.

A few hours later, another patrol, headed by Lieut. William Robertson, reached the town of Torgau, on the Elbe, and came under heavy fire from across the river. Robertson broke into a pharmacy, liberated a bed sheet, some ink and Mercurochrome, and painted a crude U.S. flag. He climbed the tower of the town castle and hung his flag from the parapet. "Tovarish!" he shouted. "Amerikansky!"

The gunfire stopped briefly, but the Soviets apparently suspected a trick and soon resumed shooting.

Robertson had recently passed a German prison camp, so he sent back to find someone who could speak Russian. When a Soviet prisoner of war was produced, Robertson and the man headed toward the wrecked bridge across the Elbe and shouted that they were friends. On the eastern bank, several uniformed men approached the bomb-shattered bridge. Robertson and the Russian began scrambling across the river, clawing their way from girder to bent girder. As they neared the far shore, one of the Russians finally crawled out on the bridge to meet them.

Germany had been cut in half. Robertson became a hero. He presented his homemade flag to Eisenhower four days later and was promoted on the spot. Kotzebue got nothing.

It took the Red Army just ten days to surround Berlin, Marshal Georgi Zhukov encircling it from the north and Marshal Ivan Konev from the south. When the ring was complete on April 25, the Soviets arrayed a fearful multitude of weapons--6,000 tanks, 42,000 guns--and began bombarding the city. In the central area around the Chancellery and the bunker, around the Reichstag and the opera and the university, the shells landed at the rate of one every five seconds. The barrage went on all day and then all the next day.

The imperial palace last inhabited by Wilhelm II crumpled into rubble. The great dome of the cathedral on the other side of Unter den Linden burst into flames and then collapsed. One shell hit a riding stable in the Tiergarten park, and the horses went galloping wildly down the Kurfuerstendamm, their manes and tails on fire.

Benito Mussolini was caught in a village called Dongo, on the western shore of Lake Como. Fleeing from the Allied advance, which had reached the Po River, the Italian dictator had tried to disguise himself in a German army overcoat and helmet. He sat slumped among German soldiers in the back of a truck convoy retreating northward from Milan. Italian resistance forces had blocked the lakeside road by cutting down a tree, and when the German convoy ground to a halt, the partisans began searching the trucks. One of the Italians took a closer look at a fat man slumped in a corner and recognized that famous profile. Il Duce!

The partisan leader thought he should say something historic. "In the name of the Italian people, I arrest you!" he declared. "I won't do anything," said il Duce. The partisans, who had also captured Mussolini's 33- year-old mistress, Clara Petacci, and 16 of his underlings, promised the prisoners that they would not be harmed. The resistance men asked for instructions from Milan. The headquarters, where the Communists had a strong influence, decided to send an officer known as Colonel Valerio to kill the fallen dictator. Over the protests of the local partisans who had captured Mussolini, Valerio drove il Duce and his woman out into the country, then stopped by the side of the road.

"No! No!" cried Mussolini as Colonel Valerio fired five rounds with his machine pistol.

The bodies were loaded into a truck and hauled back to Milan. There they were dumped at a half-built gasoline station where the Fascists had recently executed 15 partisan hostages. Before long a crowd gathered and began shouting curses at the still corpses.

"While I watched," a TIME correspondent reported, "a civilian tramped across the bodies and dealt Mussolini's shaven head a terrific kick. Someone pushed the twisted head into a more natural position again with a rifle butt ... A bullet had pierced his skull over the left eye and emerged at the back, leaving a hole from which the brains dripped."

So that the crowd could see better, the partisans tied Mussolini's heels with wire and then strung him up on high, upside down, with Petacci strung up beside him. The crowd went on striking and shouting and spitting at the bodies.

About ten miles northwest of Munich stood Dachau. There, back in 1933, Hitler had established the first of the Nazi concentration camps. There on April 29, troops of the U.S. Seventh Army freed 32,000 survivors and buried uncounted thousands of corpses. Dachau was one of the last of the camps to be liberated and one of the worst. A TIME correspondent who accompanied the troops and inspected the whole incredible scene--the gas chamber, the crematorium, the 5-ft.-high stack of cadavers--found himself overwhelmed by the overjoyed survivors. "There is nothing you can do," he reported, "when a lot of hysterical, unshaven, lice-bitten, half-drunk, typhus-infected men want to kiss you."

The air war too was steadily nearing its end. The last German V-2 rocket hit Britain on March 27. The rubble heaps that had once been the great cities of Germany--Hamburg, Frankfurt, Cologne--were mostly in Allied hands now.

Late in the war, two B-17 bombers collided over Belgium at 13,500 ft., and one of them was sheared in two. From the main section, one crewman succeeded in bailing out, but the rest crashed to their deaths. In the tail, Joe Frank Jones Jr., a 19-year-old gunner, tried to get out the escape hatch, found it jammed. He tried the window, but it was too small. He was trapped inside the plunging fragment. When Belgian peasants found him lying in a field, still alive, they took him to a hospital. There he lay unconscious for eight days while doctors treated him for his remarkably minor injuries: a lacerated tongue, a ruptured blood vessel in his stomach and a bruised thigh. When he came to, he was asked what he had done when he had realized that he was trapped inside the tail. The gunner answered that he had unbuckled his parachute, sat down in his seat, lit a cigarette and waited.

The bulletin originated in San Francisco, where the Allied diplomats had just approved the United Nations Charter: SF APRIL 28 (AP) GERMANY HAS SURRENDERED TO THE ALLIED GOVERNMENTS UNCONDITIONALLY, AND AN ANNOUNCEMENT IS EXPECTED MOMENTARILY, IT WAS STATED BY A HIGH AMERICAN OFFICIAL TODAY.

Radio reporters immediately began broadcasting the news. On the floor of the U.N. conference, a Chilean delegate waved an extra edition of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin with the screaming headline NAZIS QUIT. The delegates burst into applause. Cheering crowds gathered in the streets of New York City and Chicago. An hour and a half later, President Truman called in reporters and announced that the story was untrue.

What had happened in San Francisco was that British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had told his colleagues about a new German peace feeler. His words had leaked to the British press, and U.S. Senator Tom Connally of Texas had confirmed them to the Associated Press.

The German peace feeler was a desperate maneuver by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, the police and the concentration camps, who had escaped from Berlin to the north German port of Luebeck. There he told a diplomat from neutral Sweden that Germany was willing to surrender to the Americans and British. At worst, Himmler thought, this would enable Germany to throw all its troops against the Soviets; at best, the Western Allies would join the German defense. Himmler seems even to have cherished the illusion that the Allies would support him, the lord of the Holocaust, as the new German leader.

Truman's reaction to Himmler's offer was acerbic. "Has he anything to surrender?" the new President asked Churchill on the transatlantic telephone. The two quickly agreed to tell the Swedish diplomat (and to reassure " the ever suspicious Stalin) that Germany must surrender unconditionally to all the Allies. No more was heard from Himmler. Inside the Berlin bunker, Hitler denounced him as a traitor. He dismissed Himmler from his government positions and expelled him from the Nazi Party.

One of Hitler's last acts was to get married. His acquiescent mistress Eva Braun (the dictator was in fact impotent) had yearned for years for the respectability of a wedding license, and now she was to achieve it. She wore a black taffeta afternoon dress with two gold clasps at the shoulders. A minor party official with the coincidentally appropriate name of Wagner (Hitler's favorite composer) was brought in from his militia post to perform the brief ceremony. As the law prescribed, both bride and groom swore that they were Aryans. Wagner signed the marriage certificate, glanced at his watch, saw that it was just after midnight and changed the date from April 28 to April 29. Then they all had champagne and liverwurst. As Wagner dutifully returned to his post half an hour later, he was killed by Soviet gunfire.

At 4 a.m. Hitler signed his will. He designated Goebbels as Chancellor and Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz as commander of the armed forces. He said he had never wanted a war. He blamed that and all his other crimes upon his victims, whom he described as "international Jewry and its helpers." Then Hitler left instructions for his body to be burned. By now the Red Army was fighting for the nearby Tiergarten and smashing westward along the Leipzigerstrasse, just one block south of the bunker.

The afternoon of the 29th was devoted to the final preparations for death. Hitler ordered that his favorite Alsatian wolf dog Blondi be poisoned; the other two dogs were shot. He gave capsules of poison to his two secretaries, presuming that they would want, as part of their jobs, to join in the imminent suicides (they did not). At 3:30 p.m. on April 30, Hitler and his new wife retired to the anteroom of his private suite and shut the door. Hitler put a cyanide pill between his teeth, then raised a Walther pistol to his temple and fired. For Eva, a cyanide pill was enough.

During a lull in the Soviet shelling, the two bodies were carried upstairs to the Chancellery garden, doused with gasoline and set afire. Even before the flames died down, renewed shelling drove the survivors underground again. Goebbels and Nazi Party Secretary Martin Bormann decided to try offering the Soviets a deal. On May 1 they sent a general to Soviet headquarters to propose a surrender of Berlin in exchange for their own safety in leaving the city. During the long interval before the general returned with a Soviet rejection, Goebbels decided that he too must die. He ordered one of the bunker's doctors to inject sedatives into his six children, who had taken refuge with him in the bunker, then they were given poison. Goebbels' wife Magda bit on a cyanide pill, and Goebbels shot her in the back of the head. Then, just like Hitler, he raised his pistol to his own temple and fired.

Bormann decided to attempt a breakout. Up on the street, he spotted a German tank and started to follow it. A Soviet shell scored a direct hit on the tank, and Bormann was never seen again.

Admiral Doenitz went on the radio to declare that "the military struggle continues [against] the spreading of Bolshevism." But German soldiers were now surrendering by the tens of thousands. Two days after Hitler's suicide, all German forces in Italy gave up. On May 4 all Wehrmacht troops in northwestern Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands surrendered to the British. On May 5 and 6 Doenitz sent Admiral Hans von Friedeburg and General Alfred Jodl to negotiate complete surrender to Eisenhower. The Germans' only goal now was to yield as much territory and as many troops as possible to the Western Allies rather than the Soviets. Eisenhower refused any deal and told the Germans that "unless they instantly ceased all pretense and delay I would close the entire Allied front and would, by force, prevent any more German refugees from entering our lines."

At 2:41 on the morning of May 7, in a red schoolhouse in the French city of Reims, the Germans signed the surrender. But it remained secret.

At Supreme Allied Headquarters in Paris, reporters had been rounded up on 15 minutes' notice the previous afternoon and loaded onto a plane. Only after they were airborne did a general tell them that they were to cover the surrender and that the story was off the record until the Allied governments announced it. "I therefore pledge . . . you on your honor," he said.

Edward Kennedy, the A.P.'s chief European war correspondent, got all the details into his notebook and flew back to Paris with the other reporters. Then, 24 hours before the formal announcement, he called his agency's London bureau. "Germany has surrendered unconditionally," he said. "That's official. Make the dateline Reims, France, and get it out." (The A. P. at first boasted of Kennedy's exclusive and protested vehemently when Eisenhower temporarily gagged all A. P. correspondents, but six months later Kennedy was fired for his breach of the rules.)

By noon on Monday, May 7, millions had heard the news, but the Allied governments still refused to confirm the story, apparently because of a Soviet request for a delay until a formal surrender in Berlin could be arranged. Several hundred thousand people milled around for five hours in New York's Times Square, sober, uncertain whether to celebrate or not. Ticker tape fluttered through the air, then stopped. Finally Mayor Fiorello La Guardia bellowed through a loudspeaker, "Go home ... or return to your jobs."

Not until the next day, on a chilly gray morning that happened to be Truman's 61st birthday, did the new President go on the radio and read his formal proclamation: "The Allied armies, through sacrifice and devotion and with God's help ..."

There was mist and rain in London too, where Churchill spoke just after Big Ben had sounded 3 p.m.: "This is your victory. It is the victory of the cause of freedom in every land." Then the crowds sang For He's a Jolly Good Fellow. And God Save the King.

They sang that in Paris too. And the Marseillaise. And they danced in the streets. "We waltzed in the Place de la Bastille," says Lucie Aubrac, who was 32 then, "and the noise of the wooden shoes on the cob blestones was very pretty. They were playing accordions, and there were Chinese lanterns. There were also church bells. It was a happy sound. It was marvelous. Oh, we drank. We drank a lot. Everybody was kissing. There was such a feeling of joy."

Even in Germany there were a few among all the defeated, among all the homeless and injured, all the guilty and the frightened, who felt that joy. "I remember the sky was clear and the heavens blue, and we felt liberated," says German Author Walter Kempowski, who was then 16. "I spent May 8 drinking champagne with my mother and grandfather on the balcony. My mother, who was in the Bekennende Kirche [an anti-Nazi Protestant splinter group], said, 'It was we who won the war, the church and the powers of goodness.' "

Raymond Hallery, now a retired publisher, was in an adjunct of the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz when the official announcement that the Germans had surrendered came over the prisoners' long-secret radio. The French began singing the Marseillaise. "There was the joy of being alive, but it was mixed with much sadness," Hallery says. "Two hundred to three hundred people a day were still dying in the camp, from exhaustion and hunger. There were bodies everywhere." Hallery went to the infirmary where one of his friends lay nearing the end. "I know I'm finished," the friend said, "but I want you to tell my wife one thing. Tell her I had the joy of knowing the war is over." -- By Otto Friedrich. Reported by Michael Adler/Paris and Zona Sparks/New York

With reporting by Reported by Michael Adler/Paris, Zona Sparks/New York