The advance through northwestern Germany thereafter by penetrating the defensive Siegfried Line. Further advances into northwestern Germany took place in the face of stiff resistance against Montgomery’s British Second Army, with Osnabrück falling on 4 April, prior to advancing to Bremen and then Lauenburg. The final British offensive culminated in the battle of Hamburg as the final major battle of the conquest of western Germany, which surrendered on 3 May as the last defensive stronghold in northern Germany. Lieutenant-General William Simpson’s American Ninth Army crossed the Elbe on 15 April and halted the American advance toward Berlin, facing the remnants of the German Ninth Army under General Walther Wenck, which was ordered on 23 April to move eastward to defend Berlin. During the American forces eastward advance, a reconnaissance team made initial contact with Russian troops at Lorenzkirch on the Elbe on 25 April, which was followed by Soviet forces under both Zhukov and Konev having an officially staged meeting with Simpson’s troops at Torgau later on the same day to ensure the American forces would not advance further toward Berlin.
Soviet forces had begun attacking Berlin on 16 April, and surrounding the city by 21 April. Hitler would hereafter be unable to organise a last-ditch defence by calling on intervention by the so-called and weak Army Group Steiner that was created following the Soviet breakthrough at the Seelow Heights by 20 April, General Wenck’s Twelfth Army and General Busse’s Ninth Army. Bitter street fighting took place in Berlin, which culminated in the final Soviet assault on the Reichstag from 30 April on the same day when Hitler committed suicide rather than surrender to Soviet forces advancing through Berlin, and had his remains burned to prevent his body itself form being desecrated. Fighting in Berlin would continue until 2 May, with fighting continuing until 7 May when General Alfred Jodl, the chief of military operations, signed the unconditional surrender that scheduled the war on all fronts to end at 23:00, 8 May. This agreement was then ratified in Berlin at Stalin’s insistence in the Soviet sphere of influence on 8 May, and signed by the chief of the general staff, Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel.
A new Soviet offensive on the Vistula front in a drive toward Berlin began on 12 January, following the end of the final major offensives on the western front, which penetrated the German defensive Army Group Vistula, west of the Oder River on 16 January. The sustained German war of attrition on the eastern front remained hard-pressed, and remained unable to close the ring around Leningrad that had withstood a siege from 8 September 1941 was lifted on 26 January, following the Tsarkoye Selo-Ropsha offensive launched on 13 January, composed of simultaneous attacks toward Petergof and Strelna outside Leningrad, with separate units advancing toward Narva and Pskov that available German forces were unable to withstand. The German Army Group North was forced to withdraw to new defensive positions of partially constructed defences, known as the Panther Line, running south from Lake Dvina and Lake Pskov. However, adequate defences proved to be incomplete, with further withdrawals becoming inevitable, including a fighting retreat from the north until October 1944 where the remaining forces of Army Group North would be trapped on the Courland Peninsula following the destruction of the German Army Group Centre in June. They would would remain stranded on this bridgehead without German forces being able to stage a counteroffensive to restore overland communications with this army group. One of the dubious contributing factors for allowing these troops to remain trapped there was Admiral Dönitz having persuaded Hitler about the possibility of resuming submarine warfare with new prototypes developed in the Baltic Sea as a training ground for the German navy, and ultimately launching submarines that would travel faster underwater to attack allied convoys in the North Atlantic, while able to stay underwater almost indefinitely to avoid allied aircraft and escort vessels. Preventing supplying and reinforcing western forces could thus enable Germany to concentrate greater amounts forces on the eastern front. A further underlying concern was averting the possibility of critical iron ore imports from Sweden that could be threatened by a Russian naval advance attendant upon the loss of control over western Latvia.
During this time, the western allies were establishing their bridgehead in Normandy, from which they would advance throughout France, and eastward toward Germany. Germany faced parlous military situations on all fronts by the end of 1944, which was most acutely evident on the eastern front where Soviet forces had cut off Army Group North, and entered Belgrade in December 1944. Budapest was surrounded on 25 December 1944. As General Heinz Guderian was engaging in a fighting retreat in Poland, Soviet forces under Field-Marshal Konev reached approximately five hundred kilometres to the Oder River by 25 January 1945, roughly sixty kilometres from Berlin, which extended their logistics to their limit. Heavy resistance in East Prussia against the Second and Third Belarussian Fronts that had had begun advancing on 13 January in the north reaching the Baltic Sea on 26 January, while Field-Marshal Zhukov’s First Belarussian Front advanced in the centre on 14 January, and entered Warsaw on 17 January, leaving his flank exposed to attack from German forces massing in Pomerania and those remaining in East Prussia. The Soviet political military high command, or Stavka, decided to halt the offensive toward Berlin until the flanks were secured. As the Soviet forces advanced, German defensive strategy on the eastern front entailed holding entrenched stronghold positions, by which certain cities, including Budapest, Königsberg, Danzig and Breslau, were to be held to the end as defensive fortresses to delay advances by hindering the enemy logistics, and forcing forward units to be stopped at these obstacle destinations, and thereby allow for time to establish new rearward defensive lines, although resources were unavailable for separate in depth lines of defence, and the front line remained porous. These strongpoints inevitably became besieged when the front lines disintegrated in the face of overwhelming offensives, with further counteroffensives becoming increasingly more limited as a result of the western allied advances that diverted resources away from the western front. Berlin itself was designated as a fortress on 1 February, and ultimately became a battleground between locally available German and advancing Soviet units in house to house fighting.
Field-Marshal Konev’s First Ukrainian Front advanced in the south and reached the Neisse River on 8 February, and attacked Breslau as the main axis of highways in the Silesia region in which major industrial concerns were located. This city was surrounded by 16 February, while depriving Germany of the natural and industrial resources in Silesia, as well as holding the German defence of northern Czechoslovakia and the German interior in the direction of Dresden. Renewed attacks against strong resistance were made on 22-23 February, with the isolated German defences remaining solid, prior to another attack on 6 March, which failed to penetrate into the city that remained approximately 160 kilometres away from the new German defensive line on the Neisse, while Soviet control over Pomerania was consolidated as troops and material were accumulated for the final assault on Berlin. Breslau’s outer defences would only be overcome in a new assault on 1 April with continued German resistance that could no longer be supported by airlifting supplies.
A German offensive was launched in Pomerania on 16 February, named Operation Sonnenwende by the SS, in an attempt to reverse the Soviet advance failed to achieve any positive results due to a considerable lack of train transports for over 1,200 tanks, which became bogged down in muddy conditions as a result of a sudden thaw as well as a serious shortage of ammunition and fuel, and had to be abandoned two days later. Another effect of this offensive attempt was persuading Soviet leaders that the Pomeranian coastline was to be secured, before making a dash toward Berlin. Zhukov later breached the defensive lines to the north in Pomerania on 1 March, and reached Kolberg on the Baltic coast on 6 March. Rokossovsky’s Second Belarussian Front entered Danzig by the end of the month, and the Third Belarussian Front overwhelmed resistance in East Prussia, apart from in Königsberg where the garrisoned surrendered on 9 April. German defensive strongholds were thus left isolated as the defensive lines before Berlin were breached, with the Soviet armies having reached the banks of the Oder River, or within sixty kilometres from Berlin by the end of January.
Armed resistance against the allies remained unabated and unpredictable when it remained motivated by maintaining the existence of the German nation. Although Hitler controlled the highest levels of command through the OKW, field commanders exercised considerable autonomy in exercising initiative to make independent decisions during combat to adapt swiftly to kinetic conditions, which contributed to maintaining operational effectiveness while rapidly marshaling any locally available resources to execute specific missions as a standard feature of German army tactical doctrine. Recalcitrant German troops on the western front supported by a flotilla of minor naval assets in the English Channel staged a successful hit-and-run raid on Granville from the Channel Island of Jersey on the night of 8-9 March 1945, where a German infantry division was stationed and was left bypassed and isolated during the invasion of France. These efforts could have resulted from ideological indoctrination leading to a cult mentality about the Nazi notion of unending struggle for the survival of the nation among those who refused to surrender when the war was clearly lost. There appeared to be nothing for the nation to gain in view of the allied demand for unconditional surrender. It was believed this result could result in harsh conditions imposed in the peace settlement that could be comparable to the Versailles Treaty that caused postwar hardship, and therefore chose to fight rather than face fearful future uncertainty while inflicting high losses on allied troops, in addition to fulfilling their duties with the fatalistic sentiment of defending the homeland and fighting for its survival, regardless of whether or not they were hardline Nazis, in order to at least mitigate the negative effects of the ultimate military defeat that would ultimately lead to harsher consequences than the terms of the Treaty of Versailles had been, while they were also heavily influenced by relentless propaganda about the complete destruction of Germany and Europe as a whole, which all fuelled a sense of desperation. Surrender was therefore never an option, and therefore motivated desperately relentless resistance. Furthermore, any expressed pessimism about the ongoing war effort was ruthlessly stifled by both civilian and military police authorities and courts that had been in place from the beginning of the war. Those who risked not facing the existential threat of the unconditional surrender were also subjected to brutal repression. Moreover, civil service functions continued operating during April 1945, regardless of the increasingly worsening war damage caused by land warfare and increasingly greater amounts of aerial bombardment.
German generals who were not privy to knowledge about allied postwar planning otherwise remained determined to prevent Soviet forces from advancing into Germany, regardless of whether the Americans and British or Soviet forces would reach Berlin first, and was also a motivating factor for the German troops deployed on the eastern front. Troops could also have been influenced by the death of President Roosevelt, which Goebbels claimed would result in the fracture among the allies, and a belief that western allied troops would fight alongside German forces against the Soviet Union. There was also fear of reprisals from both the allies and also Nazi authorities accusing them of abandoning the fighting, with the additional factor of military personnel having taken an oath of allegiance to Hitler who stubbornly maintained the war effort, regardless of the precluding unconditional surrender became complete implausible.
German forces in the east could likewise have remained motivated by this ideological tenet that negated rational thought, especially among younger personnel who had lived their formative years throughout the Nazi regime, as well as fear of the repercussions of the future of Germany at the hands of the Soviet Union, especially following reporting of Soviet atrocities that were perpetrated on German civilians, in addition to facing repercussions for German atrocities on the eastern front, which were in fact expressed by Soviet troops expressing their sentiments of vengeance on the German population during their advance into East Prussia. There was also an underlying belief among many Germans that the propaganda about the advent of new technologically advanced so-called “miracle weapons” could yet radically shift the tide of the war in their favour, and therefore were willing to fight to the bitter end as parts of disciplined as well as propaganda indoctrinated cohesive units with effective leadership who had become indoctrinated throughout the early years of the regime, which became further radicalised after the failure of the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt, with earlier implicated military leaders who were replaced by hardliners.
The German military faced a highly tense situation on both the western and eastern fronts during this time. Soviet forces consolidated their positions along the Oder and Neisse rivers that ranged from Stettin on the Baltic to the Czech border as separate elements of a three-pronged thrust toward Berlin on 16 April, consisting of Zhukov’s First Belarussian Front at the centre toward Berlin, Field-Marshal Ivan Konev’s First Ukrainian Front to the south toward Potsdam and Dresden, and Field-Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s Second Belorussian Front to the north to prevent German forces from reinforcing Berlin’s defences. which fielded an estimated 140 divisions on the final assault on Berlin, constituting 2.5 million troops, 6,250 tanks and self-propelled guns, and 7,500 combat aircraft, opposing thirty-seven understrength German divisions with 766,750 troops, 9,303 artillery guns and mortars, and 1,519 tanks and assault guns, and 2,200 aircraft, while all of the vehicles were desperately short of fuel. Soviet forces resumed their advance toward Berlin that was launched on 8 April, culminating in a major offensive toward the Seelow Heights, a range of hills roughly thirty to sixty metres high as a final natural barrier before Berlin, at the centre of the advance east of the city as a crucial final defensive line on 16 April, where the German defenders of Army Group Vistula under Colonel-General Gotthard Heinrici as a defensive warfare expert were outnumbered ten to one stalled the Soviet advance was at this defensive final line of defence east of Berlin until 19 April.
Both eastern and western fronts were collapsing thereafter. While the Americans entered Hanover and were besieging Leipzig and the British were outside Celle on 16 April, and then entered Nuremberg on 20 April, and then the British moving toward Bremen until 28 April and Hamburg, followed by the Americans entering Leipzig and Magdeburg on 23 April, and then reaching outside Regensburg on 25 April, when American reconnaissance team made the first contact with Soviet troops at Lorenzkirch on the Elbe, prior to an official meeting of American troops from the Sixty-Ninth division and the leading elements of the Soviet Fifty-Eight Guards Rifle Division at Torgau on 25 April, which divided Nazi Germany into northern and southern halves. The Soviets who had started crossing the Oder and Neisse Rivers on 16 April resumed their westward drive, including Field-Marshal Zhukov’s First Belorussian Front and Marshal Konev’s First Ukrainian Front, facing German Army Group Vistula. There were Soviet breakthroughs at two different points, destroying the last German defences on the eastern front. Zhukov’s forces began the ultimate advance toward Berlin on 16 April, but were stalled at the Seelow Heights for three days, following earlier errors that worked to the German defenders’ advantage. Using searchlights intending to blind the defenders inadvertently created silhouettes of advancing Soviet soldiers. Further applying significantly greater firepower eventually led to a breakthrough, and the German defenders were forced to retreat westward toward Berlin, which was encircled by 25 April.
Konev’s forces to the south crossed the Spree River on 18 April, and then received Stalin’s approval to turn two tank armies toward Berlin, while Rokossovsky’s forces fifty miles north of Berlin approached the lower reaches of the Oder River, and then broke out of their bridgeheads on 20 April. Zhukov’s forces reached the outskirts of Berlin by 21 April. German forces on the eastern front retreated either northwestward to join General Felix Steiner’s Eleventh SS Panzer Army, while other units, including the Fifty-Sixth Panzer Corps led by General Helmuth Weidling, joined the German defensive forces that retreated into Berlin. Others were surrounded in isolated pockets, including the Ninth Army led by General Theodor Busse contained in the Halbe area to the southwest of Berlin, which was to be linked with the Twelfth Army led by General Wenck to the west of the city in order to defend it against the advancing Soviet forces, which began artillery shelling Berlin’s northeastern suburbs on 20 April. German resistance to the Soviet onslaught remained greatly inferior, with the Ninth Army being outnumbered seven to one in infantry, six to one in tanks, eleven to one in artillery, and fourteen to one in aircraft.
Both Zhukov and Konev’s forces arrived in the suburbs of Berlin on the evening of 22 April, and the city was soon surrounded, prior to costly urban fighting. Hitler denounced his armed forces for their cowardice and incompetence and at the same time clung to the belief that what the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called the “perverse coalition between plutocracy and bolshevism” would fall apart. Goebbels had interpreted the death of Roosevelt on 12 April as an encouraging sign that a rupture could emanate among the Allies as a result of their incompatible ideological differences, and deluded Hitler into believing that Roosevelt’s successor Harry S. Truman would offer a peace settlement, akin to Frederick II of Prussia who had faced defeat in the Seven Years War was able to prevail as a result of the death of his enemy, Tsarina Elizabeth of Russia. Hitler made the frenzied optimistic prediction that the “unnatural” alliance between the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain would collapse, and that Britain and the U.S. would recognise him as the champion of a common cause against the spread of communism emanating from the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the military defeat was clearly apparent to the leading military authorities of the regime, but could nevertheless have motivated German troops to maintain resistance against the unrelenting Soviet force in the face of insurmountable odds, just as the demand for unconditional surrender was propagandized as entailing to leading to a peace settlement that would lead to worse living conditions than the ongoing war effort.
Hitler ordered Steiner’s Army Detachment on 21 April to mount a southward attack toward Field-Marshal Zhukov’s right flank from the north during the continued advance toward Berlin while attempting to restore contact with the Ninth Army and the Third Panzer Army, and thereby establish a defensive line around Berlin in an unrealistic attempt to trap the Soviet forces therein, which proved to be implausible in practice due to their weakened strengths. Rather than face the impossible task of providing Hitler’s only hope of breaking the siege of Berlin, Steiner would not commit his troops to this effort with its limited probability of success. Konev’s armies that were not engaged in investing Berlin or the battles against the German Ninth and Twelfth armies advanced to the Elbe at various points other than Torgau on 24 and 25 April, along with units of the Fifth Guards Army, the Thirty-Second Guards Army Corps, the Fourth Tank Army Corps, and the First Guards Cavalry Corps. While Berlin was surrounded by Soviet forces and American and Soviet troops cut Germany into north and south at Torgau, General Wenck chose to act independently in an offensive effort to attempt to blunt the Soviet attack on Berlin by advancing toward Potsdam on 24 April, where a twenty-thousand troop garrison of the Ninth Army was trapped, to create a channel of escape to the west for trapped German soldiers and civilians, while maintaining a thin defensive line against the Americans in the vicinity of Magdeburg in the west. This attempt was abandoned on 28 April when Wenck managed to reach the outskirts of Potsdam, and then retreated westward to across the Elbe River, where he surrendered his troops to American forces on 7 May, along with the remnants of the Ninth Army that had staged the last breakout from the Battle of Berlin.
In spite of German military reverses, Hitler issued a series of completely unrealistic operational orders to the army group led by Steiner in the bunker deep below the Reich’s Chancellery on 20 April to establish a defensive line along the Spree and the Oder. Steiner’s army could not break out of the encirclement, and the Ninth Army to the southeast of Berlin was also unable to fight its way through to relieve the capital. Hitler nevertheless maintained a delusion about a potential German victory by destroying Soviet forces in Berlin through the advance of the Steiner army detachment and the Ninth Army under the command of General Busse in General Henrici’s army group holding the centre of the defensive line in front of Berlin facing advancing Soviet forces led by Field-Marshal Zhukov.
Holding this final defensive line was hopelessly unrealistic in view of the overwhelming Soviet superiority of seven to one in infantry and six to one in tanks that had broken through German defences on the Oder River on 21 April, as well as not having access to resupplies in view of the shortages of transport aircraft and fuel, in addition to threats from Soviet fighter aircraft and flak defences. Field-Marshal Ferdinand Schörner launched the final German offensive of the war by assaulting on the left flank of the First Ukrainian Front advancing toward Dresden on 21 April, approximately 150 kilometres south of Berlin, following its entry into Bautzen on 20 April, in an attempt to separate the Second Polish Army in this army group penetrating through German defences south of Cottbus, prior to advancing toward Dresden on 21 April with a supply line extending over fifty kilometres. Schörner exploited this weakness while hoping to reach Busse’s troops who had been retreating from the Oder to contribute to its defence, while the city was surrounded on 23 April. They only managed to succeed in retaking Bautzen on 24 April as the outcome of three days of volatile battlefield conditions that constituted the final minor German offensive of the war where German forces were temporarily rejoined and remained until the end of the war, but this advance stalled on 26 April in the face of overwhelming Soviet material and personnel superiority, as well as German fuel shortages. Isolated clashes continued until 30 April in continued desperate attempts to resist the Soviet advance on Berlin, while German troops in Italy capitulated and Munich was surrendered. Although this was a tactical victory, German forces only managed to temporarily blunt the Soviet advance to Dresden, rather than establishing a new defensive front, and did not have any decisive outcome on the battle of Berlin. German formations south of Berlin remained cut off and trapped in a pocket, the Halbe cauldron, to the southeast of the city, from which these troops attempted to break out westward to join Wenck’s Twelfth Army on 25 and 28 April, with only between twenty and thirty thousand of the original 200,00 troops reaching Wenck’s troops on 1 May. The battle lines were ultimately drawn in northern Finland in the Lapland War, in which Finnish troops fought against German troops withdrawing into occupied Norway by 27 April. German troops remained occupying Norway until the unconditional surrender due to Hitler’s insistence on perpetuating U-boat warfare from the ports there, along with protecting iron ore imports from Sweden that were vital for the war industry. Denmark likewise remained fully occupied until the surrender.
Although it was apparent that the war was lost, the German military remained compelled to fight to defend their homeland, as well as being subject to death sentences for desertions, while there were undoubtedly younger military personnel who had long been indoctrinated with Nazi ideology, including those who took over military functions in the aftermath of the failure of the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt, and maintained the war effort. The civilian population remained subjected to harsh repercussions while living under totalitarian state conditions, and the civil service dutifully remained functioning until April 1945 out of loyalty to the state in the interest of serving public interests. Meanwhile, Hitler refused to consider any form of surrender. During the final days of the fighting in Berlin, General Helmuth Weidling as the commander of the city’s defence had merely an estimated forty-five thousand army and Waffen SS troops, and slightly over forty-thousand Volkssturm troops, and sixty tanks short of fuel against an estimated 1.5 Soviet troops.
While the Nazi regime continued disintegrating, there were also signs of dissension within the Nazi ranks continued as Soviet troops reached the outskirts of Berlin on 21 April, which became completely surrounded by 27 April, and severed road and rail connections to the German Ninth Army that could not advance to link with the Twelfth Army, while the remaining German army, Waffen SS units, including the Charlemagne Thirty-third Waffen Grenadier Division composed of French volunteers, along with SS volunteers from Denmark, Norway, Holland and Belgium in the Eleventh SS Panzergrenadier Nordland Division, two hundred and fifty sailors from the Groβadmiral Dönitz Battalion who were transported into the besieged city by air, Hitler Youth, and Volkssturm troops in the city were heavily outnumbered, regardless of urban combat favouring the defenders, while resupplying the city by air became impossible due to the lack of sufficient amounts of aircraft and a critical fuel shortages, in addition to threats from Soviet aircraft and flak defences. When Russian troops had overrun most of the city up to roughly a kilometre of Hitler’s bunker on the night of 28-29 April , five DFS-230 gliders pulled by Heinkel-111s, followed by another glider flight on the night of 29-30 April loaded with supplies. Rather than relieve Berlin, the Twelfth Army that had attempted to create a corridor from the west of Berlin to rescue German soldiers and civilians in Potsdam, and then the Ninth Army would fight their way westward, and only link at Beelitz on 29 April, prior to surrendering to the American Twelfth Army Group.
Göring, who had left Berlin on 20 April, received the news on 22 April that Hitler would remain in Berlin and end his life there upon the Soviet troops overrunning the city in an admission that the war was lost, and was unaware of Hitler having designated Karl Dönitz as his successor. Acting in his capacity as Deputy-Führer and still expecting to be the next legitimate head of state, he planned for the immediate future of the regime by sending a telegram from the Obersalzberg on 23 April in which he stated that if he did not hear from Hitler by 22:00, he would assume the leadership of the Reich and begin peace negotiations, while he must have feared facing rival claims for state leadership. Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, the NSDAP party secretary, who received this message and was looking to preserve his personal advancement, filtered this message by claiming to Hitler that it was an act of treachery. Hitler then denounced Göring as a corrupt morphine addict and stripped him of all his offices and responsibilities and ordered his arrest, unless he chose to retire from all of his posts on health grounds, to which he conceded rather than facing graver charges. Bormann ordered Göring to be placed under house arrest by the SS, but he was rescued from their custody by Luftwaffe personnel, only to surrender to American troops and then his suicide in prison, prior to the execution of a death sentence. Only Bormann and Goebbels remained as the leading authorities with Hitler inside the bunker. Hitler promoted Robert Ritter von Greim to the rank of Field-Marshal, and appointed him as the head of the Luftwaffe, and was on the last flight out of besieged Berlin on 28 April.
Hitler also learned from a Stockholm radio report on 28 April that was later corroborated by Reuters about Himmler’s initiative to secretly negotiate an armistice with the western allies through the intermediary of Count Folke Bernadotte, the vice-president of the Red Cross in Sweden, who acted on behalf of the Swedish government, while Himmler was attempting to whitewash his earlier crimes against humanity and bolster his own personal power by ludicrously making a delusional attempt to position himself as a “reasonable Nazi” with whom allies could negotiate, and possibly the leader of a reformed postwar Germany, regardless of Nazi Germany’s rapid deterioration. Hitler expelled “the former Reichsführer-SS and Reich Minister of the Interior Heinrich Himmler” from the party and from all offices of state in his Political Testament, written the same day, the day before committing suicide, with whom Himmler had been in direct contact as early as February, concerning the release of Scandinavian and western European concentration camp inmates. Himmler had met Bernadotte for the first time on 19 February, when he was in Germany, and then at the beginning of March, and then on 2 April. Himmler had attempted to deal directly with the western allies to distance himself from the disintegration of the Nazi regime by preparing for his personal postwar future by attempting to rehabilitate his image, which was in fact self-delusion about the possibility of the allies considering him to be an alternative leader of Nazi Germany, and an individual with whom they would enter into peace negotiations as a self-proclaimed provisional leader. This included using his authority to order the release Jewish inmates as negotiation bargaining chips in a show of goodwill for his personal advantage during a secret meeting followed with Norbert Masur as a representative of the World Jewish Congress on the night of 20-21 April, leading to a further meeting with Bernadotte on the night of 23-24 April at the Swedish consulate in Lübeck. Himmler claimed to Bernadotte that Hitler was determined to commit suicide in a few days, and therefore considered himself to be entitled to act even without Hitler’s consent, and asked him to convey to the Swedish government his wish to arrange a meeting with Eisenhower, so that an armistice could be concluded with the western allies, whereas the eastern front would be held as long as possible. These attempts were rebuffed in view of wartime agreements for the demand for unconditional surrender and plans for postwar Germany, akin to the western allies refusing to take German conservative resistance elements into consideration for their planning for establishing a postwar state, prior to their elimination through Himmler’s deployment of the SS and the Gestapo that led to their executions, or choosing to commit suicide rather than ultimately face degrading circumstances when it was apparent that “miracle weapons” or a division of the allies superseding the wartime unconditional surrender and postwar planning would lead to a positive postwar outcome for Germany.
When Hitler himself finally realised that the war was lost, especially after realising that the U.S. would not pull out of the war after Roosevelt’s death and the Red Army approached the centre of Berlin, he decided to marry his long-time mistress, Eva Braun on 28 April. He dictated his political testament shortly afterwards, as he was planning to end his own life and drafted his last will and political testament on 29 April, in which he planned for the continuity of the government by appointing Admiral Karl Dönitz to take office as the Reich president and supreme commander of the armed forces, choosing the leader of the navy to perpetuate the regime while believing that the army, the air force and the SS had either failed or betrayed him. The propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels would become Reich Chancellor, Gauleiter Karl Hanke as the Reichsführer of the SS and chief of the German police, Bormann as the NSDAP Chancellor, and Gauleiter Paul Giesler minister of the interior. General Helmuth Weidling, the commander of the Berlin Defence Area, was given a belated permission to attempt a breakout from the city to join other forces while capitulation was forbidden. Hitler and his wife then both committed suicide in his bunker on the afternoon of 30 April under the Chancellery to precluded the humiliation of being subjected to vengeance at the hands of the advancing Russians. The bodies were then soaked in petrol and burnt to prevent desecration for propaganda purposes, while the fighting continued.
Goebbels’s representatives failed to negotiate a ceasefire and armistice with the advancing Soviet troops in Berlin in the early hours of 1 May at General Chuikov’s headquarters, ostensibly to allow time to establish a new national German government, which was rebuffed as the Soviet authorities acting on Stalin’s orders demanded unconditional surrender, which Goebbels had refused to contemplate. Goebbels and his wife then killed their six children, and then committed suicide later on that day, refusing to contemplate any of them living during the inevitable postwar circumstances in which national socialism would be extirpated. Bormann committed suicide during an unsuccessful escape attempt from Berlin to reach the new Dönitz government in Flensburg. General Weidling as the commander of the Berlin garrison was prevented by SS Sturmführer Hanke to attempt his earlier breakout plans on the evening on 29 April, surrendered the city to the Soviet forces at 06:00 on 2 May.
The British and American forces advance continued at different points in late April toward the Elbe, as had been agreed with the Russians during the Yalta Conference to be the farthest advance by western allied forces. American forces nevertheless advanced beyond the Elbe in the interest of military necessities, as far as two hundred miles into what would constitute the Soviet occupation zone, and, while Soviet forces continued their advances at different points in the east, including advancing as far as Stettin on the Baltic coast on 26 April. Although the allied postwar occupation zones in Germany outside the dismembered territories had been delineated, Churchill expressed concern about the Russians advancing into Denmark, and therefore had Montgomery dispatch the First Canadian Parachute Division to Wismar, also beyond the Elbe, on 2 May to stem the Soviet advance during Operation Eclipse – the seizure of Kiel and Denmark. A delineation line was set between Canadian and Russian troops on the evening of that day. British troops effected the surrender of Lübeck on 2 May, and then Hamburg on 3 May. Montgomery accepted the capitulation of the German forces in northwestern Germany, Holland and Denmark and the surrender of the German fleet stationed in this area on 4 May, which went into effect on the next day. Allied forces entered Denmark on 5 May while the island of Bornholm was under Soviet bombardment, which they would then occupy until withdrawing on 5 May 1946. Field-Marshal Albert Kesselring maintained command of German forces holding the Allied advance in northern Italy at the Gothic Line, before surrendering on the same day, which was soon followed by the surrender of German Army Group G in southern Germany surrendered to the American Sixth Army Group in Munich on 5 May. The remaining 20,000 troop garrison, out of the earlier 50,000, composed of SS troops, including French and Dutch volunteers along with Volkssturm home guards, Hitler Youth and various army units, in the besieged “fortress city” of Breslau surrendered on 6 May.
German propaganda that had succeeded in misleading the allies to believe that Hitler and loyal divisions would continue their final resistance in a so-called National Redoubt in the Alps of southern Germany and western Austria proved to be unfounded. A new government was appointed under Grand Admiral Dönitz as President, who had consistently demonstrated his loyalty to the regime while waging naval warfare through an effective U-Boat campaign, whereas Göring and Himmler had been dismissed from their posts. Meanwhile, Dönitz commanded the remaining forces in northwestern Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway. When Dönitz heard of Hitler’s death, his main concern was to end the war as quickly and as advantageously as possible from his seat of government in Flensburg. The continued unabated, as announced in a radio address that the war was still being fought to “save the German people from annihilation by the advancing Bolshevik enemy,” and that hostilities would continue against the western Allies only if they attempted to preclude this purpose.
The rump Nazi government led by Dönitz in Flensburg that continued operating following Hitler’s suicide set two objectives on 2 May: attempting to negotiate a series of partial surrenders to the western allies, regardless of the Allied demand for unconditional surrender that was imposed at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, and rescuing as many German military personnel and civilians as possible from the advancing Soviets in the east for them to be spared suffering the effects of their vengeance in retaliation to the destruction caused by the German military on the eastern front, while primarily managing to manage food supplies. The fighting therefore continued in the east, before troops could surrender following evacuating them to western Germany, as well as rescue between eight hundred to nine hundred thousand civilian refugees and three hundred fifty thousand troops from the advancing Soviet armies in the Baltic regions by ship in Operation Hannibal, which constituted the largest naval evacuation in history during fifteen weeks by marshalling the use of all available remaining surface fleet naval and requisitioned civilian vessels in the Baltic Sea, which had begun from 21 January to evacuate wounded military personnel and equipment, beginning with four large ships, while transporting civilians was a lower priority than military equipment. The first ship to evacuate refugees from East Prussia arrived on 27 January, when Hitler concurred with Dönitz about allocating the navy’s scarce reserve resources and subordinating all civilian shipping in the Baltic Sea for military objectives only, in terms of transporting wounded military personnel and damaged equipment from the front, and resupplying ammunition and supplies to pockets of resistance, following the launch of the Soviet Vistula offensive on 12 January and Soviet troops enveloping East Prussia on 16 January, leaving approximately five million vulnerable civilians, primarily women, children and the elderly, who had been seeking refuge in the west by escaping by sea from 20 January. When Soviet troops were attacking Königsberg on 6 April, allocation priorities for transportation remained fixed at forty percent for wounded military personnel, twenty percent for civilians, and forty percent for military purposes. The amount for civilians was then raised to forty percent for civilians upon the city’s surrender on 9 April, with forty percent remaining for military equipment to be transported westward.
The troops in Danzig, East Prussia and Courland were to continue fighting against the advancing Soviet forces and hold the Baltic coast areas that were used for experimental submarine testing, while the navy kept them resupplied. In addition to facing the threat of sea mines laid by British aircraft, twenty-four of the evacuation ships were sunk in Soviet air and submarine attacks, including the submarine torpedoing of the Wilhelm Gustloff passenger liner on 30 January 1945 that led to the death of an estimated 5,300 and 7,400 passengers and crew in the worst naval disaster in history, along with the sinking of the General von Steuben on 9 February with only about six hundred and fifty survivors out of four thousand mainly military personnel. The Goya was sunk on 16 April, with an estimated seven thousand victims, out an estimated twenty thousand who perished at sea during this evacuation effort, which remained concentrating on sustaining the war effort. When Soviet forces attacked Königsberg on 6 April, the distribution of ship transports from East Prussia remained set at forty percent for the wounded, forty percent for military equipment, and twenty percent for civilians, and then forty percent for civilians and forty percent for the wounded on 9 April, after the city had been surrendered. Following Admiral Dönitz taking power as Reichspräsident on 1 May, civilian refugee evacuations were only given priority on 6 May, which continued from isolated pockets on the Baltic shores until mid-May. Himmler’s attempt to join the new government in Flensburg under Dönitz as president of the rump Nazi state was rebuffed. While Dönitz potentially suspected that Himmler sought to seize power rather than serve as his second in command, he was relieved of all of his governmental responsibilities on 6 May. He was taken into British custody on 20 May, and committed suicide three days later.
As the margins of land movement operations were wider in the east than in the west, one of the outcomes of the effects allied bombings and logistical difficulties, as well as chronic fuel shortages that were aggravated by allied bombing of synthetic fuel facilities, along with the mostly ineffective effects of British area bombing in the form of using blunt force against the civilian population, which was largely protected by the construction of robust air raid shelters in addition to street sweeping immediately following bombings, to demoralise the home front, the continued degradation of the surface warship fleet, and the allies achieving air superiority, was marshalling naval and air force personnel into the land forces to be redeployed for defensive efforts on three separate fronts. Separate naval infantry divisions were created for this purpose and remaining serving under naval command. The first naval division, composed of 10,000 sailors, was established in February 1945 and dispatched to the eastern front. A second division composed of 1,700 U-boat personnel was formed in March 1945, which was deployed to counter British and Canadian forces advancing toward the remaining German naval bases in the west to keep them operating, while available surface vessels were primarily utilised to sustain Operation Hannibal – the evacuation by sea of German military personnel with their light infantry weapons, as well as civilian refugees to a lesser degree from the Courland Pocket, East Prussia and Pomerania in the face of the Soviet advances, although available transport vessels were limited as a result of being damaged during the fighting by 3 May, with a low probability of enabling repairs in Germany, in addition to fuel shortages for the evacuation journeys. The last evacuation vessels departed from Liepāja at midnight on 9 May, with Soviets firing upon them and capturing two of them, while others that escaped were further subjected to Soviet air force attacks. 203,112 German troops along with Latvian volunteers remained left behind and were taken into Soviet captivity.
Dönitz ordered the end of the U-boat war on 5 May, while there remained sixty-four U-boats at sea, which continued their active operations, which included U-2336 and U-1023 launching attacks on 8 May. Another attempt to allow more time for evacuations from the Baltic was to also have Eisenhower agree to a partial surrender in the west, while he remained committed to the demand for Germany’s unconditional surrender. When Eisenhower definitively demanded an unconditional surrender of all German forces on all fronts to the Dönitz government, Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, the chief of the operations staff of the German army (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) attempted to negotiate a surrender on the western front at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims, which was adamantly rejected.
General Alfred Jodl and Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg signed an unconditional military surrender agreement on behalf of the Dönitz rump government at 02:41 on 7 May on Lüneburg Heath, which was to be in effect at 23:01 on the following day, which allowed forty-five hours for Operation Hannibal to be ended. As a result of Dönitz’s delaying tactics more than half of the troops on the eastern front, approximately 1,850,000 troops, were able to flee westward, and thus avoid being taken prisoner by the Russians. A certain number of troops were not repatriated westward in order to maintain the occupation to protect sustaining technological research on waging U-boat warfare as a potential “superweapon.” Regardless of this initial signing at Rheims, General Ferdinand Schörner’s Army Group Centre remained fighting Soviet forces in Bohemia and Moravia, as part of a contiguous region in central Europe where German troops remained in southeastern Germany, Austria, western Czechoslovakia and Croatia, along with General Dietrich von Saucken’s forces stranded in Hella in East Prussia, and Army Group North remaining isolated in Courland Peninsula in present day Latvia. Other German troops remained isolated on the Dodecanese Islands, western Crete, separate pockets in northern France, including in Dunkirk, La Rochelle, Lorient, St. Nazaire, the British Channel Islands, and northern and western parts of the Netherlands. The final unconditional surrender, which ratified the previous agreement that had been signed in Reims to preclude any of Stalin’s suspicions about the signing of a separate peace and recognising the Soviet war efforts, was finally signed by Wilhelm Keitel upon Stalin’s insistence on 8 May at Berlin-Karlshorst in the presence of Marshal Zhukov and Air Marshal Tedder, with the final signatory ratifying this instrument on 9 May 1945, at 00.16.
Dealing with the consequences of the Second World War in Europe would remain to be implemented in different forms, in direct reaction to the unprecedented forms of inhumanity that had been perpetrated, in addition to various reconstruction efforts. Numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity were widely perpetrated through occupation policies in the countries that Germany invaded. When German troops invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia, they were accompanied by special troops (Einsatzgruppen) from the security police who seized Jewish property and made a large number of somewhat haphazard arrests. In the same manner, Himmler and Heydrich sent the Einsatzgruppen into Poland where they dispossessed and isolated the Jewish population. Dr. Hans Frank, the head of the “General Government” area of Poland that had not been absorbed by either Germany or the Soviet Union, ordered all Jews to wear the Star of David. Jews were forbidden to use the railways, were forced into slave labour and crammed into ghettos in the larger towns. Special units of the security police were given specific orders to “liquidate” the Polish intelligentsia.
The murder of patients deemed “unworthy of life” in the hospitals and psychiatric clinics in Germany continued unabated after the outbreak of the war. Crude social Darwinism was aimed at eliminating the disabled, people with genetic defects, and homosexuals who were considered genetically deficient to prevent further alleged decay of continued human existence supposedly led by the German people’s community. An attempt to “purge” the German population of “unworthy” members led to sterilising about 400,000 men and women, and many were killed in the so-called euthanasia program on the same basis. The mass murder of the incurably sick and the mentally disturbed to the mass murder of Jews continued after the invasion of the Soviet Union. The leaders of the Einsatzgruppen were given intensive training in preparation for their functions in the Soviet Union where they began to operate immediately after the invasion of the Soviet Union. The were told that they would have to exterminate four distinct groups: Soviet functionaries, “inferior Asiatics,” Gypsies and Jews. Heydrich told the commanders of the four Einsatzgruppen on 17 June 1941 that the murder of Soviet Jews was merely the first stage of a programme to kill all European Jews. By the beginning of December 1941 more than 400,000 Soviet Jews had been murdered, among them the 33,771 victims of the massacre at Babi Yar outside Kiev on 29-30 September 1941, which was the best known for the mass executions by these murder squads, which also illustrated the intersection of security and ideological motives, as well as the cooperation between the army and the SS. the SS murdered about 750,000 Jews in the first nine months after the invasion. The complicity of the army in the murder of Soviet Jews is also beyond all doubt, although individual soldiers bravely resisted and refused to compromise either because of their moral standards or having human decency with prejudice to racist ideology.
The invasion of the Soviet Union was followed by Göring’s order to Heydrich in July 1941 to prepare an overall draft on the implementation of the so-called “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” i.e. extirpating the European Jewish populations. The further degradation of the Jewish populations throughout Europe was to be facilitated with a decree on 1 September 1941, ordering that all Jews over six years of age to wear a yellow star of David badge to identify them, and would facilitate taking them into custody and ultimate deportation to concentration camps. The holocaust had already been taking place in the front line areas through the Einsatzgruppen killing squads who waged war against the civilian population with sparse written records, in contrast to meticulous recordkeeping in the concentration camps. Earlier experiments with executing plans for mass murder had begun with gas vans, in which victims were subjected to carbon monoxide poisoning from vehicle exhausts piped into sealed compartments that were first tested in Chelmo in late 1941. There was then a deliberate transition to industrialised execution through using Zyklon B gas in sealed chambers, which was first used at the Auschwitz concentration camp in September 1941 on Soviet prisoners-of-war and ill Polish nationals, who were the first 850 victims, before certain concentration camps would be scaled up to actual extermination centres where inmates were not to survive any length of imprisonment. There was the formulation of a “final solution” at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin on 20 January 1942, chaired by Rheinhart Heydrich presiding over fifteen high ranking Nazi officials, where they were presented with a protocol drafted by Adolf Eichmann, which outlined the coordination of the transportation and secretly killing Jews throughout Europe. Heydrich stated during this meeting that the approximately eleven million Jews in Europe were to “fall away,” which Adolph Eichmann orchestrated through the subsequent systematic deportations and murders.
The history of Nazi Germany remains infamously characterised by its unprecedentedly organised crimes against humanity, particularly against Jews, for the purpose of their elimination as well as other peoples that were intrinsically inimical to Hitler’s demented visions for a racial utopia, (See World War II Archive: Holocaust; The Simon Wiesenthal Center). Hitler especially used anti-Semitic sentiments to his political advantage by blaming negative economic and social developments on Jews. Moreover, the Nazi antisemitism introduced a racist world view that emanated from a vulgar form of social Darwinism that emphasised the survival of the fittest according to a “law of struggle,” which claimed that genetic selection was to be deliberately implemented in practice. This entailed breeding a racial “elite” and exterminating “racially inferior” people, such as Slavs and gypsies, who were to be considered racially inferior to a mythical race of German Aryans, which Nazi ideologues claimed was weakened by Jews as allegedly composing allegedly greatest threat to the subsistence and preservation of “a healthy race.”
The implementation of antisemitic and racist ideology took place in different steps, with the National Socialist Jewish policies assuming three subsequent forms. This first phase of this process took place from 1933 to 1938, with policies imposing various restrictions and segregation by reducing and halting Jewish immigration and encouraging their emigration, limiting the rights of German Jews, and making it illegal for marry non-Jewish Germans. This policymaking stage was devised to remove Jews from Germany’s economic life. There were occasional incidents of violence, most notoriously during the SA directed boycott of Jewish stores on 1 April 1933, and then the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 that restricted civil right for Jews, legalized the confiscation of Jewish property legal, and sanctioned the removal of Jews from government offices, from the military, and most professions. Approximately one fourth of Germany’s 600,000 Jews emigrated during this time. The next phase took place from 1938 to 1941, which involved expulsion and exclusion, as the regime forced target groups, particularly Jews, out of society and out of the country. SA gangs supported by the Gestapo and other party organisations burned synagogues and Jewish stores all over Germany during the Kristallnacht – the night of broken glass – on 9 November 1938. The police under Nazi control did not interfere. Another 150,000 German or Austrian Jews left the country thereafter, but it was difficult for Jews to get visas to other countries, most of which had adopted restrictive immigration policies. After the outbreak of the Second World War, the SS in Poland forced Jews to live in ghettos in big cities, most prominently in Warsaw and Krakow, and along railroad lines, where terrible living conditions led to a high mortality rate. During this expulsion and exclusion phase from the rest of society as the official policy, the SS consequently closed all borders for non-German Jews, while German Jews who could obtain a visa to a foreign country could still emigrate. Expulsion proved nearly impossible in eastern Europe during the war, which resulted in creating delimited city ghettos. The final stage was executing a policy of outright extermination through mass killings. The first extermination programs began in 1939 and 1940 with killing physically and mentally disabled Germans, including disabled children, in the summer of 1939 that soon followed with adults in Germany and then in Poland during the occupation. News about this extermination leaked out, and the protests of many citizens and the Catholic Church in 1940 stopped these extermination programs that Hitler had ordered in writing, backdated to 1 September 1939. Meanwhile, the SS started mass murders of Poles with a higher education who were considered a potentially dangerous form of support for Polish nationalism.
The next phase was the destruction of European Jewry from 1941 to 1944, as the Russian campaign led to the most radical phase of the Nazi regime, since the conquest of living space and the creation of “Aryan colonization” in Eastern Europe were the most radical Nazi goals. The SS Einsatzgruppen followed the regular army and shot masses of Jews, Communists, prisoners of war and civilians with impunity. The four Einsatzgruppen and their enabled killed well over 500,000 Soviet Jews in the first months of the invasion of the Soviet Union, in addition to tens of thousands of partisans and Soviet prisoners-of-war, along with the willing and active cooperation of the Wehrmacht, barring those who choose to resist against these crimes against humanity.
The occupation of Denmark was initially relatively benign in comparison to the other occupied territories, while Germany depended on importing its essential products, especially food, and Danes were considered to be “fellow, proper Aryans,” and was therefore afforded relative independence in a so-called “model protectorate” where the local government was maintained, with its independent control over its civil service and police. Its monarch, Christian X, offered to cooperate with the German authorities who imposed relatively slight restrictions over the population on the condition of not imposing anti-Semitic legislation. A significant change took place when the Danish government resigned in August 1943 as local resistance intensified in the face of increased German military setbacks. The German military commander imposed martial law, and the local Gestapo began searching for Danish Jews who had hitherto not been forced to identify themselves. German police and members of the Danish SS were ordered on 1 October 1943 to round up and deport Jews from Copenhagen where nearly all of them were residing, but were found to have already fled. George Ferdinand Duckwitz, who worked at the German embassy and was made aware of the forthcoming deportations of Jews by the German civil administrator of Denmark, Werner Best, had warned Danish political authorities about this plan, who in turn informed Rabbi Marcus Melchior who forwarded this warning to his synagogue congregation on 29 September, with the message then passed on by both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. Forwarding this information enabled the possibility of their escape to safety Sweden on a twenty-mile journey across the Oresund, while only 476 arrests were made of those who were elderly and could not flee, and others in the provinces who had not been alerted to the danger, while the other seven thousand were already in hiding. By the end of the war, over ninety-five percent of the nearly eight thousand Jews in Denmark, beginning with approximately 4,500 reaching Sweden by 9 October, and then 7,200 by mid-October, would escape becoming victims of the Holocaust in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Hitler claimed to be imposing a so-called “New Order” in Europe throughout the war, wherever the German armies established occupation regimes according to executing policy with three underlying main considerations: military security, economic exploitation and delusions of racial domination. The Germans exploited the resources of the defeated states, as well as removing people from all over Europe for forced labour in Germany. The failure of the Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union led to the economic exploitation of the occupied territories as a primary consideration. Many from the occupied territories were forced to serve the German war industry. On 21 March 1942, Fritz Saukel, the Gauleiter of Thuringia, was appointed “General Plenipotentiary for the Use of Labour,” and immediately began seizing workers in the occupied territories. Whereas the workers recruited in western Europe were treated little differently from German workers, the “eastern workers” (Ostarbeiter) were constituted slave labour forces with dreadful living conditions. By the end of the summer of 1944, the number of foreign workers rose to 7.6 million. Many of them were Soviet prisoners-of-war who were treated with excessive brutality. Of the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners-of-war, 3.3 million died in captivity. Among the foreign workers, 2.8 million were Soviet citizens, 1.7 million Poles, 1.3 million French, 590,000 Italians, 280,000 Czechs, 270,000 Dutch and 250,000 Belgians. About half of the agricultural workers and one-third of the workers in the armaments industry were foreigners who were drawn from occupied countries.
France was separated into an occupied zone in the north and west and a formally independent unoccupied state after the defeat in June 1940. Alsace-Lorraine was annexed by Germany. Germany justified the occupation of parts of France with the necessity to fight the British. In the unoccupied south of France, a conservative and authoritarian government under General Pétain, the popular defender of Verdun in 1916, established itself in Vichy. The Vichy regime legally had authority over all of France and its colonies, but its power was particularly limited in the areas occupied by German troops. The Vichy regime collaborated with the Germans, particularly after the end of 1942, when the German army occupied the rest of France fearing an allied invasion after the defeat in North Africa. Under the cover of compliance, the Vichy regime preserved some limited independence for France. Resistance in France, as in many other German-occupied areas, arose on a larger scale only when the tide of war had obviously turned against Nazi Germany, and when Nazi rule in the occupied countries became more exploitative and repressive. Forced labor and other forms of German exploitation fueled broader popular resistance in France. Similar dynamics characterized the other occupied countries in western and northern Europe. Resistance was partly successful in Norway and Denmark, although many western and northern Europeans accommodated themselves with the Nazi regime, believing that the Nazi empire would remain in place for the foreseeable future.
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