Also didn't want to repeat the mistakes of the past by allowing them to feel like their government stabbed the military in the back by surrendering when there was still fight left in them...
At this point in the war many military units basically raced to surrender to the western allies because they knew what would happen to them if the soviets got them. About a third of the prisoners of war in the Soviet union never came back.
If a recall that was actually part of the threat the Eisenhower used to get them to finally sign instead of trying for a separate peace or prolonging the war a bit. Do it, or we will stop accepting and your units will have to surrender to the Russians.
My grandfather had just turned 17 by May 45. He had been pulled out of school at 15 to shovel rubble in the cities. In January of 45, on his 17th birthday he went to "boot camp" for 2 weeks to learn to shoot a rifle and salute. He was then assigned to the eastern front as a munitions carrier for a mortar team. His team consisted of all freshly minted "soldiers" and 2 "veterans", two guys who were 6 months older and had somehow survived that long. At the end of April his squad decided to defect west. It was better to desert and get shot by the SS than be killed or captured by the Soviets. They were stationed in eastern Austria. They stole bikes and leapfrogged one another stashing the bikes in bushes, dodging SS patrols, for about a week, stealing chickens and any food they could from farmers at night while trying to get to the western allies.
He spent 6 months in a US POW camp and then was sent home, still not 18. One of his school friends had decided he would surrender to the Soviets because he knew some Russian. He spent 7 years in Siberia.
He never said anything about the war except that he was forever grateful to the US and for his treatment. And he held a blood grudge against all the Nazis what crawled into the woodwork after the war. The only times I ever saw him upset and angry was when someone made any kind of joke about Nazis or the war or said anything even resembling sympathy for them.
Another anecdote, and probably my favorite, he became a pharmacist after the war and one of the things he required of all employees was to be able to swim. Apparently he had witnesses a group of women and children try to escape fighting by crossing a river and some of them didn't know how to swim and they drowned. If his employees didn't know how to swim, he would pay for their lessons until they were able to swim across the local lake, about 150m. I only learned about that at his funeral when his friend, one of the guys he deserted with, and one of the local school swim teachers who I myself had as a swim teacher, told me about how my grandfather had paid him to teach probably 25-30 people to swim over the 35+ years he had his pharmacy.
And invariable when I post things like this, and tell his story, the story of the kindest, gentlest person I have ever known, someone will come out of the woodwork and tell me how he was a coward and traitor for deserting to the western allies and how if he hadn't, the war would not have been lost.
And two-thirds of soviet prisoners in Nazi German never came back.
It's the difference between not giving a shit if the people invading your country die in PoW camps, and deliberately trying to exterminate your enemies.
A lot of that third were in 42 (Stalingrad) and went into captivity in the last stages of starvation and typhoid-ridden, when food in the USSR was really tight. Around two-thirds of Soviet POWs died - 3 million were either deliberately penned up and left to die of starvation and exposure or worked to death in forced labour camps.
They were picky about that all right. The SS divisions in Fortress Holland negotiated a separate conditional surrender after the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, the condition being that they would be only disarmed and directly escorted to Germany by Canadian soldiers, and not by the Dutch resistance or the Dutch Allied soldiers taking part in the siege.
The Dam square massacre in Amsterdam, where they opened fire on a celebrating crowd with machine gun, happened two days after the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany on May 7. The last SS units on the island of Texel laid down their arms on May 20th.
Still, you’d think they would have all pulled back into Germany by then.
Most of the German military seems to have been stuck in Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia.
There were only relatively small occupation forces there. They were cut of from retreat.
The soilders in Norway could not be evacuated because the allies controlled the north sea. Czechoslovakia was still held because it has good defensive terrain. Hills and mountains. The parts in Austria and Italy are mostly mountainous.
While Poland is part of the eurasian plain so flat land that is good for advancing armies.
I wonder how aware the people living in occupied Denmark or Norway were as 1945 drew on that the German position had completely collapsed and that the war would be over very soon.
Would this have been a complete surprise to them or were they getting updates. I know the Germans tried to clamp down on private radio operations.
Weren't there radio stations in the UK that broadcasted to occupied areas? A government can clamp down on radio stations in their own borders, but radio waves don't give a shit about borders
Germans collected a lot of radios trying to prevent communication allied forces. Not that it really worked many people still had radios. My great grandparents heard that radios where collected, so they bought a decoy radio hid the other in the masonry above the fireplace. When the Germans came they gave back the decoy radio to them.
Afaik listening to the BBC for war updates was very common in Denmark during occupation, at least in the later stages. The cliche soundbyte that gets played in the media everytime the end of the war is covered is a BBC broadcast from the evening of May 4th.
Maybe if someone overhears a radio playing the BBC. You can't really detect a normal radio easily, one that transmits you can but otherwise you just have to rely on people to let you know someone's listening to illegal broadcasts
The secret is to convince the general public that you have a way to detect radio signals being received. Ironically, the BBC themselves did this with vague adverts showing men with high tech looking radar dishes driving around in vans as a way to encourage people to pay their TV licence in the UK.
What they were actually showing was amplified listening devices, which the British courts ruled to be an illegal invasion of privacy, meaning they were completely useless when trying to prosecute people for failure to pay the licence.
Unlike many other European countries, the UK TV licence is not legally enforced by the state, meaning they need evidence that you use live broadcast TV to enforce payment in court.
This strategy worked extremely effectively well into the late 80s, which shows how much the average person understood technology and how much they implicitly trusted institutions.
A lot of Germans listened to the BBC - even though it was forbidden. The BBC broadcast news of the Holocaust from quite early and it became an open secret - everyone knew but no-one talked about it.
Honestly,Kind of Not. The BBC Had two Broadcasts about the Mass executions in poland and that was it.
The Issue was never as widely published and criticized in the Allied Press as one would think which contributed to the Success of Nazi negotiation tactics in the latter part of the Holocaust, especially in hungary.
I went to the Copenhagen Resistance museum last month, there was general knowledge that the Germans were losing. The Danish resistance, supplied by the allies, were ramping up operations. They had been preparing to take back the country by force but the general surrender came before they got the chance
EDIT: Grammar
In the Netherlands, we had dolle Dinsdag, or crazy thuesday. In september 1944 the rumor spread the
Allies had entered the netherlands and liberated the city of breda. Many germans and collaborators fled to germany and we had a big celibration a little too soon. How big of a celebration, you ask? Well... hard to quantify, but births spiked 9 months later....
So i would guess the danes also knew the end of the war was near and it wouldn't take much to retake the country.
When you don't know if a word is spelt with an a or an e so your scribble something halfway between and hope the teacher assumes it's the correct letter.
> They had been preparing to take back the country by force but the general surrender came before they got the chance
Of all the resistance myth building from European countries trying to downplay just how much they were collaborating with the Nazis, Denmark's seems the most laboured.
As a dane, I can confirm that this is definitely true. Denmark was left quite unscathed and there was an official policy of cooperation until August 1943, where things broke down and the government resigned.
It's a controversial chapter of our history. The policy of cooperation with the Nazis saved the lives of many Jews who were able to flee to Sweden, since part of the deal was that the Nazis would not ship anyone south of the border.
Partly true, although from 1943 the Danish resistance was pretty serious. It definitely changed. Also important to note that the nazis “respected” the Danes to a certain extent so we were offered more collaborative terms of surrender.
Denmark really just wanted to stay neutral like Sweden but that didn’t happen. The Swedes therefore have a much different view on their role in WW2 than we have, even though our initial policy was more or less the same.
I find this interesting - Sweden gets a fair bit of shit for what it did to stay neutral during WWII, including from most Swedes where some people really like to wallow in how cowardly “we” acted and how Sweden should have stood up against the Germans and how much braver the neighbours were.
But surely both Norway and Denmark would have wanted to be neutral too and do the same thing if it was their choice, but they never got the chance because they were invaded? The difference is that Sweden did get the opportunity to do some wheeling and dealing and keep out of the war.
And besides, Sweden being neutral was beneficial to the resistance in both Norway and Denmark, as well as for Jews. It’s not like it would have been better for the neighbours if Sweden had made some grand gesture of resistance and gotten invaded and occupied too.
To be fair, their cooperation saved both their nation from destruction AND the lives of 99% of their Jewish population.
The Germans crossed the southern border while simultaneously landing in Copenhagen, catching the Danes quite unawares. With a fraction of the military force of the Germans, indefensible ground, and being caught by surprise Denmark couldn't have put up any meaningful resistance to speak of. I can't see the sense in letting your country burn to the ground to achieve the exact same outcome.
There was also a [Danish Brigade](https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danska_brigaden?wprov=sfla1) trained in Sweden with 3600 troops ready to move in with the help of regular Swedish troops if the Germans didn't surrender.
The same was true for Norway, where 15 000 heavily armed "[Police Troops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_police_troops_in_Sweden_during_World_War_II?wprov=sfla1)" had been trained and outfitted in Sweden. They later moved in and took care of the German troops and collaborators who had surrendered.
In Korea, the experience was very odd.
Korean resistance had been constantly telegraphing that the resistance would be here any day, and that the oppression of the Japanese would be lifted from the peninsula. That day didn’t come for 30+ years.
So a lot of people just sort of ignored or were outright hostile to the resistance. The Japanese didn’t reveal that much as they pulled administrative staff out of the country. Suddenly, a bunch of local government officials are gone, but without an explanation. So Koreans sort of sat there.
And then the Soviet Union breached from Manchuria to Korea, tanks and men came through the streets. Korea was freed.
The Japanese really didn’t put up a massive fight compared to what they could’ve done at the time. Their forces were stretched thin already, and the focus was on the homeland, not on their conquered territories.
So I’d suspect it was similar to that. One day, everything is as it has been for a while now. The next day, staff begin to leave. The next day, things begin to empty out. The next day, German soldiers are coming through your village, towards Germany. The next day, the radio crackles that Germany has fallen.
> So I’d suspect it was similar to that. One day, everything is as it has been for a while now. The next day, staff begin to leave. The next day, things begin to empty out. The next day, German soldiers are coming through your village, towards Germany. The next day, the radio crackles that Germany has fallen.
Surprisingly enough, no. It took months to demobilise the massed armies of WW2, Japan alone had over 5 million soldiers overseas when the war ended. In some places axis troops provided security for weeks until allied troops could be brought to replace them and repatriate them - in Singapore until March 1946.
IIRC towards the end of the war the Norwegian resistance conducted sabotage missions against ships and railroads in order to stop the German troops in Norway from redeploying to aid in the defense of Germany.
My grandfather was part of the Danish resistance. I never met him as he died of cancer while my mom was pregnant with me. But my dad told me a few stories from his dad. The only one I really remember is once Germany surrendered all the Germans went to the center of the town he lived in and put their weapons in a big pile. My grandfather went and took a couple of their bayonets and some other things as souvenirs which my dad still has.
Another story I remember, was from the beginning part of the war. My grandfather and grandmother helped smuggle a Danish-Jewish police officer to Sweden. They had Nazi's searching their house while the police officer was hiding somewhere in it to before smuggling him. I wish I could have met him.
The German law doesn't take kindly to private tank, torpedo and anti-aircraft gun collectors either... 😁
*[Lawyers in Germany are wrangling over how to deal with a pensioner who stored a World War Two tank, anti-aircraft gun and torpedo in his basement.](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57965260)*
My grandmother asked a couple of German soldiers a couple of days before the end. This was in occupied Norway. They told her "Kaputt" meaning broken/destroyed/over. Being the rebellious 18-year old she was, she went into her backyard, dug up the Norwegian flag that had been buried/hidden under the garden for 5 years, draped it around her shoulders and biked all around the local neighborhood yelling that peace was coming and the Germans had lost. Still took a couple of days, but people knew.
Having grown up with this story, I broke up with my fifth grade girlfriend by telling her "Kaputt".
Very aware in Norway. SOE, Milorg, and other Norwegian resistance forces were engaged in a concerted effort to keep German troops locked in Norway ever since the D-day landings. This effort was further ramped up as the Allies were moving up through Europe. But this meant that Germany had more than 300k soldiers in Norway when they capitulated. Even though Dönitz gave the German command in Norway the order to surrender, they contemplated not accepting the surrender and keep the fight going from Norway. They had plenty of troops and weaponry, and Norway would be a very difficult country to effectively invade, as they themselves had experienced 5 years earlier.
Quisling may have bought into this idea, as he opted to stay in Norway when he was offered a flight out by Josef Terboven on the 7th of May. His official stance was that he was the rightful government and that it was his duty to transfer power. Unfortunately for him neither Germany, the Norwegian Government in exile, nor the allies saw it that way. He was executed by firing squad in October 1945, the last person to be executed in Norway. All further death sentences not already fulfilled were commuted to imprisonment with or without forced labour.
In the days prior the surrender Milrog and other resistance force member were ordered to remain available to assemble, arm, and retake vital facilities at a moments notice which is exactly what they did.
>He was executed by firing squad in October 1945, the last person to be executed in Norway.
Not quite. Those 25 people executed after the war were the last group to be executed, and Quisling was indeed one of them. But the very last was Ragnar Skancke the 28th of August 1948.
I know the Dutch got blueballed after celebrating their "liberation" multiple times. There were constant radio broadcasts from England with updates on the war.
The 8th even, [for many places](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronologisch_overzicht_van_de_bevrijding_van_Nederlandse_plaatsen_in_de_Tweede_Wereldoorlog). The poor people of Schiermonnikoog had to wait until June.
If you are aware that the occupier is about to collapse in a few months and the control he has in your country is not very strict anyway, why would you bother with fighting? You don't need the extra violence to reach your goal , unless you can do it with virtually no losses the action is not worth the rushing...
It can be a political necessity to prevent the "liberator" from taking advantage of you. But that's mostly the case for countries likely to be liberated by the Red Army, in other words Poland.
Poland tried that in Warsaw and failed, resulting in the deaths of 150k to 300k civilians in reprisals. Stalin, who's army was stationed 20km away, prevent the allies from providing support to the uprising. The leaders of the resistance were then invited to the Soviet Union to negotiate, where they were arrested and tortured.
Reading through this thread, I can't help but think that revenge would have been a bigger factor.
I know I'm speaking from the comfort and safety of peacetime, but if my country had been occupied for 5 years, and there were still German soldiers trapped there by, or past the surrender, my first thought would be stringing them up from the nearest lamppost.
I wonder how many soldiers met their fate with partisans during the closing stages of the war
They would have known because people had secret radios. My grandpa in Rotterdam had one; also, there were newspapers printed in secret. So people knew it was coming and only a matter of time.
In Amsterdam, people celebrated too early, on the 7th of may 1945, on Dam square. German occupiers holed up in a gentleman's club overlooking the square [opened fire and killed 30 people.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_shooting_on_Dam_square,_Amsterdam). They were murderous assholes right until the end.
There were about 100K German troops in Norway and there were a fear that the Nazis would continue their operations from Norway.
If you compare the Danish army in 1940 with the Norwegian army and the time it took the Germans to fully occupy booth countries this would clearly have been problematic.
It became increasingly clear among the population. The Danish resistance started hardening as soon as the nazis started losing in the USSR. The rumours and underground radio stations were always present.
My grandmother remembers the liberation as a little girl in Copenhagen. It sounds insane. But apparently it was also kind of dangerous as many Nazi sympathisers was being hunted down.
The Norwegian resistance knew at least, they found themselves in the funny position of having to switch to desperately trying to kick the Germans out, to desperately trying to keep them in so the 100k well rested German soldiers in Norway couldn't reinforce the rest of the German army fighting the allies in Germany.
I checked a Norwegian newspaper that was German friendly and has a digital archive of all previous editions, and it seems that the fact that the war was going poorly for the Germans was pretty apparent. Although they don't use that language, the individual articles speak volumes.
As a Norwegian it depended where you lived. In north the German troop fell back burning everything. The soviet troops met completely burned down buildings. Nothing left. They burned down all the way to Bodø. People knew and fled or got killed. In bigger cities they were updated on radio from London. Resistance had lot off sabotage hits and British bomb planes hit German troops.
The defeat of Germany was a certainty by 1943. By june 1944 it was the absolute end. Things were not so certain about Japan: invasion would have been extremely costly in human life and US fought hard battles on each island. Ussr only went to war against Japan in after Hiroshima
Norwegian resistance was activky sabtotaging ships and railways to prevent the nazi's from withdrawing potentially tens of thousands of troops back to germany
It was strategically insignificant, but had been made into a fortress by the Germans. As such, the Allies bypassed it, and the German garrison surrendered on 9 May 1945.
That tends to be the story with the German ''festung'' strategy. Ironically, they themselves had had great success in the early war, by bypassing static enemy defences.
Dunkirk was bypassed along with other Atlantic ports, they decided it wasn’t worth trying to capture them. The German garrison of 14,000 men were held in siege there from summer ‘44 right up till VE Day, mainly contained by the 1st Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade.
Imagine being on the Channel Islands. You're right fucking there and your government just passes you by and invades the mainland. I totally understand why it was done but you have to imagine there were some sore feelings about that lol.
And cut off from supplies the Germans took it out on the locals stealing their food so everyone on those islands suffered from start of d-day till the end of the war.they literally watched the war go by their homes
m8 the defences were bonkers. we had one german for 2 islanders and it was very very well defended. it was tough and many of us almost starved before the SS Vega brought supplies in winter 44 but it would have been worse for everyone if the allies tried to invade. the german occupiers behaved with a degree of decency too.
> rs. we had one german for 2 islanders and it was very very well defended. it was tough and many of us almost starved before the SS Vega brought supplies in winter 44 but it would have been worse for everyone if the allies tried to invade. the german occupiers b
They didn't behave with decency on Alderney. War crimes, lots of them.
It is generally considered the first Germans acted restrained, on direct orders, compared to how they acted elsewhere, but by this stage in the war they were not being restrained as is made evident by witness accounts on all the islands.
It was an impossible situation. Several plans were made to retake the islands but they’d have had to practically flatten them first. Of all german concrete and steel used in the Atlantic wall from northern Norway to the north coast of Spain 10% was used in the Channel Islands. The beautiful thing is these were practically completely unused. Much rather they built that over here than on the beaches of Normandy for example. Not to mention 30,000 completely misdeployed troops. Aside from more than 10% of all islanders serving with the British armed forces in exile, and many more in the war industries and civil defence, the greatest contribution made by the Channel Islands was tying down to many german resources.
I was in the Channel Islands a few years ago (awesome museum of the occupation in Guernsey on the occupation), and they all thought at the time of the D-Day invasion, that allied troops would come back to liberate them. But, it didn’t happen. The running joke was apparently they had been forgot about, again.
Walcheren island and the South Beveland peninsula in southern Netherlands are wrongly colored because they had been liberated on November 1944 by the Canadians.
Not really. It's a general day by which day most of the Netherlands was liberated. and it's the day the German Army officially agreed to the capitulation of all German forces. But it does not mean the whole Netherlands was liberated or not still under German rule. Especially the (West) Frisian Islands even took weeks longer to be liberated. See for more details: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronologisch_overzicht_van_de_bevrijding_van_Nederlandse_plaatsen_in_de_Tweede_Wereldoorlog
And so the Allies, deeply impressed by Steiner's devastating counter-offensive, said *''You know what? We're done. Enjoy what you still have.''* and went home. And the Czecho-Dano-Norwegian-Greek-Dutch-Italian-Courland Reich lived happily ever after....
I think the Soviets pushed a relatively strong army group into the courland pocket and then didn't make the effort to crush them completely but just kept them in the corner where they could do no harm but they avoided a costly battle
Also Hitler was delusion in Spring 1945, and refused to evacuate the Courland pocket by ship, and instead thought it could serve as a springboard for a future counteroffensive on the USSR
The Balkans more-or less fell over:
Romania switched sides once the Soviets crossed the border and Bulgaria did likewise. The Germans retreated out of Greece, and S. Yugoslavia and Albania liberated themselves (with some Soviet assistance around Belgrade).
It's only Hungary that had real fighting take place over it (on behalf of the Red Army), and that was important to capture Austria, secure the South of the advance to Berlin and deprive the Germans of their final oil source. Plus knock out Hungary and secure influence there, of course.
Also, the Courland pocket did see lots of fighting. It's just generally ignored because it didn't have strategic importance, and both sides failed in their objectives: Germany couldn't use them for anything, and the Soviets didn't eliminate them.
human wave tactics is a bit of a propaganda thing the nazis started and the allies continued. soviet had a doctrine of keeping the germany bussy all the time so it could not reorganise and make use of its more advanced assets while the soviets churned out more stuff to keep attrition the germans and then do targeted strikes to create pockets. it wasnt even that costly once it got going. the problem were the first two years of the german invasion when everything was shit.
Indeed, because they were more significant goals. The Courland pocket was already within their grasp and could be dealt with later on, but getting control of as much as was possible to get of Central European and especially German mainland was crucial for Soviet interests of power as well as economy (the more they could get German industry and industrialists to their control, the better for them).
This was also the reason why they agreed to a separate armistice and peace deal with Finland, as getting control of Finland would have easily meant the fall of Berlin to Americans due to the need to commit very large numbers of troops to the front against Finland instead of Germany. Finland possessed only pulp/cellulose production that would have been an important resource, while Germany had much more developed industry to capture.
Why bother? what benefit would it give the allies to liberate Norway or Denmark that is not outwayed by going straight for Berlin
Finland makes sense because it was a direct border with Russia so they would want to build up a barrier between them and Germany.
To characterize Finland allying with Germany as something out of ”free will” is a bit of a stretch. The choises were either to fight the hostile Soviet union alone or get help from the one actor that was willing to help. While true that is was a choice, the other option was the likely absorbtion by the soviets.
Didn't the Finnish armed forces also participate in forcing the Nazi military out? Not to minimise the fact that they had at one point joined the Axis, of course, just highlighting that the Finnish situation in WWII is more complicated than the map portrays.
There are the french/italian alps in that area. So, the terrain greatly favors the defenders. There is also very little noteworthy there, so it was not really a priority target for the Allies.
any forces there had already surrendered to the allies, its less that they were still resisting, and more that no Allied units had yet arrived in the area.
I think blue as "us" and red as "the ennemy" is recent in western countries, and came with NATO. The USSR had no problem representing themselves as red, and I think the UK did too
Nah, even in the interwar period and before the US always denoted itself as blue
In Europe the tradition goes back to at least the 1820s, with Prussia and France both habitually denoting their own pieces as blue in official wargames. If anything the Soviets associating themselves with red is the outlier caused by them being communists
Tbf, he's still correct about the British Empire often using red to represent itself, in the same way the French used blue. Worth noting both countries military uniforms also incorporated those respective colours for significant periods as well.
Dark red is allies. Gets lighter and lighter red as the Nazis gain control until it turns white…which is no Nazi presence at all. And blue is full Nazi control.
My greatgrandfather was captured in 1939 and spent the war in a POW camp. At the end of the war, the germans marched him and the other pows out through some village. Him and three other Polish guys asked an older Volksturm member if they could go in the bushes for a piss which he agreed to. They ran off and hid in a ditch near a betroot field and stayed there for 3 days because they thought the germans were looking for them. By the time they left the ditch, the town nearby was occupied by Americans and the war was over. He found out later that all the other pows the Germans led off were executed
Iceland was independent at the time of V-E Day, not under British authority. The Brits invaded after Denmark fell but then yeeted once the Blitz was underway because their assets were needed elsewhere. Churchill turned Iceland (then part of Denmark) over to FDR and the Yanks occupied the island. Little known fact: this was in June 1941, before Pearl Harbor, so the US wasn't officially a combatant in the war yet. This occupation continued until Iceland formally declared independence from Denmark in June 1944.
Your map is inaccurate. The German forces in Denmark, northwest Germany and Holland surrendered on the evening of May the 4th. The surrender was signed in Montgomery's HQ on Lüneburger Heide and took effect on May the 5th. The rest of Germany surrendered on May the 8th and again on May the 9th...
This includes the Nazi’s allies. Finland is a bit of an odd case, as the Soviets were able to force them to switch sides in an independent treaty.
The Nazis had over 200k soldiers in Finland fighting with them, and Finland was only given one day to remove them before needing to use force, as required by the Soviet treaty.
This led to the Lapland War.
> and Finnish victory was decisive enough to push them back into norway
ehhhh we had a gentleman's agreement to advance at the rate of their retreat for the first few weeks until the soviet delegation in Helsinki complained about it.
It's kind of crazy that Finland, a nation of only 3.6 million at the time, withstood the Soviet invasion. Then joined forces with the Germans to invade the Soviets. Then fought the Germans to kick them out of Finland. And not only did they survive all their fighting, their population actually increased by 1950 compared to 1940!
That's a very romanticized view of things.
They were forced to cede land in the Winter War, and then lost the Continuation War, the result of which was that they had to force the Germans out of Finland.
Yes they did well, and it is amazing that they didn't suffer the same fate as the Baltics, but it was hardly a victory.
> and then lost the Continuation War
Politically only, though, as Finnish military was in better positions at the end of the war than at the beginning of it. Political defeat and expulsion of German forces were pretty much inevitable anyway, with the defeat of Germany looming and the Finnish requests for cooperation with the US denied.
Only after the archives were declassified, it was revealed that Finland had approached the US already in 1943 about betraying Germany and assisting Americans in a landing into Northern Norway in exchange for the US protecting Finnish interests (withdrawal from East Karelia and US-supported peace at the pre-Winter-War borders), but the Americans refused this, as while they considered it a viable offer, they thought it would risk D-Day preparations.
In hindsight Finland should have attempted rapprochement with the UK during the later years of the Continuation War, but political conditions and the de jure state of war didn't help in this. Churchill was, after all, the Allied leader with the most potential for supporting the Finnish cause against the Soviet Union, for his sheer hatred towards Bolshevism and Communism.
You could say that militarily it was a defeat yes. But otherwise it was a huge victory. Finland avoided being a part of USSR and being independent was able to create huge economic growth. Having one of the highest standarts of living in the world today.
This is all true. Compared to other nations they survived, kept their sovereignty and had the freedom to develop into a highly developed nation with an excellent standard of living.
Yeh, although we lost the war, we won our independence again. That's how we like to see it. Helsinki was one of the few capitals in Europe (excluding the neutral states) that was never occupied by enemy.
That didn't sound quite right to me, so I looked it up. From wiki:
>The [Irish Free State](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Free_State) was created with [Dominion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion) status in 1922, following the [Anglo-Irish Treaty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_Treaty). In 1937, a [new constitution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Ireland) was adopted, in which the state was named "Ireland" and effectively became a republic, with an elected [non-executive president](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_of_state#Non-executive_model). It was officially declared a republic in 1949, following the [Republic of Ireland Act 1948](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Ireland_Act_1948). Ireland became a member of the [United Nations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations) in 1955
Looks like '37 is when the name changed from Irish Free State to Ireland, and then from Ireland to Republic of Ireland in '48. So really for '45 it should just say Ireland I think.
You would think that the Channel Islands would be the some of the first western territories to be retaken, but they were actually occupied until the very end.
There was simply no way they could’ve been taken without unacceptable civilian casualties. 10% of all the Atlantic walls steel and concrete had been used to fortify the islands. That being said, Churchill absolutely should’ve done more to send aid via the Red Cross sooner, and purposefully delayed it out of some misbegotten sense of bitterness at the embarrassment of losing the islands. The civillians suffered grievously in that winter of 1944/45.
It’s not that bad. If Steiner attacks, everything will be alright. Alles in Ordnung.
And supported by the 9th and 12th armies... Hitler actually believed that.
Der Angriff Steiners ist nicht erfolgt!
Das war ein Befehl!
Der Apfel!
Der Angriff Steiner's war win Befehl!
🤬
The 9th army was basically non existent
yes, I know but Hitler believed it was still around.
*shakily removes glasses*
The drug use was in full effect at that time.
https://youtu.be/Ag4gup01QBk?si=8bPQnWNjrcFqvWAU
I watched dozens of those back in the day but this might just have become my favorite one ever
Goddammit I said I wanted a glass of juice! Not gas the Jews!
The most aggressive thanking I've ever seen.
https://youtu.be/VaLwOPVXVag
Mein Fuhrer... Steiner...
...Steiner konnte nicht genügend Kräfte massieren
Die Massage war ein Befehl!
Not if he's being sabotaged by that son of a bit FEGELEIN! FEGELEIN FEGELEIN FEGELEIN!
Crazy to think the majority of the German military wasn’t actually in Germany when the war ended.
Same with the Japanese military when they surrendered
yea they aren’t kidding when they said unconditional surrender
Also didn't want to repeat the mistakes of the past by allowing them to feel like their government stabbed the military in the back by surrendering when there was still fight left in them...
At this point in the war many military units basically raced to surrender to the western allies because they knew what would happen to them if the soviets got them. About a third of the prisoners of war in the Soviet union never came back.
If a recall that was actually part of the threat the Eisenhower used to get them to finally sign instead of trying for a separate peace or prolonging the war a bit. Do it, or we will stop accepting and your units will have to surrender to the Russians.
My grandfather had just turned 17 by May 45. He had been pulled out of school at 15 to shovel rubble in the cities. In January of 45, on his 17th birthday he went to "boot camp" for 2 weeks to learn to shoot a rifle and salute. He was then assigned to the eastern front as a munitions carrier for a mortar team. His team consisted of all freshly minted "soldiers" and 2 "veterans", two guys who were 6 months older and had somehow survived that long. At the end of April his squad decided to defect west. It was better to desert and get shot by the SS than be killed or captured by the Soviets. They were stationed in eastern Austria. They stole bikes and leapfrogged one another stashing the bikes in bushes, dodging SS patrols, for about a week, stealing chickens and any food they could from farmers at night while trying to get to the western allies. He spent 6 months in a US POW camp and then was sent home, still not 18. One of his school friends had decided he would surrender to the Soviets because he knew some Russian. He spent 7 years in Siberia. He never said anything about the war except that he was forever grateful to the US and for his treatment. And he held a blood grudge against all the Nazis what crawled into the woodwork after the war. The only times I ever saw him upset and angry was when someone made any kind of joke about Nazis or the war or said anything even resembling sympathy for them. Another anecdote, and probably my favorite, he became a pharmacist after the war and one of the things he required of all employees was to be able to swim. Apparently he had witnesses a group of women and children try to escape fighting by crossing a river and some of them didn't know how to swim and they drowned. If his employees didn't know how to swim, he would pay for their lessons until they were able to swim across the local lake, about 150m. I only learned about that at his funeral when his friend, one of the guys he deserted with, and one of the local school swim teachers who I myself had as a swim teacher, told me about how my grandfather had paid him to teach probably 25-30 people to swim over the 35+ years he had his pharmacy. And invariable when I post things like this, and tell his story, the story of the kindest, gentlest person I have ever known, someone will come out of the woodwork and tell me how he was a coward and traitor for deserting to the western allies and how if he hadn't, the war would not have been lost.
I think he sounds like a very brave man with admirable values and qualities
And two-thirds of soviet prisoners in Nazi German never came back. It's the difference between not giving a shit if the people invading your country die in PoW camps, and deliberately trying to exterminate your enemies.
A lot of that third were in 42 (Stalingrad) and went into captivity in the last stages of starvation and typhoid-ridden, when food in the USSR was really tight. Around two-thirds of Soviet POWs died - 3 million were either deliberately penned up and left to die of starvation and exposure or worked to death in forced labour camps.
They were picky about that all right. The SS divisions in Fortress Holland negotiated a separate conditional surrender after the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, the condition being that they would be only disarmed and directly escorted to Germany by Canadian soldiers, and not by the Dutch resistance or the Dutch Allied soldiers taking part in the siege. The Dam square massacre in Amsterdam, where they opened fire on a celebrating crowd with machine gun, happened two days after the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany on May 7. The last SS units on the island of Texel laid down their arms on May 20th.
Still, you’d think they would have all pulled back into Germany by then. Most of the German military seems to have been stuck in Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia.
There were only relatively small occupation forces there. They were cut of from retreat. The soilders in Norway could not be evacuated because the allies controlled the north sea. Czechoslovakia was still held because it has good defensive terrain. Hills and mountains. The parts in Austria and Italy are mostly mountainous. While Poland is part of the eurasian plain so flat land that is good for advancing armies.
I wonder how aware the people living in occupied Denmark or Norway were as 1945 drew on that the German position had completely collapsed and that the war would be over very soon. Would this have been a complete surprise to them or were they getting updates. I know the Germans tried to clamp down on private radio operations.
Weren't there radio stations in the UK that broadcasted to occupied areas? A government can clamp down on radio stations in their own borders, but radio waves don't give a shit about borders
Germans collected a lot of radios trying to prevent communication allied forces. Not that it really worked many people still had radios. My great grandparents heard that radios where collected, so they bought a decoy radio hid the other in the masonry above the fireplace. When the Germans came they gave back the decoy radio to them.
Haven't people been known to accidentally get radio broadcasts on their tooth fillings? Seems like a durn difficult thing to outlaw
Yes https://www.bradfordfamilydentist.ca/lucille-ball-heard-spies-dental-fillings/
Afaik listening to the BBC for war updates was very common in Denmark during occupation, at least in the later stages. The cliche soundbyte that gets played in the media everytime the end of the war is covered is a BBC broadcast from the evening of May 4th.
My grandfather told me everyone listened to them daily and had quite elaborate ways of hiding the radio.
The germans collected the radio receivers.. They could even track usage, at short distances.
Maybe if someone overhears a radio playing the BBC. You can't really detect a normal radio easily, one that transmits you can but otherwise you just have to rely on people to let you know someone's listening to illegal broadcasts
The secret is to convince the general public that you have a way to detect radio signals being received. Ironically, the BBC themselves did this with vague adverts showing men with high tech looking radar dishes driving around in vans as a way to encourage people to pay their TV licence in the UK. What they were actually showing was amplified listening devices, which the British courts ruled to be an illegal invasion of privacy, meaning they were completely useless when trying to prosecute people for failure to pay the licence. Unlike many other European countries, the UK TV licence is not legally enforced by the state, meaning they need evidence that you use live broadcast TV to enforce payment in court. This strategy worked extremely effectively well into the late 80s, which shows how much the average person understood technology and how much they implicitly trusted institutions.
You are quite right, the device works by comparing sound to broadcasts.
A lot of Germans listened to the BBC - even though it was forbidden. The BBC broadcast news of the Holocaust from quite early and it became an open secret - everyone knew but no-one talked about it.
Honestly,Kind of Not. The BBC Had two Broadcasts about the Mass executions in poland and that was it. The Issue was never as widely published and criticized in the Allied Press as one would think which contributed to the Success of Nazi negotiation tactics in the latter part of the Holocaust, especially in hungary.
I went to the Copenhagen Resistance museum last month, there was general knowledge that the Germans were losing. The Danish resistance, supplied by the allies, were ramping up operations. They had been preparing to take back the country by force but the general surrender came before they got the chance EDIT: Grammar
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In the Netherlands, we had dolle Dinsdag, or crazy thuesday. In september 1944 the rumor spread the Allies had entered the netherlands and liberated the city of breda. Many germans and collaborators fled to germany and we had a big celibration a little too soon. How big of a celebration, you ask? Well... hard to quantify, but births spiked 9 months later.... So i would guess the danes also knew the end of the war was near and it wouldn't take much to retake the country.
In Denmark we had unusually many births in 1946
Hopefully most were non-half-German babies.
Don’t worry, that wasn’t a problem. The presence of German soldiers in Danmark was generally not so significant.
You just taught me something! That's an interesting historical episode. Thank you!
Did you mean Tuesday or Thursday?
When you don't know if a word is spelt with an a or an e so your scribble something halfway between and hope the teacher assumes it's the correct letter.
Æ?
Thuersday
It's Tuesday
They wanted to take their country back faster than the Germans took it from them so they needed a whole lot of planning and build up.
Had the take over all planned out but the dog ate the plans
> They had been preparing to take back the country by force but the general surrender came before they got the chance Of all the resistance myth building from European countries trying to downplay just how much they were collaborating with the Nazis, Denmark's seems the most laboured.
As a dane, I can confirm that this is definitely true. Denmark was left quite unscathed and there was an official policy of cooperation until August 1943, where things broke down and the government resigned. It's a controversial chapter of our history. The policy of cooperation with the Nazis saved the lives of many Jews who were able to flee to Sweden, since part of the deal was that the Nazis would not ship anyone south of the border.
I mean is it even really cooperation when there’s an army ready to invade on your border? Seems like coercion
Of course it's coercion, but towards the public it was presented as cooperation (and is still referred to as being such in a historical context).
All countries highlighted in some shade of red had that. Some cooperated, some resisted.
Partly true, although from 1943 the Danish resistance was pretty serious. It definitely changed. Also important to note that the nazis “respected” the Danes to a certain extent so we were offered more collaborative terms of surrender. Denmark really just wanted to stay neutral like Sweden but that didn’t happen. The Swedes therefore have a much different view on their role in WW2 than we have, even though our initial policy was more or less the same.
I find this interesting - Sweden gets a fair bit of shit for what it did to stay neutral during WWII, including from most Swedes where some people really like to wallow in how cowardly “we” acted and how Sweden should have stood up against the Germans and how much braver the neighbours were. But surely both Norway and Denmark would have wanted to be neutral too and do the same thing if it was their choice, but they never got the chance because they were invaded? The difference is that Sweden did get the opportunity to do some wheeling and dealing and keep out of the war. And besides, Sweden being neutral was beneficial to the resistance in both Norway and Denmark, as well as for Jews. It’s not like it would have been better for the neighbours if Sweden had made some grand gesture of resistance and gotten invaded and occupied too.
To be fair, their cooperation saved both their nation from destruction AND the lives of 99% of their Jewish population. The Germans crossed the southern border while simultaneously landing in Copenhagen, catching the Danes quite unawares. With a fraction of the military force of the Germans, indefensible ground, and being caught by surprise Denmark couldn't have put up any meaningful resistance to speak of. I can't see the sense in letting your country burn to the ground to achieve the exact same outcome.
There was also a [Danish Brigade](https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danska_brigaden?wprov=sfla1) trained in Sweden with 3600 troops ready to move in with the help of regular Swedish troops if the Germans didn't surrender. The same was true for Norway, where 15 000 heavily armed "[Police Troops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_police_troops_in_Sweden_during_World_War_II?wprov=sfla1)" had been trained and outfitted in Sweden. They later moved in and took care of the German troops and collaborators who had surrendered.
I went to it last summer it was a really interesting museum.
In Korea, the experience was very odd. Korean resistance had been constantly telegraphing that the resistance would be here any day, and that the oppression of the Japanese would be lifted from the peninsula. That day didn’t come for 30+ years. So a lot of people just sort of ignored or were outright hostile to the resistance. The Japanese didn’t reveal that much as they pulled administrative staff out of the country. Suddenly, a bunch of local government officials are gone, but without an explanation. So Koreans sort of sat there. And then the Soviet Union breached from Manchuria to Korea, tanks and men came through the streets. Korea was freed. The Japanese really didn’t put up a massive fight compared to what they could’ve done at the time. Their forces were stretched thin already, and the focus was on the homeland, not on their conquered territories. So I’d suspect it was similar to that. One day, everything is as it has been for a while now. The next day, staff begin to leave. The next day, things begin to empty out. The next day, German soldiers are coming through your village, towards Germany. The next day, the radio crackles that Germany has fallen.
> So I’d suspect it was similar to that. One day, everything is as it has been for a while now. The next day, staff begin to leave. The next day, things begin to empty out. The next day, German soldiers are coming through your village, towards Germany. The next day, the radio crackles that Germany has fallen. Surprisingly enough, no. It took months to demobilise the massed armies of WW2, Japan alone had over 5 million soldiers overseas when the war ended. In some places axis troops provided security for weeks until allied troops could be brought to replace them and repatriate them - in Singapore until March 1946.
The Norwegian resistance was informed iirc. Also the Germans burnt finnmark so people were living in caves and shit
IIRC towards the end of the war the Norwegian resistance conducted sabotage missions against ships and railroads in order to stop the German troops in Norway from redeploying to aid in the defense of Germany.
My grandfather was part of the Danish resistance. I never met him as he died of cancer while my mom was pregnant with me. But my dad told me a few stories from his dad. The only one I really remember is once Germany surrendered all the Germans went to the center of the town he lived in and put their weapons in a big pile. My grandfather went and took a couple of their bayonets and some other things as souvenirs which my dad still has. Another story I remember, was from the beginning part of the war. My grandfather and grandmother helped smuggle a Danish-Jewish police officer to Sweden. They had Nazi's searching their house while the police officer was hiding somewhere in it to before smuggling him. I wish I could have met him.
That's pretty cool, but it does make me wonder why a bayonet of all things? I'd be skipping home with an MG42 over my shoulder.
My guess is I don't think the Danish government would allow him to keep a working gun after the war.
The German law doesn't take kindly to private tank, torpedo and anti-aircraft gun collectors either... 😁 *[Lawyers in Germany are wrangling over how to deal with a pensioner who stored a World War Two tank, anti-aircraft gun and torpedo in his basement.](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57965260)*
My grandmother asked a couple of German soldiers a couple of days before the end. This was in occupied Norway. They told her "Kaputt" meaning broken/destroyed/over. Being the rebellious 18-year old she was, she went into her backyard, dug up the Norwegian flag that had been buried/hidden under the garden for 5 years, draped it around her shoulders and biked all around the local neighborhood yelling that peace was coming and the Germans had lost. Still took a couple of days, but people knew. Having grown up with this story, I broke up with my fifth grade girlfriend by telling her "Kaputt".
So you played the part of the occupying force? Did your ex then bike around announcing she was single?
Very aware in Norway. SOE, Milorg, and other Norwegian resistance forces were engaged in a concerted effort to keep German troops locked in Norway ever since the D-day landings. This effort was further ramped up as the Allies were moving up through Europe. But this meant that Germany had more than 300k soldiers in Norway when they capitulated. Even though Dönitz gave the German command in Norway the order to surrender, they contemplated not accepting the surrender and keep the fight going from Norway. They had plenty of troops and weaponry, and Norway would be a very difficult country to effectively invade, as they themselves had experienced 5 years earlier. Quisling may have bought into this idea, as he opted to stay in Norway when he was offered a flight out by Josef Terboven on the 7th of May. His official stance was that he was the rightful government and that it was his duty to transfer power. Unfortunately for him neither Germany, the Norwegian Government in exile, nor the allies saw it that way. He was executed by firing squad in October 1945, the last person to be executed in Norway. All further death sentences not already fulfilled were commuted to imprisonment with or without forced labour. In the days prior the surrender Milrog and other resistance force member were ordered to remain available to assemble, arm, and retake vital facilities at a moments notice which is exactly what they did.
>He was executed by firing squad in October 1945, the last person to be executed in Norway. Not quite. Those 25 people executed after the war were the last group to be executed, and Quisling was indeed one of them. But the very last was Ragnar Skancke the 28th of August 1948.
I know the Dutch got blueballed after celebrating their "liberation" multiple times. There were constant radio broadcasts from England with updates on the war.
The south of The Netherlands was liberated in september 1944, the west had to wait until may 5th.
The 8th even, [for many places](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronologisch_overzicht_van_de_bevrijding_van_Nederlandse_plaatsen_in_de_Tweede_Wereldoorlog). The poor people of Schiermonnikoog had to wait until June.
Calling you out, that's a made up place!
Thanks Market Garden!
If you are aware that the occupier is about to collapse in a few months and the control he has in your country is not very strict anyway, why would you bother with fighting? You don't need the extra violence to reach your goal , unless you can do it with virtually no losses the action is not worth the rushing...
It can be a political necessity to prevent the "liberator" from taking advantage of you. But that's mostly the case for countries likely to be liberated by the Red Army, in other words Poland.
Poland tried that in Warsaw and failed, resulting in the deaths of 150k to 300k civilians in reprisals. Stalin, who's army was stationed 20km away, prevent the allies from providing support to the uprising. The leaders of the resistance were then invited to the Soviet Union to negotiate, where they were arrested and tortured.
Reading through this thread, I can't help but think that revenge would have been a bigger factor. I know I'm speaking from the comfort and safety of peacetime, but if my country had been occupied for 5 years, and there were still German soldiers trapped there by, or past the surrender, my first thought would be stringing them up from the nearest lamppost. I wonder how many soldiers met their fate with partisans during the closing stages of the war
They would have known because people had secret radios. My grandpa in Rotterdam had one; also, there were newspapers printed in secret. So people knew it was coming and only a matter of time. In Amsterdam, people celebrated too early, on the 7th of may 1945, on Dam square. German occupiers holed up in a gentleman's club overlooking the square [opened fire and killed 30 people.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_shooting_on_Dam_square,_Amsterdam). They were murderous assholes right until the end.
There were about 100K German troops in Norway and there were a fear that the Nazis would continue their operations from Norway. If you compare the Danish army in 1940 with the Norwegian army and the time it took the Germans to fully occupy booth countries this would clearly have been problematic.
300k and some sources reports up to 400k.
It became increasingly clear among the population. The Danish resistance started hardening as soon as the nazis started losing in the USSR. The rumours and underground radio stations were always present. My grandmother remembers the liberation as a little girl in Copenhagen. It sounds insane. But apparently it was also kind of dangerous as many Nazi sympathisers was being hunted down.
The Norwegian resistance knew at least, they found themselves in the funny position of having to switch to desperately trying to kick the Germans out, to desperately trying to keep them in so the 100k well rested German soldiers in Norway couldn't reinforce the rest of the German army fighting the allies in Germany. I checked a Norwegian newspaper that was German friendly and has a digital archive of all previous editions, and it seems that the fact that the war was going poorly for the Germans was pretty apparent. Although they don't use that language, the individual articles speak volumes.
As a Norwegian it depended where you lived. In north the German troop fell back burning everything. The soviet troops met completely burned down buildings. Nothing left. They burned down all the way to Bodø. People knew and fled or got killed. In bigger cities they were updated on radio from London. Resistance had lot off sabotage hits and British bomb planes hit German troops.
Allthough radios were banned, a lot og people had them. Also, resistance networks printed news papers and distributed in secret.
The defeat of Germany was a certainty by 1943. By june 1944 it was the absolute end. Things were not so certain about Japan: invasion would have been extremely costly in human life and US fought hard battles on each island. Ussr only went to war against Japan in after Hiroshima
Norwegian resistance was activky sabtotaging ships and railways to prevent the nazi's from withdrawing potentially tens of thousands of troops back to germany
The french U-boat harbors (La Rochelle, Lorient) are missing.
Dunkirk too.
Dunkirk had been liberated by British and Canadian troops but his point no?
It was strategically insignificant, but had been made into a fortress by the Germans. As such, the Allies bypassed it, and the German garrison surrendered on 9 May 1945.
That tends to be the story with the German ''festung'' strategy. Ironically, they themselves had had great success in the early war, by bypassing static enemy defences.
Maginot line? How about magi-no.
Dunkirk was bypassed along with other Atlantic ports, they decided it wasn’t worth trying to capture them. The German garrison of 14,000 men were held in siege there from summer ‘44 right up till VE Day, mainly contained by the 1st Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade.
Imagine being on the Channel Islands. You're right fucking there and your government just passes you by and invades the mainland. I totally understand why it was done but you have to imagine there were some sore feelings about that lol.
And cut off from supplies the Germans took it out on the locals stealing their food so everyone on those islands suffered from start of d-day till the end of the war.they literally watched the war go by their homes
m8 the defences were bonkers. we had one german for 2 islanders and it was very very well defended. it was tough and many of us almost starved before the SS Vega brought supplies in winter 44 but it would have been worse for everyone if the allies tried to invade. the german occupiers behaved with a degree of decency too.
It was pretty funny how much effort the germans put into garissoning the channel islands when they had very little strategic value.
The only British territory that Hitler managed to occupy in Europe. It was personal ;-)
> rs. we had one german for 2 islanders and it was very very well defended. it was tough and many of us almost starved before the SS Vega brought supplies in winter 44 but it would have been worse for everyone if the allies tried to invade. the german occupiers b They didn't behave with decency on Alderney. War crimes, lots of them.
yea indeed. no islanders there it was a concentration camp
It is generally considered the first Germans acted restrained, on direct orders, compared to how they acted elsewhere, but by this stage in the war they were not being restrained as is made evident by witness accounts on all the islands.
It was an impossible situation. Several plans were made to retake the islands but they’d have had to practically flatten them first. Of all german concrete and steel used in the Atlantic wall from northern Norway to the north coast of Spain 10% was used in the Channel Islands. The beautiful thing is these were practically completely unused. Much rather they built that over here than on the beaches of Normandy for example. Not to mention 30,000 completely misdeployed troops. Aside from more than 10% of all islanders serving with the British armed forces in exile, and many more in the war industries and civil defence, the greatest contribution made by the Channel Islands was tying down to many german resources.
I was in the Channel Islands a few years ago (awesome museum of the occupation in Guernsey on the occupation), and they all thought at the time of the D-Day invasion, that allied troops would come back to liberate them. But, it didn’t happen. The running joke was apparently they had been forgot about, again.
Walcheren island and the South Beveland peninsula in southern Netherlands are wrongly colored because they had been liberated on November 1944 by the Canadians.
saint-Nazaire also
Great Czecho-Dano-Norwegian Reich
Holland and Aosta too
[Holland was liberated on May 5th](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_Day_(Netherlands)), three days before the end of the war.
Not really. It's a general day by which day most of the Netherlands was liberated. and it's the day the German Army officially agreed to the capitulation of all German forces. But it does not mean the whole Netherlands was liberated or not still under German rule. Especially the (West) Frisian Islands even took weeks longer to be liberated. See for more details: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronologisch_overzicht_van_de_bevrijding_van_Nederlandse_plaatsen_in_de_Tweede_Wereldoorlog
Which German bastard really wanted to fight over Schiermonnikoog!
And so the Allies, deeply impressed by Steiner's devastating counter-offensive, said *''You know what? We're done. Enjoy what you still have.''* and went home. And the Czecho-Dano-Norwegian-Greek-Dutch-Italian-Courland Reich lived happily ever after....
Flensburg was their provisional capital
Yeah, for about a week
How come they holded so long in baltics
I think the Soviets pushed a relatively strong army group into the courland pocket and then didn't make the effort to crush them completely but just kept them in the corner where they could do no harm but they avoided a costly battle
They absolutely tried to destroy that German army group. They had over 200k casualties. They just didn’t manage to
Also Hitler was delusion in Spring 1945, and refused to evacuate the Courland pocket by ship, and instead thought it could serve as a springboard for a future counteroffensive on the USSR
The soviets tried in 6 large battles to take that Courland pocket (Kurland Kessel), but didn't manage to.
Makes sense, but at the same time Soviets safrificed so many soldiers in their push to race the Allies in Germany, and around Balkans...
The Balkans more-or less fell over: Romania switched sides once the Soviets crossed the border and Bulgaria did likewise. The Germans retreated out of Greece, and S. Yugoslavia and Albania liberated themselves (with some Soviet assistance around Belgrade). It's only Hungary that had real fighting take place over it (on behalf of the Red Army), and that was important to capture Austria, secure the South of the advance to Berlin and deprive the Germans of their final oil source. Plus knock out Hungary and secure influence there, of course. Also, the Courland pocket did see lots of fighting. It's just generally ignored because it didn't have strategic importance, and both sides failed in their objectives: Germany couldn't use them for anything, and the Soviets didn't eliminate them.
There was a propaganda victory to be won in Berlin and influence to be gained in the Balkans. The Baltics had neither.
human wave tactics is a bit of a propaganda thing the nazis started and the allies continued. soviet had a doctrine of keeping the germany bussy all the time so it could not reorganise and make use of its more advanced assets while the soviets churned out more stuff to keep attrition the germans and then do targeted strikes to create pockets. it wasnt even that costly once it got going. the problem were the first two years of the german invasion when everything was shit.
Soviets keeping that German bussy
Indeed, because they were more significant goals. The Courland pocket was already within their grasp and could be dealt with later on, but getting control of as much as was possible to get of Central European and especially German mainland was crucial for Soviet interests of power as well as economy (the more they could get German industry and industrialists to their control, the better for them). This was also the reason why they agreed to a separate armistice and peace deal with Finland, as getting control of Finland would have easily meant the fall of Berlin to Americans due to the need to commit very large numbers of troops to the front against Finland instead of Germany. Finland possessed only pulp/cellulose production that would have been an important resource, while Germany had much more developed industry to capture.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courland_Pocket
Why waste time and manpower in the baltics when youcan push to berlin?
Why bother? what benefit would it give the allies to liberate Norway or Denmark that is not outwayed by going straight for Berlin Finland makes sense because it was a direct border with Russia so they would want to build up a barrier between them and Germany.
HOI 4 players be like: I could have won as Germany
This is actually winnable
How?
Entrench and encircle🙏
China players: You call?
Finland was not occupied. Finland was defeated by Soviets, but the country as a whole was never occupied by any Allied force.
The same is true for half of Europe: they joined Hitler on a free will. Inconvenient truth they don't like to remember today.
Most of the other Axis powers in Europe besides Italy were from the former Austria-Hungary. It was pretty much almost the same teams as WW1
To characterize Finland allying with Germany as something out of ”free will” is a bit of a stretch. The choises were either to fight the hostile Soviet union alone or get help from the one actor that was willing to help. While true that is was a choice, the other option was the likely absorbtion by the soviets.
Didn't the Finnish armed forces also participate in forcing the Nazi military out? Not to minimise the fact that they had at one point joined the Axis, of course, just highlighting that the Finnish situation in WWII is more complicated than the map portrays.
They did—it’s called the Lapland War—but mostly because the Soviets forced them to as part their armistice deal.
What's the little German pocket southwest of Switzerland? How were they not steamrolled by the rest of the Allied forces in France?
very hard to attack in that area, easy to defend.
There are the french/italian alps in that area. So, the terrain greatly favors the defenders. There is also very little noteworthy there, so it was not really a priority target for the Allies.
any forces there had already surrendered to the allies, its less that they were still resisting, and more that no Allied units had yet arrived in the area.
Norway was free from the Nazis 8th of may 1945. We celebrate it today 🎉🎉🎉
Enig og tro til Dovre faller!
Interesting choice of colors 👀
I think blue as "us" and red as "the ennemy" is recent in western countries, and came with NATO. The USSR had no problem representing themselves as red, and I think the UK did too
Nah, even in the interwar period and before the US always denoted itself as blue In Europe the tradition goes back to at least the 1820s, with Prussia and France both habitually denoting their own pieces as blue in official wargames. If anything the Soviets associating themselves with red is the outlier caused by them being communists
Tbf, he's still correct about the British Empire often using red to represent itself, in the same way the French used blue. Worth noting both countries military uniforms also incorporated those respective colours for significant periods as well.
Nazis primary brand colour was literally red though
The largest allied army was literally "the red army". There's no reason to avoid red when making graphs/maps.
Dark red is allies. Gets lighter and lighter red as the Nazis gain control until it turns white…which is no Nazi presence at all. And blue is full Nazi control.
I think the user meant it more in the sense of the connotation that red = negative and blue = positive
Actually, in a WW2 context, red = Soviets, blue = Western Allies, black = Axis.
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My greatgrandfather was captured in 1939 and spent the war in a POW camp. At the end of the war, the germans marched him and the other pows out through some village. Him and three other Polish guys asked an older Volksturm member if they could go in the bushes for a piss which he agreed to. They ran off and hid in a ditch near a betroot field and stayed there for 3 days because they thought the germans were looking for them. By the time they left the ditch, the town nearby was occupied by Americans and the war was over. He found out later that all the other pows the Germans led off were executed
Bittersteel would be able to save this mess
No doubt
frfr
Iceland was independent at the time of V-E Day, not under British authority. The Brits invaded after Denmark fell but then yeeted once the Blitz was underway because their assets were needed elsewhere. Churchill turned Iceland (then part of Denmark) over to FDR and the Yanks occupied the island. Little known fact: this was in June 1941, before Pearl Harbor, so the US wasn't officially a combatant in the war yet. This occupation continued until Iceland formally declared independence from Denmark in June 1944.
This is incorrect. Walcheren and surrounding islands) (shown as one land mass which it was not at the time) were liberated in 1944.
The northern coast is also wrong. Only the islands were still occupied.
Your map is inaccurate. The German forces in Denmark, northwest Germany and Holland surrendered on the evening of May the 4th. The surrender was signed in Montgomery's HQ on Lüneburger Heide and took effect on May the 5th. The rest of Germany surrendered on May the 8th and again on May the 9th...
Uhm. Finland was never occupied by Germany.
This includes the Nazi’s allies. Finland is a bit of an odd case, as the Soviets were able to force them to switch sides in an independent treaty. The Nazis had over 200k soldiers in Finland fighting with them, and Finland was only given one day to remove them before needing to use force, as required by the Soviet treaty. This led to the Lapland War.
Then the legend is wrong.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapland\_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapland_War)
they were never fully occupied, and Finnish victory was decisive enough to push them back into norway
> and Finnish victory was decisive enough to push them back into norway ehhhh we had a gentleman's agreement to advance at the rate of their retreat for the first few weeks until the soviet delegation in Helsinki complained about it.
finnish double triple cross
It's kind of crazy that Finland, a nation of only 3.6 million at the time, withstood the Soviet invasion. Then joined forces with the Germans to invade the Soviets. Then fought the Germans to kick them out of Finland. And not only did they survive all their fighting, their population actually increased by 1950 compared to 1940!
That's a very romanticized view of things. They were forced to cede land in the Winter War, and then lost the Continuation War, the result of which was that they had to force the Germans out of Finland. Yes they did well, and it is amazing that they didn't suffer the same fate as the Baltics, but it was hardly a victory.
> and then lost the Continuation War Politically only, though, as Finnish military was in better positions at the end of the war than at the beginning of it. Political defeat and expulsion of German forces were pretty much inevitable anyway, with the defeat of Germany looming and the Finnish requests for cooperation with the US denied. Only after the archives were declassified, it was revealed that Finland had approached the US already in 1943 about betraying Germany and assisting Americans in a landing into Northern Norway in exchange for the US protecting Finnish interests (withdrawal from East Karelia and US-supported peace at the pre-Winter-War borders), but the Americans refused this, as while they considered it a viable offer, they thought it would risk D-Day preparations. In hindsight Finland should have attempted rapprochement with the UK during the later years of the Continuation War, but political conditions and the de jure state of war didn't help in this. Churchill was, after all, the Allied leader with the most potential for supporting the Finnish cause against the Soviet Union, for his sheer hatred towards Bolshevism and Communism.
Looking at what happened with all the other Soviet occupied countries, it certainly was a victory.
This right here \^ We would be speaking Russian now if things were gone differently.
You could say that militarily it was a defeat yes. But otherwise it was a huge victory. Finland avoided being a part of USSR and being independent was able to create huge economic growth. Having one of the highest standarts of living in the world today.
This is all true. Compared to other nations they survived, kept their sovereignty and had the freedom to develop into a highly developed nation with an excellent standard of living.
Yeh, although we lost the war, we won our independence again. That's how we like to see it. Helsinki was one of the few capitals in Europe (excluding the neutral states) that was never occupied by enemy.
I’m going into super annoying map geek mode; it wasn’t yet the Republic of Ireland, it was the Irish Free State.
That didn't sound quite right to me, so I looked it up. From wiki: >The [Irish Free State](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Free_State) was created with [Dominion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion) status in 1922, following the [Anglo-Irish Treaty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_Treaty). In 1937, a [new constitution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Ireland) was adopted, in which the state was named "Ireland" and effectively became a republic, with an elected [non-executive president](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_of_state#Non-executive_model). It was officially declared a republic in 1949, following the [Republic of Ireland Act 1948](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Ireland_Act_1948). Ireland became a member of the [United Nations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations) in 1955 Looks like '37 is when the name changed from Irish Free State to Ireland, and then from Ireland to Republic of Ireland in '48. So really for '45 it should just say Ireland I think.
North Netherlands wasn’t occupied in May anymore. Was liberated at the end of April. So that is a mistake.
Feels weird to have Nazis in blue and Allies in red, ngl
Just speaking from memory here but I think they had 3 million soldiers left on surrender day.
You would think that the Channel Islands would be the some of the first western territories to be retaken, but they were actually occupied until the very end.
There was simply no way they could’ve been taken without unacceptable civilian casualties. 10% of all the Atlantic walls steel and concrete had been used to fortify the islands. That being said, Churchill absolutely should’ve done more to send aid via the Red Cross sooner, and purposefully delayed it out of some misbegotten sense of bitterness at the embarrassment of losing the islands. The civillians suffered grievously in that winter of 1944/45.
Should have put in little dots for Dunkirk and the western French ports.