Germany By the end of 1944, German armies were retreating across domestic soil for the first time in the war The Red Army attacked into East Prussia in January 1945 The Western Allies crossed the Rhine in March By late April, Soviet troops were in Vienna while others fought to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin American and French armies swept through the Ruhr into Bavaria and thence to Czechoslovakia, while British and Commonwealth forces pushed deep into northwest Germany Hitler and some other top Nazis killed themselves inside the Führerbunker under the Chancellery on April 30 Others fled incognito, from all across what was left of German-occupied Europe Most were captured; a few committed suicide while in Allied hands, including Heinrich Himmler Some of the captured were tried later for war crimes and crimes against humanity A few escaped into hiding or exile, while still others disappeared, forgotten corpses buried by the ruins and rubble of Berlin The last fanatic holdouts in the capital were killed or surrendered to the Red Army on May The costly and bloody conquest of Germany was nearly over, with only sporadic fighting over the next few days along the Baltic coast and a few other small pockets of bitterender resistance On May Hitler’s surviving admirals and generals formally accepted unconditional surrender The Nazi dream of a “Thousand Year Reich” was over It had lasted just 12 nightmarish years At war’s end Germany was eviscerated: large pieces were torn off and distributed to neighboring states The Anschluss was reversed and Austria reestablished as a separate republic, though under Allied occupation for 10 years Austria was then neutralized The Sudetenland was returned to Czechoslovakia, which immediately forcibly deported its Volksdeutsche population East Prussia as historically known disappeared, much of its population expelled and old German cities renamed in Polish or Russian Silesia mostly disappeared into Poland, its ethnic German population uprooted and roughly expelled, the innocent along with the guilty and with much loss of civilian life Germany was then ripped down the middle by a four-power occupation that was left unresolved for four decades by the Cold War, which subsequently broke out among the victorious Allies Hitler’s immediate legacy was thus a divided country, split into two hostile states under close foreign domination for the next 44 years Berlin was also divided in occupation zone by the four occupying powers, France, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union; then into eastern and western halves by the Cold War from 1948, and physically by the Berlin Wall from 1961 to 1989 Germany was formally disarmed by the occupying powers in 1945, although there were hoards of weapons all over the country and trouble with a few hundred young Werwolf guerrillas for several years The much bigger quandary was that the victorious Allies quickly fell out over what to about the “German problem.” Two German states thereby emerged out of the postwar occupation, without any formal agreement made to partition Germany On May 23, 1949, federation of the three western occupation zones formed the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (FRG), or Federal Republic of Germany, or “West Germany.” On October 7, 1949, the Soviet occupation zone was reconstituted as the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), or German Democratic Republic (GDR), or “East Germany.” The FRG became independent of Allied controls in 1955, pursued limited rearmament, and 439