Victory In Europe: Freedom for the Famed

France's Jean Borotra, the Bounding Basque of tennis fame, bounded down a Tirolese road, accompanied by a bribed German guard and romped into the ranks of an American battalion. A few moments later he and the Americans raced up the Alpine road again to picturesque Itter Castle. There, waiting to be liberated, was a batch of Hitler's most prized captives. Near the Brenner Pass and in southern Germany U.S. troops released others. Some of the freed men:

¶ King Leopold III of the Belgians, a Nazi prisoner for five years.

¶ France's ex-Premiers Léon Blum, Socialist leader of the 1936 Popular Front. Edouard Daladier, the only surviving man of Munich, and Paul Reynaud, the last unhappy Premier who yielded France to Marshal Pétain.

¶ France's Generals Maurice Gamelin, who commanded the Allied armies in 1940's disastrous Battle of France, and Maxime Weygand, who remained loyal to Vichy.

¶ Austria's Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, who was treated first to Adolf Hitler's rage at Berchtesgaden, then to his country's Anschluss by the Nazi Reich, finally to seven years' captivity.

¶ Germany's Pastor Martin Niemöller. who preached from his Dahlem pulpit, too often for his own safety, against the false gods of totalitarianism. He was thin but tanned and in good spirits.

¶ Poland's Lieut. General Tadeusz Kombrowski ("General Bor"), leader of last August's abortive Warsaw uprising.

¶ Britain's Lieut. Viscount Lascelles, nephew of King George VI.

¶ The U.S.'s Lieut. John G. Winant Jr., son of the Ambassador to the Court of St. James's.

These were not broken men, as the lesser men of Buchenwald and Dachau were broken. They were well clothed and mostly in good health. Toward the end their captors had had to curry favor with them. Most had been allowed to keep voluminous notebooks. Reynaud planned to write a book about his experience (including five months' solitary confinement at Oranienburg). Daladier intended to compose a history of World War II.