Why were German losses so intense in the last 6 months of WW2?

Because they were losing against massively large forces, and they were desperate to hold the home ground, plus ordered to never withdraw, meaning massive encirclements.
 
There's also nowhere to run, and no fuel to do the retreating. Also extreme shortage of basically everything tend to make attrition more of an issue than usual...
 
Morale gave out with the massive scale of the two front war brought home with the WALLIE bombing campaign ...that and the ingrained fear of the commies getting their loved ones.
 

kernals12

Banned
Because everything had imploded. The allies were streaming in from both east and west and the Luftwaffe was non existant so the wehrmacht was easy pickings for the RAF and USAAF.
 
Ever heard of the "Volkssturm"? Since Hitler couldn't admit he wsa wrong, he decided to prolong the war, to postpone the inevitable. So he ordered to draft anyone able to hold a gun (sometimes maybe not even that much) - 16-year-olds (or even younger), old men, cripples.

Leading to the very black joke: "What does have golden teeth, silver hair and leaden limbs? The Volkssturm."

Seriously, the number of casualties could've been even higher.
 
The relative quality of German Equipment and personnel had dropped significantly while that of it enemies had surpassed it while also having a massive advantage in Logistics and numbers of just about everything

Also an army retreating often cannot all escape and units get encircled and unless they surrendered get annihilated by an enemy that can use HE and Steel instead of lives to carry out said annihilation

There is also the fact that many allied soldiers East and West saw that the war was coming to an end and nobody wanted to be the last one to die - so if there were German soldiers holed up somewhere the Allied soldiers would be not so inclined to take risks in order to take POWs - for the most part they were citizen soldiers not fanatics.

I spoke with one veteran years ago who said that if they had been obliged to assault a trench or a building when advancing into Germany each trench or room would get a grenade and then a sten gun mag into anything resembling a person - he was bringing his boys home and NFWG! The reasoning was that the Germans could have surrendered or retreated but had instead determined that they would stand and fight.

Another account I read from one unit was that if they got a village and there was no washing out on the lines they would send up 2 Churchill Crocs and 'make a demonstration' - if that did not elicit a favorable response then the Divisional CRA (Commander Royal Artillery) was asked to level the place.

If washing was on the lines then generally it was a signal that no soldiers were present and that any Volkssturm were not up for it and generally the place would be occupied with little or no drama.

There is also sadly an even darker reason in that many of Germany's enemies had been brutalized by years of war and they did not treat German POWs as well as we today might like them to have been treated and many would have been murdered by their captors afer surrender (and not in the heat of battle) or died through gross misconduct ie kept in poor conditions, not fed etc.

War's are hell and WW2 was the worst war - glad I was born long after it had ended.
 
I spoke with one veteran years ago who said that if they had been obliged to assault a trench or a building when advancing into Germany each trench or room would get a grenade and then a sten gun mag into anything resembling a person - he was bringing his boys home and NFWG! The reasoning was that the Germans could have surrendered or retreated but had instead determined that they would stand and fight.
IDK where you're from, but if your country was invaded and all you hold dear at risk, wouldn't you be determined to stand and fight? The Germans were no different. Had the USSR invaded Germany in the 1980s, the Bundeswehr would have fought as fanatically as the Wehrmacht - you have to, when the invader isn't coming for territory, but in your mind is coming to annihilate you. That's why Israel fights so hard - they know if they lose, they're finished as a people. Of course, in hindsight we know that for the most part Wehrmacht soldiers could have surrendered in the west without risk, but that wasn't what they thought.
 

Deleted member 1487

Of the 5.3 million deaths the Wehrmacht suffered in WW2 around 23% (1.23 million) were suffered in the last 6 months of the war.

Why were the losses so intense in 1945 in comparison to the years before?
Probably more than that actually, IIRC 2 million or more when you factor in missing who were never accounted for.
That is just like what would happen in ancient warfare where the majority of the killing was done after one side broke and ran away. They weren't able to coordinate fighting and in the collapse it is a lot easier to kill an imploding enemy force who stops effectively fighting back. Plus there was likely a lot of killing of PoWs or people trying to surrender. There are a few videos on youtube of US soldiers shooting down Germans trying to surrender and by many accounts the Soviets took a lot of revenge on defeated or routed German forces.

Plus in 1945 the Allied armies were the strongest they'd ever been materially and in manpower, while the Germans were at their weakest.
 
IDK where you're from, but if your country was invaded and all you hold dear at risk, wouldn't you be determined to stand and fight? The Germans were no different. Had the USSR invaded Germany in the 1980s, the Bundeswehr would have fought as fanatically as the Wehrmacht - you have to, when the invader isn't coming for territory, but in your mind is coming to annihilate you. That's why Israel fights so hard - they know if they lose, they're finished as a people. Of course, in hindsight we know that for the most part Wehrmacht soldiers could have surrendered in the west without risk, but that wasn't what they thought.

I am from the UK and generally we try to fight our wars in other peoples countries but if pressed - yep!

I am not disagreeing with you or the reason why they fought so hard - I am just saying that because of that fanatical defence Allied soldiers were not willing to risk their lives to take prisoners - so they would (because they could) expend metal and HE and the lives of their enemies first rather than their own lives.

A lot of the fighting in North West Europe was FIBUA (Fighting in Built Up Areas) and certainly the British and Canadians were brutal at it.

One only has to look at the Croc and AVRE with its spigot mortar to see how seriously they took it and that was before D-Day and most infantry units would have received training in the art mostly in abandoned towns and bombed areas of cities.
 
Probably more than that actually, IIRC 2 million or more when you factor in missing who were never accounted for.
That is just like what would happen in ancient warfare where the majority of the killing was done after one side broke and ran away. They weren't able to coordinate fighting and in the collapse it is a lot easier to kill an imploding enemy force who stops effectively fighting back. Plus there was likely a lot of killing of PoWs or people trying to surrender. There are a few videos on youtube of US soldiers shooting down Germans trying to surrender and by many accounts the Soviets took a lot of revenge on defeated or routed German forces.

Plus in 1945 the Allied armies were the strongest they'd ever been materially and in manpower, while the Germans were at their weakest.

There were a number of cases of Panzer troops beign misidentified as SS* because of their uniforms which were black and being shot on sight - the irony being that SS troops late war were equipped and uniformed much like the rest of the Heer!

*I appreciate that while there were SS units that were deserving of such vehement hatred - others were not but unfortuantely for them they were all hated the same.
 
My grandfather never talked about his WWII and Korean War experiences to me, but I did overhear him talking to my brother after he joined the navy. He had been a combat engineer and he had gone on patrols and one patrol near the end of war, he stated they gave people one chance to surrender and come out of the house/cellar, etc and when there was no response, they tossed in some grenades and moved on.
 

Deleted member 1487

There were a number of cases of Panzer troops beign misidentified as SS* because of their uniforms which were black and being shot on sight - the irony being that SS troops late war were equipped and uniformed much like the rest of the Heer!

*I appreciate that while there were SS units that were deserving of such vehement hatred - others were not but unfortuantely for them they were all hated the same.
Yeah I saw something about that in Otto Carius' book; apparently the US army officers he was trying to negotiate a surrender with wouldn't deal with him until he explained he wasn't SS and the uniform similarity issue.
 
Hitler put a very high priority on executing Jews. The casualties it took to prolong the war and complete the genocide were secondary.
 

FBKampfer

Banned
After the collapse of AGC, and AGN being cut off and later surrounded, about half of Germany's A-team (such as it was) suddenly wasn't there to speak of.

So they started pouring almost raw recruits, old men, boys, anyone who could do the job basically, into the front lines to try and put something in between the Soviets and the rest of Germany.

Basically after Bagration, the Germans lost any ability to operate and respond on a strategic level, forcing them into more and more reactive, ad-hoc action.

Ancillary to this is the fact that they were monstrously outnumbered, especially in terms of tanks. At the end of things, some of the "Panzerarmiees" OKH was ordering around had less than 50 operational tanks

And lastly, logistically the Germans were utterly fucked at this point. Allied bombing was finally able to cripple their transport infrastructure, lack of fuel kept trucks off the road, and river canals only go A to B.

Ammunition for everything but the rifles was short as hell, and nobody trusted they'd be able to get more rifle rounds tomorrow either.



In short, in 1945, German forces mostly consisted of old or young men with minimal training, little in the way of heavy equipment, virtually no tanks or artillery, effectively no airforce, and transportation mostly consisting of horses, fighting 4:1 against the two best equipped military forces on the planet, and in battles where local success was already overshadowed by strategic failure.
 
Unlike the Japanese, who bought in to the propaganda about what the Americans (especially the Marines) would do because there had been very little interaction on a personal level before the war, the Germans had a fair bit of experience with the British and Americans. Educational "exchanges" with Germans going one way, Americans and British attending German institutions. A lot of Germans had relatives who had emigrated to the USA and had kept in touch, etc. Finally, the German military knew full well what had been done in Russia, and that sort of thing was very much the exception against the Western Allies. When the wheels came off, surrendering to the Western Allies and civilians moving to get in to the Western Zone.While there were exceptions, resistance on the western front collapsed, while on the east it was still a fight to the death.
 
IDK where you're from, but if your country was invaded and all you hold dear at risk, wouldn't you be determined to stand and fight? The Germans were no different. Had the USSR invaded Germany in the 1980s, the Bundeswehr would have fought as fanatically as the Wehrmacht - you have to, when the invader isn't coming for territory, but in your mind is coming to annihilate you. That's why Israel fights so hard - they know if they lose, they're finished as a people. Of course, in hindsight we know that for the most part Wehrmacht soldiers could have surrendered in the west without risk, but that wasn't what they thought.

If my country initiated an unjust war and invaded other people's land, then my country deserved to be counter-invaded.
 
There were a number of cases of Panzer troops beign misidentified as SS* because of their uniforms which were black and being shot on sight - the irony being that SS troops late war were equipped and uniformed much like the rest of the Heer!

*I appreciate that while there were SS units that were deserving of such vehement hatred - others were not but unfortuantely for them they were all hated the same.

Given what we know today, the Heer (and the Wehrmacht) esp. those fought at the Eastern Front cannot be described as morally much superior than SS. The "Clean Wehrmacht" myth needs to strongly protested.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...y_is_the_popular_view_in_western_pop_culture/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/771kc3/did_the_wehrmacht_commit_a_disproportionally/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/619lia/rommels_legacy/dfd5n4f/
 
Given what we know today, the Heer (and the Wehrmacht) esp. those fought at the Eastern Front cannot be described as morally much superior than SS. The "Clean Wehrmacht" myth needs to strongly protested.
Same with Austria. They had a disproportionate membership roll in most explicitly Nazi groups, and afterwards pretended they were clean and accused Jews wanting their stuff back as taking advantage of Austria.
 
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