Curated category
1945 in Germany
- Battle of Nuremberg (1945)The Western Allies crossed the Rhine River on the 8th of February 1945. German forces suffered heavy losses as American and British armies pushed eastward.
- Berlin Declaration (1945)The Berlin Declaration of the 5th of June 1945 did something that the German Instrument of Surrender of the 8th of May had not done: it formally transferred…
- East Pomeranian offensiveThe East Pomeranian offensive was a Soviet Red Army campaign that changed the final shape of World War Two in Europe. From the 10th of February to the 4th of…
- Ruhr pocketThe Ruhr pocket ended with a field marshal shooting himself in a forest rather than face Allied captivity. In April 1945, some 317,000 German soldiers were…
- Operation PlunderField Marshal Bernard Montgomery launched Operation Plunder on the night of the 23rd of March 1945. Thousands of tons of supplies moved forward to support…
- Potsdam AgreementThe Potsdam Agreement was signed on the 1st of August 1945, at Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, as the guns fell silent across Europe but war still raged in…
- Potsdam ConferenceThe Potsdam Conference opened on the 17th of July 1945, just sixteen days after the most destructive war in human history had ended in Europe.
- German Instrument of SurrenderThe German Instrument of Surrender was signed at 22:43 Central European Time on the 8th of May 1945, in a building that had served as the seat of the Soviet…
- Nuremberg trialsThe Nuremberg trials opened on the 20th of November 1945 with a question that had never been seriously tested in law: could individual human beings be held…
- Western Allied invasion of GermanyThe Western Allied invasion of Germany reached its decisive turning point on the 22nd of March 1945, when American troops crossed the Rhine under a bright…
- Flensburg GovernmentThe Flensburg Government was a ghost state, nominally ruling a country that was already gone. On the 30th of April 1945, Adolf Hitler died by suicide in his…
- Soviet occupation zone in GermanyOn the 2nd of August 1945, the Soviet Union established control over a specific middle portion of Germany through the Potsdam Agreement.
- Battle of KönigsbergThe Soviet Stavka ordered the East Prussian offensive to prevent flank attacks on armies rushing toward Berlin. Joseph Stalin directed Marshal Konstantin…
- Elbe DayElbe Day, the 25th of April 1945, began with a small boat crossing a river in Germany. First Lieutenant Albert Kotzebue paddled across the Elbe near Strehla…
- Lapland WarThe Lapland War began not with a declaration but with a surrender demand issued at around 08:00 on the 28th of September 1944, when Finnish advance units…
- Battle of BerlinAt 8:30 in the morning on the 22nd of April 1945, ninety-six shells fell on the centre of Berlin in the space of a few minutes.
- Capture of HamburgThe Western Front collapsed in the spring of 1945. Army Group B, led by Walter Model, fell to American forces near the Rhine River.
- Vistula–Oder offensiveThe Vistula-Oder offensive of January 1945 was the fastest large-scale advance in the history of the Eastern Front. In just over two weeks, the Red Army…