Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Berlin had surrendered to the troops of the First Ukrainian and First White Russian Armies at 3:00 p.m. the previous day, 10:00 a.m. EWT. The surrender, coming at the end of a twelve-day battle for the capital, took place within the Tiergarten, between Victory Avenue and the Brandenburg Gate, to Marshals Ivan Konev and G. K. Zhukov. By the previous night, 100,000 German soldiers had been taken prisoner as they orderly filed through the Brandenburg Gate to surrender arms.

White flags were observed flying everywhere within the city.

Berlin had been occupied three times previously, in 1757 by the Austrians, in 1760 by the Russians, and in 1806 by Napoleon, the latter following his defeat of the Germans at Jena.

The report finally surfaced, from Herr Doktor Goebbels's chief lieutenant, Dr. Hans Fritsche, that Hitler and Goebbels had committed suicide at the Reichs-Chancellery. But the bodies were not yet found. Soviet commentator Nikolai Tikhonov stated that Hitler was not in Berlin but would be found if still alive.

Along with Goebbels and Hitler, Dr. Fritsche reported, General Hans Krebs, chief of the German General Staff, had also committed suicide.

Supreme Allied Headquarters approved the release of a report which stated that Heinrich Himmler had met eight days earlier in Luebeck with Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, posing as a potential internuncio with the Allies, to discuss his peace tender and reported that Hitler was so ill that he would not live another two days. A German general named Schillenburg contended at the meeting that Hitler had suffered a brain hemorrhage—the cause of death of FDR on April 12.

Propaganda stations still operating for the Germans at Goerlitz, Hamburg, Linz, and Prague were provided a statement by the High Command that Hitler had died leading his troops valiantly against the Bolsheviks and ordered it published, along with the suppression of any contrary accounts. They insisted that the enemy countries would take advantage of the Fuehrer's death to put forth false reports that he had died in some manner involving less derring-do than suicide or stroke, not realizing "what a world-wise statesman Adolf Hitler" had been.

A private detective agency in New York opined that if Hitler were still alive, then he would find safest asylum within the United States in some large city, where his papers would not be routinely checked as in most other countries.

Admiral Doenitz and his new Foreign Minister, Count Ludwig Schwerin Von Krosigk, were said to be in Kiel, with the British Second Army just 35 miles distant. The new Fuehrer was reported to have met with Josef Terboven, Nazi Commissioner of Norway, and Dr. Werner Best, German Minister to Denmark, to confer re last stands in those countries.

A report by correspondent Robert Sturdivant, however, stated that expectations were running high, based on a report from a "responsible diplomat", that Denmark and Norway might capitulate to terms of surrender sometime this date. A Norwegian refugee reported that the Germans appeared to be giving up their positions at Halden in Norway, southeast of Oslo, near the Swedish border, that columns of trucks and busses bearing German soldiers had left the town the previous day. The Wehrmacht was said also to be dissolving quickly within Denmark as local commanders disbanded their troops in the face of conflicting orders.

According to a Swedish radio report, the British were expected to enter Denmark during the evening hours. It also indicated that battle had erupted between SS troops and troops of the regular German Army at Aarhus in Denmark.

The German Ninth Army to the southeast of Berlin had been completely vanquished as well, with 60,000 Germans killed and 120,000 captured.

Russian forces had also overrun Rostock and Warnemuende on the Baltic.

The British Second Army, under the command of Lt. General Miles Dempsey, had captured, with little resistance, the key port city of Hamburg, home to the Blohm and Voss shipyards and the Deutsche Werke submarine manufacturer. Its oil refinery had produced up to 30,000 tons per month to run the Wehrmacht.

Before Hamburg radio, final voice box for the Abwehr in the city, went off the air, it stated that Prague had become a "hospital city" and that Hamburg was an "open city", the first German city so designated. It then declared that Hamburg had surrendered and that any armed resistance would be crushed by the British. It directed all traffic to cease on the streets at noon as the British took control. It was the last German radio station to broadcast under the aegis of the Nazis.

According to Moscow, all German resistance east of Kiel had also collapsed, cutting off Denmark and Norway. The Russians and British had linked along a 60-mile front from the Baltic at Wismar to Wittenberge on the Elbe, northwest of Berlin, overtaking all German resistance on the Mecklenburg plain. Wittenburg, Doberan, Neubukow, Warin, and Barth, the latter being the site of a prisoner-of-war camp for American fliers, had each been captured.

The Free Czechoslovak Radio broadcast assertions that Patriot forces had risen against the Germans in Czechoslovakia to such a degree that German rule was perishing.

Archduke Albrech Von Hapsburg, Hitler's handpicked successor in Hungary to Admiral Nicholas Horthy, was said to have sought asylum in Switzerland and been denied entry. He was supposedly accompanied by former Iraqi Prime Minister Rashid Ali.

All fighting in Italy west of the Isonzo River and in southern and eastern Austria to Salzburg, that region under the control of German Army Group C, commanded by General Heinrich Von Vietinghoff-Scheel, had completely ceased with the surrender of his one million troops the day before, effective at noon. More than 230,000 enemy prisoners had been captured by the point of surrender.

Fighting was still ongoing, however, to the east of the Isonzo, in Trieste, where the Yugoslav Partisans continued to meet resistance, and in the Isonzo River town of Gorizia, 20 miles to the northwest.

In Barcelona, former Vichy head Pierre Laval, already tried in absentia, convicted for treason and sentenced to death in France, was in custody at the Barcelona fortress prison, but still being attended with lavish meals supplied by the Ritz Hotel, where he ordinarily had a suite at his disposal. He would have enjoyed the suite on this occasion as well, but for the intervention and objection of the U.S. State Department.

He would not, however, enjoy the Ritz again.

Representative John Dingell of Michigan, after meeting with President Truman, assured his colleagues in the House that the President had firmly informed, as Drew Pearson had reported the day before, Foreign Commissar Molotov that the United States expected the Russians to live up to their commitment made at Yalta to have a representative government in Poland.

At San Francisco, the smaller nations of the conference appeared at odds with the Big Four plan enunciated at Dumbarton Oaks with regard to having a Security Council responsible for implementing force when necessary to repel or prevent aggression. The smaller nations preferred a regional plan, whereby the various nations in each region would form blocs to determine whether such action should be undertaken within the area of its purview. The United States favored a hybrid plan, with a Security Council fitted into the concept of regional organizations, such as the Pan-American Union.

Secretary of State Stettinius announced that he intended to remain at the conference until the work was completed on at least the skeletal framework for the organization, which he hoped would be finished within three weeks, and urged all other foreign ministers to do likewise.

On the editorial page, "The Fires of Berlin" discusses the Reichstag fire of twelve years earlier, laid off on a Dutch boy, Marinius van der Lubbe, who was then beheaded by the Nazis as their first scapegoat. And the fire had portended the holocaust which had since beset Germany during the war and had led now to its complete ruin.

"Climax in Italy" comments that, as the Gotterdammerung took place in the capital, it was not with such Wagnerian fury that the end had come in Italy. The surrender had been without the usual resistance to the last, with no suicide charges at the ramparts. It suggested likewise for the rest of German resistance in Europe.

"Remember Dachau" suggests remembrance in future days of the infamous concentration camp and its horrors when, as following the previous war, German atrocities would be shrugged off as propaganda of the Allies. Rumors of Dachau had been about for years. But now, with the American Seventh Army having liberated it, it was exposed for the world to view.

The liberators had arrived too late to save the estimated 28,000 who died during the winter and the herded passengers of the last train, now filled with dead bodies.

Occasionally, the soldiers found a person living among the dead, reduced nearly to skeleton or brute animal by torture and starvation. There were 32,000 at liberation barely alive, other thousands already marched elsewhere.

The odor of death pervaded Dachau and nearby camps, where countless numbers had died during the war.

Thoughts had to reside in Dachau as the Allies began to deal with the manner in which Nazi Germany was to be judged at war crimes tribunals. It was the answer, continues the editorial, to any issue as to whether there ought be a "soft" peace and forgiveness, and as counter to the idea that a strong Germany was necessary to maintain peace.

"Everybody Wins" praises the appointment to the North Carolina Highway Commission of former Charlotte Mayor Ben Douglas. He would, it assured, do a fine job, as he had done for Charlotte.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Tom Connally of Texas and Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan both giving rousing speeches and receiving loud applause from their colleagues as they took their leave to go to San Francisco as the Senate delegates to the United Nations Charter Conference.

Drew Pearson offers that it was hard to understand Russia's behavior at the San Francisco Conference, that poor press relations and some inartful moves of the delegates had chilled the previously warmly received military exploits of the Red Army. The diplomats had completely alienated Latin America and, in consequence, caused stronger relations between the neighbors to the south and the United States.

Dorothy Thompson states that Germany was ending the war no longer a world power, while the United States had emerged as the most powerful military and economic force on the world stage, as the Soviet Union came out as the most obvious victor in Europe. Italy, too, was crushed as a world power by the war and France was in its weakest position since 1870 following the Franco-Prussian War. The smaller states of the West had to lean on Britain while those in the East had to rely on the Soviet Union.

Samuel Grafton remarks that the lonely stand of Molotov at the San Francisco Conference against admission of Argentina and its Fascist Government under Strongman Juan Peron was remindful of former Foreign Commissar Litvinov's lonely stand against Nazi Germany during the thirties. Mr. Grafton wonders why the Western nations did not disavow more determinedly overt fascism and why it was left to Russia to carry the load on this political front.

"Anything Goes" reprints a bit of Nicolai Lenin's Christmas, 1922 deathbed testament in which he suggests that the Communist Party rid itself of the leadership of Josef Stalin as its General Secretary, that he was "too rude" an individual for the position and would render the party unstable.

A piece by Jesse Stuart, "famed hill poet" of the Saturday Review of Literature, adorns the page, telling of his characters for his poems and novels and stories deriving from his stamping grounds of Greenup, Kentucky. Many kept quiet about being characters in his publications.

But some didn't. He had been sued for $75,000 when he wrote of a man who had been sentenced to prison, using his real name in an editorial.

In discussing the case with his lawyer, the latter proceeded to tell a vignette of his boyhood, which Mr. Stuart then put down in a story, forgetting to change his lawyer's name, sent it to his magazine, wherein it was published as the trial began.

His lawyer got a copy of the magazine and was not happy. "Damn you, Jess Stuart," he had said.

Feeling was running so high in the town over the trial that Mr. Stuart had bodyguards, each of whom had been a character in his stories. The trial was postponed for several days as a result of the tension.

His lawyer then became doubly mad when he saw a Stuart story titled "The Judge Takes a Holiday", in which he wrote about the judge trying the case. The lawyer recommended he plead insanity, as the judge's political enemies had delivered up 500 copies of the magazine to the county.

So, Mr. Stuart then wrote a novel about dogs in less than a week, allowing Jerry-B Boneyard, a mongrel who had been the hero of some of his previous works, to be the narrator. Jerry-B had sucked eggs in the fox hunters' coops and killed their chickens, so was, to them, the arch-fiend among mongrels, had been shot at with intent to kill by four of their number, "once for sucking eggs, once for killing chickens, once for visiting their lady dogs..."

But, when Mr. Stuart had come home on leave, he found a change of attitude, as many had nothing save praise for Jerry-B and his many sons and daughters. The neighbors were bathing him with sweet-smelling soaps and flicking his fleas. One had even allowed the mongrel to share his bed at home and then sit in a chair at the breakfast table next morning and eat with the family. Still another wanted to provide a new upper plate for Jerry-B because he had lost his upper teeth while digging for possums, skunks, and foxes.

So, Mr. Stuart concluded, Jerry-B's popularity admitted of the possibility that Jerry-B had created a whole new breed of dog, the Mongrel.

That's all.