World Battlefronts: Bitter End

The war in Europe drained off slowly into peace. Until five days after the official surrender there was still skirmishing by Germans too afraid of peace to submit. Then the Russians closed in, and the bitter-end Germans burrowed into forest and mountain hideouts. The fight had at last gone from the Wehrmacht.

Finesse & Secrets. Britons and Americans had little trouble. Some surrendering Germans indulged in last small gestures of arrogance, then were docile enough. In the Aegean Islands 17,000 Axis troops were handed over to a British brigadier. At the French ports of Dunkirk, Lorient, La Rochelle and Saint-Nazaire (see RADIO), hundreds of miles behind the last fighting fronts, some 75,000 Germans downed arms. In one area north of Hamburg where 300 SS marines stubbornly holed up in a forest to fight on, the British with exquisite finesse declared the area out of bounds for Britons, and ordered Wehrmacht troops to deal with their countrymen.

Norway, where the Germans could have made it hard, was easy. German officers bearing suitcases full of maps flew to Scotland, spread their deployment secrets before the British and arranged to surrender 300,000 troops.

But Germans of the Middle Army Group in Czechoslovakia and northern Austria ignored surrender orders. Under command of Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner (wanted by the Russians as a war criminal) and Colonel General Otto Woehler, the Wehrmacht stumbled blindly on, fought, then despairingly submitted or fled. By week's end the Russians had rounded up 1,230,000. Still at liberty were Schörner and Woehler.

Fire & Water. In Berlin there were flare-ups of resistance against the conquerors. Russians reported new fires started by German underground fanatics, and announced that the subways had been flooded by the Germans, drowning hundreds hiding out. Ten days after the Nazi capital's surrender, bodies were still rotting in the streets. The northern pockets which had been holding out behind Russian lines were quickly swabbed out. On the Courland peninsula in Latvia some 190,000 Germans were taken. Around Danzig, Gdynia and on

Bornholm Island some 75,000 more gave up.

For the Russians the mop-up was routine, and the prisoner problem settled. Eastern Europe's roads were already covered with German columns trudging toward Russia and an assured future of redemption through hard work.