Wine, song and beautiful girls as peace breaks out in birthplace of Nazism
THIS city presented today the most amazing spectacle I have seen since the Allies entered Germany. Though not many hours had passed since it was cleared of enemy troops, Munich was full of life.
Streets thronged with Bavarians wishing to be friendly — menfolk passing bottles of wine to our troops, girls smiling gaily and trying to start conversations with any group of soldiers.
On top of all this friendliness, rumours were flying of Germany’s surrender. Munich wanted to believe that the war was over and was r eady to start celebrating.
Mingling with the thousands of Munich’s citizens were over 100,000 foreign workers and about 3,000 newly liberated British war prisoners.
Groups of them linked arms and marched singing through the streets.
I have seen more Germans — they insist you call them Bavarians, not Germans — here in one day than I’ve seen in the rest of Germany.
Not even showers of rain and a bitterly cold wind could damp their gaiety. It was like a preview of a real peace celebration — but here it was happening in Germany. The biggest reminder of the war was the terrible bomb damage in the city, espe-cially in the centre. But the ruins are silent. The people of this city today were not.
Amid it all I watched a mob plundering a wine store. Out of the crowd came a German nattily dressed in greatcoat, scarf and trilby hat, a bottle of champagne under each arm. The Britons shouted, ‘Hallo, Hans,’ and he grinned, chatted a few minutes, and then walked away. ‘Friend?’ I asked. ‘Up to eight o’clock last night he was one of our guards,’ one soldier replied. Hans is one of the hundreds of Wehrmacht men here who demobilised themselves after dark last night — and went home.
The whole atmosphere here almost convinced me the rumours were true and that the war was over. I went to Hitler’s beer- cellar and found a large crowd gathered, with Germans anxious to act as guides and show me the huge wine casks beneath the main hall where wine for the Nazi leaders was matured.
Civilians were taking buck-ets to draw off the wine and the floor of the main hall was stained with wine sloppings. By noon, someone had toured the city with buckets of tar and obliterated all the Nazi slogans on wal l s and hoardings.
Local sources told me the Munich resistance movement i s known as the Bavarian Freedom Party (BFP).
They are separatists who want Bavaria freed from the rest of Germany and set up about six months ago.
‘We were only able to arrange small acts of sabotage until you came,’ said BFP member Richard Pflaum. ‘However, when the Americans were near the city we seized the City Hall and the newspaper office.’
So far, American officials do not recognise the movement, though the BFP claim they have a full list of the Nazis still hiding here and details of other Nazis. Outside the flat used as headquarters by the movement, I was nearly run down by a party of f reed Britons careering round the city in a super-Mercedes car.
A French girl worker was perched on the bonnet of the car.
From a house opposite came the blare of radio music — the first civilian music I have heard in Germany. It is diffi-cult to describe the festive air in this city.
But I really felt today that, for a Briton, this is the end of the road — the road that was marked out for us when Chamberlain, the ‘Man with the umbrella!’, as the people of Munich still call him, came here.