Merger & Death

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.

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