#SS #Documentary Line Of Fire Battle Of Berlin | Third Reich Last Stand
115The Third Reich’s apocalyptic last stand:
💠Germany lost the war long before May 1945. But Hitler refused to surrender, instead dragging the country into the abyss. Although there was a huge imbalance in force between Germans and Soviets, the Nazis maintained surprising advantages in equipment, experience, and tactics. The Battle of Berlin has few historic parallels. It was 1945, and the Germans had lost the war by the winter of 1942/1943 – if not already by the winter of 1941/1942.
📌Certainly, once Hitler’s summer/autumn offensive of 1942 had been defeated at Stalingrad, the history of the Second World War in Europe, on all fronts, was essentially one of dogged defence, step-by-step retreat, and slow contraction of the Nazi empire. The reason was simple enough: the overwhelming industrial superiority of the Allied alliance that had been conjured into being by Hitler’s aggression. It seems likely that the Soviet Union could eventually have defeated Nazi Germany on its own. Certainly, the US commitment was relatively modest until the campaign in northwest Europe during the last year of the war. The number of German divisions deployed in North Africa and then Italy pales in comparison with the number on the Eastern Front in 1943.
📌The traditional German elites – political, corporate, and military – knew the war was lost long before the end. In 1918, their forebears had negotiated an armistice and accepted a victor’s peace, in order to save Germany both from invasion, conquest, and possible dismemberment, and to prevent socialist revolution. This was the rational course after 1942. But the process of Gleichschaltung – ‘streamlining’ or ‘coordination’ – since 1933 had created a Nazi-dominated state backed by a ferocious police terror that had effectively disempowered those traditional elites. They were unable to act. Instead, Hitler dragged the whole of Germany into the abyss of his own defeat – an act of military madness by a deranged regime.
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So how did the Soviet juggernaut put an end to the Nazi tyranny?