In this article, Senior Historian Chris Anderson, who is leading our 80th Anniversary of VE Day Tour, covers the final days of the WWII in Europe. The continent lay in ruins, 20 million were dead and the world had learned the true meaning of the word Holocaust.
The Defeat of Nazi Germany in Europe
By Chris Anderson
By 1945 the defeat of Nazi Germany was not a question of if, but when. Given the stark reality of their situation, one would have thought that German resistance would have collapsed; the defeated Wehrmacht taking the detested Nazi regime with it. It did not.
Rather than spare his people from further suffering, on March 19, 1945, Adolf Hitler issued his “Directive on the Demolitions on Reich Territory,” the famous “Nero Order,” which called for the complete destruction of Germany’s infrastructure. Facing defeat, Germany’s leader was ordering his henchmen to turn their country into a wasteland. Having hitched their wagon to the regime in 1933, there were enough Germans who were willing to continue the fight. There would be no orderly surrender, only a final “Gotterdammerung (twilight of the gods).”
Following the Allied victory in the Ardennes, Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had planned to mop up pockets of German defenses West of the Rhine before sending 21st Army Group across the Rhine and into the Ruhr in late March. This would be followed by crossings of 12th Army Group further to the south.
The situation changed dramatically on March 7, 1945, when elements of the First U.S. Army’s 9th Armored Division unexpectedly seized an intact bridge over the Rhine at Remagen. Having breached this last major barrier in the west, by the end of March, General Omar Bradley ordered a hail-Mary advance that slashed into German defenses between the Rhine and to the Elbe. By April 1, Easter Sunday, elements of 1st and 9th U.S. Army linked up in Lippstadt, Germany, cutting off nearly 400,000 Wehrmacht troops in the Ruhr Pocket, the remains of the once mighty Army Group B, which had fought the Allies unremittingly since June 6, 1944.
As the Western Allies crossed the Rhine, eliminated Army Group B and drove on the Elbe, Red Army forces resumed their own attacks. By March 23, Stalin’s men had invested the important garrison town of Kustrin—“the Gate to Berlin”—and had seized bridgeheads over the Oder. What in 1942 had been an empire that stretched across Europe and reached into North Africa, was now reduced to a narrow strip of 250 miles between the Elbe and the Oder rivers.
The final battle started in the second week of April with the ferocious opening bombardment of the more than 9,000 guns of Marshal Georgi Zhukov’s’s First Belorussian Front. Following a barrage of several days, on April 16 Russian troops burst from their Oder bridgeheads toward the Seelow Heights and the last major German defensive barrier outside of Berlin.
As the inevitable end approached some Germans surrendered. Many others, however, particularly in the East, continued their obstinate resistance. Allied soldiers frequently encountered German units, which now included the old men and boys of the Volkssturm, who were determined to go down fighting. On April 21 the Red Army seized Zossen, which since 1938 had been the headquarters of the German Army high command. Just four days later they completed their encirclement of Berlin as U.S. and Russian forces finally linked the Western and Eastern fronts at Torgau.
Five days after the U.S.-Russian linkup at Torgau, on April 30, Adolf Hitler, cowering in his bunker behind the Reich’s Chancellery in Berlin, committed suicide alongside his bride of a day Eva Braun. Although fighting would continue for another week, the Third Reich was effectively dead. The final struggle for the capital of the Reich had cost the Red Army some 360,000 casualties. German losses are estimated at nearly a million, including nearly 125,000 civilians killed. Europe was in ruins and the Cold War had begun. Hitler had his Gotterdammerung.
Join Chris Anderson on the 80th Anniversary of VE Day Tour
To mark the occasion of the end of the Second World War, I am proud and excited to be leading a special 80th Anniversary of VE Day tour for SAHT, where we will have a chance to visit battlefields and sites of this final climactic campaign of the World War II as well as to have a look at some of the most important places associated with the Cold War that followed.
