Berchtesgaden, May 4 1945:
Hitler's 'Eagles Nest'.

Easy Company took up residence near the town of Berchtesgaden, below Hitler's teahouse on the Kehlstein mountain. The buildings were formally constructed to house the families of Gestapo police, and as Easy were the first of the Allied forces to occupy the buildings, they began a process of 'souvenir hunting'.

With Hitler's mountain retreat still 1,200ft above, Easy Company would first settle for the Berghof, Hitler's secondary chalet and the point from which an elevator rose to the Eagle's Nest. Winters then assigned Easy Company to climb the road by the only means possible - by scaling the mountain face - to liberate the deserted retreat.

We had the task of taking the last combat command of the second world war - Berchtesgaden, Zell am See and Kaprun. This was supposedly where all the German generals and SS troopers were still hiding out, and we were the best trained to find the SS troopers in the hills around Berchtesgaden. You can never win a guerrilla war with conventional forces, and we had the right training - ambushes etc. It was very seldom that we had made a frontal attack during the war.
Clancy Lyall

Above: The view from the captured Eagles' Nest.
Left: Hitler's fortress in the Alps.
Right: Major Winters and Captain Petroff.

Austria, Zell am See -1945

On May 5 1945 Easy Company and the 2nd Battalion of the 506th were ordered to Zell am See, Austria, where responsibilities turned to disarming some 25,000 armed German soldiers and collecting all remaining contraband weapons from local civilians. Winters set up Battalion headquarters in the nearby resort town of Kaprun. For Winters the challenge at hand was to keep the Battalion from harm's way and to enforce the non-fraternisation orders. It would be in August 1945 that the atomic blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki would finally end the war, and on November 30th 1945 the 101st Airborne was officially deactivated.