Between November 1942 and May 1945 the strategic position of Nazi Germany deteriorated in three successive phases — slowly at first, then accelerating, then catastrophically. The phases are conventionally bracketed by four major operations: the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad (November 1942 – February 1943); the Battle of Kursk (July 1943); the Allied landings in Normandy (June 1944); and the Soviet Vistula-Oder operation (January 1945). After Stalingrad the regime could no longer realistically win. After Kursk it could no longer realistically defend its eastern conquests. After Normandy it could no longer prevent a war on two land fronts. After the Vistula-Oder the war's final outcome was a question of weeks. The thirty months between the surrender of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad and the surrender of the rump Dönitz government at Reims and Berlin were the slowest, costliest, most futile defensive campaign in modern military history.
Stalingrad
The German Sixth Army under Friedrich Paulus reached the western outskirts of Stalingrad on the 23rd of August 1942 and entered the city proper on the 13th of September. The Soviet 62nd Army under Vasily Chuikov, holding the right bank of the Volga inside the city, conducted the most famous urban defensive action of the twentieth century — eighty-eight days of building-by-building, factory-by-factory, sewer-by-sewer fighting that consumed German operational reserves at a rate the Wehrmacht could not sustain. The German plan had been to take the city in September; by mid-November about 90 per cent of the city's territory was in German hands, but the remaining 10 per cent — a strip of factories and embankments along the river — could not be cleared, and the city was now consuming everything Army Group B could send into it.
Operation Uranus, the Soviet counteroffensive of the 19th of November 1942, struck the Romanian Third Army on the German northern flank and the Romanian Fourth Army on the southern flank — both sectors held by undermanned and under-equipped allied formations on which Paulus had no operational control. The two Soviet pincers met at Kalach on the 23rd of November, encircling the Sixth Army, the 4th Panzer Army elements in the city, and a Romanian corps — approximately 290,000 men in total. Hitler forbade a breakout; Göring promised an air bridge that the Luftwaffe could not deliver (it averaged 120 tons of supplies a day against a daily requirement of 700); Manstein's relief operation in December (Operation Winter Storm) reached within 30 miles of the pocket and was beaten back. The pocket starved through December and January. Paulus surrendered the southern half of the pocket on the 31st of January 1943; the northern half held until the 2nd of February. About 91,000 emaciated German prisoners were taken; only about 6,000 returned to Germany after the war. The Sixth Army — the army that had marched into Paris in 1940 — had been destroyed.
Kursk
The 1943 summer offensive on the eastern front was concentrated on the Kursk salient — a 150-mile bulge in the Soviet line west of Kursk that the Wehrmacht intended to pinch off with simultaneous attacks from the north (Model's Ninth Army) and south (Hoth's Fourth Panzer Army). The operation was repeatedly postponed from May to July 1943 to allow the production of additional Panther and Tiger heavy tanks; Soviet intelligence had advance warning from the British "Lucy" network and the Cambridge Five, plus tactical intelligence from prisoner interrogations, and prepared eight successive defensive belts within the salient. When the operation opened on the 5th of July 1943 it was the largest tank battle in human history — approximately 6,000 armoured vehicles, 4,000 aircraft, and 2 million men engaged. The northern pincer was contained within five days; the southern pincer made progress for a week before being halted at Prokhorovka in a tactical battle on the 12th of July that was technically a German tactical victory (more Soviet tanks destroyed than German) but a strategic Soviet success (the German offensive could not continue). Hitler called off Kursk on the 13th of July to redeploy forces against the Allied landing in Sicily.
From Kursk onward, the Wehrmacht on the eastern front did not undertake another strategic offensive. The next twenty months were a continuous Soviet advance westwards — the liberation of Kharkov (August 1943), Kiev (November 1943), the Crimea (May 1944), Operation Bagration in Belorussia (June-August 1944, which destroyed Army Group Centre and produced 350,000 German casualties in six weeks), the Romanian campaign (August 1944, which forced Romania to switch sides), the entry into Poland (July-August 1944), and the Vistula crossings in January 1945.
The Italian campaign and Normandy
The Allied landings in Sicily on the 10th of July 1943 produced, three weeks later, the deposition of Mussolini on the 25th of July by the Italian Fascist Grand Council. The new Italian government under Marshal Badoglio negotiated a separate peace, which was announced on the 8th of September. The German response — Operation Achse — was the rapid disarming of the Italian army across the peninsula and the German occupation of central and northern Italy, where a German-controlled rump Mussolini regime (the Italian Social Republic, the "Salò Republic") was installed. The Italian theatre would consume substantial German resources for the next twenty months without producing any prospect of a decisive operational outcome: the Allies advanced slowly up the peninsula, taking Rome on the 4th of June 1944 and not reaching the Alps until the German surrender in May 1945.
The Allied cross-channel invasion of Normandy on the 6th of June 1944 — Operation Overlord — was the most consequential single operation of the western theatre. The 156,000 Allied troops who landed on five Normandy beaches on D-Day, supported by 11,000 aircraft and 7,000 ships, established a beachhead which had grown to 1 million troops by the end of June. The German response was hamstrung by Hitler's misjudgement that the main landing would come at Pas-de-Calais rather than Normandy; the German armour was held back from Normandy for six weeks. The breakout from Normandy in late July (Operation Cobra) and the Falaise encirclement in mid-August destroyed the western German front; Paris was liberated on the 25th of August, Brussels on the 3rd of September, and the German army withdrew to the line of the Westwall on the German frontier by mid-September. Operation Market Garden (the failed airborne attempt to seize the Rhine bridges at Arnhem, September 1944) and the Ardennes counteroffensive (the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944 – January 1945) were the two remaining German operational efforts on the western front. Neither restored the strategic position.
The Vistula-Oder and Berlin
The Vistula-Oder operation, opening on the 12th of January 1945, was the largest and fastest Soviet offensive of the war. In three weeks the Soviet 1st Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts advanced approximately 350 miles from the Vistula bridgeheads west of Warsaw to the Oder river at Küstrin, sixty miles from Berlin. The German front collapsed almost entirely; the civilian evacuation of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia — the largest forced migration in European history, eventually displacing roughly 12-14 million ethnic Germans westwards — began in panic. Soviet behaviour toward German civilians in the occupied eastern territories was extensively violent and remains a subject of historical and moral debate; the contemporary scholarly consensus is that the violence was widespread, not centrally ordered, and reflected the combination of revenge for the German atrocities on Soviet soil with the absence of any disciplinary apparatus in the Soviet army's forward units.
The Berlin Strategic Offensive opened on the 16th of April 1945, with the Soviet crossings of the Oder at Küstrin and Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. The defending German forces — approximately 800,000 men, including the regime's last reserve formations, the SS divisions of the Berlin garrison, the Hitler Youth and the Volkssturm — were overwhelmed in six days. The Soviet 8th Guards Army under Chuikov (the same general who had held Stalingrad) entered the south-eastern suburbs of Berlin on the 22nd of April. The city centre was reached on the 25th. The Reichstag was taken on the 30th of April; the famous photograph of the flag-raising was staged on the 2nd of May. Hitler shot himself in the Führerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery on the afternoon of the 30th of April, hours after marrying Eva Braun and dictating his political testament; Eva Braun took cyanide. Goebbels, his wife Magda, and their six children died in the same bunker on the 1st of May. Berlin's commandant General Weidling surrendered the city to the Soviets on the morning of the 2nd of May.
The surrender
The Dönitz government — the rump cabinet of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, named in Hitler's testament as Reich President — established itself at Flensburg in northern Germany and attempted, for eight days after Hitler's death, to negotiate a separate peace with the Western Allies in order to continue the war against the Soviets. The Western Allies refused. General Alfred Jodl signed the unconditional surrender at SHAEF headquarters in Reims at 2.41 a.m. on the 7th of May 1945. The surrender was ratified at a second, Soviet-attended ceremony at Karlshorst in Berlin on the night of the 8th-9th of May, the latter taken as VE Day by the Soviets and the 8th by the Western Allies. The Flensburg government was dissolved by the British on the 23rd of May with the arrest of its members. Twelve years and four months after the swearing-in of the 30th of January 1933, the Third Reich had ceased to exist. About 6.6 million Germans had died in the war, including 4.3 million military casualties; an estimated 35–60 million people in total had been killed in the European theatre between 1939 and 1945, the largest single death toll in human history.
End of Chapter IX