Never has there been a killing frenzy to match what occurred in Germany at the beginning of 1945. After years during which the armed forces of Nazi Germany had spread violence, devastation and mass murder across the European continent, the most destructive war ever fought well and truly came home to the Reich. As the Nazi empire contracted, with Allied armies closing in from both east and west, and as German defences against attack from the air became increasingly ineffective, the full violence of war was concentrated on what remained of what the Nazis referred to as ‘Greater Germany.’
The last months of the war were, for Nazi Germany, by far the most bloody. In January, when Soviet armies launched the greatest offensive of the Second World War, that brought them from the Vistula to the Oder in only a couple of weeks, German casualties reached their peak: In that single month more than 450,000 German soldiers lost their lives – more, by a considerable margin, than either the united Kingdom or the United States lost in all theatres during the entire war. In each of the next three months – February, March and April – the number of German military dead exceeded 280,000. That is to say, more than a quarter of Germany’s entire military losses during the Second World War occurred in 1945; during the last four months of the war more Germans were killed than in 1942 and 1943 put together, and they were largely killed within Germany.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “A World in Flames.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 11. Print.
Original Source Listed:
See Rüdiger Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich, 1999), p. 238.
Author’s Note:
See also the suggestive comments in Andreas Kunz, ‘Die Wehrmacht in der Agonie der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft 1944/45. Eine Geankenskizze’, in Jörg Hillmann and John Zimmermann (eds.), Kriegsende 1945 in Deutschland (Munich, 2002), p. 107.
No comments, yet...