Band of Brothers

17 DRINKING HITLER'S CHAMPAGNE

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BERCHTESGADEN

May 1-8,1945

On the first two days of May, the company drove south from Munich, moving slowly through streams of German soldiers walking in the opposite direction. Often there were more German soldiers with weapons going north than there were Americans going south. "We looked at each other with great curiosity," Winters remembered. "I am sure both armies shared one thought—just let me alone. All I want is to get this over with and go home."

On May 3, Colonel Sink got orders to have the 506th ready to move out at 0930 the following day, objective Berchtesgaden.

Berchtesgaden was a magnet for the troops of all the armies in southern Germany, Austria, and northern Italy. South of Salzburg, the Bavarian mountain town of Berchtesgaden was Valhalla for the Nazi gods, lords, and masters. Hitler had a home there and a mountain-top stone retreat called the Aldershorst (Eagle's Nest) 8,000 feet high. Thanks to a remarkable job of road building, cars could get to a parking place within a few hundred feet of the Aldershorst. There a shaft ran into the center of the mountain to an elevator which lifted into the Aldershorst. The walls of the elevator were gold leaf.

It was to Berchtesgaden that the leaders of Europe had come in the late 1930s to be humiliated by Hitler. Daladier of France, Mussolini of Italy, Schuschnigg of Austria, Chamberlain of Britain, and others. They had feared Hitler, as had the whole world. Now that Hitler was dead, the fear was removed, but that only highlighted the fascination with Hitler and his favorite retreat, which seemed to hold one of the keys to his character.

It was to Berchtesgaden that the highest-ranking Nazi leadership had flocked, to be near their Führer. Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Martin Bormann had houses in the area. There was a fabulous apartment complex for the SS.

It was to the Berchtesgaden area that much of the loot collected by the Nazis from all over Europe had come. The place was stuffed with money, in gold and in currency from a dozen countries, with art treasures (Goering's collection alone contained five Rembrandts, a Van Gogh, a Renoir, and much more). It was bursting with booze, jewelry, fabulous cars.

So Berchtesgaden was really two magnets: the symbolic home of Hitler's mad lust for power, and the best looting possibilities in Europe. Everybody wanted to get there—French advancing side by side with the 101st, British coming up from Italy, German leaders who wanted to get their possessions, and every American in Europe.

Easy Company got there first.

On May 4, the 101st moved out by convoy down the autobahn between Munich and Salzburg, with 2nd Battalion in the lead. The Americans passed Rosenheim and the Chiem See. At Siegsdorf they turned right on the direct highway to Berchtesgaden. About 14 kilometers down the road, they ran into the tail of the French 2nd Armored Division, the first division to enter Paris, with its famous commander Gen. Jacques Philippe Leclerc.

The 2nd Armored supposedly had been on the right flank of the 101st for the past week, but the Americans had not been able to keep in touch with it. The French were there one minute, gone the next. So far as the Americans could make out, they were looting their way through Germany. Whenever they got a truck load or two of loot, they'd send it back home to France. Now they were lusting to get into Berchtesgaden, only an hour's drive or so up into the mountains to the south. But the French were stopped by a blown bridge over a deep ravine. They did not have bridging equipment, and some SS fanatics were holding out on the south side of the ravine, using automatic weapons and mortars.

Easy Company and the remainder of 2nd Battalion began mixing in with the French, everyone standing around watching a long-range, useless exchange of fire while waiting for the 101st engineers to come forward. Winters asked Sink if he wanted to send a platoon to outflank the German roadblock. "No," Sink replied, "I don't want anybody to get hurt."

That was sensible. There was no point to taking casualties at this stage of the war. But there was Berchtesgaden, just on the other side of the roadblock, almost in hand. Sink changed his mind. "Take the 2nd Battalion back to the autobahn," he told Winters, "and see if you can outflank this roadblock and get to Berchtesgaden." If he succeeded, Sink wanted him to reserve the famous Berchtesgaden Hof for regimental HQ.

Winters led the battalion on a backtrack to the autobahn, then east to Bad Reichenhall, where another blown bridge stopped the Americans for the night. The following morning, May 5, with Easy Company leading the way, the 2nd Battalion drove unopposed to Berchtesgaden and took the town without having to fire a shot.

It was like a fairy-tale land. The snow-capped mountains, the dark green woods, the tinkling icy creeks, the gingerbread houses, the quaint and colorful dress of the natives, provided a delight for the eye. The food, liquor, accommodations, and large number of Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht service women, plus camp followers of various types, provided a delight for the body.

Accommodations were the first order of business. Winters and Lieutenant Welsh went to the Berchtesgaden Hof. As they walked in the front door of the hotel, they could see the backs of the service personnel disappear around the corner. They went into the main dining room, where they saw a waiter putting together a large set of silverware in a four-foot-long velvet-lined case.

There was no need for orders. Winters and Welsh simply walked toward the man, who took off. The Americans split the silverware between them. Forty-five years later, both men were still using the Berchtesgaden Hof's silverware in their homes.

After getting what he most wanted out of the place, Winters then put a double guard on the hotel "to stop further looting," as he put it—with a straight face—in one of our interviews. But, he berated himself, "What a fool I was not to open the place to the 2nd Battalion," because when regimental and then divisional HQ arrived, they took everything movable.

Winters picked one of the homes of Nazi officials, perched on the hillside climbing the valley out of Berchtesgaden, for his battalion HQ. He told Lieutenant Cowing, his S-4, to go to the place and tell the people they had fifteen minutes to get out. Cowing was a replacement officer who had joined up in mid-February, back in Haguenau. He had not been hardened by battle. He returned a few minutes later to tell Winters, "The people said no, they would not move out."

"Follow me," Winters declared. He went to the front door, knocked, and when a woman answered, he announced, "We are moving in. Now!" And he and his staff did just that, as the Germans disappeared somewhere.

"Did I feel guilty about this?" Winters asked himself in the interview. "Did my conscience bother me about taking over this beautiful home? No! We had been living in foxholes in Normandy, we had been in the mud at Holland, the snow in Bastogne. Just a few days earlier, we'd seen a concentration camp. These people were the reason for all this suffering. I had no sympathy for their problem, nor did I feel that I owed them an explanation."

Nor did the enlisted men have the slightest problem, physical or psychological, in taking over the SS barracks, an Alpine-style apartment house block that was the latest thing in modern design, plumbing, and interior decoration. Officers and sergeants got sumptuous homes of Nazi officials perched on the mountainsides overlooking Berchtesgaden.

Winters set up the guard around town, mainly to direct traffic and to gather up surrendering German troops to send them to P.O.W. cages in the rear. Private Heffron was thus in command at a crossroads when a convoy of thirty-one vehicles came down from the mountain. At its head was Gen. Theodor Tolsdorf, commander of the LXXXII Corps. He was quite a character, a thirty-five-year-old Prussian who had almost set the record for advancement in the Wehrmacht. He had been wounded eleven times and was known to his men as Tolsdorf the Mad because of his recklessness with their lives and his own. Of more interest to E Company men, he had been in command of the 340th Volks-grenadier Division on January 3 in the bitter fighting in the Bois Jacques and around Foy and Noville.

Tolsdorf expected to surrender with full honors, then be allowed to live in a P.O.W. camp in considerable style. His convoy was loaded with personal baggage, liquor, cigars and cigarettes, along with plenty of accompanying girlfriends. Heffron was the first American the party encountered. He stopped the convoy; Tolsdorf said he wished to surrender; Heffron summoned a nearby 2nd lieutenant; Tolsdorf sent the lieutenant off to find someone of more suitable rank; Heffron, meanwhile, seized the opportunity to liberate General Tolsdorf's Luger and briefcase. In the briefcase he found a couple of Iron Crosses and 500 pornographic photographs. He thought to himself, A kid from South Philly has a Kraut general surrender to him, that is pretty good.

Everyone was grabbing loot at a frantic pace. German soldiers were everywhere—Wehrmacht, Waffen SS, Luftwaffe, officers, noncoms, privates—looking for someone to surrender to, and Dog, Easy, and Fox Companies of the 506th were the first to get to them. From these soldiers, Webster wrote his parents on May 13, "we obtained pistols, knives, watches, furlined coats, camouflaged jump jackets. Most of the Germans take it in pretty good spirit, but once in a while we get an individual who does not want to be relieved of the excess weight of his watch. A pistol flashed in his face, however, can persuade anybody. I now have a Luger, two P-38's, a Schmeissere machine pistol, two jump smocks, one camouflaged winter jacket, several Nazi flags about three feet by two, and a watch."

The Eagle's Nest had been thoroughly worked over by the Army Air Force. The elevator to it had been put out of action. But to men who had been up and down Currahee innumerable times, the climb to the top was more a stroll than a challenge. Alton More was one of the first to get there. In the rubble, he found two of Hitler's photo albums filled with pictures of the famous politicians of Europe who had been Hitler's guests. An officer from the company demanded that More turn over the albums to him. More refused. The officer threatened to court-martial him.

More was in Malarkey's platoon. Malarkey ran to battalion HQ to see Winters. He explained the situation. Winters told his jeep driver to "take Malarkey back to his quarters and return with Private More and all his gear." When More arrived, Winters made him a driver for Battalion HQ. Thus was More able to take the albums home with him to Casper, Wyoming.

With lodging taken care of, and having looted more than they could carry or could ever hope to get home, the next thing these young Americans needed was a set of wheels. No problem: in the vehicle parks in and around town there were German army trucks, sedans, Volkswagens, and more, while scattered through town and in the garages attached to the hillside homes were luxury automobiles. Sergeant Hale got a Mercedes fire engine, complete with bell, siren, and flashing blue lights. Sergeant Talbert got one of Hitler's staff cars, with bulletproof doors and windows. Sergeant Carson got Hermann Goering's car, "the most beautiful car I have ever seen. We were like kids jumping up and down. We were Kings of the Road. We found Captain Speirs. He immediately took over the wheel and off we went, through Berchtesgaden, thru the mountain roads, thru the country with its picture-book farms.

As more brass poured into Berchtesgaden on May 7 and 8, it was more difficult for a captain to hold onto a Mercedes. Speirs got orders to turn it over to regiment. Carson and Bill Howell were hanging around the car when Speirs delivered the sad message.

Carson asked Howell if he thought those windows really were bulletproof. Howell wondered too. So they paced off ten yards from the left rear window, aimed their M-1s and fired. The window shattered into a thousand pieces. They gathered up the broken glass and walked away just as a captain from regiment came to pick up the car.

Before Talbert turned over his Mercedes, he too did some experimenting. He was able to report to Winters that the windows were bulletproof, but that if you used armor-piercing ammo, it would get the job done. Winters thanked him for his research, agreeing that one never knew when this kind of information would come in handy.

The men tried another experiment. They drained the water from the radiator of the Mercedes, to see if it could run without it. With a third luxury car, they decided that before turning it in they would see if it could survive a 30-meter crash, so they pushed it over a cliff.

So the brass got luxury automobiles without windows or water, or wrecks (Talbert's Mercedes burned out the engine trying to climb the road to the Eagle's Nest). The men ended up with trucks, motorcycles, Volkswagens, scout cars, and the like, which were good enough, and anyway the fuel came as free as the vehicle. The Americans would just fill up and drive off.

"It was a unique feeling," Winters recalled. "You can't imagine such power as we had. Whatever we wanted, we just took."

With lodging and wheels taken care of, the next thing was liquor. Every cellar held some wine, but the greatest cache of all was discovered by one of the few nondrinkers in the battalion, Major Winters. On May 6, scouting on his own, he found Goering's Officers Quarters and Club. In one room he found a dead German general, in full dress uniform, a bullet through his head, ear to ear, a pistol in his hand. He was a two-star general later identified as Kastner.

Winters wandered around, kicking open doors, when "Lord! I had never seen anything like this before." In a vaulted cellar, 15 meters by 10 meters, there were row after row of liquor racks stretching from floor to ceiling. The brand names covered the world. The later estimate was that the room held 10,000 bottles. Winters put a double guard on the officer's club entrance, and another on the cellar. And he issued an order: no more liquor, every man in the battalion was to go on the wagon for seven days.

Commenting in 1990 on this improbable order, Winters said, "Now, I am no fool. You don't expect an order like that to be carried out 100 percent, but the message was clear—keep this situation under control. I don't want a drunken brawl!"

That afternoon, Winters called Captain Nixon to him. "Nix," he said, "you sober up, and I'll show you something you have never seen before in your life."

The next morning, May 7, Nixon came to Winters, sober, and asked, "What was that you said yesterday that you were going to show me?" Winters got a jeep, and they drove to the officer's club. When Winters opened the door to the cellar, "Nixon thought that he had died and gone to heaven."

He was sure he had when Winters said, "Take what you want, then have each company and battalion HQ bring around a truck and take a truckload. You are in charge."

An alcoholic's dream come true, paradise beyond description. First choice of all that he could carry from one of the world's great collections, then a chance to let his friends have all they wanted, and the perfect excuse to celebrate, the end of the war had come, and he was still alive.

For the consequences, see the photograph of Nixon on the morning of May 8.

For the company as a whole, the celebration was grand and irresistible. Despite Winters' orders, and despite regular guard duty rotation, there was a party. There had to be: on May 7 the Germans surrendered in Reims to General Eisenhower, and word was flashed around Europe to cease fire, take away the blackout curtains, and let the light of peace shine out. News of the German surrender, Winston Churchill said, was "the signal for the greatest outburst of joy in the history of mankind." The men of Easy Company saw to it that Berchtesgaden participated in the party to the full.

Once the distribution of Goering's wine had taken place, Carson recalled that "you could hear the champagne corks going off all day long." As the celebration got noisier, Captain Speirs began to grow a bit worried that it would become excessive. Sergeant Mercier, remembered by Private O'Keefe as "our most professional soldier," got into the spirit of the day when he dressed in a full German officer's uniform, topped off with a monocle for his right eye. Someone got the bright idea to march him over to the company orderly room and turn him in at rifle point to Captain Speirs.

Someone got word to Speirs before Mercier showed up. When troopers brought Mercier up to Speirs's desk, prodding him with bayonets, Speirs did not look up. One of the troopers snapped a salute and declared, "Sir, we have captured this German officer. What should we do with him?"

"Take him out and shoot him," Speirs replied, not looking up.

"Sir," Mercier called out, "sir, please, sir, it's me, Sergeant Mercier."

"Mercier, get out of that silly uniform," Speirs ordered.

Shortly thereafter, he called the company together. He said he noted that the men who were relatively new to the company were celebrating out of proportion to their contribution to the victory. He wanted it toned down. No more shooting off of weapons for example, and especially not of German weapons, which made everyone jumpy when they went off.

But trying to stop the celebration was like trying to stop the tide. Not even Speirs could resist. Back in company HQ, he and Sergeant Carson sat in the orderly room, popping champagne bottles, throwing the empties out the French doors. Soon there was a pile of empties outside. Speirs and Carson went to the balcony for some fresh air. They looked at the bottles.

"Are you any good with that .45 pistol?" Speirs asked. Carson said he was.

"Let's see you take the neck off one of those bottles." Carson aimed, fired, and shattered a bottle. Speirs took his turn with the same results; soon they were banging away.

Sergeant Talbert came storming in, red-faced, ready to shoot the offenders of the company order. He saw Carson first. "Carson, I'll have your ass for this," he shouted. Just as he started explaining that Captain Speirs had ordered no shooting, Speirs stepped out from behind Carson, a smoking .45 in his hand.

After a few seconds of silence, Speirs spoke: "I'm sorry, Sergeant. I caused this. I forgot my own order."

Webster, Luz, and O'Keefe had meanwhile found their way to Goering's wine cellar. They were late, the other Easy men had already been there and Winters had withdrawn the guard, throwing the cellar open to anyone. As Webster, Luz, and O'Keefe drove to the site in Luz's Volkswagen, they saw a steady stream of German trucks, Volkswagens, even armored cars winding up the road to the officers' club.

The last contingent of E Company men had a wooden box with them, which they stuffed with bottles. "I was shocked to find that most of the champagne was new and mediocre," Webster remarked. "Here was no Napoleon brandy and the champagne had been bottled in the late 1930s. I was disappointed in Hitler."

What Webster failed to take into account was that Nixon had preceded him, and Nixon was a connoisseur of fine liquor, and he had picked out five truckloads for himself and the other officers long before Webster, also a self-styled connoisseur, arrived. "On this occasion," an amused Winters commented, "the Yale man [Nixon] pulled his rank on the Harvard boy."

Outside the club, Webster, Luz, and O'Keefe ran into a group of French soldiers, drinking, shouting "La guerre est finis! La guerre est finis!" shooting their machine-pistols into the sky, slapping the Americans on the back, asking for cigarettes, offering drinks.

The Americans gave away cigarettes, shook hands all around, and took off, driving back to their apartment as fast as possible. And there, Webster wrote, "began a party unequalled. Popping corks, spilling champagne, breaking bottles. Raucous laughter, ringing shouts, stuttering, lisping sentences. Have anusher glash. Here, goddammit, lemme pop that cork—ish my turn. Ishn thish wunnerful? Shugalug. Filler up. Where is Hitler? We gotta thank Hitler, the shun uwa bish. Bershteshgaden, I love you.

"And that was the end of the war."

Everyone in Europe was celebrating, victor and vanquished. First among the celebrants were the young men in uniform. They had survived, they would live, they had the best cause to celebrate.

On the morning of May 8, O'Keefe and Harry Lager went looking for eggs. They came to a farmhouse in a clearing, smoke curling up from the chimney. They kicked the door in, then ran inside with rifles ready to fire, and scared the hell out of two Italian deserters who jumped straight up and froze.

There was a bottle of champagne on a table. With one quick motion the Italian nearest it grabbed the neck of the bottle, stuck it out toward O'Keefe, whose rifle was pointed straight toward his stomach, and offered a drink, saying "Pax!"

The tension snapped. They drank to peace. The Americans left, to continue their egg hunt. They came to a lodge in the woods. "It was beautifully situated," O'Keefe wrote. "A man in his late twenties in civilian clothes was standing on a low porch at the front of the house. As we came to the steps leading up to the porch, he stepped down with a smile on his face and said, in English, 'The war is over. I have been listening to the wireless.'

"He was holding himself erect but it was noticeable that he had a bad right leg. I glanced at it; he explained, 'I was with the Afrika Korps and was shot up badly and sent home. I was a soldier.'

"He asked us to come in and have a glass of wine. We said 'no' but he said 'Wait! I'll bring it out,' and he left, to reappear with three glasses of wine. We raised them in salute, as he said, 'To the end of the war.' We raised ours, and we all drank. There was something basically soldierly and right about it."

They found some eggs, returned to their apartment, and celebrated the end of the war with scrambled eggs and Hitler's champagne.