Posted on 03/23/2014 6:14:26 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Sixty minutes before the bombers reached Berlin, the dispatch said, this warning, repeated several times was sent out:
“We are coming. Our targets will be in the northern and Wedding (northwestern) districts of Berlin. Evacuate those districts at once.”
To this day it grates that the free world didn’t give Hanoi and Haiphong this kind of aerial urban renewal in 1965.
"Saly Mayer was a Swiss businessman and president of the Schweizerischer Israelitischer Gemeindebund (Federation of Swiss-Jewish Communities) from 1936 until 1942.
He walked the tightrope of negotiating with the Nazis to save Hungarian Jews while refusing the Nazis' requests for resources that would have prolonged the war.
In 1940 he became the representative of the Jewish Distribution Committee (JDC) in Switzerland.
In that position, he sought to funnel Swiss-Jewish funds to support Jews in occupied countries and to bargain for their release."
The map actually shows 360 German division all told, of which only 68 (<20%) face western allies in France & Italy.
How many are fighting on the Eastern Front depends on which you count, but it's at least half, up to 75%.
Of course, many divisions are by now greatly reduced in size & effectiveness.
Still, the major fighting strength of the Wehrmacht is unquestionably facing east.
Yep and they are retreating in the east at about the same rate as they advanced into it a few years earlier.
Many of the German divisions on the southern sector of the front facing Konev and Malinovsky are little more than pins on Hitler’s map. The Germans have even created something called the “Korps Abteilung,” or “Corps Detachment,” which is a clump of three or four burned out infantry divisions. There are a few of them in this sector of the front. A “Korps Abteilung” has little better than a full-strength regiment’s combat power. The divisions of Army Group Center have been left alone for most of the winter, and are in fairly good shape. The problem for that formation is that the German High Command is continuously poaching divisions from them to feed into the Ukrainian meat grinder. As a result, on By June of this year, Army Group Center will have no infantry reserves, all formations being in the line, and only one panzer division.
So a count of divisions doesn’t necessarily tell you where the combat power is. It does tell you the relative importance for each theater. And yes, the Germans do still have something like 65% of their combat power facing the USSR.
Poaching divisions from Army Group Center reveals one other change in German strategy. The Germans had been using France as a rest/replacement depot for burned out divisions from the East. The Germans would take a division that saw hard combat, pull it out of the line and swap it with a division that had been on garrison duty. There it would be filled with replacements and soldiers convalescing from wounds. After a while, it would rotate back to the meatgrinder in the east. This was done somewhat with infantry divisions but more often with panzer divisions. Sixth Panzer Division, which led the attempt to relieve Stalingrad, came right off the trains from France, fully equipped with about 160 brand-new long-barreled Mark IV specials.
However, starting about the end of 1943, that policy ended as the Germans realized they needed to maintain a real army in France. Thus, the Germans could not use France as their replacement army depot. The divisions in the East stayed and burned out there. If the Germans needed a reinforcement, they had to shift a division from another sector in the East. The Soviets are taking advantage of this. Once they draw the German reserves to one offensive thrust, they then attack the spot where that division came from. Some divisions burned out divisions did go to France at the end of 1943 to beef up the defenses there, and they were lucky, because they stayed there.
An example is 16th Panzer Grenadier Division, which fought with Army Group South’s 6th Army. It was in almost continuous combat from the Mius River in July all the way back to the Dnieper, and was pretty much destroyed in the field. Sent to France, it’s Panzer battalion was upgraded to a Panzer Regiment. We will see it in Normandy and later the Ardennes renamed as the 116th Panzer Division.
But this is another example of how the threat of invasion is helping the USSR by drawing off German reserves that would otherwise face the Red Army.
But, wondering about that would violate henkster's rule not to assume people would act contrary to how they in fact did act.
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