Over the River and Into the Reich: The Last Stand of Germany in 1945

By Ben McCarty

As spring dawned on the battlefields of Europe in 1945, Adolf Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” shuddered in its death throes after just over a decade of existence. The last major German offensive had been stopped in the Ardennes, and German forces were collapsing inward towards Berlin on all fronts. By the end of April, Hitler would be dead, committing suicide in his bunker in Berlin. Yet for those final few weeks Germany fought on, its empire stripped away, its cities in ruins, and its military all but obliterated. In the closing days of the European Theater of World War II, the last desperate battles would spill over the Rhine and into the streets of Berlin, and rage in the skies over Europe. While defeat was inevitable, the Nazi regime was determined to hold out to the end, causing as much destruction as it could before it collapsed. As he prepared to kill his family and then commit suicide, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, vowed that, “[t]he Earth will shake as we leave the scene.” Indeed, with legions of fanatical Hitler Youth indoctrinated to fight to the death for their Fuhrer, and terrifying new technology such as the V-1 and V-2 missiles and Me-262 jet fighter, the Nazis were prepared to make the Allies pay dearly for their ultimate victory. In the west, American, British, and other Allied nations continued to bomb German targets relentlessly from the air, while on the ground they moved to isolate German resistance into a pocket around Berlin. In the East, the Russians under Field Marshals Georgi Zhukov and Ivan Konev mercilessly pushed their way towards the heart of Germany, preparing to execute Stalin’s orders for a final drive into the bombed-out German capital.

Part I: Lucky Break at Remagen

Following the defeat of the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge, the ability of the Wehrmacht to fight an offensive war was all but exhausted. The western Allies were piercing into Germany, with General George S. Patton’s Third Army providing the spear tip. Only one obstacle stood in the way of the Anglo-Americans and the heart of Germany: the Rhine River. No invading army had crossed the great river since the time of Napoleon, and it had always been Germany’s natural barrier to invading forces. Allied bombers had destroyed many of the bridges that crossed the river earlier in the war, and the Germans dynamited those remaining as they retreated in a bid to bring the Allied advance to a standstill. The Germans tasked with defending the bridges where put in an almost impossible position. Hitler made it very clear to them that he wanted the bridges held, but if the Allies captured a bridge across the Rhine, those officers who failed to destroy it would be shot. This was exactly the predicament the German defenders of the Ludendorff Railroad Bridge at Remagen found themselves in as they guarded one of the last bridges across the Rhine. The bridge was being used as a main avenue of retreat for German forces and refugees and they were ordered to keep it open as long as possible. Then, over the horizon, they began to see the flashes of American artillery drawing steadily closer.

The Ninth Armored Division believed that it was going to encounter nothing but a few beams and a pile of rubble when it reached Remagen. Allied bombers had reportedly destroyed the bridge a few months earlier. However, when the commander of the Ninth Armored, General William Hoge, learned that the bridge was still standing, he sent scout units to Remagen as quickly as possible to assess the situation. What the lead units found when they crested the rise above the town was a heavily damaged, but still usable bridge stretching across the Rhine. Hoge gave the order to take the bridge intact if possible and ordered Company A of the 27th Armored Infantry to fulfill that task. Just as the GIs prepared to move onto the bridge, the massive structure leapt off its foundations in a terrific explosion as the defenders set off the demolition charges they had already placed upon the bridge should such a situation arise. For a moment both Germans and Americans breathed sighs of relief. The Germans were thrilled that they had destroyed the crossing just in time, and the Americans glad that they would not have shoot their way across the well-defended bridge. However, as the smoke cleared, the bridge still stood intact across the river. Before the Germans could set up to try and try to finish off the bridge, Lt. Karl Timmerman ordered his men across. In a quick firefight, Lt. Timmerman led the company onto the bridge, taking out the German machine guns in the bridge towers as they stormed across. Sgt. Alex Drabik, Timmerman’s second squad leader, was the first GI across, becoming the first invading soldier since 1805 to reach the eastern bank of the Rhine.