On May 7, 1945, 70 years ago this week, the German military surrendered to the Western Allies in Reims, France. The next day Soviet officials, feeling as though they'd been snubbed at the moment of victory, demanded that the Germans surrender again to their representatives in Berlin.
Early 1945 saw the vast German war machine that Adolf Hitler had created crumbling. As the American, British and Free French forces drove into Germany from the west, Josef Stalin's Red Army barreled toward Berlin from the east. Indeed, Stalin delighted in playing his two top generals, Georgi Zhukov (1st Belorussian Front) and Ivan Konev (1st Ukrainian Front), off against each other in the drive to the German capital.
By mid-April, the Western Allies were firmly entrenched in western Germany, while the Red Army surrounded Berlin. April 20 saw Hitler celebrate his last birthday, followed 10 days later by his suicide. Hitler, who had amalgamated the German political offices of president (head of state) and chancellor (head of government) into the new post of Führer in 1934, separated them again with his death. His political testament decreed that the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, be named chancellor and that the politically reliable head of the German navy, Grand Adm. Karl Dönitz, be promoted to the Reich's president.
Any influence that Goebbels may have wielded in the post-Hitler German government was short-lived, however. He killed himself along with his wife and six children the day after Hitler's death. Other surviving Nazi bigwigs — SS head Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's secretary Martin Bormann, and Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering — soon found themselves isolated and without support in the new regime. Eventually, Himmler killed himself after being captured by a British patrol, Bormann was killed attempting to escape the Soviet ring around Berlin and Goering soon surrendered to the Americans.
Dönitz soon fled to Flensburg near the Danish border. By this point, geographically, the Third Reich encompassed little more than a few hundred miles near Flensburg, some territories in the south like Bavaria and Austria, and a few foreign territories like Denmark, Norway and a chunk of Holland. The Americans and Soviets had cut Germany in two at Trogau on the Elbe on April 25.
Dönitz set up a cabinet in Flensburg — what was to become the Third Reich's second and last government. Former German finance minister Schwerin von Krosigk was tapped to become Dönitz's foreign minister. Wilhelm Stuckart, architect of the infamous Nuremberg Laws and attendee of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, became the new government's interior minister. Albert Speer, the minister for armaments and war production, as well as Hitler's personal architect, expanded his brief to include the German economy as a whole.
Though Dönitz did not surrender when he took up his duties on April 30, the admiral was under no illusions. Nothing could prevent the complete collapse of the Third Reich. Its enemies had proven too powerful, too coordinated and too relentless in their desire to smash Hitler's Germany. So why did Dönitz keep fighting?
The Reich's president had a twofold goal. First, he wanted to buy time for German soldiers fighting the Soviets to disengage and make their way west, where they could surrender to the British and the Americans. Surrendering German soldiers could expect far better treatment from the Western Allies than they could from the Soviets, who had been known to torture and even execute surrendering Germans in retaliation for German war crimes in Russia.
Second, Dönitz hoped, as Hitler had, that he could drive a wedge in between the Western Allies and the Soviets. If Britain and America could somehow detach themselves from the Soviet Union, perhaps they would join Germany in fighting the Red Army. It was a fanciful notion, and one that perhaps even Dönitz didn't believe was actually possible, but during the first week of May 1945, it was the only card the Germans had left to play.
In the book “The Third Reich at War,” historian Richard J. Evans wrote: “Dönitz's tactic was partially successful, allowing over one and three-quarter million German troops to surrender to the Americans or the British instead of the Soviets, whose tally of prisoners amounted to less than a third of the total. But his bid to negotiate a separate general capitulation to the Western Allies met with a brusque rejection.”
U.S. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, recognized what Dönitz was trying to do regarding the German soldiers. To end the war as quickly as possible, Eisenhower announced on the evening of May 6 that if the Germans did not surrender within 48 hours he was going to close the American lines to surrendering Germans.
Dönitz's negotiating agent at Eisenhower's headquarters in Reims was Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of German military operations. Upon hearing Eisenhower's ultimatum he radioed Flensburg for instructions. Though Dönitz considered Eisenhower's demand “sheer extortion,” he gave Jodl the authority to sign an instrument of surrender.
On Monday, May 7, shortly after 2 a.m., Jodl and another German officer were ushered into a room, past 20 or so reporters and photographers, and signed the instrument of surrender before roughly a dozen Allied officers, including U.S. Gen. Beetle Smith. Eisenhower remained in his office, not far from the historic moment, smoking. In the book “The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945,” historian Rick Atkinson wrote:
“When Smith and others had finished countersigning each sheet, Jodl stood, leaning forward slightly with his fingertips pressed against the tabletop. 'I want to say a word,' he told Smith in English ... 'The German people and the German armed forces are, for better or worse, delivered into the victors' hands ... In this hour I can only express the hope that the victor will treat them with generosity.'”
Though a Soviet general had been present at Reims, Stalin was furious at the circumstances of the German surrender for several reasons. First, the Soviet leader remembered only too well the myth that had emerged in Germany after its defeat in World War I. Many Germans believed that since the German army had still held significant portions of French territory, and the armistice had been signed in France, that Germany was never defeated on the battlefield, but stabbed in the back by traitors on the homefront. Stalin wanted Germany to know that it was defeated by signing a surrender document in Berlin, the heart of Nazi Germany.
Second, Stalin's ever-suspicious mind feared the British and Americans might be secretly plotting with the Germans to continue the war against the Red Army. Only a week before, SS Gen. Karl Wolff had negotiated the surrender of German forces in northern Italy, and the Western Allies had not consulted Stalin as to the terms. He feared that being constantly kept out of the loop might hide more sinister Western intentions toward the USSR.
Finally, and perhaps most important not only to Stalin but to the Red Army and the Soviet people, no nation had bled as much in the fight against Hitler as his own. The Soviets lost about 27 million people during the war, with only about 8 million being military casualties. Should a nation which had lost so many, which had suffered so much, and whose contribution had been arguably more essential than any other's be relegated to merely an observer status at the war's conclusion? The Soviets justifiably believed they had earned the right to look the vanquished in the eye at the moment of triumph.
Zhukov made arrangements for a second surrender ceremony at a German army engineering school at Karlshorst, an eastern Berlin neighborhood. Late in the evening of May 8, British Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, U.S. Gen. Carl Spaatz and French Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny arrived, and soon the Allied officers negotiated with their Soviet counterparts over the text of the surrender documents. Finally, when the documents were ready, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was shown in, leading the German delegation.
In the book “Russia's War: A History of the Soviet War Effort, 1941-1945,” historian Richard Overy wrote: “Keitel struggled to maintain his dignity. His face was blotchy and red, his hand shook. As he walked to the table to sign the surrender his monocle dropped form his eye and dangled by its cord. He had, Zhukov later recalled, 'a beaten look,' though other witnesses thought the Germans 'arrogant and dignified.' At exactly forty-three minutes past midnight the ceremony was complete.”
Zhukov then made a speech before hosting a feast for the Allied officers, then, along with the other Red Army generals, began to dance in celebration. The next day, in the early morning hours, the Soviet government announced the German surrender to its people. After nearly four long years, what was known in the USSR as “The Great Patriotic War” had finally come to an end.
Cody K. Carlson holds a master's in history from the University of Utah and teaches at Salt Lake Community College. An avid player of board games, he blogs at thediscriminatinggamer.com. Email: ckcarlson76@gmail.com