Word: volksst
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...dazed Volksstürmer, the battle-shocked Wehrmacht regulars surrendered now in larger numbers. But the fanatics fought on. Perhaps they meant to fight from the deep basement of Hitler's chancellery, from behind the heroic statues of Prussians in the Tiergarten's Victory Avenue, from all around the 150-year-old Brandenburger Tor and its surmounting green-grey copper Quadriga of Victory. Defense Commissioner Joseph Goebbels screamed his final exhortations to stand and die, then, reportedly, fled. The Hamburg radio shrilled that Adolf Hitler himself had chosen to stay in his capital at the head...
Many more Germans preferred to give up rather than die on the western front last week. The number of captured, greatly swollen by Volksstürmer, was rapidly nearing 1,000,000 since April 1. Yet some did choose death. In Leipzig, the U.S. First Army discovered a grotesque tableau of suicide in the City Hall (see FOREIGN NEWS ). And there was a young sniper captured in Leipzig who talked himself into self-slaughter...
Doctor's Post-Mortem. Nürnberg, in whose great stadium the Nazi Party used to assemble in vain glory once a year, had been fanatically defended by Volksstürmer, remnants of the 17th SS Division, elements of 32 different Wehrmacht outfits. After five days of desperate fighting, it fell, on Hitler's 56th birthday. The town (but not the stadium) was 95% ruined. Correspondents who had followed the Allied armies across Germany all the way from Aachen said they had never seen such total destruction...
...anywhere. Then they put on six attacks against the Ninth, of which the heaviest-a thrust by 30 or 40 tanks supported by self-propelled guns-was beaten off at Boslar. The German prisoners were a mixture: good soldiers in their 205, boys of 15 and 16, railroad battalions, Volksstürmer, air force ground personnel. On the whole, they were far from first-rate troops...
Unknown Ingredient. But what of the top Nazis who cannot hide? With a compact army of young SS and Hitler Youth fanatics, they will retreat, behind a loyal rearguard cover of Volksgrenadiere and Volksstürmer, to the Alpine massif which reaches from southern Bavaria across western Austria to northern Italy. There immense stores of food and munitions are being laid down in prepared fortifications. If the retreat is a success, such an army might hold out for years...