Ruhr pocket

• 1. Introduction

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  The 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 encircled in the Ruhr Area of Germany, trapped alongside millions of civilians in cities already reduced to rubble by Allied bombing. The questions this story raises are not just tactical. How did the most powerful industrial region in the Third Reich collapse in weeks? Why did a German army group continue fighting with no realistic hope of relief? And what compelled a field marshal, a man who had sent countless soldiers to their deaths, to conclude that his own surrender was unthinkable?

• 2. The Ruhr Before the Battle

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  Krupp steelworks, one of Germany's largest armaments producers, sat at the heart of the Ruhr. Allied planners had coveted this region since before D-Day, but they also feared what a direct assault might cost. Military historian Robert M. Citino warned that fighting through the densely populated urban and industrial terrain could "easily turn into a super Stalingrad." Supreme Commander Eisenhower's strategy was therefore always to encircle the Ruhr rather than storm it.

  By March 1945, the forces defending the region were a patchwork of the desperate and the untested. The order of battle included SS training units, Volkssturm militia drawn from aging men including veterans of the First World War, and Hitlerjugend units with boys as young as twelve. Luftwaffe crews were pressed into service manning flak guns as infantry. These formations guarded the region under the overall command of Field Marshal Walter Model, whose Army Group B held the Ruhr with the 5th Panzer Army and the 15th Army. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring had just been appointed supreme commander of the entire Western Front in March, inheriting a deteriorating situation he could not reverse.

• 3. Closing the Trap

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  On the 7th of March 1945, the U.S. 9th Armored Division seized the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen intact before German engineers could destroy it. General Omar Bradley's 12th Army Group poured forces across and expanded the bridgehead aggressively until the bridge itself collapsed ten days later. That crossing became the southern jaw of a vast pincer movement aimed at the Ruhr.

  In the north, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's 21st Army Group launched Operation Plunder on the 23rd of March, crossing the Rhine at Rees and Wesel with airborne support from Operation Varsity. By the 26th of March, even before the pincers had closed, the effect on Germany's war economy was measurable. Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that day that no more coal was coming out of the Ruhr.

  The two Allied pincers met on the 1st of April near Lippstadt, east of the Ruhr, trapping approximately 370,000 German soldiers and millions of civilians. Inside the pocket were 14 divisions of Army Group B plus two corps from the First Parachute Army, the remnants of 19 divisions altogether. Only 20 percent of Model's forces, roughly 75,000 men, carried infantry weapons. Another 75,000 had pistols only. Ammunition and fuel were running short, and Model's requests to Hitler for an airlift were dismissed because Allied aircraft dominated the skies.

• 4. Fighting for Every Street

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  German resistance along the Dortmund-Ems Canal and the Sieg river-line held from the 4th to the 9th of April, and troops launched a counterattack against the U.S. 75th and 95th divisions near Dortmund. The pattern was uneven: Burgermeisters in Duisburg and Essen presented white flags to advancing American troops, while soldiers in Dortmund, Wuppertal, and Hamm fought building by building. SS troops were a common presence in the towns that resisted to the last.

  In the heavily forested Sauerland district to the south, U.S. III Corps and XVIII Airborne Corps found their attacks on the 5th and the 6th of April slowed by German defenders who used the terrain skillfully. The Americans advanced roughly ten kilometers per day through forested ravines and fortified towns, fighting for every stream and wood. At one point German troops blanketed a valley in a thick smokescreen to stall the 7th Armored Division.

  On the 7th of April the skies cleared and tactical air commands began pounding German columns, strafing troop concentrations and both motorized and horse-drawn transport. To preserve German railway rolling stock for later Allied use, U.S. pilots were ordered not to strike trains, a restriction that limited the bombing campaign's reach. Meanwhile, U.S. artillery supporting XVI Corps fired 259,061 rounds over a fourteen-day period after the rationing of ammunition was lifted.

• 5. Collapse and Capitulation

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  On the 10th of April the U.S. Ninth Army captured Essen. Four days later, on the 14th, the First and Ninth armies linked up along the Ruhr river at Hattingen, splitting the pocket in two. The smaller eastern half surrendered the following day. The German 15th Army under Gustav-Adolf von Zangen capitulated on the 14th as well, having lost control of all its subordinate formations.

  The German 5th Panzer Army commander Josef Harpe was captured by paratroopers of the U.S. 17th Airborne Division on the 17th of April while trying to cross the Rhine. Matthew Ridgway, commanding the Allied XVIII Airborne Corps, sent an aide under a white flag to Army Group B's headquarters calling on Model to surrender. Model refused, citing his oath to Hitler. When the squad leader of a German unit that was still armed asked him for instructions, Model told them their fight was over, to go home. He then shook their hands and wished them luck.

  In Düsseldorf, a German anti-Nazi resistance group known as "Aktion Rheinland" tried to surrender the city to the Allies to spare it further destruction. SS units crushed the effort and executed a number of those involved, and Gestapo executions of foreign laborers and political prisoners had already been underway since February. The resistance nonetheless succeeded in cancelling an attack by 800 more bombers, and American forces captured Düsseldorf on the 18th of April without significant fighting. Organized resistance across the pocket ended that same day.

• 6. Model's Final Hours

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  Field Marshal Model dissolved Army Group B on the 15th of April rather than surrender his command. His chief of staff Carl Wagener had urged him to capitulate in order to save German soldiers and civilians. Model refused on two grounds: he knew Hitler would not authorize a surrender, and he could not square surrender with the standard he had demanded of his own officers and men throughout the war.

  He was not, however, indifferent to the lives under his command. He decreed the discharge of all youths and older men from the army and authorized non-combatant troops to surrender once ammunition ran out on the 17th of April. Combat troops were permitted to either break out in organized formations or discard their weapons and go home, an implicit permission to stop fighting. Even before that order was fully transmitted, German formations began surrendering en masse on the 16th of April.

  Model attempted to reach the Harz mountains through American lines but could not break through. Unwilling to face Allied captivity as a field marshal, and fearing trial for war crimes, he committed suicide on the afternoon of the 21st of April.

• 7. Aftermath

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  The 317,000 German prisoners taken from the Ruhr pocket were held at the Rheinwiesenlager, a temporary enclosure near Remagen that translates as "Rhine meadow camp." American casualties in reducing the pocket totaled around 10,000. The Ninth Army alone lost 341 killed and 121 missing. The First Army lost roughly three times the Ninth's killed and missing, accounting for the bulk of the overall U.S. toll.

  American troops also liberated hundreds of thousands of prisoners-of-war and slave laborers, many of them malnourished and ill. The formerly enslaved tended to loot and move through the roads in ways that disrupted U.S. column movements. The Red Army soldiers among the liberated were, by American accounts, visibly glad to be free.

  The industrial machinery of the Ruhr, much of it housed in protected or dispersed locations, had largely survived the Allied bombing campaign. Most equipment needed only minor repairs and was put back into operation quickly after capture. The region that both sides had fought over as a decisive industrial prize turned out to be more durable than the armies that defended it. The 24 German generals captured inside the pocket represented the near-total destruction of Army Group B's command structure in a single encirclement.