traditional institutions supporting the State had remained,a government chosen by the people had continued to function, as did the nucleus of a German Army and a General Staff. But in the spring of 1945the Third Reich simply ceased to exist. There was no longer any German authority on any level. The millions of soldiers, airmen and sailors wereprisoners of war in their own land.The millions of civilians were governed,down to the villages, by the conquering enemy troops, on whom they dependednot only for law and order but throughout that summer and bitterwinter of 1945for food and fuel to keep themalive. Such was the stateto which the follies of Adolf Hitler—and their own folly in following him so blindly and with so much enthusiasm—had brought them, though I found little bitterness toward him when I returned to Germany that fall. The people werethere, and the land—the first dazed and bleeding and hungry, and, when winter came, shivering in their rags in the hovels which the bombings had made of their homes; the second a vast wasteland of rubble. The German people had not beendestroyed, as Hitler, who had tried to destroy so many other peoples and, in the end, when the war was lost, themselves, had wished. But the Third Reich had passed into history. * “For all writers of history,” Speer told Trevor-Roper, “Eva Braun is going to be a disappointment,” to which the historian adds: “—and for readers of history too.” (Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, p. 92.) * Who these relatives were Hitler did not say, but from what he told his secretaries he had in mindhis sister, Paula, and his mother-in-law. * Trevor-Roper, in The Last Days of Hitler, has given a graphic account of their adventures. But for an indiscretion of Heinz Lorenz, the farewell messages of Hitler and Goebbels might never havebecome known. Major Johannmeier eventually buried his copy of the documents in the garden of his home at Iserlohn in Westphalia. Zander hid his copy in a trunk which he left in the Bavarian village of Tegernsee. Changing his name and assuming a disguise, he attemptedto begin a new life under the name of Wilhelm Paustin. But Lorenz, a journalist by profession, was too garrulous to keep his secret very well and a chance indiscretion led to the discovery of his copy and to the exposure of the other two messengers. * Colonel Below destroyed the message when he learned of Hitler’s death while he was still making his way toward the Allied Western armies. He has reconstructed it from memory. See Trevor-Roper, op. cit., pp. 194– 95. * The children and their ageswere: Hela, 12; Hilda, 11; Helmut, 9; Holde, 7; Hedda, 5; Heide, 3. * The bones werenever found, and this gaverise to rumors after the war that Hitler had survived. But the separate interrogation of several eyewitnesses by British and American intelligence officers leaves no doubt about the matter. Kempka has given a plausible explanation as to why the charred bones werenever found. “The traces werewiped out,” he told his interrogators, “by the uninterrupted Russian artillery fire.” * Not Marshal Zhukov, as mostaccounts havehad it. † May I was the traditional Labor Day in Europe.