End in sight

As horrors of Third Reich are revealed

- BY MATT ROPER Senior Features Writer

It was only five months before the end of the largest and deadliest war in human history - but as the world woke up to the first day of 1945, victory was still far from certain.

Two weeks earlier, the German army had launched a surprise attack on the Allied forces in a battle in the Ardennes region between Belgium and Luxembourg, which raged throughout January.

Facing over 410,000 Nazi soldiers and 1,000 tanks in a massive push to regain dominance they had lost after D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge became the biggest, bloodiest battle American soldiers had ever fought, with nearly 80,000 killed, maimed or captured.

It would turn out to be the last major German offensive and hasten the end of Hitler's Third Reich. But on January 1, 1945, the confident Fuhrer still believed he could turn the tide - and was handing out victory medals.

Meanwhile, as the Soviet Red Army advanced on the Eastern Front, they discovered the horrific reality of Nazi crimes. On January 27, Red Army soldiers arrived at Auschwitz concentration camp, finding barely-alive prisoners and evidence of industrial-scale murder. "The Soviet troops discovered the Auschwitz camp almost by chance," writes Max Likin in his book, 1945: A World At The End Of War.

"The stench is beyond description. Inside the barbed wire, corpses are scattered everywhere... There's little obvious difference between the dead and the living - haggard survivors with faces like hunted beasts."

That day is now remembered every year as Holocaust Memorial Day.

Days later, Winston Churchill took a plane to Yalta, in Crimea, to meet US president Franklin D Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.