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8th of May, 1945. At last, the darkness was lifted. The people celebrated victory over Nazi Germany. From the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy in June 1944, it took the allies almost a full year to win the war. 11 long months of fierce, often cruel combat to plant the red flag on the roof of the Reichstag. 11 months of hopes and fears. 11 interminable months to defeat a Reich which had promised to endure for a thousand years. Those 11 months, with the highest death toll of the war, left an eternal scar in hearts and on history.
Devastated, occupied, and humiliated after five years of war with Germany, Europe was still awaiting liberation. In the summer of 1944, the allies were raising hopes. On the western front, the Normandy landings had been a success. At the same time, on the eastern front, Stalin was launching his huge army. The Reich was finally caught in a pincer movement. But nothing was yet won. In September, Hitler took the Allies by surprise with a terrible counterattack in the Ardennes. It failed, but tens of thousands would pay with their lives. The Allies were worried. And Hitler swore he would fight to the bitter end. In the new year of 1945, Hitler launched Operation Northwind.
He used every plane at his disposal in an attempt to annihilate the Allied Air Force that had defeated him in the Ardennes. But the Anglo-Americans won this aerial battle. The Germans were unsettled to learn of this fresh defeat. But Hitler, with his exultant style, convinced them to dig in. One German woman wrote, "For the last months of the war, I had to fight back my tears each time I heard Hitler's voice on the radio.
We didn't want to recognize the signs, which were ever clearer, announcing the impending downfall. In our hearts, we were afraid of the terrible truth." To boost the morale of the population, Goebbels planned the premiere of a feature film, Kolberg. It was a film he had commissioned 2 years earlier. This mega production told how the Prussian troops repulsed the attacks of Napoleon's armies. After one screening, Goebbels noted, "Kolberg is finally finished. The German people are going to need it." Meanwhile, to the east, the Red Army took back the initiative. Fresh supplies had reached the troops massed along the Vistula. But this concentration had not gone unnoticed. In Germany, General Guderian sounded the alarm.
He implored Hitler to regroup his troops on the Eastern Front to counter a Soviet attack. But Hitler would have none of it, scoffing at the supposed threat. "It's the biggest bluff since Genghis Khan. Who came up with this idiocy?" Even Himmler refused to admit it. "You see, General, I don't think the Russians are going to attack." General Guderian tried desperately to convince his superiors. Hitler repeated, "This intelligence is completely idiotic. Whoever wrote it should be shut up in a lunatic asylum." Deaf to all counsel, it was Hitler who gradually shut himself into his own world. As Guderian had predicted, on the 12th of January, 1945, first Konev, then Zhukov, sent their armies across the Vistula.
Endless columns of T-34 tanks advanced along a front of more than 600 km stretching from the shores of the Baltic to the heart of Poland. It was a devastating attack. The Russian steamroller was back in motion. The gunfire was so loud that even Zhukov had to cover his ears. For Stalin, this offensive was of capital importance. In a few weeks, he was due to meet Churchill and Roosevelt in Yalta. He didn't want Poland to slip out of his hands. On the 17th of January 1945, 5 months after the start of the insurrection, the Red Army entered the Polish capital.
They found a ghost town. As Stalin had calculated, there was no one left to contest the authority of the new occupying force. The Polish communists had no trouble taking over the reins. The Soviets paraded in the capital to celebrate a victory that came a bit too late. Having liberated the Polish capital on the 27th of January 1945, the Soviets discovered the Reich's biggest secret. A camp the size of a town surrounded by barbed wire.
Auschwitz-Birkenau. The camp had been evacuated by the SS a few days beforehand. All the guards had fled. The Soviets found 7,000 deportees abandoned there. 7,000 survivors for 1 and 1/2 million people murdered. Before they left, the Nazis had tried to erase evidence of their crimes. They blew up the gas chambers and the crematoriums. But these factories of death also formed the center of a system of plunder.
The Soviets found hundreds of thousands of pieces of clothing and hundreds of thousands of shoes. In a shed, they discovered 7 tons of hair. The deportees were not jubilant enough in front of the cameras. So the Soviets decided to re-stage the liberation of the camp a few days later using somewhat resuscitated deportees and some local inhabitants. The film would never be shown. It no doubt revealed too much of the reality. In January 1945, around 100 camps were still active across the Reich.
Even in their downfall, the destruction of Europe's Jews remained a primary objective for the Nazis. For the allies, the liberation of these killing grounds was not a priority. Especially since the accounts given by journalists were so staggering that those in the West refused to believe them. When the British reporter Alexander Werth entered the camps of Majdanek and Treblinka in July '44, he immediately wrote an article on how these death machines worked. The sorting, the gas chambers, the crematoriums, the bones ground as fertilizer for the adjacent cabbage fields. But the BBC did not broadcast his report. And the New York Herald Tribune
wrote, "We'd better await confirmation of the horrors we're hearing about from Lublin. Despite everything we know of the Nazis' savagery, these doings appear unthinkable." The camps were not the only theater of Nazi crimes. And yet every town liberated by the Red Army hid mass graves. In the basement of this building, a laboratory performed pseudo-medical experiments. To the Nazis, the Jews, the Poles were nothing more than slaves or fertilizer. In 15 days, Zhukov and his men had covered 400 km. No one in the Nazi leadership had anticipated such a rapid advance.
General Guderian wrote, "The Russian tidal wave is taking on utterly disastrous proportions for us." And yet, the Germans continued to fight, mainly because they were afraid. The Red Army had shown some particularly barbaric behavior. Neighborhoods and villages were sometimes torched. Stalin's army plundered shamelessly in this land of plenty. Radios, saucepans, watches. One soldier wrote, "The Germans abandon everything, and our men have invaded the houses. Everything is in flames. Down from pillows and feathers from mattresses are flying everywhere.
Everyone from the foot soldier to the colonel is carrying away his plunder. This town has been crucified. The Germans are right to flee from us like the plague." Anyone suspected of being a Nazi could be shot. Almost 100,000 Germans were summarily executed. One Soviet soldier noted, "The German mother should curse the day she gave birth to a son. The Germans are now going to see the horrors of war. Let them experience what they wanted to inflict on others. In Eastern Prussia, the Soviets briefly occupied the town of Nemmersdorf.
The inhabitants were massacred. An orgy of violence was unleashed. Several women were said to have been crucified naked on barn doors. The Red Army was responding to the magnitude of the crimes committed by the Nazis. Millions of prisoners of war who died of hunger, millions of civilians murdered. The camps of Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Treblinka had been exposed. Having lost 20 million of their own, the Soviets were burning with vengeance. The Soviet propagandist, Ilya Ehrenburg, had for months been urging in the Red Star newspaper, "If you haven't killed a German each day, your day has been wasted. Kill the
Germans. That's what your old mother asks of you. The children are imploring. Kill the Germans. That's what your homeland demands of you. The divisions and armies are not advancing alone on Berlin. With them, there are the trenches, the mass graves, the ravines filled with the bodies of the innocent, the cabbage fields of Majdanek, and the trees of Idepsk, where the Germans hanged so many unfortunates. The boots, the little shoes and slippers of the little children murdered in Majdanek, walk alongside them to Berlin."
The Red Army became experts in nurturing hatred. And in its path, the enemy's womenfolk were particularly targeted. Rape became a weapon of war. One young Soviet officer recalled, "Women, mothers, and their children were lying on both sides of the road, and before each of them was a noisy gaggle of men, their trousers down. And our men shot those women who tried to save their children. Smiling officers stood by, making sure each soldier, with no exceptions, took part. Stalin, in person, excused these crimes.
He declared, "Imagine a man who fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade, who has seen his homeland devastated over thousands of kilometers. After all, what's the harm if he has a bit of fun with some women after all the horrors he has suffered?" Vasily Grossman saw the terror in the eyes of the women and young girls. Horrible things happened to the German women. Across the whole German territory, close to 2 million women are thought to have been raped, including wives and daughters of communists. After hesitating for a time, the Nazi regime publicized these exactions. The advance of the Soviet troops spread panic among the civilians.
Hundreds of thousands of Germans took to the road in the midst of a particularly harsh winter. "I'm going to try and reach your place." wrote one young woman to her mother. "Please, Mama, stay calm, but I won't have Gabby with me. I could no longer carry her, and she died." "I couldn't go any further, so I wrapped her up well, and I buried her deep in the snow. Gabby is not alone there. Thousands of mothers were walking with their children, and like me, they buried their dead in the snow." To escape, thousands of terrified men and women swamped the stations and ports. In January '45, nearly 7,000 of them
packed onto the Wilhelm Gustloff. It was sunk by a Soviet submarine. More than 5,000 people disappeared beneath the waves, three times more than were lost on the Titanic. On the 29th of January 1945, 4 million Germans, 8.5 million according to some estimates, were displaced. At the end of January, between 40 and 50,000 people were arriving every day in Berlin. While refugees clogged the roads of Germany, the Soviet troops who started out from the Vistula stopped about 80 km from Berlin on the banks of the Oder. Zhukov's offensive had been a success. In total, the Germans had lost 450,000 men.
Having conquered most of Poland and imposed his domination on the Balkans, Stalin went into the Yalta Conference in a position of strength. Neither President Roosevelt, who was weakened by sickness, nor the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose country was drained after 5 years of war, could stand up to him. The Big Three agreed to divide Germany into four occupied zones. Churchill obtained a zone for France. This was not out of the goodness of his heart.
Roosevelt had said that US troops would pull out of Europe as soon as possible, and Churchill didn't want to find himself alone in the cage with the Soviet bear. Poland was handed to the communists, although Stalin had vaguely promised to organize free elections. To the west, there was one last hurdle to cross, the last natural barrier in Germany, the Rhine. All the bridges had been dynamited by the Germans. General Montgomery was still hoping to be first to cross the river. But the Americans beat him to it.
An advanced unit of the First US Army found a bridge still standing at Remagen, near Bonn. The Germans had rigged it with explosives, but had not yet detonated them. The Americans immediately established a bridgehead on the eastern bank of the river. Hitler was furious and ordered the engineers whose charges had not exploded to be shot. Meanwhile, Patton had sent his troops across further south at Oppenheim without notifying his superiors. He was already spreading panic in German territory.
Monty had dreamed of being first into Germany. In fact, he was last. But it was he who led the biggest offensive. He was in command of 1 and 1/4 million soldiers. This time, the lessons of Arnhem had been learned. The drop zones for the parachutists were spot-on. British troops pushed deep into Germany and captured increasingly younger soldiers. The French also wanted to take part in the action. De Gaulle knew that France's place in the victors' camp depended on its participation in the Allied war effort.
He summoned De Lattre, chief of the First Army. You have to cross the Rhine, even if the Americans don't grant you passage and you have to go by boat. It's a matter of the highest national importance. Further south, the French forces under General De Lattre also advanced. They fought on German soil alongside the Americans. For the Allies, there was now a gaping breach. They could finally invade the Reich. This was good news for them, but not for Stalin. As soon as he heard, he ordered Zhukov to take Berlin as soon as possible to avoid the Americans beating him to it.
Once the Rhine had been crossed, German resistance founded. Hitler had chosen to concentrate his forces to the east. He had exhausted his already diminished reserves in the costly Battle of the Ardennes. Now some towns, rather than fighting to the bitter end, were flying the white flag. The Anglo-Americans were making up ground. Churchill continually spurred on the Americans. "We have to push on and shake the Russians' hands as far to the east as possible," he urged. But Berlin was in the future Soviet occupation zone defined at Yalta.
Even if the Americans did take the city, they would have had to later withdraw. American public opinion would not accept the 100,000 dead that this might have cost simply as a matter of prestige. Such humanitarian issues never hindered Stalin. So Eisenhower decided not to launch an assault on Berlin. His troops could even afford a break for some home-style R&R. Marlene Dietrich paid them a little visit. Hello, darling. I want to say that sharing this entertainment with you today is to me more important than doing the entertaining.
I'm certain that we can look forward to a speedy victory. Goodbye. Good luck. Godspeed. But Ike's armies did not down their weapons for long. To defeat Nazi Germany swiftly without too heavy losses in their ranks, the Americans and British pursued a merciless bombing campaign. They relentlessly pounded German industrial areas and annihilated cities packed with civilians. Their aim was to smash the Reich's economic potential and to break the morale of the population, thereby undermining the regime.
Between January and April 1945, 471,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Germany. Cologne, Hamburg, and Berlin were all hit. Well, men, now that we've been the first ones to Berlin, how would you like to go back again? [screaming] In mid-February, Churchill wanted to bombard the city of Dresden as a show of strength to the Soviets, who had been less than dazzled by Montgomery's performance. The city was consumed in a firestorm. In under 24 hours, more than 25,000 inhabitants perished.
A city with no war-related industry and of no strategic importance, nothing justified the allies' brutal attack. But destroying Dresden also meant driving up the number of refugees and perturbing the movements of the Wehrmacht. The Allied leaders may have felt some regret over Dresden, but not for long, because Hitler's obstinacy drove them to maintain the bombing campaign, whatever the cost for the civilian population. At the end of March 1945, the Reich slipped into chaos. The outcome of the war was no longer in any doubt. A German officer noted in his diary, "We are reaching the end.
Do our leaders have any exit strategy in mind? The death of our soldiers, the destruction of our towns and villages, is there any sense to this now?" Another wrote, "Is there no one there to overpower the madman and call for an end to this? Are they still generals? No, they are trash, wet rags, they are cowards." But these words of revolt remained confined to private diaries. After writing these lines, those young soldiers returned to the combat. And yet, German society could not manage to rise up. And as a result, it continued its plunge to new depths.
The regime launched a new phase, radicalization against the Germans themselves. Whoever was not prepared to fight would face execution. In Königsberg, 80 deserters were executed. Often, victims' bodies were left at the roadside with a sign, "I'm a deserter and I refused to protect German women and children." Villages displaying the white flag were threatened with destruction. But this radicalization was even more harsh on deportees.
The progression of the Anglo-American armies to the west and the Soviets to the east led Himmler to close the camps, sending the deportees on abominable death marches. The detainees were on the road, but not getting anywhere. The Nazis no longer had time to gas people, so they exterminated through cold and hunger. Those who could not keep up the pace of the march got a bullet to the head. When the Allies liberated the camps, they found most of them almost entirely empty.
The Germans had only left certain deportees considered too weak to be evacuated. In April 1945, the British entered Bergen-Belsen. They found 30,000 prisoners hovering between life and death. It was an apocalyptic vision for the liberators. British troops had to use bulldozers to shift the thousands of bodies to avoid epidemics. The same month, the Americans entered the order of concentration camp, an offshoot of Buchenwald. Eisenhower was overwhelmed.
"I've never had such a shock in my entire life," he confessed. Eisenhower ordered the population of the next door town to visit the camp. In front of a crematorium where they burned 200 bodies per day, women fainted. Nonetheless, the officers insisted that the Germans confront the horrors which they had allowed to happen. On a table stood lampshades made of human skin. There were tattooed skins that a camp official had collected and shrunken heads. Trophies of Nazi barbarity. Discovering these horrors, one journalist wrote, "The gates of hell had opened."
Other camps were liberated, and more visits were imposed on local populations. Eisenhower declared, "People tell us that the American soldier doesn't know why he's fighting. Now at least he knows against who he's fighting." The discovery of the hell of the concentration camps was a shock for the whole world. For 10 months, the Reich had been shrinking. In April, the final act began. Berlin, the last citadel, was preparing for ultimate battle. On the 12th of April, 1945, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra performed Wagner's Götterdämmerung. To make up for the lack of personnel, an army of children, women, and the
elderly, marshaled by several thousand SS fanatics, had to defend the capital. They set up obstacles. Goebbels did a good job, and all those defending the city had a smile in these propaganda images. To set ambushes, every German was equipped with a rifle or a panzerfaust, an anti-tank weapon. The factories had turned out more than 3 million of them in recent months. In the streets of Berlin, people were given fast-track training. Many Germans still had faith in the Reich. One young soldier wrote to his parents, "I simply can't believe that the Führer would sacrifice us dumbly. No one can strip me of my faith in him. He is everything to me."
Certain officers confiscated white handkerchiefs to stop the defenders using them to surrender. Nazi dignitaries still believed, especially since on the same day in the United States on the 12th of April, 1945, President Roosevelt died. Hitler rejoiced. "The great miracle, the one I always predicted, has happened. The war is not lost." Hitler was blinded by his own illusions. But, the hope did not last long because the Red Army was closing in on the capital. Around a model of Berlin, Soviet generals discussed the plan of attack. Supplies from the east had finally arrived on the banks of the Oder.
Tanks, shells, planes, 30,000 cannons. On the 16th of April, the biggest artillery barrage of the war commenced. 1,236,000 shells were fired. 100,000 tons of steel rained down on the Germans. Stalin encouraged rivalry between his generals. "Whoever breaks through first can take Berlin," he declared. Zhukov made a direct thrust, but came up against stiff resistance. Konev went round the city to the south. The 196 Soviet divisions attacked from every side.
The Russians had one objective, the Chancellery, under which Hitler's bunker was located. Zhukov moved forward, but for every German killed, three Russians fell. Stalin wanted to see Berlin totally encircled to avoid the Anglo-Americans profiting from a sudden German collapse and entering the capital first. Each crossroads was defended, sometimes by young children. In these last pictures of the dictator, filmed 1 month earlier, the censor cut a piece of film which has never been shown. In it, one can see the Führer trembling, incapable of controlling himself.
Hitler is no more than a shadow. And yet, at no point was there any question of surrender. Goebbels blustered and made out all was well. "The situation is turning to our advantage. The Americans are marching on Berlin. The big turnaround is underway. We have to hold the city at any cost." Another lie from the Minister of Propaganda, but then that was his job after all. And yet, 110 km away, on the 25th of April in Torgau, the long-awaited day finally came.
The Reich was cut in two. The Soviet and American armies met up. While for the leadership, this was a time to be wary, for the ordinary soldier, it was a time of celebration. That said, certain Soviet soldiers avoided excessive fraternization that might have sent them to the gulag. In Berlin, 2 million civilians were caught in trap. It was now a matter of survival. However mighty the Soviet artillery power had been, even in a mechanized war it is the infantry who have to finish the job. In these last days, the motivation of the Germans changed. They were no longer fighting for their great Reich, for the Führer, or for National Socialism, but to save their skins.
The Russians were closing in on the bunker where Hitler was still positioning imaginary armies. The elites had fled the city. When Goebbels realized all was lost, he wondered, "What's to be done with a people whose men don't even fight when their women are being raped? All the plans, all the ideas of National Socialism are too elevated, too noble for such a people. These folk deserve the fate they are about to meet." At the same time in Italy, on the 28th of April, Mussolini was captured while trying to escape. He was shot. His body and that of his mistress were abused by the crowd. When Hitler learned of the death of Il Duce, he concluded, "Dead or alive, I don't want to fall into the hands of the enemy. After my
death, my body is to be burned and no one will be able to find it." On the 30th of April, deep in his bunker, Hitler committed suicide along with his wife, Eva Braun. His body was then burned by his chauffeur using 200 L of gas. For 12 years, the dictator had ruled over Germany. He had dreamed of a thousand-year Reich. This mirage disappeared in the ruins of his capital. One last lie. The radio claimed that Hitler had died leading the heroic defenders of Berlin.
The same day, Zhukov's troops broke through. His soldiers seized the Reichstag. Vasily Grossman wrote, "I wanted to shout, to call to all our brother fighters who lay in Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Polish soil, who were sleeping the eternal slumber on the field of honor. Comrades, can you hear us? We made it." Two days later, the Russians reconstructed the scene. A photo was taken. But this historic picture had to be retouched because one detail had been overlooked. One of the soldiers was wearing several watches on his wrists. But where was Hitler? This question haunted the Russians. Soviet soldiers found a body which bore a strong resemblance. But it turned out they were photographing themselves next to a doppelganger.
A of specialists was sent by Stalin to investigate. They found the charred bodies of Goebbels and his wife alongside with the lifeless bodies of their six children. A few months earlier, they were still being used for party propaganda. Their parents had murdered them before committing suicide. Hitler's remains were finally discovered in a bomb crater. When he learned of the Fuhrer's demise, Stalin exclaimed, "That's the end of that bastard. A shame we didn't take him alive."
The remains were secretly shipped to Russia. Even Zhukov, who savored his victory and paid a visit to the beast's lair, knew nothing of this epilogue. With Hitler dead, capitulation became possible for his successors. On the 7th of May, in a modest school in Reims at the headquarters of Allied Forces, the German representatives accepted the terms of an unconditional surrender. After the signing, General Jodl had the temerity to stand up and declare, "The German army is now in the hands of the Allies. I hope that the victor will treat us with generosity." With the pens used for the signatures, Ike made the V for victory. In January 1943 late President Roosevelt and Mr.
Churchill met in Casablanca. They all there pronounced the formula of unconditional surrender for the Axis power. In Europe that formula has now been fulfilled. But these images were not yet shown because Stalin was not satisfied with this capitulation. The strongman of the Kremlin bemoaned, "It was the Soviet people who bore on their shoulders most of the weight of the war." Stalin demanded that a second surrender be signed the following day in Berlin. On the 8th of May, the American, French, German, and British delegations crossed the shattered city. In Zhukov's headquarters on the edge of Berlin, they awaited the arrival of
Field Marshal Keitel. When he entered, no one replied to his salute. The various delegations signed all five acts of surrender. General de Lattre signed for France. It was 11:00 p.m. on the 8th of May, but it was already 1:00 a.m. in Moscow. The Soviets noted the date as the 9th of May. But the surrender did not bring an end to the tragedy. The halt in hostilities was followed by a wave of suicides. Besides the high command like Himmler, many thousands of anonymous Germans killed themselves, sometimes with their families, for fear of the Soviets, or else to follow Hitler to the afterlife.
In 1935, Hitler had promised the Germans, "Give me 10 years and you won't recognize Germany." He kept his word. "It's over." That was the cry that could be heard in towns around the world as they celebrated victory. The people hailed the liberation they had waited so long for. But the joy was also tinged with gravity. The dark shadow of Nazism would not be erased in a day. The suffering endured had left an indelible scar on memories. Nazism had plumbed the depths of horror. The extermination of the Jews, the massacres of civilians, the torture of resistance members would forever haunt the conscience of humanity.
Yet, a continent had to get back on its feet. The ruined towns had to be rebuilt. The million of displaced persons had to return to home. These were the huge challenges of the post-war period. From this chaos caused by the Nazi order, a new era would nonetheless emerge.
