The Yalta Conference: 1945
From February 4-11, 1945, as the war entered its last phase, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Yalta, a former tsarist resort on the Crimean Peninsula overlooking the Black Sea. The meeting would be the last serious undertaking of the war for Roosevelt as he would die in office two months later. The meeting was designed to finalize plans for the final offensive against Germany in Europe and future military operations against Japan in the Pacific. The postwar occupation of Germany was also discussed as were an agreement to divide Germany into zones of occupation; a postwar United Nations to replace the failed League of Nations; the future of Poland and its government, as well as other European nations liberated from Nazi rule; and Soviet entry into the war against Japan. The division of Germany would see the Soviets controlling the eastern sections of Germany, Britain the northwestern section, and the United States the southwestern.
The capital city of Berlin, which would be located deep in the Soviet zone, was also accordingly divided along this same pattern. Churchill pushed for, and received, the creation of a French zone that would be made up of the southern part of the British zone and the northern part of the American zone. It was also decided that Germany would pay reparations to the Allied powers— the figure was set at $20 billion, fifty percent of which would go to the Soviets. The three leaders also agreed on the need to hold postwar war crimes trials.
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Allied Advances in the West
A joint American-Canadian assault in February 1945 forced German troops back across the Rhine, but the Allied forces desisted from moving further forward, as the Germans effectively destroyed any bridge that offered crossing. In the meantime, American forces successfully captured the city of Colognes by early March and reached the city of Bonn.
Further south of Bonn, General Patton moved his Third Army along the west bank of the Rhine, claiming over 100,000 German prisoners. By early April, British-American forces advanced into central Germany and began to clear out the Ruhr area, which would result in the capture of 317,000 Germans. German forces, though crumbling fully at this time, continued to offer fanatical resistance.
Soviet Advances in the East
Beginning in mid-January, the final Soviet offensives of the war began. In order to complete the destruction of the Nazi state, the Soviets had amassed a force of nearly 4 million men, 9,800 tanks, and over 40,000 artillery pieces, the largest accumulation of military power during the course of the war. The January offensive was aimed at seizing the region of Silesia with its vast industrial base. German resistance was almost nonexistent as Soviet armor surged twenty to thirty miles a day in the first days. By early February, Soviet forces were a mere fifty miles from Berlin but halted in order to secure their flanks against a possible German counterattack, to refit their troops, and perhaps most importantly because of the Yalta Conference going on concurrently.
By mid-April, the Soviet military was ready for the final offensive, capturing Berlin. For Hitler and his close colleagues, this was a nightmare scenario. They had taken shelter in a bunker near the Reich Chancellery and the climax of the last few months of the Third Reich was played out here.
On April 21, Soviet tanks entered into the northern suburbs of Berlin. Ferocious fight broke out as the Russian army had to counter resistance for individual houses of Nazi supporters. Beginning on April 26, an immense concentration of artillery prepared the way for an assault on the center of the city by 464,000 Soviet troops and 1,500 tanks. As Soviet forces closed in, Hitler spent his last full day alive dictating his political testament. He also name Admiral Karl Donitz as his successor to run Germany. The following day, April 30, Hitler committed suicide in his private residence within the bunker. Fighting within the city continued on until the afternoon of May 2, when the last German defenders finally surrendered to the Soviet military. The cost of taking the city for the Soviets was high. Between April 16 and May 8, Soviet forces suffered nearly 305,000 casualties, almost ten percent of their total strength.
Over the next several days, those parts of Europe still under occupation by German forces began to surrender to the Allies. German forces in Italy surrendered on May 2 while German forces in northern Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark surrendered on May 3. close after nearly six years of violence and destruction. But, the end of fighting in Europe did not mark an end to World War II as a whole. In Asia and the Pacific, the war against Japan continued to rage.