Nearly a year after the beaches of Normandy were stormed, the Allied push across western Europe was nearly complete. American troops had helped to liberate Paris, win the brutal Battle of the Bulge and press the fight into Nazi Germany through a bitter winter. After the Allies had crossed the last major geographic barrier the Rhine River in March 1945, the war in Europe was all but over.
The Third Reich was clamped in a rapidly closing vice with the Allies racing from the west and the Soviet Union charging from the east. Gallows humor seized Berlin as residents joked that the optimists among them were learning English, the pessimists Russian. Cloistered in his concrete bunker deep underneath the gardens of the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler retreated from reality and hoped that Nazi scientists would bring him news of a miracle weapon that would change the tide of the war. From an article of History.com by their editors.
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“The German army as a military force on the western front is a whipped army,”
Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed at a press conference in Paris on March 27, 1945. Although an Allied victory seemed inevitable, a battle-tested Eisenhower knew that war never ends quietly. “I am not writing off this war,” he said. “No one knows what the German will do in his own country, and he is trying hard.” For the fanatically determined Hitler and millions of his countrymen, unconditional surrender was not an option. The final chapter of the Third Reich would be written in blood as the Nazis prepared for a tenacious last stand on the soil of their homeland. (Battle of Normandy History.com) |
By early April, the Allies had captured the industrial heart of Germany along the Ruhr River, and many cities such as Dresden had been pulverized to rubble by Allied bombing raids. While Nazi soldiers by the thousands began to shed their uniforms and put down their arms in mass surrender, Hitler’s SS hunted down deserters and hanged them from lamp posts with signs saying they were too cowardly to defend women and children.
While some American forces were able to advance 10 miles a day as they passed through villages where white bed sheets billowed in the breeze as a sign of surrender, others encountered pockets of stiff resistance. On April 16, American troops reached the Third Reich’s spiritual heart, Nuremberg, the stage for massive Nazi Party rallies and some of Hitler’s most maniacal speeches. The German chancellor ordered the city protected at all costs, and in once instance when 30 German soldiers approached the enemy with white flags, they were mowed down by machine-gun fire from their fellow Nazis to prevent their surrender. With their manpower decimated, the Nazis enlisted the Hitler Youth to fight on the front lines. Boys as young as 15 mounted some of the strongest defenses of the city until it finally fell after four days of fighting on April 20, Hitler’s birthday.
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As the Allies raced the Soviets to Berlin, the true evil of the Nazis became crystal clear, even through the fog of war. On April 4, the U.S. Third Army encountered a series of large industrial buildings in the small town of Ohrdruf that they quickly discovered were factories of death. Inside the first concentration camp liberated by U.S. troops were dead bodies of starvation victims stacked like firewood and a pyre with charred skulls and bones left by Nazis who had attempted to destroy evidence of their genocide.
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