![]() Graziani was the Minister of Defence for Mussolini's Italian Social Republic. On 29 April, Rodolfo Graziani surrendered all Fascist Italian armed forces at Caserta. The bodies were then taken to Milan and hung up on the Piazzale Loreto of the city. On 28 April, Mussolini was executed in Giulino (a civil parish of Mezzegra) the other fascists captured with him were taken to Dongo and executed there. It is disputed whether he was trying to flee from Italy to Switzerland (through the Splügen Pass), and was travelling with a German anti-aircraft battalion. On 27 April 1945, as Allied forces closed in on Milan, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was captured by Italian partisans. Mussolini is executed: On 25 April 1945, Italian partisans liberated Milan and Turin. On 27 April 1945, the Raising the Flag on the Three-Country Cairn photograph was taken. German forces withdraw from Finland: On 25 April 1945, the last German troops withdrew from Finnish Lapland and made their way into occupied Norway. However, up to 10,000 Nazi war criminals eventually fled Europe using ratlines such as ODESSA. Some Nazi guards and personnel were killed outright upon the discovery of their crimes. Captured SS guards were subsequently tried at Allied war crime tribunals where many were sentenced to death. Due to the prisoners' poor physical condition, thousands continued to die after liberation. Allied troops forced the remaining SS guards to gather up the corpses and place them in mass graves. Four days later troops from the American 42nd Infantry Division found Dachau. Up to 60,000 prisoners were at Bergen-Belsen when it was liberated on 15 April 1945, by the British 11th Armoured Division. The advance into Germany uncovered numerous Nazi concentration camps and forced labour facilities. Liberation of Nazi concentration camps and refugees: Allied forces began to discover the scale of the Holocaust, confirming the findings of Pilecki's 1943 Report. The Dachau death train consisted of nearly forty railcars containing the bodies of between 2,000 and 3,000 prisoners who were evacuated from Buchenwald on 7 April 1945 By October, thousands had died in the camps from starvation, exposure and disease. The legal fiction circumvented provisions under the Geneva Convention of 1929 on the treatment of former combatants. Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) reclassified all prisoners as Disarmed Enemy Forces, not POWs (prisoners of war). In early April, the first Allied-governed Rheinwiesenlager camps were established in western Germany to hold hundreds of thousands of captured or surrendered Axis Forces personnel. In the three to four months up to the end of April, over 800,000 German soldiers surrendered on the Eastern Front. ![]() April also witnessed the capture of at least 120,000 German troops by the Western Allies in the last campaign of the war in Italy. Main article: Timeline of the surrender of Axis forces at the end of World War IIĪllied forces begin to take large numbers of Axis prisoners: The total number of prisoners taken on the Western Front in April 1945 by the Western Allies was 1,500,000. įinal events before the end of the war in Europe The last battles were fought on the Eastern Front which ended in the total surrender of all of Nazi Germany’s remaining armed forces such as in the Courland Pocket in western Latvia from Army Group Courland in the Baltics surrendering on and in Czechoslovakia during the Prague offensive on. After German dictator Adolf Hitler's suicide and handing over of power to grand admiral Karl Dönitz in May 1945, Soviet troops conquered Berlin and accepted surrender of the Dönitz-led government. The final battles of the European theatre of World War II continued after the definitive surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allies, signed by Field marshal Wilhelm Keitel on in Karlshorst, Berlin. ![]()
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