On the afternoon of 8 May 1945 aircraft landed at Tempelhof carrying the Allied delegations and the Germans who would sign the final surrender. The Western delegation was led by Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Eisenhower’s deputy. The German delegation, flown from Flensburg under British escort, was led by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the armed forces high command, with Admiral von Friedeburg for the navy and Colonel General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff for the Luftwaffe. They were driven to Karlshorst, in the eastern suburbs, where Zhukov had his headquarters.

Karlshorst

The building chosen for the ceremony was the officers’ mess of a former German army engineer school in Karlshorst, built in 1936–37, which had been taken over by Zhukov’s staff. Its main hall was prepared with tables for the Allied representatives and a separate table for the Germans, under the flags of the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and France. The French flag had to be improvised; Soviet seamstresses, given the wrong design at first, are said to have produced a Dutch flag before the French one was made.

Most of the evening was spent on the text. The Berlin act was based on the Reims document, but it had to be translated and agreed in three languages, and there were arguments about which Allied officers would sign as principals and which as witnesses. The Western Allies wanted Tedder to sign for Eisenhower beside Zhukov; General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, commanding the French First Army, and General Carl Spaatz, commanding the U.S. Strategic Air Forces, would sign as witnesses.

The ceremony

Zhukov opened the ceremony late in the evening. The German delegation was brought in, and Keitel, in full uniform and carrying his field marshal’s baton, was asked whether he had read the act and had authority to sign it. He said he had. He signed, followed by Friedeburg and Stumpff, and then Zhukov and Tedder signed, with Spaatz and de Lattre as witnesses. The Germans were then told to leave the hall. Accounts differ on the exact minute the last signature was made, but it was close to midnight Central European time, around the moment the surrender took effect at 2301; in Moscow, two hours ahead, it was already 9 May.

The surrender terms were essentially those of Reims, with some changes. They required the German High Command to order all forces to cease operations at 2301 on 8 May, to remain in their positions, and to hand over their weapons and equipment undamaged. The English and Russian texts were authoritative. After the Germans left, there was a banquet that lasted until morning. Within days Keitel was a prisoner; he and Jodl were tried at Nuremberg, convicted, and hanged in October 1946.

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Karlshorst, 8 May 1945

VE Day

In the West, 8 May was declared Victory in Europe Day. At 9 a.m. in Washington, President Truman, who turned 61 that day, broadcast to the nation; his statement paid tribute to Franklin Roosevelt, who had died less than four weeks earlier, and reminded Americans that the war against Japan was not over. Truman’s proclamation that day asked Americans to observe Sunday 13 May as a day of prayer.

In London, Churchill broadcast at 3 p.m. Huge crowds gathered in Whitehall, Trafalgar Square and outside Buckingham Palace, where King George VI and Queen Elizabeth appeared on the balcony with Churchill and the two princesses. Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret were allowed to go out into the crowds that night. Churchill appeared on the balcony of the Ministry of Health in Whitehall and told the crowd that the victory was theirs.

In New York, crowds had already filled Times Square on 7 May after the AP report, and again on 8 May. In Paris, Brussels, Antwerp and the newly liberated Netherlands there were celebrations in the streets. For soldiers still fighting in the Pacific the news meant less. Men of the U.S. 77th Infantry Division on Okinawa listened to the radio reports a few yards behind the front line; the battle described in the Okinawa collection had six more weeks to run.

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VE Day around the world

Victory Day

In the Soviet Union the news was announced in the early hours of 9 May by the radio announcer Yuri Levitan, who read the act of surrender and a decree making 9 May a holiday. Crowds gathered in Red Square. That evening Stalin broadcast to the nation, and Moscow fired a salute of 30 salvos from 1,000 guns. On 24 June 1945 the Victory Parade on Red Square was reviewed by Zhukov on a white horse and commanded by Rokossovsky; at its climax, soldiers threw captured German standards at the foot of the Lenin Mausoleum.

The last fighting

The surrender did not stop all the fighting at once. In Prague, where the Czech uprising had begun on 5 May, Soviet tanks of Konev’s front entered the city on 9 May. Most of the German Army Group Centre under Schörner tried to reach American lines; about 11 May the last large German forces in Czechoslovakia surrendered, many of them to the Red Army. The German forces trapped in the Courland pocket in Latvia surrendered on 9 and 10 May. In Yugoslavia, fighting between partisans and German and Croatian forces went on until the middle of May.

The Channel Islands, occupied by Germany since 1940, were liberated on 9 May. The German garrisons of Dunkirk, Lorient, St-Nazaire and La Rochelle surrendered between 8 and 11 May. The last German U-boats at sea were ordered to surface, report their positions and sail to Allied ports.

Flensburg and the Berlin Declaration

The Dönitz government continued to meet at Mürwik for two more weeks, under the supervision of an Allied control party. On 23 May British troops arrested Dönitz, Jodl, Speer and the other members of the government and the high command. Photographs of the arrests were published around the world as the end of the Third Reich.

On 5 June 1945, in Berlin, Eisenhower, Zhukov, Montgomery and de Lattre signed the Berlin Declaration, by which the four Allied powers assumed supreme authority over Germany. There was no German government to sign anything. The occupation and division of Germany and of Berlin, and the memory of the battle, are the subject of Chapter 9.

Sources and further reading

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