To stop this breach, O. K.W. still had, in the Harz mountains, the 11th Army, comprising five divisions under the command of General Wenck, and a 12th Army being formed on the right bank of the Elbe. But clearly the way to Berlin lay open to the 12th Army Group and on April 4 S. H.A. E.F. transferred it to the American 9th Army, to the great satisfaction of General Simpson, its commander, and even more so of General Bradley, who saw the forces under his command now rise to four armies (11 corps of 48 divisions, 14 of them armoured, with some 3,600 tanks). But Eisenhower had no intention of giving Bradley the German capital as an objective. The question had already been considered by him among other options open to him after the encirclement of the Ruhr, and he had decided against going for Berlin for strategic and logistic reasons-in particular the lengthening of his lines of communication that this would entail, and the obstacle of the Elbe, something short of 200 miles from the Rhine and 125 from Berlin.
As a result of this decision, Eisenhower set himself the following objectives:
A Uhii Cathedral, surprisingly undamaged amidst the debris of the rest of the city.
1. to make contact without delay with the Soviet forces moving west, and thus make it impossible for the enemy to try to regroup;
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V A huge column of German prisoners wends its way back towards the American rear along one of the Autobahns constructed by the Nazis to move troops and equipment swiftly-but with a different aim in mind.
2. to hurl the 21st Army Group to the north-east, its right wing keeping its objective steadily fixed on Liibeck, to cut off the Wehrmacht forces occupying Norway and Denmark; and
3. for the 12th and 6th Army Groups, Eisenhower writes;
"Equally important was the desirability of penetrating and destroying the so-called 'National Redoubt’. For many weeks we had been receiving reports that the Nazi intention, in extremity, was to withdraw the cream of the S. S., Gestapo, and other organisations fanatically devoted to Hitler, into the mountains of southern Bavaria, western Austria, and northern Italy. There they expected to block the tortuous mountain passes and to hold out indefinitely against the Allies. Such a stronghold could always be reduced by eventual starvation if in no other way. But if the German was permitted to establish the redoubt he might possibly force us to engage in a long-drawn-out guerrilla type of warfare, or a costly siege. Thus he could keep alive his desperate hope that through disagreement among the Allies he might yet be able to secure terms more favourable than those of unconditional surrender. The evidence was clear that the Nazi intended to make the attempt and I decided to give him no opportunity to carry it out.”
So, with the Elbe reached in the vicinity of Magdeburg, it was understood that Bradley would make his main line of advance along a line Erfurt-Leipzig-Dresden, with a secondary thrust on Regensburg and Linz. Contact would be made with the Russians in Saxony, and at the same time a march would be stolen on Army Group "G” in its task of occupying the redoubt. However logical this line of argument was from a strategic point of view, it rested on a hypothesis which was shown to be false after Germany’s capitulation: the "national redoubt” concept was no more than a figment of the imagination of those who fed it to S. H.A. E.F.’s Intelligence services.
World History
