While the fighting in the west was turning into a series of gigantic mopping-up operations for the Western Allies, as long as the Oder front held, Germans still wanted Heinrici’s armies to halt the ‘Asiatic hordes’ from the ‘steppes’. This imperative continued even after the military map of a defensible ‘Reich’ had been erased in the west: in the final weeks of the war, German soldiers fought on for a variety of motives – out of automatism, because this was what they had been instructed to do, because they were still trying to hold back the ‘red tide’, or because they wanted to be conquered
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