"We Are a Shamed People"

Many more Germans preferred to give up rather than die on the western front last week. The number of captured, greatly swollen by Volksstuermer, was rapidly nearing 1,000,000 since April 1. Yet some did choose death. In Leipzig, the U.S. First Army discovered a grotesque tableau of suicide in the City Hall (see FOREIGN NEWS ). And there was a young sniper captured in Leipzig who talked himself into self-slaughter.

Blond, pudgy, slack-mouthed, sullen and mean-eyed, the sniper ranted about the disgrace of capture, said he would rather have died for his Fuehrer. An American lieutenant, one of whose men had been killed by these snipers, handed him a .45 automatic with one cartridge in the chamber. The German looked at the G.I.s who had him covered with rifles. Then he put the pistol's heavy muzzle to the soft spot under his right ear and pulled the trigger. One of the G.I.s said: "First he surrenders and then he shoots himself.

What the hell sense does that make?" The Colonel's Cigars. Leipzig had 1,000 ack-ack guns, but they caused surprisingly little trouble. Most were captured intact. Nevertheless a hail of small-arms fire, and some shells from 88s and 105s, met the 2nd and 69th Infantry Divisions fighting their way in. The doughboys mopped up resistance, except for a nest of Germans, including the garrison commander holed up in the huge, red granite "Battle of the Nations" monument (a memorial to the defeat of Napoleon by a Prussian-Austrian-Russian-Swedish coalition in 1813).

U.S. artillerymen, getting set to raze the monument, learned that it contained a handful of Allied prisoners. Two U.S. officers went up to parley with the German colonel. They had dinner with him, smoked his cigars. At 2 a.m. a white flag went up over the "Battle of the Nations" monument.

The Ninth Army captured Magdeburg (pop. 294.000) and 708,000,000 marks in the Magdeburg branch of the Reichsbank Plauen (pop. 111,000) fell to the Third Army.

The Admiral's Women. The Wehrmacht fought savagely in the north, where

General Henry D. G. Crerar's Canadians were closing on Emden and Lieut. General Sir Miles C. Dempsey's British shelled Bremen and Hamburg at close range. The German Navy, however, did not fight. The admiral commanding the German North Sea naval district headquarters at Buxtehude surrendered to Dempsey's 11th Armored Division, which captured 500 women auxiliaries, in bell-bottomed trousers and coats of navy blue. The 11th also captured a circus, fully "operational" except for two wounded bears.

The British closed up to a 40-mile stretch of the Elbe southeast of Hamburg. While the U.S. Ninth Army marked time, guarding its bridgeheads, the First crashed into Dessau, at the point where the Mulde River flows into the Elbe.

The Third Army, which had crossed the Czechoslovak border, suddenly swung south and shot an armored division 53 miles in the direction of Regensburg. At latest reports this outfit was "running wild" under a security blackout. The storm was gathering over the northern roof of the Alpine bastion.

The Nazis' Boats. On the Atlantic coast, French armored and infantry detachments cleared the Gironde estuary, opened the great port of Bordeaux to Allied ships for the first time in five years. The French First Army, on the right bank of the Rhine, captured Stuttgart and suddenly leaped south to the heavily guarded Swiss border, trapping some thousands of Germans in the Black Forest. The French also reached Lake Constance, not long after four boatloads of guilt-stricken Nazis had fled to the eastern end of the lake, where they could duck into the Alpine bastion. A few frantic latecomers, who reached the dock just as the last boat was pulling out, jumped into the water and tried to swim after it.

Swooping down on a bridge at Dillingen, east of Ulm, the U.S. Seventh Army's 12th Armored Division ripped the fuse out of a 5,000-lb. demolition charge under the bridge, crossed the Danube River and pressed on toward Augsburg. On the road beyond Nurnberg. other units of the Seventh were more than halfway to Regensburg.

Doctor's Post-Mortem. Nuernberg, in whose great stadium the Nazi Party used to assemble in vain glory once a year, had been fanatically defended by Volksstuermer, remnants of the 17th SS Division, elements of 32 different Wehrmacht outfits. After five days of desperate fighting, it fell, on Hitler's 56th birthday. The town (but not the stadium) was 95% ruined. Correspondents who had followed the Allied armies across Germany all the way from Aachen said they had never seen such total destruction.

A German Red Cross doctor who had been picking up wounded--both U.S. and German--delivered his postmortem: "We took too many orders, obeyed too many commands, listened to too many words, believed too many lies. We are a beaten people. We are a shamed people. We are reaping the whirlwind.

"I am a doctor. Also I am a German. I am proud of being a doctor."

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