http://history.howstuffworks.com/world-war-ii/nazi-germany-surrenders.htmOn the afternoon of April 12, 1945, nearing the end of World War II, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt collapsed and died from a cerebral hemorrhage. Vice President Harry Truman was catapulted from relative obscurity to a world stage in which the United States had to oversee the final defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan and play a key part in the reconstruction of the postwar order.
Adolf Hitler interpreted Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death as a miracle of deliverance. Locked away in his bunker in Berlin, the German leader played out grotesque fantasies of a final victory in which his enemies became divided and hostile -- or tired of the terrible cost of subduing the German people. Adolf Hitler no longer saw the reality of his battered country. The heaviest bombing of the war reduced German cities to ruins one after the other -- most notoriously the city of Dresden. From February 13 to February 15, 30,000 people were killed there in Allied bombing. Nazi Germany could not sustain war production. In both west and east, German forces fought on fatalistically against hopeless odds.
By February 9, American troops had breached the Siegfried Line in western Germany, and by March 5 they had reached the Rhine River at Cologne. The Germans mounted little resistance, with only 26 poorly armed divisions. Meanwhile, 214 divisions tried to hold back the Red Army in eastern Germany. By May 4, the German forces in northern Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark surrendered to Montgomery's British Commonwealth armies. Farther south, General Eisenhower swung the American advance away from the Rhine-Berlin axis toward southern Germany, where he feared the German army might make a final stand in a mountainous redoubt. Americans entered Austria in early May, by which time Axis forces in Italy had also surrendered. On April 28, Benito Mussolini was captured by Italian partisans and killed.
Adolf Hitler survived him by just two days. Since January 1945, the Soviets had pushed relentlessly toward Berlin and Vienna. By February, a succession of rolling offensives brought the Red Army within striking distance of both capitals. In the south, Budapest was occupied by February 11 and the last Germans were driven out of Hungary by early April. Farther north, Zhukov's armies reached the Oder River by February 2, but for the next month fierce pockets of German resistance held up progress toward Berlin.
The plan for the final assault was approved by Joseph Stalin in early April, and a huge semicircle of Soviet Union forces was launched at Adolf Hitler's capital on April 16. The final battle cost both sides exceptional casualties, but Soviet Union progress was remorseless. Ten days after the start of the battle, the forces of General Chuikov -- defender of Stalingrad two years prior -- reached the center of Berlin. When on April 30 Adolf Hitler was told that there was no prospect of further defense, he said goodbye to his staff and commanders, retired to his bunker living room with Eva Braun -- the mistress he had finally consented to marry the day before -- and there poisoned and shot himself while she took poison. The bodies were incinerated in the garden of the Reich chancellery, where Soviet Union soldiers found charred remains a few days later.
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