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Winters set up the guard around town, mainly to direct traffic and to gather up surrendering German troops to send them to P.O.W. cages in the rear. Private Heffron was thus in command at a crossroads when a convoy of thirty-one vehicles came down from the mountain. At its head was Gen. Theodor Tolsdorf, commander of the LXXXII Corps. He was quite a character, a thirty-five-year-old Prussian who had almost set the record for advancement in the Wehrmacht. He had been wounded eleven times and was known to his men as Tolsdorf the Mad because of his recklessness with their lives and his own. Of more interest to E Company men, he had been in command of the 340th Volks-grenadier Division on January 3 in the bitter fighting in the Bois Jacques and around Foy and Noville.
Tolsdorf expected to surrender with full honors, then be allowed to live in a P.O.W. camp in considerable style. His convoy was loaded with personal baggage, liquor, cigars and cigarettes, along with plenty of accompanying girlfriends. Heffron was the first American the party encountered. He stopped the convoy; Tolsdorf said he wished to surrender; Heffron summoned a nearby 2nd lieutenant; Tolsdorf sent the lieutenant off to find someone of more suitable rank; Heffron, meanwhile, seized the opportunity to liberate General Tolsdorf's Luger and briefcase. In the briefcase he found a couple of Iron Crosses and 500 pornographic photographs. He thought to himself, A kid from South Philly has a Kraut general surrender to him, that is pretty good.
Everyone was grabbing loot at a frantic pace. German soldiers were everywhere鈥擶ehrmacht, Waffen SS, Luftwaffe, officers, noncoms, privates鈥攍ooking for someone to surrender to, and Dog, Easy, and Fox Companies of the 506th were the first to get to them. From these soldiers, Webster wrote his parents on May 13, "we obtained pistols, knives, watches, furlined coats, camouflaged jump jackets. Most of the Germans take it in pretty good spirit, but once in a while we get an individual who does not want to be relieved of the excess weight of his watch. A pistol flashed in his face, however, can persuade anybody. I now have a Luger, two P-38's, a Schmeissere machine pistol, two jump smocks, one camouflaged winter jacket, several Nazi flags about three feet by two, and a watch."
The Eagle's Nest had been thoroughly worked over by the Army Air Force. The elevator to it had been put out of action. But to men who had been up and down Currahee innumerable times, the climb to the top was more a stroll than a challenge. Alton More was one of the first to get there. In the rubble, he found two of Hitler's photo albums filled with pictures of the famous politicians of Europe who had been Hitler's guests. An officer from the company demanded that More turn over the albums to him. More refused. The officer threatened to court-martial him.
More was in Malarkey's platoon. Malarkey ran to battalion HQ to see Winters. He explained the situation. Winters told his jeep driver to "take Malarkey back to his quarters and return with Private More and all his gear." When More arrived, Winters made him a driver for Battalion HQ. Thus was More able to take the albums home with him to Casper, Wyoming.