Hitler's Last Days Read Online Free PDF

they cannot stop shivering.
    Over the next four days, the Ninety-Ninth will see 133 more of its men die. Six hundred will fall back to the battalion aid station to be treated for frozen feet. As many as 1,844 will suffer the indignity of going “missing,” meaning that their loved ones will never get the closure that comes with having a body to bury.
    But the Ninety-Ninth will not quit. And though there are no Germans to their rear, the troops do not fall back. They must hold the line. So they await that inevitable moment when the Germans sprint the half mile up the hillside to kill them. Hour after hour, day after day, in the midst of that endless artillery barrage, they fire back and wait. All the while they wonder whether they will hold the line, get killed in action, or avoid violent death by surrendering.
    But like every soldier on both sides of the battlefield, they will soon learn that surrender does not always prevent violent death. In the next three days, Hitler’s infantry will murder more than 350 American soldiers and one hundred Belgian civilians.

    A German tank unit waits around a fire in the Ardennes. Their camouflaged tank is behind them. [Mary Evans Picture Library]

A German soldier guards as vehicles advance to the front. [Mary Evans Picture Library]
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    CHAPTER 8
    THE ARDENNES
    DECEMBER 17, 1944
    A S THE SECOND DAY OF Operation Watch on the Rhine begins, the German First SS Panzer Division is on the move. They are the lead element in the much larger Sixth Panzer Army, tasked with racing through the countryside as quickly as possible to capture three vital bridges over the Meuse River.
    The First is the best of the best, a fighting force so highly regarded by Hitler that he has allowed its men to sew his name onto their uniform sleeves. They are all hardened fighters who have seen more than their share of combat in this war. And their armament bears testimony to their elite stature. It’s nothing but the finest for the First Panzer: sixty panzer and Panther II tanks, three flak tanks, seventy-five half-tracks, fourteen 20mm guns, twenty-seven 75mm assault guns, and numerous 105mm and 150mm self-propelled howitzers.
    In command of this magnificent fighting force is the dashing poster boy for the SS, twenty-nine-year-old Joachim Peiper. “He was approximately five feet eight inches in height, 140 pounds in weight, long dark hair combed straight back, straight well-shaped features,” an American prisoner of war will later write.
    Peiper was selected to serve as a top assistant for SS leader Heinrich Himmler, a calculating and brutal man whom Peiper came to idolize. Himmler had been loyal to the Nationalsozialismus —National Socialism or Nazi—beliefs of Adolf Hitler long before the F ü hrer achieved power over the German people in 1933. As such, he enjoys Hitler’s confidence and has been given the harsh task of carrying out the extermination and suppression of those races, ethnicities, and enemies whom Hitler deems to be a threat to the Reich. Thus Jews, Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, and Nazi political opponents are sent to concentration camps in Germany and occupied Europe.
    Under Himmler’s tutelage, Peiper developed the philosophies of intolerance that now guide his military tactics. He stood at Himmler’s side to witness the shooting of Polish intellectuals in the early days of the war, and was an eyewitness to the gassing of Jewish civilians, including women and children. When Himmler rewarded Peiper with an assignment to lead a half-track battalion on the Russian front, the fanatical young officer quickly developed a reputation for battlefield brilliance. His men and tanks moved quickly, thrusting and feinting in a manner reminiscent of George S. Patton’s lightning-fast maneuvers.
    It was Adolf Hitler himself who presented his dashing tank commander with the prestigious Oak Leaves to add to his Knight’s Cross, making Peiper the youngest officer