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Only this text in English is authoritative
We the undersigned, acting by authority of the German High Command, hereby surrender unconditionally to the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces and simultaneously to the Soviet High Command all forces on land, sea and in the air who are at this date under German control.
The German High Command will at once issue orders to all German military, naval and air authorities and to all forces under German control to cease active operations at 2301 hours Central European time on 8 May and to remain in the positions occupied at that time. No ship, vessel, or aircraft is to be scuttled, or any damage done to their hull, machinery or equipment.
The German High Command will at once issue to the appropriate commander, and ensure the carrying out of any further orders issued by the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force and by the Soviet High Command.
This act of military surrender is without prejudice to, and will be superseded by any general instrument of surrender imposed by, or on behalf of the United Nations and applicable to GERMANY and the German armed forces as a whole.
In the event of the German High Command or any of the forces under their control failing to act in accordance with this Act of Surrender, the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force and the Soviet High Command will take such punitive or other action as they deem appropriate.
Signed at Rheims France at 0241 on the 7th day of May, 1945.
On behalf of the German High Command.
JODL
IN THE PRESENCE OF
On behalf of the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force.
W. B. SMITH
On behalf of the Soviet High Command.
SOUSLOPAROV
F SEVEZ
Major General, French Army
(Witness)
Supreme HQ Allied Expeditionary Force (May 7, 1945)
TOP SECRET
STAFF MESSAGE CONTROL
TOP SECRET
URGENT
TO:
AGWAR FOR COMBINED CHIEFS OF STAFF,
AMSSO FOR BRITISH CHIEFS OF STAFF
FROM:
SHAEF FORWARD, SIGNED EISENHOWER
REF NO: FWD-20798
TOO: 070325B
The mission of this Allied Force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7th, 1945.
EISENHOWER
ORIGINATOR:
SUPREME COMMANDER
AUTHENTICATION:
J B MOORE, Lt Colonel
INFORMATION:
TO ALL GENERAL AND SPECIAL STAFF DIVISIONS
FS OUT 3674
7 MAY 1945
0324B
JOB/jg
REF NO: [FND - 20798]
TOO: 070325B
FROM
(A) SHAEF FORWARD
ORIGINATOR
PRD, Communique Section
DATE-TIME OF ORIGIN
071100B May
TO FOR ACTION
(1) AGWAR
(2) NAVY DEPARTMENT
TO (W) FOR INFORMATION (INFO)
(3) TAC HQ 12 ARMY GP
(4) MAIN 12 ARMY GP
(5) AIR STAFF MAIN
(6) ANCXF
(7) EXFOR MAIN
(8) EXFOR REAR
(9) DEFENSOR, OTTAWA
(10) CANADIAN C/S, OTTAWA
(11) WAR OFFICE
(12) ADMIRALTY
(13) AIR MINISTRY
(14) UNITED KINGDOM BASE
(15) SACSEA
(16) CMHQ (Pass to RCAF & RCN)
(17) COM ZONE
(18) SHAEF REAR
(19) SHAEF MAIN
(20) HQ SIXTH ARMY GP
(21) OIA FOR OWI WASHINGTON FOR RELEASE TO COMBINED US AND CANADIAN PRESS AND RADIO AT 0900 HOURS GMT
(22) AFHQ, ROME for PWB
(REF NO.)
NONE
(CLASSIFICATION)
IN THE CLEAR
UNCLASSIFIED: Our forces liberated Pilsen, reached the vicinity of Maiersgrun and entered Wesenau, northwest of Pilsen.
To the west and south, our units reached Tschernoschin and Bischofteinitz and freed Stribro and Klattau. Our infantry reached Kunkowitz and Gutwasser.
Other elements reached to Otava River in the area 20 miles northeast of Regen.
Southeast of Pilsen, we occupied Winterberg and crossed the Muldau River to reach Schattawa.
In the area 22 miles north of Linz, our units advanced to the Muldau River. South and east of Linz we reached Leonding and Enns. Other elements advanced to Waldneukirchen, southeast of Linz.
In the vicinity of Roitham, 2,000 Hungarians surrendered to our forces.
An order by SS-Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler on April 14 that no prisoners in notorious Dachau concentration camp “shall be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive” has come into Allied possession. He had ordered the camp evacuated “immediately.”
Distinguished Allied prisoners released by Nazis included Lt. the Viscount Lascelles, nephew of King George VI; Capt. John A. Elphinstone, nephew of Queen Elizabeth; 1st Lt. John G. Winant Jr., son of the American Ambassador to Great Britain, and Gen. Bor-Komorowski who commanded the uprising in Warsaw. All had been released under Swiss diplomatic protection.
Prisoners taken in Austria included former German Ambassador von Mackensen, ex-Foreign Minister von Neurath and Gen. Beck.
Our forces in accordance with the terms of the German surrender in Holland, northwest Germany and Denmark are proceeding with the occupation of enemy-held territory.
Allied forces in the west captured 398,630 prisoners 5 May.
More than 350 heavy bombers dropped food for the Dutch population yesterday.
COORDINATED WITH: G-2, G-3 to C/S
THIS MESSAGE MAY BE SENT IN CLEAR BY ANY MEANS
/s/
Precedence
“OP” – AGWAR & WOIA
“P” - Others
ORIGINATING DIVISION
PRD, Communique Section
NAME AND RANK TYPED. TEL. NO.
D. R. JORDAN, Lt Col FA4655
AUTHENTICATING SIGNATURE
/s/
U.S. Navy Department (May 7, 1945)
Enemy positions in the Southern Sector of Okinawa were brought under fire by heavy forces of the U.S. Pacific Fleet on May 6 (East Longitude Date) and numerous blockhouses, pillboxes and other structures were destroyed. Carrier aircraft of the Fleet and planes of the Tactical Air Force gave close support to the ground troops. On the same day, U.S. carrier aircraft made neutralizing attacks on airfields of the Sakishima Group.
On May 7, troops of the Tenth Army advanced in the Southern sector. The 1st Marine Division drove southward to the edge of Dakeshi Village while the 77th Infantry Division, led by flamethrowing tanks, made gains in the center, and the 7th Infantry Division moved forward on the left flank.
From the beginning of the Okinawa operation through May 7, the enemy lost 36,535 killed in all areas of the land fighting.
A small number of enemy aircraft were over our forces in the Okinawa Area early on May 7. No damage was reported.
Search aircraft of Fleet Air Wing One attacking at masthead height with bombs and machine guns inflicted the following damage on enemy shipping in the waters around Korea on May 6:
SUNK:
DAMAGED:
Planes of Fleet Air Wing 18 in searches of Japanese waters sank three coastal cargo ships south of Honshu and probably destroyed a seagoing tug on May 7.
Mustangs of the VII Fighter Command bombed and strafed barracks, and small craft at Chichi Jima in the Bonins on May 7.
Planes of the 4th Marine Aircraft Wing made neutralizing attacks on the Marshalls on May 6. On the following day, Corsairs, Hellcats and Avengers of the same Wing and Liberators of the 7th Army Air Force attacked targets in the Palau Islands.
Deutsche Männer und Frauen!
Das Oberkommando der Wehrmacht hat heute auf Geheiß des Großadmirals Dönitz die bedingungslose Kapitulation aller Truppen erklärt. Als leitender Minister der Reichsregierung, die der Großadmiral zur Abwicklung der Kriegsaufgaben bestellt hat, wende ich mich in diesem tragischen Augenblick unserer Geschichte an das deutsche Volk.
Nach einem fast sechsjährigen heldenmütigen Kampf von unvergleichlicher Härte ist die Kraft Deutschlands der überwältigenden Macht unserer Gegner erlegen. Die Fortsetzung des Krieges hätte nur sinnloses Blutvergießen und unnütze Zerstörung bedeutet. Eine Regierung, die Verantwortungsgefühl vor der Zukunft unseres Volkes besitzt, musste aus dem Zusammenbruch aller physischen und materiellen Kräfte die Folgerung ziehen und den Gegner um Einstellung der Feindseligkeiten ersuchen.
Es war das vornehmste Ziel des Großadmirals und der ihn unterstützenden Regierung, nach den furchtbaren Opfern, die der Krieg gefordert hat, in seiner letzten Phase das Leben möglichst vieler deutschen Menschen zu erhalten. Dass der Krieg nicht sofort und nicht gleichzeitig im Westen und Osten beendet wurde, erklärt sich allein aus diesem Ziel. Wir verneigen uns in dieser schwersten Stunde des deutschen Volkes und seines Reiches in Ehrfurcht vor den Toten dieses Krieges, deren Opfer unsere höchste Verpflichtung ist. Unsere Anteilnahme und Sorge gilt vor allem den Versehrten, den Hinterbliebenen und allen, denen dieser Kampf Wunden geschlagen hat. Niemand darf sich über die Schwere der Bedingungen hinwegtäuschen, die unsere Gegner dem deutschen Volk auferlegen werden. Es gilt, ihnen ohne jede Phrase klar und nüchtern entgegenzusehen. Niemand kann im Zweifel darüber sein, dass die kommende Zeit für jeden von uns hart sein und auf allen Lebensgebieten Opfer von uns fordern wird. Wir müssen sie auf uns nehmen und loyal zu den Verpflichtungen stehen, die wir übernommen haben. Wir dürfen aber auch nicht verzweifeln und uns einer stummen Resignation hingeben. Wir müssen uns den Weg durch das Dunkel der Zukunft durch drei Sterne erleuchten und führen lassen, die stets das Unterpfand echten deutschen Wesens waren: Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit.
Aus dem Zusammenbruch der Vergangenheit wollen wir uns eines bewahren und retten: die Einigkeit, den Gedanken der Volksgemeinschaft, die in den Jahren des Krieges in der Frontkameradschaft draußen, in der gegenseitigen Hilfsbereitschaft in allen Nöten daheim ihren schönsten Ausdruck gefunden hat. Wir werden diese Kameradschaft und Hilfsbereitschaft in den kommenden Nöten des Hungers und der Armut ebenso brauchen wie in den Zeiten der Schlachten und der Bombenangriffe. Nur wenn wir uns diese Einigkeit erhalten und nicht wieder in streitende Klassen und Gruppen auseinanderfallen, können wir die künftige harte Zeit überstehen.
Wir müssen das Recht zur Grundlage unseres Volkslebens machen. In unserem Volk soll Gerechtigkeit das oberste Gesetz und die höchste Richtschnur sein. Wir müssen das Recht als die Grundlage der Beziehungen zwischen den Völkern aus innerer Überzeugung anerkennen und achten. Die Achtung vor geschlossenen Verträgen soll uns ebenso heilig sein wie das Gefühl der Zusammengehörigkeit unseres Volkes zur europäischen Völkerfamilie, als deren Glied wir alle menschlichen, moralischen und materiellen Kräfte aufbieten wollen, um die furchtbaren Wunden zu heilen, die der Krieg geschlagen hat.
Dann können wir hoffen, dass die Atmosphäre des Hasses, die heute Deutschland in der Welt umgibt, einem Geist der Versöhnung in den Völkern weicht, ohne den eine Gesundung der Welt gar nicht möglich ist, und dass uns die Freiheit wieder winkt, ohne die kein Volk ein erträgliches und würdiges Dasein führen kann.
Wir wollen die Zukunft unseres Volkes in der Besinnung auf die innersten und besten Kräfte des deutschen Wesens sehen, die der Welt unvergängliche Werke und Werte gegeben haben. Wir werden mit dem Stolz auf den Heldenkampf unseres Volkes den Willen verbinden, als Glied der christlich abendländischen Kultur in redlicher Friedensarbeit einen Beitrag zu liefern, der den besten Traditionen unseres Volkes entspricht.
Möge Gott uns im Unglück nicht verlassen und unser schweres Werk segnen!
U.S. State Department (May 7, 1945)
855.001 Leopold/5-745: Telegram
Brussels, May 7, 1945 — 8 p.m.
[Received May 7 — 11:05 a.m.]
614.
Following is a translation of memorandum handed me today by Acting Foreign Minister:
In the memorandum which it prepared concerning the terms which should be imposed on Germany following its capitulation, a memo which was handed in due time to the European Advisory Committee, the Belgian Government outlined the very great importance of obtaining without any delay the liberation of His Majesty The King as well as that of the members of his family.
At a time when the end of hostilities appears imminent the Belgian Government expressed the wish that its request that an order in this sense be given to the German authorities be given to the local military authorities as well as to the central German authorities in the event that a general capitulation of Germany should not occur.
Copies of this memorandum were also handed to British and French Ambassadors.
In handing me the memorandum M. Vos explained that the Belgian Government wished to go on record as having done everything in its power to obtain the release of the King as soon as possible in view of the controversy concerning the King’s return. The Government is finding it hard to convince the Belgian people that it is still without knowledge of the King’s whereabouts.
SAWYER
I have agreed with the London and Moscow governments that I will make no announcement with reference to surrender of the enemy forces in Europe or elsewhere until a simultaneous statement can be made by the three governments. Until then, there is nothing I can or will say to you.
U.S. State Department (May 7, 1945)
740.00119 EW/5-745
Washington, May 7, 1945 — 1:45 p.m.
Admiral Leahy telephoned me and said that the situation on the announcement of V-E Day was terribly confused and he wanted me to know the background of the latest information. He stated that we have an agreement with Stalin and Churchill to make the announcement at 9 o’clock tomorrow morning but Churchill today raised the devil because he said he had to make the announcement right away and wanted to make it at noon today. Admiral Leahy said the President declined to do it then and said that he had arranged with Stalin and Churchill to announce it at 9 o’clock and he could not violate his agreement without the assent of Stalin. Admiral Leahy said they had been trying to get in touch with Stalin but so far have had nothing from him except the vague thought that he doesn’t know the terms and can’t make an announcement as yet. Admiral Leahy said he had heard later through BBC that Churchill was going to make the announcement at 3 o’clock. He said that he also had heard that de Gaulle is going to announce it at 2 o’clock. He stated that nobody has any control over de Gaulle and that this action was typical of him. I agreed with Admiral Leahy and remarked that de Gaulle was acting just like a naughty boy. Admiral Leahy said he spoke to the President about 20 minutes ago and thought it was definite for 9 o’clock tomorrow morning. He said that the only way the thing would be stopped would be for Stalin to ask us not to announce it yet. Admiral Leahy also said that he had been in touch with Eisenhower who said he had made no announcement and has kept it as secret as it could be kept. He said he would not make any announcement until it was released here. I said I understood it had leaked through AP. Admiral Leahy said the Germans are talking freely in plain language about it so everyone knows it. I said at any rate the only people who would be displeased about the whole thing would be the newspapermen.
Moscow, May 7, 1945
[Translation]
I am in receipt of your message of May 7, about announcing Germany’s surrender. The Supreme Command of the Red Army is not sure that the order of the German High Command on unconditional surrender will be executed by the German armies on the Eastern Front. We fear, therefore, that if the Government of the USSR announces today the surrender of Germany we may find ourselves in an awkward position and mislead the Soviet public. It should be borne in mind that the German resistance on the Eastern Front is not slackening but, judging by the intercepted radio messages, a considerable grouping of German troops have explicitly declared their intention to continue the resistance and to disobey Dönitz’s surrender order.
For this reason the Command of the Soviet troops would like to wait until the German surrender takes effect and to postpone the Government’s announcement of the surrender till May 9, 7 p.m. Moscow time.
740.00119 EW/5-745: Telegram
Moscow, May 7, 1945 — 2 p.m.
[Received 3:15 p.m.]
1487.
I wish to invite attention to my several telegrams pointing out the markedly casual and inconspicuous treatment which the Soviet press has given to the surrenders of German forces in Italy and in the Western Theater and the general crumbling of German resistance there. News of these events has been made available to the Soviet public only in minor back page items in the daily press, has been accompanied by no editorial comment of any sort and has not been singled out in any way for the attention of the readers.
It is not possible to be sure of the motives dictating this extreme reserve in releasing news of victories which one might have thought would be highly gratifying to both the Soviet Government and public. The most likely explanation, in my opinion, is that the Soviet leaders, while not daring to withhold the news entirely are not happy over the fact that the big local surrenders have been exclusively to our forces and not to theirs; that they do not wish it to be suggested that the forces of the Western nations are less feared and hated than the Soviet forces among the peoples of central Europe and that they choose not to draw the attention of their public to the full extent of German disintegration until they are able to announce complete surrender and cessation of resistance on all fronts, including their own, and to attribute this primarily to the heroic efforts of the Red Army.
Sent Department as 1487, repeated to Paris for Reber and Murphy as 101.
KENNAN
Monday, May 07, 1945
THE VOICE OF DESTRUCTION: ‘You may have begun man, but I, Adolf Hitler, will finish him.’
Fate knocked at the door last week for Europe’s two fascist dictators. Mussolini, shot in the back and through the head by his partisan executioners, lay dead in Milan. Adolf Hitler had been buried, dead or alive, in the rubble of his collapsing Third Reich. Whether or not he had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage (as reported from Stockholm), or had “fallen in his command post at the Reich chancellery” (as reported by the Hamburg radio, which said that he had been succeeded as Führer by Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz), or was a prisoner of Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler as a political force had been expunged. If he were indeed dead, the hope of most of mankind had been realized. For seldom had so many millions of people hoped so implacably for the death of one man.
If they had been as malign as he in their vengefulness, they might better have hoped that he would live on yet a little while. For no death they could devise for him could be as cruel as must have been Hitler’s eleventh-hour thoughts on the completeness of his failure. His total war against non-German mankind was ending in total defeat. Around him, the Third Reich, which was to last 1,000 years, sank to embers as the flames fused over its gutted cities. The historic crash of what had been Europe’s most formidable state was audible in the shrieks of dying men and the point-blank artillery fire against its buckling buildings.
All that was certain to remain after 1,000 years was the all but incredible story of the demonic little man who rose through the grating of a gutter to make himself absolute master of-most of Europe and to change the history of the world more decisively than any other 20th-century man but Lenin. Seldom in human history, never in modern times, had a man so insignificantly monstrous become the absolute head of a great nation. It was impossible to dismiss him as a mountebank, a paper hanger. The suffering and desolation that he wrought was beyond human power or fortitude to compute. The bodies of his victims were heaped across Europe from Stalingrad to London. The ruin in terms of human lives was forever incalculable. It had required a coalition of the whole world to destroy the power his political inspiration had contrived. How had it happened? If it was necessary to exterminate Hitler and his works, it was equally necessary to try to understand him.
Clearly so absurd a character, so warped and inadequate a mind, despite its coldblooded political discernment, could not in so short a time have worked such universal havoc if it had not embodied forces of evil in the world far greater than itself.
Everything – backward environment, shabby heredity, dingy ambitions, neurotic sensitivity – prepared Hitler for his future role. But the beginnings of the future scourge of mankind were bucolic, even idyllic. Hitler was born (1889) at Braunau in Austria-Hungary, among the blue foothills of the Tirolean redoubt.
From his mother, the 20-year-old third wife of his 53-year-old father, Hitler inherited his psychotic blue-green eyes, and probably his tendency to tantrums and his anemic artistic talent. From his father, who had risen by a lifetime’s effort from a peasant to a petty customs inspector, Hitler probably inherited a toughness of character that was not so much strength as a persistent stubbornness in overcoming weakness.
He was a somewhat strident boy, who early tried out the Führerprinzip (leader principle) by bossing his schoolmates (“I became a little ringleader at that time”). One day he discovered an account of the Franco-Prussian War in two old popular magazines. “Before long that great heroic campaign had become my greatest spiritual experience.”
The Führerprinzip had no effect on Hitler’s father, who wanted his son to become a petty official. Hitler wanted to become an artist. The long struggle between them was ended only by the death of his father. Then his mother sent him to art school. Two years later she died. Young Hitler packed his few clothes in a suitcase and struck out for Vienna.
It was a momentous trip for mankind. For in gay, cosmopolitan, highly civilized Vienna the young German nationalist from the Alps suffered for the first time three new urban experiences that profoundly influenced his future: the slum proletariat, Social Democratic trade unions, Jews.
His political education kept pace with his human observations. Hitler learned to know trade unions when he got a job as a bricklayer. “When I was told I had to join, I refused." The radical talk of his fellow workers disgusted him.
Adolf tried to reason with his fellow bricklayers. “I argued till finally one day they applied the one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force." He was learning fast. Hitler was given the choice of quitting the job or being tossed off the scaffold. He quit. He also took to reading Socialist literature and attending Socialist meetings to find out what it was all about. His researches led him to a conclusion that was to blossom later into the horrors of concentration camps like Maidanek, Buchenwald and Dachau.
Soon Hitler was reaching equally luminous conclusions about the Jews. He began to read the publications of Vienna’s violently anti-Semitic Mayor Doktor Karl Lueger and his Christian Socialist Party. “One day when I was walking through the inner city, I suddenly came upon a being clad in a long caftan, with black curls. Is this also a Jew? was my first thought… But the longer I stared at this strange face and scrutinized one feature after the other, the more my mind reshaped the first question into another form: Is this also a German?"
Soon young Hitler’s researches had revealed to him that the Jew is the enemy of all mankind, but by special malice, the peculiar enemy of the Germans.
In 1912 Hitler moved from racially impure Vienna to Munich. There he continued to live a slum existence, eking out a bare living by peddling his watercolor paintings. There in June 1914, the news reached him that a Serbian nationalist had shot and killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo.
When Germany declared war and even the Social Democrats voted the war credits, Hitler was transported. Since he was an Austrian, he asked for and received permission to join a Bavarian regiment. The war was wonderful. The army was more wonderful. Hitler was made a corporal, received an Iron Cross, was wounded, and later gassed. While he was recuperating in a hospital near Berlin, news came of the German Revolution of 1918, and of the Armistice that was to save Germany from Allied invasion. Hitler buried his face in his pillow and wept. Then he decided to give up art and architecture for a new profession: “I, however, resolved now to become a politician.”
One more step was necessary: the newly minted politician must find a political party. Hitler found it in the German Workers’ Party, a tiny group which the Bavarian Reichswehr officers had sent him to observe. He became member No. 7 of the little party which was later to become the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis). He found an impressionistic economic program in the scrambled economic theories of another member, Gottfried Feder. And he found something much more important – his voice. One night a visitor said some friendly words about Jews. Without thinking twice, Hitler burst forth in speech. He had become an orator.
Then Hitler made one of the most valuable mistakes of his life: he and his handful of Party comrades decided to seize the Bavarian Government. Hitler had promised to kill himself if the attempt failed. Instead he went to jail in the Landsberg prison in a cozy cell (compliments of friendly officials).
In Landsberg, with the help of Rudolf Hess, he wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle). Seldom has a plotter set forth his purposes in plainer language or more explicit detail. The book was badly organized, but in it were the plans for Hitler’s aggression against Germany and the rest of the world. The intellectuals contented themselves with laughing at Hitler’s ideas and correcting his literary style.
Hitler had been sentenced to jail for five years. He was out in nine months.
His prestige had increased. One by one the perverse paladins of the Nazi inner circle gathered around him:
Hermann Goring, the former flyer and drug addict.
Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, the unsuccessful novelist who became the Nazi Party’s satirically clever propagandist.
Joachim von Ribbentrop, the champagne salesman who became No. 1 Nazi diplomat.
Julius Streicher, the obscene and sadistic Jew-baiter who became Gauleiter of Franconia.
Captain Ernst Rohm, the homosexual organizer of the Brown Shirts, who was shot in the Blood Purge.
Slowly the Party extended its connections among financiers, industrialists and Government men. For Hitler had learned one lesson from the Beer Hall Putsch: legal, not violent, revolution was the strategy for Germany.
The education of Adolf Hitler was all but completed. The terrible education of the world was about to begin.
It began with Germany. To Germany Hitler and his Party offered to sell protection against Marxism.
It was a purpose that most non-Communist Germans could understand. For in the election that was to carry the Nazis to power the German Communist Party polled 5,970,833 votes. The Nazis fought Communism with the weapons of Communism. To oppose the Communist troops (Red Front Fighters), the Nazis used the Brown Shirts. In place of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Nazis offered the dictatorship of the Nazi Party. In place of Bolshevism’s scapegoat, the bourgeois, the Nazis offered the Jew. In place of internationalism, the Nazis offered fanatical German nationalism. In place of one dominating class (the proletariat), the Nazis offered the people (Volk).
In place of unemployment, the Nazis offered an economy geared to war production, with jobs for all. In foreign affairs the Nazis clamored for a revision of the Versailles Treaty.
The scheme worked. How well, time quickly told:
In 1928 the Nazis won twelve Reich stag seats; in 1930 they won 107; in 1932, 230.
In January 1933, senescent President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor.
In June 1934, Hitler carried through the Blood Purge and became absolute Führer of the Nazi Party. In August Hitler became absolute head of the German state.
In 1935 the Saar returned to Germany.
In 1936 Germany reoccupied the Rhineland and signed the anti-Comintern pact with Japan.
The same strategy that had succeeded in Germany was transferred to foreign affairs; only, this time the Nazis sold protection against Russia.
In March 1938 Hitler seized Austria.
In September, he enticed Britain’s aging, fatuous Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to Munich. There the Sudetenland was ceded to Germany as the price of “peace in our time."
In March 1939, Hitler occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. A few days later, he took Memel from Lithuania. In April he made territorial demands on Poland. Britain threatened war. On August 23, Germany and Russia agreed to sign a non-aggression pact. A week after it was initialed, the Wehrmacht overran Poland. World War II had begun.
Last week, with their country four-fifths conquered by the Allies, Nazi fanatics were still forcing the Germans to fight on. There was little left to fight for or with.
From Germany TIME Correspondent Percival Knauth cabled:
If Hitler is today lying dead on a street in Berlin, like Benito Mussolini on a sidewalk in Milan, there will be few people in Germany who will be mourning his passing. The few will be the Nazi Party’s fanatic core who still believe in Nazism, and for that belief and for the sake of their own lives fight on. A growing majority of Germans, however, are looking on Adolf Hitler today with bitterness and angry despair as the man who gambled them and their lives away.
This realization is dawning on Germans as they come out of the trance-like state in which they fought the war until the Allied armies crossed the Rhine. It is not the realization of their own measure of responsibility for what has happened to them; if that comes to them it might be their salvation. It is an awakening which is expressing itself in the old cry heard after the last world war: “Wir sind belogen und betrogen warden” – “We have been lied to and betrayed.”
I heard that cry in Leipzig last week expressed in just those words. The janitor of an apartment house which stood alone in a street of utter wreckage buttonholed me, shook his fist in my face and cried: “You must tell your people how we’ve been lied to and betrayed! Every day we see it more and more! Every day we have more and more proof of how those men have ruined us! And they’re still fighting, letting us be killed – they’d drag our whole country down to death with them if they could!"
And someone else in Leipzig said to me, a young girl whom I had known before the war who has a two-and-a-half-year-old son now and a husband somewhere down in Austria: they gambled everything away, everything. We are lost as a nation. If I had known when I was in school that this was going to happen, I would have committed suicide.
It is the same picture in all parts of occupied Germany which I have seen and where I have talked to Germany’s little people. When the Nazis left their towns and villages a world came to an end for them. Leaderless, helpless, they watched the Americans come in. As a mass they did not know what to do. Without newspapers, without radio, without all the thousand and one accustomed details with which the Nazis had organized their daily lives and influenced their daily thought, they slowly began to realize the full scope of the catastrophe which had befallen them, how thoroughly they had been cut off from and ostracized by the outside world which was now bursting in upon them with such cataclysmic power.
It is what they have lost that is haunting the Germans now. As long as the Nazis were still there, exhorting them, promising them victory and restoration, most of them did not fully realize how complete their loss actually was. It is a material loss measurable in homes destroyed, industries bombed into ruins, fortunes burned up in incendiary bombs. It is a moral loss felt in the loss of national honor, independence and dignity. It is the loss of every foundation of their lives, and many Germans already and probably many more to come see only one way out: suicide.
In that respect it seems that even the war has not changed the German character. It has not infused new political strength into these people who can not only be led, hypnotized, to their own destruction, but can actually be made to participate in it. In all the various emotions which the Germans are feeling now – fear, anger, hopelessness, bitterness, shame, servility and helplessness – there is one which you will rarely find and that is a sense of guilt, the sense of being responsible personally and as a nation for what has happened.
Most Germans realize now or profess to realize that this war was unnecessary and wrong. But they still don’t go beyond that to the salient realization that Nazism and everything that went with it was wrong. The main reason the war seems wrong to them is because they lost it. They place the blame on Hitler because he got them into it; if he had won the war few people in Germany today would be concerned with the question of whether the war was right or wrong.
Judging by present appearances, it does not seem likely that Adolf Hitler will go down in German history as a martyred leader. All last week the radio was propagandizing him as the nation’s military and spiritual leader fighting at the head of his troops in Berlin. Nobody I met was in any way impressed. But when rumors circulated that the Führer had been killed in Berlin, Germans began to stop Allied soldiers on the streets to ask them if it was true. What they were concerned about, however, was not whether Hitler was alive or dead. What they said was: “If it is true, then finally perhaps the war will end.”
For the German people, as for the rest of the world, the end of World War II would bring – had already brought – one tremendous, if negative, good: the end of the monstrous historical lie embodied in Nazism and its perverted practices. Hitler, if he were still able to wonder what his historical function had been as everything crumbled, might say with Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust: I am
Ein Teil von jener Kraft,
Die stets das Böse will
und stets das Gute schafft.
(Part of that force,
That is forever willing evil,
continually produces good.)
The Pittsburgh Press (May 7, 1945)
Last-minute hitch delays proclamation – AP barred in Europe
By Phil Ault, United Press staff writer
LONDON, England – The British Ministry of Information tonight said that tomorrow “will be treated as Victory in Europe Day.”
In Washington, President Truman said that he was withholding any announcement in reference to the surrender of enemy forces in Europe until he could complete arrangements for simultaneous statements in Washington, London and Moscow.
A German broadcast today reported the surrender of all remaining German forces in Europe. The Flensburg radio said it was making the announcement by authority of Adm. Karl Doenitz and the German High Command.
The British Ministry of Information statement said that “tomorrow, Tuesday, will be treated as Victory in Europe Day, and will be regarded as a holiday.” Prime Minister Churchill will broadcast at 3 p.m. (9 a.m. ET) tomorrow and King George at 9 p.m. (3 p.m. ET tomorrow).
EDITOR’S NOTE: A flat announcement of an unconditional German surrender was carried by the Associated Press, but not by the United Press or International News Service (Hearst). It was not carried by important foreign news services.
Allied Supreme Headquarters in Paris announced that the filing facilities of the Associated Press had been suspended throughout the European Theater of Operations.
Earlier an announcement was made that the AP’s filing privileges at SHAEF had been suspended.
AP headquarters in New York said they had no immediate statement to make.
Radio broadcasts from London shortly after noon today said that Prime Minister Churchill and President Truman were ready to announce officially the end of the war in Europe, but that Marshal Stalin “has still not agreed.”
The broadcast said that telephone conversations between the Big Three had been held this morning. The broadcast was made by Edward R. Murrow of the Columbia Broadcasting System.
The reports of German surrender started today with a German broadcast that all remaining Nazi forces have surrendered.
A speaker identified as German Foreign Minister Count Ludwig Schwerin von Krosigk announced over the Flensburg radio at 2:09 p.m. (8:09 a.m. ET) that the high command of the German Armed Forces had surrendered unconditionally all “fighting German troops” today.
The order for surrender was given by Doenitz, the broadcast said. It came on the 2,074th day of the European War.
Though the surrender order was not confirmed immediately, it presumably covered the almost one million German troops still holding out in Norway, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Yugoslavia, the French coast and the Channel Islands.
Only an hour earlier, the BBC, in its Danish service, broadcast a report that the Norwegian garrison had capitulated. Speedy confirmation of the surrender of the other German forces was expected.
Schwerin von Krosigk’s announcement was carried over the German station at Flensburg on the German-Danish border. Though behind the Allied lines, Flensburg was declared an open city by the Germans earlier this week and apparently has not been occupied by Allied forces.
A transcript of von Krosigk’s remarks was recorded by BBC and rushed to 10 Downing St., where the British Cabinet was in session under Prime Minister Churchill.
The greater proportion of German forces already was in Allied hands following piecemeal surrenders along the Western Front. The German armies in Northern Italy surrendered last Wednesday, those in Denmark, Holland and Northwest Germany on Saturday and those in Western Austria Sunday.
Details of the surrender of the German garrison in Norway were lacking, but Stockholm dispatches said Hans Thomsen, German Ambassador to Sweden, was believed to have delivered the documents of capitulation to Allied legations in the Swedish capital this morning.
Thomsen was said to have journeyed across the Swedish-Norwegian border to Lillehammer last night to confer with Gen. Franz Boehme, German commander in Norway, and Reich Commissar Josef Terboven.
Arrangements for the surrender presumably were completed at the Lillehammer conference. Included in the capitulation presumably were between 200 and 300 German submarines and a number of surface warships that had sought refuge from Allied bombs in Norwegian fjords.
The surrender was believed to have been made jointly to the United States, Britain and Russia. BBC said Marshal Sir Bernard L. Montgomery rejected a German offer to surrender to the Western Allies alone and informed the enemy that any offer must be to Russia as well.
Vidkun Quisling, premier of the Norwegian puppet government, and other high Nazi leaders also held lengthy conferences at the Royal Castle at Oslo over the weekend, Stockholm said.
There were some reports that the Germans were seeking to arrange to surrender en masse to neutral Sweden for internment. German soldiers have been surrendering in large groups to Sweden for a number of months.
Informed Czechoslovak sources in London said it was “entirely possible” that tank vanguards of Lt. Gen. George S. Patton’s U.S. Third Army already were in Prague this afternoon.
The Czechs said they had reliable information that Gen. Patton’s forces were only 12½ miles from Prague at 6 a.m. However, they added that German troops on the west bank of the Vltava River bisecting the capital, were between the Americans and Czech patriots in the eastern portion of the city.
The eastern or newer part of Prague was said to be held firmly by the patriots. Thus, the Germans out on the west bank faced imminent entrapment between the patriots and the Third Army.
Official American accounts of the Third Army’s progress ran far behind those from patriot sources.
A dispatch from the Third Army front said three columns were converging on Prague. One was 50 miles southwest of the capital after capturing Pilsen, home of the giant Skoda arms works.
Another, from the 4th Armored Division, advanced 25 miles to Brez, 48 miles southwest of Prague and 24 miles southeast of Pilsen, and a third, also from the 4th Armored Division, entered Boschowitz, 52 miles southwest of Prague and 41 miles southeast of Pilsen.
All three columns were meeting little or no resistance.
German broadcasts admitted that the Russians had burst through the Nazi lines 130 miles east of Prague.
The U.S. Fifth Army joined in the final assault on the southeastern redoubt with an invasion of Austria through the Alpine passes east of Brenner from Northern Italy, roughly 100 miles from the Third Army’s southern flank.
The Red Army virtually completed the conquest of Germany’s Baltic coast with the clearing of Ruegen Island, a mile off the Mecklenburg shore and 35 miles southeast of Denmark.
Has nothing to say now on surrender
WASHINGTON (UP) – President Truman said today that he was withholding any announcement in reference to the surrender of enemy forces in Europe until arrangements could be completed for a simultaneous statement here, in London and in Moscow.
He said:
I have agreed with the London and Moscow governments that I will make no announcement with reference to the surrender of the enemy forces in Europe or elsewhere until a simultaneous statement can be made by the three governments.
Until then, there is nothing I can or will say to you.
The President’s statement was directed to the crowd of press and radio reporters that besieged the White House for news.
White House Press Secretary Jonathan Daniels, who released Mr. Truman’s statement, would not comment on the announcement by the British Ministry of Information that tomorrow would be treated as V-E Day in Britain with Prime Minister Churchill speaking to the British public at 9 a.m. ET tomorrow.
The White House earlier had repeated its announcement of more than a week ago that Mr. Truman would make a broadcast to the American public on V-E Day. It refused, however, to say when the broadcast would be made. In view of the arrangement for simultaneous announcements, and Mr. Churchill’s decision to speak tomorrow, it seemed likely that Mr. Truman would also make his proclamation tomorrow.
‘Nothing definite’ now
Democratic Leader John W. McCormack (D-Massachusetts) told the House today that “nothing definite can be said now” concerning the surrender situation in Europe, “although it is hoped some official proclamation might be made some time this afternoon.”
In a statement to the House, Speaker Sam Rayburn said that although he had been in communication with the White House, he “knows nothing more than any other member of the House.”
Without waiting for an announcement, several members took the floor to discuss the situation.
Rep. Frances Bolton (R-Ohio) said she was distressed to learn that New York was celebrating the end of the European war without regard for the “broken homes.”
“What is wrong with us as a nation?” she asked.
She said Times Square was filled with “paper and people” all of whom were rejoicing. except the few hiding personal grief.
Rep. Francis Case (R-South Dakota) reminded the House that today was the 30th anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania in the last war and said history had taken a “full turn” since that disaster.
Rep. Clare Hoffman (R-Michigan) said 40 or 50 million Americans wanted to know now how many Pacific islands would have to be recovered for the British and the Dutch after American security was assured.