Word: germanically
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What had happened in San Francisco was that British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had told his colleagues about a new German peace feeler. His words had leaked to the British press, and U.S. Senator Tom Connally of Texas had confirmed them to the Associated Press...
...German peace feeler was a desperate maneuver by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, the police and the concentration camps, who had escaped from Berlin to the north German port of Lübeck. There he told a diplomat from neutral Sweden that Germany was willing to surrender to the Americans and British. At worst, Himmler thought, this would enable Germany to throw all its troops against the Soviets; at best, the Western Allies would join the German defense. Himmler seems even to have cherished the illusion that the Allies would support him, the lord of the Holocaust...
Bormann decided to attempt a breakout. Up on the street, he spotted a German tank and started to follow it. A Soviet shell scored a direct hit on the tank, and Bormann was never seen again...
Admiral Doenitz went on the radio to declare that "the military struggle continues [against] the spreading of Bolshevism." But German soldiers were now surrendering by the tens of thousands. Two days after Hitler's suicide, all German forces in Italy gave up. On May 4 all Wehrmacht troops in northwestern Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands surrendered to the British. On May 5 and 6 Doenitz sent Admiral Hans von Friedeburg and General Alfred Jodl to negotiate complete surrender to Eisenhower. The Germans' only goal now was to yield as much territory and as many troops as possible to the Western...
Even in Germany there were a few among all the defeated, among all the homeless and injured, all the guilty and the frightened, who felt that joy. "I remember the sky was clear and the heavens blue, and we felt liberated," says German Author Walter Kempowski, who was then 16. "I spent May 8 drinking champagne with my mother and grandfather on the balcony. My mother, who was in the Bekennende Kirche [an anti-Nazi Protestant splinter group], said, 'It was we who won the war, the church and the powers of goodness...