CHAPTER 14

The Fall of Germany

THE AFTERMATH OF A GERMAN V1 ATTACK ON ANTWERP, 1944.

THE V1 AND V2 ROCKETS WERE UNDOUBTEDLY WEAPONS OF TERROR

THAT QUITE LITERALLY FELL FROM THE SKY. ULTIMATELY, HOWEVER, THEY

COULD NOT REVERSE THE FORTUNES OF NAZI GERMANY AS THE ALLIES

AND THE RUSSIANS PRESSED EVER CLOSER TO BERLIN.

On 1 July 1944, Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt, Commander-in-Chief of German forces in western Europe was asked by his fellow Field Marshal, Wilhelm Keitel, what the German response to the recent Allied invasion of France should be. Von Rundstedt reportedly replied: ‘Make peace, you fools!’

Since 1942, the Nazi architect Albert Speer…had actually managed to increase Germany’s industrial output by a wholesale reorganisation of its workers and resources. This had included using a large amount of slave labour

Within hours, news of the remark reached Hitler, and von Rundstedt was replaced by Field Marshal Günther von Kluge. This did not, however, change the situation that the Führer and his people faced as the consequences of the D-Day invasion became clear. The Germans had just scored a success at Arnhem in the Netherlands, where 10,000 British troops were lost trying to capture a key bridge in an assault launched on 17 September 1944. Even so, in the three weeks following the Normandy invasion, Allied troops elsewhere had liberated most of France and the Low Countries. In Italy, German forces were steadily retreating northwards, despite fighting a brilliant defensive campaign. On the eastern front, Soviet troops had smashed the remnants of the German Army in the Soviet Union and were now overrunning Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. In Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito’s partisans were on the verge of liberating Belgrade from Nazi occupation.

ALBERT SPEER (RIGHT), HITLER’S ARCHITECT AND GERMAN MINISTER FOR ARMAMENTS AND MUNITIONS. RESPONSIBLE FOR THE GERMAN WAR ECONOMY, HE WOULD LATER SERVE 20 YEARS IN PRISON FOR HIS USE OF SLAVE LABOUR.

The German people, many so far untouched by the direct effects of war, were at last beginning to feel the results of their Führer’s actions. Since 1942, the Nazi architect Albert Speer had been head of German war production. During that time, and in spite of the damage done to the country’s infrastructure by Allied bombing, Speer had actually managed to increase Germany’s industrial output by a wholesale reorganisation of its workers and resources. This had included using a large amount of slave labour. In 1944, with defeat looming, Speer went a step further, and ordered the ‘total mobilisation’ of Germany and its citizens in support of the war effort. For the first time, all women under 50 were forced to sign up for compulsory labour. They might find themselves with responsibilities as diverse as producing ball-bearings for tanks, or operating anti-aircraft guns. The schools were closed, and the children put to work on farms gathering in the harvest or working on production lines in armaments factories. Older children were called up into the Volksturm, the People’s Militia. This last line of defence against the Allies was made up of poorly trained and ill-equipped old men and young boys. Later, Allied soldiers were shocked to find themselves fighting against ‘soldiers’ as young as 12, and old men the age of their grandfathers.

THE FACE OF A SHELL-SHOCKED GERMAN WOMAN TELLS THE STORY OF ANOTHER ALLIED AIR RAID. FOR THE FIRST TIME THE GERMAN PEOPLE WERE BEGINNING TO SUFFER EN MASSE THE EFFECTS OF THE WAR THEIR FÜHRER HAD UNLEASHED.

THE CONTROVERSIAL AIR CHIEF MARSHALL SIR ARTHUR ‘BOMBER’ HARRIS, COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF ALLIED BOMBER COMMAND, ATTENDS THE DEBRIEFING OF ‘DAM BUSTER’ PILOT GUY GIBSON’S CREW.

However, it was those civilians living in large towns and cities who were the first to experience directly the horrors of war. At the Casablanca Conference of 1943, the British and US air forces had agreed to begin a joint, round-the-clock bomber offensive on industrial targets throughout Germany, aiming for the ‘systematic obliteration, one by one, of the centres of German war production’. But despite scoring notable successes like the famous raid by RAF 617 Squadron on the Mohne and Eder dams along the River Ruhr, it was soon realised that a large number of bombing missions were missing their targets. Speer had cunningly split up the workings of a number of vital factories into individual operations, separated and spread throughout Germany, so that no single attack could entirely cripple production. In response to this situation, RAF Bomber Command, under the leadership of Air Marshal Arthur Harris, switched to a policy of ‘saturation bombing’. As well as carrying out raids on communications and industrial installations, bomber crews were ordered to start targeting large towns and cities, with the specific aim of causing as much loss of civilian life as possible. Not only was it hoped that this would eventually destroy German morale, but it presented the RAF with targets that were considerably easier to hit.

This last line of defence against the Allies was made up of poorly trained and ill-equipped old men and young boys. Allied soldiers were shocked to find themselves fighting against ‘soldiers’ as young as 12, and old men the age of their grandfathers

DRESDEN, ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CITIES IN EUROPE, IS REDUCED TO RUBBLE IN THE WAKE OF ALLIED FIREBOMBING. FIRES RAGED THROUGHOUT THE TOWN FOR DAYS.

THE BOMBING OF DRESDEN REMAINS ONE OF THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL ACTIONS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR. HERE GERMAN CORPSES ARE PILED UP IN THE STREETS.

Armed with incendiaries, high explosives and huge 4000lb ‘blockbuster’ bombs, RAF Lancasters and Halifaxes began flying night missions over German cities in huge numbers. The destructive power of these ‘thousand bomber’ raids was immense. In July 1943, over 30,000 people were killed in Hamburg by a firestorm started by four nights of continuous bombing. By the time the fire died down, 80 per cent of the city had been destroyed. Further firebombing raids followed on Cologne and Berlin, as well as smaller towns in the industrial Ruhr valley, and each time the death toll was in thousands. The campaign reached a climax with the firebombing of Dresden, a historic and beautiful city of little military consequence, on 14 February 1945. Over 35,000 lives were lost. Witnesses reported that in the aftermath, what was left of the city looked like the surface of the Moon.

If the intention of the strategic bombing campaign was to speed the capitulation of the German people, then it was a failure. Like Londoners during the Blitz, ordinary Germans simply carried on with their lives as best they could in defiance of the death and destruction raining down on them.

Altogether, over 500,000 died during the Allied bombing campaign, including more than 100,000 children. The ethics of this strategy became the subject of heated debate among the British High Command. At one point, questions were even raised in parliament about the ‘moral danger’ of continuing the deliberate bombing of civilians on such a scale. Such sentiments were not universal, but when, in the House of Lords, the Marquis of Salisbury was reminded that the Nazi Luftwaffe had ushered in the era of strategic bombing, he replied: ‘Of course the Germans began it, but we do not take the devil as our example.’

THE BODIES OF A GERMAN MAN, WOMAN AND CHILD LIE SIDE BY SIDE FOLLOWING THE ALLIED AIR ATTACK ON COLOGNE.

MOURNERS AT A COLOGNE CEMETERY GATHER TO SAY A FINAL FAREWELL TO LOVED ONES LOST IN THE BOMBING. HITLER WOULD SOON LAUNCH HIS OWN REVENGE ON THE BRITISH PUBLIC IN THE SHAPE OF THE NEW ‘V’ WEAPONS.

The White Rose Underground began its activities by distributing anti-Nazi literature in 1939. It was organised by a 17-year-old German Catholic, Sophie Scholl, and her elder brother, Hans, 20, a former member of the Hitler Youth. Together with friends, the Scholls printed anonymous leaflets protesting against the war and the Nazi Party, and distributed them all over Germany. On 18 February 1943, they were spotted handing out leaflets around Munich University by a janitor who promptly arrested them and reported them to the Gestapo. When the secret police searched the Scholls’ apartment, they found ‘subversive’ literature and hundreds of stamps and envelopes. Four days later, Sophie and Hans Scholl were tried, tortured, found guilty of subversion and sentenced to death. Both were beheaded. Before she died, Sophie told her friends: ‘So many people have died for this regime that it’s time someone died against it.’

As it happened, the devil had not yet run out of tricks. Germany was about to begin a new bombing campaign of its own. Suffering a chronic shortage of resources, Hitler turned in desperation to his scientists to come up with new, more economic ‘miracle weapons’ that might alter the course of the war. Working at the isolated Peenemunde research complex on Germany’s Baltic coast, a team led by a brilliant young engineer, Wernher von Braun, first developed the V-1, a remote-controlled, pulse jet-powered flying bomb with a one-ton warhead. The ‘V’ stood for Vegeltungswaffe, or reprisal. From 13 June 1944 onwards, thousands of these unmanned ‘Buzz Bombs’, ‘Doodlebugs’ or ‘Flying Bombs’, as they were variously called, were launched indiscriminately at London and southern England. On 8 September, V-2s – giant liquid-fuel rockets packed with explosive and capable of reaching Mach 1, the speed of sound, in under half a minute – were also added to the campaign. The V-1, V-2 and others in the pipeline were undoubtedly intended as terror weapons. The hard, rasping roar of the V-1’s engine was a fearful sound that no one who heard it ever forgot, all the more so when the engine cut out and the missile started its dive earthwards. The V-2, on which space rocket technology was later based, was more insidious. Flying through the atmosphere, between 50 and 60 miles high and more, it fell on its targets quite literally out of the blue, and completely without warning. Altogether, more than 9000 British civilians were killed by the V weapons in 1944 and 1945. After the war, Wernher von Braun was spirited out of Germany by US military intelligence and later worked on the US space programme.

Despite the destruction and loss of life caused by the V weapons and other technical developments such as the new Messerschmitt Me-163 ‘jet’ fighter, which was powered by rockets and could reach speeds of up to 596mph, there was a growing tide of panic in Germany throughout 1944 as the enemies of the Reich seemed to be advancing from all sides. In Germany itself, rationing had been introduced, and living conditions steadily deteriorated as the war effort sucked in all available resources. A flourishing black market had quickly sprung up as a result. To a great many Germans who had shown absolute faith in their Führer, the reversal of Germany’s fortunes seemed like a betrayal of everything they had been promised. In such circumstances, dissent was inevitable, and it has often been asked why the German people did not rise up and rid themselves of Hitler in the way the Italians had done with Mussolini. That, though, was easier said than done.

A V2 ROCKET – THE WORLD’S FIRST BALLISTIC MISSILE – TAKES OFF FROM ITS LAUNCH PAD SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN EUROPE. BETWEEN SEPTEMBER 1944 AND MARCH 1945 THE 517 V2 ROCKETS THAT FELL ON LONDON KILLED 2700 PEOPLE.

THE ALLIED FRONT

There was, in fact, a German resistance movement that had encouragement from inside the Wehrmacht, but it was given little chance to act. During the final year of the Third Reich, as discontent spread, SS activities against ‘enemies of the state’ increased rapidly. The Nazi regime protected itself by turning on its own people, striving to keep them in line by using surveillance, the concentration camps, midnight arrests and summary public executions of suspected ‘traitors’. Among those to be executed were the youthful founders of the White Rose Underground.

Within the German military itself, resistance to Hitler had been growing ever since the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943 had made it clear that the Nazi machine was not invincible after all. After D-Day, figures as high up in the German chain of command as Erwin Rommel were being openly critical of Hitler’s policies. There had already been a number of failed attempts on the Führer’s life before 20 July 1944 when the last bid was made to kill him. That day, Colonel Claus Schenk, Count von Stauffenberg, a well-respected soldier who in 1943 had lost an eye, his right hand and forearm and the third and fourth fingers of his left hand when his staff car was attacked by low-flying aircraft in North Africa, left a briefcase full of dynamite under a table at Hitler’s headquarters at Rastenburg in east Prussia. The resulting explosion all but destroyed the room in which Hitler and a number of his generals were discussing the course of the war. However, possibly saved by the thickness of the table, the Führer survived with nothing more than a few bruises, though physically and mentally he never fully recovered. Von Stauffenberg was afterwards shot. So were his fellow conspirators, a group of high-ranking officers who had realised too late that Germany was being led to disaster. Their deaths were followed by a savage purge of the German military High Command, during which thousands, however remote their connection, were tried and executed for plotting to overthrow the Führer. Rommel, one of Hitler’s greatest commanders, was not directly involved in the plot. He was, nevertheless, forced to commit suicide for his suggestion that Hitler should be removed from power. Hitler, meanwhile, entertained himself by watching film of the conspirators hanging from meat hooks.

THE NEWS OF THE ATTEMPT ON HITLER’S LIFE RAPIDLY SPREAD TO THE ALLIES, PROVIDING FURTHER EVIDENCE OF COLLAPSING GERMAN MORALE.

COLONEL CLAUS SCHENK (FAR RIGHT) WAITS TO GREET HITLER SHORTLY BEFORE HIS FAILED ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT.

Fear of the enemy also kept the German people from surrendering en masse. They had always been taught that the Russians were subhuman barbarians, and were now hearing horrifying tales of rape and torture as the Red Army advanced from the east. Joseph Göbbels, Hitler’s chief of propaganda, whipped up these fears to the point of hysteria in a series of radio broadcasts that also made much of the Allies’ demand that Germany surrender ‘unconditionally’. This, Göbbels told the German people, would mean the total destruction of their nation. Had not Stalin called for the ‘laying waste’ of all German factories and property, and the ‘battering to death’ of the entire German people? With these

DR JOSEF GÖBBELS, THE THIRD REICH’S CHIEF OF PROPAGANDA, MEETS THE PEOPLE OF BERLIN DURING A MORALE DRIVE. ALTHOUGH A DEEPLY CYNICAL AND EMBITTERED MAN, GÖBBELS WAS A BRILLIANT SPEAKER WHO GALVANISED THE GERMAN PEOPLE WITH HUGELY POPULAR RADIO BROADCASTS.

Just as they had already done at Stalingrad, the Red Army took Berlin street by street. They had travelled halfway across Europe to get there, and were wary of losing more men than was absolutely necessary in the final days of the war. The Russians were faced by some 60,000 German troops, a great many of them old men and boys of the Volksturm. In the confusion that descended on Berlin in the last weeks of the Third Reich, one Russian officer actually managed to get a German switchboard operator to connect him to Dr Göbbels at the Ministry of Propaganda across town. When he asked how long Berlin could be expected to hold out, the officer was told that Göbbels expected the defence of the city to carry on for months. However, when the officer queried Göbbels about how he planned to escape, he was told that his question did not deserve an answer. After a couple more minutes of polite conversation, Göbbels hung up. Göbbels, in fact, never escaped. On 30 April 1945, he and his wife Magda poisoned their children and committed suicide.

On 3 May, a delegation of high-ranking German officers met General Bernard Montgomery to request that they be allowed to surrender their forces in Berlin to him rather than to the Red Army, from whom they expected precious little mercy. Many of the Soviet troops in the city had already begun to extract their own bloody revenge for German atrocities committed in the Soviet Union. Montgomery, however, was in no position to accede to such a request, as it had already been agreed among the Allies that the Russians would take Berlin. Three days later, another delegation, this time to the US military, made the same request. It was again denied.

grim reminders in their ears, it was not surprising that the closer the Allies came to victory, the more fiercely the Germans fought to defend themselves.

Most of all, though, the Germans hung on because their leader, although by now addicted to drugs, half paralysed and isolated from them in his Wolf’s Lair at Rastenburg, still had absolute control over both the country and the vast majority of his people. Hitler was sufficiently in command of the military situation to order an audacious counter-attack on the advancing Allies in December 1944.

Rommel…was not directly involved in the plot. He was, nevertheless, forced to commit suicide for his suggestion that Hitler should be removed from power. Hitler, meanwhile, entertained himself by watching film of the conspirators hanging from meat hooks

After amassing a force of over 250,000 men and more than 1000 tanks in the Ardennes forest, Hitler’s troops swept through US forces in Belgium in an attempt to reach the port of Antwerp and divide the Allied lines. They got as far as the town of Bastogne before they were beaten by a brave American fight-back and were halted by lack of fuel. This last desperate stand, known as the Battle of the Bulge, cost the German Army over 100,000 men killed or taken prisoner.

At the beginning of 1945, as the Allied noose tightened around the remains of his forces, Hitler returned to Berlin to take up residence in a bunker under the Reichschancellery. The Ardennes campaign had managed to hold up the Allied armies in the west for six weeks, but that was all. As Hermann Göring observed, Hitler seemed to have aged 15 years since 1942. He spoke to the German people for the last time on 30 January, ironically the twelfth anniversary of his appointment as chancellor, urging them to fight to the end against the approaching Russian ‘hordes’, reminding them that God was on their side. He then instructed Speer to begin a ‘scorched earth’ policy that amounted to the destruction of Germany as a ‘punishment’ for the people who had ‘betrayed’ their Führer. Speer, realising at last that Hitler no longer cared what happened to the German people, pretended to obey but in fact did nothing.

AFTER THE SUDDEN DEATH OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT, FORMER US VICE-PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN TOOK HIS PLACE. HERE (CENTRE) HE MEETS WITH STALIN AND THE BRITISH DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER CLEMENT ATTLEE. BEHIND TRUMAN IS ERNEST BEVIN, BRITAIN’S INDOMITABLE MINISTER FOR LABOUR.

THE RUSSIAN COUNTER-ATTACK

LEFT: GENERAL JODL, HITLER’S CHIEF MILITARY ADVISOR, SIGNS THE TOTAL, UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER OF ALL GERMAN FORCES AT GENERAL EISENHOWER’S HEADQUARTERS IN RHEIMS, FRANCE.

RIGHT: FIELD MARSHALL BERNARD MONTGOMERY WITNESSES THE SIGNING OF THE OFFICIAL SURRENDER OF GERMAN FORCES IN HOLLAND, DENMARK AND NORTHERN GERMANY BY ADMIRAL HANS VON FRIEDENBURG, LUNEBERG HEATH, 6.25 P.M.

RELIEVED GERMAN SOLDIERS – MOST OF THEM YOUNG BOYS – SURRENDER TO THE US 7TH AND 24 ARMIES ON THE AUSTRIAN BORDER. THEY COULD EXPECT FAR BETTER TREATMENT FROM THE AMERICANS THAN THEY MIGHT HAVE RECEIVED AT THE HANDS OF THE RUSSIANS.

EAST EMBRACES WEST, AS AN AMERICAN GI HUGS A SOVIET COMRADE IN ARMS, SOUTHERN GERMANY, MAY 1945.

By now, the Soviet forces were rolling all before them in the east. Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria were occupied in turn, and by the beginning of February 1945, the Red Army was less than 40 miles from Berlin. Across Germany, a mass exodus began, as people crammed the roads in an attempt to escape the Soviet advance, carrying whatever possessions they could on carts, horses and on their own backs. Those who could not or did not get away in time faced an uncertain future at the hands of the oncoming Russian soldiers, many of whom were now embarking on their own private campaigns of looting and rape in revenge for their country’s sufferings. Meanwhile, at the Yalta conference, which had convened on 4 February 1945, the ‘Big Three’ – Churchill, an ailing President Roosevelt and Josef Stalin – had already carved up Europe between them. With the exception of Austria, the Soviet Union would ‘administer’ all the countries its troops now occupied. Despite the misgivings of both Britain and the USA, it was also agreed that Soviet forces were better placed to take Berlin. This strategy had been aided by Eisenhower’s refusal to make a direct drive for the German capital instead of advancing on the Reich from France along a broad front.

On 7 March 1945, 8000 Allied troops became the first to break into Germany from the west when they crossed the River Rhine by way of the Ludendorff bridge at Remagen, which a retreating German unit had failed to destroy behind them. Germany’s greatest natural defence had been breached. Field Marshal Kesselring was recalled from the fighting in Italy to shore up the German defences. He introduced himself to his troops with the sardonic words ‘Gentlemen, I am the new V-3’, but could do little to stop the rest of the Allied forces crossing the Rhine after a series of massive airborne landings. Almost 500,000 German soldiers of Army Group B surrendered as the Ruhr was overrun by the US 1st and 9th Armies. At the same time, the Russian 8th Army, which, led by General Vasili Chuikov, had defeated the Germans at Stalingrad, moved towards Berlin and began bombarding the city with rockets.

In the summer of 1942 US bombers stationed at air bases in Britain began flying missions over Germany. While the RAF concentrated its efforts on night bombing as its part of the Allied ‘combined bomber offensive’, the giant B-17 Flying Fortresses of US 8th. Air Force operated during the day. This meant that USAAF air crews could target specific military and industrial installations that were impossible to attack by night, but it also denied the US bombers the protection of darkness. The consequences of this were illustrated by the August 1943 raid on the ball-bearing factory at Schweinfurt. Flying in huge formations without fighter cover, the US bombers were easy prey for the Luftwaffe and German anti-aircraft crews on the ground, despite themselves being heavily armed with a number of guns. Of the 229 B-17s that set out on the mission, 36 were shot down, an attrition rate of over 15 per cent.

This was unacceptable to US Bomber Command, and as a result of the disaster daylight missions over Germany were suspended for a full five months, only to be resumed after the development of new long-range Mustang fighters, which, equipped with extra fuel drop tanks, were able to provide escort for the bomber crews all the way to Germany and back. Heavily armed and capable of flying at over 400 miles per hour, the Mustangs soon achieved Allied air superiority over Europe. Nevertheless, German defences, and what was left of the Luftwaffe, continued to take a huge toll. During 1944 alone the 8th Air Force lost 2400 bombers over western Europe. Final figures released in October 1945 stated that in total more than 18,000 USAAF aircraft had been lost in air raids over Germany. The lives of 79,265 US airmen were lost with them.

On 21 April 1945, the first Soviet tanks entered Berlin. By now, most of the inhabitants were living in cellars to escape the constant bombardment, equally afraid of the Russians and of the remorseless SS units that patrolled Berlin summarily executing suspected ‘deserters’. Food and water were scarce. Electricity and gas supplies had been cut off or destroyed. Almost 500,000 Soviet troops ringed the city. Meanwhile, in his chancellery, beneath the rubble and the ruin, Hitler was living in delusion. In this last week of his life, he still believed that Germany could triumph. Following the sudden death of President Roosevelt on 12 April, he was convinced that the moment had finally come for a ‘turn in the fortunes of war’. Hitler told his troops on the eastern front that ‘countless new units are replacing our losses’, when in fact there were none. As the Red Army advanced through the ravaged streets of Berlin, German soldiers were deserting in their thousands. When the news reached him that SS chief Heinrich Himmler, too, was preparing to surrender, Hitler became enraged. He announced to those still left in his command bunker: ‘Nothing now remains! Nothing is spared me! There is no bitterness, no betrayal that has not been heaped upon me!’

LEFT: TWO JUBILANT LONDONERS CELEBRATE THE END OF THE WAR IN EUROPE. THE HEADLINE OF THE SUN NEWSPAPER SAYS IT ALL.

RIGHT: THE COVER OF THE DAILY MAIL SHOWS THE SCENE IN PICADILLY CIRCUS, LONDON, AS WORD SPREADS ABOUT THE IMPENDING DECLARATION OF PEACE.

BELOW: THE FRONT COVER OF THE BRITISH RADIO TIMES, AS THE BBC CELEBRATES THE VICTORY.

Finally, on 29 April, after marrying his mistress Eva Braun and naming Admiral Dönitz as his successor, Hitler shot himself, and his wife took poison. Afterwards, their bodies were burned in what was left of the garden of the Reichschancellery. A week later, on 7 May, Germany officially surrendered. A quarter of a million Berliners had been killed during the siege of the city. Eight million Germans were now refugees. An estimated 30 millions had died in Europe as a result of Nazi policies. The fate of six million Jews, hounded, brutalised, starved, beaten, worked to death or murdered was yet to come to light.