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By Root 1246 0

and Bohning, the town hall completely burned. It’s impossible even to begin to describe it. But you will be able to imagine it. You have seen Munich. Is everything going to be destroyed? Yet there is no other way out to be seen. Why do people let our soldiers go to their deaths uselessly, why do they let the rest of Germany be ruined, why all the misery, why?’ She added later: ‘If you were still a loyal supporter of these people after the war – you know who I mean – it would inevitably separate us. What have they made of our beautiful, magnificent Germany? It’s enough to make you weep. And one mustn’t even think about how the others will enslave us.’

Histories which depict Hitler’s 1945 ‘armies’ and ‘divisions’ as serious fighting formations mock the reality: every unit was reduced to a fragment of its proper strength in men, tanks, artillery, transport. Between June 1944 and March 1945, the Wehrmacht lost 3½ million rifles, so that in its last campaigns even small arms were in short supply. Many soldiers were in wretched physical condition: a medical report from a parachute artillery battery on 10 January observed that of its seventy-nine men, all but two were suffering from lice, and eighteen from eczema caused by poor diet. Efforts to sustain discipline invited derision; it must have seemed fantastic to the soldiers of 1/1120 Volksgrenadiers that in January, as the Reich collapsed, their CO Major Beiss issued an order of the day deploring personal slovenliness: ‘Rifles will be carried on the right shoulder, barrel up. If I should again see a “Sunday sportsman” wandering about with his rifle pointing downwards, he will be punished by seven days’ close arrest. Fresh dirt graces a soldier, but old filth exposes laziness. If I again see any man with a “lion’s mane” or any other fancy hairstyle, I shall personally cut his hair.’

The 1945 Western Drive into Germany

It is a commonplace among armies, especially those facing adversity, that men must never be left idle to brood. In the early days of 1945, when the war was going very badly indeed for Germany, panzer company commander Lt. Tony Saurma sought to divert his men’s leisure hours with lectures: he once addressed them for an hour about the United States, its cornbelt, industrial areas and great cities. He knew, as did his audience, that the country would soon loom large in their lives, if they were fortunate enough to survive. What was remarkable was not that hundreds of thousands of Germans abandoned the war in its last months, but that others continued to resist – a few even professing to find their predicament acceptable. An SS panzer platoon commander, posted to Hungary, wrote of a lull behind the battlefield in mid-February: ‘rations were excellent. We learned from the civilian population the various uses of paprika. The people were very friendly. During the evenings we drove to see films in Nové Zámky.’

The 1 February Western Allied combined chiefs of staff meeting, held on Malta before the Yalta summit, endorsed Eisenhower’s plan to entrust his main effort, in this last phase of the campaign, to Montgomery’s 21st Army Group in north Germany, reinforced by Simpson’s US Ninth Army. The heavy bomber forces were directed to assault Germany’s transport infrastructure, including such rail centres as Dresden* and Leipzig in the path of the Russian advance. But the ground advance proved slow: Montgomery’s next big attack, Operation Veritable, ran into trouble in the Reichwald forest; Simpson’s formations were held back until 23 February by German flooding of large areas of their front. Only after painful fighting did Montgomery’s forces close up to the Rhine between the Dutch border and Koblenz on 10 March.

In Germany’s desperate circumstances, Hitler adopted a familiar panacea: changing generals. Kesselring, who had conducted the brilliant defence of Italy, succeeded von Rundstedt as commander in the west. Yet Kesselring was no more capable than his predecessor of carrying out a coherent campaign with fifty-five enfeebled divisions against Eisenhower’s eighty-five