The Waterbury Democrat., 1945-04-16

| Ga0os4 EgAaat B0obAN VI Se@~s~eA@a~~-t hF~e haps 75 miles from Prague.
 Latest official information from the Third Army front p.aC:d Pat. toms vanguards in Hof, 54 miles southwest of Chemnitz and eight miles west of the Czechoslovak frontier. Another column five miles to the south reached the Schwarz- zenbach area, seven miles from the border.
 From the other Allied western armies came these developments
 American Seventh Army: Broke loose on the roads to Nuremberg af- ter two weeks of slow, bloody fight ing and cracked the enemy lines on a 70-mile arc extending within is miles of the Nazi shrine city. Radio were only six miles from the city this morning.
 Canadian First Army-reached the North Sea on a broad front with. in five miles south of Emden, clos ing completely the trap around 100000 or more Germans in Hol- land.
 British First Army-SmaShed out of it's Aller river bridgeheads south of Hamburg and advanced to posi- tions reported unofficially only 15 miles from the port: launched knockout assault on Bremen. MOp-up Stage Simultaneously, the American First and Ninth armies brought the blazing battle of the Ruhr into the mop-up stage after splitting the trapped enemy forces with june ture in the center of the pocket at Wetter, eight miles south of Dort. mund.
 More than 5000 of the 100000 Germans originally trapped there were in American hands, including the notorious Baron Franz Won Papen, one-time chancellor of Ger many and ambassador to Turkey under the Naz regime. A member of the Krupp munitions family, ten- tatively identified as Alfred or Gus tav Krupp, also was reported to have been taken there.
 Late dispatches said the German corps commander in the Ruhr sur rendered and that the complete liquidation of the pocket was ex- pected before nightfall. The great influx of prisoners from the Ruhr swelled the Allied armies bag of captives for Saturday alone to the staggering figure of ST. l 779 officers and men
 But there was little German sur- rendering along the bloody Elbe be- fore Berlin. There the Germans still were fighting savagely from hedgehog positions in and around Magdeburg on the west bank of the river and were falling back slowly but in good order before the Ninth Army forces advancing be- yond the Barby bridgehead.
 Three Nazi Elite Guards divisions formerly under Adolf Hitler's per- sonal command and now led by the willy Field Marshal Albert KeSsel- ring, were thrown into the Elbe line over the weekend.
 Counter attacking with strong armored and artillery support, the tough Nazi veterans managed to slow down the Barby advance and were still flashing out against the Americans this morning in the hope of repeating the success achieved against the Second Armored Divi- sion Saturday.
 Field dispatches from the Amer ican First Army front, however, | indicated that the staggering Wehrmacht had few if any reserves to bolster that section of the line.
 Units of the Third Armored Di- vision fought their way into the southern outskirts of Dessau, 52 miles southwest of Berlin, and cap- tured Kothen, 12 miles farther southwest. There they seized the the spraWling JunkerS aircraft plant that the Germans had been trying desperately to keep in pro- duction almost under the American guns.
 Leuna Taken Still farther south, the 1O4th "Timberwolf" Division stormed into the streets of Halle and had that key railway center almost cleared early today. Leuna site of one of the biggest synthetic oil plants in the Reich, also was taken by the 104th.
 Other Firsth Army forces tighten ed their siege arc around the out skirts of Leipzig, where by-passed German garrison appeared to have dug in for death stand.
 The Ninth Armored Division meanwhile, raced 20 miles beyond Leipzig to reach the Mulde river on a six-mile front around Colditz. There the Americans were 30 miles west of the Elbe river, which field dispatches hinted might be the scene of the expected Russian American juncture.