The “plan”—agreed to by Eisenhower—was for Montgomery to launch his grand attack at Wesel on March 24, three weeks later.
Bradley was furious, and finally got Eisenhower to approve a strike out of the Remagen bridgehead toward Frankfurt with five divisions. Meanwhile Patton cleared the west bank of the Rhine between Coblenz and Mannheim, cutting off all German forces still to the west by March 21. The Germans lost 350,000 men, the vast bulk of them captured.
On March 22, Patton’s troops crossed the Rhine almost unopposed at Oppenheim, between Mainz and Mannheim. When the news reached Hitler, he learned that only five tank destroyers were available to contest the advance of an entire American army—and they were a hundred miles away.
The American advance east of the Rhine now became a procession. Columns spread out east, south, and north. Meanwhile Montgomery had completed his elaborate preparations. He had assembled twenty-five divisions, vast quantities of ammunition and supplies, and on the night of March 23 launched his attack after a tremendous bombardment of more than 3,000 guns, followed by waves of bombers. After daybreak two airborne divisions dropped ahead.
But there were only five weak and exhausted German divisions defending the thirty miles of the river where Montgomery crossed. They offered little resistance, and Allied losses were tiny.
Even so, Montgomery refused to sanction a general advance until he had massed twenty divisions and 1,500 tanks in the bridgehead. By this time American columns were fanning out all over central and southern Germany.
Hitler sacked Rundstedt for the last time on March 10, replacing him with Kesselring, and hunted for scapegoats for the collapse of resistance. A “Flying Special Tribunal West” tried and executed eight German officers who commanded the weak forces at Remagen. But despite these and other frantic efforts by Hitler to require every soldier to stand or die, Germans everywhere knew the end was near, and withdrew or surrendered. Only a few fanatic troops, mostly SS, resisted here and there.
Hitler now turned on his own people. On March 19 he issued an order that the entire German economy was to be destroyed—industrial plants, electric-generating plants, waterworks, gas works, bridges, ships, locomotives, food, clothing stores. His aim was to produce a “desert” in the Allies’ path.
Albert Speer, Nazi armaments chief, immediately petitioned Hitler. “We have no right at this stage of the war to carry out demolitions which might affect the life of the people,” he said. But Hitler, his own fate sealed, was not interested in the continued existence of the German people.
“If the war is lost,” he told Speer, “the nation will also perish…. It will be better to destroy these things ourselves because this nation will have proved to be the weaker one.”
The scales fell from the eyes of Speer. With superhuman efforts, Speer and a number of army officers, directly disobeying Hitler’s orders at last, raced about the country to make sure the demolitions did not take place.
The end was now approaching. Montgomery’s British and Canadian armies pushed north toward Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck on the Baltic. Simpson’s U.S. 9th Army rushed past the Ruhr on the north while Hodges’s 1st Army drove past it on the south. They linked up April 1 at Lippstadt, closing 325,000 Germans of Walther Model’s Army Group B in the Ruhr pocket. The army group held out till April 18, when it surrendered. Model was not among the prisoners: he had shot himself.
During this period Hitler more and more lost contact with what was happening. While the western Allies were sweeping almost unopposed over Germany, Hitler focused his attention on recapturing the fortress of Küstrin on the Oder, complaining that the attacking general had not used enough ammunition in the artillery preparation. When Guderian angrily pointed out on March 28 that there was no more ammunition, Hitler relieved him, appointing Hans Krebs as chief of staff.
On April 12, President Roosevelt died unexpectedly, arousing wild hopes in Hitler that a miracle like that which saved Frederick the Great from defeat in the Seven Years War would be repeated. The death of the empress of Russia ended the coalition against Frederick.
The day before FDR died, the spearhead of 9th Army reached the Elbe River near Magdeburg in the heart of Germany. Berlin was only sixty miles away, and the road lay open.
Over the violent objections of Churchill and the British military chiefs, who wanted to beat the Russians to Berlin, Eisenhower halted the western Allies on the Elbe.
Berlin “was not the logical or the most desirable objective for the forces of the western Allies,” Eisenhower wrote.
The Russians commenced their drive from the Oder shortly after the Americans reached the Elbe. This meant, to Eisenhower, that they would reach Berlin before the British and Americans could do so. Eisenhower and his staff were obsessed with Nazi reports that they would establish a “National Redoubt” in the mountains of southern Germany and conduct guerrilla warfare for years. Eisenhower also feared the Nazis were setting up an “underground army” of “Werewolves,” composed of loyal followers of Hitler, to commit murder and carry out acts of terrorism.
The National Redoubt and the Werewolves existed only in the propaganda blasts of Joseph Goebbels. But Eisenhower and his staff fell for the ploy, and he directed the American armies into the southern mountains as fast as possible. American troops reached Nuremberg on April 16, Munich on April 30, and met troops of the U.S. 5th Army from Italy at the Brenner Pass between Austria and Italy on May 3. German resistance had collapsed in Italy and commanders had signed a surrender on April 29.
The Russians burst out of their bridgeheads on the Oder on April 16, and reached the suburbs of Berlin a week later. While several hundred thousand Soviet troops invested the city, others swept around it north and south, and on April 25 patrols of the 58th Guards Division met patrols of the U.S. 69th Division on the Elbe at Torgau, seventy-five miles southwest of Berlin. Adolf Hitler was cut off in Berlin. The death throes of the Third Reich had come.
Hitler had planned to leave Berlin on April 20, his fifty-sixth birthday, for Obersalzberg in the Bavarian Alps. Most officials had already moved south, along with the Fuehrer’s personal staff. But Hitler stayed, convinced that the Russians would suffer their greatest defeat trying to capture the German capital. But Himmler, Göring, and Ribbentrop got out. Hitler called for a counterattack that never came—and in fact existed only in the mind of the dictator. Hitler had fallen into a world of delusion.
On April 22, Jodl and Keitel reported that the Russians had broken through on the north and their tanks were now inside the city limits. Hitler completely lost control. This was the end, he shrieked. There was nothing but treason, lies, cowardice! All was over. He would stay in Berlin, and personally take over defense of the city.
Three defensive rings encircled the city, the last a small circle around the Chancellery and other main government buildings in the center. Forces included 9th Army, elements of 3rd and 4th Panzer Armies, and Volkssturm units of overage untrained men and Hitler Youth boys. Red Army forces occupied outlying areas of Berlin on April 21, and completely surrounded the city on April 25. The battle was largely a huge moppingup operation. Russians destroyed pockets of resistance with artillery fire, or bypassed them until supplies ran out.
Only in the center around the government buildings was resistance fierce. The Russians abandoned efforts to overrun the center with tanks when German infantry were able to get close enough in the heavily built-up area to destroy armor with antitank weapons. The Russians also found it difficult to deploy artillery in the close confines of the city. They used cannons where they could, but relied mainly on mortars and rockets. Small combat teams cleared the center city block by block—300 blocks in all, every house or building taken by storm. It was a slow process, but thorough. Especially heavy fighting raged in the subway and underground communications facilities.
Before the fighting started, on April 15, Hitler’s mistress for twelve years, Eva Braun, thirty-five years old, arrived in Berlin to join him in a wedding and her ce
remonial death. Eva Braun was a simple woman with no intellectual pretensions, but she was determined to share Hitler’s end.
So also was Goebbels and his wife. They and their six children (the oldest twelve years old) moved into the Chancellery bunker.
Hitler sorted out his papers, and sent one of his adjutants up to the garden to burn those he wanted destroyed. He ordered Keitel and Jodl to go south and take direct command of the remaining armed forces.
Meantime Göring arrived at Obersalzberg, and on April 23 sent Hitler a telegram proposing that he take over “total leadership of the Reich.” Hitler responded that Göring had committed high treason. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s sinister private secretary, got off a radiogram to SS headquarters in Berchtesgaden, and had Göring arrested. On April 28 Hitler received word through a BBC broadcast from London that Himmler was negotiating through Sweden to surrender all armies in the west to Eisenhower.
A few minutes later Hitler received word that the Russians were nearing the Potsdamerplatz, only a few hundred yards away, and would likely storm the Chancellery on the morning of April 30.
Hitler directed General Robert Ritter von Greim, whom he had named as Luftwaffe chief, along with Hanna Reitsch, a famous woman test pilot and admirer of Hitler, to leave the bunker, rally the Luftwaffe for a last attack on the Russians, and arrest Himmler as a traitor. Meanwhile he had Himmler’s chief liaison officer, Hermann Fegelein, taken up to the Chancellery garden and shot.
Hitler also married Eva Braun, and drew up his last will and testament. These two documents reveal that Hitler had learned nothing from his errors and from the disasters he had brought upon the world. He denied he had wanted war in 1939, and claimed it had been brought on by foreign leaders who were “of Jewish origin or worked for Jewish interests.” He placed the “sole responsibility” for all the deaths on the Jews.
Hitler held that honor required “a district or town” to be held “unto death,” thus showing he had learned nothing from the disasters he himself had brought on at Stalingrad and other places he ordered defended to the last.
He expelled Göring and Himmler from the Nazi party and their offices, and appointed Admiral Karl Dönitz as president of the Reich and supreme commander, enjoining him to resist “international Jewry.”
The time was now 4 A.M. on Sunday, April 29, 1945. Hitler called in Goebbels and others in the bunker to witness his signatures. He then drew up his will, handing over to his relatives any property he might possess, and adding: “My wife and I choose to die in order to escape the shame of overthrow or capitulation. It is our wish that our bodies be burned immediately.”
Hitler now went to bed, exhausted. Above ground Russian artillery shattered buildings at point-blank range only yards from the Chancellery. A pall of smoke and dust hung over the city.
In the afternoon, news came in that Italian partisans had shot Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, near Lake Como and that their bodies had been strung up by their heels on lampposts in Milan. Soon thereafter, Hitler poisoned his favorite Alsatian dog, Blondi, and gave his two remaining women secretaries capsules of poison to take if they wished when the Russians broke in. About 2:30 A.M. on April 30 Hitler said good-bye in the dining area to twenty persons of the bunker staff, mostly women.
A bizarre event now took place. Tension had been building to such a height that several persons went into the canteen and began to dance. The party got so noisy that word came from the Fuehrer’s quarters asking for quiet. But the partygoers, at last released from Hitler’s control, frolicked all through the night.
At noon on April 30 word reached the bunker that the Russians were at the eastern end of the Tiergarten and had broken into the Potsdamerplatz. They were just a block away. Hitler’s chauffeur, on orders from below, delivered 180 liters of gasoline to the Chancellery garden. Hitler fetched his bride, Eva, and they made their final good-byes to Goebbels and a few others.
Hitler and Eva retired to their rooms. Goebbels, Bormann, and a few others waited in the passageway. In a few moments they heard a revolver shot. They waited for a second shot, but none came. They entered the Fuehrer’s quarters. Adolf Hitler’s body sprawled on the sofa, dripping blood. He had shot himself in the mouth. Eva Braun lay beside him. She had taken cyanide poison, and had not used a pistol. It was 3:30 P.M. on Monday, April 30, 1945—twelve years and three months since Hitler had become chancellor.
As Russian shells screamed and exploded in the immediate environs, their bodies were brought to the garden above, and Adolf and Eva Braun Hitler were consumed in a funeral pyre.
The Third Reich survived for seven days.
Early on the evening of May 1, Goebbels and his wife ordered a physician to give their children lethal injections. That done, they mounted the stairs to the garden. There, at their request, an SS orderly shot them both in the back of the head. SS men poured gasoline on their bodies and set them on fire, but the cremation was incomplete, and the Russians found the charred remains the next day.
Around 9 P.M. on May 1, about 500 survivors of Hitler’s headquarters, mostly SS men, tried to get away, walking along the subway tracks from the station under the Wilhelmplatz, opposite the Chancellery, to the Friedrichstrasse railway station, then crossing the Spree River and slipping through the Russian lines to the north. A good many got through, but not Martin Bormann. He was either killed or took poison to avoid capture.
On March 4 the German high command surrendered to Montgomery all forces in northwest Germany, Denmark, and Holland. The next day Kesselring’s Army Group G, comprising the armies north of the Alps, capitulated.
On May 5, Admiral Hans von Friedeburg, now navy commander, arrived at Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims, France, to negotiate a surrender. General Jodl came the next day, hoping to draw out proceedings long enough for hundreds of thousands of German troops and refugees to move west far enough to surrender to the western Allies instead of the Russians.
But Eisenhower would brook no delay, and at 2:41 A.M. on May 7, Friedeburg and Jodl signed Germany’s unconditional surrender, effective at midnight May 8, 1945.
Himmler, captured by the British, bit down on a cyanide capsule and died. Nineteen of the worst Nazis were convicted at Nuremberg of war crimes. Seven drew prison terms, the remainder were sentenced to hang, including Ribbentrop, Keitel, Jodl, and Göring, though Göring cheated the hangman by two hours. Someone had slipped a poison vial into his cell, and he was dead when the guards came for him.
Germans were evicted from all the lands east of the Oder and from the Sudetenland. Germany lay in rubble with no government and scarcely any economy. Hitler’s dreams of world dominance and Lebensraum had collapsed. Only the generosity of their former enemies in providing food and fuel kept the German population alive that summer and bitter winter of 1945–1946.
But the most terrible, costly war in history had ended. The world had finally rid itself of Hitler, Nazism, and the Third Reich.
Illustrations
Adolf Hitler (left) confers with Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and General Alfred Jodl. Keitel was chief of staff of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), or armed forces supreme command, while Jodl was OKW chief of operations. Keitel was a toady to Hitler, but Jodl gave Hitler limited advice, though he never dared clash with the Fuehrer. (Topham/ The Image Works)
Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke (center), chief of the British Imperial General Staff, with Lieutenant Generals Laurence Carr (left) and Sir G. le Q. Martel. (Topham/The Image Works)
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (left) and Adolf Hitler in a motorcade in Berlin. (Topham/ The Image Works)
Hermann Göring, chief of the German Luftwaffe, or air force, and a crony of Hitler. (Topham/The Image Works)
British General Sir Harold Alexander, Allied commander in Tunisia and Italy (in front seat), with American Lieutenant General Mark Clark, 5th Army commander (in back seat, left), and Major General John Coulter. (Topham/The Image Works)
General Franz Halder, chief of sta
ff of the German army since 1938, persisted in pointing out the dangers of dividing German forces between Stalingrad and the Caucasus. Hitler paid no attention and removed him on September 15, 1942. (AP/Wide World Photo)
Grand Admiral Erich Raeder (left), chief of the German navy, leaves a vessel after an inspection in December 1939. Raeder tried repeatedly to convince Hitler to commit enough German forces to seize Egypt, the Suez Canal, and the Middle East, but Hitler refused and continued with his fixation on destroying the Soviet Union by a direct attack. Hitler removed Raeder early in 1943. (AP/Wide World Photo)
Field Marshal Erich von Manstein conceived the plan that defeated France in six weeks in 1940 and carried out withdrawals that saved the southern wing of the German army in Russia early in 1943 after Hitler’s disastrous decision to sacrifice the 6th Army at Stalingrad. (AP/Wide World Photo)
British soldiers form a human chain to wade through the surf during the evacuation of Dunkirk, France, in June 1940. The British mobilized every vessel they could find, from private yachts to warships, to rescue 338,000 beleaguered British and French troops, cut off by the German thrust through the Ardennes to the English Channel. (AP/Wide World Photo)
General Heinz Guderian in his command vehicle. Guderian was father of the German panzer, or armored, divisions; he led the breakout through the Ardennes to the English Channel in May 1940 and directed the main panzer thrust at Moscow in the fall of 1941. (Topham/The Image Works)
The major German commanders in Africa in 1941 (from left): Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, German chief in the Mediterranean; Major General Stefan Froehlich, Luftwaffe commander in Africa; Lieutenant General Alfred Gause, Rommel’s chief of staff; General Erwin Rommel, field commander; and Lieutenant General Ludwig Cruewell, chief of Africa Corps. (Topham/ The Image Works)
How Hitler Could Have Won World War II Page 33
