Berlin, Germany • May 1, 1945 A little before 4 a.m. on this date in 1945 in Berlin, the new Chief of German Army General Staff Gen. Hans Krebs was shown into the tactical headquarters of Lt. Gen. Vasily Chuikov, commander of the Soviet Eighth Guards Army, on the west side of Tempelhof airport. A…
Berlin, Germany • April 30, 1945 Sometime after 3 p.m. on this date in 1945 Adolf Hitler, to all the world the face of unspeakable evil, shot himself in the right temple after he and Eva Braun, his wife of 40 hours (and near-secret mistress for 14 years), had poisoned themselves by ingesting cyanide. The Fuehrer’s psychotic…
Dachau, Germany • April 29, 1945 On a gray last Sunday in April 1945, 10 miles/16 kilometers north of Munich, Bavaria’s capital, U.S. soldiers of the 42nd Infantry Division, nicknamed the “Rainbow Division,” the 45th “Thunderbird” Infantry Division, and the 27th Tank Battalion were overwhelmed by the horror they saw as they closed in on Dachau concentration…
Luebeck, Northern Germany • April 24, 1945 Reichsfuehrer-SS, Reich Minister of the Interior, Gestapo chief, and Adolf Hitler-devotee Heinrich Himmler began making clumsy attempts to secure a separate peace treaty with the Western Allies as German defenders of the Reich capital—ground zero of Nazi resistance—failed to push the Red Army back across the Spree River,…
Berlin, Germany • April 23, 1945 On this date in 1945, with most land communications and electrical power lines down, Adolf Hitler broadcast on Greater German Radio the order to save his beleaguered capital. The order called for Wehrmacht forces opposing the Americans at the Elbe River to withdraw and move north to rescue Berlin,…
Ploen, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany • April 22, 1945 By the start of April 1945 most large German cities were rubbish heaps. Cityscapes were characterized by great rows of apartment blocks with their brick or stone facades ripped open. Church spires and factory chimneys poked into grimy skies, their walls and roofs collapsed. These scenes of civilian…
Berlin, Germany • April 20, 1945 On this date in 1945 a stooped, haggard, yellowish gray- and jowly-faced Adolf Hitler celebrated his 56th birthday in the safety of his underground command bunker 50 feet/15 meters beneath Berlin’s battered Old Reich Chancellery. Unlike previous birthdays marked by much ceremony and fuss, this one was all gloom and doom…
Rhine Meadow Camps, German Rhineland • April 17, 1945 By this date in 1945 and over the next 2 months, American, British, and French armies established 19 Rhine Meadow camps (German, Rheinwiesenlager) principally on the west bank of the Rhine River in the German states of North-Rhine Westphalia and Rheinland-Pfalz (Rhineland-Palatinate) (see map below). The Rhineland camps were…
Seelow Heights, Germany • April 16, 1945 On this date in 1945 the Allies called off their strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany because most targets were already in Allied hands or, like the Reich capital, Berlin, would be soon. So on the day the aerial campaign stopped the Red Army unleashed a battle to…
Ruhr Pocket, Northwestern Germany • April 14, 1945 In the spring of 1945 senior leaders of the Third Reich were on edge. On Germany’s Eastern Front, the tracks of Soviet mechanized armor and the boots of their infantry could be heard approaching the outskirts of the epicenter of Nazism, Berlin. On the Western Front, elements of…
