Heartbreak House

The smell of doom lay heavy on the German air. Almost every German could smell it. The incredible Nazi failure at the Remagen bridge last week sluiced U.S. troops over the Rhine, and Marshal Zhukov's men were pouring over the Oder east of Berlin [see below']. Now, at last, the battle was being joined in the final arena.

Said Paul Joseph Goebbels "The war has passed its climax. This, however, will not mean that the intensity will lessen. On the contrary, in its last phase, there will be a brio furioso of arms, and a sudden end."

Colonel General Heinz Guderian, Chief of Staff of the Wehrmacht and commander on the eastern front, rasped that conditions were "well nigh intolerable."

Heinrich Himmler, Germany's strong man, said nothing.

Adolf Hitler issued an order of the day to his troops, on the tenth anniversary of compulsory military service under the swastika. He rehashed his personal nightmare of German martyrdom, and concluded: "We witness both in the east and the west what our people would have to face. Our task is therefore clear: to put up resistance and to wear down our enemies so long that, in the end, they will get tired and will yet be broken."

Winston Churchill, the man who never tired and never broke, said he could see the beginning of German disintegration.

Commenting on the growing defeatism of German soldiers, the London Sunday Observer said: "They lack the indestructible self-confidence, deep-rooted in the people, that was at the root of Allied recovery. . . . This has been a war of hearts as well as machines. When the heart breaks, all breaks. And Germany now is Heartbreak House."

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