THE OCCUPATION: The Iron Cross

The Germans managed their surrender with a skill which will plague the victors for years to come. No Wehrmacht campaign was ever planned to deadlier purpose, executed with greater cunning.

The Mission. The twilight rulers of Germany preached to the last that the German people and armies were the enemies of Russian Bolshevism, the defenders of western civilization. Upon this powerful and insidious theme, they based the whole edifice of surrender.

The Strategy. To a disturbing degree, they succeeded in their strategy of separate surrender. True, a Russian signed the first general surrender at Reims; British and U.S. officers signed the second in Berlin (see WORLD BATTLEFRONTS). But Reims was General Eisenhower's show. Berlin was Marshal Zhukov's.

British and U.S. army commanders in the west had no choice but to accept the "field surrenders" of German armies—a process climaxed by the surrender of The Netherlands, Denmark and northwestern Germany to Field Marshal Montgomery. The fact that U.S. armies had been deliberately halted in their advances toward Berlin and Prague, so that the Red Army could take them, was so much grist for the German mill.

The scheme of separate surrender was no artificial fabrication; it had its roots in the fears and beliefs of the German soldiery and people. On the U.S. First Army front, many German units seriously expected to join the U.S. battle line, march with the Americans against the Russians. An entire German regiment had kept its arms with this end in view, was genuinely astonished when the Americans declined to cooperate.

The Alibi. The bankrupt Reich's receivers did their utmost to absolve the German people and the German military command of responsibility for the war and the defeat. Blame went impartially to: 1) the Nazi party, no longer to be confused with the German nation; 2) an "unfortunate" shortage of equipment. This inferiority, the propaganda suggested, was no reflection on the power and genius of German arms and could be corrected next time.

The Germans disclosed and carried out their strategy with atavistic frankness. One after another, surrendering generals spoke their pieces:

¶| General Alfred Jodl (at Reims): "The German people and armed forces .... have achieved and suffered more than perhaps any people in the world." ¶ General Franz Boehme: "We are unbeaten. . . ."

¶ General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst: "Insane war . . . mad leadership."

¶ Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, at last defeated and taken in Austria, notably broke the pattern insofar as he professed complete loyalty to Adolf Hitler, blamed defeat on both military and political bunglers. But, smiling and spruce and personally unbowed, he was a living embodiment of Wehrmacht "honor." ¶I General Kurt Dittmar, theGerman ground forces' prize analyst, was asked by his U.S. and British captors to write a speech for broadcasting to the defeated Germans. He did, but it was not used: he had composed a masterful exoneration of the Wehrmacht.-