The Battle for the Ruhr: The German Army's Final Defeat in the West (review)

Derek Zumbro has written a masterful account of the final collapse of the German forces along the Rhine front in the early months of 1945. Zumbro deliberately sets out to tell the story of the campaign from the German perspective. Scholars will rejoice at the extent to which Zumbro weaves German language primary and secondary source material into a page turning account in the English language.

The Battle for the Ruhr is not just the story of the soldiers of Field Marshal Walter Model's Army Group B but also of the ordinary citizens and small town mayors that lived on the battlefield. They are of great importance in Zumbro's account. Thus, this work is special in that it is not simply names, dates, units and territory lost or gained but instead is a work that "encompasses and illustrates a dramatic series of events that create a unique story of human experience" (p. 2), simply put, "This is the story of the defeated, " of both soldier and citizen alike.

In methodical fashion Zumbro tracks Army Group B as it is closely pursued and eventually encircled. As British and American forces deal Model's Army Group its deathblow, Zumbro takes us into Model's final hours drawing on new interviews conducted with the Field Marshal's staff. Readers follow along as Model's tiny caravan attempts to break out from the Ruhr pocket only to meet with failure. Model, nearly alone except for a small entourage, opted for suicide instead of captivity – saying just before his death "I cannot imagine that I, as a field marshal, the one who out of conviction in victory for my country am responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of my soldiers, should now emerge from these woods to approach Montgomery or the Americans, with my hands in the air and say 'Here I am, Field Marshal Model, I surrender'" (p. 378). Zumbro's interviews were not limited to former staff officers but also expanded out to include the rest of the German population.

Zumbro's deliberate concentration on the experiences of the German populace helps create a new dimension to the well known English language works on the crossing of the Rhine and the reduction of Ruhr pocket. Here are the accounts of the defeated German populace praying on Easter Sunday 1945 as battle rages around, here are the stories of myriad atrocities committed by both sides in the closing days of war, and most poignantly described by Zumbro is the confusion experienced by Wehrmacht soldiers in the final days, including the overpowering feeling that many didn't want to be the last to die for a lost cause.

Thus, Zumbro truly succeeds in creating an account of not just the military experience but the human one as well. The balance is perfectly struck. This work is an essential contribution to the literature on the war.