By the end of the winter of 1944, Hitler's Europe had dwindled
to very little. On the Eastern front, East Prussia had fallen and
the Wehrmacht was left with a few bits of Poland, Hungary, and
Italy and nearly all of Czechoslovakia. In the west, the outlook
was as grave. Except for half of Holland and part of Alsace,
German troops were defending their own borders. It was clear
that the Allies were about to launch the final assault.
Hitler decided to attempt a large-scale westward offensive.
His army would cross the Ardennes again and heave on towards
Antwerp, the centre of Allied food supplies. He hoped to win
time and then to turn his main force against the Russians. At
the end of December 1944, the German offensive caught the
Americans off guard. Flying bombs and rockets (Vi's and V2's)
rained down on Antwerp. By January, however, the German
advance had been halted. Again the British and the Americans
disagreed about how to proceed. Montgomery repeated his
proposal that a concentrated force should cross the northern
plain, while Eisenhower preferred not to take the risk and to
advance only as far as the Rhine. Since the American force was
by far the larger, the Americans were in a position to have their
own wray. In February 1945 the Colmar pocket fell to the French
First Army. The British and the Americans implemented then
plan within six weeks, while Hitler repeated the classical error
of ordering his troops to resist rather than putting the protection
of the Rhine between themselves and the enemy. On 7
March, the Allies luckily captured a bridge intact at Remagen.
The die wTas cast. The principal attack would strike across the
centre of Germany. First ten thousand bombers dropped ",0,000
tons of bombs on the Ruhr, which the Allies then began to
occupy.
The Russians were held outside Budapest. Although the Germans
continued to resist at a number of points on the Baltic
coast, where the latest models of the electric submarines were
under construction, elsewhere the Red Army continued its advance
towards the main target - Berlin. In January it reached the
middle Oder between Breslau and Kuestrin. Here it halted while
pockets of German resistance were cleared away, particularly at
the mouth of the Vistula. In the meantime, it made slow progress
across Slovakia, and rapid progress towards Vienna. By
the beginning of April 1945, although the Anglo-American
army was closer to Berlin, and closer still to Prague than the
Red Army, it did not try to reach Berlin first. Churchill alone
discerned the political importance of this. After Roosevelt's
illness and death, decisions were left to Eisenhower, who was
only interested by military problems. His main worry was to
link up with the Red Army without exposing either army to
attack. He expected a last defensive operation from German
strongholds in the Tyrol.
Nazi Germany had begun to disintegrate. One after another,
arms factories came to a standstill. Planes and tanks ran out of
petrol. Hordes of refugees fled before the Russians. Whole cities
had been reduced to rubble and death. Some of Hitler's immediate
subordinates, including Himmler, deemed that it was
time to surrender to the Western Allies, in the hope of splitting
up the 'strange Alliance'. The Germans continued fiercely to
resist the Russians, but frequently thev surrendered to the
Western Allies. Until the very last moment Hitler counted on new
weapons secretly being developed, including the electric submarines,
rockets, jet aeroplanes, and perhaps the atomic bomb.
But it was too late. Roosevelt's death did not revive the 'miracle
of the house of Brandenburg.' In April German defences collapsed
in every sector. In Italy, Alexander's troops reached the
Po Valley. Vienna fell. The American and Russian forces linked
up at Torgau on the Elbe. On 22 April Berlin was surrounded
and bombarded by 25,000 heavy guns; it surrendered on 2 May.
On 30 April Hitler committed suicide in his bunker 500 yards
from the Russian lines. The German army surrendered unconditionally
on all fronts, despite the efforts of Admiral
Doenitz, Hitler's successor, to delay the defeat. On 7 May at
Rheims, Jodl signed Nazi Germany's death certificate in Eisenhower's
presence; Keitel in Zhukov's presence the next day at
Berlin.