The Pittsburgh Press (May 5, 1945)
Direct report from inside Germany –
Most Germans believe Hitler died July 20 in army bomb plot
People, troops wanted only to escape Reds and give up to Americans and British
By Edward W. Beattie Jr.
Since last September, United Press war reporter Edward W. Beattie Jr. has been inside Germany – a prisoner of war. He was captured while going up to an advanced Allied combat position to cover a story. Yesterday he came out of Luckenwalde Prison Camp, which had been overrun by the Russians, and was flown back to Paris. The following dispatch is the most recent and most reliable report on the dying days of the Reich.
PARIS, France – I do not know the answer to the mystery of Adolf Hitler. But I can tell you what a good proportion of the German people – front frontline troops to village housewives – think about it.
They think he has been dead since July 20, 1944.
They think the bomb plot against Hitler, hatched by German Army officers, succeeded. They think Heinrich Himmler and a small group of his henchmen seized control of Germany after July 20 and kept it in the war.
Few Germans believe the story their own propagandists put out – that Hitler died in battle as the Russians closed in against the heart of Berlin. The ones who do believe that are Nazi fanatics who also believe they can go underground and continue the fight against the Allies for years.
Don’t care about Hitler
For the last few weeks, no Germans with whom I talked cared where Hitler was. They didn’t care whether he was dead or alive.
The only thing they cared about was getting themselves into position to surrender to the Americans or the British.
At the Luckenwalde Camp, the German guards talked frankly about what they intended to do when the Russians came.
They said they would fire one token volley and then run. Actually, they didn’t wait to do that. They fled before the Russians ever got there and turned the camp over to those of us who were prisoners.
The average German soldier seems to have realized as early as last fall that he was fighting in a lost cause.
I say that because there were two weeks after I was captured that I was forced to live in the battlefield with a unit of the German Army.
Surrounded by Allies
We were surrounded by Allied troops southwest of Epinal on the western approaches to the Vosges. For transportation we had a strange convoy of French autos and most of the daylight hours we were strafed by Allied planes.
One day I tried to buy a bottle of schnapps from a French distiller and offered him Allied occupation money in payment. He finally took it when some of my German captors told him:
“The Americans will be here in two days or so.”
I knew then that the Germans knew they were licked.
My captors finally broke out of the Allied trap and then I was shuttled from place to place. In these travels I came into contact with all types of Germans from Foreign Office officials to victims of Gestapo torture. Almost all of them were blaming Hitler and the Nazi regime for their troubles and the remark that was made most often to me was: “We are victims of our leadership.”
One day last November I was taken into the office of Dr. Paul Schmidt, head of the Press Section of the German Foreign Office.
Learned Nazi plans
Obviously, he was trying to get information out of me, but in the course of our conversation he let out some interesting information himself. What he outlined to me was Germany’s grand strategy for the remainder of the war.
He said quite frankly that Germany had no chance to drive the Americans and British back out of France into the sea. But he insisted that the German Army could keep the Western Allies out of Germany through the winter and, in the spring, start a tremendous offensive against the Russians.
German hopes fade
“This offensive," he said, “will shatter the Russians’ propaganda front line and roll up their last-ditch army. Then we will force England and the United States into a compromise peace.”
They clung to that hope until January. Then the Russians made their great breakthrough and threw all of Eastern Germany into chaos.
Then the German propagandists made one last attempt. They circulated a story that Marshal Semyon Timoshenko had led a revolt against Marshal Joseph Stalin and had seized the great military base of Smolensk. This coup, the German propagandists told their people, had split the Russians’ Eastern Front and deprived the northern end of it of supplies.
Beginning of end
The onrushing Red Army cave the lie to such propaganda. Then the tide really began running heavily against the Germans.
The Allies crossed the Rhine. The Russians rolled up to the Oder. Secret weapons promised to the German soldier never appeared. But as late as three weeks ago, an SS agent, who claimed to be a Swiss doctor, was circulating through our prison camp at Luckenwalde, trying to persuade American and British prisoners to sign a round-robin letter denouncing the “Red Evil.” Shortly before the Russians arrived, he disappeared.
Now the German panic is on. The fear of the Russians has caused groups of armed Germans, numbering as many as 100, to try to surrender to American prisoners of war who were still deep inside Russian-occupied Germany.