At 0241 local time on Monday 7 May 1945,
General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
(OKW) signed the unconditional surrender document at Supreme Allied Command HQ
in Reims, France, effectively ending the war in Europe. With Adolf Hitler dead
by suicide and his top lieutenants either dead or in flight, with Germany in
ruins and with no resources (much less the long-promised “super weapons” that
would save the master race), they were running out of options.
Hitler’s heirs had been equivocating for a
few days with the Western Allies over the unconditional surrender requirement,
largely to delay the inevitable so as allow tens of thousands of soldiers and
civilians to flee westward and not be in Soviet-held territory at the moment
that everything was officially frozen. They were also laboring under the pipe
dream that they could somehow convince the Anglo-Americans to team up with them
and drive eastward to take on their natural and mutual enemy, the Soviet Union.
Because the representatives were all
old-school military, they expected to treat soldier-to-soldier with the Allies,
with all courtesy attendant upon their rank. I don’t know whether they’d
thought that clean uniforms would somehow cause SHAEF command to disassociate
them from (among other things) the previously unimaginable horrors of places
like Dachau, Bergen-Belsen or Mauthausen. But Eisenhower had visited Ordruf,
part of the Buchenwald installation, and he refused to set eyes on Jodl and his
entourage until after they’d signed the unconditional surrender.
Whereupon he curtly informed Jodl,
"You will, officially and personally, be held responsible if the terms of
this surrender are violated, including its provisions for German commanders to
appear in Berlin at the moment set by the Russian high command to accomplish
formal surrender to that government. That is all."
He refused to salute the Germans.
(They were rather like the German
representatives to the Versailles Conference of 1919, who—by the time they
arrived—had convinced themselves that Germany was no more culpable for the
outbreak of war than everyone else, that the other nations at the conference
recognized that and that they would therefore be engaged in a somewhat
technical exercise in diplomat-speak for a while, after which everything would
return to status quo ante bellum. It never ceases to astonish me how
delusional people can be, or how predictable their subsequent disastrous
mistakes can therefore be.)
Later that day, German Field Marshal
Wilhelm Keitel, Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov and American, British and French
representatives signed an identical document in Berlin, drawing a very final
line under German resistance.
(And in less than two years, both Jodl and
Keitel would be hanged as war criminals at Nuremberg. Their membership in the
comrades-in-arms club hadn’t saved them from accountability for their actions
while in Nazi service.)
By that time, word was seeping out that
Germany was kaput, and—despite Stalin wanting to delay the
announcement—Churchill proclaimed the surrender to a Britain that was already
half-delirious with relief and hope, and the Western world partied like it was
1918.
In almost six years of war in Europe, 40
million people had died, half of them civilians. Millions were homeless,
hundreds of thousands stateless. Pretty much everyone was somewhere on the
hunger-to-starvation spectrum. Entire cities had been razed, libraries and
museums burnt and looted. Nations had been bankrupted.
And they still faced the continuing war in
the Pacific against Japan, which would go on for another four months.
But for a few hours on 8 May there was
literally dancing in the streets; laughing, kissing, comradery. In London,
Buckingham Palace was lit by floodlights for the first time since 1939, and two
searchlights shone a huge “V” above Saint Paul’s Cathedral. For a city that had
spent almost six years in blackout, this was proof that people would once again
be able to sleep through the night.
Just not that one.
Eisenhower’s message to his troops
included these words:
"Let us have no part in the
profitless quarrels in which other men will inevitably engage as to what
country, what service, won the European war. Every man, every woman, of every
nation here represented has served to the outcome. This we shall remember—and
in doing so we shall be revering each honored grave, and be sending comfort to
the loved ones of comrades who could not live to see this day.":
Naturally, on VE-Day + 80, Cadet Bonespurs
(coming, as he does, from generations of draft dodgers, and ignorant as a slug)
has latched onto the notion that the United States alone “won the war that
ended in May.” And he and his minions are scurrying about federal archives and
websites to reshape history to their outlook. I assure you that—while our
commitment was total and we prevailed in two theatres of operation—we were
deplorably late to the fight because entire swathes of Americans favored
isolation and followed the America First movement. And we had so much ground to
make up.
We really need to learn from history.
©2025 Bas Bleu
