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The Last German Occupied Places To Surrender In WWII
The Atlantic Pockets
When the first Allied boots hit the beaches in Normandy, France in June of 1944, the fate of Nazi Germany was sealed. The Soviets were driving hard in the East, and now the rest of the Alliance was pushing hard from the West. Many people imagine that the swell was an unstoppable tide that swept over all of Germany and recaptured everything in one fell swoop. But that is not the case. Germany managed to hold on to a series of tenuous pockets and fortresses throughout Western Europe until the bitter end. Some of the last German controlled places to surrender were not in Germany but in France.
This oddity of history was made possible by two things. First, Hitler ordered that certain towns and ports were to be fortified by special garrison forces and defended to the very last man. Second, the Allies were intent on speed and ferocity, so they decided to bypass certain areas that were simply too tough to crack in a single go.
The result was that one of the very last places to lay down their arms wasn’t Berlin or Hamburg or Munich but rather Saint-Nazaire in Brittany, France.
The Atlantic Pockets
In 1944, the Allied plans to invade Western Europe were becoming more and more apparent. It wasn’t a question of…
