Military science fiction tank designs10/4/2023 Fanatical diehards and small squads of Hitlerjugend were determined to fight to the finish. Across Germany, people witnessed bodies hanging from lamp posts or trees with a crude caption hung around their neck: Ich bin ein Reichsverrater (‘I’m a national traitor’). But if they were found with signs of surrender ready, they would have been murdered or strung up by the SS or other Nazi fanatics who went hunting for signs of defeatism. Many German civilians had white sheets ready by the windows to display when Allied soldiers drove into their town or village. The rest surrendered, and Model walked into a wood and shot himself. But after just two weeks, Field Marshal Model ordered his youngest and oldest soldiers to return home. Hitler called for a fanatical, Stalingrad-type last-ditch defence. In the Ruhr pocket, 400,000 Wehrmacht troops were surrounded by 15 US divisions. Supreme Commander Dwight D Eisenhower was in command of seven Allied armies, a total of four million men. Having crossed the Rhine in March and early April 1945, the British and American armies were rapidly advancing across Germany from the west. ‘The boys deserve their fun’, said Stalin, excusing the stories of mass abuse by his troops. Millions of Soviet soldiers in the Red Army were advancing relentlessly from the east, killing Wehrmacht troops, laying waste to towns and villages, and raping upwards of two million German women as they moved across the east of the country. Most sane Germans knew the game was up and defeat was certain. Any sign of weakness or defeatism was to be sought out and destroyed. The SS, who regarded themselves as the ideological and racial warriors of the Third Reich, generally took the same view. He ordered that every street and every building in the city should be defended ‘to the last man and the last bullet’. This is what he said in his final will and testament, dictated to his secretary, Traudl Junge, inside the bunker in Berlin the day before he shot himself. Hitler held the view that it was the weakness of the German people that had brought defeat upon the nation. The last weeks of the war inside Germany were a desperate time for all its citizens.
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