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during a night air raid, listening to Heinrich
Himmler as he requested me to take his offer of capitulation
to the Allies. That was the night when it becane
clear to me that the collapse of the Third Reich was
only a matter of days. Now Himmler has departed
from history and from life. He has succeeded in
outwitting justice.
A summary of my impressions after my return
indicated that the food situation in Germany at that
time could not be considered desperate. On the other
hand, an aggravation of conditions could be expected
in the autumn. Then the food situation would be
handled by the Germans themselves under a certain
amount of Allied control.
One of the things that struck me during this first
short journey in post-war Germany, six weeks after
the capitulation, was the attitude of the civilian
population toward the occupying military forces.
The Germans were strikingly amenable and all the
British and American representatives I talked with
agreed that they often were embarrassingly
submissive. Control of the German population had posed
very few problems. In the streets, the German police
and sometimes even civilians politely greeted the
Allies. It is certain that large groups of the German
people looked upon the western Allies as liberators
who would ameliorate conditions in Germany, and
wipe out all traces of the hard times they had gone
through, under the severe Nazi regime, before and
during the war. During later visits to Germany, I
felt that relations between the òccupation powers
and the German population had grown worse instead
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