Word: wehrmachters
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Ruhr, Wehrmacht resistance was collapsing swiftly. U.S. Ninth and First Army units, driving from the north and the south, bisected the pocket at Hagen. Ruhr civilians had learned by the examples of ruined Dortmund and flattened Paderborn that to resist was to be destroyed. Essen (pop. 659,871) gave up with little struggle; the Yanks found hundreds of drunken civilians reeling in the streets...
...Limburg, where U.S. soldiers, captured in the Battle of the Bulge but four months ago, were left to starve into illness and death. The pictures from Limburg (see cuts) spoke for themselves. They were stark testimony of the barbarous state into which the once correct, highly professional Wehrmacht had fallen. More than that, they were the final proof, if any was still needed, that Germany would have to be flattened into complete submission...
...days the western Allied armies took 189,611 prisoners; in all their battles in World War I the Americans had taken less than one-third of that total. In those six days at least 25,000 Germans had been killed or wounded. These were the casualties of a Wehrmacht falling swiftly apart...
...Payoff. The German command reacted as if. the capture of Merkers and its mine had been so much salt in the Wehrmacht's deep wounds. Near Mühlhausen, about 30 miles northeast, the Germans opened the most concerted resistance Patton's men had met in many days. The Germans lost 40 tanks in one day, came back for more wounds and lost ten the next...
Across the shrinking Nazi realm writhed columns of civilian refugees, hungry, pan icky, desperate. Remnants of the Wehrmacht, cut off, cut up, were dissolving into a hopeless, fugitive mob. Great centers like Frankfurt (see below) and Mannheim had become ghost cities, stark in their architectured wreckage, starker in their human disintegration. The few Germans left behind were unheroic, impenitent, apathetic, sullen, unable or unwilling to believe what had happened. The diehards were mostly adolescent gangs, leftovers of Hitler Youth, who fought street battles between themselves, spied on Allied authorities and sometimes flung grenades into Allied trucks...