On Christmas Eve 1944, somewhere in the frozen Ardennes Forest, a German soldier named Hans walked out into no-man land carrying a white flag and a bottle of schnapps. An American soldier named Robert met him halfway. They did not speak the same language, but they did not need to. They shook hands, drank from the same bottle, and shared photographs of their families.
Within an hour, men from both sides had wandered out into the clearing. They traded cigarettes for chocolate, shared stories of their childhoods, and compared the photographs of wives and children who were, in most cases, separated by the same distance in every home. The fighting that had been killing so many of them for the previous two weeks stopped, for a few hours on Christmas Eve.
A German medic treated an American soldier who had been wounded in the leg by shrapnel three days earlier. An American soldier shared his last cigarette with a German boy who was 17 years old and had been drafted two months before. A corporal from Alabama played harmonica while a private from Bavaria sang a German Christmas carol.
The ceasefire lasted approximately three hours. At approximately 10 PM, a German officer ordered his men to return to their positions. The Americans did the same. The two sides shook hands and walked back into the forest. The war resumed the next morning.
Hans survived the war and became a teacher in Munich. Robert survived and became a farmer in Alabama. They wrote to each other for the rest of their lives. Hans said in a 1972 letter, I will never forget the night I drank from the same bottle as an American. He was my enemy, but he was also my brother.