Along the roadside he [Truman] saw “a long, never-ending procession” of men, women and children, all staring straight ahead.” Ejected by the Russians, they were “carrying what they could of their belongings to nowhere in particular.
The sight of defeated Germans and their victims reminded Truman once again of his Confederate grandmother and her family after the Civil War: “Forced off the farm by Yankee laws,” they had wandered for weeks “along the hot Missouri roads until they found a safe place to stay.” Truman thought of the “millions of people who were like her in Europe now.”
Touring Berlin’s ruins, Truman smelled the stench of rotting corpses and saw what was left of the blackened Reichstag. “It is a terrible thing,” he said, “but they brought it on themselves.” He imagined what a victorious Hitler might have done to Washington, D.C. He felt “thankful” that Americans had been “spared the devastation.”
They pulled up at Hitler’s chancellery, near the underground bunker. Truman refused to go in, saying that he wouldn’t want any of “those unfortunate people” to think he was “gloating over them.” But he muttered acidly to Byrnes that he wasn’t sure the Germans had “learned anything” from the Nazis’ miserable end.
Truman returned to his villa that evening deeply depressed. He wrote Bess, “This is a hell of a place – ruined, dirty, smelly, forlorn people, bedraggled hangdog look about them. You never saw as completely ruined a city.” In his diary, he wrote that the “absolute ruin” of Berlin was “Hitler’s folly. He overreached himself by trying to take in too much territory. He had no morals and his people backed him up.”
Source:
Beschloss, Michael R. “How I Hate This Trip!” The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007. 255-56. Print.
Further Reading:
Fighting against the world banks was so evil of him.