At 1130 on 25 April 1945 a jeep patrol of the U.S. 69th Infantry Division, led by First Lieutenant Albert Kotzebue, reached the Elbe near the village of Strehla in Saxony. Kotzebue and a few of his men crossed the river in a small boat and met soldiers of the Red Army on the east bank. Later that afternoon, a few miles downstream at Torgau, a second patrol under Second Lieutenant William Robertson met Soviet soldiers on the wrecked Elbe bridge. The armies that had started from Normandy and from the Volga had met in the middle of Germany.

On the Elbe

The U.S. Ninth Army under Lieutenant General William H. Simpson had crossed the Rhine with Montgomery’s 21st Army Group in March and helped encircle the Ruhr. In April its armored divisions drove east across the north German plain at a pace that astonished both sides. On the evening of 11 April the 2nd Armored Division reached the Elbe at Schönebeck, just south of Magdeburg.

On 12 April the 2nd Armored put troops across the river at Westerhüsen, but a German counterattack and heavy fire destroyed the bridgehead by 14 April. On 13 April the 83rd Infantry Division crossed further south at Barby and built a bridge that it named for President Truman, who had taken office the day before after Roosevelt’s death. The bridgehead held. Some officers of the Ninth Army believed they could be in Berlin within two days.

The halt order

Simpson asked to be allowed to go on. On 15 April Eisenhower told Bradley, and Bradley told Simpson, that the Ninth Army would stay on the Elbe. Eisenhower’s reasons, described in Chapter 1, were that Berlin lay in the future Soviet zone, that the Red Army was closer and far stronger, and that an American drive on the city might be costly and would need supplies and bridging that the Ninth Army did not yet have. He also wanted the forces free for the advance toward the Baltic and the supposed Alpine redoubt in the south.

Whether the Americans could have reached Berlin first has been argued ever since. Their advance guards on the Elbe were about 60 miles from the city; the Soviet armies on the Oder were closer and began their attack the next day. Most historians agree that the Western Allies could not have held the city against the Red Army’s wishes, and that a race for Berlin would have cost American lives for ground that had already been allocated to the Soviet zone. Some, including several of the generals involved, believed that the attempt would have strengthened the West’s hand after the war.

Further south, the U.S. First Army under Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges reached the Mulde river, a tributary of the Elbe, in mid-April and was ordered to stop there. The 69th Infantry Division took Leipzig on 18–19 April together with the 2nd Infantry Division. Its patrols then waited on the Mulde, about 20 miles west of the Elbe, with instructions not to go beyond a few miles east of the river.

The patrols

Both high commands knew that the meeting was days away. Everyone wanted to be first. On the morning of 25 April several patrols of the 69th Division’s 273rd Infantry Regiment went east from the Mulde with orders to look for the Red Army, technically beyond the limits they had been given.

Kotzebue’s patrol, from Company G, reached the Elbe near Strehla, about 15 miles upstream (south) of Torgau. At about 1130 near the village of Leckwitz they met a Soviet soldier on horseback. Kotzebue and several men crossed the river in a boat they found on the bank and met soldiers of the 175th Guards Rifle Regiment of the 58th Guards Rifle Division, part of the 5th Guards Army of Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front. That was the first contact, though it did not become the famous one.

Torgau

Robertson, a second lieutenant serving as an intelligence officer of the 1st Battalion, 273rd Infantry, had gone out that morning on a reconnaissance with three men, Frank Huff, James McDonnell and Paul Staub. Their jeep reached Torgau in the afternoon. The town was nearly deserted; its bridge across the Elbe had been blown. When the Soviets on the far bank fired at the Americans, Robertson made a makeshift American flag from a bedsheet and paint and waved it from the tower of Hartenfels Castle.

Soviet troops on the far bank stopped firing. Robertson and his men climbed out along the twisted girders of the bridge, and in the middle they met a patrol of the 173rd Guards Rifle Regiment led by Lieutenant Alexander Silvashko. Robertson then took a Soviet major and three other soldiers back in his jeep to the 69th Division’s headquarters at Wurzen to prove the meeting had happened.

The handshake

On 26 April the commander of the 69th Division, Major General Emil F. Reinhardt, met the commander of the 58th Guards Rifle Division, Major General Vladimir Rusakov, at Torgau. On 27 April the event was formally restaged for photographers and newsreel cameras, with Robertson and Silvashko clasping hands and putting their arms around each other on the broken bridge. That picture became the image of the day.

News of the link-up was held back until the evening of 27 April, when Truman, Churchill and Stalin released statements at the same hour in Washington, London and Moscow. In Moscow the event was marked with a salute of 24 salvos from 324 guns. The meeting cut the remaining German forces in two: Army Group Vistula and the north on one side, Army Group Centre and the forces in Bavaria and Austria on the other.

Gallery · 6 photographs · select to enlarge

Elbe Day in photographs

Spirit of the Elbe

For many of the soldiers, the meeting meant more than a military link-up. Joseph Polowsky, a private in Kotzebue’s patrol from Chicago, campaigned for the rest of his life for 25 April to be marked as a day of peace and was buried in Torgau at his own request in 1983. Veterans of both armies met at Torgau for anniversary reunions, even during the Cold War.

Torgau has a Soviet monument to the meeting, erected in 1945, and exhibitions on the meeting in the town. The site of Kotzebue’s crossing at Strehla–Lorenzkirch is marked with a memorial stone. In the United States, a plaque at Arlington National Cemetery commemorates the “Spirit of the Elbe”. The 69th Infantry Division, inactivated after the war, is remembered by its veterans’ association and in the collections of the National WWII Museum.

Sources and further reading

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