Marshalling all available resources for Nazi Germany’s war effort was managed by Albert Speer, the chief architect of the NSDAP was responsible for overseeing war damage repairs caused by aerial bombing with conscripted forced labour composed of Jews and political prisoners from throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, and prisoners-of-war put to work in agriculture and industry. As the economy began becoming repurposed to gear production toward more effective production of war materials, he was later appointed Minister of Armaments and Munitions following the death of his predecessor Fritz Todt on 8 February 1942, and also the overseer of the German railway network, the water and energy departments, the office of technology, and Todt Organisation that was responsible for a wide range of civil engineering projects.
Speer the effective head of the wartime German wartime economy that was largely based on drawing on slave labour enlisted by Fritz Sauckel drawn from concentration camps and prisoners-of-war, among other labour conscripts, in his capacity as the director of the office of labour mobilisation, to which Hitler appointed him on 21 March 1942. The Todt organisation under Speer’s leadership became a slave labour service for German wartime industries. Both civilians and military personnel would make forcible contributions to the German wartime economy from when there were 1.2 million prisoners-of-war in Germany, and 1.3 million civilian workers, who composed 8.4 percent of the German workforce in the spring of 1941, which only increased as the scope of occupied territories was further extended as a result of the subsequent military invasions, and was further refined into the largest pool of slave labour in history under Speer’s administration, who would oversee the deportation and forced labour of 6.5 million civilian and military workers by June 1943. An estimated 8.4 million civilians, 4.6 million prisoners-of-war and 1.7 million concentration camp inmates would contribute to the war economy by the end of the war, along with the workforce of voluntary labourers from Germany and abroad, which included considerable numbers from Spain. The system of production committees chaired by industrialists that had been created earlier was extended under his direction. The “Central Planning” allocated raw materials and labour to firms deemed best suited to undertake a specific task.
The results of goods being produced, either directly or indirectly, for the war effort were immediate. In spite of the allied bombing offensive, the production of land vehicles increased sixfold between 1941 and 1944 and that of aircraft by 350 per cent. Industrial production reached its peak in 1944, as did allied area and precision bombing, including the RAF directing bombing attacks on targets that were later designated in March 1944 in preparation of the invasion of Normandy while allied aircraft production was increasing, along with radio direction aiding in improving accuracy, as well as being afforded the protection of long range American escort fighters. Speer contributed to protecting Germany’s industrial capacity by contriving the streamlining and dispersal of industry that had been concentrated in twenty-seven larger works arranged on production, technical and economic lines by centralising production decision making that had previously depended on various bureaucratic organs. Resources from less productive factories were dedicated to larger concerns, and production was increasingly more standardised to allow for more efficient production. Although production increased as a whole, this was at the expense of allocating resources to economic sectors other than armament production, as well as sacrificing quality control while simplifying production led to decreases in research and innovation. Available resources were protected by spreading industrial production facilities over 729 medium and small plants, with some being located in tunnels, caves or disused mines, or hidden in forests, ravines and villages that were impressively camouflaged, and therefore made allied air observation difficult, as well as spying and sabotage, which contributed to the probability of prolonging the sustained war effort, although increased allied bombing prompted further dispersal of economic production.
The air defence of the occupied Europe remained in place during 1943, although the combined air forces of the Allies against the Luftwaffe would hereby become one of attrition. Forty percent of the Luftwaffe strength was deployed on the eastern front at the beginning of 1943, which were reorganised under the leadership of General Wolfram von Richthofen, the commander of Luftwaffe Fleet Four, following the defeat at Stalingrad, which remained operating at recovered strength. 1,200 sorties per day were taking place in March 1943, from the approximately 350 in January. During this time, the Allies achieved aerial superiority in North Africa where the Afrika Korps were forced to withdraw to a narrow part of Tunisia, where the Luftwaffe lost roughly forty percent of its total strength. Another setback during this time was the Russians possessing higher numbers of aircraft, largely due to Lend-Lease aid, also achieving aerial supremacy on the eastern front during the battle of Kursk. The combined British-American bomber offensive in the west demonstrated how Luftwaffe fighter defences were increasingly ineffective, which led to bringing fighter aircraft from the eastern and Mediterranean fronts, leading to seventy percent of Luftwaffe aircraft defending Germany itself, which in practice inflicted heavy losses on Allied bomber strength, which was apparent on two American daylight bombing raids on Schweinfurt aimed at paralysing German aircraft production, without the benefit of fighter escort protection as far as the target area. The USAAF lost approximately sixty B-17 bombers in its attacking force on this long-range raid in August, and then another one hundred and forty-eight bombers attacking the same targets in October, which did not have a long-term impact on continued production that was spread over different areas.
Allied forces cooperating cohesively challenging the Axis on land, sea and in the air inflicted German losses among aircraft and aircrews proved to be higher than those of the allies, and could not be sufficiently replaced to counter allied strength. German crews were taken from training programs and deployed into combat situations as early as January 1941, and allied bombing attacks caused recurring supply shortages from February onward, in addition to disrupting the availability of information on the manufacturing rate of new aircraft. Increasingly higher numbers of recruits were also subjected to less training before being deployed with each passing month as a result of wartime exigencies. The lack of training and flight hours along with complementing aircraft losses subsequently eroding German air superiority. As demands in Russia increased, undertrained crew as well as flight instructors aggravated air crew losses and receiving sufficient training. Erratic adequate fuel supplies. Göring ordering training aircraft to be deployed to the eastern front in November 1941 also undermined training schedules to prepare sufficient numbers of air crew to be deployed on multiple fronts, in contrast to increasingly greater numbers of allied air crews who underwent higher amounts of training, prior to deployment. German losses defending the western front during 1943 proved to be higher than in the other theatres, composing a total of forty-two percent, in comparison to twenty-eight percent on the eastern front and thirty percent on the Mediterranean front.
While German forces were in retreat in northern Africa and were likewise suffering setbacks in the North Atlantic and in the air war, the fighting on the eastern front continued unabated, although it became apparent by the end of 1942 that the strategy of continual advancing failed with the defeat at Stalingrad. The Germans nevertheless maintained their front lines during the spring of 1943 in an ongoing stalemate while exploiting the resources in the occupied Soviet territories, and then recovered their fighting strength prior to launching a new offensive toward Kursk, Operation Citadel, in an attempt to encircle Russian forces in a salient in this region, in the final major German offensive on the eastern front to regain the strategic initiative from the Soviets. Undertaking Operation Barbarossa allowed respite for British forces in northern Africa to stem the German forces’ advance toward the Suez Canal when the majority of available resources were marshalled for this purpose, and the Russians halting their advance on the eastern front ultimately culminated in the Stalingrad disaster that coincided with the setback at El Alamein, and the American and British landings in northwestern Africa. These developments marked Nazi Germany losing the initiative in late 1941, and faced the combined resources of the allies that Germany was unable to overcome with its available resources. Rather than retreating to more defensible lines to maintain the occupation of Ukraine and Poland as the generals advised, Hitler persisted this would the final gamble of resources to turn the tide of the war in Germany’s favour.
Stalin had comprehensive details of the slow German build up for the offensive against the Kursk salient from a spy in Berlin known as “Lucy,” who provided daily reports of German Army High Command decisions, from other agents who had infiltrated the German administration in occupied Russia, several German soldiers who crossed the lines to surrender on the night of 4-5 who warned about the forthcoming offensive, and from the British who provided “Ultra” decrypts of German deployments. Soviet defences therefore were packed with superior amounts of armour and infantry that prepared for the advance with superior amounts of numbers. The German attack on the Kursk salient was launched on 4 July 1943 with a preliminary artillery bombardment prior to an advance on two separate norther and southern flanks, culminating in the battle of Kursk in an attempt to seal this salient and surround the underestimated Soviet defenders that involved the deployment of up to 6,000 tanks, 4,000 aircraft, and two million troops.
General Erich von Manstein, the commander of Army Group South, began Operation Citadel by ordering launching a German armoured offensive on the southern flank on 10 July at Prokhorovka, north of Belgorod, with air support from dive bombers, where the Fourth Panzer army penetrated the third ring of Soviet defences. This offensive force failed to lead a spearhead advance to breach Russian defences by 12 July by countering the pressure of an advancing Russian counteroffensive, Operation Kutuzov, which had begun on 12 July. Hitler decided to abandon Operation Citadel as a resumed offensive effort on the eastern front, claiming that some of Manstein’s armoured resources were necessary to be withdrawn due to the allied landings in Sicily, Operation Husky, on 10 July. In fact, Hitler sought to avoid a dispute with Manstein about sustaining the offensive on the southern flank of the salient on 13 July, and army units were only dispatched to Sicily from the eastern front on 23 July, and General Walther Model was withdrawing his forces in the north in the face of this separate Russian attack. In spite of the casualties that were inflicted on Soviet forces, the German forces lacked the necessary strength to overwhelm well prepared and tenacious Soviet defences until they held their positions until 17 July.
A Soviet counteroffensive, culminating in the final phase of the battle of Kursk beginning on 3 August, Operation Commander Rumiantsev, ultimately led to German forces surrendering Belgorod on 5 August, and then eventually Kharkhov on the night 22-23 August. In addition to the turning point at Kursk that would lead to a fighting retreat from the eastern front, Axis troops were unprepared for the surprise landing on Sicily, which would eventually weaken their strength on the eastern front. German intelligence was duped through Operation Mincemeat into believing that an allied invasion of Greece was forthcoming, which led to diverting German troops from the eastern front to defend Sicily. Reports of expected Soviet assaults on the Mius River and Izium, which led to withdrawing Manstein’s armoured forces from Prokhorovka on 18-19 July to reinforce the eastern front south of the Belgorod-Kharkiv sector. German forces’ disposition would hereafter shift to a defensive stance all along the eastern front, beginning with attempting to set up defences along the Dniepr river in August to contain further Soviet advances following the failure of the Kursk offensive. The Dniepr River defences were hardly fortified as Manstein had required to provide respite for four depleted armies under his control, due to Hitler’s refusal to establish rear defensive lines to prevent further withdrawals behind them, in addition lacking resources to build fortifications in Ukraine extending nine hundred kilometres in a few weeks, while resources were being marshalled to build the west wall on the Atlantic coast at the fastest possible extent. Soviet forces were thus able to deploy several expanding beachheads across the Dniepr River in October and November, culminating in a massive Russian onslaught launched on 24 December, leading to creating a two hundred kilometre long advance, and isolating German forces in the Crimea, and then further Soviet advances in Ukraine until 24 February 1944, Further Soviet offensives were launched on 5 March toward the Carpathian mountain range that divided Manstein’s forces into northern and southern elements, and Soviet forces occupied Odessa on 10 April, as well as crossed into Rumania and the Crimea during this time.
Further German setbacks were evident on other fronts. The western allied invasion of Italy and subsequent northward advance was contained at the defensive Gustav Line in December. However, the German war effort would continue disintegrating in the face of superior amounts of allied material, personnel and air power, as they were hemorrhaging manpower and supplies while economic strength was diminishing. Several battles also took place along the western front following the Normandy landings, with the separate allied forces linking their beachheads on 12 June. British and Canadian troops advanced toward Caen which initially stalled between 13 June and 1 July, prior to attacking this city on 8 July. American troops advanced toward Cherbourg as the only deep water port in the region, leading to isolating the Cotentin peninsula by 18 June and attacking the city on 22 June until it fell on 27 June. One of the initial significant developments during the breakout from the Normandy beachheads was Operation Cobra, launched on 25 July 1944, which hit German defences west of St. Lô that had been taken on 18 July. This breakout was followed by the advance through the Falaise pocket from the highly reinforced Normandy beachhead stronghold toward the transport hub of Caen, which had initially begun on 12 June, with heavy fighting continuing until 19 July. Operation Cobra led to seizing the road junction at Avranches on 30 July, from which a subsequent breakout was staged on 1 August, which led to the occupation of Rouen on 3 August, and eventually culminated in the being the collapse of the German defence of Normandy upon a British advance toward Falaise on 8 August, and then closing the Falaise gap in coordination with American forces advancing southward between 15 and 21 August 1944. Trapping remaining German forces in this Falaise cauldron from 19 August proved to be a decisive final allied breakthrough that marked the end of the Normandy campaign. A separate western allied advance in southern France on 15 August further undermined German resistance in France as a whole, and the German garrison in Paris surrendered on 25 August 1944. The westward advance culminated in ending German resistance in Antwerp over the Scheldt Estuary on 8 November.
Further setbacks were likewise faced on the eastern front, following the Soviets launching Operation Bagration on 22 June 1944, which culminated in expelling German forces that they remained holding on Soviet territory. German troops were forced to withdraw five hundred kilometres from their defensive positions east of Minsk within a month, while Army Group North was isolated in Courland. The subsequent advance toward Warsaw as an important military hub, with its direct road and railway line to Berlin, as well as supply depots, military depots and weapons factories, threatened the German defensive front on the Vistula River. The Soviet launched a direct assault on Warsaw from Lublin on 21 July, and reached the Vistula River on 26 July, and then Radzymin on 29 July, which was eventually halted by General Walther model counteroffensive from 1 to 4 August by deploying all available mobile forces composed of four tank divisions against the Soviet army flanks that forced a withdrawal. As the Germans consolidated the defence of Warsaw, the Soviets continued advancing against German defences in East Prussia and Courland, and attacked Rumania on 20 August, which then led to its invasion and entering into the Balkan Peninsula. Germany was thus led to the loss of its primary source of oil, in addition to the destruction of most its refineries, which led to increasingly critical fuel shortages.
Following the collapse of the Normandy front in August and the subsequent liberation of France, further advances in September led to separate attempts on the western front to pierce the Siegfried Line, or the so-called “West Wall” of defensive fortifications, akin to the Maginot Line as a series of bunkers and fortifications to turn certain areas into kill zones on the prewar western German border. Aachen as a gateway for the western allies to the Rhineland was attacked on 13 October, and was the first German city to surrender to American troops on 21 October 1944. Another significant ongoing battle took place in the Hürtgen Forest from September 1944, which would continue until the final German resistance was overcome from 10 to 17 February 1945. This battle, which stalled the American advance into Germany, began during roughly the same time that Field-Marshal Montgomery attempted his ambitious Operation Market Garden in Holland, with the common objective of crossing the Rhine River and then advancing into Germany’s industrial heartland in the Ruhr valley. This failed hasty attempt to overwhelm Germany from the west was countered with a final western German counteroffensive against the western allies in an attempt to secure the western front and achieve a peace settlement that would allow for further concentrations of military operations on the eastern front where Warsaw and Budapest were under threat of Soviet attacks following the progress of Operation Bagration and the Soviet offensive on Hungary that had taken place from 6 to 29 October 1944. A new provisional Fatherland Front government in Bulgaria had requested peace terms from the Soviet Union, and declared war on Germany in September, which was followed by the Red Army occupying Sofia on 18 October, and the Bulgarian army deployed with them into Yugoslavia, where the Red Army entered Belgrade on 20 October. Fighting in Yugoslavia against German troops under General Schoerner would ultimately only end on 11 May 1945. Upon having had driving German forces from Ukraine and Moldova in August 1944, the Red Army concentrated its offensive westward and southwestward in Operation Debrecen aiming to divert German resources from the western and Leningrad fronts, where Soviet armies exerted pressure as German communications and logistics were deteriorating, while Budapest was targeted as a strategic location as a major communications and transportation hub. A Soviet takeover of Budapest would lead to losing Hungary as an Axis ally, and further weaken the German defensive positions in central-eastern Europe.
German military leaders inevitably recognised how the balance was deteriorating in view of the deteriorating amounts of available personnel and material and the increasing disparity with resources that the allies possessed, with reports from August 1943demonstrating that German formations on the eastern front could not muster offensive potential without considerable reinforcements, which remained unavailable. German forces could only stage costly defensive battles following Hitler’s demands to hold ground at all costs, which became increasingly pronounced following the defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk, and overrode professional military advice that recommended strategic withdrawals or establishing flexible defences, leading to costly defensive battles during late 1943, and early 1944, while attempts to stabilise separate fronts further consumed any available resources, while partisan resistance activity further harried logistics behind the front lines.
At a time when the western allies had advanced eight hundred and fifty kilometres from Normandy eastward toward Germany, leading to the advance eventually stalling as supply lines became overextended, the final major German offensive in the west, Operation Wacht-am-Rhein, was launched through the Ardennes on 16 December 1944, spearheaded by the Sixth and Fifth panzer armies, with the sole purpose of gambling to drive a wedge between the American and British along with Commonwealth troops in a drive toward Antwerp as the main western allies’ supply base. However, fuel shortages reduced the probability of this operation’s ultimately successful outcome, while German general staff officers were concerned that this western offensive would weaken the eastern front at a critical time. Nevertheless, Hitler maintained his penchant for staging audacious gambles as well as being influenced by his atrocious personal vanity, expecting that a successful western offensive culminating in a military victory would force Roosevelt and Churchill to come to terms, in spite of their pledged wartime cooperation with Stalin, regardless of what military leaders envisaged based on more realistic expectations.
The German counteroffensive necessitated armoured units advancing through the weak American front lines along the borders of Germany and Belgium and Luxemburg, and then seizing control of a series of bridges across the Meuse River in Belgium to make a rapid breakout from the Ardennes to reach this primary allied resupply port and the accumulated resources there, before the allies could organise counterattacks against the flanks of the German advance within three days. Although this surprise attack was initially successful in gaining ground through using massive amounts of armoured resources supported by experienced infantry, tenacious American resistance in different isolated pockets, especially those trapped at the transport hub of Bastogne, stalled the advance that had created a bulge in the front line and the advance toward the Meuse bridges, and ultimately attempting to reach Bastogne.
German commando leader Stürmbannführer Otto Skorzeny attempted to make this possible by organising a unit of English-speaking German commandos disguised in American uniforms in what he termed Panzer Division 1-5-0 to operate captured American and British vehicles, and enable taking and holding these bridges by sowing disruption and confusion behind American lines by misdirecting traffic, turning road signs, killing messengers, cutting telephone lines and destroying radio stations to inhibit retreats and sending reinforcements, as well as damage vital fuel and ammunition dumps. These disguised troops caused minor damage, but also generated a great deal of confusion and disruption. Further confusion among American forces was caused by a night time parachute drop on 17 December, Operation Stoesser, aimed at securing the main road junction at Malmedy as key terrain to stall the advance of American reinforcements. Although this drop was a failure due to inadequate training, allied air superiority, unfavourable weather, and deficient preparations and instructions that led to miscarried ground attacks, the presence of German paratroopers behind the allied lines caused alarm among American troops who greatly overestimated their widely scattered and limited numbers, which led to altering the deployment of American troop units from reinforcing the front while searching for them for several days.
The German advance stalled by 22 December, as fuel shortages precluded armour from continuing toward the bridges during continued American resistance, which was further aggravated by movement slowed by narrow forest paths. This Ardennes offensive gamble on the western front ultimately failed by 26 December in the face of a determined American counteroffensive in the Bastogne area, and recovering air cover when the earlier poor weather conditions cleared, and American aircraft were enabled with threatening German armour and supply vehicles. While the land forces were deadlocked in a stalemate and German supply lines were overextended and fuel resources were dwindling, Luftwaffe resources were likewise squandered in a separate desperate last-ditch gamble on attacking allied airfields in Operation Bodenplatte on 1 January 1945, which led to irreplaceable material and personnel losses that led to the ultimate destruction of German air power effectiveness, while total allied air superiority remained enabled to attack German land forces.
At a time when Budapest was under siege, and a counterattack was staged to enable a breakout on 1 January in Operation Konrad I, and German military intelligence reporting the accumulation of Soviet forces preparing for an offensive on the eastern front, Hitler nevertheless dismissed this new threat and ordered continued attacks in the west. A final understrength German offensive into Alsace, Operation Nordwind, was launched on the night of 31 December/1 January in a desperate subsidiary action to regain the initiative in an advance two hundred kilometres south of the Ardennes offensive This became known as the “Battle of the Bulge” to provide additional support as an additional surprise attack between Switzerland and the Saarland as the final offensive in the west, which failed to meet its objectives as the American forces maintained a tenacious defence in the Ardennes. A third secondary attempt at a German advance westward took place at Strasbourg, which was contained on 13 January, with clashes taking place along a roughly hundred kilometre long front, with German offensive attempts stalling at different points on the western front.
The setbacks on the western front and six considerable Soviet army groups taking part in an offensive on 12 January overwhelmed the Vistula front, and Warsaw was overrun by 17 January. Marshal Zhukov’s vanguard units reached the Oder River seventy kilometres from Berlin, prior to securing the flanks, prior to launching a final offensive. These developments culminated in withdrawing armoured units eastward to defend against the Russian offensive on the Vistula front from 27 January. An entire German army group was trapped in East Prussia, and Russian forces established bridgeheads over the Oder River by 2 February, followed by occupying Pomerania and Silesia by the end of March, while the western allies assisted with Soviet efforts by intensifying the bombing of German cities..
German troops on the western front faced dwindling reserves of supplies, ammunition and fuel had been slated for the western offensives, and were therefore forced to take a defensive stance as a result of having expended Germany’s operational capacities on this front. Hitler came to realise that this Ardennes offensive had failed, and agreed to a retreat of German forces west of Houffalize on 8 January, which allied troops entered on 16 January, and returned to the front lines that had been in place six weeks earlier by the end of the month, with heavy losses on both sides. At a time when any front-line units that could be spared from the western front to contribute to defending Berlin were then dispatched to defend Germany’s final available oil reserves in Hungary, west of Lake Balaton. The Soviet Sixth Guards Army established a twenty kilometre bridgehead north of the Danube River on the west bank of the river Hron River from 6 January 1945, which threatened the rear of the German Sixth SS Panzer Army in the vicinity of Lake Balaton. The final major German offensive on the eastern front took place against Soviet bridgeheads in Operation South Wind from 17 to 24 February 1945, which successfully eliminated the Soviet bridgehead over the Grand River in Slovakia in preparation for Operation Spring Awakening aimed at securing the oil fields in Hungary. This offensive launched on 6 March was concentrated on the Lake Balaton region, prior to turning north toward Budapest. This next unsuccessful offensive toward the Danube was exploited by the Russians on 16 March to attack the German rear echelons and advance toward Vienna. Three separate attempts were made to relieve the siege of Budapest as it was surrounded by Soviet troops on 1 to 8 January, 10 to 13 January, and 18 to 28 January composing the Konrad I, II and III operations to break the siege of Budapest, where Axis defenders were ultimately overwhelmed on 13 February. The German military was thus beginning to be deprived of access to the key oil fields in Hungary and Austria that had supplied approximately eighty percent of its petroleum requirements in early 1945.
A final German offensive deploying nineteen divisions of troops and armour was launched against Soviet forces in Hungary, Operation Spring Awakening, on 6 March 1945, for which Hitler deployed two eastern front reserve SS divisions were deployed south as a final attempt to relieve Budapest and secure Hungarian oil fields. Armoured units from the Sixth Panzer Army were withdrawn from the western front following the failure of the Ardennes offensive in the west while the Soviet Vistula offensive threatened Berlin, and were therefore deployed to attack the Soviet flank from the south toward the Oder River, aiming to protect the last considerable natural oil reserves located in western Hungary that consisted of approximately eighty percent of Germany’s fuel requirements during this time. Advances against Soviet concentrations that were prepared for this offensive were limited as a result of intelligence reports, but were nevertheless anticipated, as the Soviet High Command had hoped for German armoured units to be drawn to the south from Poland by applying pressure on the Hungarian front, and thereby allow for an advance on the Vistula front. A Soviet counterattack followed on 16 March, and forced the German forces to withdraw by 23 March. Relentless fighting on this Hungarian front continued where German forces were destroyed as a result of lacking mobile reserves. Soviet forces then advanced toward and then reached Vienna on 4 April, with fighting there continuing until between 10 and 13 April, and ultimately cut off Germany’s final supply of petroleum resources. The Soviet military campaigns in Silesia and Pomeria were effectively over, leading to a massive redeployment of Soviet forces on the Oder-Neisse front along an approximately four hundred kilometre front prior to advancing toward Berlin.
Operation Spring Awakening failed for different reasons. The severely weakened German military after fighting on multiple fronts with depleted resources. Hitler’s attempt to reacquire the Hungarian oil fields was another desperate final attempt to regain the initiative after the earlier failed Ardennes offensive, which further overextended Germany’s war waging capabilities that were already rapidly collapsing at the beginning of 1945. This operation also diverted critical resources in the form of understrength and underequipped units away from defending Germany itself, which left other fronts vulnerable to other allied advances while being unable to concentrate sufficient forces for this offensive facing numerically superior and better equipped Soviet forces that displayed readiness to counter this threat by fortifying their defences that enabled absorbing German assaults, prior to staging counteroffensives with effective uses of artillery and air support applied with speed and intensity in the face of unrealistic German expectations, leading to a renewed rapid advance. German forces were also dealing with logistical difficulties over overextended supply lines that were vulnerable disruption for resupplying and transporting any reinforcements, as well as facing acute fuel shortages that severely limited armoured unit movements, along with the lack of spare parts and ammunition, with winter conditions further aggravating these circumstances. When Germany was consuming war materials that could not be replaced as the allies liberated the occupied territories from which they were extracted, allied bombing of synthetic oil plants caused an acute fuel shortage, and labour shortages reached critical proportions as all available manpower was drafted into the war effort.
German resistance would continue while Hitler and ideologically committed Nazis refused to contemplate surrender and face trials and imprisonment. Military personnel may have remained motivated to resist as a result of ideological indoctrination, and would only abandon hope when defeat was inevitable, and also continued fighting with an underlying fear of Soviet retaliation. In the face of insurmountable personnel shortages and material losses, the Germans made a desperate attempt to augment their forces by creating a Volkssturm (Home Guard) on 25 September 1944, with enlistments beginning from 18 October as a politically directed people’s militia to reinvigorate the population’s will to resist the allies by drawing on manpower from the ages of sixteen to sixty from those who had been deemed unfit for duty, due to their age, occupation or physical status. Hitler personally ordered all available able-bodied males between the ages of sixteen to sixty to contribute to Germany’s defences, as a paramilitary militia under the control of the local NSDAP leaders (Gauleiter) under Himmler at its head, and thereby separate from the military command. Those who had previously been exempt from military service due to age, occupation, or physical status, could theoretically constitute a total of thirteen million personnel according to allied intelligence reports, but barely had any success in actual practice as poorly-equipped civilian partisans, apart from preventing an internal collapse of the home front, and taking part in the street fighting by using the anti-tank Panzerfaust anti-tank rocket launcher with a sixty metre range, a single burst flamethrower, and a wide range of various types of small arms. This underequipped civilian militia of over five hundred thousand who were largely untrained in the space of two weeks on weeknights and Saturdays, in contrast to most males ranging between the ages of seventeen and forty-five who had been conscripted into the military, was among these results of refusing to abandon the war effort by staging what largely became a propaganda exercise in practice, as these volunteers were poorly motivated and had few successes as screening forces against allied advances, which sustained sixty to eighty percent casualties.
When the Soviet armies with increasingly experienced troops were becoming increasingly effective, the calibre of German troops was considerably undermined as a result of the high amounts of casualties, especially following the losses inflicted during Operation Bagration on the eastern front, in addition to the efforts to defend against the western allied onslaughts. Hitler issued Decree Number 58 on 18 July 1944 to formulate plans for defending Germany’s original prewar borders, to which Himmler responded by recommending creating new divisions with a renewed fighting spirit, which he named Volksgrenadier to emphasise a latent nationalistic and popular character. Forty-nine Volksgrenadier strategic reserve divisions were formed, largely from non-infantry personnel, including air force and redundant navy personnel, as a form of stop-gap personnel reorganisation to enable augmenting available firepower with understrength numbers of experienced veterans from former decimated units at their core, regardless of their overall lack of fighting experience, and were expected to function autonomously with available resources, without coordination with aviation and armour support.
Himmler ordered military police to mobilise any source of personnel, including reinstating military deserters, drafting civilians who were not engaged in occupations that were necessary for the war effort or whose work positions could be replaced by women, discharging military hospital patients earlier than necessary, and drawing on rear echelon soldiers and excess Luftwaffe ground troops, naval personnel and ethnic Germans from eastern Europe. They were hereby deployed as front-line troops with limited amounts of training led by veteran soldiers to serve as defensive formations. Grave personnel shortages were also attempted to be addressed at the end of January 1945 by closing all training academies and training and recruitment centres to deploy tens of thousands of instructors and undertrained recruits with negligible equipment, and therefore not sufficiently fit for front-line service. These largely incoherent and undertrained personnel units were nevertheless to be deployed for the final defence of the borders and contribute to taking part in the final offensives.
Hitler also clung to delusions that new advanced weapons, which were also exploited for propaganda purposes to maintain resistance. This belief particularly applied to overestimating the effects of the jet-powered V-1 and the rocket propelled V-2 (Vergeltungswaffen – revenge weapons) missiles that were developed at the military experimental testing station at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast, would shift the war in Germany’s favour by striking at allied targets while unhindered by allied air superiority. The programme was partially delayed by bombing raids on the factories and the launch pads on the night of 17/18 August 1943. These missile weapons were soon back under construction in underground facilities in Kornstein near Nordhausen in the Harz mountains within two months. The unguided V-1 carrying a tonne of explosives was first fired in large numbers from a two hundred kilometre distance against London on 15 June 1944, with continued launches until 1 September 1944. A total of 9,300 of these rocket-propelled “buzz bombs” with an 800 kilogram warhead fell on England in the following months, killing an estimated six thousand people, and were met with propeller fighters and high-speed jet-engine Gloster Meteors that took down fourteen V-1s, barrage balloons and anti-aircraft guns firing proximity fuses, as well as bombing raids against the V-1 installations, which continued firing these missiles until March 1945.
The V2 rocket that underwent development in early 1944 was an even more alarming weapon as the world’s first liquid fuelled, gyrospocically stabilised ballistic missile. It travelled faster than the speed of sound and entered the stratosphere, and therefore could not be intercepted by fighter aircraft or antiaircraft batteries. 1,115 V-2s were fired at England between 7 September 1944 and 25 April 1945, and killed 2,754 people; 2,050 others were fired at Antwerp as the allies’ primary resupply port in western Europe. The delivery of one tonne of explosives without prior warning was highly alarming. It was, however, a very inaccurate weapon, and therefore these German wonder weapons did not have the overall effect that was expected of regaining the initiative. They were also applied too late and there were too few of them to cause a decisive change in the miliary situation.
Another desperate attempt to resist the allies was Hitler demanding fanatical resistance and the mobilisation of boys and men up to the age of sixty-five. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe was unable to match the western allied air offensive since it partly resulted from a total inability to adjust to a changed situation, as it had been designed as an offensive weapon, it was further weakened by chronic fuel shortages, and accelerated fighter production was overdue. The innovative axial flow jet-engine Swallow Messerschmidt-262, the world’s first operational jet fighters, with a top speed of 568 miles per hour that was faster than the Mustang P-51. Although their deployments were repeatedly postponed due to several design modifications over several months, owing to Hitler’s interference, demanding that they were to be redesigned as light bombers, their deployments from April 1944 proved to have lethal effects as the final opportunity to challenge huge formations of allied bombers that were destroying German cities, industries, transportation hubs and fuel production. However, there were also far too few of them to change the outcome of the air war, while the Luftwaffe was fighting a losing defensive battle of attrition by July 1944 in the face of increasingly superior allied air power, while shortages of air crew, aircraft and aviation fuel also continued undermining German air power. Although they had considerable advantages over conventional allied fighter escorts, they were expensive to build, and time consuming to train new pilots, and develop new tactics.
German engineering designers engaged in creating advanced designs in the interest of developing miracle weapons, rather than economical and conventional designs that could be mass produced with available resources, in desperate attempts to withstand allied air superiority. The high maintenance yet highly manoueverable rocket-powered Messerschmidt-163 Komet rocket propelled interceptor with approximately seven minutes of flight time following launching them to disrupt bombing raids with a few seconds of firing time as the first piloted aircraft to attain speeds of over a thousand kilometres per hour during level flight, prior to a glided landing due to its inefficient high fuel consumption, was credited with shooting down sixteen allied bombers. Other advanced aircraft designs, such as the Arado-234 as the world’s first operational turbojet bomber that could not be intercepted by allied piston engine fighters during reconnaissance flights over the U.K. from August 1944 to April 1945, and the Dornier 335 Arrow as the world’s fastest piston engine aircraft, were not successfully deployed while the Luftwaffe, unlike the allies, lacked a sufficient pilot training infrastructure.
As with Japanese kamikaze suicide pilots, a Leonidas squadron was raised among seventy volunteers to ram enemy bombers to contribute to offset allied air superiority by flying a modified V-1, the Fieseler Fi-103 Reichenberg prototype, which would allow for a less than one percent chance of successfully bailing out prior to the aircraft upon enemy aircraft impact. Aerial ramming was also planned to be executed through steel reinforced rocket gliders, Bachem BA 349 Natter, which likewise remained in prototype form. These plans were shelved in favour of a Mistel Focke-Wulf 190 fighter mounted atop a pilotless Junkers 88 bomber to be released be flown into a bomber stream, and thus allowing the FW-190 pilot to not resort to a suicide attack. Some of these attacks were staged on the eastern and western fronts in 1945, which had minimal impacts as they were intercepted by allied fighters. Suicide flights nevertheless resulted in downing thirteen bombers at the cost of fifty-three German pilots and aircraft. A Sonderkommando Elbe was formed using approximately a hundred and twenty BF 109s for suicide ramming missions into allied bomber streams. These disarmed for accelerated speed aircraft along with fifty-one ME 262s jet fighters attacked a wave of over 1,300 B-17 and B-24 American bombers, escorted by 824 fighters on 7 April 1945, which destroyed twenty-one bombers, of which eight were downed by ramming, while they absorbed seventy-seven fatal casualties. Thirty-five other sorties were made by German suicide pilots were ordered to fly thirty-five different types of available aircraft from Jüterborg between 17 and 20 April, to destroy bridges over the Oder River in the face of the Soviet advance, which merely caused a minor distraction by destroying a pontoon bridge near Zellin and a railway bridge at Küstrin.
Hitler repeatedly refused to allow for the evacuation of the troops isolated on the Courland Peninsula, who withstood six Soviet offensives until the unconditional surrender. These 203,112 troops remained trapped for different reasons. The German navy lacked sufficient resources in terms of transport capacity and fuel for the ultimate evacuation of all these remaining personnel, which was partly due to the priority of evacuating military personnel and civilians from East Prussia. Moreover, this was partly due to illusory hope of using these isolated troops for a counteroffensive, and also vainly maintaining with claims made by Admiral Dönitz that the war could yet be won through waging submarine warfare, among other such “miracle weapons,” by creating and testing new U-boat designs in the Baltic Sea. The development of the sophisticated fully submersible type XXI and XXIII electric-powered U-boats was likewise too late to make a considerable impact on the war effort, partly due to allied bombing and logistical difficulties. In practice, only five or six XXIIIs were put out to sea, and two type XXI were put into action, and did not inflict any allied casualties. Furthermore, Dönitz argued to Hitler about the strategic importance of controlling the Baltic Sea in view of Finland’s withdrawal from the war that jeopardised Germany’s interests, as the Soviet Baltic fleet was in a position to threaten deliveries of ore and coal from Scandinavia, as well as the German navy’s abilities to evacuate personnel, and especially training new U-boat crews at Baltic naval bases. Nevertheless, U-boats would sink 2,603 merchant ships and 175 allied warships by the end of the war, out of the 1,162 that were built, out of which 784 were sunk. As the remaining resources of the German navy surface fleet was engaged in supporting the eastern front in the Baltic Sea while remaining U-boats could not longer make considerable contributions to the defensive war effort, commando units, known as the K-Verbânde, were created as a form of offering last-ditch resistance by using explosive speedboats, divers, experimental midget submarines, and manned torpedoes to ambush allied supply and smaller warships in the English Channel, the North Sea, and the Baltic Sea. These types of craft often faced mechanical failures and subjected personnel to the threats of rough weather conditions, in addition to allied warships and air superiority, and therefore had few successes, while divers managed to destroy underwater bridge supports on the eastern and western fronts, also with few successes and high casualties.
As the end of the war was feasible as the German defensive fronts were severely weakened, the Big Three allies began discussing the future of Europe again at the Yalta conference from 4 to 11 February 1945. The decisions made at this conference were essentially the confirmation by the Big Three of decisions that had previously been made by subordinate organizations and officials. Thus, an agreement was reached on the final occupation zones in Germany along the lines suggested by the European Advisory Commission, which was also empowered to draw up the final details. An important change was that at Churchill’s insistence Stalin agreed to allow the French a share in the occupation of Germany. Roosevelt’s main concern at Yalta was to reach an agreement on voting procedures for the United Nations Security Council, a problem which had not been resolved at the preparatory conference at Dumbarton Oaks. Stalin eventually accepted the American proposals, which included the right to veto, but in return Roosevelt had to agree to at least two Soviet republics becoming full members of the United Nations. It was further agreed that the founding conference of the United Nations should take place on 25 April 1945 in San Francisco.
While the land forces continued their advances on the western and eastern fronts, the Allied bombing campaign against German cities reached its climax. 650,000 tons of explosives fell on Germany in 1944, up from 120,000 in 1943, and the bombing reached 500,000 tons in 1945. The British and American bombers reaching targets in eastern Germany flying from bases in England and Italy caused high amounts of civilian casualties in the Dresden raid between 13 and 15 February, targeting this city as a war industry manufacturing centre and a major transport hub from which military resources and troops were directed to the eastern front. This was comparable to the Hamburg firestorm experience, and the number of dead was probably about the same. The police chief reported 25,000 dead and 35,000 missing. The last one and a half years of the war directly affected the German civilian population along with the aggravating factors of police state conditions administered by the Gestapo during a time when listening to foreign news broadcasts or making “defeatist” remarks were punishable by death, while the bombing campaign targeted both civilians as well as industrial targets. Another major threat to German civilians came from the east, where Russians took revenge while they occupied German territories in later 1944 and in 1945. Civilians being murdered, raped, plundered and deported to gulags by Russian soldiers became common occurrences, in addition to Poles and Czechs likewise wreaking revenge against hundreds of thousands of Germans.
Guderian realistically insisted that the eastern front could collapse at any moment while the Russians were prepared for their final drive to Berlin. Other Soviet advances trapped the German army group troops in East Prussia, which became destroyed in the second week of April 1945. When the Soviets captured the industrial region of Upper Silesia by the end of the month, Speer promptly informed Hitler that the German economy would collapse within a matter of weeks. Hitler ignored this warning, which he attributed to faint-heartedness and lack of true National Socialist zeal. Hence, the German population would deserve to perish in the event of the war being lost, while the existentialist nihilism of the regime was extended by maintaining the unabated holocaust operations. During this time, the German military was increasingly less tactically effective as a result of the supporting logistical apparatus continued collapsing, which had gradually begun from 1943, and then became increasingly irreversible during 1944, and 1945, and therefore became increasingly unable to supply sufficient amounts of food, fuel and ammunition as a result of the increasingly worsening industrial infrastructure and capacity as the initial factor that was aggravated by the effects of allied aerial bombing that had devastating effects on military production as new equipment production was reduced, as well as repair and maintenance. Consistent fuel shortages paralysed any remaining available vehicle mobility, and shortages of ammunition reduced the probability of sustaining defensive combat with available resources, which inevitably led to military units being forced to retreat from hostilities, including when individual commanders ignored rigid orders to maintain resistance when Hitler demanded positions to be held while forbidding retreats, at the risk of being accused of disloyalty to the regime, regardless of professional military criteria regarding taking independent action at operational and tactical levels, or were forced to hold indefensible positions with insufficient supplies, while the chain of command ceased to exist as a functional structure during the final weeks of the fighting when faulty communications led to separate units taking individual action in the face of the lack of cohesive directions from the highest echelons of military authority led to fragmentation among the lower ones.
Political authority remained superficially in place, while there were also signs of subtle dissent. Speer in his capacity as the Minister of Armaments addressed Hitler in a memorandum on 18 March 1945 in which he expressed concerns that the national economy would not be sustained for another four to eight weeks. Hitler issued his scorched earth decree on 19 March, ordering the complete destruction of all communications, manufacturing and transportation infrastructures in Germany to deny their use to the advancing allies, at the expense of the country’s postwar future and the continued living conditions of the population. Speer stalled the enactment of this scorched earth “Nero Decree,” by persuading local military and regional civilian political leaders to mitigate its effects for the purpose of allowing postwar functions, in contrast to hindering allied advances as the extent of Hitler’s authority was increasingly diminishing where the allies were in control.
The Soviet advance toward Berlin continued from the east, along with the slow western allied advance in Italy in late 1944 and early 1945, while the German forces were desperately short of fuel and munitions as the supply lines over the Brenner Pass were constantly under attack by allied aircraft. A combined British-American spring offensive led by Field-Marshal Sir Harold Alexander was launched on German forces entrenched in the Appenine mountains between 9 and 14 April, which reached the southern bank of the Po River. German military leaders in Italy therefore decided to enter into armistice negotiations in Switzerland with the head of the American Office of Strategic Services, Allen Dulles, to discuss the possibility of a separate surrender of the German forces in northern Italy, which began in earnest on 23 April 1945. Mussolini, who had been was rescued from his prison at the Hotel Campo Imperatore in the Gran Sasso raid on 12 September 1943 by a special paratroopers unit and Waffen-SS commandos led by Major Otto-Harald Mors and Otto Skorzeny, and was then set up a new regime, the Italian Social Republic (Republica Sociale Italiana, RSI), informally known as the Salò Republic because of its seat in the town of Salò, where he was settled eleven days after his rescue by the Germans. His new regime was much reduced in territory; in addition to losing the Italian lands held by the Allies and Badoglio’s government. Allied troops were advancing into northern Italy n 25 April 1945, and the collapse of the Salò Republic was imminent. Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci set out for Switzerland, intending to board an aircraft and escape to Spain. They were stopped near the village of Dongo on Lake Como by communist partisans on 27 April. They were shot in the back and hung upside down from the roof of a gas station in the Piazza Loreto in Milan on the next day, which influenced Hitler into refusing to be taken into custody or his body being publicly degraded. Other leading fascists were also captured and executed just as the fighting in Italy was going to cease. Army Group Southwest signed an armistice on 29 April, and ending the war in Italy with an unconditional surrender on 2 May.
The allied advances continued in the east and west. In the west, Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group launched a two-pronged offensive into northwestern Germany against German forces defending the western banks of the Rhine on 8 February 1945. British forces reached the Rhine near Düsseldorf on 2 March. General Omar Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group positioned to the south of Montgomery’s forces reached the Rhine at Cologne on 7 March. Hitler ordered the bridgehead across the Rhine from Wesel to Krefeld to be held at all costs in order to keep the Dortmund-Ems canal, which was vital for the transportation of coal and steel, open as far as Duisberg. The western allies thus advanced between fifty and a hundred kilometres along the entire front line between the end of February and mid-March, with the Germans having to abandon the west bank of the Rhine by 10 March. Further to the south, the American First Army reached Cologne, Germany’s third largest city, on 5 March and drove the Germans back across the Rhine there on 6 March as the final natural barrier in western Germany, while the Soviets reached the Oder River in the east. One of General Courtney Hodges’s armoured divisions found the Ludendorff railway bridge at Remagen fifty kilometres south of Cologne damaged, but still intact on 7 March, and stormed the bridge before the German pioneer troops were able to destroy it. The Americans then quickly established a bridgehead across the Rhine on the following day, where they were able to defend this bridge from ground attacks. The Germans tried desperately to destroy the bridge through bombing it, but the Americans had built three alternative bridges after it suddenly collapsed on 17 March, and thereby opened the way for further offensives into western Germany toward the south.
The American First Army’s rapidly reinforced bridgehead led to Hitler massing troops to stage counterattacks, which made other crossing points along the Rhine vulnerable to further advances. Patton’s Third Army advanced in the south through the Eifel, and then the Saarland and the Palatinate, and approached Koblenz, Worms and Bad Durkheim on 19 March. They then forced the Germans over the Rhine and south over the Mosel, before crossing the river near Oppenheim between Mainz and Mannheim on 22 March, and formed a bridgehead at Nierstein. Hitler having forbidden withdrawals following the failed Ardennes offensive led to many German divisions to being trapped west of the Rhine River. The western allies’ offensive into the Ruhr was launched on 23 March, with the Ninth U.S. Army attacking from the north, and the First U.S. Army from the south in a distant armoured drive from Marburg to Paderborn, which trapped German Army Group B in the Ruhr by 1 April, and crippled Germany’s industrial capacity to sustain the war effort. With General Patton’s Third Army having crossed over the Rhine at several points south of Koblenz, the Germans were forced to abandon their last bridgehead across the Rhine on 25 March, while fear of draconian reprisals was all that kept the Wehrmacht fighting on the western front. Meanwhile, General Eisenhower’s strategy was to surround the fiercely defended Ruhr and send the Twelfth Army Group straight across Germany in the direction of Leipzig and Dresden to face the Red Army on the Elbe, thus pressing toward central and then southern Germany. Montgomery was to push towards Hamburg and Lübeck, and thereby isolating the German forces in Denmark and Norway.
The failure of Operation Market Garden allowed time for German forces to regroup, prior to the final western Allied offensive launched in March 1945. British forces in the Twenty-first Army Group under General Montgomery staged an offensive into the Rhineland from 8 February to 25 March 1945, aimed at securing passages across the Rhine, beginning with Operation Veritable as a breakout from Nijmegen into Germany through the Reichswald forest. The British led attempt to cross the Rhine onto the eastern bank began with Operation Plunder on 23 March, and consolidated a forty kilometre long and ten-kilometre bridgehead by the end of 24 March, which composed the most successful airborne of the war with troops from the British Sixth Airborne Division and the American Seventh Airborne Division. This operation was followed by a supporting airborne assault with glider borne troops, Operation Varsity, to reinforce those advances over the Rhine River around Wesel. British and American troops then converged east of the Rhine on 25 March, leaving only isolated pockets of German resistance opposing the newly established western allied positions by the 28 March, when the German Army Group B was surrounded in the Ruhr Valley, which marked the end of any significant German resistance on the western front, and opened the way for a further westward advance toward the Elbe River.
Eisenhower hereafter weighed the offensive efforts southward, believing that Hitler would withdraw troops to Bavaria and northwestern Austria to form a so-called “Alpine Redoubt” as a concentration of last-ditch resistance, while the Soviet armies assembling along the Oder River was closer to Berlin as the political and psychological centre of Nazi Germany’s power. A western advance toward Berlin would also strain logistical resources maintain western forces in central and southern Germany. The American Sixth Army Group would advance towards Linz and crush the German forces in the south against the Alps. Eisenhower was also concerned about the possibility of the Germans forming an “Alpine Redoubt” bastion of resistance, from which a counteroffensive could be launched from the Alps in southern Bavaria and Austria. He therefore determined to cut Germany into northern and southern to prevent German military forces from converging, and therefore concentrated the western allied advance toward the south before a centre of resistance could be reinforced in the Alps. German propaganda led to the speculative belief that this would constitute a centre of final resistance led by Hitler himself, who in fact insisted on remaining in Berlin, while there was not any centralised direction for the construction of such a fortress city to be defended to the last defender, in addition to shortages of personnel, materials and machinery. Eisenhower considered that a rapid advance across Germany would make it impossible for them to move forces south. Berlin was therefore a political prestige rather than a strategic objective that was left to the Russians. Apart from combined allied military strategic planning, Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s minister of state security, had also formulated a plan to seize atomic research establishments and their resources, including German scientists, in Berlin before the western allies would arrive, while the atomic research programme at Los Alamos was well known to the Russians from their spy, Dr. Klaus Fuchs, and therefore sought to acquire the capacity to create their own atomic weaponry.
Soviet forces would advance onto Berlin with approximately 2.5 million troops, 6,250 tanks and self-propelled guns, and 7,500 combat aircraft, facing 750,000 German troops, supported by 1,519 tanks and assault guns, 9,303 guns and mortars, and 2,200 aircraft. However, land troop units were understrength and composed of inexperienced troops, while the tanks and aircraft lacked sufficient amounts of fuel. While Montgomery’s troops crossed the Rhine to the north at Wesel, two American army groups pressed eastward, while one was deployed southward toward the suspected “Alpine Redoubt.” Frankfurt-am-Main was taken at the end of March. Other American forces reached Magdeburg during this time and crossed the Elbe River and reached the Oder River, while Eisenhower left the assault on Berlin to Soviets, rather than risking approximately a hundred thousand casualties for what he considered to be a prestige target that would be within the already demarcated postwar Soviet occupation zone. Eisenhower thus proposed to Stalin on 28 March to joining the western Allies’ forces with the Soviet armies across northern Germany, and thereby cutting off the north from the possibility of prolonged German resistance led from a southern Alpine Redoubt, while declaring that Berlin was no longer a major military objective for the western allies, which would therefore be left for the Soviets, who reached Vienna on 9 April, while Königsberg that had remained besieged since late January was surrendered on the same day. The next American objective was Leipzig, where vital synthetic oil refineries and industrial installations were located, which was cut off on 18 April in the furthest eastward American advance into Germany, with the final resistance subdued on 20 April at the Battle of the Nations monument. Further American efforts to alleviate German resistance that was concentrated on the eastern front took place at Dessau, beginning on 21 April, as a key highway destination in the direction of Berlin, where the German forces surrendered on 23 April.
Leave a Reply