GERMANY: Chaos — and Comforts

Much of Hitler’s Reich lay prostrate, exposed for all the world to see. The stabbing steel columns that lanced at military vitals had ripped away the barriers of Nazi secrecy.

Correspondents, at last inside Germany, were flabbergasted by the kaleidoscope of contrasts: war and peace, hunger and plenty, anger and kindness, ruin and feudal pomp, a fantastic blend of the modern and medieval. Wherever the tide of war engulfed it, the German state was disintegrating into chaos. Elsewhere, it was incredibly stable.

Rubble & Blossoms. By last week some 18,000 square miles of the Fatherland’s “sacred soil” east of the Rhine had passed from German sovereignty for the first time in more than a century. Over a score of great cities flew Allied flags—and the little white flags of the conquered Reich.

The cities were mostly rubble piles. Typical was Minister. In its streets there was an eerie stillness, broken by a singing bird, a scurrying rat, a few fearful civilians picking their way.

In a subcellar of Frankfurt, five stories beneath what was once the famed Opera House, reporters found an order of Catholic nuns. For seven months they had lived like troglodytes in the dank, dark earth waiting serenely for the war to end.

The villages and country towns were different. From behind lace curtains in neat, storybook cottages, Hausfrauen watched the endless chain of tanks clanking down the cobbled Hauptstrasse. The war was passing them by.

From the university seat of Heidelberg, TIME Correspondent Sidney Olson cabled this bucolic picture: “Old Heidelberg today slept in the April sunshine, in a cloud of appleblossoms, as tranquil and placid as the mirror-smooth Neckar River. Here the war seems something far away. On this Sunday, the first after Easter, the people of all the towns in the Neckar Valley were out in force for the great weekly business of churchgoing. The big men were richly dressed in tail coats and high hats, their great stomachs resplendently vested in oyster white or French grey.”

Village homes and farmhouses were stuffed with comforts, even luxuries. Near Frankfurt, one correspondent wonderingly noted the furnishings—paintings, silver and glassware, rich linens—then dipped into a bedroom closet: “I counted 87 dresses, three pairs of boots, 17 pairs of shoes. One whole drawer was jammed with tightly packed, unworn silk stockings.”

Schnapps for the Invaders. Seldom did correspondents find Germans who were really hungry or ragged. Ahead of the invaders, fleeing Germans were eating horse meat on the roads, but for those who stayed behind, even in the cavernous cities, food seemed sufficient. In heavily bombed Münster, restaurants served steaming Westphalian meals to all. In Osnabrück’s intact suburbs, German civilians thrust food and schnapps on the invaders without thought of payment. Department-store shelves were crammed with linen, stockings, blankets, perfume, cameras. Cellars overflowed with fine French wines. British Commandos who took the town lived opulently on champagne, ham & eggs, ripe strawberries.

Castles & Eagle’s Nest. Near Driburg, U.S. soldiers came upon portly Princess Armgard zu Lippe-Biesterfeld, widowed mother of Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands, living peacefully in a palace. The Army set up an accommodating “off limits” sign, left her undisturbed.

The conquest of castles became commonplace. In her 300-room castle at Nordkirchen, Princess Valerie-Marie of Schleswig-Holstein, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, ran her fingers through marcelled hair at the sight of bearded G.I.s tracking mud on her carpets. When she was confined to 14 gilded chambers, she wrung her hands and protested: “It’s absurd, this tiny wing.”

Next ripple in the advancing tide was the onetime castle of Baron Munchausen, legendary apostle of the apocryphal. Hard by, in storied Hameln, the tanks had to flatten a fifth of the turreted town before it yielded. Unharmed was the 17th-century house from which the Pied Piper beguiled Hameln’s children to their end.

Far more of a sight to the doughboys was the fabulous Adlerhorst (Eagle’s Nest), Hitler’s 20th-century eyrie on a peak west of Bad Nauheim. The rock-hewn retreat, served by three miles of subterranean corridors, sported 1,000 air-conditioned rooms with hidden exposures of the rustic scene below.

Island of Thought. Overriding every G.I. discovery was the phenomenon of the people: they had no conception of the degree to which they had been thrust beyond the pale of the human race. Under Nazi rule, Germany had become an island of thought completely segregated from the outside world.

First contact with that world usually came as a sharp shock. Sometimes it bred effusive warmth, sometimes icy resentment. Many Germans at first looked on the Americans as liberators, then relapsed into timid docility. Some went on smiling, trying to be friendly, until finally they understood that the Americans were all but anesthetized against them.

Other Germans complained of being ousted from their homes by billeted soldiers. After the G.I.s asked “What about the people of Lidice?” and got no reaction, it was apparent that the Germans did not know what they were talking about.

This ivory-tower ignorance persisted in the most unexpected places. In Sendenhorst, correspondents came upon towering, grey-haired Count Clemens von Galen, renowned Catholic Bishop of MUnster and fearless critic of the Nazi regime since its inception. Instantly the prelate made it clear that he was “loyal to the Fatherland,” and must therefore consider the Allies as enemies. His uppermost concern was the spread of Communism in Germany. To him all the liberated, wandering slaves were “Russians,” plundering German homes. As for the western Allies: “I hope the future will bring a time when we will all be good neighbors. . . . Maybe it will be possible in 65 years.”

Another rescued prelate, Polish-born Cardinal Hlond, was found in good health and spirits in a convent near Paderborn. Of his treatment by the Germans, he said only: “All is now forgotten; those are little personal things.” Of German morale: “It is difficult to get any idea of the state of the German mind.”

Slaves & Skeletons. Other rescues—the liberation of “dispossessed persons” (officialese for slave laborers and foreign workers overtaken by the advancing Allies)—became a problem. Ignoring Allied commands to stay put, thousands upon thousands of the emaciated, verminous, happy, resigned workers began the long walk back to freedom.

In their numbed minds was a single thought: “Get out of Germany.” All went west, even the Russians, in a shuffling exodus that clogged the roads for military traffic. For these liberated slaves, food was very much a problem. Horses and cows killed in battle were stripped to skeletons by the hungry travelers.

Birth of a Union. Timidly, in isolated spots behind the Allied front, a semblance of responsibility began to stir.

TIME Correspondent Percy Knauth saw it at Hoechst, an industrial town near Frankfort. Four men—a Communist, a trade-unionist, two Social Democrats—had scrapped their pre-Hitler political differences and were working as auxiliary police for the U.S. army.

In Aachen, first Rhineland city to be freed, the process advanced a stage further. German workers formed themselves into a trade union, denounced Naziism, demanded an eight-hour day and the right to strike.

For the Nazis, as their integrated state shrank about them, the problems of defeat were insoluble. A decree by Hitler last week divorced Nazi Party duties from local government affairs. The German radio said that it was done to free busy Nazi officials from the burden of local administration. More probably, it was to free them for flight to their last-ditch Bavarian bastion.