"You Can't Understand"

A German Foreign Office worker was captured on the western front last week by the U.S. First Army. He was talkative: "There will be no capitulation--you will have to occupy every town in Germany. You can't imagine or understand the Ger man people. They are living in a completely different world, one of heroism and romanticism. The fact that they have no manufacturing centers remaining doesn't make any difference to them."

There was not much heroism in the little houses which hoisted white flags in the path of the Allied columns. Yet still no white flag had been raised over the Nazi-dominated core of the German nation.

Adding up the evidence, General Eisenhower in a letter to President Roosevelt expressed his opinion that there would never be a "clean-cut military surrender" in the west (see U.S. AT WAR). On some sectors last week, in fact, the Germans were still full of fight. They fought hard for the north, to keep the Allies away from the ports; for the south, to keep them away from the Alpine bastion; and for the cut-off Ruhr, which, though its industries were useless, had become a pocket of strategic value (see below).

The German High Command still seemed to have a plan, political or military or both; it still seemed able to find fighting men to carry it out.

The Bastion. On the eastern front, the Nazis were losing Vienna in a bloody, costly, hopeless battle. It was too late for considerations of prestige. The alarming thing was that, at Vienna, the Russians had reached the eastern approaches of the Alpine bastion.

In Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito's forces captured historic Sarajevo. Tito, who was in Moscow at the time, said it would be "only a matter of days" before all Yugoslavia was cleared of Germans.

Meanwhile the Nazis began to hole up in their southern redoubt in real earnest. The area around Berchtesgaden, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Starnberg and Miesbach was guarded by a double cordon of Himmler's blackshirts, and no one could pass without proper credentials. If, as seemed likely, the Russians and the western Allies should soon meet south of Berlin, the bastion would be cut off from northern Germany. Then the Allies would see how seriously the Nazis intended to fight in it, and how well they were able.

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