Introduction Comments (by John Kenneth Galbraith) Praise Sample Chapter Additional Links

THIRTY-FOUR YEAR OLD American intelligence officer, I became a prisoner-of-war interrogator with the Twenty-first Corps of the United States Army and witness to the endgame of the Third Reich. Our troop movements were often so rapid that tactical information elicited from the German soldiers, who were surrendering to us in droves, quickly became obsolete, and my role at headquarters turned into that of a supernumerary assigned to a variety of tasks for which I had no previous training. On Hitler's birthday, April 20, 1945, I was promoted to first lieutenant and awarded a Bronze Star for meritorious service against the enemy. Toward the end, medals were distributed among us officers in profusion.

Notes written immediately after I returned home, on V-J night, were composed in a frenzied attempt to recapture what I had seen and heard during the last stages of the war in Europe. Fifty years later I found these papers, along with letters to my wife, then working in Washington. Excerpts from the letters are a documentary record of what I felt and thought at the time, censored by a writer who was subject to the constraints of military security and conjugal vows. Conversations reported here have passed through the smoke screen of memory, recollections of the spirit, rather than the precise detail, of events; sometimes they echo the voices of other observers. Converse with the defeated enemies in the last months of the war on the western front was rarely subject to the formalities of interrogation; the quotations and descriptions are the distilled essence of those encounters. Prisoners of war often had a greater need to talk than we had a capacity to listen. In the long, drawn-out dialogues between us more truths were conveyed than in the casual exchanges of most men during times of peace. The style and technique of these sketches derive from the movies, with their abrupt shifts of scenes and persons, to which the reader has to adapt. Military historians have assembled a picture of the grand design, creating the myth of an official history; but fragments may be closer to the chaos of experience in war before it has been subjected to cleansing.

Fact and an occasional fantasy rub shoulders in my story of the collapse of the Reich, seen through a tiny peephole. The names of minor characters are synthetic, but the major players are depicted as I confronted them. To blur the line between invention and recollection, fantasy and memory, was not my intent; it just happened that way. The result is a hybrid far more common among historians since Herodotus than we professionals admit when we don our academic gowns. What I have written is sometimes a "feigned history" in the spirit of David Hume rather than Leopold von Ranke's pretentious manifesto, bloss wie es eigentlich gewesen war (simply as it actually happened).

Mea culpa. Today I feel ashamed of verdicts pronounced in the heat of battle or at the sight of human atrocities. I regret the summary judgments that poured out of me and the sentiments of superior virtue that besmirch all victors.