Historic Hour

At 11 a.m., a white flag fluttered out side the massive four-story shelter where the German commander at Aachen had holed up with his last surviving men. The surrender flag was carried by two U.S. sergeants who had been taken prisoner.

Wearing an immaculate uniform and mirror-shined boots, stiff, grey Colonel Gerhardt Wilck approached the commander of the U.S. attacking party -- a 21 -year-old lieutenant. The young American took the elderly German to U.S. headquarters.

The first document produced by Wilck was unsatisfactory to the Americans: it did not contain the word "unconditional." After some hesitation, which he said was due to fear of Nazi retaliation against his family, Gerhardt Wilck drafted another: "Aachen's defending German garrison ran out of food and ammunition. I am forced to give up my command and surrender Aachen unconditionally, with all its stores, to the commanding officer of the victorious Americans."

A Word of Farewell. Soon from the shelter strutted eight spic-&-span staff officers, one a Heidelberg alumnus with dueling scars on his face; 400 German soldiers and 30-odd U.S. captives followed them. Colonel Wilck asked for and received permission to address a Word of farewell to his men. Said he: "Dear German soldiers, I am speaking to you at a painful moment. ... I saw that further fighting was useless. ... At this time I have to remind you that you are still German soldiers. Please behave as such. I also wish you the best of health in your future travels and fast return to the Fatherland after hostilities have ended.

"Return to Germany to help rebuild our country. I was refused by the Americans the authority to give the Sieg Heil and Heil Hitler. But we can still do it in our minds."

Then Colonel Wilck went off to the prisoners' cage and sobbed.

Mud and Rubble. The town was a welter of muddy rubble, pervaded by the stench of dead animals and burst sewer and gas mains. Despite all efforts of Allied airmen to spare the cathedral, one bomb had pierced the roof of the Gothic choir and smashed the empty tomb of Emperor Otto III (11th Century). The U.S. troops who fought toward the air-raid shelter had been trained in the streets of a bomb-riddled town in England.

When the U.S. flag went up over Aachen, the Allied Military Government announced that there would be no "coddling" of German civilians camping in the vicinity. They must buy their own food from local farm supplies or sign chits to the A.M.G. for stores left by the Wehrmacht. Rubble would be cleared from the streets to ease military traffic and a military telephone service restored; beyond that no Allied restoration was contemplated.

Aachen was not only the first large German city (peacetime pop. 160,000) ever taken by U.S. troops, it was also the first formal surrender of German arms on German soil to foreign invaders since the Napoleonic Wars. Eastward, the Nazis sullenly prepared to defend Dueren and Juelich on the way to Cologne.

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