The capture of Frankfurt am Main

On 29 March 1945 the American command judged that Frankfurt am Main – the largest city in Hesse, once the coronation city of the emperors and one of Germany’s main financial and commercial centres – was essentially in their hands. For three days the infantry of the 5th Infantry Division and the tanks of the 6th Armored Division of General George Patton’s Third Army had fought their way through the ruins of the city under fire from anti-aircraft guns shooting at ground targets. On the same day, across the whole central sector of the Western Front, the Allied forces that had broken out of their Rhine bridgeheads in the last week of March were advancing deep into Germany almost unopposed.

In the east, the Red Army entered Austria on the same day. Frankfurt was taken by two American divisions of the Third Army’s XII Corps – the 5th Infantry Division and the 6th Armored Division – and the fighting lasted from 26 to 29 March. The date of 29 March marks the day on which Frankfurt was considered secure. The statement found in some accounts that the city was taken by the Seventh Army is mistaken – units of the Seventh Army crossed the Rhine at Worms and operated further south.

The city before the battle

Before the war Frankfurt had more than 550,000 inhabitants. It was home to one of the largest and oldest Jewish communities in Germany – some 26,000 people in 1933. After Kristallnacht and the deportations of 1941–1945 that community ceased to exist. The city was the seat of the IG Farben concern, whose huge building in the Westend district survived the war and afterwards became the headquarters of the American occupation authorities.

Frankfurt had been a target of air raids since the first years of the war, and the heaviest of them fell in March 1944. On the night of 22–23 March 1944 more than 800 RAF bombers burned down the medieval old town, one of the largest in Germany – about a thousand people were killed and 120,000 were left homeless. The raids continued until March 1945; the heaviest of the last ones, a daylight attack by some 300 American aircraft, came on 9 March 1945. According to official municipal statistics, a total of 5,559 people were killed in the raids, 4,822 of them residents, the rest prisoners of war and forced labourers. When the Americans approached the city, most of the centre lay in ruins.

Breaking out of the bridgeheads

After the capture of the bridge at Remagen on 7 March and the collapse of the German defence on the west bank of the Rhine, crowned by the capture of Mainz, the Allies crossed the Rhine at several points within a few days. On the night of 22–23 March Patton’s 5th Infantry Division crossed in boats at Oppenheim without any artillery preparation. A day later Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group launched Operation Plunder – the crossing of the lower Rhine at Rees and Wesel – and on 24 March two airborne divisions landed beyond the river in Operation Varsity. On 25 and 26 March the Third Army’s VIII Corps crossed the Rhine in the narrow gorge at Boppard and St. Goar, and on 26 March the Seventh Army’s XV Corps forced the river at Worms.

What mattered most, however, was the breakout from the bridgeheads. General Courtney Hodges’s First Army struck out of the Remagen bridgehead before dawn on 25 March, and from the next day its armoured divisions were already roaming the enemy’s rear. One column raced down the autobahn from the Ruhr to Frankfurt and took Limburg an der Lahn. By the end of 28 March the First Army had crossed the Lahn, advancing at least 80 kilometres and taking thousands of prisoners. At the same time the 4th Armored Division broke out of the Oppenheim bridgehead, bypassed Darmstadt and headed for the Main at Hanau and Aschaffenburg. General Manton Eddy, commander of XII Corps, sent General Robert Grow’s 6th Armored Division straight at Frankfurt.

The fighting for the city, 26–29 March

Early on the morning of 26 March Combat Command A of the 6th Armored Division drove through the extensive forest south of Frankfurt, bypassing the Rhein-Main airfield, which the infantry of the 5th Division cleared later that day. In the early afternoon the tanks reached the Main in the southern district of Sachsenhausen. There they found a bridge still standing, although demolition charges had damaged it so badly that vehicles could not cross. A company of armoured infantry dashed across to the far bank and occupied several buildings at the northern end of the bridge, and after dark it was joined by a battalion of the 11th Infantry Regiment of the 5th Division.

What the German engineers had failed to do, the artillery tried to accomplish. Self-propelled guns in the city and heavy fixed anti-aircraft guns on its outskirts – the remnants of Frankfurt’s air defences – poured fire on the area around the bridge, much of it airburst shells. Throughout 27 March the shelling was so heavy that the engineers could not repair the bridge for tanks and tank destroyers. During lulls in the fire more 5th Division infantrymen crossed to the north bank and cleared the rubble-strewn streets. The defence was put up by a handful of soldiers from scratch units, policemen and some civilians, but – as the US Army’s official historian Charles B. MacDonald writes – they were trying in vain to put off the inevitable. On the German side, responsibility for the line of the Main and the Rhine fell to General Kniess’s LXXXV Corps, which had a few replacement battalions, artillery and scattered anti-aircraft batteries at its disposal. On 29 March resistance in the city ceased and Frankfurt was considered taken.

Meanwhile, on the night of 26–27 March, Patton sent a small armoured task force under Captain Abraham Baum from the bridgehead at Aschaffenburg to the prisoner-of-war camp at Hammelburg, some 55 kilometres away, where among others his son-in-law was being held. The Hammelburg raid ended in disaster – the force reached the camp but was destroyed on the way back, and most of its men were taken prisoner. It was one of Patton’s most controversial decisions.

Retreat across central Germany

War chronologies speak of a “general retreat” by the Germans in the central part of the country, and the phrase captures the situation on 29 March well. On the west bank of the Rhine the German armies had lost hundreds of thousands of men in March, most of them taken prisoner, and the remnants were incapable of building a new defensive line on the east bank. On 19 March Adolf Hitler had issued the Nero Decree, ordering the destruction of bridges, industrial plants and power and communications networks before the enemy arrived. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Commander-in-Chief West since 10 March, could do no more than plug holes. In the centre of the front Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B was defending the Ruhr without any reserves with which to close the breaches on its flanks.

On 29 March the First Army wheeled north from the Giessen area towards Paderborn, while the Third Army, covering its right flank, headed north-east towards Kassel. On 28 March the Seventh Army broke out of the Worms bridgehead, and on the night of 27–28 March Patton’s XX Corps forced the Rhine at Mainz and the Main above its mouth, cutting off Wiesbaden. In the north the Ninth Army, hampered by traffic jams and the poor roads of the Wesel bridgehead, was preparing to strike along the River Lippe. Two days later, on 31 March, the French First Army crossed the Rhine at Speyer.

These movements led to the encirclement of the Ruhr. On 1 April 1945 the spearheads of the First and Ninth Armies met at Lippstadt, trapping Army Group B in a pocket. In the battle of the Ruhr Pocket more than 300,000 soldiers had been taken prisoner by mid-April, and Model committed suicide.

Significance

The capture of Frankfurt was not a great battle, but it symbolically closed the first stage of the march into the Reich. The city lay on the main axis of advance of General Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group, along the Frankfurt–Kassel corridor towards Thuringia and Saxony. It was precisely in these days that Dwight Eisenhower changed his plans: instead of on Berlin, the main blow was to be delivered by Bradley’s army group towards Leipzig and Dresden, to meet the Red Army. Giving up Berlin made Frankfurt and Hesse the rear base of that offensive.

After the war Frankfurt found itself in the American occupation zone. Eisenhower’s headquarters, and later the US military governor of Germany, were housed in the surviving IG Farben building. Of the more than 550,000 pre-war inhabitants, some 358,000 were living in the city at the end of 1945. In 1949 Frankfurt narrowly lost to Bonn in the contest to become the provisional capital of the Federal Republic, but within a dozen or so years it had rebuilt itself as the financial centre of West Germany.