Millions of people died during WWII… but ONE death was welcome | UK | News

No one knew how or when the Third Reich would collapse. British parliamentarian Harold Nicolson summed up the confusion in his diary on March 15, 1945: “The Nazis may retire to their Bavarian Alpine Redoubt to stage a Götterdammerung and prolong their own invincible legend. Others do not share this idea and believe there will be a series of large-scale capitulations. All of which boils down to the fact that the war may last till Christmas 1945, or it may end by June. Nobody can tell.” Efforts to finally rid the world of Nazi Germany began with two great Allied river crossings in March and April 1945, both heralded by unprecedented thunders of cannon-fire.

In the east, the Soviets had advanced to the River Oder, 40 miles from Berlin and paused to reorganise, reinforce and reequip. Then, on April 16, led by Marshals Zhukov, Rokossovsky and Konev, two million men with 6,000 tanks and supported by 40,000 artillery guns, parked one every yard, leapt across the water and attacked the German capital. The assault would carry them to the very steps of Hitler’s Berlin bunker.

In the west, three million Canadians, Britons, Americans and Frenchmen launched an equally ambitious series of attacks along a 300-mile stretch of the fast-flowing River Rhine, Germany’s western barrier since Roman times. At Kleve, Rees and Wesel near the German-Dutch border, Field Marshal Montgomery led the main push by Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander. His assaults thereafter triggered a southwards ripple of American and French units also crossing under fire along as far upriver as Strasbourg.

For Montgomery, his riverine operation overnight on March 23-24, codenamed Operation Plunder, was the culmination of every doctrine and piece of machinery his soldiers had developed since winning at El Alamein, 28 months earlier. Parked wheel-to-wheel, 6,000 guns pulverised German positions before overnight attacks led by commandos, swimming tanks, and infantry in amphibious craft.

The following morning, watched personally by Winston Churchill, they were complemented by a 16,000-strong Anglo-American air assault, Operation Varsity, which landed on the east bank by parachute and glider, while Royal Engineers constructed 30 combat rafts and bridges. Thereafter Montgomery’s Anglo-Canadian 21st Army Group, numbering 1,284,712 personnel, fanned out into Holland and northern Germany, with the American Ninth Army to its immediate south. Monty’s force is best pictured as a right hand, with its wrist on the Rhine crossing sites, and the thumb and index finger representing the Canadian I and II Corps that assaulted and liberated the Netherlands.

The middle finger, in the form of General Brian Horrocks’ XXX Corps drove hard for Bremen, Cuxhaven and the North Sea coast, with the Guards Armoured forging ahead of the 3rd British, 43rd Wessex and 51st Highland Divisions, plus 8th Armoured Brigade. The next digit of Montgomery’s hand was represented by XII Corps, thrusting to Hamburg, spearheaded by 7th Armoured, with 52nd Lowland and 53rd Welsh Divisions, plus 4th Armoured Brigade.

Beyond the Rhine, the 11th Hussars, an original Desert Rats formation, who in their distant past had picked up the nickname of ‘Cherrypickers’ and had since exchanged their horses for armoured cars, overran a school near Hamburg, and found from blackboard illustrations a lesson on the use of anti-tank weapons in progress. The final advance, of the little finger, saw VIII Corps stabbing its way to Osnabrück, Lüneburg and as far as the banks of the River Elbe, with 11th Armoured, 6th Airborne and 15th Scottish Divisions, and 1st Commando and 6th Guards Tank Brigades. This took them to the future home of the British Army of the Rhine for the next 70 years.

When encountered, Germans at this stage either surrendered with alacrity or rabidly fought on, but it was impossible to predict which. One stiff fight took place in an ancient strip of woodland, the Teutoburgerwald. So high were the casualties sustained by the 3rd Monmouthshire Battalion during six days in the wood, that although Corporal Ted Chapman was awarded one of the last Victoria Crosses of the European war on April 2, the Monmouths had to be withdrawn from operations and replaced by another battalion.

Along the way, the Allied troops encountered the camps. On April 16, more than 15,000 allied prisoners of war were liberated from their stockade at Fallingbostel, but more numerous were the concentration and labour camps where the victims of the Reich were murdered by malnutrition, disease, overwork or cold-blooded murder. Patton’s men had been shocked to discover the first at Ohrdruf, near Weimar, on April 4. Even the famously tough general vomited when he visited days later.

Soon after, GIs uncovered the depravities of Buchenwald and the shocking underground factory at Nordhausen. But for Montgomery’s troops the evils of Nazidom were revealed on April 15 with the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. More than 30,000 rotting corpses were subsequently buried by former German guards under the watchful gaze of the Tommies. Over half of the victims had perished after being freed, their bodies too weak to carry on. As one US commander observed at Ohrdruf: “Some did not know what they were fighting for. Now we know what we are fighting against.”

Soon, huge numbers of Axis prisoners began to be taken. By the end of April, the total on the Western Front alone was 1.5 million, who were held in temporary POW camps along the banks of the Rhine. The end was obviously near.On April 28, Mussolini was executed by partisans, and his beaten body strung up and displayed to Italians like that of a medieval criminal. As reported by the Daily Express, when he read the news, Hitler determined on his own suicide of cyanide followed by burning, so there would be no repeat of the Italian’s humiliating fate.

Consumed by despair and beyond hope of victory, with Russian tanks in the streets nearby, we are now sure the Führer carried this out with his bride of one day, Eva Braun, on April 30 in his Berlin bunker. As Harold Nicolson foresaw, the end of the Reich was messy, with a series of large-scale capitulations. First, another million German troops in Italy ceded on April 29 to Field Marshal Alexander at his headquarters in the former royal palace of Caserta, north of Naples, effective from May 2.

Two days later, in his tented headquarters on Lüneburg Heath, between Hamburg, Hanover and Bremen, four German officers relinquished all their forces in Holland, in northwest Germany, and Denmark to Montgomery. A sergeant major recalled the field marshal’s finest moment had the “sober air of a school prize-giving or village fete where award-winning vegetables were being judged”. This news overshadowed the equally important submission of the Wehrmacht in southern Germany on May 5. The final act followed two days later by General Jodl yielding at Eisenhower’s command post in Rheims.

However, Stalin wanted his own surrender moment and insisted on an identical ceremony with the Wehrmacht’s chief, Field Marshal Keitel, at the Soviet military headquarters in Karlshorst near Berlin.

This document was signed at 12.16am on May 9, which became Soviet Victory Day, and remains so in Eastern Europe. Later the same day, Force 135 of 6,000 troops liberated the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey. For the British and Canadians, however, the signal sent by Sergeant Susan Hibbert was the one that mattered. Before the ink was dry on the surrender document at Rheims, Eisenhower ordered her to signal the War Office in London: “The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 02:41 local time 7 May 1945”.

To allow official messages to reach every headquarters of both sides, this was how May 8 came to be designated VE Day.

• Peter Caddick-Adams is the author of Sand & Steel: A New History of D-Day (Cornerstone, £16.99)