Germany was the first country in modern history to achieve total defeat. The Nazi regime did not surrender and German soldiers did not stop fighting, even when foreign armies were approaching the gardens of the Reich Chancellery in the centre of Berlin. Never before in modern history had a nation reached the depths plumbed by Germany in 1945; its sovereignty was extinguished; its infrastructure was smashed; its economy was paralysed; its citied reduced to piles of rubble; much of the population was hungry and homeless; its armed forces were disbanded and their surviving members were in prisoner-of-war camps; its government had ceased to exist and the entire country had been occupied by foreign armies. Germany had become a land of death.
During the last year of the Second World War, more Germans died than in any other year before or since. By the time that the Wehrmacht surrendered in May 1945, half the population had lost at least one family member. The bombing, and the fighting on the ground in 1945, much of it taking place within Germany, left behind a landscape littered with corpses.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “Conclusion: Life After Death.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 385-86. Print.
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