The last days of Nazi Germany through photographs, 1945

These German soldiers stand in the debris strewn street of Bastogne, Belgium, on January 9, 1945, after they were captured by the U.S. 4th Armored Division which helped break the German siege of the city.

The last days of Nazi Germany through photographs, 1945

By the beginning of 1945, the war which Germany had unleashed throughout the world had come back to consume it. In sharp contrast with what had occurred in 1918 in 1945, Germany fought, literally, to the bitter end.

The Germans held out, although by early 1945 just about everyone knew that catastrophic defeat was the inevitable outcome. They did not give up even when Russian soldiers arrived in the garden of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Not even the Japanese resisted like that.

By March, Western Allied forces were crossing the Rhine River, capturing hundreds of thousands of troops from Germany’s Army Group B. The Red Army had meanwhile entered Austria, and both fronts quickly approached Berlin. Strategic bombing campaigns by Allied aircraft were pounding German territory, sometimes destroying entire cities in a night.

In the first several months of 1945, Germany put up a fierce defense, but rapidly lost territory, ran out of supplies, and exhausted its options. In April, Allied forces pushed through the German defensive line in Italy. East met West on the River Elbe on April 25, 1945, when Soviet and American troops met near Torgau, Germany.

On April 30th, as Russian troops entered the outskirts of Berlin, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. The leadership of Germany passed to Joseph Goebbels, but within 24 hours he too took his own life. Elsewhere, other Nazi leaders were either in Allied custody or running like fugitives.

The German surrender came on May 7th, a week after Hitler’s death. Nazism, the proud and boastful movement of the 1930s, was drawing its final breaths. The Nazis had promised the German people dignity, respect, and prosperity – and for a time seemed to deliver on these promises.

But their ultimate legacy was a war that had claimed the lives of more than 48 million people, a racial genocide unlike any other in history, and a Germany that was devastated, occupied, and torn apart for more than 40 years.

A group of Hitler youth receive instruction in the use of a machine gun, somewhere in Germany, on December 27, 1944.

A formation of B-24s of Maj. General Nathan F. Twining’s U.S. Army 15th Air Force thunders over the railway yards of Salzburg, Austria, on December 27, 1944. The smoke created by their bombs mingles with that from the enemy’s many smudge pots.

An infantryman from the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division goes out on a one-man sortie while covered by a comrade in the background, near Bra, Belgium, on December 24, 1944.

A heavily armed German soldier carries ammunition boxes forward during the German counter-offensive in the Belgium-Luxembourg salient, on January 2, 1945.

(Photo credit: Library of Congress / AP Photo)

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A Soviet machine gun crew crosses a river along the second Baltic front, in January of 1945. The soldier on the left is holding his rifle overhead while his comrades push a floating device with a Maxim machine gun, followed by two men with several supply boxes.

Low flying C-47 transport planes roar overhead as they carry supplies to the besieged American Forces battling the Germans at Bastogne, during the enemy breakthrough on January 6, 1945, in Belgium. In the distance, smoke rises from wrecked German equipment, while in the foreground, American tanks move up to support the infantry in the fighting.

A dead German soldier, killed during the German counteroffensive in the Belgium-Luxembourg salient, is left behind on a street corner in Stavelot, Belgium, on January 2, 1945, as fighting moves on during the Battle of the Bulge.

Refugees stand in a group in a street in La Gleize, Belgium on January 2, 1945, waiting to be transported from the war-torn town after its recapture by American Forces during the German thrust in the Belgium-Luxembourg salient.