German Instrument of Surrender

• 1. Introduction

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  The German Instrument of Surrender was signed at 22:43 Central European Time on the 8th of May 1945, in a building that had served as the seat of the Soviet Military Administration in the Berlin district of Karlshorst. But by that point, Germany had already technically surrendered once before, in a red brick schoolhouse in Reims, France, the previous day. The question hanging over the final hours of World War II in Europe was not whether Germany would capitulate, but who would witness it, where it would happen, and whether the document would actually hold.

  How did a single military collapse require two separate surrender ceremonies? Why did the Soviet Union refuse to recognize the first one? And what happened in the tense hours between the Reims signing and the definitive act in Berlin, when German forces in the east were still fighting? The answers run through a web of diplomatic disputes, a broken news embargo, and a deliberate strategy by Germany's last leader to save as many soldiers as possible from Soviet captivity.

• 2. The Flensburg Government

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  On the 30th of April 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide inside his Führerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery. In his final testament, he named Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor with the title of Reichspräsident, a position that had sat vacant since the Weimar Republic. Dönitz moved quickly to establish a government at Flensburg, on the Danish border.

  The Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the German military high command under Wilhelm Keitel, joined him there on the 2nd of May. It had relocated in stages from Krampnitz near Potsdam, then to Rheinsberg during the Battle of Berlin, before reaching Flensburg. Dönitz presented his administration as unpolitical, yet the Nazi Party was not banned, no leading Nazis were detained, and the symbols of Nazism stayed in place. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans were willing to treat this rump government as a legitimate representative of the German state.

  When Hitler died, German armies were still deployed across a vast arc: the Atlantic coast pockets of La Rochelle, Saint-Nazaire, Lorient, Dunkirk, and the Channel Islands; the Greek islands of Crete, Rhodes, and the Dodecanese; most of Norway; Denmark; the northwestern Netherlands; northern Croatia; northern Italy; Austria; Bohemia and Moravia; the Courland peninsula in Latvia; and multiple positions inside Germany itself. Dönitz knew he could not win. His goal was to buy time.

• 3. Partial Surrenders and Stalling

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  From the 2nd of May 1945, the Dönitz government pursued a deliberate policy of successive partial capitulations in the west. On the 4th of May, German forces facing the British and Canadian 21st Army Group signed an act of surrender at Lüneburg Heath, taking effect on the 5th. On the 5th of May, all German forces in Bavaria and Southwest Germany surrendered to the Americans at Haar, outside Munich, effective the following day.

  The strategy was calculated. Dönitz and Keitel were resolved against ordering any surrender to Soviet forces. Their anti-Bolshevism was undiminished, but there was also a practical concern: they could not be confident such orders would be obeyed. If soldiers refused a direct order to surrender, they would lose their legal status as prisoners of war. So instead, German forces in the east were ordered to fight westward to reach American or British lines.

  Dönitz also continued a seaborne evacuation from the Hela peninsula, moving soldiers and civilians across the Baltic. General Eisenhower eventually recognized what was happening. Conscious that the Soviet command would suspect a separate peace was being arranged with the Western Allies, he issued an ultimatum: no further partial surrenders would be accepted. Representatives of the Dönitz government were instructed to come to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force at Reims to agree a general surrender covering all fronts simultaneously.

• 4. The Reims Signing and its Limits

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  Dönitz's representative, Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, reported back on the 6th of May that Eisenhower was demanding immediate, simultaneous, and unconditional surrender on all fronts. General Alfred Jodl traveled to Reims to argue for a delay, but Eisenhower closed off discussion. At 9:00 pm on the 6th, he announced that if no complete capitulation was received, he would seal British and American lines to German soldiers at midnight on the 8th of May and resume bombing.

  Jodl telegraphed Dönitz, who authorized him to sign but pushed for a 48-hour delay to allow surrender orders to reach outlying units. That grace period was back-dated to the start of final negotiations. At 02:41 CET on the 7th of May, Jodl signed on behalf of the German High Command in the Reims schoolhouse. General Walter Bedell Smith signed for the Allied Expeditionary Force, General Ivan Susloparov for the Soviet High Command, and French Major-General François Sevez as official witness.

  There was a problem from the start. The text of the act had been telegraphed to General Aleksei Antonov of the Soviet High Command in the early hours of the 7th, but no Soviet approval had been confirmed before the ceremony. Nor was it clear that Susloparov had been empowered to sign. Eisenhower and Susloparov agreed on a separate undertaking: fully accredited German representatives from all three armed services would attend a formal ratification at a time and place still to be designated. The Reims document was provisional by design.

• 5. Soviet Objections and the Berlin Decision

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  About six hours after the Reims signing, the Soviet High Command responded. The act was unacceptable. Susloparov had no authority to sign. The text differed from what had been agreed by the European Advisory Commission. These were the stated grounds, but the Soviet objection ran deeper. The surrender of Nazi Germany should be a singular historical event reflecting the Soviet people's central role in the victory. It should not be held on liberated French soil but in Berlin, at the seat of the government from which German aggression had originated.

  Eisenhower agreed without difficulty. He acknowledged the Reims act as a preliminary instrument and arranged for the German commanders in chief of all three armed services to be flown from Flensburg to Berlin on the 8th of May. He also issued a statement that any German forces continuing to fight the Soviets after the stated deadline would no longer hold the status of soldiers, and if they then surrendered to American or British forces, they would be handed to Soviet captivity.

  Despite this, fighting continued in the east. General Ferdinand Schörner, commanding Army Group Centre, broadcast to his troops on the 8th of May denouncing what he called false rumors that the OKW had surrendered to the Soviets as well as the Western Allies. The Dönitz government was still ordering resistance against Soviet forces, exploiting the 48-hour grace period to redouble efforts to move troops westward. Dönitz had authorized the Reims signing in bad faith.

• 6. Berlin, 8 May 1945

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  The German officers flown to Berlin on the 8th of May were kept waiting through the day. The Allied delegation did not arrive until 10:00 pm, at which point the amended surrender text was handed to them for the first time. Because Eisenhower technically outranked Marshal Georgy Zhukov as Supreme Allied Commander for Western Europe, the act of signing on behalf of the Western Allies fell to his deputy, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder.

  The identification of the Allied signatories proved contentious. French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny was to sign for the French High Command, but that created an expectation of an American signature on the definitive document. The Soviets would accept no more than three Allied signatories in total, one of whom had to be Zhukov. After repeated drafts, all requiring translation and retyping, it was agreed that both French and American signatures would appear as witnesses. Carl Spaatz signed for the United States in that capacity.

  The physical signing was not complete until nearly 01:00 am on the 9th of May. The documents were back-dated to 22:43 CET on the 8th of May to align with the public announcements Western leaders had already made. Field Marshal Keitel, the senior German representative, initially objected to the amended text and requested a 12-hour grace period before punitive action could be taken against non-compliant forces. He had to settle for a verbal assurance from Zhukov. Admiral Friedeburg was the only German officer to have been present at all three surrender signings: Lüneburg Heath on the 4th of May, Reims on the 7th, and Berlin on the 8th.

• 7. The Broken Embargo and Two Victory Days

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  The Reims ceremony had been attended by reporters operating under a 36-hour news embargo. When it became apparent that a second, definitive signing would be needed, Eisenhower maintained the blackout. American journalist Edward Kennedy of the Associated Press in Paris broke the embargo on the 7th of May. The German surrender became front-page news in the western press on the 8th.

  With the story already public, it was politically impossible to hold to the original announcement schedule. Western leaders agreed to celebrate Victory in Europe Day on the 8th of May, but delayed their formal proclamations until that evening, when the Berlin ceremony was expected to be imminent. The Soviet government made no public acknowledgment of the Reims signing, which it did not recognize. The Soviet Union observed Victory Day on the 9th of May 1945, because under Moscow time the Berlin document was signed after midnight.

  Both dates have held. Today, the 8th of May and the 9th of May are each recognized as the end of World War II in Europe, the difference a function of time zones and the diplomatic fracture that produced two ceremonies. On the 23rd of May 1945, in Flensburg, Karl Dönitz and other members of the rump Nazi government were taken into captivity as prisoners of war. Admiral Friedeburg, who had negotiated and signed Germany's surrender more times than anyone, took his own life that same day.

• 8. Legal Aftermath and German Statehood

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  The 8th of May 1945 marked the end of Germany as a diplomatic entity. The United States State Department had prepared for this outcome throughout the final weeks of April, notifying neutral governments and protecting powers that, following the German surrender, the continued identity of the German state would rest solely with the four Allied Powers. On the 8th of May, those arrangements were put into effect: German diplomatic staff were recalled, German state property was transferred, and the protecting power functions of Switzerland and Sweden were extinguished.

  The surrender instrument itself had been signed only by military representatives, leaving the full civil provisions for unconditional surrender without explicit formal footing. On the 5th of June 1945, the Berlin Declaration addressed this gap. The four Allied Powers adopted the European Advisory Commission's text, redrafted as a unilateral declaration, which confirmed that Germany had no government or central authority and that civil authority had passed entirely to the Allied Representatives, who subsequently formed the Allied Control Council.

  Stalin had already moved away from the principle of dismembering Germany. In his victory proclamation to the Soviet people on the 8th of May, he publicly renounced any such policy. Consequently, the dismemberment clause that had been negotiated at Yalta did not appear in the Berlin Declaration. Germany would remain a region under foreign occupation, without a state of its own, until the establishment of West Germany on the 23rd of May 1949.