Killing Hitler’s Reich, The Battle for Austria

Killing Hitler’s Reich, The Battle for Austria 1945, is the history of the now-forgotten life and death struggle for Hitler’s homeland, and with it the soul of postwar Europe. The victims of the two regimes were caught between two totalitarian nightmares.

Every last man was thrown into the fighting. Lingering questions may never be answered. Created as the armed wing of the Nazi Party, the Waffen-SS should logically have gone down fighting to protect their leader, Adolf Hitler, as the Russians overwhelmed the Berlin garrison. Yet instead, at Hitler’s insistence, the SS Panzer Divisions fought and died in Austria. No less than fifteen of Himmler’s divisions ended the war there, including 1. SS-Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, 2. SS-Panzer Division Das Reich, 3. SS-Panzer Division Totenkopf, 5. SS-Panzer Division Wiking, 9. SS-Panzer Division Hohenstaufen, and 12. SS-Panzer Division Hitlerjugend.

Long ignored by Western historians, the titanic struggle for Vienna and Austria now has a definitive history to mark the struggle of countless Russians, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Romanians, and dozens of other nationalities. Written over a 13-year period, the Battle for Austria left behind very few authoritative German sources. The War Diary of Army Group South, for example, ended in early April. No official records exist to fill in the blanks of where units fought and died.

Austria’s fate held major ramifications for postwar Europe and the entire free world, yet there is no complete account of the campaign written in English. Given the scale of the fighting and the scope of the consequences, this book fills a major gap in the literature of World War Two.

On VE Day Army Group South listed 450,000 men still under arms in four armies. It was this massive force that made General Dwight Eisenhower change the entire focus of American ground operations to cut off Germans from retreating into the National Redoubt.

And as the German war effort disintegrated into chaos, high ranking Nazis fled the dying Reich through Austria and into Italy. Some made it, many didn’t. Killing Hitler’s Reich follows the chase and capture of some of the most notorious, such as Himmler’s Second in Command, Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

The author collected more than 800 sources for this massive work, most of them in German or Russian. Unlike the previous fighting in Hungary, there was no real oversight by higher command; communications had broken down to the point where local commanders fought in isolation. Only in Vienna did the general maintain some control over events.

Killing Hitler’s Reich, The Battle for Austria, 1945, fills a major gap in the literature of World War Two.