Early April 1945, an airfield somewhere in the occupied part of Nazi Germany. Behind the front, George Stevens and his camera team are taking pictures of German aircraft, which have fallen largely intact into American hands. For the last ten months, Hollywood director Stevens has been filming on behalf of the US military leadership in Europe.
The special feature of his work is that he is using 16mm colour film. The aircraft here also include a Messerschmitt Bf 109, a successful model Allied and Soviet pilots learned to fear. The German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, had been unable to prevent the Allies from crossing the Rhine. Consequently, the outcome of the war in the West had long been decided.
George Stevens and his men were witnessing the demise of the Nazi regime. The scenes which George Stevens and his team filmed in Bad Wildungen in Hesse were peaceful. This historic spa town had been spared the ravages of war. It was now the headquarters of US General Omar Bradley and his staff, who were planning a further advance to the River Elbe.
The American military government had imposed strict rules on the civilian population. A 7-7 curfew was now in place. and freedom of movement was limited to a radius of six kilometers from the town. All members of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS and the Volkssturm, the National Militia, had to report to the U.S. Commander’s Office.
No one was allowed to use private or public transport. All communication via radio or the postal service was banned. It was also forbidden to read uncensored newspapers. April 9, 1945 As American units advanced further east, they were accompanied by camera teams from the US Air Force’s Special Film Project 186.
Engineers had built a pontoon bridge over the Werra to ensure troops at the front were kept well supplied. According to US Secret Service reports, Hitler had decided to conduct operations in the south of the country. From his Alpine fortress, as it was known. Consequently, against the wishes of the British, the supreme commander of the Allied forces in the West had decided to leave Berlin to the Russians.
General Eisenhower had already sent a telegram to Joseph Stalin, informing the Soviet leader that the Americans had no interest in the German capital. Any obstacle was simply dynamited. and anyone getting in the way of the Americans paid the price. April the 9th, 1945. American units reached the Eisfeld region in Thuringia.
Shortly before, fighter bombers had attacked Gunterode, killing six of its inhabitants. Now, peace reigned in the small town. Not every town or village surrendered without a fight. Orders from Berlin to hold out were still having an effect. In Thuringia too, time and again fierce fighting cost the lives of many American soldiers.
But the cameramen were not allowed to film any dead GIs. Here a young German soldier has surrendered to the Americans. He has obviously ignored the call from Martin Bormann, the head of the Nazi party chancellery. Anyone who, without the express permission of the Führer, leaves his district When it is under enemy attack and who fails to fight to the bitter end is scum and will be treated as a deserter.
Lift up your hearts and overcome all weakness. The cry now can only be victory or death. A German non-commissioned officer, who was still fighting at the front, dryly commented in his diary : “The emphasis clearly seems to lie on the latter.” On April 9, 1945, another cameraman with Special Film Project 186 filmed U.S. troops reconnoitering the situation.
According to an intelligence report issued the previous day by the Allied Supreme Command : “It is patently clear that the enemy does not have enough forces in the West even to slow down our advance.” Here, in the middle of Thuringia, the Americans had opened fire on the village of Ebeleben. On April 11, 1945, a German soldier on the other side of the front line wrote in his diary : There is no leadership, no longer any solidarity.
The tanks push back everything in front of them. Since they cannot be combated with trucks, tanks or heavy weapons, the will to resist is nonexistent. Our troops are wandering around like rabbits. There is no point in carrying our gear and our weapons around. They say the enemy has already taken Apolda and reached Iéna.
We don’t know where to go or what to do. The situation is hopeless. We can only abandon ourselves to our fate. Any resistance the Germans did put up was quickly crushed by American artillery or aircraft. The GIs then marched on through ruined towns or villages, towards the Elbe. Sometimes it was only old men or members of the Hitler Youth who still tried to stop the enemy’s advance.
Hollywood director George Stevens and his men were still waiting in Bad Wildungen. The camera team passed the time with trips into the surrounding area. At Frankenberg on the Elbe, Stevens was allowed to film a provisional camp for German prisoners of war. The Americans were virtually overwhelmed by the task of suddenly having to feed hundreds of thousands of surrendering German troops.
They could muster up only the most basic of rations for their prisoners. And with no suitable shelter available, the Germans had to camp out in the open. In Moscow, the almost unhindered advance by American troops was viewed with mistrust. Stalin suspected that the Germans were surrendering in masses in order to spare their best troops for the defense of Berlin.
Soviet author Ilya Ehrenbourg commented that the Germans are capitulating with fanatical tenacity. The Americans, he added, were defeating them with cameras, thus implying that in this war they were merely tourists. Some GIs were heavy-handed in their treatment of enemy soldiers. One German officer wrote in his diary, There are growing signs of disintegration and desperation, but we cannot capitulate right at the end and spend the rest of our lives regretting that we have not held out.
In the Reich Chancellery it said, they are more convinced of victory than we are. At the end of March near Oberursel in the Taunus Hills, the Americans turned a German camp for captured Allied airmen into a transit and interrogation center for their own prisoners. Anyone who was unsuitable for providing valuable information was soon dispatched elsewhere.
Behind most German soldiers lay years of war, in which they had faced death on a daily basis. They had seen their comrades die, and had themselves killed enemy troops and civilians. The system they had fought for, and which many of them believed in, was collapsing. No one had prepared them for military defeat.
Their commanders had only ever talked about final victory. German prisoners of war were transported back to Wiesbaden, on the other side of the Rhine, in seemingly endless convoys. The Golden Mile at Remagen. The Americans had fenced in vast areas with barbed wire. As far as food and hygiene were concerned, conditions in the Rhine Meadows camps, as they were known, were catastrophic.
With no billets available, the prisoners lived in the open in holes dug in the ground. According to American reports, in the end, around 170,000 prisoners were crowded together in the Remagen camp. On April 15, 1945, one German officer in a prisoner of war camp wrote in his diary, Spent the night out in the open yet again. It was fairly cold.
The only water is for drinking, and there is a big fight for that. Shitting is a problem. It’s not organized. The men just shit where they want. Rectangular pits were dug, but the edges soon became bespattered. So people started to shit further and further away, and in the end, all along the barbed wire. The soldiers were in a weakened state anyway and disease took a heavy toll.
Around 1,200 prisoners in the Golden Mile alone died from dysentery, malnutrition or exhaustion. Wiesbaden, mid-April 1945. Since the 21st of March, the Americans had been the town’s new masters. The military commander of Wiesbaden, Colonel Sirenberg, had personally called an end to all combat operations and thus saved the town from further destruction.
One cameraman with Special Film Project 186 was particularly interested in how the town’s children and adolescents were faring. Many of these youngsters had spent years growing up in Wiesbaden without a father. Now, if their fathers had survived at all, they could expect to be detained as prisoners of war.
In Wiesbaden too, people were happy that the night-time bombing raids on the town were now over. They focused on organizing the basic things they needed for survival. For the children, the ruins were adventure playgrounds. The end of the war had made old taboos no longer valid. Only a short while ago, as members of the Hitler Youth, they were expected to defend the fatherland and the Nazi regime with bazookas.
Now they were allowed to be children again. Some were still clearly afraid of their new masters, but most German children were curious about a peace they had never consciously experienced. The victors brought not only chewing gum and cigarettes with them, but also the hope of a normal life. A flight over the Rhine near Bingen.
The historic Mäuseturm was only caught in the picture by chance. The US Air Force wanted to get an idea of the destruction to Germany’s infrastructure. Freight depots and marshalling yards had been the favorite targets of American bombers. The Germans had blown all road and rail bridges over the Rhine at Wiesbaden and Mainz.
So huge pontoon constructions had to be built to replace them. In towns and villages on the Rhine, the post-war period had already begun. Further east, however, the Americans were still fighting their way to the Elbe. One area where they met with resistance was around Freyburg an der Unstrut. SS units, which were often comprised of guards from sub-concentration camps that had been abandoned, put up far more fanatical resistance than the hopelessly overextended soldiers of the Wehrmacht.
The US army had not changed its tactics. Anything thought to be a defensive line, like Neuenburg Palace, which dates back to the Middle Ages, came under massive bombardment from tanks and artillery. The advancing GIs were given support by the US Air Force. As a rule, resistance was then quickly broken. It seems like a refugee trek has reached this village.
But surrender was still dangerous. Time and again deserters or soldiers and officers who were ready to capitulate were shot, as Hitler had ordered. Anyone who is not prepared to fight for his nation but betrays it, at this most critical time, does not deserve to live. and must be executed. Nordhausen in the south of the Harz region.
In mid-April 1945, Hollywood director George Stevens and his team were allowed to visit Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, which had been liberated by special units a few days earlier. The Americans had long known that one of the Third Reich’s most important armories was located here. George Stevens had been given special permission to film because details of arms production here were regarded as valuable information for the future.
V-1 and V-2 rockets were built in an underground factory. Engines for the A-4 rocket, which the Nazis had described as their miracle weapon, would soon be sent to the United States for further use. The deadly missiles were built in Kohnstein by concentration camp inmates and forced laborers. The slave workers used by the SS had their own hut camp.
In a letter to Washington, Stevens wrote, So completely without record of their past lives had these creatures been left, that of 2,000 odd men and women and children it was possible to identify but 4 men by name and nationality. The few prisoners who survived were closer to death than life. Shortly before the arrival of the Americans, most of them had been sent on death marches.
This is how a GI later described the Americans’ arrival in Nordhausen. There are no words to describe the stench. Many of the guys were tough. They had been battle-hardened since they landed in Normandy. But now they were quite sick at the side and had to throw up. Most of my comrades had no personal reason to fight the Germans.
They thought that many of the stories they had read in newspapers or heard about were made up, or at least exaggerated. They only realized what it was really about when we came to Nordhausen. Forced laborers from countries occupied by the Germans were making their way west. This truck was carrying French prisoners of war, interned after their country was defeated by Germany in 1940.
George Stevens and his team also visited the nearby town of Nordhausen. The place was teeming with liberated slave laborers who, from 1943, had had to assemble aircraft parts in an old Air Force barracks. In the meantime, the film director and his men had received new marching orders. They were told to get ready to head for the Elbe to document the Americans’ link-up with the Red Army.
On April 16, 1945, a camera team with Special Film Project 186 reached Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. Written above the gates are the words, right or wrong, my fatherland. Most of the SS guards had fled five days previously. The inmates had overpowered the henchmen who had remained, and handed the camp over to the advancing US troops.
Buchenwald is less than 10 kilometers from the center of Weimar, the city of poets and thinkers. Set up in 1937, the concentration camp was one of the biggest in the German Reich. In Buchenwald and its sub-camps, nearly 280,000 people from more than 50 nations were exploited, tortured and used for medical experiments.
Conditions in the huge camp complex came as a total shock for the GIs. The 21,000 prisoners had not been given any bread for three days. At least 5,000 of the survivors were in a critical state. Every day, more than 200 inmates died from malnutrition and typhoid. In all, 56,000 people failed to survive the horror of Buchenwald.
This is how US journalist Edward R. Murrow described Buchenwald in a radio report. As I walked down to the end of the barracks, there was applause from the men too weak to get out of bed. It sounded like the hand-clapping of babies. They were so weak. For most of it, I have got no words. Dead men are plentiful in war.
But the living dead in a camp, the country roundabout was pleasing to the eye, and the Germans were well fed and well dressed. On April 16, 1945, 1,000 citizens of the nearby town of Weimar were forced to visit the camp. The commanding US general had decided that the population had to be confronted with the extent of the atrocities.
In a letter to his sister, one inmate described their reactions. Only the modest remnants of reality were still visible, but even that was enough to make some people faint. Time and again people exclaimed in desperation, but we had no idea. Now, after years in which they regarded and treated us as criminals, all of a sudden they are confronted with the certainty of a guilt that can never be expunged.
In an internal report, US General Eric F. Wood doubted the educational effect of the operation. After the visit, many citizens had the cheek to claim that they had never heard of this camp, although it had been very close by. April 20, 1945. On Hitler’s birthday, a camera team with Special Film Project 186 filmed American tanks on their way to Leipzig.
Troops of the 69th US Infantry Division had captured the city the day before. They had met with very little resistance. For days previously, resistance fighters had been distributing leaflets in Leipzig bearing slogans like Put an end to the Nazis’ crazy war and get your white flags out. In the town hall, the camera team filmed a gruesome scene.
An unknown Nazi bigwig lay next to a portrait of Hitler. It seems he had chosen suicide in order to avoid the shame of capitulation. In the mayor’s office, along with his wife and his daughter, municipal treasurer Kurt Lisso had also committed suicide. On this day, April the 20th, a woman in southern Germany wrote in her diary, Hitler’s birthday.
Listening voluntarily for the first time to a speech by Goebbels, I asked myself whether it was already madness or simply cunning. Whether he was cold-bloodedly playing a double role, party leaders are committing suicide because well over half of Nazi Germany is occupied. The Eastern Front is getting closer by the day.
Everywhere bombs are falling, day and night, even on peaceful villages. Near us, too. And Goebbels is talking as if victory were imminent. The centre of Leipzig lay in ruins. An Air Force cameraman meticulously documented the damage. In Leipzig, too, right to the end, there were fanatics who would rather believe the propaganda than look reality in the face.
Leipzig had fallen on the evening of April 19th. Only those in the monument to the Battle of the Nations had no thought of surrendering. The city’s military commander and a good 300 soldiers and members of the National Militia and the Hitler Youth were holed up inside the Colossus. Colonel von Poncet still believed in ultimate victory.
He repelled several American attacks, which saw defenders being killed and wounded. It was only when a shell flew through the window and exploded inside the monument that von Poncet was prepared to negotiate and finally surrendered. Just outside Leipzig, liberated British and French prisoners of war posed for the camera.
Now it was the turn of German soldiers to prepare for lengthy detention. Anyone who was able to, tried to get behind the American lines and surrender there. On no account did men want to fall into the hands of the Red Army. Many of the troops had held out for weeks in positions on the Elbe and Oder. It was only slogans like Victory or Siberia that had motivated them to hang on in order to save what can be saved.
The American advance had then made it easier for most of them to lay down their arms. April 25, 1945. Near the town of Wurzen, cameramen with Special Film Project 186 took pictures of the particularly impressive footage of German soldiers and members of the National Militia who had surrendered voluntarily to the Americans.
Along the west bank of the Mulde, the Americans had halted their advance and taken up position. This had been agreed with the Red Army, which was approaching the Elbe from the east. Wehrmacht units trying to make their way west found themselves in no man’s land between the fronts. According to a report by the first united states army.
Enemy troops opposite the Mulde Line feared above all the approach of the russians and in the fear of becoming russian prisoners of war fell into our lines to surrender Within a short space of time, tens of thousands of German soldiers became American prisoners of war in this section of the Mulde Line alone.
Wurzen lay in the middle of no man’s land. The previous day, the town’s mayor, Armin Grebert, had surrendered to the Americans without a font. On April the 25th, Wurzen was overflowing with refugees heading west. Residents and liberated slave laborers were filmed plundering storage warehouses at the station.
One young woman noted : In an instant a disgusting fight for food broke out. The town is an absolute Babylon, a mix of indescribable characters, and the Germans are not the best of them. It seems as if there will never be peace and calm here. What helps most is writing something every day. It’s an activity you can withdraw into to counter the unreality of these days with small realities that are familiar.
Since 1940, around a million French prisoners of war had been deported to the Third Reich to replace the manpower of German workers called up by the Wehrmacht. French slave labor was particularly indispensable in agriculture to maintain Germany’s food supply. As a rule, these forced laborers were themselves given meager rations, containing nothing like the calories normally required by a worker.
On April 25, 1945, near Wurzen, a cameraman with Special Film Project 186 filmed an almost endless stream of French forced laborers who were now allowed to return home. Numerous horse-drawn carts with German civilians could also be seen heading west. Most of them already had a long journey behind them, from East Prussia, Pomerania or Silesia.
They had suffered weeks and months of deprivation, always in search of food and shelter, and always in fear of being attacked or being killed between the fronts. For these people, their final destination and their whole future were still uncertain. Thirty kilometers north of Wurzen, Hollywood director George Stevens and his team made a stop.
At Düben, on National Route 2 to Berlin, the 104th US Infantry Division had taken position and was first of all doing some cleaning up. The Timber Wolves, as they were known, had been in Europe since August 1944 and had fought their way through the Hürtgen Forest, Holland and the Ardennes. At the beginning of April they had liberated Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp.
Now they had reached the west bank of the Mulde and were involved in final skirmishes with scattered units of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. Here, too, on April 25, 1945, the war was over. Vast numbers of German soldiers were fleeing across the Mulde. In their section of the front, the Americans turned to unconventional methods.
In an attempt to cope with the situation, they dropped leaflets over the fleeing troops, calling on them to form groups of 500 men each and to appear on the eastern bank of the river at half-hourly intervals, naturally with their weapons unloaded. In this way, over the next four days, more than 16,000 German soldiers reached safety as prisoners of the Timber Wolves.
George Stevens still had no idea that the British and the Americans had decided to halt their advance on Berlin. He desperately wanted to film the demise of the Nazi regime, alongside US troops in Hitler’s capital. Instead, he had to be satisfied with experiencing the end of German bellicosity in a small town in the middle of Germany.
On April 26, George Stevens and his team set out for Torgau. Their brief was to document the link-up of American and Russian forces. Berlin was already a long way off for the GIs. Later, one member of Stevens’ escort wrote : People resigned themselves to the fact that we weren’t going to Berlin. The feeling had overwhelmed them that the war wouldn’t last much longer.
For the first time there were no more enemies. It’s a nice feeling when you’re driving around in a jeep. We could rest by the Elbe. The first Red Army soldier they met welcomed them with a grin and the word capitalists. Then he pointed to himself and said, communist. April 26, 1945 also saw the first official meeting between the Soviets and the Americans.
It had been organized to take place on the Elbe Bridge at Torgau and was filmed by a camera team with Special Film Project 186. Each side had prepared a big celebration. The pictures were supposed to go all round the world. April the 27th, 1945. Elbe Day. The great celebration began in the midst of refugees crossing the river.
But the first unofficial link-up had already taken place two days previously. 40 kilometers upstream, an American reconnaissance team had encountered a Soviet patrol purely by chance. It wasn’t exactly a suitable location for such a symbolic event. The spectacle, which took place in Torgau on April the 27th, was named East Meets West.
Allied representatives from Britain and France had also been invited. For George Stevens and his team, every scene was important. They succeeded in capturing the casual atmosphere that prevailed. Soviet camera teams and photographers were also present for the momentous occasion. The Russians took a great interest in the equipment the Americans had with them.
Harold Denny reported for the New York Times, The Western Front and the Eastern Front are finally united, and Germany is cut in two. On the American side, the honour of sealing the Union fell to General Courtney H. Hodges of the First Army, the force that attacked the shores of Normandy last June and advanced 700 miles through France, Belgium and Germany to this point.
Representing the Russian side was Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the 1st Ukrainian Army, which fought its way clear for 1,400 miles against the fiercest resistance history has ever seen. The spectacle in Torgau was an event for the entire world. The link-up meant more to the Americans than the Soviets. Moscow chose to see itself as the sole victor over Nazi fascism.
The joining of the two sides was of particular significance for the Western world because it symbolized the end of the war. Just two weeks before, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died suddenly. For the Nazi leadership in Berlin, this offered a glimmer of hope that America’s alliance with Stalin might fracture, but Torgau showed exactly the opposite.
On this day, America’s new president, Harry S. Truman, ceremoniously announced, The union of our arms in the heart of Germany has a meaning for the world, which the world will not miss. It means, first, that the last faint, desperate hope of Hitler and his gangster government has been extinguished. In his speech, Truman expressed a wish which, even at this point in time, was unrealistic.
Second, the junction of our forces at this moment signalizes to ourselves and to the world that the collaboration of our nations in the course of peace and freedom is an effective collaboration which can surmount the greatest difficulties, of the most extensive campaign in military history and succeed.
In his article for the New York Times, Harold Denny agreed with the President. The spirit in which the Americans and Russian troops and their respective commanders met was worthy of the great occasion. The Russians received us with generous hospitality, and our men responded accordingly. From the moment an outpost of the Russians picked up the 1st American Patrol, there was an almost continuous celebration.
The Russians arranged banquets with food and vodka, and the Americans brought cognac and champagne, drinks they had liberated from German army depots. And then there was toasting and singing, an expression of hope for a future in which Americans, Russians and British would stand together for a lasting peace.
The alliance against Hitler was close to its objective, but shortly after victory was achieved it would crumble. On April 27, 1945, three days before the German dictator committed suicide and 11 days before Germany’s unconditional surrender, the post-war era in international politics began.
