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Twas among the first .LAmerican soldiers to enter Germany in September 1944.1 was a corporal, just turned 20, in an Allied Military Government unit consisting of three officers and five enlisted men, attached to the Ninth Infantry Division which had rushed across France and Belgium to be halted just inside the German border by the “Siegfried Line,” which Germans called the Westwall.
We established ourselves in Monschau, deep in the valley of the Roer River 20 miles south of Aachen, which remained in German hands for the next month. Monschau had been a cloth manufacturing center since the Middle Ages. Its halftimbered, gabled houses had made tourism a major industry in modem times, but it still had eight textile and blanket factories. One had made parachutes for the Wehrmacht.
Part of the town remained in German hands during the entire winter of 1944-45, for the Wehrmacht was firmly lodged behind “dragon’s teeth” in pillboxes on the hills to the east, blocking the American advance toward the Roer dams which provided water and electricity to Cologne and other Rhineland cities.
A Minnesotan, I was well into my second year in the U.S. Army, having been drafted at 18 before the end of a freshman year in college. I went through a rugged summer of Infantry training in Texas and was then selected for German area-and-language schooling at the University of Nebraska.
In the spring of 1944,1 found myself on a troopship crossing the Atlantic to Liverpool to be assigned to the European Civil Affairs Division (ECAD) in Manchester. It was charged with preparing for the occupation of Germany.
We spent five months in England where we continued training for occupation duty and were organized into units of varying size designated for every city, town and county in what was expected to be the American Zone of Occupation once the Nazis were defeated.
In September 1944, our unit moved across the Channel, landed on Utah Beach, raced through Paris a few days after Liberation and on into Belgium. We joined the Fifth Corps and were sent onto the Ninth Division on the front. Our job: to manage the population of the newly conquered area, Landkreise [counties] Monschau and Schleiden along the Belgian border. The prevailing belief at the time was that the war would be over in a few weeks. It lasted eight more months.
We took over the former Nazi Party Gauleitung as our headquarters and proceeded as our training had prescribed. A couple of blocks up the street,
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