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The Rhineland Offensive was a series of allied offensive operations by 21st Army Group commanded by Bernard Montgomery from 8 February 1945 to 25 March 1945, at the end of the Second World War. The operations were aimed at occupying the Rhineland and securing a passage over the Rhine river.
The occupied Rhineland made up 6.5% of Germany's total area and had a population of about seven million. While the negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles were in progress, the region was under a state of siege and the number of occupation troops stood at approximately 240,000 (220,000 French and 20,000 Belgian).
The official history "U.S. Army in World War II - European Theatre of Operations" states: [122] The capture of the Ludendorff railroad bridge and its subsequent exploitation was one of those coups de théâtre that sometimes happen in warfare and never fail to capture the imagination. Just how much it speeded the end of the war is another question.
Later on in World War II, despite the increasing desperate situation of Germany from 1942 onwards and a whole series of humiliating defeats, the overwhelming majority of the Wehrmacht stayed loyal to the Nazi regime and continued to fight hard for that regime right up to its destruction in 1945 (the only exception being the putsch of July 20 ...
The Propaganda War in the Rhineland: Weimar Germany, Race and Occupation After World War I. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781780763460. Diefendorf, Jeffry M. (14 July 2014). Businessmen and Politics in the Rhineland, 1789-1834. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9781400853786. Emmerson, James Thomas (1977). The Rhineland Crisis. 7 March 1936.
The Allied disposition in western Europe by March 1945. By March 1945, the Allied armies had advanced into Germany and had reached the River Rhine.The Rhine was a formidable natural obstacle to the Allied advance, [12] but if breached would allow the Allies to access the North German Plain and ultimately advance on Berlin and other major cities in Northern Germany.
The Rheinwiesenlager (German: [ˈʁaɪnˌviːzn̩ˌlaːɡɐ], Rhine meadow camps) were a group of 19 concentration camps built in the Allied-occupied part of Germany by the U.S. Army to hold captured German soldiers at the close of the Second World War.
The Western Allied invasion of Germany was coordinated by the Western Allies during the final months of hostilities in the European theatre of World War II.In preparation for the Allied invasion of Germany east of the Rhine, a series of offensive operations were designed to seize and capture its east and west banks: Operation Veritable and Operation Grenade in February 1945, and Operation ...