End of World War II in Europe

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File:Red army soldiers raising the soviet flag on the roof of the reichstag berlin germany.jpg
During the Battle for Berlin, the Red Flag was raised over the Reichstag, May 1945.

The final battles of the European Theatre of World War II as well as the German surrender took place in late April and early May 1945.

Surrender timeline

Soviet and American troops met at the River Elbe - 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.

Mussolini dead - On April 27, as Allied forces closed in on Milan, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was captured by Italian Partisans. He was trying to flee Italy to Switzerland and was traveling with a German anti-air battalion. On April 28, Mussolini and several of the other Fascists captured with him were taken to Dongo and executed. The bodies were then taken to Milan and unceremoniously strung up in front of a gasoline station.

Hitler dead - On April 30, as the Battle of Berlin raged above him and realizing that all was lost, German dictator Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker along with Eva Braun, his long-term mistress and wife. Braun had married Hitler just hours before their joint suicide. In his will 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.

German forces in Italy surrender - On May 1, SS General Karl Wolff and the Commander-in-Chief of the German Tenth Army, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, after prolonged unauthorised secret negotiations with the Western Allies named Operation Sunrise, 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.

German forces in Berlin surrender - The Battle of Berlin ended on May 2. On this date, General of the Artillery Helmuth Weidling, the commander of the Berlin Defense Area, unconditionally surrendered the city to General Vasily Chuikov of the Soviet army.[1] On the same day the officers commanding the two armies of Army Group Vistula north of Berlin, (General Kurt von Tippelskirch commander of the German Twenty-First Army and General Hasso von Manteuffel commander of Third Panzer Army) surrendered to the Western Allies.[2]

German forces in north west Germany, Denmark and Holland surrender - On May 4, 1945, the British Field Marshal Montgomery took the unconditional military surrender from General Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, 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."[3] 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.[4][5][6][7][8]

U-boats cease operation - 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).[7][8] In Dresden, Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann let it be known that a large-scale German offensive on the Eastern Front was about to be launched. Two days later, Mutschmann was captured by Soviet troops while trying to escape.[9]

File:Paradejack.jpg
Deposition of captured 1st SS Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler standards by Soviet soldiers near the Kremlin Wall during the Victory Parade, June 24, 1945.

German forces in Breslau surrender - 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.[8] 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 Friedeburg 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.[10] Eisenhower explicitly told Jodl that he would order western lines closed to German soldiers, thus forcing them to surrender to the Soviets.[10] 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.[10][8]

Jodl and Keitel surrender all German armed forces unconditionally - 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[11] It included the phrase "All forces under German control to cease active operations at 2301 hours Central European Time on May 8 1945."[3][12] The next day, General Wilhelm Keitel and other German OKW representatives traveled to Berlin, and shortly before midnight signed a similar document, explicitly surrendering to Soviet forces, in the presence of General Georgi Zhukov.[13] The signing ceremony took place in a villa in an eastern suburb of Berlin, in the town of Karlshorst.[14]

Victory in Europe - 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.

The government of Donitz ordered dissolved by Eisenhower - Karl Dönitz continued to act as the German 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 given no regard after the surrender on May 8th. On May 23, 1945 a British liaison officer was sent to Flensburg and read to the Flensburg government Eisenhower's order dissolving the government and ordering the arrest of its members. 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, 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.][15]

de facto becomes de jure - 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.

Concentration camps and refugees

Thousands of Holocaust victims arriving at the Nazi extermination camp at Birkenau in 1944.

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 11 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.

See also

Further reading

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Footnotes

  1. ^ Dollinger, Hans. The Decline and Fall of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 67-27047. p. 239
  2. ^ Ziemke, Earl F. Battle For Berlin: End Of The Third Reich, NY:Ballantine Books, London:Macdomald & Co, 1969. p. 128
  3. ^ a b The German Surrender Documents - WWII
  4. ^ The Papers of Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein Imperial War Museum
  5. ^ Instrument of surrender of all German forces in HOLLAND, in northwest Germany including all islands, and in DENMARK
  6. ^ Veteran remembers 'war of words' BBC 4 May, 2005
  7. ^ a b World War II Timeline:western Europe: 1945
  8. ^ a b c d Ron Goldstein Field Marshal Keitel's surrender BBC additional comment by Peter - WW2 Site Helper
  9. ^ [Page 228, "The Decline and Fall of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan", Hans Dollinger, Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 67-27047]
  10. ^ a b c Ziemke, Earl F. Battle For Berlin: End Of The Third Reich, NY:Ballantine Books, London:Macdomald & Co, 1969. p.130
  11. ^ 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 will and 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:
    • The Second Army, under the command of General von Saucken, on the Heiligenbeil and Danzig beachheads, on the Hela Peninsula in Vistula delta surrended on May 9 as did the forces on the Greek islands; and the garrisons of St. Nazaire, La Rochelle, Lorient and La Pallice.
    • On May 13, the Soviet Army halts all offensives in Europe. Isolated resistance pockets in Czechoslovakia were mopped up by this date.
    • 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.
  12. ^ 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
  13. ^ Ziemke Further reading CHAPTER XV:The Victory Sealed Page 258 last paragraph
  14. ^ Currently, the villa is a museum called the German Russian Museum in Karlshorst.
  15. ^ Declaration Regarding the Defeat of Germany
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