The encirclement of the Ruhr

At the beginning of April 1945 a ring of American troops closed around the Ruhr, Germany’s largest industrial region. Trapped in the pocket was the whole of Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B: two armies, the remnants of a dozen or more divisions, tens of thousands of men from rear-area units, anti-aircraft crews and the Volkssturm, and alongside them several million civilians and hundreds of thousands of forced labourers from all over occupied Europe. Historians put the number of encircled soldiers at 320,000–370,000; it was the largest encirclement of German forces on the Western Front in the entire war.

Strictly speaking, the ring had closed a day earlier. On Easter Sunday, 1 April 1945, the spearheads of the American Ninth Army, advancing from its bridgehead on the lower Rhine, and the First Army, coming up from the south out of the Remagen bridgehead, met near Lippstadt in Westphalia. Over the following days the Americans sealed the encirclement, closing it for good by 4 April. By 2 April, the date under which the event is usually recorded, the German armies in the Ruhr were already surrounded, and the Allied command was beginning to plan their destruction.

The industrial heart of the Reich

The Ruhr, stretching between the Rhine, the Ruhr and the Lippe, had been the forge of German power since the second half of the 19th century. The coal mines, ironworks and steelworks of Duisburg, Essen, Bochum, Gelsenkirchen and Dortmund, and above all the Krupp works in Essen, supplied steel, coal and arms to the imperial army and later to the Wehrmacht. From the start of the war the region was one of the main targets of British bombers. In the spring of 1943 the RAF waged a long campaign of raids against it, and in May that year a special squadron destroyed the Möhne and Eder dams. In 1944 and 1945 the raids on the Ruhr were almost incessant, and its cities were turned into a sea of ruins.

In the last months of the war the Ruhr became more important still. After the loss of Upper Silesia in January 1945 it was practically the only major source of coal and steel left to the Reich. From February, however, Allied aircraft systematically destroyed the railways, bridges and canals by which the coal was shipped to the rest of the country. The propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary at the end of March that coal was no longer coming from the Ruhr. The German economy had been cut off from its heart even before the ring of ground forces closed.

The Allied commanders had long known that the Ruhr was the key to defeating Germany. They also knew that an assault on a densely built-up industrial area inhabited by millions of people could turn into a bloody, weeks-long fight for every street. The plan of the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, was therefore not to take the Ruhr but to bypass it on both sides and cut it off from the rest of Germany.

The two jaws of the pincer

The way to the encirclement was opened by the Rhine crossings in March. On 7 March the 9th Armored Division of General Courtney Hodges’s First Army seized the bridge at Remagen and won the first bridgehead on the right bank of the river, south of the Ruhr. On the night of 23/24 March Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group launched Operation Plunder – the crossing of the lower Rhine at Rees and Wesel, supported the next day by the largest single-day airborne operation of the war, Operation Varsity. Montgomery’s army group at that time included General William Simpson’s American Ninth Army, which crossed the Rhine on the right wing, just north of the Ruhr. These operations together made up the crossing of the Rhine.

By the end of March the German front in the west had ceased to exist as a continuous line. General Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group, which controlled the First and Third Armies, broke out of its bridgeheads on the middle Rhine; the Third Army took Frankfurt am Main on 29 March and pressed on eastwards. At the same time the First Army wheeled north. Its spearhead was General J. Lawton Collins’s VII Corps, and within it General Maurice Rose’s 3rd Armored Division. On 29 March the division made one of the longest single-day advances of the war, covering – according to divisional accounts – some 100 miles, more than 150 kilometres, northwards from the Marburg area towards Paderborn.

At Paderborn the Americans ran into fierce resistance. The town was covered by units improvised from the instructors and trainees of nearby panzer and Waffen-SS schools and training centres, including the so-called SS Brigade Westfalen, equipped with tanks, among them heavy Tigers. On the evening of 30 March General Rose’s headquarters column, travelling at the head of the division south of Paderborn, ran into German tanks. The group tried to break away but was surrounded. When a German tank crewman called on the Americans to surrender, Rose reached for his holster – it is not known whether to hand over his pistol or to defend himself – and was shot dead. A post-war American investigation concluded that the Germans had most probably taken the movement as an attempt at resistance and did not know whom they had killed. Rose, the son and grandson of rabbis from Poland, was the highest-ranking American officer killed by enemy fire in the European theatre, and also the highest-ranking Jew in the US Army.

From the north came the Ninth Army. Its XIX Corps, led by the 2nd Armored Division, broke out of the bridgehead at Wesel and advanced eastwards along the northern edge of the Ruhr, past Hamm and Beckum. Since the fighting at Paderborn had held up the 3rd Armored Division, Collins sent part of its forces west, towards Lippstadt, to meet the approaching 2nd Armored. On the afternoon of 1 April the leading elements of the two divisions – and thus of the two armies – met in and around Lippstadt. The pincers had closed.

Over the following days the ring was tightened. On 4 April the Ninth Army reverted from Montgomery’s command to Bradley’s, who could now direct the reduction of the pocket as a single operation. Most of the American armoured divisions, however, raced straight on eastwards towards the Elbe. In line with the decision Eisenhower had taken at the end of March, central Germany, not Berlin, was to be the main axis of the Western Allies’ advance.

In the pocket

Trapped in the ring were two armies of Army Group B: General Josef Harpe’s Fifth Panzer Army and General Gustav-Adolf von Zangen’s Fifteenth Army, as well as two corps of the First Parachute Army – in all, the remnants of a dozen or more divisions, none of them still at full strength. On paper these forces looked impressive, but they consisted largely of supply troops, Luftwaffe anti-aircraft crews, older men of the Volkssturm and boys from the Hitler Youth. According to post-war American findings, only about a fifth of the encircled men had infantry weapons; a similar number had nothing but pistols. Ammunition, fuel and food were short, and Allied intelligence – as the Americans later admitted – had clearly underestimated the number of men trapped.

Their commander, Walter Model, born in 1891 the son of a teacher from Genthin near Magdeburg, was one of the commanders most highly regarded by Adolf Hitler. On the Eastern Front in 1942–1944 he had earned a reputation as “the Führer’s fireman”, sent wherever the front was collapsing: to Rzhev, to the northern flank of the Kursk salient, to Ukraine and – after the destruction of Army Group Centre in the summer of 1944 – to Belorussia. In August 1944 he took over command in the west at the moment of the defeat at Falaise; in the autumn he halted the Allied advance at Arnhem, and in December he commanded the German armies in the Ardennes offensive. He was an officer devoted to Hitler and ruthless towards his subordinates and the population of occupied territories; in the Soviet Union his troops used scorched-earth tactics, and the Soviet authorities regarded him as a war criminal.

Model had long foreseen what would happen. As early as March he had proposed withdrawing Army Group B from the Ruhr before it was cut off. Hitler refused: the region was to be defended like a fortress, and Model’s armies were to tie down as many enemy forces as possible. The new Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who had replaced Gerd von Rundstedt on 10 March, loyally passed these orders on. Once the ring had closed, Hitler also rejected a request to supply the pocket by air – which, given the Allies’ total command of the skies, was in any case impossible – and forbade a breakout. He was counting on the besieged being relieved by an attack from outside, among others by the Twelfth Army then being formed in central Germany. But the Reich no longer had the forces for such an attack.

Model was aware of the hopelessness of his position, but he did not consider surrender. Surrender would have meant disobeying Hitler, and would also have contradicted everything he himself had demanded of his subordinates throughout the war. Recalling Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who had surrendered at Stalingrad in 1943, Model is said by his officers to have remarked that a German field marshal does not go into captivity. The encircled troops were therefore to fight on.

Civilians, forced labourers and “scorched earth”

Trapped in the pocket along with the soldiers were the people of the Ruhr – several million, although some had been evacuated earlier because of the bombing. They lived in ruins, in cellars and bunkers, without reliable supplies of electricity, gas or water, and with dwindling stocks of food. Many of them, worn out by years of bombing, were simply waiting for the fighting to end; the party authorities and the Gauleiters, however, still called for resistance to the last man, and drumhead courts imposed the death penalty for “defeatism” and for hanging out white flags.

The Ruhr was also home to hundreds of thousands of forced labourers – above all Soviet citizens (the so-called Ostarbeiter), Poles, French, Belgians and Dutch – as well as prisoners of war working in the mines and factories. In the last weeks of the war they fell victim to crimes committed in the panic of a collapsing state. Between 20 and 23 March 1945 Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht units murdered 208 forced labourers, mostly Soviet citizens and Poles, among them women and children, in the woods near Warstein, Suttrop and Eversberg in the Sauerland. In Dortmund in the spring of 1945 the Gestapo shot – according to post-war findings – some 300 people in the Rombergpark and the Bittermark woods: forced labourers, prisoners of war and German opponents of the regime. Similar executions took place in other Ruhr cities.

Hanging over the whole region, too, was the spectre of destruction by the Germans themselves. On 19 March Hitler issued the so-called Nero Decree, ordering the destruction, before the enemy arrived, of all industrial, transport and supply installations that might be of use to him. Carrying it out in the Ruhr would have meant blowing up the mines, power stations and waterworks on which the survival of millions depended. The armaments minister Albert Speer, who considered the war lost, travelled around the Ruhr at the end of March and in early April – by his own account – persuading industrialists, officials and officers not to carry out the order. His post-war accounts were sometimes embellished and should be treated with caution, but the fact remains that large-scale demolition in the Ruhr largely did not happen, and much of the industrial plant, though damaged by bombing, survived the war.

Crushing the pocket

To reduce the pocket the Americans left 18 divisions of the Ninth, First and Fifteenth Armies, while the rest of 12th Army Group’s forces set off towards the Elbe. The Ninth Army attacked from the north, through the densely built-up towns along the Rhine–Herne Canal; from the south and east came the corps of the First Army, including General Matthew Ridgway’s XVIII Airborne Corps. On the western edge of the pocket, along the Rhine, stood the American Fifteenth Army.

The fighting lasted more than two weeks and was by no means a token affair. Between 4 and 9 April the Germans stubbornly held the line of the Dortmund–Ems Canal and the river Sieg, counter-attacked near Dortmund, and in the wooded hills of the Sauerland forced the Americans to fight for every village and every pass. The towns behaved differently: in some, mayors and inhabitants hung out white flags; in others – especially where SS units were present – every block was fought over. On 10 April the Ninth Army took Essen, and a day later the Americans arrested Alfried Krupp at the Krupp family residence, the Villa Hügel.

On 14 April units of the First and Ninth Armies met on the Ruhr at Hattingen, splitting the pocket in two; that same day the headquarters of the German Fifteenth Army surrendered. The eastern part of the pocket gave up the next day. On 15 April Model, unwilling to sign a capitulation, dissolved Army Group B: he discharged the youngest and oldest soldiers and the non-combatant personnel to go home, and left the rest to choose between trying to break out and laying down their arms. Ridgway sent an emissary to him with a letter recalling that in 1865 General Robert E. Lee, having judged further fighting futile, had surrendered with honour to spare the lives of his soldiers. Model refused, citing the oath he had sworn to Hitler. On 16 April German divisions began surrendering en masse, on 17 April General Harpe was taken prisoner, and on 18 April organised resistance ceased; that day the Americans entered Düsseldorf without a fight, the SS and police having earlier crushed an attempt by a local resistance group to surrender the city.

According to American figures, some 317,000 soldiers were taken prisoner, including 24 generals; some sources give even higher figures, exceeding 320,000. This was more than had been captured at Stalingrad or in Tunisia in 1943. The prisoners were held in makeshift camps in the meadows along the Rhine, where conditions in the first weeks were very harsh. The Americans lost some 10,000 men in the fighting for the pocket, including about 2,000 killed and missing. Model himself wandered for several days with a small group of staff officers through the woods between Duisburg and Düsseldorf. On 21 April 1945 he committed suicide, shooting himself in the head.

The significance of the encirclement

The closing of the ring at Lippstadt sealed the fate of the Western Front. Army Group B was the last large Wehrmacht grouping between the Rhine and the Elbe; its encirclement tore a gap more than 300 kilometres wide in the German defences, through which American armoured divisions could advance almost unhindered eastwards to the Elbe, and the British northwards towards Bremen and Hamburg. At the same time the Reich lost its last great industrial centre, and with it any real ability to continue the war; it had already lost Upper Silesia in the east and, in March, the Saar in the west.

The encirclement also showed how much the war had changed in a year. In the summer of 1944 a large part of the German forces in the Falaise pocket had still managed to escape; in April 1945 nobody broke out of the Ruhr, and the German command had no reserves with which to come to the aid of the encircled troops. Hitler’s obstinacy in forbidding a retreat cost the lives of thousands of soldiers and civilians and changed nothing except to delay the occupation of the ruined region by two weeks.

After the war the Ruhr fell within the British zone of occupation. Its coal and steel, which for decades had driven German rearmament, became a subject of dispute among the Allies, and later the foundation of the economic reconstruction of the Federal Republic of Germany and – through the European Coal and Steel Community – of Western European integration.