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Rhineland

Geography

The Rhineland is in the western part of Germany, and abuts international boundaries with France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. The River Rhine delta forms the region's eastern boundary south (upstream) of a point north of Bingen.

The southern and eastern parts are mainly hill country (Westerwald, Hunsrück,Taunus and Eifel), cut by river valleys, principally the Rhine and Mosel. The north takes in the Ruhr valley.

Some of the larger cities in the Rhineland include Aachen, Bonn, Cologne, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Essen, Heidelberg, Koblenz, Krefeld, Leverkusen, Ludwigshafen, Mainz, Mannheim, Mönchengladbach, Wiesbaden and Wuppertal.

Polity

The Rhine Province was created in 1824 by joining the provinces of Lower Rhine and Jülich-Cleves-Berg. Its capital was Koblenz; it had 8.0 million inhabitants by 1939. In 1920, the Saar was separated from the Rhine Province and administered by the League of Nations until a plebiscite in 1935, when the region was returned to Germany. At the same time, in 1920, the districts of Eupen and Malmedy were transferred to Belgium (see German-Speaking Community of Belgium). In 1946, the Rhine Province was divided up between the newly-founded states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate. The town of Wetzlar became part of Hesse.

Today, the German region of Rhineland consists of the states of Saarland, the southwestern half of North Rhine-Westphalia, and the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. North Rhine-Westphalia is one of the prime German industrial areas, containing significant mineral deposits (coal, lead, lignite, magnesium, oil and uranium) and water transport. In Rhineland-Palatinate agriculture is more important, including the vineyards in the Ahr, Mittelrhein, Mosel, Nahe, Pfalz (Palatinate) and Rheinhessen regions.

Following World War I

French troops leaving Mainz (1930)

Following the Armistice of 1918, Allied forces occupied the Rhineland as far east as the river with some small bridgeheads on the east bank at places like Cologne. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 the occupation was continued. The treaty specified three occupation Zones, which were due to be evacuated by Allied troops five, ten and finally 15 years after the formal ratification of the treaty, which took place in 1920, thus the occupation was intended to last until 1935. In fact, the last Allied troops left Germany five years prior to that date in 1930 in a good-will reaction to the Weimar Republic's policy of reconciliation in the era of Gustav Stresemann and the Locarno Pact.

Sections of the Rhineland bordering Belgium were annexed from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. The cantons of Eupen, Malmedy and Sankt Vith though entirely German in culture and language became the East Cantons of Belgium against the will of the population. Today Belgium has granted these East Cantons many democratic rights, so that a question of return to Germany no longer plays a role; e.g. German has been declared an official language in Belgium, together with French and Dutch.

The French tried to separate the occupied areas from Germany by establishing an independent Rhenish Republic as a French puppet state. Separatist riots were encouraged and supported by the French, who tried to exploit traditional anti-Prussian resentments in the overwhelmingly Catholic region. In the end, the separatists failed to gain any decisive support among the population.

The Treaty of Versailles also specified the de-militarization of the entire area to provide a buffer between Germany on one side and France, Belgium and Luxembourg (and to a lesser extent, the Netherlands) on the other side, which meant that no German forces were allowed there after the Allied forces had withdrawn. Furthermore (and quite unbearably from the German perspective) the treaty entitled the Allies to reoccupy the Rhineland at their will, if the Allies unilaterally found the German side responsible for any violation of the treaty.

In violation of the Treaty of Versailles and the spirit of the Locarno Pact, Nazi Germany remilitarized the Rhineland on Saturday, March 7, 1936. The occupation was done with very little military force, the troops entering on bicycles, and no effort was made to stop it (see Appeasement of Hitler). France could not act due to political instability at the time, and, since the remilitarization occurred at a weekend, the British Government could not find out or discuss actions to be taken until the following Monday. As a result of this, the governments were inclined to see the remilitarization as a fait accompli.

Hitler took a risk when he sent his troops to the Rhineland. He told them to "turn back and not to resist" if they were stopped by the French Army. The French, however, did not try to stop them because they were currently holding elections and the president did not want to start a war with Germany.

The British government agreed with the act in principle, "The Germans are after all only going into their own back garden" Lord Lothian, but rejected the Nazi manner of accomplishing said act. Winston Churchill, however, advocated military action through cooperation by the British and the French.

The remilitarization of the Rhineland was favoured by some of the local population, because of a resurgence of German nationalism and harboured bitterness over the Allied occupation of the Rhineland until 1930 (Saarland until 1935).

A side-effect of the French occupations was the offspring of French soldiers and German woman. These children, who were seen as the continuing French pollution of German culture, were shunned by the broader German society and were known as Rhineland Bastards. Children fathered by French colonial troops (who were generally of African ancestry) were especially despised and became targets of Nazi sterilisation programmes in the 1930s. The American poet Charles Bukowski was born in 1920 in Andernach as the son of a German mother and a Polish-American US soldier, serving among the occupation troops.

1944–1945 military campaigns

Two different military campaigns were fought in the Rhineland.

U.S. Army

The first operation of the campaign was the Allied Operation Market Garden that sought to allow the Second British Army to advance past the northern flank of the Siegfried Line and enter the Ruhr industrial area. After the failure of that operation for five months, from September 1944 until February 1945, the First United States Army fought a costly battle to capture the Hürtgen Forest. The heavily forested and ravined terrain of the Hürtgen negated Allied combined arms advantages (close air support, armor, artillery) and favoured German defenders. The U.S. Army lost 24,000 troops. The military necessity of their sacrifice has been debated by military historians.

Canadian Army

In early 1945, after a long winter stalemate, military operations by most Allied armies in Northwest Europe resumed with the goal of reaching the Rhine. From their winter positions in The Netherlands, the First Canadian Army under General Henry Crerar reinforced by elements of the British Second Army under General Miles Dempsey, drove through the Rhineland beginning in the first week of February 1945.

Operation Veritable lasted several weeks, with the end result of clearing all German forces from the west side of the Rhine river. The supporting operation by the First US Army, Operation Grenade, was planned to coincide from the River Roer, in the south. This was delayed for two weeks however, by German flooding of the Roer valley.

Other actions

On March 7, 1945 a company of armoured infantry of the U.S. 9th Armored Division captured the last intact bridge over the Rhine at Remagen. General George Patton's Third US Army also made a crossing of the river the day before the much anticipated Rhine crossings by the 21st Army Group (First Canadian Army and the British Second Army) under Field Marshal Montgomery in the third week of March 1945.

Operation Varsity was a massive airborne operation in conjunction with Operation Plunder, the amphibious crossings. By early April, the Rhine had been crossed by all the Allied armies operating west of the river, and the battles for the Rhineland were over.

Battle Honours

In the official histories of the British and Canadian armies, the term Rhineland refers only to fighting west of the river in February and March 1945, with subsequent operations on the river and to the east known as "Rhine Crossing". Both terms are official Battle Honours in the Commonwealth forces.