http://www.etherit.co.uk/month/3/24.htm
April 24th, 1945
UNITED KINGDOM: The “dim-out” is abolished, except for a coastal belt five miles deep.
Minesweeper HMS Mary Rose commissioned.
GERMANY: Konev’s troops penetrate Berlin from the South.
Berlin: Hitler orders Göring to be arrested after receiving a telegram from him offering to take over command of the Reich.
The RAF joined in the final battle of Berlin today with fighter-bombers of Bomber Command pouncing on General Wenck’s Twelfth Army as it moves east after being switched from the western front to Berlin. The pilots report that the entire eastern half of the city is on fire. On the ground Konev’s men are crossing the heavily-defended Tetlow canal on bridges built by assault sappers under fire.
Dessau on the Elbe falls to the British 1st Army.
Guardsman Edward Colquhoun Charlton (b.1920), Irish Guards, stopped a German attack single-handed. He died of wounds. (Victoria Cross)
Shortly after liberation from the Berga Elster concentration camp, Norman Fellman of the US 70th Infantry Division, an American Jewish GI, is made to sign a “Security Certificate for Ex-Prisoners of War”. This states in its first clause: “Some activities of American prisoners of war within German prison camps must remain secret not only for the duration of the war against the present enemies of the United States, but in peacetime as well.” (Personal recollection of William J. Shapiro and Mordecai Hauer, The Lost Soldiers of Stalag IX-B, by Roger Cohen, New York Times, 27 February, 2005)
U-2371, U-2551 commissioned.
ITALY: The US 5th and British 8th Army cross the River Po, in large numbers.
La Spezia falls to the US 92nd Division.
VOLCANO ISLANDS: Iwo Jima: VII Fighter Command, United States’ Seventh Air Force bases the 506th Fighter Group flying P-47Ns at North Field.
JAPAN: The Japanese forces on Okinawa begin to pull back to the 2nd section of the Shuri Line.
BORNEO: Two BAT missiles are launched at Balikpapan. The only US use of guided missiles in the war. (Patrick Holscher)
U.S.A.: Destroyer USS Goodrich commissioned.
ATLANTIC OCEAN: U-363 was attacked by a hunter-killer group. During the depth charge attack the periscope was damaged so badly that the boat had to return to base.
USS Frederick C. Davis was participating in the operation Teardrop, a hunt for snorkel-equipped U-boats in the Western Atlantic and was part of the 4th Escort Division, which screened escort carrier USS Bogue in the Southern Surface Barrier. On 24 April 1945, U-546 discovered the USS Bogue about 570 miles east of Cape Race, Newfoundland and tried to attack on periscope depth, but the USS Frederick C. Davis discovered the U-boat and prepared herself for an attack. At this moment a Gnat struck forward on the portside. The ship broke in two and sank. The crew abandoned ship and were picked up within three hours by the other escort destroyers of the Division, after they had sunk U-546.
At 1414, the unescorted Monmouth Coast was torpedoed and sunk by U-1305 about 80 miles from Sligo. The master, 13 crewmembers and two gunners were lost. Irish fishermen rescued the sole survivor, mess room boy Derek Cragg.
Seeing all the U-boat activity this close to the end, reminded me of how the U-boats that survived the war all put to sea and scuttled, reminiscent of the high Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow nearly thirty years before.
37th Infantry, Capture Of Baguio, Mindanao, Philippine Islands, April 24, 1945
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_ucXNKIZR8
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/Liberation5.html
Congressmen & Reporters visit Buchenwald
After the liberation of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, the rotting corpses were left unburied until General Dwight D. Eisenhower could arrange for a contingent of American congressmen and a group of newsmen, led by Joseph Pulitzer of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, to fly to Germany to view the camp on April 24, 1945.
April 24, 1945
Mao Zedong, ‘On Coalition Government’
http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/121326.pdf?v=4e62b7da5f815e5fd70fb2cb40d8f7f2
In this April 24, 1945 photo released by the U.S. National Archives, an American soldier stands among German loot stored in a church at Elligen,
Eyewitnesses provide filmed testimonies of Nazi atrocities 70 years ago today (Apr 24 1945)
The spires of the cathedral of Cologne, Germany, stand on April 24, 1945, amid ruins of buildings bombed during World War II.
http://www.executedtoday.com/2012/04/24/1945-a-day-in-the-death-penalty-around-the-reich/
April 24, 1945
Lehrter Street Prison, Berlin. Bavarian Social Democratic politician and trade union activist Ernst Schneppenhorst — who spent most of the war years under detention — was executed by the SS.
Moritz Police Barracks, Berlin. While most petty criminals being held by the police were released as the war’s conclusion drew near, an exception was made for four gay policemen.
Otto Jordan, Reinhard Höpfner, Willi Jenoch and a man named Bautz were, instead, summarily shot at Berlin’s Moritz police barracks. In 2011, a memorial plaque honoring the four was installed near the place of their execution.
Regensburg. The pastor of Regensburg Cathedral, Dr. Johann Maier, was hanged here for participating in the previous day’s public demonstration begging the Nazi government to surrender to approaching American forces in order to minimize destruction.
When the government responded by turning water cannons on the crowd, Maier began to protest:
“We have not come here to make a disturbance; we Christians do not register any indignation against divinely ordained authority. We have come simply with a request: we ask that the city be surrendered for the following reasons … “
Rather than let him enumerate his reasons, the divinely ordained authority seized him on the spot and hauled him away for a summary trial that night, followed by a hanging and gibbeting the following morning. A pensioner who protested Maier’s arrest was hanged alongside him, while a policeman who argued the point at the foot of the gallows was promptly shot there and demonstratively laid out to make the group a trio.
When the Americans entered Regensburg on April 27, Maier’s corpse was still strung up in the town marketplace, bearing a placard denouncing him as a “saboteur.”
Today, however, the memorial plaque for him in the cathedral salutes him for “giving his life for the preservation of Regensburg.”
Somewhere in Southern Germany. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a story on this date attributed to no exact date or locale reporting on the recent, routine execution by the U.S. army of a German civilian believed to be a spy.
It seemed like an innocent enough offer at the time. A friendly German civilian approached soldiers from the U.S. 7th Army, offering to help set up a civilian government. But he broke down after being questioned, admitting he was a spy bent on sabotage. The spy was executed, but that wasn’t the end of trouble for the advancing U.S. army, says CBC correspondent Sam Ross, reporting on developments for the U.S. troops.
Remaining pockets of German soldiers are now attempting to ambush the Americans. Nevertheless, the U.S. 7th has managed to take some prisoners from the German People’s Army, the Nazis’ last-ditch militia composed of very young and very old men. And there are other people to contend with on the roads behind Allied lines; German civilians are returning home after fleeing from war, and displaced persons freed from forced-labour camps are heading home on foot to Russia, Belgium, Poland and France.
"They Took the Other Road" - Organized Resistance in Austria
The significance of the resistance group operating between 1942 and 1944 around Chaplain Dr. Heinrich Maier (1908-1945) and Semperit Director General Franz Josef Messner (1896-1945) was chiefly in its contacts to the American military secret service. Thanks to information provided about the locations of industrial companies, the latter could be bombarded by the Allies with precision and the destruction of residential areas could be, at least partially, avoided. The group was uncovered by a traitor between February and April 1944. Eight leading members were sentenced to death for "preparation toward high treason" on October 28, 1944 and later on executed or murdered.
Franz Josef Messner (1896-1945) was sentenced to death on October 28, 1944 and murdered in the gas chamber at the Mauthausen concentration camp on April 23, 1945. (Photo DÖW)
"On April 23, 1945 at 3 p.m., Commander SS Standard Leader Franz Ziereis personally came to the bunker and ordered me to take forty prisoners, among them Dr. Franz Messner, to the gas cellar. While leaving his cell, Messner still wanted to tell me something, but the Commander's presence prevented that. None of the prisoners were beaten. The Commander himself had the gas flow in. The gassing worked since already five minutes later, I had to open the doors and switch on the ventilators. That same night of April 23 to 24, 1945, the corpses of the gassed individuals were incinerated in the crematory of the Mauthausen concentration camp."
- The Tyrolian Ernst Martin, at the time a Mauthausen prisoner, on Messner's murder
