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East Germany World War II
By the end of September, Hitler's armies had overrun western
Poland; Soviet armies occupied eastern Poland two weeks after the
German invasion. In April 1940, German forces conquered Norway
and Denmark, and in May they struck at the Netherlands, Belgium,
Luxembourg, and France. Skirting the northwestern end of the
Maginot Line, German troops drove deep into northern France.
British and French troops offered ineffective resistance against
the lightning-like strikes (blitzkrieg) of German tanks and
airplanes. A large part of the French armies surrendered, and
more than 330,000 British and French soldiers were trapped in
Dunkirk on the coast of northern France. However, because Hitler,
for a combination of political and military reasons, had halted
the advance of his armored divisions, the British were able to
rescue the men in Dunkirk. When France fell in June 1940, Hitler,
who had originally hoped that Britain would stay out of the war,
approached Winston Churchill with the offer of a separate peace;
but the new British prime minister was intransigent. The Third
Reich experienced its first military defeat in the Battle of
Britain in which the Royal Air Force, during the summer and fall
of 1940, prevented the German Luftwaffe from gaining the air
superiority necessary for an invasion of Britain. As a result,
Hitler postponed the planned invasion.
In the winter of 1940-41, after Japan had joined the Axis
powers, Hitler began to plan the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, Italy, which had made advances in North Africa and the
Mediterranean region, was experiencing setbacks, and Hitler sent
German troops to its assistance. As preparation for a campaign
against Greece designed to protect Romanian oil fields from
British air strikes, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia were taken
into the Berlin-Rome Axix of 1936, and German troops were sent to
Romania in November 1940. Bulgaria joined the pact in March 1941.
That year, in spite of resistance by the army and the civilian
population, German troops also occupied Yugoslavia.
As a result of the campaign in the Balkans, the German
invasion of the Soviet Union was delayed until June 1941. By late
fall, Hitler's armies stood before Moscow. The führer had
anticipated victory in the Soviet Union within three months, but
the early onset of winter stopped German advances. A
counteroffensive, launched in the winter of 1941, drove the
Germans back from Moscow. In the summer of 1942, Hitler shifted
the attack to the south of the Soviet Union and began a large
offensive directed at the Caucasian oil fields. By September
1942, the Axis controlled the area from Norway to North Africa
and from France to Stalingrad.
Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, had
brought the United States into the war, and the United States
joined forces with Britain and the Soviet Union to defeat the
Third Reich. The British began to bomb German civilian
populations in 1942, and Soviet armies assumed the offensive
after defeating German troops in the Battle of Stalingrad in the
winter of 1942-43. The Allied road to victory had begun. By May
1943, Allied armies had driven the Axis forces out of Africa and
had landed in Italy, and in 1943, also, the Americans, using
precision daylight bombing, had begun a series of raids on the
ball bearing factories at Schweinfurt and Regensburg. Area
bombing, however, failed to bring about the submission of the
German people, and the daylight raids, although temporarily
seriously hindering the production of war matériel, proved to be
extremely costly. As early as 1943, however, the American and
British navies had succeeded in substantially reducing the German
submarine threat to shipping, thereby clearing the way for the
shipment of arms and troops to Britain in preparation for the
Normandy invasion.
In June 1944, American, British, and Canadian forces invaded
France, driving the Germans back and crossing the German frontier
in September. The strategic bombing of oil dumps and oil plants
after the Normandy landings crippled the German counteroffensive
in the Ardennes, which took place in December. Soviet troops,
meanwhile, advanced from the east. Hitler, however, remained
determined to fight on and called for the "total mobilization of
all Germans" for the war effort. In March 1945, American forces
reached the Rhine River; simultaneously Soviet armies overran
most of Czechoslovakia and pressed on toward Berlin. Although
faced with certain defeat, Hitler insisted that every German
city, every village, and finally "every square meter" would have
to be defended or left behind as "scorched earth." The western
Allied and Soviet armies in Germany made their first contact in
Saxony on April 27. Three days later, Hitler and his bride, Eva
Braun, committed suicide in a Berlin bunker. Berlin fell to the
Soviets on May 2; on May 7 the Third Reich surrendered
unconditionally. German military casualties in World War II are
estimated at 3.5 million dead; more than 600,000 German civilians
were killed in the bombing offensive.
Data as of July 1987
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