Europe in an Age of Total War: World War II,1939–45 589British Empire, the Free French, and the United States
to press into western Germany while the Russians in-
vaded eastern Germany. This reverse precipitated an at-
tempt to assassinate Hitler by a conspiracy within the
Wehrmacht.The plot involved several senior officers, but
the central figure was Colonial Claus von Stuaffenberg,
who carried a bomb into a conference among Hitler
and his military advisers. Hitler survived and the con-
spirators were brutally executed (Hitler filmed their
deaths for evening entertainment).
Hitler responded to the reverses of June–July 1944
with one last surprise: a wave of rocket attacks whose
technology presaged the cold war and the space race. A
German research program (which included many scien-
tists who would later contribute to the space race of the
1950s and 1960s, such as Dr. Wernher von Braun) at
Peenemünde, on the Baltic coast, achieved significant ad-
vances in rocketry. The results were the V-1 rockets —
flying bombs with a ton of explosives traveling 370 miles
per hour—which hit London in the summer of 1944,
and more sophisticated V-2 rockets, which struck Lon-
don and Antwerp that autumn. V-1 and V-2 attacks de-
livered more than seventy thousand tons of explosives
to Britain, approximately four times the amount that the
Luftwaffedropped in 1940; the rockets killed nearly eight
thousand people but had little effect on the course of
the war.
Allied armies reached Paris in August 1944 and
speeded the liberation of France by making further
landings in the south of France. Lyons, Brussels, and
Antwerp were all liberated in September 1944, and
western armies crossed into western Germany in that
same month. The Allies officially recognized Charles
de Gaulle’s government of liberated France in October.
Although the Wehrmachtstaged a strong counteroffen-
sive through the Ardennes forest in December 1944,
the Nazi regime was crushed between western and So-
viet armies. The Red Army had reached Warsaw in July
1944 and a Polish uprising joined in throwing off the
Nazi occupation. The Russian army, however, waited
for the Nazis to crush the Polish resistance (with
245,000 Poles killed) before advancing on Warsaw (be-
cause Stalin reasoned that Polish resistance to a Ger-
man occupation could easily become Polish resistance
to a Russian occupation). As France was being freed in
the west, Russian troops were crossing into East Prussia.
The Red Army approached Berlin in early 1945 (see il-
lustration 29.4), just as the U.S. army was crossing the
Rhine River. With the war nearly over, Allied bombers
delivered a horrifying final blow, a last testament to the
nature of total war: The historic Saxon city of Dresden,
known as “the Florence of Germany,” was subjected to
two days of nightmarish bombing, killing more than
130,000 civilians.
Mussolini and Hitler died one day apart in April- While Il Duce was killed by Italian partisans, der
Führer committed suicide in the ruins of Berlin a day
later. Hitler’s war had cost Germany more than three
million combat deaths; more than twice that number of
Russian soldiers had died, compared with a combined
total of approximately one million British, French, and
American troops (see table 29.1). Roosevelt also died in
April, a few days before the unconditional surrender of
Illustration 29.4
Victory on the Eastern Front.The turning point of the war
in eastern Europe had come in 1943 when the USSR won the
battle of Stalingrad. For the next two years, the Red Army under
Marshal Zhukov pressed into central Europe in a campaign that
culminated in the Soviet capture of Berlin in April–May 1945. In
this photo, Zhukov (front, lower right) and his staff stand on the
steps of the ruined Reichstag, now covered in Russian graffiti.