Averell Harriman will later recall: Our officers were thinking of the welfare of our own prisoners, some seventy-five thousand men, who without exception could not get home quickly enough. We had no idea that hundreds of thousands of the Soviet citizens would refuse because they had reason to suspect they would be sent to their deaths or to Beria's prison camps. That knowledge came later. (Harriman)

 

From Hitler, A Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock: Hitler had lost all control over events, and by April he had the greatest difficulty in discovering what was happening. The Germans went on fighting—in the east with the courage of despair—but there was no longer any organized direction of the war. This is amply confirmed by such records as survive of the conferences Hitler held from the beginning of January onwards. Once the operations in the Ardennes had failed, all sense of purpose was lost. The discussions of the military situation in the early months of 1945 are rambling, confused, and futile. The leadership was not only morally, but intellectually, bankrupt. Hours were wasted in discussions of detail and local operations, interrupted by reminiscences and recriminations. Hitler no longer showed any grasp of the situation. His orders became wilder and more contradictory, his demands more impossible, his decisions more arbitrary. His one answer to every proposal was: No withdrawal."

From Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, by Gitta Sereny: In early April, Hitler's surgeon Dr. Brandt had evacuated his wife and child to Thuringia, where the arrival of the British was imminent. When (Eva) Braun quite innocently told Hitler, he thundered to her horror that this was treason, and ordered that Brandt be court-marshaled and sentenced to death. Speer wrote in Spandau: 'We were appalled. Johanna Wolf, who had been his senior secretary for twenty years, sobbed, 'I don't understand him any longer.' Luckily, there was a missing witness and Brandt's execution was put off awaiting his return. Himmler - of all people - assured me privately that this witness 'would not be found.'' Speer had his own problem with this. A few days before, probably just about when Brandt moved his family away from Berchtesgaden, he had done the same. Now it was a crime. Hitler, he knew, intended to divide the country into two commands, with Field Marshal Kesselring in charge of the southern half and Admiral Doenitz the north. 'I had a terrible feeling that even if he did finally decide to go south rather than stay in Berlin, he would create a Goetteraemmerrung at the Berghof,' Speer told me. 'So I had been determined to get the family north, to the potential British zone and Doenitz's sensible command sector, but it wasn't easy. Eva Braun asked me every day where they were.'

From Doenitz's IMT Testimony: In the spring of 1945 I was not head of the State; I was a soldier. To continue the fight or not to continue the fight was a political decision The head of the State wanted to continue the fight. I as a soldier had to obey. It is an impossibility that in a state one soldier should declare, "I shall continue to fight," while another declares, "I shall not continue the fight." I could not have given any other advice, the way I saw things; and for the following reasons: First: In the East the collapse of our front at one point meant the extermination of the people living behind that front. We knew that because of practical experiences and because of all the reports which we had about this. It was the belief of all the people that the soldier in the East had to do his military duty in these hard months of the war, these last hard months of the war. This was especially important because otherwise German women and children would have perished. The Navy was involved to a considerable extent in the East. It had about 100,000 men on land, and the entire surface craft were concentrated in the Baltic for the transport of troops, weapons, wounded, and above all, refugees. Therefore the very existence of the German people in this last hard period depended above all on the soldiers carrying on tenaciously to the end.

Secondly: If we had capitulated in the first few months of the spring or in the winter of 1945, then from everything we knew about the enemy's intentions the country would, according to the Yalta Agreement, have been ruinously torn asunder and partitioned and the German land occupied in the same way as it is today. Thirdly: Capitulation means that the army, the soldiers, stay where they are and become prisoners. That means that if we had capitulated in January or February 1945, 2 million soldiers in the East, for example, would have fallen into the hands of the Russians. That these millions could not possibly have been cared for during the cold winter is obvious; and we would have lost men on a very large scale, for even at the time of the capitulation in May 1945-that is, in the late spring-it was not possible in the West to take care of the large masses of prisoners according to the Geneva Convention. Then, as I have already said, since the Yalta Agreement would have been put into effect, we would have lost in the East a much larger number of people who had not yet fled from there.

From Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, by Jon Meacham: Eleanor (Roosevelt) was called to the telephone. It was Steve Early, asking her to return to the White House. Ever dutiful, Eleanor said her good-byes at the party and then sat, she recalled, 'with clenched hands' as she was driven home. 'I knew down in my heart that something dreadful had happened... Steve Early broke the news to Eleanor at the White House. She sent a telegram to her sons, all of whom were overseas. 'Father slept away. He would expect you to carry on and finish your jobs.' The Other Club had adjourned. Churchill was in the Annexe. 'I am very glad your visit to Leningrad was so pleasant and interesting,' he was writing to Clementine. 'Here everything is quiet except politics. Love.'

Then came a call from Washington with the news from Warm Springs. 'I felt as if I had been struck a physical blow,' Churchill recalled. The long courtship, with its joys and frustrations, had come to an end. 'I have just heard the grievous news of President Roosevelt's death,' he added to the cable to Clementine. He had been writing to Mary, too, who had just been decorated for her service in antiaircraft batteries in northwest Europe. Telling her the news in a postscript, Churchill noted: 'You know how this will hit me.' It was late, too late to do much, but Churchill discharged his duties. 'Get me the palace,' he said to an aide, and Churchill briefed the king's private secretary, who told George 6th. In the night, Churchill cabled Lord Halifax in Washington to ask if he might come to the funeral.

From Eleanor and Franklin, by Joseph P. Lash: The vice president, who did not know why he had been summoned to the White House so urgently, soon arrived and was ushered into Eleanor's sitting room...Eleanor came forward and placed her arm gently on the vice presidents shoulder. 'Harry,' she said quietly, 'the President is dead.' For a moment a stunned Truman could not bring himself to speak. Finally, finding his voice, he asked, 'Is there anything I can do for you? He would never forget, he later wrote, her 'deeply understanding' reply. 'Is there anything we can do for you?' she asked. 'For you are the one in trouble now.' As the arrangements went forward to swear in the vice president, he asked Eleanor whether there was anything she needed to have done. She told him she would like to go to Warm Springs at once and asked if it would be proper for her to make use of a government plane. He agreed immediately, and minutes after the new president was sworn in, she left for Warm Springs.

From In the Shadow of FDR, by William E. Leuchtenburg: In the eighty-two days he was vice-president, Truman had so little contact with Roosevelt that he cannot be said to have received any tutelage at all. 'I don't think I saw him but twice as Vice President except at Cabinet meetings,' Truman subsequently acknowledged. Not once did he see inside the map room at the White House, where battle strategy was reviewed, and Roosevelt failed to keep him abreast of diplomatic developments for he was viewed as far too insignificant a subaltern to be trusted with secrets of state. (Roosevelt appears never to have entertained seriously the possibility that he would die.) When Roosevelt went to Yalta, he informed the vice-president that he could send dispatches via the map room only if they were 'absolutely urgent'; and if Truman's messages ran too long, the map room officer would have the discretion to refuse to radio them. A week before FDR's death, the vice-president was reduced to writing, 'Hate to bother you but I have a suggestion to make.'

As Truman later told his daughter, 'He never did talk to me confidentially about the war, or about foreign affairs or what he had in mind for peace after the war.' Incredibly, Truman never even met the secretary of state, Edward R. Stettinius, Jr... A single episode at the end of his first cabinet meeting reveals how poorly informed Truman actually had been during his apprenticeship. As cabinet members filed out, Secretary of War Henry Stimson moved to the chair next to Truman's. When they were alone, Stimson confided that the government had been working secretly on an explosive of 'exceptional force' that no one in Congress knew about. That is all that the man Franklin Roosevelt had appointed to the cabinet felt free to tell the president of the United States at that time. Truman did not even grasp that Stimson was talking about the atomic bomb. On the following day the president learned a bit more, but nearly two weeks would go by before Stimson spelled out in detail what was happening, and Truman still appears to have been kept in ignorance of the meaning of the phrase 'Manhattan Project' more than a month after he succeeded FDR.

From The Cold War and its Origins, by D. F. Fleming: Just before Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, he had prepared a radio address to be given the next day to celebrate Jefferson's birthday. In it he had written that 'the mere conquest of our enemies is not enough. We must go on to do all in our power to conquer the doubts and the fears, the ignorance and the greed, which made this horror possible.' Urging that an end be put 'forever, to this impractical, unrealistic settlement of the differences between peoples by the mass killings of peoples,' he asked the American people to 'keep your faith. I measure the sound, solid achievement that can be made at this time by the straight-edge of your own confidence and your resolve.' Then in his last words to us Roosevelt said: 'The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.' This was the spirit in which Roosevelt faced the making of peace, on the last day of his life.

From Truman, by David McCullough: In a house at Marburg, Germany, three American generals, Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton, sat up much of the night talking about Roosevelt and speculating on the sort of man Truman might be. All three were greatly depressed. 'From a distance Truman did not appear at all qualified to fill Roosevelt's large shoes,' Bradley wrote. Patton was bitter and more emphatic. 'It seems very unfortunate that in order to secure political preference, people are made Vice President who are never intended, neither by Party nor by the Lord to be Presidents.'

It had been an unusually difficult day for the three commanders, even before the news about Roosevelt. They had seen their first Nazi death camp, Ohrdorf-Nord, near Gotha. As they bid good night to one another, an aide recalled Eisenhower looking deeply shaken... There were some, however, who, facing the prospect of a Truman presidency, felt confident the country was in good hands. They knew the man, they said. They understood his origins. They had seen how he handled responsibility and knew the inner resources he could draw on. As before and later in his life, Harry Truman was greatest among those who knew him best.

Nicolaus von Below will write of the occasion: It was unforgettable. I sat with Speer and Admiral Doenitz and listened to Beethoven's Violin Concerto, the finale from the Goetterdaemmerung and Bruckner's symphony. Can there ever have been such a moment, such an experience? Silently the three of us walked afterwards across the totally destroyed Potsdamer Platz back to the Reich Chancellery.

Annemarie Kemp will later tell Gitta Sereny: What those who didn't attend didn't see were the baskets offered to spectators on the way out—cyanide capsules. Speer was just horrified. We never found out who organized it, but doubtlessly the party. The baskets were offered by Hitler Youths in uniforms—children. The subject of suicide was being constantly discussed ever since Hitler had declared his intention to kill himself if the war was lost. We heard that everybody around him said they would follow him. Speer said it was not only madness, but cowardly.

From The Nuremberg Trial, by Ann and John Tusa: Papen's arrest caused consternation at the (British) Foreign Office. It raised in far more acute form than Ribbentrop's the danger of Soviet misinterpretation of his presence behind Western lines. 'I cannot imagine a more unwelcome prisoner,' wrote a Foreign Office official. 'More peace feelers have been associated with his name than almost any other prominent German.' The Foreign Office moved fast to head off any possible Allied misunderstandings. Within six days of his detention, Papen found himself at Eisenhower's headquarters facing the senior British and American military intelligence chiefs in Europe—and two Soviet generals. He told them little of any military or political significance, but demonstrated an amazing self-confidence.

"He was extremely well-dressed, beautiful silk suit, etc., and it was clear that he had intended to fall into the hands of the Americans and had dressed up for the occasion," said the Foreign Office report on the meeting. He indicated his belief that he still had a role to play in liaising between the Germans and the Allies. When Major General Strong, the British head of Military Intelligence at SHAEF, asked the Foreign Office if he should seek a further, private interview with Papen, he was put sharply in his place: 'Such an interview must under no circumstances take place—Papen is as dangerous as a hamadryad snake—he could do us no good.

Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov: I attacked along the whole front, and at night. As prisoners later told us, the great artillery barrage at night was what they had least expected. They had expected night attacks but not a general attack at night. After the artillery barrage, our tanks went into action. We had used 22,000 guns and mortars along the Oder, and 4,000 tanks were now thrown in. We also used 4,000 to 5,000 planes. During the first day alone there were 15,000 sorties.

From Speer's testimony before the IMT: It was said that military protection against the East would have been necessary to protect refugees. In reality, until the middle of April 1945, the bulk of our last reserves of armored vehicles and munitions were used for the fight against the West. The tactical principle, therefore, was different from the one it should have been if the fight had been carried out with the aims which have been stated here. The destruction of bridges in the West and the destruction orders against the basis of life of the nation show the opposite. The sacrifices which were made on both sides after January 1945 were senseless. The dead of this period will be the accusers of the man responsible for the continuation of that fight, Adolf Hitler. The same is true of the ruined cities, which in this last phase had to lose tremendous cultural values and where innumerable dwellings suffered destruction. Many of the difficulties under which the German nation is suffering today are due to the ruthless destruction of bridges, traffic installations, trucks, locomotives, and ships. The German people remained loyal to Adolf Hitler until the end. He betrayed them with intent. He tried to throw them definitely into the abyss.

Popular Jewish-American comics as Goering, Goebbels, and Hitler.

From The Unseen War in Europe, by John H. Waller: Goebbels, propagandist to the end, delivered a flaming speech on April 19, (on the eve of) Hitler's birthday, threatening a terrible 'flood of bolshevism,' in a desperate attempt to cause the Western powers to turn on their Soviet Allies. Goebbels's biographer Ralf Georg Reuth thinks that unlike Himmler, who looked westward, Goebbels believed that Stalin was 'more realistic than the English-American runners amok' and 'it was more likely that something could be accomplished in the East.'

While Goebbels's ranting made no impression on the Western Allies, it probably served once more to rattle Stalin, who could not be dissuaded from his conviction that the West would make a separate peace with the Nazis and join forces with the German Army against the USSR. Soviet intelligence had been well aware of General Wolff's negotiations with Dulles all along and knew that Himmler and Schellenberg in the end were trying desperately to make a deal with the West through Bernadotte's good offices. Ribbentrop too had sent out probes to the West through Stockholm. In newly occupied Vienna Soviet loudspeakers shrieked warnings of the coming 'greatest betrayal in world history,' in which the capitalist powers would join the Nazis in a struggle against democracy. The Austrian people were exhorted by the Russians to 'come over to us.'

From Nazi propagandist Hans Fritzsche's testimony before the IMT: ...the most impressive false news of which I was a victim was given out in the last few days of the war. I must describe it for the sake of clearing up matters. In the days when Berlin was surrounded by the Russian Army the people of Berlin were told that a relief army, the army of General Wenck, was marching on Berlin; that there was no more fighting on the Western Front. The news was given out that Ribbentrop had gone to the Western Front and had concluded a treaty there, and handbills were printed in Berlin which contained approximately this text: "Soldiers of the Wenck army, we Berliners know that you are as far as Potsdam. Hurry, come quickly, help us." These handbills were printed at a time when the Wenck army no longer existed and had already been captured. These handbills were apparently dropped over Berlin inadvertently and were to give the inhabitants of Berlin new courage. That happened in the days when Hitler, according to Speer's testimony, had already told his entourage that there was no use trying to do anything for the rest of the German people.

From Fritzsche's testimony before the IMT: These were the last words (above) which I heard from Dr. Goebbels and these words are untrue. I declare under oath: Dr. Goebbels had never previously given such significance to that plebiscite. Never had he given it that interpretation. The exact opposite was the case. At the time of this plebiscite, the German people were explicitly given once again a solemn assurance of the will for peace on the part of Hitler and his associates. Therefore, I am convinced that Hitler and at least some of his colleagues had deliberately lied to the people on decisive points, right from the beginning of their political career; and, something that is not so important to history, I personally felt deceived on these points, too.

From Speer's testimony before the IMT: The State Secretary of the Propaganda Ministry made it possible for me on 9 April to speak briefly over the entire German radio system. All preparations were made, but at the last moment Goebbels heard about it and demanded that Hitler should approve the text of my speech. I submitted to him a very modified text. But he forbade even this very modified text.

On 21 April 1945 it was possible for me first of all to record a speech at the broadcasting station at Hamburg. This was to be broadcast as the instructions for the final phase. The recording officials, however, demanded that this speech should be broadcast only after Hitler's death, which would relieve them of their oath of allegiance to him.

Furthermore, I was in contact with the chief of staff of an army group in the East, the Army Group Vistula. We were both agreed that a fight for Berlin must not take place and that, contrary to their orders, the armies should by-pass Berlin. To begin with, this order was carried out; but later several persons empowered with special authority by Hitler were sent outside Berlin and succeeded in leading some divisions into Berlin. The original intention however that entire armies should be led into Berlin was thus not carried through. We expected that the war would last longer, for Churchill, too, prophesied at the time that the end of the war would come at the end of July 1945.

From Speer's IMT testimony: On 23 April I flew to Berlin in order to take leave of several of my associates, and—I should like to say this quite frankly—after all that had happened, also in order to place myself at Hitler's disposal. Perhaps this will sound strange here, but the conflicting feelings I had about the action I wanted to take against him and about the way he had handled things, still did not give me any clear grounds or any clear inner conviction as to what my relations should be toward him, so I flew over to see him. I did not know whether he knew of my plans, and I did not know whether he would order me to remain in Berlin. Yet I felt that it was my duty not to run away like a coward, but to stand up to him again. It was on that day that Goering's telegram to Hitler arrived. This telegram was not to Hitler, but from Goering to Ribbentrop; it was Bormann who submitted it to him...

Hitler was unusually excited about the contents of the telegram, and said quite plainly what he thought about Goering. He said that he had known for some time that Goering had failed, that he was corrupt, and that he was a drug addict. I was extremely shaken, because I felt that if the head of the State had known this for such a long time, then it showed a lack of responsibility on his part to leave such a man in office, when the lives of countless people depended on him. It was typical of Hitler's attitude towards the entire problem, however, that he followed his statement up by saying: 'But let him negotiate the capitulation all the same'...He said (it) in an offhand manner: 'It doesn't matter anyway who does it.' He expressed all his disregard for the German nation in the way he said this.