The Jewish-born diarist Victor Klemperer, who had spent most of the war in Dresden but was in a village (Unterberbach) to the north of Aichach (near Augsburg) in late April 1945, described how the war ended when the Americans arrived there on the 28th:
We were sitting reading in our attic in the morning. Suddenly, the already familiar artillery fire turned into explosions very close by and the sharp report of individual shots. Eva [Klemperer’s wife] also heard the whistle of a bullet – evidently, there was now fighting going on at the edge of our wood, in front of our village, our corner. We hurried downstairs. […] For quite a while we stood and sat pressed into a corner of the kitchen, which appeared safest to us. Gradually the shooting abated and our courage grew. We wanted to cross over to the Asam shelter [i.e. the shelter of the Asam family] – renewed shooting forced us to look for cover against the outside wall of the Asam shelter; not until some time had passed did we risk the final couple of steps. […] After that we sat in the shelter, sometimes I stuck my head out, but without discovering anything […] at about two o’clock we ventured home again and made ourselves a coffee. The attack rolled over our village, more exactly, it had rolled around it: only at the edge of ‘our’ strip of wood had a last, small group of soldiers offered resistance for a couple of minutes, before they too fled. The war lay behind us, even as we thought it was before us.
In the end it was rather anti-climactic – so much so that Klemperer’s wife had to remind him during the following week to include this account in his otherwise richly detailed diary.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “The Last Days of the Reich.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 137-38. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Victor Klemperer, To the Bitter End. The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942-1945 (London, 2000), pp. 547-577 (diary entry for 3 May 1945).
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