World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF GERMANY: Merger & Death

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General Eisenhower announced: "The Germans as a military force on the western front are a whipped army." To the Germans themselves he proclaimed: "The German government has ceased to exercise effective control over wide areas. The German High Command has lost effective control over many units, large & small, of the German forces. Soldiers of the German Wehrmacht . . . cease hostilities . . . surrender."

In the west there was no longer a major defense line. In the east two Russian armies were advancing into Austria; two more were poised along the Oder. Somewhere soon the fronts of the east and west would merge. After that might come a furious, chaotic period of cleanup—in Norway, along the Baltic, amid the mountains of southern Germany and northern Italy. But the obscene grandeur that had been Nazi Germany would be dead and finished.