Exorcising Hitler Read Online Free PDF

Germany’s enforced transformation begins, as it must, in the thick of war, when a still defiant German heartland was bracing itself for the now inevitable enemy invasion. Although the Allies had broad ideas about what they needed to do once they controlled the enemy’s country, much policy was as yet only sketchily defined, and would be made on the hoof according to the exigencies and anxieties of the moment.
    So we join the advancing Allied troops at the point when they took their first modest and cautious steps on to the soil of the Third Reich.
    The day was, as it happened, 11 September – or as Americans usually express it, September 11 – 1944.

1
    Into the Reich
    Ninety-six days after the Allies’ first landings on the Normandy beaches, a seven-man patrol of the 2nd Platoon, Troop B, 85th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, attached to the 5th Armoured Division, 1st United States Army, crossed the River Our from Luxembourg into the pre-war territory of the Third Reich.
    The bridge that normally straddled the border had been demolished by the retreating Wehrmacht, but the waters of the Our were shallow enough for Sergeant Warner W. Holzinger and his men to wade across and cautiously make their way on to the far bank. Encountering no enemy troops, they proceeded up the slope on the German side.
    Soon the Americans observed a German farmer at work in the field. Sergeant Holzinger – a German-American who spoke his parents’ language – addressed the man, who offered to show them the enemy bunker system. Led by this disarmingly friendly native, they walked a mile or more into Reich territory and, sure enough, found themselves gazing at a set of German fortifications – in this case, consisting of nineteen or twenty concrete pillboxes. Adjoining one of these, incongruously, locals had constructed a chicken shed. There was no sign of enemy forces. 1
    Deciding not to push their luck, the American soldiers quickly retraced their steps and returned to the Allied-held side of the river. They reported at about 18:15 hours on 11 September to their platoon commander, Lt Loren L. Vipond.
    The news of their incursion into Germany was quickly radioed to the Headquarters of Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges, Commander of the First Army, from where the long-awaited message flashed around the world: the Allies had finally pierced the Reich. 2
    The 2nd Platoon’s dart across the border was the first of several undertaken by American units. In early evening, a company of the 109th Infantry, 28th Division, crossed the Our on a bridge between Weiswampach, in the northern tip of Luxembourg, and the German village of Sevenig. Near St Vith, Belgium, a patrol from the 22nd Infantry, 4th Division, likewise went over the border near the village of Hemmeres and roamed around the countryside for a while. The GIs rounded up and talked to some civilians. Many had been evacuated by the SS. Those of the German population who remained had largely taken to the nearby woods, though for these country people the exigencies of peace proved unsuited to the imperatives of war. A local woman from the small farming community of Heckuscheid reported a little melodramatically: ‘Suddenly we realised that the people who had gone back into the village to feed the livestock had not returned: they had been arrested by the Americans who had in the meantime advanced into the village.’ 3 To provide proof of their success, the border-crossers brought back a German cap, some currency and a sample of earth.
    A more determined incursion in force had to wait until the following day, 12 September, and it took place a hundred kilometres or so north of the previous day’s efforts. Shortly before 3 p.m., the Sherman tanks of Colonel William B. Lovelady’s armoured task force, an elite outfit that had carved a path to here all the way from Omaha Beach, rumbled in battalion strength past a last farmhouse flying the Belgian flag in anticipation of liberation. Beyond that