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THE Wehrmacht has collapsed. Berlin has fallen. Hitler and Goebbels have killed themselves in the dying capital.
The German armies — a million men — in Northern Italy and Western Austria have surrendered unconditionally. The Southern Redoubt has been torn to pieces.
And surrender in Holland, Denmark and Norway is expected at any hour.
Surrender of the shattered remnants of Berlin’s garrison was announced by Marshal Stalin. The end came at three o’clock yesterday afternoon. By nine o’clock 70,000 German prisoners had been counted.
General Helmuth Weidling, an obscure artillery commander, was left to give up the keys of Berlin to the Russians after 11 days’ fighting.
Surrender of the German armies was announced by Prime Minister Winston Churchill to a cheering House of Commons.
President Harry S. Truman, giving the news in Washington, said: ‘Only folly and chaos can now delay the general capitulation of the everywhere-defeated German armies.’
In Northern Germany the whole pocket covering the North Sea ports and Denmark is swiftly collapsing.
Germans running blindly from the Russians are being swamped.
Roads leading from t he Lübeck area towards Denmark are an inferno of destruction. British planes, s wooping on the fleeing Germans, have smashed more than 1,000 lorries.
For miles t he highways are cluttered with burning German transport, and frantic civilian refugees.
In Berlin, not only Hitler but Goebbels, t oo, have committed suicide.
Hans Fritzsche, director of Nazi radio propaganda, gave
It was suicide or face the ‘Bolshevik terror’
this dramatic news to the Russians, it was announced in Marshal Stalin’s communiqué early today. Fritzsche was taken prisoner with a number of other German military and political chiefs when Berlin was captured, said the communiqué.
It went on: ‘Fritzsche, when interrogated, stated that Hitler, Goebbels, and the newly appointed Chief of the General Staff, Infantry General Krebs, have committed suicide.’
Fritzche’s statement, if true, completely repudiates that made by Admiral Doenitz on Tuesday that Hitler had died at his post ‘fighting in defence of Berlin’.
It is presumed the Soviet authorities will do everything possible to find and identify the bodies and obtain complete proof of Fritzsche’s statement. Last news of Goebbels — who was in charge of Berlin’s defence — was on April 22, when he declared: ‘I and my colleagues are, of course, remaining in Berlin. My wife and children are also here and will remain.’
Fritzsche’s r eport s uggests t hat Goebbels carried out the promise he made when he declared in a radio speech that he would rather commit suicide t han live i n Germany under ‘ t he Bolshevik terror’.
Hans Fritzsche, 45, an ex-journalist, was Goebbels’s star broadcaster. He had two main war jobs — political controller of the Greater German wireless and head of the radio department of the Reich Propaganda Ministry.
Least distinguished of the three reported suicides is General Hans Krebs, a 47-yearold Sudeten German.
Bespectacled and fat- j owled, Krebs t ook a l eading part i n organising t he Sudetenland r ebellions which led to the Czecho-Slovak crisis and the eventual ill-fated flight to Munich by Neville Chamberlain.