End of World War II in Europe

• 1. Introduction

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  The end of World War II in Europe came down to a single signature, placed in the early hours of the 7th of May 1945, in a schoolhouse in Reims, France. General Alfred Jodl, chief-of-staff of the German Armed Forces High Command, set his name to a document surrendering every German soldier on every front to every Allied power. The war that had consumed Europe for nearly six years was, at that moment, legally over.

  But the days before that signature were crowded with deaths, desperate escapes, and negotiations happening in secret. Adolf Hitler was dead in his bunker. Benito Mussolini's body was hanging in a Milan square. A German admiral no one had heard of was suddenly the head of state of the collapsing Reich. And even after the surrender was signed, fighting continued across Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the Atlantic coast of France for weeks.

  How did the most destructive war in European history actually end? Not in a single moment, but in a cascade of surrenders, some orderly and some chaotic, stretching from the Baltic coast to the Greek islands. The story of those final days raises questions about legality, loyalty, and what it means for a state to truly cease to exist.

• 2. The Bunker and Its Aftermath

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  On the 30th of April 1945, Adolf Hitler died by suicide in his Führerbunker beneath Berlin. His long-term partner Eva Braun died with him; Hitler had married her less than forty hours before. Soviet forces were already surrounding the city and American forces had cut off any western escape route.

  Hitler had not left the succession to chance. His will dismissed both Hermann Göring, his second-in-command, and Interior Minister Heinrich Himmler, after each had separately tried to seize power from the crumbling government. In their place, Hitler appointed Großadmiral Karl Dönitz as Reichspräsident and Joseph Goebbels as Chancellor. Goebbels died by suicide the following day, leaving Dönitz as the sole leader of what remained of Germany.

  Dönitz set up his government in Flensburg, a port city in the far north of Germany near the Danish border. The so-called Flensburg Government controlled almost nothing beyond the town itself. The Allies refused to recognize it. On the 12th of May, an Allied liaison team arrived and took quarters on a passenger ship called the Patria, moored in the harbour. Within days they concluded that they had no need to deal with Dönitz at all. On the 23rd of May, American Major General Rooks summoned Dönitz aboard the Patria and informed him that he and every member of his government were under arrest. The government was dissolved on the spot.

• 3. A Week of Surrenders

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  Berlin fell to Soviet troops on the 2nd of May. On that same day, General der Artillerie Helmuth Weidling, commander of the Berlin Defense Area, surrendered the city to General Vasily Chuikov of the Red Army. Nearly 1,000,000 men in Italy and Austria also surrendered that afternoon, at 2 pm, to British Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, following secret negotiations that had been going on without Hitler's knowledge.

  On the 4th of May, British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery accepted the unconditional surrender of all German forces in northwest Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands at Lüneburg Heath, an area lying between Hamburg, Hanover, and Bremen. Generaladmiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg and General Eberhard Kinzel signed the document. The surrender covered 1,000,000 German land, sea, and air forces.

  The following day, General Hermann Foertsch surrendered all German forces between the Bohemian mountains and the Upper Inn river to American General Jacob L. Devers at 14:30. That same afternoon, at 16:00, Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz surrendered to Lieutenant-General Charles Foulkes of the I Canadian Corps in the Dutch town of Wageningen, in the presence of Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring himself surrendered on the 6th of May to General Carl Spaatz, the American air commander, along with his wife and daughter, at the Germany-Austria border.

  When General Alfred Jodl arrived in Reims on the evening of the 6th of May, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower made the terms plain: a complete unconditional surrender to all the Allies on all fronts, or Eisenhower would close the western lines and force the remaining German soldiers to surrender to the Soviets. Dönitz, receiving Jodl's signal from Flensburg, accepted. Jodl signed at 02:41 on the 7th of May.

• 4. Prisoners, Camps, and the Scale of Collapse

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  Even before the formal surrender, the sheer scale of German military collapse was staggering. Western Allied forces captured 1,500,000 prisoners on the Western Front in April 1945 alone. At least 120,000 additional German troops were captured in the final Italian campaign during that same month. Over 800,000 German soldiers surrendered on the Eastern Front in the three to four months leading up to the end of April.

  To hold this flood of captives, Allied headquarters established the Rheinwiesenlager camps in western Germany in early April. Crucially, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force reclassified all prisoners as Disarmed Enemy Forces rather than prisoners of war. That distinction mattered enormously. It circumvented the protections guaranteed to POWs under the Geneva Convention of 1929. By October, thousands of men held in these camps had died from starvation, exposure, and disease.

  The discovery of Nazi concentration camps ran alongside the military collapse. Up to 60,000 prisoners were held at Bergen-Belsen when British troops of the 11th Armoured Division liberated it on the 15th of April. Four days later, soldiers from the American 42nd Infantry Division reached Dachau. Allied forces confirmed what Pilecki's 1943 Report had already documented about the Holocaust. Many SS guards captured at the camps were later tried and sentenced to death at Allied war crime tribunals. Some were killed outright by troops on the scene. But up to 10,000 Nazi war criminals eventually fled Europe entirely using what became known as ratlines.

• 5. Fighting After the Surrender

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  Not every German commander obeyed the order to lay down arms. The largest holdout was Army Group Centre, under Generalfeldmarschall Ferdinand Schörner, who had been named Commander-in-Chief of the Army in Hitler's own will on the 30th of April. On the 8th of May, Schörner deserted his own command and flew to Austria. The Soviet Army sent overwhelming force against his leaderless troops in the Prague offensive, forcing most units to capitulate by the 11th of May.

  Fighting continued across a wide arc of Europe well into May. The Courland Pocket in western Latvia surrendered on the 10th of May. The Atlantic Pocket of Saint-Nazaire held out until the 11th of May. The Battle of Slivice, described as the last battle in occupied Czechoslovakia, took place on the 12th of May. On the 13th of May the Red Army formally halted all offensives in Europe. The Battle of Odžak in Yugoslavia, between the Yugoslav Army and Croatian Armed Forces, did not end until the 25th of May, when remaining Croatian soldiers fled into the forest.

  Perhaps the strangest postscript belongs to a small German unit stationed on Svalbard, the Arctic archipelago far to the north. Deployed there as part of Operation Haudegen to man a weather station, the soldiers lost radio contact in May 1945 and had no way of knowing the war had ended. They finally surrendered on the 6th of September 1945, to some Norwegian seal hunters, four days after Japan formally surrendered and months after Germany itself had ceased to exist.

• 6. Legal Loose Ends

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  Allied planners had assumed a debellation had occurred, meaning the complete destruction of a hostile state that legally ends a war. That assumption shaped everything that followed. But the legal ground was shakier than it appeared. SHAEF had failed to use the surrender document prepared by the European Advisory Commission, so there had been no formal surrender by the German civilian government, only by the military.

  This troubled the Allies deeply. They remembered how Hitler had built his rise to power partly on the claim that Germany had been stabbed in the back in 1918 by a civilian government that surrendered when the army had not. They did not want to leave a similar legal opening for any future German regime.

  The Declaration Regarding the Defeat of Germany, signed by all four Allied powers on the 5th of June, formally assumed supreme authority over Germany. The Potsdam Agreement, signed on the 1st of August 1945, resettled territorial boundaries, ordered German demilitarization and denazification, and mandated the expulsion of millions of Germans from territories east of the Oder-Neisse line. France, however, had not been invited to Potsdam at American insistence, and French representatives on the Allied Control Council subsequently refused to implement the agreement, leaving much of the postwar plan for Germany a dead letter.

  Operation Keelhaul added another grim chapter. Between the 14th of August 1946 and the 9th of May 1947, up to five million displaced persons, anti-communist refugees, former Soviet POWs, and Cossacks were forcibly handed back to the Soviet Union. On return, most faced imprisonment or execution; on some occasions the NKVD began killing people before Allied troops had even left the handover points.

• 7. The Long Peace Process

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  The formal end of hostilities between the United States and Germany was not proclaimed until the 13th of December 1946, by President Truman. The Paris Peace Conference concluded on the 10th of February 1947, with treaties signed between the wartime Allies and Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland. Germany itself received no peace treaty.

  The Federal Republic of Germany was founded on the 23rd of May 1949, when its Basic Law was promulgated. The German Democratic Republic followed on the 7th of October. In 1951, a series of former Western Allies formally ended their state of war with Germany: the United Kingdom and Australia on the 9th of July, the Netherlands on the 26th of July, and the United States on the 19th of October. The Soviet Union ended its state of war with Germany in early 1955.

  Full sovereignty came piecemeal. "The full authority of a sovereign state" was granted to the Federal Republic of Germany on the 5th of May 1955, under the Bonn-Paris conventions. The treaty ended military occupation of West German territory, though the three western powers retained special rights over West Berlin. Only the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, signed after the 1990 reunification, saw all four powers renounce their remaining rights. That treaty came into force on the 15th of March 1991, allowing Allied troops, who had been permitted under the treaty's terms to remain in Berlin until the end of 1994, to withdraw by that deadline. Nearly half a century after the last shot was fired in Europe, the war's legal machinery was finally, fully, at rest.