The guns in Europe ceased firing and the bombs ceased dropping at midnight on May 8-9, 1945, and a strange but welcome silence settled over the Continent for the first time since September 1, 1939. In the intervening five years, eight months and seven days millions of men and women had been slaughtered on a hundred battlefields and in a thousand bombed towns, and millions more done to death in the Nazi gas chambers or on the edge of the S.S. Einsatzgruppen（党卫军特别行动队的）pits in Russia and Poland ---- as the result of Adolf Hitler’s lust for German conquest. A greater part of most of Europe’s ancient cities lay in ruins, and from their rubble, as the weather warmed, there was the stench of the countless unburied dead.No more would the streets of Germany echo to the jackboot of the goose-stepping storm troopers or the lusty yells of the brown-shirted masses or the shouts of the Fuehrer （元首）blaring from the loudspeakers.After twelve years, four months and eight days, an Age of Darkness to all but a multitude of Germans and now ending in a bleak night for them too, the Thousand-Year Reich had come to an end. It had raised, as we have seen, this great notion and this resourceful but so easily misled people to heights of power and conquest they had never before experienced and now it had dissolved with a suddenness and a completeness that had few, if any, parallels in history.In 1918, after the last defeat, the Kaiser had fled, the monarchy had tumbled, but the other traditional institutions supporting the State had remained, a government chosen by the people had continued to function, as did the nucleus of a German Army and General Staff. But in the spring of 1945 the Third Reich simply ceased to exist. There was no longer any German authority on any level. The millions of soldiers, airmen and sailors were prisoners of war in their own land. The millions of civilians were governed, down to the villages, by the conquering enemy troops, on whom they depended not only for law and order but throughout that summer and bitter winter of 1945 for food and fuel to keep them alive. Such was the state to which the follies of Adolf Hitler ---- and their won folly in following him so blindly and with so much enthusiasm ---- had brought them, though I found little bitterness toward him when I returned to Germany that fall.The people were there, and the land ---- the first dazed and bleeding and hungry, and, when winter came shivering in their rags in the hovels which the bombings had made of their homes; the second a vast wasteland of rubble. The German people had not been destroyed, as Hitler, who had tried to destroy so many other peoples and, in the end, when the war was lost, themselves, had wished.But the Third Reich had passed into history.2．The ground there was covered with a mist of blue bells, and nearly a score of crabapple trees were in full bloom. He threw himself down on the grass. The change from the buttercup glory and oak-goldened glamour of the fields to this ethereal beauty under the gray tor filled him with a sort of wonder; nothing the same, save the sound of running water and the songs of the cuckoos. He lay there a long time, watching the sunlight wheel till the crab-trees threw shadows over the bluebells, his only companions a few wild bees. He was not quite sane, thinking of that morning’s kiss, and of tonight under the apple tree. In such a spot as this, fauns and dryads surely lived; nymphs, white as the crab-apple blossom, retired within those trees; fauns, brown as the dead bracken, with pointed ears, lay in wait for them. The cuckoos were still calling when he woke, there was the sound of running water; but the sun had couched behind the tor, the hillside was cool, and some rabbits had come out. ‘Tonight!’ he thought. Just as from the earth everything was pushing up, unfolding under the soft insistent fingers of an unseen hand, so were his heart and senses being pushed, unfolded. He got up and broke off a spray from a crab-apple tree. The buds were beautiful, rose pink, wild, and fresh; and so, too, the opening flowers, white, and wild, and touching. He put the spray into his coat. And all the rush of the spring within him escaped in a triumphant sigh. But the rabbits scurried away.3．Julius Streicher（尤利乌斯·施特莱彻）, the Jew-baiter of Nuremberg（纽伦堡）, was there. This sadist and pornographer, whom I had once seen striding through the streets of the old town brandishing a whip, seemed to have wilted. A bald, decrepit-looking old man, he sat perspiring profusely, glaring at the judges and convincing himself --- so a guard later told me --- that they were all Jews. There was Fritz Sauckel（弗里茨·沙克尔）, the boss of slave labor in the Third Reich, his narrow little slit eyes giving him a porcine appearance. He seemed nervous, swaying to and fro. Nest to him was Boldur von Schirach（巴尔杜·冯·席腊赫）, the first Hitler Youth Leader and later Gauleiter of Vienna, more American by blood than German and looking like a contrite college boy who has been kicked out of school for some folly. There was Walther Funk, the shifty-eyed nonentity who had succeeded Schacht（沙赫特）. And there was Dr. Schacht himself, who had spent the last months of the Third Reich as a prisoner of his once revered Fuehrer in a concentration camp, fearing execution any day, and who now bristled with indignation that the Allies should try him as a war criminal. Franz von Papen（弗朗兹•冯•巴本）, more responsible than any other individual in Germany for Hitler’s coming to power, had been rounded up and made a defendant. He seemed much aged, but the look of the old fox, who had escaped from so many tight fixes, was still imprinted on his wizened face.Together Again(from )When Sharon Galbraith was dating Fred Inns in high school back in 1965, she remembers being head over heels in love with him. He recalls falling in love at first sight.But Galbraith's mother — with some input from the family pastor — put an end to the young love affair. She decided that her 16-year-old daughter was far too young to be serious with a boy, and insisted they stop seeing each other. Inns, who was 18, reluctantly honored the request, a decision that he would later painfully regret."She was it. She was my girl right from the start," Inns said on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. "What attracted me I guess my heart."Galbraith said she felt the same about Inns from the very start. "He made my heart happy, too," Galbraith said. "He was just a wonderful guy. He had good character, and I just fell in love with him," she said.But Inns tried to put his feelings aside when Galbraith's mother ordered the young couple to end their relationship. Inns and Galbraith reluctantly allowed their relationship to fizzle out, and after graduating from Newport Harbor High School in Costa Mesa, Calif., Inns was drafted into the Army.Now, 38 years later, after two marriages that ended and six children between them, Galbraith, 54, and Inns, 56, are not just back together. They are husband and wife.It was a long road, though. After Inns was drafted into the Army during Vietnam, he still wrote to Galbraith, and his feelings were unchanged."I carried a torch for her4 and I carried her picture as I traveled," Inns said. "I didn't know how she felt about me."But then Inns received a letter from one of his friends back home, claiming that he was dating Galbraith. Though he found out much later that it was not true, Inns believed it, and felt crushed. He decided to let his "girl" go ahead and be happy with someone else.Galbraith eventually moved on and married another man and raised two children. She divorced in 1986. Each time she returned to her childhood home, her thoughts went back to Inns."It seemed like every time I would come back for a vacation, I alwayswas drawn to go by the old house where we used to live," Galbraith said. "Ialways asked my mom if she heard any news about him."Her mother told her she didn't know what happened to Inns either. But they assumed he had been scooped up by someone else.After Inns' stint in the Army, he married and had four children. He remained with his first wife for 30 years. But despite having a large family, he did think of Galbraith at times. In 1995, he read an update about her in a classmates book, but it said she was married and he didn't think it was appropriate to call another man's wife.Then last year, Galbraith found out that Inns' brother was still a deacon at the old church they used to go to. After church one Sunday, she spoke to the brother, and to Inns' mother, and handed them her phone number.Like a nervous schoolgirl, she waited for 10 days and heard nothing. It turned out that Inns' brother, the deacon, waited a week to pass on the message, and when he did, Inns' heart leapt with excitement, but each time he called, he kept getting Galbraith's answering machine.When he finally got in touch with Galbraith, he met her at a coffee shop. It didn't take long for the old couple to get comfortable again. After coffee, the two headed to the beach, where they sat for hours talking.The rest was history. Inns proposed marriage to Galbraith in March, and they got married on Sunday in Newport Beach, Calif.Inns and Galbraith say it's hard to believe they got a second chance at love with one another after so many years."It felt wonderful, like something we should have done a long time ago," Inns said.。