Flensburg Government

• 1. Introduction

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  The Flensburg Government was a ghost state, nominally ruling a country that was already gone. On the 30th of April 1945, Adolf Hitler died by suicide in his Berlin bunker as Soviet forces closed in. Within hours, the machinery of Nazi Germany had to appoint a successor. The man chosen was Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, a naval officer with no experience of civil government, who found himself head of a regime with shrinking territory, no diplomatic recognition, and armies dissolving on every front. He set up shop in a naval academy near the Danish border. His government lasted exactly three weeks. What did those three weeks look like? Who was in the room? What were they actually trying to accomplish? And how, exactly, does a dictatorship come to its formal end?

• 2. The Succession Problem

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  Hitler's political testament created an immediate constitutional puzzle. He had named Dönitz as President and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels as Chancellor - but the appointment had no legal basis even under Nazi law. The Weimar Constitution, still formally in force, made the presidency an elected office, not an appointed one. The Enabling Act of 1933, which had given Hitler sweeping legislative powers, had explicitly stated in its Article 2 that the president's powers were to remain "undisturbed".

  Goebbels committed suicide in the Führerbunker on the 1st of May 1945, which eliminated the designated Chancellor before the government even convened. Dönitz accepted both the role of Supreme Commander and Head of State that same day, delivering separate broadcast addresses to the armed forces and to the German people.

  The question of who would actually serve below Dönitz had a surprising answer: Hitler's former Finance Minister, Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, who had earlier met with Dönitz at Wehrmacht barracks near Plön in Holstein. Dönitz asked him to constitute a new Reich government, partly because he suspected that Martin Bormann might have escaped Berlin and be angling for power himself.

• 3. The Cabinet's Grim Roster

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  On the 2nd of May 1945, Schwerin von Krosigk's cabinet held its first meeting in Eutin. The roster Dönitz assembled was presented publicly on the 5th of May. Julius Heinrich Dorpmüller became Minister of Transport and Communications. Herbert Backe remained Minister for Food and Agriculture. Albert Speer replaced Walther Funk as Minister of Economics. Franz Seldte replaced Theo Hupfauer as Minister for Labour, and Herbert Klemm replaced Otto Georg Thierack as Minister of Justice.

  Dönitz avoided the most prominent Nazi figureheads, but the men he did choose carried appalling records. Herbert Backe had authored the Hunger Plan of 1941, a deliberate strategy to kill Soviet prisoners of war and urban Soviet populations through starvation. Speer's deputy in the Economics ministry was Otto Ohlendorf, who had personally directed the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Communists in occupied Soviet territory. Wilhelm Stuckart had attended the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, where administrative responsibilities for the Final Solution were assigned. Of 350 staff working in the offices at Flensburg, 230 had been members of the SS or other security services.

  Three ministries were abolished outright: the Air Ministry, the Ministry for Occupied Eastern Territories, and the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. The ministries for Armaments and Church Affairs no longer played any functional role.

• 4. The Himmler Problem

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  Heinrich Himmler had been condemned as a traitor by Hitler's own testament and ordered arrested. Dönitz had no desire to associate his new government with Himmler's name. Yet he could not move against him. The SS remained armed, powerful, and loyal to Himmler personally - and Dönitz feared that any direct challenge would fracture his already tenuous authority.

  The situation was further complicated because Hitler's testament had named a specific successor to Himmler: Paul Giesler, whom Dönitz detested. Rather than act on Hitler's instructions, Dönitz simply ignored them. He continued meeting Himmler daily throughout early May while extending vague hints about a possible future role, stringing him along without any formal appointment.

  By the 5th of May, with surrender negotiations to Eisenhower underway, the presence of the SS leadership in Flensburg had become untenable. Dönitz informed Himmler he was being dismissed, and offered false identity papers to him and his senior lieutenants if they left immediately. Himmler gathered the SS leadership for a final meeting that day, advised them to disperse within the Wehrmacht, and they vanished. It was only on the 6th of May that Dönitz formally stripped Himmler of all posts.

  The SS departure came too late for the concentration camp prisoners under Dönitz's nominal authority. Around 10,000 prisoners, mostly former inmates of the Neuengamme camp outside Hamburg, had been moved by the SS onto a flotilla of unseaworthy ships anchored in the Bay of Lübeck between the 16th and the 28th of April. On the 3rd of May 1945, the Royal Air Force sank the flotilla in the mistaken belief that the ships were being used to evacuate SS leadership. Over 7,000 prisoners drowned, the majority aboard the former liner Cap Arcona. The Flensburg government made no attempt to free them and later avoided any acknowledgement that they had known the prisoners were there.

• 5. Partial Surrenders and Maneuver

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  Dönitz's central strategic goal was to surrender to the Western Allies while keeping German forces fighting the Soviets in the east, hoping to split the alliance. On the 3rd of May, he sent Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg to the headquarters of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery at Lüneburg. The offer on the table was surrender of German forces in northwest Germany and elements of Army Group Vistula. Montgomery refused to accept any arrangement that excluded the Eastern Front, but agreed to accept the surrender of all German forces in Northwestern Germany, Schleswig-Holstein, the Netherlands, and Denmark.

  Friedeburg signed that instrument on the 4th of May. It came into effect at 8:00 am on the 5th. Dönitz tried to exploit the window: he ordered all ships involved in Operation Hannibal - the maritime evacuation of troops trapped on the Baltic coast - to conduct a final covert voyage before the deadline. He also unilaterally ordered all U-boat actions to cease. When one crew in the evacuation fleet refused to sail, Dönitz ordered the ringleaders arrested, tried by summary court martial, and shot.

  Montgomery had provided Friedeburg with a German-language text of the surrender documents, but apparently deemed it unnecessary to release it to the press since only the English text was officially authentic. Dönitz and Krosigk noticed the gap immediately. They broadcast their own altered German version, which described the surrender not as a capitulation but as a "truce", and omitted the Baltic warships and the territory around Flensburg itself. The broadcast deepened Stalin's suspicions of the partial surrenders and confirmed to Eisenhower that no further partial capitulations would be accepted.

  A parallel scheme unfolded in Bohemia. Dönitz and Karl Frank, the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, proposed dissolving the Protectorate and installing a puppet Czech government that would declare Prague an open city and invite General George S. Patton's American forces in. Frank hoped this could "engineer a disagreement between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union even more serious than that of Poland". The Prague uprising on the 5th of May overtook the plan. SS forces responded to the insurgents with brutal reprisals against civilians, with orders to firebomb the entire Old Town averted only by lack of Luftwaffe fuel. Alerted through intercepted Ultra signals, Eisenhower ordered Patton to remain in Pilsen. Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev's forces relieved Prague on the 9th of May 1945.

• 6. The General Surrender

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  Jodl arrived at Eisenhower's headquarters in Reims, France, on the 6th of May, ostensibly to sign a general surrender. Dönitz's instructions were to delay for as long as possible so that German troops and refugees could move west. Eisenhower made the Allied position unambiguous: unconditional surrender on all fronts, to all the Allies, or nothing. When stalling became obvious, Eisenhower threatened to seal the western front against any Germans attempting to cross from the east, forcing all subsequent surrenders to the Soviets. Dönitz radioed Jodl full powers to sign at 1:30 am on the morning of the 7th of May. Just over an hour later, Jodl signed.

  US Army General Walter Bedell Smith signed for the Western Allies. General Ivan Susloparov, the Soviet liaison officer at SHAEF, signed for the Soviets. French Major General François Sevez signed as witness. But the Soviet High Command had not confirmed that Susloparov was empowered to sign, and hours later a message arrived from General Aleksei Antonov stating the terms were unacceptable. Eisenhower promptly agreed to a definitive ratification ceremony in Berlin.

  Antonov had also noted that Dönitz, in direct breach of the signed surrender, was still instructing German forces in the east to maintain resistance and flee westwards rather than remain in position. Antonov proposed that the Berlin signing should make clear that the service commanders were surrendering on the authority of the German High Command itself, not as delegates of Dönitz or the Flensburg government.

  The second, amended instrument was signed at Karlshorst, Berlin, on the 8th of May shortly before midnight. Marshal Georgy Zhukov signed for the Soviet High Command. British Marshal of the Royal Air Force A. W. Tedder signed for the Western Allies. French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny and US Army Air Forces General Carl Spaatz signed as witnesses. Keitel signed as Chief of the Armed Forces High Command. Friedeburg signed as Commander in Chief of the Kriegsmarine. General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff signed as Deputy Commander of the Luftwaffe, since Field Marshal Robert Ritter von Greim had been injured.

• 7. Three Weeks in Limbo

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  After the 8th of May, the Flensburg government found itself an enclave surrounded by occupied territory, ignored by the Western Allies and denounced by the Soviets. Sweden, Switzerland, and Ireland announced the breaking off of relations; the German state ceased as a diplomatic entity on that same date. Japan, which had been Germany's principal remaining ally, promptly seized the German embassy in Tokyo and took custody of seven U-boats.

  Japanese ambassador Hiroshi Oshima and his legation were among those taken into Allied custody, captured by the US Army at Bad Gastein in Austria after Hitler had ordered them out of Berlin. The Soviet Union's newspaper Pravda described the Flensburg ministers as a "Dönitz Gang" on the 20th of May, and derided any suggestion of employing them as a provisional government. Winston Churchill was more cautious, having publicly named Dönitz as "the designated Head of the German State" in his victory speech on the 8th of May, and he privately urged letting the situation slide for a while, calculating that the Flensburg enclave gave Britain a bargaining counter regarding Soviet intentions in the western Baltic.

  Inside the headquarters, the cabinet still met daily at 10:00 am. Papers on post-war reconstruction were proposed. Debate continued about which Nazi insignia and symbols should be retained within the building. Armed German guards continued to march outside buildings still flying the Nazi flag. US Major General Lowell Ward Rooks arrived on the 12th of May aboard the passenger ship Patria in Flensburg harbour. On the 17th of May, Rooks, Foord, and Ambassador Robert D. Murphy recommended immediately dissolving what they called "the so-called acting government".

  Operation Blackout began at 10:00 am on the 23rd of May. British troops of the Cheshire Regiment and the Herefordshire Regiment, supported by tanks of the 15th/19th Hussars, occupied government buildings. Two Royal Navy destroyers, Zodiac and a second vessel, were deployed in Flensburg Fjord to prevent escape by sea. By 11:30 am, 5,000 German prisoners had been taken. Dönitz, Friedeburg, and Jodl were brought aboard the Patria and informed of the dissolution. They were strip-searched for concealed poison. Faced with that prospect, Friedeburg committed suicide. Dönitz, Schwerin von Krosigk, Speer, and Jodl were taken prisoner under the command of RAF Regiment Squadron Leader Mark Hobden. Some, including Speer, were later transferred to the British POW camp Dustbin at Kransberg Castle. All Camp Ashcan prisoners, including Dönitz, were eventually moved to Nuremberg to stand trial.

• 8. The Berlin Declaration

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  The arrest of the Flensburg Government on the 23rd of May left Germany with no central authority at all. That vacuum held for nearly two weeks. On the 5th of June 1945, the four Allied Powers signed the Declaration Regarding the Defeat of Germany and the Assumption of Supreme Authority by Allied Powers - the Berlin Declaration.

  The declaration was signed at 18:00 in Berlin. Eisenhower signed for the United States, Montgomery for the United Kingdom, Zhukov for the Soviet Union, and de Tassigny for the Provisional Government of the French Republic. The text stated that the four governments "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", while adding that this assumption did not constitute the annexation of Germany.

  The declaration drew heavily on a draft instrument the European Advisory Commission had prepared but which had never been used in the Reims or Berlin surrender ceremonies. That draft was reworked into a unilateral declaration with an extended explanatory preamble, spelling out the Allied position that Germany's total defeat had left it without a government - a vacuum the Allied Powers would now fill directly.

  During the initial occupation phase, the Allied Control Council, formed jointly by the four powers, served as the direct successor to the Dönitz Administration in governing German national territory. After the Potsdam Agreement of the 2nd of August 1945, the Council limited its jurisdiction to German territory west of the Oder-Neisse Line, implementing the decision to place Germany's pre-war eastern territories under direct Polish and Soviet administration.