At the end of April 1945, American troops from the 20th Armored Division and the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions of the XV Army Corps advanced on Munich from the west and north. The Wehrmacht units stationed in the city did not have the staffing or equipment needed to defend it adequately. Even Regional Leader (Gauleiter) Paul Giesler, whose insistence on perseverance was downright fanatical, was forced to face facts and finally agreed to limit the city’s military defenses to the coffins of ‘blood witnesses’ (Blutzeugen) on Königsplatz.
However, Giesler also called on the military leaders to blow up the bridges over the Isar to make the American takeover of the city and subsequent advance towards the Alps as difficult as possible. On April 24, Military District Command VII gave the command to “prepare the bridges for permanent destruction” (Brückner, p. 185). Numerous explosive charges were attached to the Isar bridges, which were important parts of the city’s infrastructure. It was mostly police officers from the local police stations who, at great personal risk and despite opposition from the People’s Storm (Volkssturm) and remaining SS units, removed or defused these devices shortly before the American troops arrived. The only bridge damaged by explosives was the Robert Bosch bridge at the Deutsches Museum (science museum), which was relatively insignificant in terms of strategy and transportation.
On April 30, 1945, the war in Munich came to a surprisingly quick end. The advance of the U.S. Army, which began early in the morning, was preceded by artillery fire and met with astonishingly little resistance in the ‘Capital of the Movement’. The ‘Werwolf’ group and SS units had retreated. Only a handful of fanatical Hitler Youth members, ‘People’s Storm’ men and remaining SS troops put up any kind of opposition, an act that was doomed to failure. During the morning hours, the American advance on the SS barracks in Freimann triggered bloody fighting that lasted into the afternoon. Otherwise, the Americans met with little or no resistance as they continued through Pasing and Laim to the city center. The German troops remaining in Munich had left the city through its eastern suburbs in the afternoon of April 30, 1945.
The first American soldiers to reach Marienplatz and the City Hall at around 4 p.m. were members of the 42nd (Rainbow) Division. The city was officially handed over to them. The most prominent Nazis, Gauleiter Paul Giesler and Lord Mayor Karl Fiehler, had long since fled to safety.
In the days before and during the American occupation of Munich, the number of suicides by despairing supporters of the collapsed regime rose significantly. Entire families went together to their deaths. There was also a significant rise in violent crime. The German police had been disarmed; the American authorities initially reacted with comparative indifference to the criminality spawned by the lawlessness of the first few days of occupation. Looting, robbery with murder, and other property-related crimes were the order of the day.
Many of Munich’s citizens also took part in the looting of Wehrmacht depots and Nazi Party buildings. Liberated concentration camp inmates and foreign forced laborers took their revenge for the maltreatment and harassment they had suffered. The authorities recorded numerous violent deaths, which could not be investigated more closely due to the absence of a police force. Only gradually were regulatory structures re-established and measures taken to guarantee public safety.
The often violent behavior of the liberated foreigners and concentration camp inmates in those days is indelibly marked in the memories of many of Munich’s citizens and shifted the framework of reference from their own culpability and responsibility. These acts of violence at the end of the war, their experiences of aerial warfare, the destruction in the city and the many dead and wounded made it easier for the local population to see themselves as the actual victims of the Nazi regime.
Munich’s citizens reacted ambivalently to the American occupation: quite a few of them were profoundly disappointed by the downfall of the Nazi regime with which their personal fortunes were linked. Many were deeply concerned by the breakdown of any kind of law and order. Overall, however, the prevalent feeling was relief that the war had finally come to an end. Many of Munich’s citizens lined the streets and welcomed the GIs with white handkerchiefs as they marched into the city. White sheets were hung over the walls of buildings to show that the population was peaceful. Above all, the countless victims of Nazi terror, the POWs, the forced laborers, the concentration camp inmates, theJewish survivors, the victims of political persecution and others saw the Americans as liberators who would put an end to threats, fear, and the deprivation of rights.
Nevertheless, in view of their traumatic experiences of persecution, it would not be possible for most victims of the Nazi regime to transition seamlessly to any kind of ‘normality’. What hurt most was the fact that their suffering would be forced out of the public eye by the general hardship experienced by the rest of the population. It was not until much later, long after the end of the war, that society at large would deliberately begin to face up to its Nazi past.
