under this army. The army was tasked with holding Holland as a "fortress" under all circumstances. Blumentritt presented his assessment to Rundstedt that the Allied forces, in the aftermath of the failed attempt to swing north through Arnhem, would bypass Holland and cross the Rhine further south (an accurate prediction), thus cutting off the forces in Holland. However, Hitler refused to evacuate the country and consequently the German forces in Holland later fell into Allied hands without a major battle. It was also during this time that Blumentritt received the Oak Leaves (Eichenlaub) to the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross. He was the 741st person to receive this award. Later, the Germans were pushed back to the Ruhr and, after the war Blumentritt disagreed with the Allies′ strategy in the west, discussing the precarious nature of the German position with its meager one armoured division against the twelve of the Allies, and he stated that had Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's Anglo-Canadian 21st Army Group been unleashed earlier for a concentrated armoured assault (as he had wished) rather than fighting on a broad front, "Such a breakthrough ... would have torn the weak German front to pieces and ended the war in the winter of 1944." On 27 March 1945, Blumentritt briefly assumed command of the increasingly demoralized 1st Parachute Army and then, from 8 April commanded "Army Group Blumentritt"—an ad-hoc collection of depleted units on the Weser river from Hameln to the Baltic Sea—up to the end of the war. He was tasked to delay the Anglo-Canadian advance into northern Germany and he attempted to keep the Baltic sea ports open as long as possible so that German refugees could escape from the Russian advance in the east. On 2 May, after the death of Hitler on 30 April, Blumentritt ordered his men to give no further resistance to the allies and to fall back gradually. In early May, Blumentritt acted as a first emissary to General Montgomery for the surrender of the German forces in the North-West. After the war After capitulation on 5 May, Blumentritt and his command cooperated in demobilization, under orders from the British 2nd Army, and the taking of prisoners did not take place until 1 June. He was captured in Schleswig-Holstein and was placed in a British prisoner-of-war camp by 1 December, was interrogated by the International Military Tribunal for the Nuremberg Trials