The Nazis’ ferocious final strike in WWII (PHOTOS) Getty Images Despite Soviet troops in the spring of 1945 being just a few dozen miles from Berlin, Hitler decided to concentrate his main strike force somewhere else entirely.
On the morning of March 6, 1945, after a massive artillery bombardment, an avalanche of German tanks and infantry came crashing down on the Soviet positions in the region of Lakes Balaton and Velence and the Drava River in Hungary. This was the start of Operation Spring Awakening, which turned out to be the last major German offensive of WWII. Getty Images
By the spring of 1945, the situation for Germany on the Eastern Front was close to catastrophic: the Red Army was on the approach to Berlin, just 70 km from the city. While the Soviet troops were taking a breather in preparation for a decisive offensive on the capital of the Third Reich, the Germans themselves went on the charge, and much further south too in Hungary. Th
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All of his generals were against his decision to attack in the West.
Here s What You Need to Know: Hitler often went his own way, regardless of the consequences.
By early autumn, he was taking 60 pills a day. They ranged from “speed” to the poison strychnine. He took pills to make him wake up; he took pills to make him sleep. Although to his entourage he seemed to have retained his old willpower and energy, it was really the tablets that kept him going.
By now, Hitler’s secretaries noticed that his knee shook all the time. Sometimes he had to control the shaking in his left knee with his right hand. What his adoring young female secretaries did not know was that his knee continued to tremble even when he was in bed. There, too, he was plagued by stomach cramps. What the secretaries did notice they could not help but do so was that the Führer passed gas all the time due to his vegetarian diet and weight-reducing tablets. His doctors there were four of them called it “mete
Operation Stösser was launched during Germany’s last gamble:
Wacht am Rhein (Operation Watch on the Rhine), Hitler’s offensive in the West which Americans know as the Battle of the Bulge, had as its ultimate objective the Belgian port of Antwerp. Recently captured, it was under repair to be reopened as a deep-water port.
When Antwerp was serviceable, the Allies would be able to bring supplies and reinforcements quickly to the front lines instead of transporting them across France from the Channel ports. To reach Antwerp, the German Army would push through the Ardennes Forest. An armored spearhead would attack in the Eifel plateau region of western Germany, lying between the Rhine and Moselle Rivers and the Luxembourg and Belgian frontiers.
Adolf Hitler believed in
Vorsehung (providence). The German leader felt that if anything was going to happen to him, such as assassination, there was nothing he could do about it. He had been selected by fate to achieve something great; he would not die, either by accident or assassination, until he had fulfilled that God-given mission.Time and time again in the past, providence, not planning, had taken care of him. In 1933, for instance, just before he became master of the Third Reich, he was involved in a terrible car crash with a truck. He emerged from the wreckage stating that he could not die yet his mission had not yet been achieved.