Schlachtfeld zwischen Maas und Rhein : das Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges September 1944 bis März 1945 : wie es damals war

From the landing in Normandy on 6 June 1944 until the end of the war on 8 May 1945, the Allies only needed eleven months. Over six months of which was battled from September 1944 until early March 1945 in the only 80-mile front strip between Aachen and Cologne bitterly. The expansion of the battlefield from North to South ranged from Kleve to Luxembourg. Cornerstones of this "battlefield between the Meuse and Rhine" were the cities of Nijmegen (to the north, Meuse and to the south, Liege) as well as the Rhine cities of Emmerich to the north and to the south of Mainz at Oppenheim. This book provides new documentation on the fighting in this area which is the most comprehensive and most cohesive representation of the Rhineland during the war. More than anywhere else in Germany, the Battle of the Rhine, or the "Gateway to Germany", was long and costly - for both sides. The book shows what was left after the six-month struggle left of the Rhine with a thousand photos and 16 mostly full-page maps. It goes in detail about the battle for Aachen on 21 October 1944, which was the first major German city to fall to the West, to the four-month battle in Hürtgenwald between Düren and Monschau (68 000 casualties -- the largest U.S. defeat in Europe), the Battle of the Bulge, the bombing of the towns on the Rur on 16 November 1944 (at least 3,500 civilian deaths alone in Düren, Germany), the transition of Americans over the Roer on 23 February 1945, the rolling over of the "Erft line", the invasion of Cologne on 6 March 1945, and the Allied Rhine crossings between Wesel and Oppenheim at Mainz. The book begins with an American and a Jewish camp service and ends with the first Corpus Christi procession after long years of war in Cologne-Mülheim. Each chapter starts with a full-page map of the situation in that month, a narrative, and also two pages of eyewitness accounts. Many "then-now" photos complete the picture. 2nd ed. 400 pages : illustrations, maps ; 31 cm