In the autumn of 1944, six British, American, Canadian and French armies advanced on Germany from the west, while three Red Army fronts approached from the east.
Numerically, the Allies had overwhelming superiority. Their uniformed combatants numbered well over five million – the US and the Soviets fielded more than two million soldiers each – and they were backed by almost 20,000 aircraft. British and American planes controlled Germany’s skies, from which they bombed towns and cities remorselessly in the hope of weakening the country’s industrial base and demoralizing the population. Germany’s forces, meanwhile, were dwindling in number, as its soldiers were killed or captured and its planes shot down. Persistent Allied bombing had devastated the German oil fields and synthetic oil plants were only producing a fraction of what was needed to keep the country’s tanks and other military vehicles on the move.
›› Civilian responsibility
Before and during the invasion of Germany there was much discussion about the culpability of the German population, and how they should be treated in defeat. It was easy to see the entire German people as responsible – and it might have been necessary for soldiers to accept this as a simple truth – but the reality was far more complex. There was some opposition to Hitler in Germany, and plenty of people wanted the war to end or the Führer replaced with a peacemaker. Unfortunately, few of them had any real power. The Nazis were ruthless in jailing and executing their political opponents, and expressing scepticism of Hitler’s leadership was to risk death. Only the military had any chance of controlling Hitler, but the failed coup d’etat of 20 July 1944 proved just how difficult a takeover would be.
As the Allies gathered on Germany’s borders for the final assault, Wehrmacht officers and civilians found guilty of plotting against Hitler were still being executed. The 20 July assassination attempt had resulted in an escalation of terror operations: more than 7000 were arrested and nearly 5000 were executed in its aftermath. The failed plot also led to obligatory fanaticism, as every high-ranking German officer was made to swear personal allegiance to Hitler. In the defence of the Fatherland, any unauthorized surrender – and Hitler did not authorize surrender – was punishable by death.
To an outside observer it was an unequal fight with a certain outcome. Some German generals believed the war was lost as early as July 1944. Each month that passed, each kilometre of retreat, seemed to bring further proof of the country’s inevitable defeat.
The odds may have been heaving in the Allies’ favour, but Eisenhower in the west and the commanders of the Russian fronts (army groups) in the east knew that Germany was not a military power to be underestimated. Only a well-coordinated and tenacious attack would succeed. The campaign began inauspiciously, however, with a battle that would prove unexpectedly bloody, brutal and futile.
›› Hitler’s failure to negotiate
With the advantage of hindsight, it’s hard not to ask why Nazi Germany carried on fighting rather than negotiating a peace with the Allies.
Before the war, Hitler had proudly proclaimed the start of a thousand-year Reich. In his mind, Germany’s territorial expansion into Central and Eastern Europe – and the war that followed – was just the beginning. Even as he was forced to fight on multiple fronts, unable to mount a new offensive, Hitler still talked and behaved like a man who thought he could win the war.
Hitler trusted in himself and his mission, and believed it was Germany’s destiny to be victorious under his leadership. Faced with mounting German losses, Hitler responded by branding his generals incompetent and his people irresolute. He was dismissive of anyone who expressed pessimism towards the Nazi cause, and made it clear that his confidence on winning the war rested on three expectations. Firstly, Hitler believed that the Allies would argue among themselves and that these divisions could be exploited. This was possible: at times, the American and British generals carped at each other, and the only motivation they shared with the Soviets was a desire to see the end of Nazism. Secondly, Hitler hoped that the introduction of new weapons would swing the balance of power in Germany’s favour or terrorize Britain’s population into demanding peace. Had Germany perfected the atomic bomb before the USA, the outcome of the war may indeed have been different.
If none of these hopes was realized, Hitler was certain that providence would step in to save Germany, killing one of his enemies or dealing a similarly devastating blow to the Allies.
Significant sites
Significant sites are marked on the map
Wewelsburg Castle, Wewelsburg.
Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, Dachau.
Dokumentation Obersalzberg, Berchtesgaden.
Credit: Getty Images
Adolf Hitler on his 55th birthday, 1944
On the evening of 11 September 1944, a US patrol crept across the German border from Luxembourg. The following day, US General Courtney Hodges’ First Army pushed forward towards Aachen with the intention of breaking through the Siegfried Line to reach the Rhine.
Eisenhower’s overall plan was to co-ordinate and advance his three army groups together, liberating German territory without committing troops too far ahead of a broad north-south front. The setback around Colmar and Axis resistance in the Netherlands meant that the corps in the centre of the Allied front were moving slightly faster than the rest. Reluctant to halt the advance of Hodges’ American troops – who could make a spectacular breakthrough and shorten the war – the Allies decided to press on, but Hodges realized he must first protect his right flank. This meant taking control of the Hürtgen Forest (Hürtgenwald), and its high point, crowned by the village of Schmidt. This ostensibly simple operation would prove anything but. The Germans lay in wait in the forest, and the ensuing six-month battle was the longest the western Allies would fight on German soil.
›› Logistics
One reason for the delay in launching the final assault on Germany was the perennial, unseen problem of all armies: getting supplies to the front line in sufficient quantities and at the right time. It is no exaggeration to say that logistics was as vital a part of the Liberation as events on the battlefield. For every combat soldier, up to eight others were needed to staff supply chains stretching back to ports and across the seas to Britain and the USA.
Every need had to be foreseen and catered for by clerks and logistics managers. Thousands of men in the field needed nutritious food provided on time and in quantity; tanks and other vehicles required refuelling if they were to keep asserting pressure on the enemy; and survival and success in battle depended on the ready availability of ammunition. The further the army drew from its ports of supply, the more difficult it became to keep them functioning at peak efficiency. Each hungry town conquered and each battalion of new prisoners simply increased the demand for Allied provisions.
The forest constituted unfamiliar and forbidding terrain, and its defenders were easily concealed. These gloomy evergreen woods, bare hilltops and deep gorges bounded by Aachen, Duren and Monschau were of no obvious strategic importance, but the natural landscape provided a perfect snare. The Germans had scattered the thickets with pillboxes, machine-gun nests, barbed wire and minefields, while the woods were difficult to penetrate, either on foot or by vehicle. Heavy rainfall and then snow compounded the formidable task of the American soldiers.
Underestimating the German defences and the difficulties of the terrain, the Americans suffered heavy losses, particularly during a bitter confrontation from 2 November 1944 for the village of Schmidt, northwest of the Rur Reservoir. The US 28th Infantry Division committed three regiments to the advance on Schmidt. On the second day, one managed to reach the village church. The other two regiments struggled in the thick woods, sustaining substantial casualties. The American units in Schmidt then came under artillery fire from the German 89th Infantry Division and the 272nd “People’s Grenadier” Division, while American tanks sent in as support were disabled by the terrain.
All Allied attempts to resupply Schmidt failed. The American troops on the bare ridge between Vossenack and Schmidt were pounded by German artillery until 8 November, when their withdrawal was finally ordered. The reason for the unexpectedly tenacious defence of the woods became clear only later: the Germans needed to hold the Hürtgen Forest as a marshalling area for their planned offensive in the Ardennes – the Battle of the Bulge. It was only after the Battle of the Bulge was concluded in early 1945 that the Allies were finally able to take possession of the forest that had cost so many lives.
Museum of Hürtgenwald in 1944 and in Peacetime
Pfarrer-Dickmann-Str. 21–23, Vossenack, 
museum-huertgenwald.de
The Battle of Hürtgen Forest in the autumn and winter of 1944 claimed the lives of thousands of German and American soldiers, as well as leaving villages, farmland and forest utterly devastated. Evacuated inhabitants returning to their homes at the end of the war saw the labour of generations annihilated. During the summer of 1945, forest fires burned for months and spontaneous explosions of unspent ammunition killed many men, women and children. Displaying immense courage and dedication, the local population set about the daunting task of rebuilding their lives and their land from scratch.
The Museum of Hürtgenwald explores the military confrontation as well as the plight of the civilian population during and after the battle. It is run entirely by volunteers, and most of its objects were collected in the Hürtgen Forest area after the war.
Vossenack was almost completely destroyed between November 1944 and February 1945. The village changed hands nearly thirty times between German and American forces, while the front ran straight through its parish church, which witnessed close-quarters combat and was reduced to rubble.
The church was rebuilt and newly consecrated after World War II. An inscription on the door commemorates 68,000 soldiers who died in Hürtgen Forest, but this figure is inaccurate. Current estimates suggest around half that number perished here; 68,000 is most likely a mix-up of the dead and injured.
Vogelsang International Place and The Torchbearer
Vogelsang 70, Schleiden, vogelsang-ip.de
The Vogelsang complex was built between 1934 and 1936, on a wooded mountain spur above the Urfttal dam, as a National Socialist training institution for young party fanatics. The imposing buildings were intended to show the dominance of state and party over nature, and great trouble was taken to create a relief effect on the hillside. Those who came here adhered to a cult of prowess and virility: physical health, beauty and strength were equated with the ideal of the “Aryan race”.
Around the park are several sculptures depicting favourite Nazi images of the master race, the Herrenmensch. The most conspicuous of these is Willy Meller’s The Torchbearer, which borrows heavily from Christian and Greek mythology. The raised torch references the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus, bringing fire to mankind; the flame symbolizes the rebirth of the nation through the victory of Nazi Germany; while the chilling inscription echoes Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount, directly addressing the cadets: “You are the torchbearers of the Nation, you carry forth the light of spirit in the fight for Adolf Hitler”. When American soldiers captured Vogelsang in 1945, they fired on The Torchbearer and the site’s other sculptures. Look out for the bullet marks, which are still clearly visible today.
Field Hospital Bunker Simonskall
Simonskall, museum-huertgenwald.de
This medical aid bunker is the only bunker of its type in all Nordrhein-Westphalia, and its inventory is almost completely original. Conditions were very cramped, with four medics caring for twenty or thirty infirm soldiers. Visits can be arranged via the Museum of Hürtgenwald in Vossenack, which is run by the same volunteer organization that renovated the bunker.
In November 1944, several units of the 28th US Infantry Division advanced towards the village of Schmidt via the so-called “Kall Trail”, a rough road cutting through the dense forest. After eight days of fighting, the Battle of Schmidt ended in German victory and the exhausted US soldiers were forced to fall back on their front line in Vossenack. On their return, the troops had to cross the Kall Bridge, leaving them vulnerable to German forces who had retaken the surrounding valley. Between 7 and 9 November, Dr Stüttgen, a German captain in the medical corps, managed to negotiate a series of short ceasefires at this bridge, allowing wounded soldiers from both sides to be treated. While the effect of these ceasefires was limited, the lives of numerous US soldiers were saved by German doctors and paramedics. After the war, Dr Stüttgen was honoured by the Governor of the State of Pennsylvania for his act of humanity. The events at Kall Bridge are immortalized in the painting A Time for Healing, which is displayed at the National Guard Museum in Washington DC; a replica can be seen at the Museum of Hürtgenwald in Vossenack.
A simple sculpture by Michael Pohlmann marks today’s bridge.
Thousands of American and German soldiers died during the six months of bloody fighting for Hürtgen Forest. Most American servicemen were repatriated to the US for burial, but some of the German soldiers who lost their lives during the campaign were laid to rest in German war cemeteries at Hürtgen or Vossenack, or at communal cemeteries in the area. Many more were transferred to German war cemeteries in Belgium and the Netherlands.
The Vossenack German Cemetery was constructed on a hill by the German War Graves Commission (Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge) between 1949 and 1952. Today, the cemetery contains the graves of 2347 war dead, among them 35 men who lost their lives during postwar operations as members of an “Ammunition Search and Removal Team”. A monument at the entrance commemorates Julius Erasmus, a German engineer captain who – at great risk – recovered the remains of around 1500 of his former comrades from the Hürtgen Forest battlefields and personally buried them on this hill.
Heimbach, kloster-mariawald.de
During the battle for Hürtgen Forest, this 15th-century Trappist abbey served as a hospital for casualties on both sides. The Nazis closed the abbey before the war because of its opposition to their regime, arresting some brothers and conscripting others. A few were allowed to stay on as farmhands, working the fields of the monastery.
Not all the wounded treated here could be saved – 414 men are buried in the military cemetery nearby.
When Hodges’ American soldiers arrived at Hürtgen Forest, they had to adapt quickly to fighting in the wooded terrain. Their German counterparts, meanwhile, were reinforced by troops returning from the Eastern Front who were familiar with the tactics demanded by forest warfare. In areas such as Ochsenkopf and Peterberg, the Germans had another advantage: they could withstand American fire in the pillboxes that dotted the hills. These formed part of the Westwall, or Siegfried Line – the last line of defence of Hitler’s Third Reich. In the northern Eifel, the pillboxes were generally situated in dense spruce forests, where trees doubled up as tank obstacles. In the bewildering forest, every German company and regiment could hide behind the pillboxes’ massive concrete walls.
The scant remains of a number of pillboxes can still be made out in the forest.
›› The Siegfried Line
In 1936, Nazi Germany began to build a line of defences along its western border to match the French Maginot Line. The Germans know it as the Westwall, but in English it is the Siegfried Line, a reference to the Wagnerian hero who didn’t know what fear was.
The Siegfried Line consisted of a series of fortifications with interlocking fields of fire, minefields and anti-tank obstacles. In 1939, construction of the structures used up one third of all cement production in the Reich.
The conquest of France in 1940 rendered the Siegfried Line redundant: henceforth occupied Europe would be defended against its enemies by the Atlantic Wall. As a consequence, its fortifications were neglected and its guns removed. In autumn 1944, however, the Siegfried Line rediscovered its purpose when it was required to delay the invading army until reinforcements could be brought up from the front. Determined German soldiers held the American and British troops at bay for several months, until the line was breached and overrun in February 1945. Several components of the Westwall survive, particularly near Aachen.
The Allied operation to reach the Rhine – codenamed Veritable – was a campaign fought with grit and zeal on both sides.
As the Allies battled on at Hürtgen Forest, another unsuccessful attempt to invade Germany was being launched in the northern Netherlands. Operation Market Garden failed to capture the bridge across the Lower Rhine at Arnhem, but it did give the Allies a salient extending to Nijmegen. This was chosen by General Montgomery as the starting point for another assault, Operation Veritable, but the surprise German offensive in the Ardennes – the Battle of the Bulge – intervened. Allied resources became tied up in the Ardennes and the start of Veritable was delayed until the German troops had been driven back to the Siegfried Line, where they’d launched their initial attack, in January 1945.
The aim of Veritable was for Montgomery’s British and 21st Canadian Army Group to advance swiftly to reach the Rhine at the far north of the Allied front. The troops would then cross the river and attack the Ruhr conurbation from the north, making a concentrated thrust at Germany’s industrial centre.
Credit: Getty Images
Kleve was pulverized by Allied bombardment in October 1944 and again in February 1945
Veritable was entrusted to the First Canadian Army (under General Crerar), supported by the British XXX Corps commanded by General Horrocks. Its instructions were to clear the area between the rivers Maas (Meuse) and Rhine of German forces, so that a crossing of the latter could be organized. To assist in the task, the US Ninth Army was to simultaneously implement Operation Grenade, approaching from the south to meet the British and Canadians.
As a prelude to Operation Veritable, the historic town of Kleve (Cleves) was heavily bombed. Veritable proper began on 8 February 1945 with a massive artillery barrage.
When the Allies crossed the border into Germany they entered the Reichswald, a densely wooded area 10km wide and 15km deep. German units had turned the forest into a death trap. Their commanders knew that the Rhineland was the last chance to organize an effective, spirited defence before the Allies penetrated the heart of the Reich. The natural obstacles of the forest were heavily reinforced by German troops and rigged with trenches, mortar pits, barbed wire, mines and anti-tank ditches. Two major roads provided the only means of an Allied approach, while inside the forest there were virtually no other surfaced roads. The paths leading through the woods snaked and zig-zagged – ideal for laying ambushes. The British and Canadian troops were forced to advance on a narrow front, while movement was further restricted by bad weather and the control of large areas by the German army.
As at Hürtgen Forest, the wooded terrain naturally favoured the German defenders, who could only be dislodged after close-quarters combat. Deep in the forest, infantry units fought hand-to-hand, where risk, bravery and tenacity were as important as technical skill. At times, the struggles in the Reichswald resembled the battles of attrition fought between opposing trenches in World War I.
To the south, Simpson’s US Ninth Army made good progress under Operation Grenade, until the German troops flooded the lands in its path. Simpson was forced to wait two weeks for the water levels to subside. He resumed his march on 23 February 1945, and by 2 March his troops had reached the Rhine opposite Düsseldorf.
With relentless determination, the advancing troops of Operation Veritable fought their way eastward past Kleve (Cleves) to reach the Rhine opposite Emmerich. To the south, they met the US troops of Grenade at Geldern on 3 March. As the Allies approached the river, the Germans were ordered to evacuate their forces to the other bank and destroy the bridges behind them. By mid-March the Rhineland had been cleared, although at great cost, with heavy casualties to both military and civilian populations.
Montgomery would later conclude that the Germans had made three major mistakes while defending occupied Europe: fighting the battle of France south of the Seine rather than using it as a defensive line; launching a counter-offensive in the Ardennes without air support or fuel to sustain it; and lastly, deciding to stand and fight in the Rhineland – west of the river – in order to mask the Ruhr.
The Allies were finally ready to cross the Rhine, threaten the Ruhr and take the battle into the heart of Germany.
The town of Kleve (Cleves) was repeatedly bombed as part of the invasion of Germany. On 7 October 1944, a major bombardment by the RAF using Lancaster and Halifax bombers left Kleve devastated and an estimated five hundred civilians dead. The historic centre was mostly destroyed, including Schwanenburg castle and its imposing tower, the Schwanenturm. Just four months later, on 7 February 1945 (the eve of Operation Veritable), Kleve was bombed again and the upper town was ravaged. The civilian population had largely been evacuated, leaving only military personnel, members of the Hitler Youth and firefighters behind. One hundred Ukrainian slave labourers, locked in the prison on Krohnestrasse, were killed in the raid.
The Reichswald Forest War Cemetery, designed by Philip Hepworth, is the largest Commonwealth cemetery in Germany. It holds the remains of 7654 soldiers, mostly airmen from the Royal Air Force and paratroopers; 176 burials remain unidentified. Wheelchair access is possible. The cemetery is situated in the Reichswald itself, an ancient forest on the Dutch-German border and the scene of heavy fighting in February 1945.
›› Prisoners of war
The rules on taking prisoners of war, as laid out in the Third Geneva Convention of 1929, were easily stated but just as easily broken. All countries in World War II were obliged to adhere to the Geneva Convention, both during fighting and occupation.
One of the most fundamental directives made it unlawful to kill a soldier who had surrendered on the battlefield. There were instances of misuse, however, when capitulators would fly a white flag only to fight on against their unwitting opponents. Abuses of the Geneva Convention made some combatants cynical about honouring its legal and ethical procedures. In certain cases, commanders on both sides indicated that prisoners were an inconvenience, and that it was better to annihilate the enemy completely. Even when the framework was upheld, excuses were often made for soldiers who vented their bitterness by killing unarmed prisoners in cold blood.
Once in custody, prisoners of war were property of the state to which they had surrendered, not of any individual soldier. They were to be securely and safely incarcerated for the duration of the conflict, treated humanely and their wounds tended to. No physical or mental torture was permitted to extract information from them. The transporting, housing and feeding of prisoners of war made great demands on the resources of every army.
An exception was made by the convention to “unlawful” combatants: those who participated in battle without a uniform or visible insignia, and who were not part of a clear hierarchy of command. This meant that saboteurs, spies, ununiformed snipers, plain-clothed commandos and resistance fighters were not protected under international law. Many were summarily shot.
Thousands of Polish officers and men captured in 1939 spent nearly six years in prisoner of war camps, a few months longer than the unlucky French and British soldiers captured in the brief battles of 1940. Generally, officers were kept separate from enlisted men in the camps and treated with more respect. The International Red Cross did what it could to ensure that the rules of holding prisoners of war were complied with – for instance, that letters and parcels from home could reach men in custody – but experiences of captivity were varied, ranging from the tolerable to the unspeakable. Much depended on the nationality of the prisoner, and where they were captured: around 3.5 million Soviet POWs taken by the Nazis are estimated to have died from cruelty, neglect or overwork.
The course of war is sometimes dictated not by strategy, the technical skill of soldiers or even the quality of equipment, but by luck – and knowing how to exploit a small stroke of good fortune.
As a German retreat from the Rhineland became increasingly likely, the Nazi high command issued orders to lay explosive charges on the bridges across the Rhine. If it proved impossible to hold the west bank, the German troops and vehicles should be evacuated and the charges detonated.
When General Hodges’ US First Army approached the Rhine on 7 March 1945, they expected to find all the bridges blown. But the defenders of the Ludendorff rail bridge at Remagen were surprised by the approach of the first American patrols; their bridge, situated between Koblenz and Bonn, was not on any strategic route of conquest. German soldiers scrambled to detonate the charges, which caused only partial damage to the bridge, which was subsequently seized. An Allied bridgehead was quickly established on the east bank. One bridge was not enough to win the war, but it was a prize to boost morale and discourage the Germans, who discussed flying kamikaze missions into the bridge and even targeted it with V2 rockets. The bridge eventually fell of its own accord ten days later, but not before the Allies had erected temporary bridges beside it. Their forces were now building on the east side of the river, although Eisenhower chose to wait for further bridgeheads to be established before pushing forwards into central Germany.
Credit: Getty Images
American Navy LCM landing craft being loaded with a tank to cross the Rhine as part of Operation Plunder
Inside the Cologne National Socialism Documentation Centre
On the night of 22–23 March, US General Patton’s Third Army reached the Rhine at Oppenheim, south of Mainz, and crossed it using boats and later a floating bridge. The next day, British Field Marshal Montgomery breached the Rhine in an elaborate “invasion within an invasion”, Operation Plunder. One million ground troops stormed across the river, supported by 14,000 paratroopers who landed on the opposite shore.
The US Seventh Army crossed the river on the night of 24–25 March near Worms. The Free French Army, delayed by the Colmar Pocket, made the crossing at sites between Mannheim and Karlsruhe between 31 March and 2 April.
NSDOK (Cologne National Socialism Documentation Centre)
Appellhofplatz 23–25, Cologne, nsdok.de
From 1935 to 1945, the EL-DE House functioned as the headquarters of the Cologne Gestapo. Many victims of the German secret police were held in its basements – with up to 25 people sharing one cell – and executions were carried out in the courtyard. The last Gestapo officers fled when American troops entered the city. Cologne, which straddles the Rhine, was officially taken on 6 March 1945 by the US First Army, the day before they crossed the Rhine at Remagen.
The documentation centre was founded in 1979 and serves both as a memorial to the victims of the Nazi regime and as a research centre documenting Cologne’s history during the Nazi era.
An der Alten Rheinbrücke 11/Rheinpromenade, Remagen, bruecke-remagen.de
Although the Ludendorff railway bridge spanning the Rhine at Remagen collapsed in 1945, two of its towers remain intact. Today, they contain a museum recalling the bridge’s history and its role in the Liberation through photos, newspaper clippings, a video documentary and a selection of other artefacts.
›› Bridges
Every river on the liberation route was both a line of defence for the retreating German army and an obstacle for the Allied advance. Strategy demanded careful planning as to whether a bridge should be preserved or demolished, and when. A key bridge blown up at the right time could prolong a battle by days or even weeks – as the Germans expertly demonstrated in Italy and in the battle for the Rhineland. A priority for the liberators was taking bridges intact before they could be destroyed, but this was seldom possible. If Allied ground forces couldn’t reach a bridge quickly enough to save it, they were forced to cross the river by boat under heavy fire. Only when they had established control of the opposite bank could engineers begin to build a makeshift military bridge capable of carrying tanks and other vehicles across. Failing to destroy a bridge was a costly mistake, for which the Germans paid the price at Remagen.
Between December 1944 and March 1945, the Dortmund State Police, a branch of the Gestapo, arrested thirty known members of the Resistance in the region. They were imprisoned, along with around two hundred others (including non-German forced labourers and prisoners of war) before being taken to sites south of Dortmund, including Bittermark Forest, where they were ordered to stand in bomb craters and shot. The last mass execution was carried out on 12 April 1945, the day before a division of the US Ninth Army – who had crossed the Rhine with Montgomery in Operation Plunder – arrived in Dortmund.
The Bittermark Memorial is a stark bunker-like slab, with haunting relief images depicting the condemned.
The majority of the 3330 people buried in this cemetery are airmen whose graves were brought in from Düsseldorf, Krefeld, Mönchengladbach, Essen, Aachen and Dortmund. Four hundred and fifty are from Cologne alone. Men from other branches of the armed forces interred here mostly lost their lives during the battle of the Rhineland, or in the advance from the Rhine to the Elbe. There are also nine war graves of other nationalities, most of them Polish.
After the Allies had breached the Rhine, they had a chance to regroup and take stock before marching on central Germany.
By the end of March 1945, General Eisenhower was drained; the Rhine had finally been crossed, but only after months of difficulties and reversals. Since D-Day there had been several moments in which the Allies had assumed the collapse of Germany was imminent and the war was close to an end, and Eisenhower had learned not to celebrate too soon. Once the Allies had successfully crossed the great river, Eisenhower had time to rethink his strategy. The weight of responsibility had depleted his mental and physical resources, however, and he took five days off in Cannes, which he used mainly to sleep.
Credit: Getty Images
A German civilian carries her belongings from a burning building in newly liberated Siegburg
For most of the war, Eisenhower had favoured an advance in Germany on a broad front, and for several months had encouraged Montgomery’s belief that his 21st Army Group would be the main invasion force, with a mandate to thrust across northern Germany towards Berlin. When Eisenhower returned to his headquarters at Reims, he revised his strategy, partly because of the capture of the bridge at Remagen and partly because of the rapid progress of the Red Army from the east. He realized that there was no point in competing with the Soviets to take Berlin, who were much closer to the German capital than the Anglo-American forces. In addition, committing US troops to an attack on Berlin would risk heavy casualties for a city that was steadily being reduced to rubble.
Instead of looking to Berlin, Eisenhower nominated Montgomery’s rival, US General Omar Bradley, as the vanguard. His US 12th Army Group would traverse Hessen and Thuringia, making for Leipzig and Dresden in Saxony, before meeting up with the Soviets on the Elbe. Once Germany was defeated, it would be divided into zones assigned to the western Allies and the Soviets. Montgomery’s role would be to protect Bradley’s northern flank, while the south was assigned to Devers’ 6th Army Group.
›› Occupation zones
In September 1944 – when Allied victory was still uncertain – American, British and Soviet politicians began to plan the fate of a defeated Germany. Designed to prevent the dominance of a single power and international disputes after the war, Germany was to be divided into three zones of occupation, assigned to each of the “Big Three” victors.
The zones were reaffirmed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, but with a difference. The Americans and British insisted that the French be given their own zone in the west of Germany. Stalin reluctantly agreed, so long as the French zone was carved out of the American (southern German) and British (northern German) zones. Berlin, located within the Soviet sector, would also be split into four zones of occupation.
No firm “stopping” lines were drawn up at the conference, which would have prevented the western Allied troops from liberating parts of Germany in the Soviet zone. At the time of Yalta, the British and Americans were still west of the Rhine, recovering from the Ardennes offensive and anxious about the existence of a southern redoubt. They didn’t expect to reach beyond the Elbe before the Red Army took Berlin.
In April 1945, however, the pace of the British and American advance took them further than expected. Eisenhower restrained his armies from continuing further east, leaving some Allied planners disappointed, who wanted to see General Patton liberate Prague. Instead, Eisenhower established stopping lines, beyond which only reconnaissance patrols were permitted to venture. Churchill remarked that Eisenhower’s decision must have been political, thinking ahead to the new world order. Yalta, he claimed, left a loophole: occupation zones were not to affect strategic military decisions, so Berlin, Vienna and Prague could be liberated by whichever army got to them first.
By the end of the war, both the British and Americans had advanced into territory far beyond their zones of occupation. The “line of contact” – where the western Allies met the Soviets – ran from Wismar on the Baltic, through Schwerin and Magdeburg, to the east of Leipzig and through Pilsen (in modern-day Czech Republic) to Linz (in Austria).
In July 1945 the British and Americans withdrew from the territory they had taken in the Soviet zone. The Soviet Union, in turn, honoured the division of the city of Berlin into four sectors. Austria was treated in a similar fashion to Germany, except that the centre of Vienna was declared a fifth, international zone to be governed by each of the occupying powers in turn. The postwar Potsdam Conference in August ratified the occupation zones.
Having successfully crossed the Rhine, the Allies were presented with an opportunity they had anticipated for some time. The cities of the Ruhr made up the industrial heartland of the German Reich, and although they had been damaged by Allied bombing, the factories were still of great symbolic importance. Hitler would defend them with force, but that incurred a risk: the Allies may be able to surround the Ruhr and capture the German troops within their cordon.
The German Army Group B, led by Walter Model, defended the Ruhr. Model was aware of the risk of encirclement, but was told by Hitler to make the Ruhr into a fortress that would not yield. Model was outmatched. His men were poorly trained: they included numerous Volkssturm militia volunteers, some of whom were unarmed, and members of the Hitler youth who – though enthusiastic and ready to die for the Fatherland – were unlikely to offer any serious resistance.
On Easter Sunday, which fell on 1 April 1945, US troops travelling north met their counterparts travelling south at Lippstadt, and the Ruhr was enveloped. Model’s predicament worsened, and on 14 April the US divisions split the Ruhr Pocket into two further sections, east and west. The next day Model formally dissolved his army group, a move to make his coming surrender seem less calamitous. He made provisions for the safety of his family before committing suicide on 21 April to avoid the shame of capitulation. More than 300,000 prisoners were captured in the Ruhr Pocket, a much higher number than the Allied planners had predicted. In total, one and a half million German prisoners were taken on the Western Front. Incarcerating all of them in safe conditions was a major problem for the Allies, a common issue throughout the Liberation.
Credit: Getty Images
Establishing the bridgehead across the Rhine at Remagen
While the events of the Ruhr Pocket were being concluded, Hodges’ US First Army advanced rapidly across land to the south of the Harz mountains, until it neared the Elbe river. On 25 April, forward American patrols met Soviet scouts at Torgau, a meeting of great significance. German forces in the north of the country were cut off from those in the south, and Berlin was surrounded. The war could only have days left.
Credit: Shutterstock
Wewelsburg Castle
Olbrichtplatz 2, Dresden, mhmbw.de
Dresden, in the far east of Germany’s central belt, was one of the last cities to be taken by the Allies on 8 May 1945. It had already suffered enormously as the result of a ruthless bombing campaign in February of the same year.
The Military History Museum in Dresden is one of the few museums in the country that has German military equipment from both world wars. The largest items on display include a V2 ballistic missile and Germany’s first submarine. The museum aims to explain how armies and war influenced politics and society in the twentieth century, and vice versa.
Schlossgasse 1, Colditz, schloss-colditz.com
Fifteenth-century Colditz Castle was used to incarcerate political prisoners in the early years of the Nazi regime. At the outbreak of war, it was designated “Oflag IV C” and claimed to be “escape-proof”, serving as a prisoner of war camp for Allied officers until it was liberated on 16 April 1945. Life inside was relatively comfortable, but thirty prisoners still defied the camp’s guards, barbed wire, searchlights and reputation to break free. A British escapee later wrote The Colditz Story, which was subsequently adapted into the film that turned the castle into a household name in Britain. The museum displays artefacts and uniforms of Allied POWs as well as detailed information on their legendary breakouts.
Burgwall 19, Büren-Wewelsburg, wewelsburg.de
Heinrich Himmler had big plans for this triangular castle. It was used in the 1930s and the early years of the war as an SS ideological training site, a meeting place of high-ranking officers and a base for Himmler’s military and racial elite. The north tower was planned as the focal point of a vast complex consisting of a series of concentric installations. Slave labourers, housed in a specially commissioned concentration camp nearby, began construction work, but it was never finished. The intended purpose of the circular crypt and Hall of the Supreme SS Leaders above it is unknown.
In the guardhouse, a permanent exhibition entitled “Ideology and Terror of the SS” tells the story of the SS and its relationship with Wewelsburg between 1933 and 1945.
Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, Weimar, buchenwald.de
“Nothing has shocked me as much as that sight,” wrote Eisenhower of his visit to Buchenwald, the largest concentration camp in Germany, shortly after its liberation on 11 April 1945. At its height, Buchenwald and its 139 subcamps held a staggering 280,000 prisoners. An estimated 56,000 people died here – some as the result of torture or medical experiments – including eight thousand Soviet prisoners who were shot in a specially built killing facility. There was an underground resistance organization operating in the camp, but it was unable to prevent the worst excesses.
›› The bombing of Dresden
Dresden, capital of Saxony state, had little industry of value to the Reich. It was known for its production of china, and yet it was repeatedly bombed in February 1945 by the British and Americans, igniting a firestorm. While emergency workers tried to control the fires caused by one raid, another wave of bombers arrived overhead. Whether the bombing of Dresden was a legitimate act of strategic warfare or a terrible atrocity – even a war crime – is hotly debated. The number of casualties is also controversial, but 25,000 civilian deaths is probably a fairly low estimate.
One of the men ordered to dig bodies out of the rubble was Kurt Vonnegut, an American intelligence scout who had been taken prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge. During the bombing he took refuge in an underground meat store; he would later use his experiences in his cult novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.
Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp
Kohnsteinweg 20, Nordhausen, buchenwald.de
Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp was established in 1943 near Nordhausen in Thuringia and served as a subcamp of Buchenwald. Like Buchenwald, it was liberated on 11 April 1945. The memorial includes one permanent collection and several changing exhibits with information on the camp’s history.
Sorbenweg 7, Erfurt, topfundsoehne.de
“Always happy to be at your service” was the slogan of Topf & Söhne, the leading company for the supply, installation and maintenance of crematorium incinerators under the Weimar Republic. The creation of the Nazis' extermination camps boosted business for Topf & Söhne, whose engineers installed corpse incinerators and ventilation systems for gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau and serviced their upkeep. The management knew what its products were being used for; demand for better efficiency led one of the company’s engineers to design and patent a horrifying “continuous operation corpse incineration oven for mass use”. Even as late as February 1945 Topf & Söhne was planning a new extermination centre for Mauthausen camp in Austria, reusing machines that had to be dismantled at Auschwitz-Birkenau because of the approach of the Red Army. The company was closed down after the war, and its former premises are now a memorial to those who died as a consequence of the Holocaust and – more directly – as a result of Topf & Söhne apparatus.
›› The SS
The Nazi regime relied on violence and terror perpetrated by a fanatical paramilitary organization called the SS (or Schutzstaffel). The SS was founded in 1925 as a personal protection force to escort the Führer, and each member swore unconditional loyalty to him.
In 1926, Heinrich Himmler, a former chicken farmer, was appointed as Reichsführer – head of the SS. After he had employed his storm-troopers to eliminate a competing paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, the SA (in 1934), he transformed the SS into a vast structure that infiltrated the lives of ordinary German people and spread terror across Europe. “I know there are many people who fall ill when they see this black uniform,” Himmler remarked; “we don’t expect that we will be loved.”
The SS was divided into units. One squad enforced Nazi racial laws; another ran the concentration and extermination camps; while the Gestapo – the official secret police – carried out investigations, acts of torture and executions in Germany and its occupied territories. The SS had its own system of ranks, which deliberately differed from those of the army, and a variety of distinctive insignia, most notably a double “S” in German runes and an ominous skull and crossbones.
In keeping with Nazi ideology, the SS recruited according to a policy of racial selection. It excluded non-Aryans from its ranks, relaxing this rule only when it urgently needed new recruits – later accepting foreigners with proven fascist sympathies.
The SS branch known as the Waffen-SS occupied a blurred space between paramilitary and military organization. Known as the “Black Order”, its series of 38 fully equipped divisions worked alongside and sometimes rivalled units of the regular army, the Wehrmacht. Because fearlessness and fanaticism were prized traits in the Waffen-SS, where surrender was deemed a fate worse than death, its units suffered particularly high casualty rates. The Waffen-SS was also notorious for its brutal reprisals against acts of resistance, and for initiating its own bloodthirsty atrocities.
The SS was largely responsible for the horrors of the extermination camps. A number of other sites and monuments, including the ruins of Oradour in France, are further testament to their ruthlessness. Because of their reputation for cruelty, SS men were regarded with special contempt by the Allied troops as they fought to liberate Europe. After the war, many former SS members claimed they were guilty only of efficiency and patriotism, and that their “crimes” were exaggerations and lies circulated by their enemies.
While Allied commanders encountered the bulk of German forces where they expected to find them – concentrated in the centre of the country blocking the route to Berlin – they still harboured a fear that everything might not be as it seemed.
For some time, murmurings of a Nazi contingency plan had been rippling across Europe. They hinted that Germany’s retreating armies could be set to regroup at an Alpenfestung (also known as the “National Redoubt”), an impregnable Alpine fortress that would function as a final holdout. Many Allied politicians and military planners believed the rumours. The strategy seemed consistent with the Nazi psyche. Moreover, Berlin was not a city with natural defences, and once the Oder had been crossed in the east and the Rhine in the west, there was little to stop a large army taking the capital by force. Southern Germany and Austria, meanwhile, were more easily defended as a result of their mountainous terrain. It was plausible that Hitler – an Austrian by birth – had made plans for a last stand in a landscape more friendly and familiar.
A trickle of intelligence reports were read as indicating German plans for the National Redoubt: the stockpiling of arms, equipment and food; the excavation of tunnels; the building of fortifications; and even the construction of subterranean factories to continue building Messerschmitt planes and V2 rockets. Meanwhile, Goebbels’ propaganda hinted that all was not lost for National Socialism. The National Redoubt grew in the Allied imagination into a potential reality that could not be ignored.
Credit: Alamy
The Eagle's Nest, Hitler's retreat near Obersalzberg
Even the Allied commanders who treated the idea of a last great stand by Hitler with scepticism could not afford to dismiss it completely. If the rumours were true, their clean victory would be frustrated by a determined garrison of well-armed, fanatical troops. Hitler could hole up and rebuild his regime or, at the very least, subject Europe to years of guerrilla warfare.
The task of overwhelming resistance in southern Germany and neutralizing the prophesied National Redoubt was assigned to three Allied armies.
The First French Army under de Lattre was given the extreme southwestern corner of the country, adjacent to France. Having been delayed by the Colmar Pocket, de Lattre’s troops crossed the Rhine later than the other armies, between 31 March and 2 April 1945, at Germersheim and Speyer, before liberating Stuttgart on 21 April and Ulm on 24 April. To its northwest, Patch’s US Seventh Army was directed to work its way along an arc from its Rhine crossing site at Worms through western Bavaria and into Austria. It liberated Nuremberg on 20 April, Dachau concentration camp on 29 April and Munich on 30 April, before its advance eventually came to a halt at the Brenner Pass, where it met American troops of the US Fifth Army heading towards Germany from northern Italy.
Further northwest still, protecting the flank of the US First Army as it made its way across central Germany, was the US Third Army under Patton. Patton travelled quickly, leaving Mainz on 22 March; Frankfurt was reached on 29 March and Linz (Hitler’s hometown) in Austria on 5 May. He was only stopped by Eisenhower when he reached Pilsen, on the border of Czechoslovakia, deep inside the designated Soviet zone of occupation.
German General Hermann Foertsch and American General Jacob Devers signed an instrument of surrender covering the southeastern areas of the Reich at 2.30pm on 4 May 1945.
After a thorough search, the existence of the National Redoubt turned out to be unfounded. It suited the moribund Nazi regime for its enemies to believe it had a final, elusive plan, but the Allies had misread Hitler this time. He had always dismissed his commanders’ pleas for a last stand. Sometimes history leans towards anti-climax, and Hitler remained in Berlin where he let the inevitable run its course.
›› The Eagle's Nest
The Eagle's Nest or Kehlsteinhaus is a chalet poised atop an 1834m-high rock outcrop near Obersalzberg in Bavaria, designed by Nazi acolyte Martin Bormann and gifted to Adolf Hitler on his 50th birthday in 1939. It was a prized trophy when it was captured by the US 3rd Infantry in early May 1945, and is one of the few monuments to Nazi arrogance that has survived intact. A truly outstanding spot, with breathtaking panoramas over the surrounding mountains, the Eagle's Nest – now a restaurant run by a charitable trust – would be truly idyllic if not for its origins and associations. A guided tour includes an ascent in the original brass elevator.
Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site
Alte Römerstr. 75, Dachau, kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de
On 22 March 1933, soon after Hitler came to power as Chancellor, Dachau concentration camp opened to receive political opponents of the new regime, who were incarcerated in indefinite “preventive custody”. They were joined over the following years by Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Roma, Sinti, Poles and Soviet prisoners of war. Dachau spawned 150 subcamps, an empire of misery, exploitation and death. On 29 April 1945, US troops arrived at Dachau and were aghast at the sight of 33,000 starving and mistreated survivors. Some American soldiers were so horrified that they gunned down the SS guards who had already surrendered.
Credit: Getty Images
Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) was a prominent critic of the Nazi party. Its racist policies and their violent enforcement directly opposed the pastor’s Christian ethics. As the war progressed, Bonhoeffer came to consider passive resistance an insufficient response to the evils of Nazism. He was an active member of the Resistance and plotted against Hitler before being arrested and imprisoned in April 1943. After the 20 July plot in 1944, Bonhoeffer was found guilty of conspiracy and hanged at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945, two weeks before its liberation by the Allies and less than a month before the collapse of the Nazi regime. Bonhoeffer’s life and fate illustrate the great sacrifice of many Germans who resisted the Nazis at great personal cost.
Brienner Str. 34, Munich, ns-dokuzentrum-muenchen.de
The capital of Bavaria, Munich played a key role in the development of National Socialism; this documentation centre charts the details. It was here that the German Workers’ Party was founded shortly after World War I. In 1920 it changed its name to the National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP), although it had nothing to do with socialism. Initially the party was a marginal group that struggled for publicity and popularity – it achieved the former on 9 November 1923, when the Nazis attempted a coup d’état known as the Beerhall Putsch. Hitler received a mild jail sentence, during which he wrote Mein Kampf. Even after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 the party headquarters remained in Munich, and the first concentration camp was built at nearby Dachau.
Flossenbürg Concentration Camp
Gedächtnisallee 5, Flossenbürg, gedenkstaette-flossenbuerg.de
As the Soviets continued their advance into Germany and concentration camps in the occupied territories were evacuated, the number of prisoners in Flossenbürg, northeast of Nuremberg, rapidly increased. By March 1945, there were 15,000 people in the main camp and a further 37,000 in satellite camps. At the beginning of April, the SS executed resistance fighters here, including some high-ranking participants in the attempt to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944. An estimated 30,000 other people died at Flossenbürg because of the appalling living conditions and hard labour. The camp was liquidated between 16 and 20 April 1945, and the remaining prisoners organized into “death marches” heading southwards. When the US 90th Infantry and 97th Infantry arrived on 23 April, the camp was mostly empty, except for 1500 critically ill prisoners who had been left behind.
›› Concentration camps
Nazi Germany wasn’t just a police state, it was a prison state too. The regime’s grip on power depended on incarcerating millions of innocent people who fell foul of the party’s ideology. As the Allies moved across Germany dismantling the Nazi regime, they liberated its many concentration camps. Finally open to the scrutiny of the outside world, the inhumane conditions suffered by camp inmates appalled people around the globe.
Mass arrests of Hitler’s political opponents began soon after he came to power, and Dachau concentration camp housed the first undesirables as early as 1933. As the regime became bolder, ever greater numbers were installed in a burgeoning system of camps and subcamps in which ill treatment, malnutrition, disease, forced labour, summary justice and death were commonplace.
The SS ran the concentration camps (Konzentrationslager) with ruthless administrative efficiency. Labour camps differed from extermination camps, although the two often existed within the same complex, such as at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There were no death camps in Germany designed expressly as places of mass murder. The inmates of labour camps were incarcerated indefinitely without trial but were rarely subject to systematic killings. Prisoner of war camps (Stalags or Oflags) were something else again, conforming, at least nominally, to international law.
Nazi concentration camp prisoners wore uniforms with a badge indicating their offence. Jews, for example, were made to wear a yellow Star of David. Inside the camps, inmates existed outside the law, and camp guards frequently committed horrific acts of violence against them. Many were used as slave labour, others as disposable fodder for medical experiments.
The outside world knew little about the concentration camps until the invasion of Germany beyond the Rhine in April 1945. With the discovery of the camps and the depravity they witnessed, any illusion that Nazism was simply a different – pragmatic and authoritarian – approach to organizing modern society was quickly dispelled. Evidence from the camps, their abysmal conditions, ruthless cruelty and mass killings, changed perceptions of human nature forever.
While the liberation of the camps brought some survivors hope, others found it hard to adjust to civilian life. Many had no home or family to return to; some suffered from survivor’s guilt; others were in such poor health that they never recovered, but died in freedom rather than captivity.
The site for this cemetery to the south of Munich was chosen shortly after hostilities had ceased. The great majority of the 2934 people buried here (93 unidentified) are airmen who were shot down over Bavaria, Württemberg, Austria, Hessen and Thuringia, brought from their scattered graves by the Army Graves Service. The remainder are men who were killed while escaping from prisoner of war camps in the same areas, or who died towards the end of the war on forced marches from the camps to more remote areas.
Documentation Center Nazi Party Rally Grounds
Bayernstr. 110, Nuremberg, museen.nuernberg.de/dokuzentrum
The city of Nuremberg had great significance for the Nazis. In the 1930s, the famous Nuremberg Rallies were held here, during which Hitler perfected his oratory skills to massed ranks of the faithful. It was here too, during a rally in 1935, that Hitler proclaimed the discrimination and persecution of German Jews in the infamous Nuremberg Laws.
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Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler on the terrace of the Berghof
The city’s final service to the Nazis was as a place of postwar trials and executions. The Documentation Center has a permanent exhibition that seeks to explain the hold the Nazis had on German society up until the end of the war.
Salzbergstr. 41, Berchtesgaden, obersalzberg.de
After his rise to power, Hitler bought a holiday home in Obersalzberg, near the town of Berchtesgaden, with the proceeds of Mein Kampf. He called his house the Berghof. Obersalzberg’s residents were gradually driven out as other Nazi leaders moved in, buying up its properties. Their presence turned this inconspicuous corner of Bavaria into a second seat of Nazi government, close to their powerbase in Munich. From here, Hitler presented himself to the world – often through film – as a dictator at ease, as a good neighbour and as a lover of nature, children and the ordinary people of rural Germany.
›› Austria
One of Hitler’s key ambitions when the Nazi party rose to prominence was to reunite his native Austria with Germany, a move that would break the treaties that had ended World War I. In 1938, he defied the world and joined the two countries in a union known as Anschluss. Austria became a province of Greater Germany, subject to its repressive racial laws.
A number of concentration camps were built in Austria. The most visited today is Mauthausen (southeast of Linz, mauthausen-memorial.org), which, together with its various subcamps, processed almost 200,000 displaced and detained persons, including political prisoners. A group of exiled Spanish Republicans was even sent to Mauthausen as a courtesy to General Franco – despite technically being citizens of a neutral country. As the war drew towards its conclusion, overcrowding increased as inmates from other camps were evacuated and transported here, either on forced “death marches” or in cramped railway wagons.
During its seven years of existence, Mauthausen earned a reputation as one of the harshest Nazi camps, where throngs of inmates were worked to death and 3500 people, including a high proportion of Soviet prisoners of war, were exterminated in a single gas chamber. As the Reich crumbled, SS guards tried to destroy the evidence before they fled. An estimated 90,000 people died at Mauthausen, including some after US troops liberated the camp on 5 May 1945.
Hartheim Castle (Schloss Hartheim, schloss-hartheim.at) is another infamous Austrian site, which acted as a euthanasia centre from 1940 to 1944. Some 30,000 people with mental and physical disabilities were murdered here under the auspices of psychiatrist Dr Rudolf Lonauer from Linz, who committed suicide in May 1945. An elaborate cover-up was organized, including false death certificates which claimed the victims died of tuberculosis.
Four different armies liberated Austria in 1945. The Soviets’ Second Ukrainian Front (under Marshal Malinovsky) and the Third Ukrainian Front (commanded by Marshal Tolbukhin) combined to take Vienna on 13 April 1945. Patton’s US Third Army invaded eastern Austria, while Patch’s US Seventh Army entered western Austria from Bavaria, advancing as far as the Brenner Pass.
When the war ended, Vienna was divided into five zones of occupation, a tense arrangement that is brilliantly evoked in Carol Reed’s 1949 film, The Third Man. In the postwar settlement, Austria became an independent republic again.
On 25 April 1945, while Hitler was ensconced in Berlin, Obersalzberg was bombed by British and American forces and mostly destroyed. When the US 3rd Infantry arrived on 4 May, plunderers had already picked over the ruins, leaving a smattering of memorabilia behind.
A museum was built on this site long after the war, which explains the development of Nazism and its association with Obersalzberg and Bavaria in meticulous detail. Beneath the museum, a bunker complex built in 1943–5 survives. Its dank stairs and passageways give an idea of the realities of war, a stark contrast to the bucolic mountain world above.
Despite being relegated to a subordinate role in the conquest of Germany by Eisenhower, General Montgomery acquitted his responsibilities in the north of the country with diligence.
After crossing the Rhine, Montgomery’s 21st Army Group separated into three parts. The First Canadian Army turned north to liberate the northern Netherlands and the northwest corner of Germany (including the principal German naval base of Wilhelmshaven); command of the US Ninth Army was passed to Bradley and sent south to meet up with the First Army and encircle the Ruhr; while the British Second Army headed for the Baltic coast.
The Second Army at the Elbe river
The bulk of Montgomery’s forces, the British Second Army, moved in an oblique line across the plains of northern Germany towards the Baltic coast. The Bremen–Hamburg autobahn was crossed on 19 April 1945.
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Liberated Allied POWs
A number of watercourses – the Ems and Weser rivers and two canals – presented obstacles for Montgomery’s army, and five hundred bridges were built to carry its men and vehicles forwards. Its greatest challenge was crossing the Elbe on 29 April. Montgomery met with limited resistance from German Army Group H, under the command of General Johannes Blaskowitz; by now, Nazi military strength was thinly spread and fuel in short supply. As Montgomery proceeded, he was able to take the Luftwaffe’s last operational airfields. Aided by the arrival of the first RAF jets, the Allies established control of the airspace over northern Germany.
Eisenhower urged Montgomery to quicken his progress. Now that the defeat of Nazism appeared inevitable, British and American politicians turned their thoughts to the occupation of Germany and the order of the postwar world. Stationing their troops in the liberated territories would give the Allied nations clout after the war, and although the Soviets were their allies, the Anglo-American commanders would readily take lands in the designated Soviet zone and return them later on to serve their own interests.
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Lübeck in ruins at the end of the war
Advancing from the Elbe, Montgomery took both Lübeck and Wismar on 2 May 1945, just hours before the Russian troops of Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky arrived from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in northeastern Germany. British troops were now deep inside the Soviet zone of occupation agreed at the Yalta Conference in February, but were unable to prevent the Soviets reaching Schleswig-Holstein, the Jutland peninsula and Denmark. Montgomery halted on a line through Hamburg (liberated on 3 May) and Lübeck. The new German head of state, president Karl Dönitz, was left stranded in Flensburg on the Danish border.
The end of the war in northern Germany
On 4 May, a delegation of high-ranking German officers arrived at Montgomery’s tactical headquarters on Lüneburg Heath. It was led by Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg on behalf of Karl Dönitz and Wilhelm Keitel, Commander-in-Chief of the German armed forces. Dönitz was still hoping for a negotiated armistice with the Anglo-American allies, but Montgomery convinced von Friedeburg that Germany’s situation was hopeless. Berlin had capitulated, Germany had been organized into zones of occupation, and – in any case – Montgomery could not accept the surrender of any armies engaged with Soviet forces. After some discussion, Dönitz and Keitel authorized von Friedeburg to sign an instrument of surrender of all German forces in the Netherlands, northern Germany and Denmark; the document was officially signed at 6pm on 4 May. War in northern Germany was over. Islands and ships were included in the capitulation and all U-boats were ordered to return to base.
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Peenemünde's former power station
Withdrawal from the Baltic coast
On 7 May, Montgomery formally met his Russian counterpart, Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, in Wismar. Two months after the end of the war, the British withdrew from the Baltic ports.
Im Kraftwerk, Peenemünde, museum-peenemuende.de
In the late 1930s, the thickly wooded island of Peenemünde, at the mouth of the Oder river on the north coast of Germany, was chosen as the secret location for a weapons research centre and test site. It became the largest installation of its kind in Europe, employing 12,000 people, including forced labourers.
The Polish Resistance (AK) managed to infiltrate Peenemünde and, in April 1943, information about the research centre and the progress of its work on the V1 and V2 was smuggled out of Poland via Switzerland and delivered to Britain. On the night of 17–18 August 1943, the RAF attacked Peenemünde with almost six hundred heavy bombers, dropping more than 1600 tons of bombs over the site. Many German personnel were killed, but one of the leading scientists on the programme, Wernher von Braun, survived. The raid was considered a success: development of the V1 and V2 was halted at Peenemünde and moved to other sites in a response estimated to have delayed the first offensive launch of the V1 by six months.
The Historical Technical Museum in Peenemünde was built in 1991 on the grounds of the former research centre where the rockets were constructed. As well as information on the programme and the weaponry, displays also focus on the people who lived and worked at Peenemünde.
›› The Hamburg Firestorm
In the early hours of 28 July 1943, the RAF unleashed Operation Gomorrah upon the city of Hamburg. The campaign lived up to its name, a reference to the biblical city consumed by fire and brimstone. Dropping a mass of highly explosive and incendiary bombs over Hamburg, so many fires were started that they soon fused together to form a single, monstrous blaze. The fire sucked in so much oxygen that hurricane-force winds were generated, and temperatures rose to a staggering 800°C. The Hamburg Fire Department was forced to coin a new term: Feuersturm (firestorm).
Bombing had reached its nadir: survival was almost impossible for those on the ground and 40,000 people – mainly civilians – were killed. After Hamburg, other deliberately provoked firestorms would follow.
German bombers were responsible for the deaths of 60,500 British civilians in World War II. During the Liberation, British and American bombers would kill many times that number of German nationals.
Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial
Jean-Dolidier-Weg 75, Hamburg, kz-gedenkstaette-neuengamme.de
Opened in 1938 as a subcamp of Sachsenhausen, Neuengamme became an independent camp in 1940. More than half of its 100,400 prisoners, mostly foreign nationals, died under Nazi persecution. The memorial, which was inaugurated on the 60th anniversary of the camp’s liberation in May 2005, encompasses the entire grounds and seventeen of Neuengamme’s original buildings.
Becklingen Cemetery is located on a hillside overlooking Lüneburg Heath, at the site where Field Marshal Montgomery accepted the German surrender from representatives of Admiral Dönitz on 4 May 1945. Burials were transferred to Becklingen from isolated German and POW cemeteries located within an 80km radius; most of those interred here died during the last two months of the war.
›› German military technology
Hitler recognized that the development and availability of technology could have a profound impact on the war’s outcome, and would transform the face of modern warfare. He hoped that a series of new weapons would swing the war in the Nazis’ favour, but was unable to perfect his V1 and V2 missiles before the Allied victory. The USA remained the frontrunners in nuclear development throughout the war. Their atomic bombs would devastate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
The Nazis invested heavily in technology. The Peenemünde facility was the largest armaments centre in Europe; in the 1930s, its team of experts worked on new inventions and machines they hoped would deliver the Nazis a decisive victory. Towards the end of the war, as the German army yielded ground to the advancing Allies, Hitler was convinced that several newly perfected weapons would reverse his fortunes. An “electro” submarine was preparing to come into service, and the first military jet aircraft were already flying over Germany.
The future of modern warfare, Hitler realized, was the pilotless aircraft – what we now call the cruise missile. Priority was afforded to the development of so-called Vergeltungswaffe (Retaliation weapons), which were given a variety of nicknames by the Allies, generally with the prefix “V”. After Peenemünde was destroyed by Allied bombing, the manufacture and evolution of the V weapons was moved to secret locations around Germany.
The V1 was a cruise missile launched by catapult or dropped from an aircraft, with a range of 200km. The first V1 fell on London a week after D-Day, renewing the terror of the Blitz. The V1 was later fired at Antwerp, with similarly devastating results. The Allies’ main tactic against the V1 was to find its launch bases and destroy them.
The first V2 was deployed on 18 September 1944. It could go higher and faster than the V1, which meant it was impossible to shoot down. The V2 could be launched from almost anywhere within its 320km range using minimal equipment, making the Allies’ task even harder.
Both the V1 and V2 weapons were of variable accuracy and reliability, however, and eventually the advance of the liberating armies overran all of Germany’s launch sites.
Wöbbelin Concentration Camp existed for just ten weeks from 12 February to 2 May 1945. Constructed under extremely harsh conditions by inmates from Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen camps, it was originally intended to house American and British prisoners of war. As the Allies advanced, the still incomplete camp was used between 15 and 26 April 1945 as a reception camp for various evacuation transports, mainly from the satellite camps of Neuengamme. Nearly 5000 inmates from at least 25 nations were interned at Wöbbelin, more than one thousand of whom died as a result of exhaustion, maltreatment and starvation.
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Junkers aircraft factory at Tarthun
On 2 May, units of the 82nd US Airborne Division and 8th Infantry reached the region. The guards left the camp around noon; in the early afternoon American soldiers stumbled upon Wöbbelin, which was not marked on any maps.
A circular path lined by information panels takes the visitor through the grounds of the former camp.
Bunkermuseum (Air-Raid Shelter Museum)
Wichernsweg 16, Hamburg, hh-hamm.de
This four-chamber air-raid shelter, built in 1940–41 in the Hamm district of Hamburg and complete with restored furniture, gives a lasting impression of what it would have been like during the bombing raids that racked the city in the summer of 1943. A further exhibit displays the personal effects of people who lived through the war.
Credit: iStock
Bergen-Belsen Memorial
Südstrand 125, Wilhelmshaven, marinemuseum.de
Germany’s military maritime museum recalls the history of the naval town of Wilhelmshaven, beginning in 1869 and covering both world wars. The World War II artefacts collection includes a Seehund (a two-man submarine), a barrel of the German cruiser Köln and a ship’s bell. Boat tours leaving from the museum are also available.
Anne-Frank-Platz, Lohheide, bergen-belsen.stiftung-ng.de
In early 1945, no Allied soldier, commander or politician suspected the number of concentration camps that existed in Germany. Nor were they prepared for their inhumanity, which would shock even the most battle-hardened troops. On 15 April, the 11th British Armoured Division opened the gates of a camp whose name was to become notorious throughout the world. Overcrowded and underfed, Bergen-Belsen’s 40,000 emaciated prisoners could hardly comprehend liberation after the horrors they had lived through. Some had resorted to cannibalism to survive, while more than 12,000 corpses were left unburied and had to be bulldozed into immense mass graves. When the British had evacuated the survivors and buried the dead, they razed this “horror camp”.
The site and museum give a good understanding of the events that occurred here. Note that, as with most of the concentration camps, exhibits may not be appropriate for children; much of the material is chilling.
Rekumer Siel, Bremen-Farge, Bremen, denkort-bunker-valentin.de
Europe’s second-largest above-ground bunker was begun in 1943 using forced labour; around two thousand people died during its construction. Planned as a production site for type XXI submarines, it was bombed by the RAF in March 1945 and never served its intended purpose.
Haakengraben 2/Kremper Tor, Neustadt in Holstein, museum-cap-arcona.de
On 26 April 1945, SS guards loaded prisoners from Neuengamme and several other concentration camps onto three unmarked ships. One of them was the SS Cap Arcona, an ocean liner and former flagship of the Hamburg–South America Line. No one is certain where the ships were headed, but on the afternoon of 3 May, RAF fighter-bombers attacked the convoy and the ships were sunk almost immediately. Afterwards, both the pilots and SS lifeboat crews shot drowning prisoners in the water. Over six thousand prisoners from 24 different European nations were killed in what came to be known as the Cap Arcona disaster.
This museum explains the whole story – or at least what’s known of it.
Hans-Krüger-Str. 33, Münster, daspanzermuseum.de
The German Tank Museum in Münster was constructed in 1983. Its military hardware – tanks, uniforms, small arms, medals and so on – covers World War I to the present day.
Str. der Nationen, Fürstenberg/Havel, ravensbrueck.de
Ravensbrück was the largest concentration camp for women on German soil. Between 1939 and 1945 around 133,000 women and children as well as 20,000 men were imprisoned here. Ravensbrück Memorial presents the camp’s history in various exhibitions and commemorates the fate of its former prisoners.
Credit: iStock
Denkort Bunker Valentin
Stalin was eager to reach Berlin before the Americans and the British. To take the city, he would first have to penetrate Brandenburg, the German province surrounding Berlin.
Stalin hoped that the conquest of Berlin would demonstrate Soviet military might and help lever a favourable negotiating position after the war. In the event, by the spring of 1945 there was little competition for the city. US President Franklin Roosevelt, whose troops were deep in the heart of Germany, was happy to ignore Berlin so long as Nazi Germany was defeated. His main interest was keeping the Soviet Union as an ally in the war against Japan, and as a willing partner in the creation of a stable postwar world order. Roosevelt’s death on 12 April and the accession of Harry S. Truman to the presidency had little impact, and the Red Army was left to capture the city via Brandenburg.
Credit: Getty Images
Soviet artillery at the Battle of the Seelow Heights, April 1945
In mid-April 1945, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, commander of the 1st Belorusian Front, and Ivan Konev, leading the 1st Ukrainian Front, began their offensive campaign against Berlin. Zhukov hoped to advance directly on the city, but had underestimated the obstacle formed by the Seelow Heights, 70km east of Berlin in Brandenburg.
On the morning of 16 April, the 1st Belorusian Front attacked several German positions in the Seelow Heights, but met with little success. The intensity of German defensive fire took the Soviet troops by surprise. To make matters worse, nearly 150 anti-aircraft defence searchlights placed in the Soviet front lines to blind the Germans caused disorientation among Zhukov’s own troops instead. His tanks attempted to scale the Heights but found the incline so steep that the Soviet commanders had to search for alternative routes through, frequently meeting German defensive positions in the process.
After several fruitless days of fighting, Zhukov realized he needed to change course, to go around the Heights and approach Berlin from the north. Konev, meanwhile, swung his forces round after crossing the Neisse to attack Berlin from the south.
The two Russian fronts advanced and surrounded the German Ninth Army under General Theodor Busse, which was positioned in the Spree Forest southeast of Berlin. Busse attempted to break out of the Halbe Pocket – as the encirclement became known – to the west, and join up with Wenck’s Twelfth Army with the intention of surrendering to the Americans rather than the Soviets. While a few thousand Ninth Army soldiers were successful, the rest were killed or captured.
On 20 April, Adolf Hitler’s 56th birthday, the Führer awarded medals to members of the Hitler Youth and addressed key members of the Nazi elite for the last time in Berlin. The Soviets would soon take the city, and Hitler finally gave his followers permission to try to steal through their offensive lines.
By 25 April, Soviet troops belonging to the 1st Belorusian Front and the 1st Ukrainian Front met to completely surround Berlin. With the defeat of the Ninth Army, German resistance outside Berlin was over. All that was left was for Zhukov, who had been granted the honour of delivering the coup de grâce, to enter Berlin.
Seelow Heights Memorial Site and Museum
Küstriner Str. 28a, Seelow, gedenkstaette-seelower-hoehen.de
The Seelow Heights Museum, built in 1972 and expanded in 1985 with a semicircular entry area, was inspired by Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s command bunker, which he established on Reitwein Heights and used as a forward command post on 15 and 16 April 1945. The permanent exhibition, presented in both English and German, provides information on the Battle of Seelow Heights, with text, pictures and sound documentation, as well as expert accounts of the events of 1945. It also shows how the battle was incorporated into East German historiography.
Parked in front of the museum are several large military vehicles and artillery pieces. Situated on the plateau above is the Kerbel Memorial, designed in 1945, together with the military cemetery. A Russian Orthodox cross, dedicated in 2003 and restored in 2013, has consciously been placed on an axis leading to the graves of the fallen Soviet soldiers. From this “Place of Rest”, visitors can take in a sweeping view of the Oder Marsh area all the way to Küstrin (Kostrzyn) and the Reitwein Heights. The panorama includes part of the historical battlefield.
Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial and Museum
Str. der Nationen 22, Oranienburg, sachsenhausen-sbg.de
The closest concentration camp to Berlin and the first to be constructed after Himmler became chief of police, Sachsenhausen was opened in the summer of 1936 in Oranienburg. Himmler intended it to serve as a model camp.
Between 1936 and 1945, more than 200,000 people, including 20,000 women, were imprisoned here. The museum was inaugurated in 1961, after Sachsenhausen had been used by the Soviet secret police for its own nefarious purposes. The remnants of buildings and other relics of the camp are augmented by several interesting permanent exhibitions.
›› Potsdam Conference
Between 17 July and 2 August 1945, the Potsdam Conference was held at Cecilienhof Palace (see above) in Potsdam, southwest of Berlin. It was here that the three leaders of the dominant Allied victors (Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union) met to discuss the new order in Europe and Germany. The results of the conference were contained in the Potsdam Agreement.
In the summer of 1945, world history was written. To the “Big Three” – Harry S. Truman (who had become president of the USA in April), Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin – was added Clement Attlee, who had just won the British general election and would be replacing Churchill as prime minister. These men came to an agreement about the political principles that would govern Germany during its occupation: decentralization, demilitarization, denazification and democratization. The German-Polish border would be provisionally shifted westwards to the Oder-Neisse Line, but the final boundary would be decided at a later peace conference. The expulsion of German populations from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary was to be suspended to ensure an orderly transfer.
It was also decided that each occupying power was to take reparations from its designated zone. Additional reparations would be provided to the Soviet Union from the Western sectors.
Although France was informed of the outcomes of the Potsdam Conference, it took no part in the decision-making process. On 7 August 1945, the French government acceded to the Potsdam Agreement, albeit with reservations about a number of points.
At the Potsdam Conference it became clear that the end of the war also meant the end of a common policy shared by the Allies, and the beginning of new and unpredictable disputes between them. There was repeated discussion about how the details of the Potsdam Agreement were to be interpreted.
Less than one week after the conference broke up, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a demonstration of US power that was intended not only to bring the Japanese government to the negotiating table, but also to impress upon the Soviets that although World War II had ended, they would still face opposition to their envisioned world order. Rumblings of the Cold War had begun.
Am Neuen Garten, Potsdam, spsg.de/schloesser-gaerten/objekt/schloss-cecilienhof
This vast mansion was built from 1913–17 in the style of a country manor. It was the last palace to be commissioned by the Hohenzollerns before their fall from grace at the end of World War I; Emperor William II had it built to accommodate his eldest son, Crown Prince William. From 17 July to 2 August 1945, it was used as the venue for the Potsdam Conference.
More than 40,000 people were killed in the Battle of the Halbe Pocket at the end of April 1945. The bodies of the fallen had to be buried quickly – the first warm days of May were accelerating their decay, and the risk of disease and epidemic was high. The local Soviet occupying authority stipulated that the dead were to be interred immediately and where they lay, be it in mass graves, front gardens or shell craters. As a result, numerous provisional gravesites were cleared in the forests and along pathways, while many single graves were dug in the gardens of local villagers.
In 1951, six years after the battle, a local Protestant minister, Ernst Teichmann, initiated the gathering of bodies buried in and around Halbe into a central cemetery. The result, Halbe Forest Cemetery, is the resting place of 24,000 victims of the Battle of the Halbe Pocket, including soldiers, civilians and Soviet forced labourers. There are also a number of graves holding people killed at the German execution site in Berlin-Tegel and at the Ketschendorf internment camp.
Victims of Political Dictatorships Documentation Centre
Carl-Philipp-Emanuel-Bach-Str. 11, Frankfurt (Oder), museum-viadrina.de
Located in a former prison, this documentation centre records the fate of those who were persecuted for political reasons, not only in Nazi Germany but also during the subsequent Soviet occupation and in the East German GDR.
Credit: Alamy
Tableau at the Death March Museum
Belower Damm 1, Wittstock, stiftung-bg.de
This little museum in the Below Forest commemorates the prisoners of Sachsenhausen camp who were forced to march through this area in April 1945 after Himmler ordered the evacuation of the camps. The Reichsführer-SS didn’t want any “human evidence” of the horrifying conditions to fall into the hands of the Allies as they advanced and the camps were liberated.
An estimated 33,000 prisoners were marched in columns towards the Baltic. According to the camp commander, they were destined to be loaded onto ships and sunk at sea. The marchers got as far as Schwerin before their guards deserted them and the Allies found their columns.
By the end of April 1945, Berlin was no longer much of a prize. The Prussian and imperial capital that Hitler dreamed of making the fulcrum of an ordered, authoritarian world had been reduced to a state of ruin and rubble by sixteen months of Allied bombing.
As the Soviet troops approached Berlin, most of its inhabitants cowered underground, safe from the effects of Soviet shelling. Those who were able manned the concentric lines of defence that ringed the city, but they did little to slow the advance.
The front line crept inexorably inwards from the suburbs, despite the efforts of an ad hoc army of regular soldiers, SS fighters and Volkssturm (home guard) units. There was no longer an age limit for military service: young boys who had grown up in a warring country fought and died in Berlin supporting Hitler’s desperate last stand. Most of the combatants defending Berlin had little or no training. They fired anti-aircraft guns or whatever weapons they had at the advancing Russian soldiers.
Credit: Getty Images
The Soviet flag is raised over the Reichstag in a popular propaganda photo
The Führer and his government took refuge in a subterranean bunker, where they received sporadic intelligence from the outside world. They knew that the Soviets had reached the outer suburbs and were making progress street by street, house by house, towards Berlin’s centre and the remaining trappings of the Nazi state.
Hitler still hoped that salvation would come from outside the city – that General Walther Wenck would rally the remaining German soldiers for a do-or-die attempt to break the Soviet throttlehold. Hitler’s commanders, confined to the bunker, knew there wasn’t enough military manpower or order left in Nazi Germany to organize an effective opposition.
Without outside assistance, Berlin could not hold out. However much courage its citizens’ army displayed, the city’s arsenal was running out of ammunition; food was also becoming increasingly scarce.
In the early hours of 29 April, the Soviet troops managed to cross the Moltke Bridge and attack the Interior Ministry. After capturing the Secret State Police headquarters later that day, the Soviets pressed on towards the Reichstag. Only now did Hitler begin to envisage a Germany without himself in command. He dictated his will and a political testament, which made provisions for continuing the governance of a Reich that no longer existed. Reichsmarschall Göring and Himmler, the minister of the interior, were both dismissed from the Nazi party. Each had tried to take control of the Reich and still hoped to come to an agreement with the British and the Americans. Hitler appointed Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor – with the title of president of Germany – and Joseph Goebbels as Chancellor.
The next day, Hitler killed himself. Goebbels poisoned his own family and followed suit on 1 May, leaving Dönitz, who was absent from Berlin, in charge of the closing stages of Germany’s war.
The Battle for the Reichstag was one of the last fights in the conquest of Berlin. Two soldiers raised the Soviet flag on its roof, while heavy fighting still raged below. The city’s remaining 10,000 German soldiers, now commanded by General Helmuth Weidling, were forced into a shrinking area in the city centre.
On 1 May, the German garrison tried and failed to negotiate a conditional surrender; the Reichstag was occupied and German defeat was imminent. Weidling agreed to the Soviet demand for an unconditional ceasefire, saving the lives of the remaining inhabitants of Berlin, and an armistice was signed on 2 May that handed control of the city to Vasily Chuikov, commander of the Soviet armies. The commanders of the two German armies closest to Berlin – the Twenty-first Army and Third Panzer Army – simultaneously surrendered to the western Allies.
The Battle for Berlin is estimated to have cost the lives of 80,000 Soviet troops and 50,000 German soldiers and civilians.
Clayallee 135, alliiertenmuseum.de
The Liberation was the end of one story and the beginning of another. This museum explains what happened next, from the defeat of Germany in World War II to the division of West and East Berlin between the three Western powers and the Soviet Union.
This delightfully idiosyncratic museum was originally founded in 1925 by anarchist-pacifist Ernst Friedrich. It was destroyed in 1933 by stormtroopers, for whom war was to be admired rather than vilified. The building was used as an SS torture chamber in the following years, when Friedrich emigrated to Belgium and then France. The museum has since been revived and is run by Friedrich’s grandson, with the help of volunteers. There are exhibits on both wars, as well as displays dedicated to current global conflicts.
A modern work of art marks the spot at Bebelplatz where a Nazi book burning took place in May 1933, when 20,000 books were engulfed by flames. Today’s memorial takes the form of a sunken library of empty shelves.
Brunnenstr. 105, berliner-unterwelten.de
The Berliner Unterwelten Museum is located in a former air-raid shelter at Gesundbrunnen underground station. Visitors can explore the site by guided tour to see bunkers from the former government quarter, war rubble and archeological finds. The museum also explores the difficult topic of military construction and historic preservation.
The permanent exhibition, “Myth of Germania – Vision and Crime”, explores Hitler’s grand plans for Berlin, which he envisioned as an architectural showcase of Nazi strength and power. Several displays focus on the expulsions, deportations and use of forced labour that were implemented to make his vision a reality.
Credit: Edwin van Wanrooij
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Cora-Berliner-Str. 1, holocaustmahmal.de
The block of land immediately south of Brandenburger Tor and Pariser Platz is officially called the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and general known as the Holocaust Memorial. It involves 2711 dark grey oblong blocks (stelae), evenly and tightly spaced but of varying heights, spread across an area the size of two football pitches. As there is no single entrance, visitors make their own way through the maze to the centre where the blocks are well above head height, tending to convey a sense of gloom, isolation and solitude. An underground information centre relates the life stories and plight of Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Undeniably powerful, the memorial has faced various criticisms: for being unnecessarily large in scale; for its use of prime real estate with little historical significance; and for its incredible costs. Also contentious was the hiring of German company Degussa (now Evonik) to supply the anti-graffiti paint for the blocks, since they are a daughter company of I.G. Farben – the company that produced Zyklon B, the gas used in the Nazi gas chambers.
This ruined 42m-high tower is normally inaccessible, but can be visited on a tour arranged by Berlin Unterwelten. Equipped with heavy anti-aircraft guns, Berlin’s flak towers were supposed to protect its city centre from bomb attacks.
To see this bunker, located in a former gasometer, you will need to ask for details at Berlin Unterwelten. The six-storey bunker – with a 3m-thick ceiling – was installed in 1940 to shelter 6500 mothers and children. Later in the war, as many as 30,000 people crowded into its interior.
The German Historical Museum tells the comprehensive story of 2000 years of German history. The permanent exhibition comprises around seven thousand historical exponents providing information on the individuals, ideas, events and developments that have shaped the nation. The main floor is devoted to the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, the postwar period and the two German states that existed from 1949 to the reunification in 1990.
Forced Labour Documentation Centre
Britzer Str. 5, dz-ns-zwangsarbeit.de
This centre in Schöneweide is the last well-preserved Nazi forced labour camp. “Barack 13”, one of the first camp buildings, is open to the public on guided tours. Two permanent exhibitions document the fate of the resident forced labourers during World War II.
German Resistance Memorial Centre
Stauffenbergstr. 13–14, gdw-berlin.de
This slick exhibition centres on German resistance to the Nazi regime. It is an important reminder that not all Germans were Nazis, and that many stood up to Hitler and paid with their lives. Note the name of its street, which honours the man who tried to assassinate Hitler in the summer of 1944.
Zwieseler Str. 4, Berlin-Karlshorst, museum-karlshorst.de
A unique bilateral institution sponsored by the Federal Republic of Germany and the Russian Federation, this museum marks the spot where the unconditional surrender was signed on 8 May 1945 signalling the end of World War II in Europe. The war caused an unprecedented amount of death and destruction across the continent, but fighting was especially brutal during Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union that began on 22 June 1941.
This is the only museum in Germany with a permanent exhibition recalling the war of annihilation in Eastern Europe. It documents wartime events from the perspective of both parties, German and Soviet, as well as exploring the consequences of World War II as they continue into the present day.
Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church
Breitscheidplatz, gedaechtniskirche-berlin.de
This church, named after the Emperor Wilhelm, was badly damaged in a raid on 23 November 1943. After the war, its surviving sections were left standing as a reminder of the catastrophic events of 1939–1945.
Lindenstr. 9–14, jmberlin.de
Berlin’s Jewish Museum is the place to go to reflect on Jewish history and culture. Changing temporary exhibitions, from cultural history displays to contemporary art installations, cover a broad range of interesting themes.
›› The last days of Hitler
The exact truth of what happened in the Führerbunker at the end of April 1945 can never truly be known. But by piecing the most reliable sources together, it is at least possible to get a good approximation.
With the Soviets advancing through the streets of Berlin, Hitler knew that the war was lost. He had become a sick man, dependent on medication and suffering from serious delusions. Refusing to accept any personal culpability, Hitler blamed the Nazi defeat on military setbacks and on the incompetence and betrayal of his generals.
On 29 April, Hitler had poison administered to his beloved dog, Blondi: a prussic acid capsule was forced into the dog’s mouth and crushed with a pair of pliers. That evening he received the news that Mussolini and his mistress had been shot by partisans and their bodies hung upside down at a petrol station in Milan; Hitler resolved not to suffer the same fate.
On the afternoon of 30 April he sat with Eva Braun, who he had recently married. Braun took a capsule of prussic acid while Hitler shot himself in the right temple with a pistol. Following the Führer’s orders, his subordinates took both bodies outside the bunker, doused them with petrol and set them alight.
Rumours immediately began to circulate, suggesting that a body double had died in Hitler’s place and that the Führer had managed to escape. This ruse is highly improbable: several witnesses saw Hitler’s body, and the Soviets carried out a post-mortem as soon as they took the Führerbunker.
Today, there is nothing left of Hitler except for photographs, film footage, assorted Nazi memorabilia and copies of his anger-filled book, Mein Kampf. The man who wanted to rule the earth left no descendants, and there is no grave or memorial to mark his death. None of Hitler’s schemes endured for more than a handful of years. His followers were disbanded and many of them tried and executed as war criminals, while the apparatus of the Reich was dismantled and destroyed by his enemies.
Hitler wanted history to remember him as a visionary. Instead, his life is a cautionary tale to the consequences of megalomania, a mass murderer in pursuit of futile ends.
Platz der Republik 1, bundestag.de
Seizing the Reichstag – already heavily damaged by bombing and shelling – was one of the final victories in the Battle of Berlin. Storming the iconic building on 30 April 1945, two soldiers raised the Soviet flag on its roof, although fighting continued below for another two days. The scene was re-enacted for a well-known propaganda photo on 2 May.
After the war, the Reichstag fell into disrepair as an enduring symbol of the Weimar Republic that was abused and manipulated by Adolf Hitler. The Neoclassical building had been ravaged by a fire in 1933 which had completely destroyed the plenary chamber; this was one of the defining moments in Hitler’s rise to power, who used the fire as an excuse to persecute his political opponents.
The reunified German parliament moved back into the building in 1999 after extensive renovations and the addition of a flashy cupola by British architect Sir Norman Foster.
This war memorial near the Brandenburg Gate is one of several monuments erected by the Soviets after the war. It commemorates the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who fell during the Battle of Berlin. Erected in 1945 as a semicircular stoa (covered walkway), it resembles other Soviet World War II monuments in the former Eastern bloc. On top of the stoa is a large bronze statue of a Soviet soldier, rifle slung over his shoulder, flanked by two T34 tanks and two howitzers used in the Battle of Berlin. Though the memorial was located in the former British sector of Berlin, Soviet honour guards were sent every day to perform guard duty, a tradition that was stringently maintained even during the harshest Cold War periods.
Niederkirchnerstr. 8, topographie.de
Standing on the site of Berlin’s Gestapo headquarters, the Topography of Terror has a main permanent exhibition on the Nazi state’s institutions of repression. A second exhibition examines the city’s role as the capital of the Third Reich.
›› The fate of Hitler’s henchmen
Following Hitler’s death, the remaining Nazi leaders either committed suicide or survived to face punishment for their crimes. Joseph Goebbels, loyal to the last, had his six children murdered and then killed himself with his wife on 1 May. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was captured by the Allies and killed himself in prison at Lüneberg on 23 May by cyanide. Göring was sentenced to death at Nuremberg; he asked to be shot as a soldier but was refused, instead swallowing cyanide on the night before he was due to hang. Von Ribbentrop did hang at Nuremberg, on 16 October 1946, as did Jodl and Keitel. Martin Bormann went missing in May 1945, but it was later proven that he had been shot by the Soviets as they took Berlin. Some Nazis – Dönitz, Hess, Speer – survived the war and their imprisonment.
The House of the Wannsee Conference was used as an SS guesthouse during World War II. It is most remembered, however, as the setting for the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, where high-ranking Nazi officials planned the Final Solution. Its permanent exhibition, “The Wannsee Conference and the Genocide of European Jews”, fleshes out the details of this grim meeting and the story of the persecution of Jews using original documents and audiovisual displays.
The surrender of Germany and the end of the war
With Adolf Hitler dead, the other Nazi leaders discredited, Berlin in Soviet hands and Italy reconquered by a combination of British, Americans and partisan troops, the only remaining question on 2 May 1945 was how Germany as a whole would surrender to the Allies.
The few remaining armies of the Wehrmacht were dispersed and unable to fight on a co-ordinated front. Their strategic positions were weak and the German troops were diminished by the breakdown of their supply chains. Faced with the inevitable, commanders of individual units in the field surrendered to their victorious opposite numbers, as at Lüneburg Heath.
Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler’s nominated successor as head of state and commander of the armed forces, was ensconced at Flensburg near the Danish border. He still hoped to negotiate an honorable, conditional surrender with the British and Americans as opposed to the Soviets.
On 5 May, Dönitz dispatched a delegation to Eisenhower’s headquarters, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) at Reims in France to see what terms could be arranged. Eisenhower refused to discuss anything less than unconditional surrender and threatened to close American lines to Germans fleeing west. The next day Dönitz sent his deputy, Wehrmacht Chief of Staff General Alfred Jodl to Reims in an increasingly desperate attempt to play for time, allowing more of his solders to escape from the encroaching Soviets. Again, the Americans insisted there was no negotiation to be had.
Göring, Hitler’s erstwhile deputy, now a fugitive from both the Allies and the Nazi party, was forced to give himself up to the Americans on 6 May on the German–Austrian border.
On Dönitz’s instructions, Jodl ceded to Eisenhower’s demands and signed the German surrender at 2.41am on 7 May, stipulating a ceasefire at 11.01pm on 8 May – which would become Victory in Europe (VE Day) in the west.
The Soviets were not satisfied with Jodl’s surrender, chiefly because they were absent at the signing and because a surrender on French soil did not carry the same weight as one performed in Berlin.
The definitive surrender of all German military forces therefore took place in Berlin’s Karlshorst district, where the Soviet forces had set up their main headquarters after taking the city. Shortly after midnight on 8 May, the surrender was signed on behalf of the German High Command by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Colonel General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff and General Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg. Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov signed the document on behalf of the Supreme High Command of the Red Army and British Air Marshal Arthur W. Tedder as deputy of the Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force. Because of this second signing of the armistice, Russia celebrates the end of the war in Europe on 9 May.
Even before the Reims ceremony, news of peace had swept across Europe, the British Empire and the USA, and celebrations were widespread and spirited. For the hordes who had been displaced by the war, there was both relief and anxiety about the future. Many would remain burdened by unspeakable memories.
Peace was not quick and clean everywhere. Although most German commanders obeyed the orders issued by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), some fought on, extending hostilities by several days. The Second Army in the Vistula delta held out until 9 May, while the last battle in Czechoslovakia was fought on 12 May. The Atlantic pockets of France capitulated after the armistice, while the German garrison on Alderney in the Channel Islands surrendered on 16 May.
The Allies occupied Germany but allowed Dönitz’s government in Flensburg to conclude its business before it was declared illegal and disbanded on 23 May. Several of Dönitz’s cabinet – including the admiral himself – were immediately arrested as war criminals, to be tried at Nuremberg.
Credit: Getty Images
Nazi criminals Irma Grese (the "Hyena of Auschwitz") and Josef Kramer (the "Beast of Belsen") in British custody at the end of the war
A great many SS members and other Nazis who believed they would be indicted for war crimes – perhaps as many as 10,000 – took advantage of the chaos that followed the first days of peace to adopt new identities and flee south on “ratlines”, a system of escape routes that connected Nazi safe houses. If they were lucky, they quietly crossed the Alps into Italy, where the fascists were still willing to help them. From here, they travelled to safety in Franco’s Spain or South America. Many Nazis who could not escape, or chose not to, committed suicide rather than facing the justice of their accusers. With the death or execution of its hallowed leadership, Nazism disintegrated, leaving people all over Europe to pick up their lives in the new conditions of the postwar world.
Credit: Getty Images
Credit: Getty Images
Displaced persons and refugees
Deciding what to do with Europe’s displaced persons and refugees was a pressing issue after the Liberation.
As the last German soldiers surrendered in May 1945 and the fighting in Europe drew to a close, a whole new set of problems presented themselves to the Allies. Foremost among these was how to deal with the millions of sick, malnourished and homeless people now either wandering around Europe or stuck in displaced persons’ camps.
Credit: Getty Images
German refugees sleeping in the hay
The scale of the problem was colossal. Across those countries occupied by the Nazis, and in Germany itself, there were huge numbers of deportees who had been forcibly removed from their homelands to work as slave labour for the Reich (with their houses taken over by immigrant Germans). In addition, there were all those prisoners of war and concentration camp survivors who had been left behind in Germany and its occupied territories as the Wehrmacht fled the Soviet advance.
Strange as it seems, at the conferences of Yalta in February 1945 and Potsdam in July, the “Big Three” powers decided to adopt a policy of mass deportation themselves in order to solve the ongoing problem of ethnic strife in Central Europe. The consensus was that the redrawn national boundaries of 1918 had exacerbated ethnic tensions, and that the new post-war settlement was a unique opportunity to avoid the same mistakes. This would be achieved, it was hoped, by making those countries in which conflicts were most extreme as ethnically homogeneous as possible. This meant removing between 12 and 14 million people from their homes – “ethnic cleansing” on a massive scale.
In Poland, where the borders had been almost completely redrawn, this involved the mass deportation of both Poles and non-Poles. About a million Poles living in what had been the eastern side of the country – now absorbed into the Soviet Republics of Lithuania, Belarus and the Ukraine – were transferred, voluntarily or otherwise, to its western side. Similarly, as many as half a million ethnic Lithuanians, Belarusians and Ukrainians were forced out of Poland. In both cases, these were mostly people who had strong traditional ties to areas in which they had been living for many generations. Unsurprisingly, many did not want to leave and had to be forced to do so.
Other people who had once lived in eastern Poland now found themselves in newly annexed Soviet territory and were forced to stay. Many still thought of themselves as Polish but had been given Soviet citizenship against their will and were prevented from making their way back to Poland.
To compensate for the loss of the eastern borderlands, the western side of Poland had been extended up to the Oder and Neisse rivers, into lands which had previously been German. Many of the inhabitants of these areas had already fled to Germany as the Red Army advanced, with thousands dying in the attempt to do so. On 30 January 1945, a Soviet submarine sank a German military transport ship, the MV Wilhelm Gustloff, with the loss of around 9500 lives, half of whom were children. Despite the exodus, parts of Silesia and Prussia were still home to many Germans. These people were now expelled (or “transferred” in the official jargon). A similar situation played out in Czechoslovakia after the return of the so-called Sudetenland.
Credit: Getty Images
A young Holocaust survivor at roll call
According to what was agreed at Potsdam, all transfers of Germans were to be “effected in an orderly and humane manner.” The opposite was more often the case, as Poles, Czechoslovaks, Hungarians and the Soviets used the expulsions as an opportunity to inflict revenge for the years of murderous oppression they had suffered during Nazi occupation. Random acts of violence, even murder, were not unusual and the rape of German women was commonplace. Official reparations by Germany, as agreed at Yalta, included using both soldiers and civilians – women as well as men – as forced labour. By far the greatest number, around 200,000, were transferred to the Soviet Union by the Allies to add to the three million German prisoners of war already held there. Some of these spent more than fifteen years in the gulag and many have never been accounted for.
It might be assumed that the victims of Nazism, once liberated from the various labour, POW, concentration or extermination camps fared rather better. In fact, for many the nightmare continued almost as before, despite the Allies’ best intentions. These were the people designated as Displaced Persons (DPs) by the Allies and, as more countries were liberated, their numbers substantially increased. Some of them simply decided to make their own way home, but did so through a chaotic, war-ravaged landscape in which much of the infrastructure of Europe had been destroyed. The functioning roads that still existed were clogged with military vehicles and long lines of desperate refugees.
Those DPs with no homes to go to, or who were too sick and malnourished to move, remained in camps, often for several years. Initially, it was the task of the Allied armies to shelter them and distribute food and medical aid. But because the Anglo-American forces had plenty of other things to do – not least continuing with the Liberation – DPs tended to be seen as a logistical, rather than a human, problem. Systems were set up to repatriate as many as possible in the shortest possible timeframe. Military resources were so stretched that often just one officer and a handful of soldiers would be in charge of thousands of DPs, who would be treated as recalcitrant children, with little understanding of the degradations they had experienced. DPs were often blamed for looting and criminality, when these actions were actually widespread across all sections of society. Despite all the problems, the repatriation process worked with surprising efficiency and within a few months of VE Day, several million people had been returned home.
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United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration truck loaded with displaced persons
The Allied authorities had thought long and hard about the human damage, both physical and psychological, that they would encounter as the Liberation unfolded across Europe. In November 1943, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was founded, an organization supported by 44 different nations (primarily the USA, the UK and Canada). UNRRA’s mission was to coordinate relief operations and provide much-needed food, clothing and medical supplies at a time when such things were in short supply. It was a massive operation: thousands of staff were recruited from all walks of life and sent into the field after the briefest of training. UNRRA provided not just goods, but the professional compassion which the Allied armies, with their different priorities, could not be expected to supply. There were inevitable problems, and frequent clashes between UNRRA’s needs and those of the military, but the organization made a huge and vital contribution to the mending of broken lives, running hundreds of camps that accommodated almost seven million people. The organization closed in 1947 when most of its responsibilities were absorbed into the European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan.
With the liberation of Auschwitz in January and Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, it became absolutely clear the extent to which the Jews had been singled out by the Nazis, but initially this did not affect how they were treated. At Belsen, the obvious priority for the British liberators was to improve the horrific conditions and attempt to stem the daily death rate. But once this emergency situation had been stabilized, Jewish DPs began to organize themselves politically. The DP camps and repatriation had been established along national lines, but soon Jews were demanding to be treated as a distinct group. This was something the Allies resisted because it seemed to echo Nazi thinking. But the reality was that very few Jews wanted to return to lands where they had been – and were still being – persecuted. What they wished for was to emigrate, primarily to Palestine, which since 1923 had been mandated by the League of Nations as “a national home for the Jewish people”.
The Jewish desire to leave for Palestine was one that the British – who were responsible for rule in Palestine – strongly resisted, restricting the number of immigrants on the grounds that mass migration would enflame Arab opinion in the region. The Jewish Agency – the organization responsible for establishing a Jewish homeland – and US politicians castigated the British government for its position, especially after it began deporting illegal Jewish immigrants from Palestine to camps in Cyprus. Two-thirds of the remaining Jewish DPs emigrated to the State of Israel when it was founded in 1948, with the rest heading mostly to the USA after it relaxed its own immigration quotas.
As many as three million Soviet POWs are thought to have died or been killed in captivity by the Germans, but a further 2.5 million were liberated by the Allies in the last years of the war. At the Yalta Conference, Churchill had agreed to Stalin’s request that all former Soviet POWs should be repatriated, believing that not doing so would jeopardize the return of British POWs freed by the Red Army. For those Soviet citizens and Russian exiles who had fought for or collaborated with the Nazis – either because they were forced to or for ideological reasons – return meant an inevitable, and often brutal, death. For those who had fought loyally for the USSR, the outcome was better but still grim for many. Stalin regarded surrender as tantamount to treason, and all returning former POWs were interrogated at NKVD screening camps. Of these, about a quarter of a million – the exact figures are disputed – were sent to the Gulag (the Soviet system of forced labour camps). Their release only came in 1953, following the death of Stalin, when the extremes of repression in the country began to be eased.
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Jewish illegal immigrants protesting their political situation
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