Excerpt
April 23, 1945
Germany


Dear Louise and Chas.,
Once more it’s been a long time since I wrote to you. In fact I’m pretty sure that I haven’t written since we entered Germany. I expect you’re rather curious about that. I was too, so supposing we consider this a little report on Germany. It won’t be a nice story.

As you probably know our entrance was an abrupt one and the depth of our penetration came as a complete surprise to the Germans. Therefore a good deal of the territory we occupied was exactly as it had been before the Wehrmacht took off. This being the case I found myself in very fertile fields indeed to make a few first hand observations relative to those controversial questions about which we heard so much before the war regarding Hitler’s Reich. The first thing that strikes one is the signs and posters urging the population on to a greater war effort.

Some of them are similar to our own but the majority are much more vicious. You see posters reading, “Hate the cursed enemy!” The word “Hate” is written in very bold type. One that’s very popular goes, “Know Germany’s enemies. They don’t greet Heil Hitler!”

There are others along the same general lines. They’d be pathetically ridiculous if it weren’t for their intensity. These people seem to want to make the bitter end as bitter as they possibly can.

Some time ago I had occasion to go through a school in one of the larger towns. It had two large rooms covering both floors of a two-story building. On the most prominent spot in the rooms was hung an immense sign. It appeared to be sort of a creed for the kids to memorize. As nearly as I can remember it went something like this, “I believe there is a God in heaven but on this earth I believe only in Adolph Hitler. I thank God daily that he saw fit to bless us with Adolph Hitler.” There was more of the same sort of tripe, and on the face of it, it seems plain damn foolishness. Looking over the empty seats in the classroom, however, I remembered that there were kids in those seats, repeating those words as long ago as 1932. They aren’t kids anymore.

Another thing that strikes you immediately are the number of foreigners in the country. Suddenly you realize that here is Hitler’s slave labor that you’ve been reading about—his manpower solution. Everywhere there are Poles and Russians, Frenchmen and Yugoslavs, Belgians and Ukrainians, and assorted other nationalities. The poorest farm has its group of foreign workers—men, women, and children and as nearly as I can discover they’re rarely of the same family. Apparently it made little difference that these people had homes and family ties. At any rate there is no sign of any effort having been made to at least keep families together in all this mass movement. In many cases the living quarters supplied for them defy description. I was pretty thoroughly disgusted by all this. Then one day we ran into one of those murder camps you’ve been reading about. Let me tell you what I saw.