The railway car, resting on a siding under the shadow of a Balkan mountain on whose crest anti-aircraft units kept constant vigil, was set as usual for Adolf Hitler's morning conference with his advisers. Assembled in the car were all the biggest of the bigs: Göoring, Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Brauchitsch, Raeder, Himmler, Hess (see cut). They were gathered together to congratulate Adolf Hitler on his 52nd birthday.
The celebration, said the official news agency D.N.B., was one of "soldierly simplicity," including a brass band, a review of honor troops, toasts in champagne, a wooden platform for speechmaking, an international broadcast, armfuls of flowers, and certain other super-soldierly amenities. Each of the Nazi bosses drank a tasteful toast to the birthday man. Keitel: "Big and gigantic successes. . . ." Goring: "You, my Führer. . . ." Hess: "God protect our Führer."
Just what deity Rudolf Hess, whose job it is to protect his Führer, referred to was not specified. It could scarcely have been the God of the Orthodox Eastern Church, which was next day to celebrate its Easter, symbolic of rebirth, expressing faith in life, not an occasion of death.* It was probably not one of the deities once thought to be resident on Mt. Olympus, on whose summit German troops had planted the swastika just a few hours earlier—for the Gods of Olympus were fundamental to the ancient civilization which had invented democracy, the very thing Adolf Hitler had set out on his wars to extirpate.
Adolf Hitler, with soldierly simplicity, accepted the good wishes of his good friends, stared for a moment at the maps of slaughter spread out on the car's table, asked for the latest military reports, and retired to peruse them. They were almost universally favorable to his cause.
The Yugoslavs were out of the war. They had capitulated after just twelve days of resistance. The Axis deathblows had been delivered by German forces which crushed the Third Yugoslav Army at Kachanik Pass, and by Italians who poured down the Adriatic Coast.
In Greece the Allied lines had been repeatedly pushed back. The Germans believed the heaviest battles of the campaign were over. At some points Adolf Hitler's infantry troops had attacked in oldfashioned, 1918-style, suicidal mass, but at a price. According to Greek accounts "Adolf Hitler's Own" SS (Elite Guard), magnificent hand-picked lads of 19 and 20, bore the brunt of the slaughter.