End of World War II in Europe
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The final battles of the European Theatre of World War II and the German surrender took place in late April and early May 1945.
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[edit] Timeline of surrender
On April 25, Soviet and American troops linked up, cutting Germany in two (see Elbe Day). The first units to make contact were from the U.S. 69th Infantry Division of the U.S. First Army and the Soviet 58th Guards Division of the 5th Guards Army near Torgau, on the river Elbe.
On April 30, 1945, realizing that all was lost, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker along with Eva Braun, his long-term mistress who had married him hours before their joint suicide. In his last testament Hitler appointed his successors; Karl Dönitz as the new Reichspräsident ("President of Germany") and Joseph Goebbels as the new Reichskanzler (Chancellor of Germany). However, Goebbels committed suicide on May 1 1945, leaving Dönitz to orchestrate negotiations of surrender. Dönitz appointed Ludwig von Krosigk as Reichskanzler.
On May 1 SS General Karl Wolff, after prolonged unauthorised secret negotiations named Operation Sunrise, with the Western Allies, and the Commander-in-Chief of the German Tenth Army, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, which were viewed as trying to reach a separate peace by the Soviet Union, ordered all German armed forces in Italy to cease hostilities and signed a surrender document which stipulated that all German forces in Italy were to surrender unconditionally to the Allies on May 2. The Battle of Berlin ended on May 2, when the commandant, General Helmuth Weidling, surrendered the city to the Soviet army.
On May 4 1945, the British Field Marshal Montgomery took the unconditional military surrender from Grand Admiral Hans Georg von Friedburg, and General Hans Kinzel, of all German forces "in Holland, in northwest Germany including the Frisian Islands and Heligoland and all other islands, in Schleswig-Holstein, and in Denmark… includ[ing] all naval ships in these areas"<ref name="GSD">The German Surrender Documents - WWII</ref> on Lüneburg Heath; an area between the cities of Hamburg, Hanover and Bremen. As the operational commander of some of these forces was Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, this signaled that the European war was over.<ref>The Papers of Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein Imperial War Museum</ref><ref>Veteran remembers 'war of words' BBC 4 May, 2005</ref><ref name="TWE">World War II Timeline:western Europe: 1945</ref><ref name="FNKS">Ron Goldstein Field Marshal Keitel's surrender BBC additional comment by Peter - WW2 Site Helper</ref>
On May 5 Dönitz ordered all U-boats to cease offensive operations and return to their bases. At 14:30 General Hermann Foertsch surrendered all forces between the Bohemian mountains and the Upper Inn river to the American General Jacob L. Devers, commander of the American 6th Army Group. At 16:00 General Johannes Blaskowitz, the German commander-in-chief in the Netherlands, surrendered to Canadian General Charles Foulkes in the small Dutch town of Wageningen in the presence of Prince Bernhard (acting as commander-in-chief of the Dutch Interior Forces).<ref name="TWE"/><ref name="FNKS"/>
On May 6 at 18:00, General Hermann Niehoff the commandant of Breslau, a fortress city surrounded and besieged for months, surrendered to the Soviets. Half an hour later General Alfred Jodl arrived in Rheims and following Dönitz's instructions offered to surrender all forces fighting the Western Allies. This was exactly the same negotiating position that von Friedburg had initially made to Montgomery, and like Montgomery the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, threatened to break off all negotiations unless the Germans agreed to a complete unconditional surrender. Jodl sent a signal to Dönitz, who was in Flensburg, informing him of Eisenhower's position. Shortly after midnight Dönitz, accepting the inevitable, sent a signal to Jodl authorizing the complete and total surrender of all German forces.<ref name="FNKS"/>
At 02:41 on the morning of, May 7 1945, at the SHAEF headquarters in Rheims, France, the Chief-of-Staff of the German Armed Forces High Command, General Alfred Jodl, signed the unconditional surrender documents for all German forces to the Allies<ref>General Franz Böhme announced the unconditional surrender of German troops in Norway on May 7, the same day as Jodl signed the unconditional surrender document. Although the military commanders of most German forces obeyed the order to surrender issued by the German Armed Forces High Command (German acronym OKW), not all commanders did so. The largest contingent not to do so were Army Group Centre under the command of Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner who had been promoted to Commander-in-Chief of the Army on April 30 in Hitler's last testament. Like many institutions in Nazi Germany the control of the Army was split between the OKW and the German Army High Command (OKH). By 1945 the OKW commanded all German forces in every theatre apart from those on the Eastern Front which were under OKH control and which, before his suicide, had reported directly to Hitler. So it was not clear if Schörner was under the command of OKW on May 8 or if Dönitz, or von Krosigk, needed to order Schörner to surrender. In the end it was resolved by force of arms. On May 8, Schörner deserted his command and flew to Austria and the Soviet Army sent overwhelming force against Army Group Centre in the Prague Offensive forcing all German units in Army Group Centre to capitulate by May 11 (some sources state 12 May). The other forces which did not surrender on May 8 surrendered piecemeal:
- Army Group Courland the only other sizable pocket not to surrender on May 8 surrendered on May 9; as did the Second Army, under the command of General von Saucken, on the Heiligenbeil and Danzig beachheads, on the Hela Peninsula in Vistula delta; the forces on the Greek islands; and the garrisons of St. Nazaire, La Rochelle, Lorient and La Pallice.
- The garrison on Alderney, one of the Channels Islands occupied by the Germans, surrendered on May 16 one week after the garrisons on the other Channel Islands which surrendered on May 9.
- The Georgian Uprising of Texel (April 5, 1945–May 20, 1945) was Europe's last battlefield in World War II. It was fought between Soviet Georgian POWs on Texel against the German occupiers of that Dutch island.</ref>. It included the phrase "All forces under German control to cease active operations at 2301 hours Central European Time on May 8 1945"<ref name="GSD"/><ref>During the summers of World War II, Britain was on British Double Summer Time which meant that the country was ahead of CET time by one hour. This means that the surrender time in the UK was "effective from 0001 hours on 9 May". RAF Site Diary 7/8 May</ref>. The next day, shortly before midnight, German officials in Berlin signed a similar document, explicitly surrendering to Soviet forces, in the presence of General Georgi Zhukov.<ref>Ziemke Further reading CHAPTER XV:The Victory Sealed Page 258 last paragraph</ref>
News of the surrender broke in the West on May 8, and celebrations erupted throughout Europe. In the United States Americans awoke to the news and declared May 8 V-E Day. As the Soviet Union was to the east of Germany it was May 9 Moscow Time when German military surrender became effective, which is why Russia and many other European countries east of Germany commemorate Victory Day on May 9.
Karl Dönitz continued to act as head of state, but his Flensburg government (so-called because it was based at Flensburg and controlled only a small area around the town) was not recognised by the Allied powers and was dissolved when its members were captured and arrested by British forces on May 23, 1945 at Flensburg. The Allies had a problem, because they realised that although the German armed forces had surrendered unconditionally, SHAEF had failed to use the document created by the "European Advisory Commission" (EAC) and so the civilian German government had not. This was considered a very important issue, because just as the civilian, but not military, surrender in 1918 had been used by Hitler to create the "stab in the back" argument, the Allies did not want to give a future hostile German regime a legal argument to resurrect an old quarrel. Eventually they decided not to recognise Dönitz and to sign a four-power document instead, creating the Allied Control Council which included the following:
- The Governments of the United States of America, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United Kingdom, and the Provisional Government of the French Republic, hereby assume supreme authority with respect to Germany, including all the powers possessed by the German Government, the High Command and any state, municipal, or local government or authority. The assumption, for the purposes stated above, of the said authority and powers does not affect the annexation of Germany. [US Department of State, Treaties and Other International Acts Series, No. 1520.]
On 5 July 1945 the four powers signed the document in Berlin and the de facto became the de jure. In July/August 1945 the Allied leaders planned the new postwar German government, resettled war territory boundaries, ordered German demilitarization, denazification and settlements of war reparations at the Potsdam Conference.
[edit] Concentration camps and refugees
In the last months of the war and immediately afterwards, Allied soldiers discovered a number of concentration camps and other locations that had been used by the Nazis to imprison and exterminate an estimated 10 million people. The largest single group represented in this number were Jewish (roughly half the total according to the Nuremberg trials), but Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals and various minorities and disabled persons, as well as political enemies of the Nazi regime (particularly communists) formed the remainder. The most well-known of these camps is the death camp Auschwitz in which about two million prisoners were killed. Although the Nazi genocide or Holocaust was largely unknown to the Allied soldiers fighting the war, it has become an inseparable part of the story of World War II.
In May and June 1945 thousands of refugees from Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were rounded up by the Western Allies in Austria and handed over to the Soviets and the Yugoslavs in Operation Keelhaul. The Soviets and the Yugoslavs executed or deported many of them (an example being the Bleiburg massacre). Also defeated Finland and neutral Sweden felt compelled to extradite Ingrian and Baltic refugees in a similar manner, some of whom committed suicide before the extradition.
[edit] Partitioning
The former Third Reich was partitioned as previously agreed by the Allies. Some parts like East Prussia were divided between Poland and the USSR. Other German lands, to the East of the Oder River, were transferred to Poland. This reassignment resulted in the deportation or expulsion of ethnic Germans from the occupied eastern territories, resulting in an estimated 0.5 million to 3 million civilian casualties. Germany proper (the area making up present day Germany), excluding Berlin, was divided into four military zones of military occupation: American, British, French and Soviet. The line of contact between American and Soviet forces at the end of hostilities was not congruous with the pre-arranged occupation zones. After two months of holding areas that were over a hundred miles deep into what would become East germany, American forces withdrew to the agreed upon bounderies in July of 1945, allowing Soviet troops to take their place.
With tensions rising in the beginning of what would later be known as the Cold War, the zones controlled by the "Western Allies" (USA, UK, France) in 1949 united to form the Federal Republic of Germany (generally known as West Germany or FRG in English, referred to in German as the Bundesrepublik Deutschland or BRD), to the exclusion of the Soviet Zone. In response, the Soviet Zone later that same year became the German Democratic Republic (generally known as East Germany or GDR, referred to in German as Deutsche Demokratische Republik or DDR).
Austria, which had been become part of the Third Reich in 1938 (see Anschluss), was recreated and was partitioned in a similar way. In 1955 Austria signed the Austrian State Treaty and, under the condition of future neutrality, the country again became a fully independent republic.
Berlin, which was also partitioned into four zones, remained under formal military occupation until September 12, 1990 when the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany was signed by the four powers and the two German governments which was the final peace treaty and the restoration of German sovereignty. This allowed German reunification to take place on October 3, 1990 and the reunited country became fully sovereign again on March 15, 1991. Germany signed a separate treaty with Poland confirming their present border the same year.
[edit] See also
- Battle of Berlin
- Prague Offensive
- Debellatio
- Allied Commissions
- Council of Foreign Ministers
- German Instrument of Surrender
- Japanese Instrument of Surrender
- Paris Peace Treaties of 1947
- Four Power Agreement on Berlin
- line of contact
- Morgenthau Plan
[edit] Further reading
- Earl F. Ziemke "The U.S. Army in the occupation of Germany 1944-1946" Center of Military History, United States Army, Washington, D. C., 1990, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 75-619027
- Deutsche Welle special coverage of the end of World War II -- features a global perspective.
- On this Day 7 May 1945: Germany signs unconditional surrender
- Account of German surrender
- London '45 Victory Parade, photos and the exclusion of the Polish ally
- Multimedia map of the war (1024x768 & Macromedia Flash Plugin 7.x)
[edit] Footnotes
