German Western Front 1944/1945
1944: Overlord · Dragoon · Mons · Market Garden · Scheldt estuary · Aachen · Hürtgenwald · Queen · Alsace-Lorraine · Ardennes
1945: Nordwind · Bodenplatte · Blackcock · Colmar · Veritable · Grenade · Blockbuster · Lumberjack · Undertone · Plunder · Würzburg · Ruhrkessel · Nuremberg
In the final phase of the Second World War, the German Western Front 1944/1945 was the most important theater of war in Europe alongside the Eastern Front . It was created in June 1944 by the landing of the Allies in Normandy, followed by the liberation of occupied France and Belgium . In 1944, the Allies were no longer able to penetrate deeply into the interior of Germany; the front stabilized temporarily at the Siegfried Line . In the winter of 1944/45 the German Ardennes offensive led to one of the last major war efforts of the Wehrmacht , which however no longer had any influence on the outcome of the war. After the Allied breakthrough to the Rhine and its crossing in spring 1945, the German front collapsed. Shortly before the end of the war, the heads of the American and Soviet troops met near Torgau on the Elbe , after VE-Day (May 8, 1945) the Western Allies briefly occupied parts of what would later become the Soviet occupation zone .
Prehistory of the landing in Western Europe
In anticipation of the anti-Hitler coalition planned during the Second World War Second Front which was in November 1943. Army Group B of the armed forces under their commander Erwin Rommel moved to France and the OB West Gerd von Rundstedt assumed. Rommel was also tasked with overseeing the defense measures on the Atlantic Wall . In this function he was directly subordinate to Adolf Hitler .
At the beginning of 1944, Rommel took over command of Army Group B , which was north of the Loire . On January 21, 1944, the German Air Force began again with attacks on London , which continued until April.
While the Western Allies were preparing the landing in Normandy and were gathering large amounts of troops, weapons and supplies in southern England, the Germans strengthened their coastal fortifications on the Atlantic Wall. Rommel had the fortifications on the coast expanded with a will to assert himself and with organizational skills. Among other things, he had simple obstacles made of tree trunks (" Rommel asparagus ") bury or erect against landing craft and gliders .
On paper, the numbers were impressive, especially given the setbacks over the past two years. The Wehrmacht still had 54 divisions in Western Europe, 27 in Italy and 156 on the Eastern Front (→ German situation in Normandy in 1944 ). In reality, however, only 850,000 men were ready in the West. Most of the infantry divisions lacked motorized transportation; they were just immobile ("down-to-earth") divisions. They were reinforced by units of the Eastern Legions , which mostly did well here, even if they were exposed to constant air raids .
The armor strength of the Wehrmacht was not very encouraging either: in June 1944 there were only ten armored divisions and one armored infantry division stationed far behind the coastline after Gerd von Rundstedt, General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg and Hitler had decided against the will of Rommel to establish the armored reserve to relocate to the hinterland. In total, they had only 1,552 tanks at their disposal. After deducting vehicles with maintenance problems, the German armored divisions had an average of only around 100 operational tanks at their disposal, so that they were far inferior in numbers. The total air superiority of the Western Allies also made practically any movement of German tank units during the day impossible.
The German tank divisions on the Eastern Front suffered considerable losses in the summer of 1943 when they tried to clear enemy forces from the promontory near Kursk ( Operation Citadel ). In addition, the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942/43 and the German defeat in it had weakened the personal and material forces - and possibly also the fighting morale (belief in the final victory ) - considerably.
The fundamental dilemma of invasion defense was where to hit the enemy. Based on his experience in Africa, Rommel was of the opinion that this should be done in the landing zone. Once the enemy had established himself, it would be impossible, because of its air superiority, to muster sufficient forces to destroy it. Rundstedt and Hitler, on the other hand, considered it impossible to adequately defend all conceivable landing zones. They wanted to keep reserves in the hinterland ready and use them as soon as the invasion area was clearly visible. Basically both were right - but only in a negative sense. Rundstedt saw correctly that there were not enough forces to defend all possible landing zones. Rommel was right about the assessment of the Allied air control. Since a German air reconnaissance no longer existed, there was no way to identify the landing zones in time.
On the landing day ( D-Day ), the difference of opinion proved to be almost irrelevant, as Rommel was on home leave on the occasion of his wife's 50th birthday (given poor weather forecasts, he considered an invasion unlikely) and Rundstedt was not allowed to do anything without Hitler. Since nobody in his environment dared to wake Hitler, who was staying at the Berghof , because of a possible false report, he only found out about the invasion between 10:00 and 11:00; at first he thought it was a diversionary maneuver, and two armored divisions held in reserve near Paris were not alerted until about noon. “This delay was crucial.” During the day, the armored forces suffered heavy losses of men and material due to Allied air raids.
From the landing in Normandy to the liberation of Paris
On June 6, 1944, the Allies landed in Normandy . The plan for Operation Overlord was based on invasion plans drawn up from 1941; the British Lieutenant General ( Lieutenant General ) Sir Frederick E. Morgan had drawn up its final version. The plan was to land with four armies and then quickly advance inland. The Germans were ill-prepared for the invasion. The German planning staff and Hitler always expected the landing on the Strait of Dover , the narrowest part of the English Channel . The area of Calvados , where the Allies finally landed, was in places only defended with a few meters of barbed wire and a few machine-gun nests . Despite the OKW's false expectations about the location of the invasion, the Normandy coast was heavily fortified in many places. The invasion area was divided into five landing sections with the code names Juno , Gold , Sword (British / Canadian landing sections ), and Utah and Omaha (US landing sections ). The air and sea bombing of the coast went according to plan, but missed the first German line at Omaha. This (together with the fact that the Germans had a second division there without the knowledge of the Allies) resulted in very heavy losses of the first wave (around 70%).
On the so-called D-Day , almost 6,700 ships and over 13,000 aircraft were involved during Operation Neptune , the actual landing company. In the early morning of June 6th, several airborne units (the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and the 6th British Airborne Divisions ) started their operations in the hinterland. Because of navigation errors and surprisingly strong German flak fire , many machines did not reach the designated drop-off zones , so that the paratroopers were spread over large parts of the Cotentin peninsula .
Although the Allies had mobilized enormous forces, they made slow progress in places. But not least because of the Allied air superiority and the self-destroyed French railroad tracks, the German side did not succeed in relocating additional units to the combat area of Normandy as quickly as possible. Cherbourg in the north of the Cotentin Peninsula (fortress commander Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben ) fell on June 26th after heavy American artillery fire and fierce street fighting (→ Battle of Cherbourg ).
The capture of Caen , a primary target on the first day of the landing, proved much more difficult for the Allied troops of the British and Canadians on the east side of the Normandy bridgehead; Only after six weeks of heavy fighting was the city fully occupied on July 19 (→ Battle of Caen ).
In the western part of the beachhead in Normandy, the US Army launched an offensive from the Lessay - Saint-Lô line on July 25 , which led to the breakout from the landing head at Avranches on July 31 (→ Operation Cobra ).
Hitler ordered OB West , Field Marshal General Günther von Kluge , to carry out a counterattack via Mortain to Avranches in order to cut off the armored and infantry divisions that had already been smuggled through from Patton (→ Operation Liege ). The attack began in the night of August 7th, but got stuck in the course of the afternoon, mainly due to the massive air superiority of the Allies. After that, the broken-out US troops were able to encompass the German 7th Army and the 5th Panzer Army from the south and form the Falaise pocket with the British and Canadians from the north , in which the German troops in Normandy until August 21 were largely worn out. Hitler, the v. Assuming that he was sabotaging his plans, Kluge replaced him on August 16 with Field Marshal Walter Model , who was considered to be the “savior of the Eastern Front” and who should now do the same with the Western Front after the defeat by the Allied landing operation.
A second invasion began on August 15th. It took place on the Côte d'Azur (southern France) between Toulon and Cannes (→ Operation Dragoon ). About 5,000 aircraft and 880 Allied seagoing ships (including four aircraft carriers, six battleships, 21 cruisers and over 100 destroyers, a total of 34 French ships and 1,370 landing craft) were involved in the landing. Three American divisions formed the attack forces. The French and Americans were able to advance swiftly into the interior of the country without decisive resistance.
As early as August 16, Hitler gave “the order for the gradual evacuation of southern France. Only Marseille and Toulon should each have 1 Div. being held. [...] 18.8. Beginning of the withdrawal of H. Gr. G. from the Spanish border and the Atlantic coast in the direction of the upper Marne , the Saône and the Swiss border. "
Paris was liberated on August 25th (→ Battle of Paris ). The German city commandant General Dietrich von Choltitz refused Hitler's order to destroy the city and surrendered with his troops without a fight. Model had previously ignored all Paris-related orders.
The advance to the Siegfried Line and the German Ardennes offensive
Model, who was used to being able to assert himself with Hitler, immediately organized the rescue of as many troops as possible from the Falaise pocket and the subsequent retreat across the Seine. Despite Hitler's orders, he did not take care of the defense of Paris, made drastic demands for troops to replace Hitler with the pointlessness of "holding on" in France and brought the remnants of the Western Army via Belgium back to the Netherlands and as far as the Siegfried Line. The withdrawing German troops - in addition there were the retreating 15th Army from the French English Channel coast and the 19th Army with a huge baggage train and authorities from southern and southwestern France - were harassed by the advancing American armored troops. In the Mons pocket , the Americans trapped five divisions of the 7th Army and took 30,000 prisoners.
After the loss of the Atlantic ports on the English Channel and especially in Brittany ( Battle of Brittany ), the Navy continued its submarine war from Norway. Until September 1, the Germans attacked London with rockets ( V1 , V2 ) from launch pads in northern France . Work on the “ Friesenwall ” project was intended to counteract the direct penetration of the Allies on the German North Sea coast.
With a the British hardly have dared pace foray underlined Montgomery mobility also his armored divisions and these captured on August 31, Amiens , reached on September 2, the Belgian border near Lille , the day after Brussels and again a day later Antwerp with its port . Only when the Allies had supply problems due to their action on all fronts - in the meantime Patton was also marching with the 3rd US Army to the upper Moselle near Metz and Nancy towards the Saarland - their tank divisions had to stop because of a lack of fuel from September 11th insert. Model used the respite to consolidate his units and to stabilize the German front.
Meanwhile, Montgomery and Eisenhower could not agree on a coordinated approach. The British marshal had suggested to the American, who on September 1st took immediate command of all earth operations,
“To restrain Patton's right wing and beat with the left, […]” or vice versa: “If we cut the supplies in half and act on a broad front everywhere, we will be so weak everywhere that we cannot count on success anywhere. [...] Eisenhower replied that he still intended Patton to advance eastwards and to shake hands with the forces approaching from southern France. "
After further disputes - most recently on September 10 - Eisenhower endorsed both ventures and hoped that the supplies would be sufficient.
The problem was that while the supplies were stacked well in Normandy, there was a lack of transportation. Since Bradley favored Patton, with the commander of the 3rd US Army also using questionable means, Montgomery did not receive enough fuel and ammunition to make the concentrated push into the Ruhr area that he demanded a resounding success. The combined airborne and ground troop company Market Garden near Nijmegen and Arnhem, which was prepared for this, ended with a successful defensive model. Patton was also unable to achieve a breakthrough across the Westwall towards the Saarland.
"The result was that both plans were foiled."
Bradley also remained blocked with the 1st US Army in front of Aachen. Although the VII US Corps crossed the German border on September 12, 1944 and took the Kornelimünster district in the south of Aachen on September 14, 1944 , without causing any major damage, the advance in the Stolberg area came to a standstill .
The Allies tried to expand their supply routes with truck columns moving in circles ( Red Ball Express ) and two fuel pipelines through the North Sea ( Operation Pluto ), but Model closed the port of Antwerp to them for weeks until the end of November (→ Battle of the Scheldt estuary ) . Until then, no “short supply route” could be established. In addition, there was the necessary supplies for the French population, especially the residents of Paris.
In Germany, the creation of the new divisions required by Model was feverishly worked on in order to consolidate the decisive front area of Army Group B. To relieve the model, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt took over command of the Western Front again on September 4, with the quickly assembled units and reinforcements from Italy
“Within three weeks of the fall of Paris and the crushing defeat of the German armies in the battle for France, the Wehrmacht had almost restored its equilibrium; in any case, it was no longer 'running'. "
In October 1944, the German battle fronts in the west and east were strengthened again.
No sooner had the situation been more or less consolidated after the British withdrawal from Arnhem than Hitler dealt with the plan of a counter-offensive. “On October 8th, Jodl submitted the draft for an offensive to be opened through the Ardennes with the aim of Antwerp at the end of November.” Although he had “burned up” some of the new tank brigades against Patton, he managed to set up the 6th Panzer Army ; a total of 32 divisions should be available until the attack. The German tank and assault gun production now went almost entirely to the Western Front.
After fierce fighting , the Allies captured Aachen, the first German city, on October 21. Subsequently, the cities of Euskirchen (bridges over the Erft ) and Düren as well as Jülich (both on the Rur ) were completely destroyed and Heinsberg (on the Rur; northern end of the western wall ) was heavily devastated. On November 22nd, US Army troops reached Metz and Strasbourg further south . From mid-December 1944 onwards, the Wehrmacht tried in vain to regain the initiative in the West with the Battle of the Bulge . The objective of the operation to split the front of the Western Allies and advance as far as Antwerp was not achieved.
Advance to the Rhine
The Battle of the Bulge triggered a regrouping of the Allied troops. This favored an offensive launched by Hitler at the turn of the year 1944/45 in Lower Alsace ( Operation Nordwind ), which, like the Ardennes offensive, failed. The collapse of the eastern front as a result of the Vistula-Oder operation ultimately led to a thinning of the western front, with the result that the initiative finally went to the Allies. Allied troops smashed the Alsace bridgehead from January 19 to February 9 (second part of Operation Colmar) and captured the Rur Triangle between January 14 and 27, 1945 as part of Operation Blackcock the cities of Roermond , Sittard and Heinsberg. On February 10, 1945, the battle in the Huertgen Forest finally came to an end.
The Allies began operations on February 7th that were to bring them into possession of the Rhineland :
- Operation Veritable (= Battle of the Reichswald , February 7-22 ) and Operation Grenade (from February 8; crossing the Rur)
- Operation Lumberjack (March 1 - 7; advance to the Rhine up to the Moselle)
On March 7th they reached the still intact Rhine bridge from Remagen south of Bonn (and thus south of the Ruhr area). Operation Undertone took place on the Moselle and Saar from mid-March .
Rhine crossing and advance into the interior of the empire
American troops crossed the Rhine in the night of March 22nd to 23rd, 1945 near Nierstein and advanced through the Hessian Ried , which was conquered until March 24th, 1945 with sometimes heavy fighting. Subsequently, the troops under General Patton encircled Darmstadt , which had been destroyed on September 11, 1944 by an air raid , the so-called fire night , and surrendered on March 25, 1945 ( Palm Sunday ). The Rhine crossing north of the Ruhr area near Wesel ( Operation Plunder ) began on March 23 . With Operation Varsity , another major air landing operation took place.
The majority of Army Group B of the Wehrmacht under Field Marshal Model was enclosed in the so-called Ruhr basin on April 1 . The organized resistance in the cauldron ended on April 18, and over 300,000 soldiers were taken prisoner. On the same day the US troops took Magdeburg , one day later Leipzig .
End of war
On April 25, US and Soviet troops met in Torgau on the Elbe. After Elbe Day , the Germans' sphere of influence was divided into two parts. On April 26, Bremen fell to the British, who moved on to the northeast. They took Lübeck on May 2nd, while the 6th Airborne Division was advancing to Wismar , probably also to prevent the Red Army from advancing to Schleswig-Holstein. Hamburg capitulated on May 3rd . On May 5th, Colonel General Johannes Blaskowitz surrendered , whose troops had been cut off in the " Fortress Holland ".
While the British units were conquering northwest Germany, the Americans turned south: They occupied Munich on April 30th . On April 22nd, Stuttgart fell to the French army, which advanced south to Vorarlberg . Units of the 7th US Army met on May 3rd at the Brenner Pass with their compatriots who had occupied Northern Italy from the south . The 3rd US Army advanced as far as West Bohemia and Upper Austria and liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp on May 5th .
In Italy, Bologna fell to US forces on April 19; Genoa was captured on April 27th. One day later, Italian partisans in Dongo seized the fallen "Duce" Benito Mussolini and shot him. On May 2, the German units surrendered in Italy, and on the same day the British army marched into Trieste .
On May 8, 1945, the last remaining German units capitulated. Alfred Jodl signed the unconditional surrender in Reims and Wilhelm Keitel in Berlin-Karlshorst . That ended the war in Europe.
See also
literature
- Chester Wilmot : The Struggle for Europe. Gutenberg Book Guild, Zurich 1955.
- Walter Görlitz : Model - Defensive Strategy. Limes-Verlag, Wiesbaden / Munich 1982, ISBN 3-8090-2071-0 .
- Helmut Ritgen: West Front 1944. Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-613-02409-8 .
- Peter Lieb : Conventional war or Nazi ideological war? Warfare and the fight against partisans in France 1943/44. Oldenbourg, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-486-57992-5 .
Remarks
- ↑ Model demanded "25 fresh Inf.-Div. [...] with a sufficient tank reserve of 5–6 tank div. […] Otherwise the gate to West Germany is open. ”: Telex from Models to Jodl on September 4, 1944 (From the collection of documents by von Tempelhoffs. - quoted from: Chester Wilmot: Der Kampf um Europa. P. 508.) The OKW could not find a single "fresh" division in all of Germany. There were training units, but not a single new division-like association that was operational. […] Through […] desperate temporary help, Hitler and Himmler got 135,000 soldiers and workers on their feet to re-fortify and manned the West Wall […] At this critical moment, when the immediate army reserves were exhausted, the rescue came from the Air Force. On September 4, Göring announced to the Army General Staff, which was completely surprised, that he could deploy […] 20,000 men (paratroopers in 8 regiments) […], plus 10,000 men of flight and ground personnel. These troops formed the core of the (1st Paratrooper Army), which came into being on the afternoon of September 4th by a […] General (Kurt Student) given an order by telephone in Berlin. (Wilmot: Europa, p. 509 f.)
- ^ "By lowering the age limit from seventeen and a half to sixteen years, by thoroughly combing the industry and generally grazing the home front, Goebbels was able to mobilize 300,000 men in August and 200,000 men each in September and October." (Wilmot: Europa, 594.)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ian Kershaw : Hitler. 1936 - 1945. DVA, Stuttgart 2000, p. 845.
- ↑ Albert Speer: Memories . Frankfurt a. M., pp. 364f .; quoted n. Ian Kershaw: Hitler. 1936 - 1945. DVA, Stuttgart 2000, pp. 845f.
- ^ Rüdiger Bolz: Synchronopses of the Second World War. ECON Taschenbuch Verlag, Düsseldorf 1983, p. 215. ISBN 3-612-10005-X .
- ↑ Chester Wilmot : The fight for Europe , Gutenberg Book Guild, Zurich 1955, p. 505.
- ↑ Wilmot: Europa, p. 504.
- ↑ Görlitz: Model, p. 205 f.
- ↑ Wilmot: Europa, p. 526.
- ↑ Wilmot: Europa, p. 587.
- ^ Paul Fabianek: Consequences of secularization for the monasteries in the Rhineland - Using the example of the monasteries Schwarzenbroich and Kornelimünster, 2012, Verlag BoD, ISBN 978-3-8482-1795-3 , p. 30/31, with excerpts from the secret daily reports of the German Wehrmacht leadership on the '' Lage West '' from 13th to 15th September 1944 ( Army Group B / LXXXI AK)
- ↑ Wilmot: Europa, p. 588.
- ↑ Wilmot: Europa, p. 598.
