Editing Volkssturm (section)

==Final phase==
While Iron Crosses were being handed out in places like Berlin, other cities and towns like [[Parchim]] and [[Mecklenburg]] witnessed old elites, acting as military commandants over the Hitler Youth and ''Volkssturm'', asserting themselves and demanding that the defensive fighting stop so as to spare lives and property.{{sfn|Bessel|2010|pp=139–140}} Despite their efforts, the last four months of the war were an exercise in futility for the ''Volkssturm'', and the Nazi leadership's insistence to continue the fight to the bitter end contributed to an additional 1.23 million (approximated) deaths, half of them German military personnel and the other half from the ''Volkssturm''.{{sfn|Fritz|2004|p=191}}{{efn|The figure put forward by the historian Stephen Fritz does not match the observations of [[Richard J. Evans]], who reported 175,000 ''Volkssturm'' members killed when fighting the professional armies of the western Allies and the Soviet Union.{{sfn|Evans|2010|p=676}} Evans' figures are based on the members listed in the index cards and reported as killed, while Martin Sorge pointed out that this figure did not include the 30,000 listed as presumed missing or dead in a 1963 report.{{sfn|Sorge|1986|p=50}} }}

In many small towns, when leading members of the ''Volkssturm'' refused to fight on against the superior forces of the Allies—part of an attempt to circumvent the "total destruction" of their home regions—they were tried and "summarily hanged" by party activists.{{sfn|Blatman|2011|p=260}} During the spring of 1945, thousands of ''Volkssturm'' members were killed like this by Nazi Party fanatics in Franken.{{sfn|Blatman|2011|p=261}}
[[File:The British Army in North-west Europe 1944-45 BU2810.jpg|right|thumb|Two members of the ''Volkssturm'' after surrendering to British troops near [[Bocholt, Germany|Bocholt]], 28 March 1945]]