In January 1945 the end of the Second World War looked hopeful, but was by no means guaranteed as the Nazis continued to launch deadly attacks costing thousands of Allied lives. Here’s the story of the last five months, 80 years ago, before the world finally celebrated victory
It was only five months before the end of the largest and deadliest war in human history – but as the world woke up to the first day of 1945, victory was still far from certain. Two weeks earlier, the German army had launched a surprise attack on the Allied forces in a battle in the Ardennes region between Belgium and Luxembourg which raged throughout January.
Facing over 410,000 Nazi soldiers and 1,000 tanks in a massive push to regain the dominance they had lost after D-Day, the so-called Battle of the Bulge became the biggest and bloodiest battle American soldiers had ever fought, with nearly 80,000 men killed, maimed or captured.
It would turn out to be the last major German offensive and hasten the end of Hitler’s Third Reich. But on January 1, 1945, the confident Fuhrer still believed he could turn the tide – and was handing out victory medals. Legendary Luftwaffe pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel, who flew 2,530 combat missions and destroyed over 500 Allied tanks, received Germany’s highest decoration for bravery, The Knight’s Cross, one of 12 medals intended to be handed out once the war was won, from Hitler himself.
Meanwhile, as the Soviet Red Army advanced on the Eastern Front, they discovered the horrific reality of Nazi crimes. On January 27, soldiers from the 32nd Rifle Division arrived at Auschwitz concentration camp, finding 700 barely-alive prisoners and shocking evidence of industrial-scale murder, including 600 corpses.
“The Soviet troops discovered the Auschwitz camp almost by chance,” writes Max Likin in his book, 1945: A World at the End of War. “The stench is beyond description. Inside the barbed wire, corpses are scattered everywhere, with unwieldy piles by the doors of the huts. There’s little obvious difference between the dead and the living – haggard survivors with faces like hunted beasts.” That day is now remembered every day as Holocaust Memorial Day.
News from Auschwitz still hadn’t reached Britain when Winston Churchill took a plane to Yalta, in Crimea, to meet with US president Franklin D Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union.
By now the Allies had won the Battle of the Bulge and liberated all of France and Belgium and were fighting on the western border of Germany, while Soviet forces were 40 miles from Berlin and had already pushed back the Germans from Poland, Romania and Bulgaria.
With victory looking likely, the aim of the Yalta Conference was to decide what do with Germany after defeat. Furious discussions ensued for seven days until February 11, when a plan to carve up the country was agreed – setting the scene for the rest of the Cold War in Europe.
Germany would be divided into four zones of occupation, with the USSR, Britain, France and the USA each controlling a zone. The so-called Big Three also agreed to launching the United Nations with the air of preventing future world wars.
The reach and depravity of the current war became even more clear on February 3 when, after a fierce battle with Japanese occupying force, American troops finally recaptured Corregidor Island in the Philippines. The rush to liberate the Santo Tomas and Los Banos internment camp, where mostly American and British families were imprisoned, was due to the belief that desperate Japanese soldiers would massacre all camp internees.
In Santo Tomas they found 3,785 half-starved and ill-treated Allied men, women and children, who had survived on 500 calories a day of rotting and insect-infested food. “Screaming and shouting, tears rolling down, most internees drop to their knees while the throng rushes outside to surround the tanks,” writes Max.
Weeks later, American forces took part in one of the fiercest and bloodiest battles of the Pacific, when 6,821 soldiers were killed as they fought to capture the heavily fortified Iwo Jima island from the Japanese. It was the only battle of the Second World War in which US casualties exceeded those of Japan.
An iconic photo of American troops raising their flag on the island was printed in newspapers, just as the horrific revelations from Auschwitz started to be reported. It was then that Spanish artist Pablo Picasso started work on his famous portrait, The Charnel House, depicting cadavers with twisted limbs piled up like refuse.
By March, the Nazis were beating a hasty retreat, but still putting up a fight and blowing up bridges as they went.
As US forces reached the River Rhine in Remagen, 35 miles into Germany from Belgium, it was believed there were no more bridges intact. Then a reconnaissance patrol found that German demolition charges placed on the Lundendorff rail bridge had failed to completely detonate, and a fierce battle to capture it ensued.
Knowing the bridge was their last chance at stopping the Allied armies, the Nazis used troops, V-2 rocket and jet fighters to defend it, but on March 25, after 18 days of fighting, the Americans successfully captured and crossed it – a decisive moment in the impending collapse of Hitler’s Germany.
Sadly, victory was too late for one teenage girl, Anne Frank, who on March 12, burning with a fever, fell off her bunk in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and died.
Two years earlier, when 13-year-old Anne and her family went into hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands, the German-born Jewish girl had kept a diary documenting her life, which would become one of the world’s best-known books, turned into many plays and films.
Max Likin writes: “In an April 1944 entry, she wrote, ‘I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore, I am grateful to God for giving me this gift… of expressing all that is in me.’”
In Britain there’s a rising sense of optimism that five years of war will soon be over. Then suddenly, on March 27, a V-2 rocket slammed into several buildings in Whitechapel in London’s East End, killing 134 people. Later that day, another hits Orpington in south east London, killing a 34-year-old. Nobody knew it, but they would be the last two rockets fired from the European continent – Hitler’s very last offensive.
The world was further shocked on April 12 when, while sitting for a portrait, American president Franklin D. Roosevelt suddenly collapsed and died of a brain haemorrhage, aged 63. Vice president Harry Truman took the oath – and command of the final push to victory – just before midnight on the same day.
Three days later, British troops arrived at the gates of Bergen-Belsen, and found a scene from hell. Thousands of bodies lay unburied around the camp, and some 60,000 starving people were packed together without food, water or basic sanitation.
“Richard Dimbleby breaks down five times while recording his report from Belsen. For several days, his BBC bosses refuse to believe or broadcast it until he threatens to resign,” writes Max.
By the end of April, the Russians were closing in on Berlin, and Adolf Hitler had retreated to his concrete Fuhrerbunker below the city’s Reich Chancellery, along with his lover Eva Braun. On April 20, his 56th birthday, he saw daylight for the last time, greeting members of the Hitler Youth when he encouraged them in a final attempt to stop the Red Army.
Within a week, with news the city had been encircled, he knew it was over. He also discovered his ally Benito Mussolini, while trying to flee Italy with a convoy of German soldiers had been captured by communist partisans, along with his young mistress, Claretta Petacci.
The next day, April 28, Mussolini, 61, and Petacci, 33, were ordered to stand in front of a stone wall near Lake Como where both were executed by machine gun fire, before their bodies were passed to an angry crowd which brutalised their corpses and hung them upside down from a girder in Milan’s main square.
“This will never happen to me,” Hitler told Hermann Goring. Just after midnight on April 29, he and Braun got married in the bunker, in a ceremony witnessed by Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann.
Less than 40 hours into their union, at 1pm on April 30, the newlyweds said their farewells to staff and members of the inner circle and retired to their quarters, before committing suicide together at around 3.30pm.
After hearing a gunshot, Hitler’s valet Heinz Linge and his SS adjutant Otto Gunsche found their lifeless bodies on a small sofa. Braun, 33, had bitten into a cyanide capsule and Hitler had shot himself in the right temple with his pistol.
The next day, German state radio played solemn music by Wagner for 90 minutes as the world waited in suspense for a promised announcement.
In one of the most dramatic broadcasts of the Second World War, at 10.25pm the music stopped. Three drum rolls and a moment’s silence followed, then Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz announced the Fuhrer’s death – not mentioning suicide.
He announced that Hitler had appointed him to be his successor, and promised to keep fighting and “save Germany from destruction”. But no-one believed him. Cheers were heard in streets all over Britain as the BBC broadcast the news to the nation.
Days later, on May 4, a German delegation arrived at the headquarters of British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery at Luneberg Heath, east of Hamburg, offering the unconditional surrender of German forces in the Netherlands, northwest Germany and Denmark.
Two days later, Hermann Goering, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, walked out of his home in the Bavarian town of Berchtesgaden and surrendered to the first American soldier he met – First Lieutenant Jerome Shapiro, a Jewish officer from New York. Troops later entered his luxury mountainside home and found a cellar containing 16,000 bottles of expensive wine.
In the early morning of May 7, the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich was signed at the Allied Expeditionary Force HQ in Reims, France, marking the end of the Second World War in Europe. Hostilities continued in Asia, with war officially ending on September 9, after the US dropped two atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing up to 246,000 people.
But for Europe, nearly six years of war that had cost the lives of millions, was finally over.
Soon after, the BBC interrupted its scheduled programming with a news flash announcing that Victory in Europe Day, May 8 1945, would be a national holiday the following day.
Now, 80 years on, we celebrate VE Day again, remembering the heroes who gave their lives for our freedom, determined that the horrors witnessed by the ‘bravest generation’ will never again return to European soil.
- 1945: A World at the End of War by Max Likin, History Press, £12.99, out now.
