The elimination of the giant bugle, between Christmas and New year in 1944.

  The elimination of the giant bugle, between Christmas and New year in 1944. the British and Americans began eliminating the giant bulge in the Allied line that the Germans had created in their Ardennes Offensive - the Battle of the Bulge - earlier in December.

 It was becoming clear to everyone that Hitler had thrown his last punch, and missed. Still, German military professionalism remained intact and their resistance remained fierce.

While retreating and pulling back across the Rhine River, the Germans blew up all the bridges as soon as the Allies approached.

 The German forces that Hitler allowed to retreat, that is. However, Hitler often foolishly ordered that his troops fight on in place and be annihilated instead of pulling back to fight under better circumstances. 

This terrible military leadership created a golden opportunity for the innovative American general George Patton. 

He managed to catch many Germans on the wrong side of the Rhine, capturing over 100,000 prisoners, and making the ultimate job of the Allies a little easier.

On March 7, 1945, as an American armored division was pushing through disorganized and retreating German soldiers at the town of Remagen on the Rhine, the Germans tried to blow up the Ludendorff railroad bridge.

 However, the charges didn’t work. The bridge stood. Acting without orders, the GIs immediately raced across, followed by American tanks.

 They had to cross their fingers that the bridge wouldn’t be blown up or collapse under or behind them.

 Now American soldiers were standing on the east bank of the Rhine, with no major natural barriers between them and Berlin.

 Thousands of Americans made it across that first day.

Still, Eisenhower was remarkably cautious and restrained in taking advantage of this stroke of luck.

 The Allies did not push aggressively to expand this position. It’s not quite clear why, but the massive egos and personalities of the generals under him might have had a great deal to do with it. 

After all, the Allied command had been planning a large operation for a crossing of the Rhine led by the vainglorious British general Bernard Montgomery, with American support. 

And in Montgomery’s usual style, it was meticulously planned and incredibly slow. 

The accidental crossing at Remagen took place two weeks before Montgomery was scheduled to go.

 And while Montgomery was still in preparations, the Americans made yet another crossing.

Patton was never going to let Montgomery steal his thunder. 

He used his relative lack of recourses to his advantage. And while Montgomery’s buildup telegraphed his plans, Patton’s Third Army successfully improvised a Rhine crossing on the southern part of the front.

 They then quickly built floating pontoon bridges to get heavy equipment and supplies across. Two days later, Montgomery finally forced his own crossing in Operational Plunder.

By the end of March, with three separate Allied crossings of the Rhine, all restraints were off. 

The British and Americans resumed their advance, facing fierce and dogged resistance from the Germans at every point. Losses were extremely heavy.

 If Germany was beaten and the war was hopeless, no one had told the German soldiers. Still, they had little left: no fuel, no tanks, no aircrafts. They couldn’t win. 

Hitler was pressing boys and old men into service, often without weapons to equip them.

At the beginning of April, British and American spearheads linked up on the far side of the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland.

 They trapped 350,000 German soldiers and millions of civilians inside. Even then, the trapped German forces fought for more than two weeks before finally surrendering. 

The German commander Walter Model killed himself rather than be taken prisoner. There was a tradition that German field marshals weren’t taken alive.

 A lot of other German field marshals would be faced with the same choice very soon.

The farther the British and the Americans went into Germany, the more evidence they found of what they were fighting for. 

They made some grim discoveries while streaming through western Germany: Germany’s concentration camps.

On April 11, the Americans reached and liberated Buchenwald. 

Patton wanted to make sure that Germany’s civilians could not deny the crimes their country had committed during the war. 

He compelled local Germans to tour the camp to see for themselves what their regime had done.

On April 15, the British liberated some 30,000 prisoners hanging in between life and death at Bergen-Belsen. 

They also discovered more than 10,000 unburied corpses on the premises. The stench and the sights made most of the soldiers feel physically sick. 

They made the SS camp guards and the local German population handle the mass burial of the dead. 

The locals expressed great shock upon entering the camp and all professed to have known nothing about what had happened there. The soldiers were not convinced.

At the end of April, Americans liberated Dachau, near Munich, and carried out summary executions of a few dozen camp guards.

Mass graves, bodies piled in heaps, survivors reduced to little more than skeletons, ovens still choked with lifeless bodies, storage bins of gold from extracted teeth, balls of women’s hair, spectacles by the thousands, dentures, clothing, including at one camp, thousands of pairs of babies shoes, yielded up the harvest of the Third Reich. 

The Soviets had freed concentration camps before, but the Germans had had time to destroy much of the evidence of what had happened there.

 There was also a great deal of distrust of the information coming out of the Soviet Union.

 Now, American and British journalists could present their public back home with harrowing reports of what they had seen with their own eyes. 

And these weren’t even the worst of the concentration camps. Tens of thousands of Jews, political prisoners, and prisoners of war had died at these camps, but they weren’t purposely designed as death camps.

 The mass deaths at these camps came from starvation and disease. Mass murder had been a side effect, not design.

 The purpose built death camps had all been in Poland, not Germany. The Soviets had liberated them in 1944 and early 1945. Full accounts of what the Soviets had found took time to make it to the West. 

The British and the Americans were stunned and shocked by Nazi brutality, but they weren’t even seeing the worst of it.

This evidence of Nazi brutality gave plenty of assurance, in case anyone still doubted, that the war had to be brought to a final and decisive end. But there was was still much to be done. 

Hitler and his armies in Berlin, and hundreds of thousands of German troops in Norway, Denmark, Austria, and Czechoslovakia were still fighting. 

The Soviets were only 40 miles from the capital of Berlin, and the Americans and British were across the Rhine and well into Germany, but the war wasn’t over.

 Hundreds of thousands more would have to die before the nightmare of National Socialism would come to a fiery end.