Germany, battle for

Germany, battle for (see Maps 44 and 45). On 15 January 1945, when Hitler returned to Berlin from the headquarters he had used during the Ardennes campaign, he knew his military options were exhausted. Henceforth, he could only hope for a ‘Miracle of the House of Brandenburg’ like that of 1763 in which the death of the Russian Empress Elizabeth had split a European coalition against Frederick the Great and saved him from a total defeat in the Seven Years War. The alliance against Hitler was indeed coming under great strain, but not over concerns from which he could profit. Nazi Germany's fate was sealed. The war was about to become a contest for shares in the victory, and the German capital, symbol of German militarism and expansionism, was regarded as the grand prize (see Berlin, fall of).

1. Clearing the Rhineland

Though they had fought their first major battles on German soil as early as the previous autumn (see Aachen and Huertgen Forest), there was grave doubt that Eisenhower's armies were credible contenders in a race for Berlin on 28 January, the day they reoccupied the line they had held before the Ardennes offensive. Zhukov's First Belorussian and Konev's First Ukrainian fronts (army groups) were closing to the River Oder, 65 km. (35 mi.) east of Berlin, at high speed; and the Soviet plan called for the city to be taken and the River Elbe reached in a maximum of 30 more days.

On 1 February, meeting at Malta before the Yalta conference which was held from 4 to 9 February (see ARGONAUT), the Combined Chiefs of Staff approved Eisenhower's plan for a final offensive. It delegated the main effort to Montgomery's Twenty-First Army Group, which would employ First Canadian, Second British, and Ninth US Armies in a drive to and across the Rhine north of the Ruhr and thence over the North German plain to Berlin. The remaining armies, three American and one French, after completing the clearing of the Rhineland, would develop as strong a secondary thrust south of the Ruhr as could be managed without impairing support for Montgomery's effort. To assist the Soviet forces, who had no heavy bombing support of their own, the chiefs also approved a bombing offensive by Bomber Command and Eighth US Army Air Force against rail centres in eastern Germany.

The bombing began almost at once and reached its peak intensity in night and day raids on Dresden on 13 and 14 February. The first (see VERITABLE) of two operations to bring Montgomery's armies to the Rhine began on 8 February. It was launched out of the Nijmegen salient created by MARKET-GARDEN and involved the British and Canadians in some of the most difficult fighting of the campaign when they had to clear the Reichswald forest. The second (see GRENADE) was to have started two days later, but German engineers had destroyed the floodgates on several dams, which kept the River Ruhr flooded in front of the Ninth US Army until 23 February. Thereafter, Twenty-first Army Group pushed steadily towards the Rhine. General Bradley's Twelfth Army Group, First and Third US Armies, joined in on the right on 3 March. On 7 March, First Army, by a stroke of luck that was to have far-reaching effect, captured the Ludendorff railway bridge at Remagen. By 10 March, Montgomery's and Bradley's lines were on the river from the Dutch border upstream to Koblenz.

Joined on the north by Patton's Third US Army, Devers's Sixth Army Group, Seventh US and First French Armies, began clearing the Saar and Palatinate on 15 March. The Third US Army seized a bridgehead at Oppenheim, near the confluence of the Rhine and Main rivers on 22 March, and all German resistance west of the Rhine ended three days later.

Meanwhile, Stalin had prolonged the race for Berlin. At Yalta, when Roosevelt and Churchill opposed shifting the Polish border west to the Oder–Neisse Line, he had told them that then it was better ‘the war should continue a little longer, although it would cost Russia much blood, so that Poland could be compensated at Germany's expense’ ( W. S. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, London, 1953, p. 370). Through February, while Hitler withdrew divisions from the Western Front to defend Berlin, Zhukov, was stopped on the Oder; Konev crossed the Oder and moved towards Dresden, but stopped at the River Neisse on 21 February; and then in March, both busied themselves in Pomerania and Upper Silesia, taking territory planned for transfer to Poland.

2. The Ruhr pocket

Bradley had instantly grasped the opportunity the Remagen Bridge offered for an enlarged American role in the advance beyond the Rhine. Eisenhower, having his obligation to the combined interest to consider, had evinced some restraint. Nevertheless, he had allowed the bridgehead to be expanded and on 18 March approved Bradley's plan for VOYAGE, an American operation south of the Ruhr that would be a counterpart to PLUNDER, Montgomery's advance on the north.

On 24 March, Montgomery's armies crossed the Rhine at Wesel. For the three previous days, Bomber Command and Eighth USAAF had devoted virtually their entire strengths to strikes at road and rail junctions around the crossing zone. First US Army began VOYAGE on 25 March. Kesselring, who had assumed command of the German Western Theatre on 10 March, had three army groups: H, downstream from Düsseldorf; B, between Düsseldorf and Koblenz; G, Koblenz to Karlsruhe. He had 55 weak divisions; Eisenhower had 85, all at full strength, and overwhelmingly superior air power. Army Group B, sandwiched between the Allied bridgeheads, was the actual first target of VOYAGE and PLUNDER.

On 27 March, Montgomery issued his order for the breakout from the Wesel bridgehead, and First US Army reached Marburg, 110 km. (68 mi.) east of the Rhine, where it was to turn north behind Army Group B. A day later, Eisenhower changed the strategic plan. Telling Montgomery that Ninth US Army would revert to Bradley's control after it and First US Army had encircled Army Group B, he directed Montgomery to protect Bradley's north flank while Twelfth US Army Group made the main thrust towards the Elbe along the Erfurt–Leipzig–Dresden line.

When First Army made contact with Ninth US Army at Lippstadt on 1 April, Hitler resorted to a device he had used on the Eastern Front, notably at Stalingrad: he declared the entire Ruhr a fortress, placed it directly under his control and forbade any attempt to break out. Model, the Army Group B commander, had earned his field marshal's baton as a defensive specialist, but the Ruhr, once the heart of the munitions industry, could no longer sustain even his two armies. He shot himself on 17 April, and 317,000 of his troops were taken prisoner.

3. To the Elbe

Eisenhower's change of plan gave his American generals a victory in a long-standing and latterly acrimonious rivalry with Montgomery. It also aligned his American armies on easterly and north-easterly courses across central Germany that bypassed the entire south between the Rhine and the Czechoslovak border and raised, in Eisenhower's and Bradley's estimation, a danger of prolonged, vicious fighting after the war ended on the main fronts. The idea of a so-called ‘National Redoubt’ in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps, probably suggested by Swiss doctrine, had no concrete evidence to support it but appeared entirely consistent with the Nazi mentality. Were Hitler and his most fanatical troops to make such a last stand, they could tie down American forces scheduled for transfer to the Pacific war.

On the day he communicated the changed plan to Montgomery, Eisenhower also sent a message to Stalin, in which he proposed an arrangement for his and the Soviet forces' meeting. The Yalta conference had divided Germany into occupation zones (see also Allied Control Commissions), but those were not to come into being until a state known as ECLIPSE—German collapse or surrender—was reached. To Stalin, Eisenhower stated that he wished to make a junction with Soviet forces along the Erfurt–Leipzig–Dresden axis, which would be his main line of attack because he believed the German government ministries were being moved to that area.

The first response came from Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff, who attempted to have the message stopped on the ground that Eisenhower was intruding into the inter-governmental sphere. Churchill also argued that Berlin had not lost either its military or its political significance, because the Germans would keep fighting as long as it held out; and he added that leaving the city to the Soviets would allow them to claim the lion's share of the victory. When the US Joint Chiefs of Staff supported Eisenhower on all points, the British accepted his reassurance that the decision on Berlin was not irrevocable.

Eisenhower's message reached Stalin on 31 March. For him, the contents were no doubt a shock: not only were Erfurt, Leipzig, and Dresden deep in the designated Soviet zone, but he could not bring himself to believe Eisenhower would go for Dresden, which was further east, and not for Berlin. That night he had Zhukov and Konev in Moscow working on a hasty redeployment for a massive strike to Berlin. He replied blandly to Eisenhower, saying he agreed fully that Berlin had lost its strategic significance. Three days later, however, he dispatched an explosive note to Roosevelt. His ‘military colleagues’, he asserted, had solid evidence that the Americans and British had made a deal with the Germans where by, in exchange for easier armistice terms, the Germans would open their Western Front to them while stiffening their resistance to the Soviet forces in the east.

The Ruhr pocket tied down two First and one Ninth Army corps and after it closed Kesselring had a great gap 200 km. (125 mi.) wide in his centre. But Hitler's ‘stay put’ order had denied Army Group B any further influence on the war, thereby lending an ironic validity to Stalin's charge as coherent defence was now impossible.

Against sporadic resistance, Eisenhower allowed the advance to continue as a pursuit on a broad front. Cities, rivers, and terrain features such as the Harz mountains and Thuringian forest, which could provided temporary rallying-points for the defence, barely kept the war alive, while masses of prisoners marching rearwards signalled its imminent demise. However, the absence of rail transport east of the Rhine posed some problems for the supply services, although the Ninth, First, and Third US Armies had the advantages of operating in the gap, and were, therefore, able to narrow their fronts slightly as they progressed eastwards, the Second Canadian and First British Armies had to fan out northwards and eastwards on widening fronts.

By 7 April, First British and Ninth, First, and Third US Armies had crossed the approximate halfway mark to the Elbe, the line of the Weser and Werra rivers. The Third Army was at Erfurt on 10 April, and by 12 April the Ninth Army was closing to the Elbe between Wittenberg and Magdeburg. By then, all three American armies were inside the Soviet zone. On 12 April, Bradley instructed First Army to stop short of Dresden, on the western tributary of the Elbe, the River Mulda, and await the Soviet contact there.

4. Victory in Europe

In a cable sent to Marshall, the US chief of staff, on 15 April, Eisenhower said that in view of his and the Soviet forces' relative positions, it would be foolish to push on towards Berlin. Thereafter, the debate on how the race should have ended was in the hands of memoirists and historians. Zhukov and Konev began the Soviet Berlin offensive on 16 April. On that day also, the Allied air staffs declared a victory in the strategic bombing offensive and terminated it.

On 19 April, Second British Army reached the Elbe upstream from Hamburg, and First US Army took Leipzig. Three days later, Third and Seventh US and First French Armies opened the drive to eliminate the supposed National Redoubt. Since the stop on the Mulda did not apply to reconnaissance, First Army sent parties across the river, and one of those made contact with Konev's troops at Torgau on the Elbe on 24 April.

After the Soviet Berlin offensive began, Churchill expressed great concern to Washington that Denmark would fall into the Soviet sphere. The British zone extended east of Jutland to Lübeck, but Montgomery doubted that he had the strength to get there in time. Had the Soviet attack resulted, as planned, in a fast, crushing sweep to the Elbe, he would certainly have been right but German resistance was tying down all of Zhukov's and most of Konev's, strength around Berlin. On 29 April, Montgomery crossed the Elbe with the 18th US Corps supporting him on the right. Second British Army reached Lübeck on 2 May, and 18th Corps took Wismar and made contact with Soviet units there a day later.

In Berlin, on 30 April, Hitler designated Grand Admiral Dönitz his successor as chief of state and C-in-C of the armed forces and then killed himself. Dönitz attempted, by piecemeal surrenders to the British and Americans, to give the forces on the Eastern Front time to escape westwards. On 4 May he surrendered the Netherlands, Denmark, and north-western Germany to Montgomery (see Lüneburg Heath).

On 6 May, the fighting ended for the American armies. The Soviet forces completed their advance to the Elbe and the Mulda opposite the Ninth and First Armies. In the south, the National Redoubt having proved to have been an illusion, Third Army made contact with Soviet troops at Linz, and Seventh Army linked up with Fifth US Army at the Brenner Pass. Third Army also took Pilsen, which placed it in position for an advance to Prague, but Eisenhower acceded to an urgent request from the Soviet General Staff not to go beyond Pilsen.

Dönitz's emissaries arrived at Eisenhower's forward headquarters (see SHAEF) in Reims on 5 May to seek either a separate surrender to the Americans or a phased one that would allow more time to the troops on the Eastern Front. Eisenhower let them be told he would not grant anything but a simultaneous unconditional surrender on all fronts. General Jodl, who had been Hitler's chief military adviser, came a day later and after being given the same answer, with a threat that Eisenhower would close all his fronts to German military and civilians if the negotiations were not completed promptly, signed the unconditional surrender at 0241 on 7 May. It specified that all German forces were to cease operations and movements at 2301 on 8 May.

Churchill and Truman declared 8 MayV-E Day, but Stalin, suspecting treachery, refused to accept the Reims signing as valid and demanded another, which took place in Berlin half an hour before midnight on 8 May, so that 9 May became the Soviet V-E Day. But Konev was then in the midst of a massive operation to take Prague (see German–Soviet war, 11); consequently, Soviet operations did not end until 11 May. In the event, both surrenders proved to apply to the German military but not the civil government, and that omission, the Dönitz government having been abolished, had to be corrected on 5 June in a declaration by the four occupying powers.

Earl Ziemke

Bibliography

Ellis, L. F. , Victory in the West, Vol. II (London, 1968).
Pogue, F. C. , The Supreme Command (Washington, DC, 1954).
Wilmot, C. , The Struggle for Europe (New York, 1952).