The success of Nazi armies until the end of 1941 had made it possible to spare German civilians on the home front from the misery and sacrifices demanded of them during World War I. Hitler’s imagination, however, was haunted by the memory of the collapse of the home front in 1918, and, to avoid a repetition, the Nazis looted the occupied territories of food and raw materials as well as labour. Food shortages in Germany were not serious until late in the war. Women were allowed to stay at home, and the energies of the German workforce were not stretched to their limits, because eventually some seven million foreign slave labourers were used to keep the war effort going.
Through much of 1942 an ultimate German victory still seemed possible. The renewed offensive in the Soviet Union in the spring at first continued the successes of the previous year. Once again Hitler chose to concentrate on the capture of the Caucasus and its oil at the expense of the Moscow front. The decision entailed a major battle over the industrial centre at Stalingrad (now Volgograd). Elsewhere, by midsummer of 1942, Rommel’s Afrika Korps advanced to within 65 miles (105 km) of Alexandria in Egypt. In the naval battle for control of the Atlantic sea lanes, German submarines maintained their ability to intercept Allied shipping into mid-1943.
By early 1943, however, the tide had clearly begun to turn. The great winter battle at Stalingrad brought Hitler his first major defeat. His entire Sixth Army was killed or captured. In North Africa Rommel’s long success ended in late 1942 when the British broke through at El Alamein. At the same time, a joint British-American force landed in northwestern Africa, on the coast of Morocco and Algeria. By May 1943 the German and Italian forces in North Africa were ready to surrender. That same summer the Allies broke the back of the German submarine campaign in the Atlantic. On July 10 the Allies landed in Sicily. Two weeks later Mussolini was overthrown, and in early September the Italians withdrew from the war.
The addition of an Italian front made the rollback of German forces on all fronts that much more likely. In the Soviet Union, German forces were stretched across 2,500 miles (4,000 km). They had lost their air superiority when Allied bombing raids on German cities forced the withdrawal of large numbers of fighter planes. British and American bombings reached a high point in midsummer when a raid on Hamburg killed 40,000 of its inhabitants. Similar air raids killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians and leveled large areas of most German cities. Shortages of food, clothing, and housing began to afflict German cities as inevitably as did the Allied bombers.
The rollback of German forces continued inexorably during 1944. On June 6 the Allies in the west launched their invasion of France across the English Channel. In the east the Soviet army was advancing along the entire 2,500-mile front. By the end of the year, it stood poised on the eastern frontiers of prewar Germany. In the west, British and American troops stood ready to attack across the western borders.
On the German home front, 1944 became a year of acute suffering. On July 20, officers carried out a plot, part of a long-simmering opposition to Hitler from within German military and civilian circles, but Hitler managed to escape the dramatic attempt on his life practically unharmed. He attributed his survival of the July Plot to his selection by fate to succeed in his mission of restoring Germany to greatness.
Fate did not again intervene on Hitler’s behalf. In mid-January of 1945 he withdrew underground into his bunker in Berlin where he remained until his suicide on April 30. By that time Soviet soldiers were streaming into Berlin. All that remained of the Reich was a narrow wedge of territory running southward from Berlin into Austria.
With the Soviet army in control of Berlin and the Western Allies within striking distance to the west and the south, there was no prospect of dividing them. Nonetheless, when Hitler’s successor, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, sought to open negotiations for a surrender a few days after Hitler’s death, he still hoped that a separate surrender to the British and Americans in the west might allow the Reich to rescue something from the Soviets in the east. The Western Allies, fearful of any move that might feed the suspicions of Stalin, refused to consider the German proposal, insisting that a German surrender be signed with all the Allies at the same time. Early in the morning of May 7, 1945, a German delegation came to U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s headquarters in Rheims, France, and at 2:41 am signed the surrender documents. Despite the fact that a Soviet major general signed for the Soviet Union, Stalin insisted that a second surrender ceremony take place in Soviet-occupied Berlin. This second surrender was signed in a Berlin suburb the following afternoon.
Karl A. Schleunes The era of partition Allied occupation and the formation of the two Germanys, 1945–49
The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin.© Helga Lade/Peter Arnold, Inc.
Following the German military leaders’ unconditional surrender in May 1945, the country lay prostrate. The German state had ceased to exist, and sovereign authority passed to the victorious Allied powers. The physical devastation from Allied bombing campaigns and from ground battles was enormous: an estimated one-fourth of the country’s housing was destroyed or damaged beyond use, and in many cities the toll exceeded 50 percent. Germany’s economic infrastructure had largely collapsed as factories and transportation systems ceased to function. Rampant inflation was undermining the value of the currency, and an acute shortage of food reduced the diet of many city dwellers to the level of malnutrition. These difficulties were compounded by the presence of millions of homeless German refugees from the former eastern provinces. The end of the war came to be remembered as “zero hour,” a low point from which virtually everything had to be rebuilt anew from the ground up.
For purposes of occupation, the Americans, British, French, and Soviets divided Germany into four zones. The American, British, and French zones together made up the western two-thirds of Germany, while the Soviet zone comprised the eastern third. Berlin, the former capital, which was surrounded by the Soviet zone, was placed under joint four-power authority but was partitioned into four sectors for administrative purposes. An Allied Control Council was to exercise overall joint authority over the country.
These arrangements did not incorporate all of prewar Germany. The Soviets unilaterally severed the German territories east of the Oder and Neisse rivers and placed these under the direct administrative authority of the Soviet Union and Poland, with the larger share going to the Poles as compensation for territory they lost to the Soviet Union. The former provinces of East Prussia, most of Pomerania, and Silesia were thus stripped from Germany. Since virtually the entire German population of some 9.5 million in these and adjacent regions was expelled westward, this amounted to a de facto annexation of one-fourth of Germany’s territory as of 1937, the year before the beginning of German expansion under Hitler. The Western Allies acquiesced in these actions by the Soviets, taking consolation in the expectation that these annexations were merely temporary expedients that the final peace terms would soon supersede.