British and American air raids virtually obliterated the city of Dresden. Estimates of the toll of civilian casualties ranged in the vicinity of 100,000. The author Kurt Vonnegut, a prisoner of war in Dresden, described the bombardment in his book Slaughterhouse Five. Remarking on the offensive, Winston Churchill commented, “The destruction of Dresden remains a query against the conduct of Allied bombing.”
Thousands of Jewish prisoners who survived the death marches began to reach Buchenwald in early 1945. However, as the American forces advanced through Germany, an evacuation of the prisoners in this camp began. About 25,000 inmates-Jews and members of other nationalities-perished at the time of the evacuation, but the Nazis´ scheme failed because successful actions by the prisoners´ underground, such as obstructing SS orders over the radio, sabotaged and considerably slowed the evacuation process.On April 11, 1945, American forces liberated
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States, died on April 12. Aged, exhausted, and ill, Roosevelt was resting at Warm Springs, Georgia, when he suddenly complained of a terrible headache. Two hours later, he was pronounced dead of a stroke. Churchill responded to the news by bemoaning “a loss of the British nation and of the cause of freedom in every land.” In Moscow, the streets filled with sobbing men and women. Goebbels, in contrast, called Hitler
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