A question for World War II boffins. Where was the surrender signed at the end of the war... here's a hint... we are currently staying in Reims. You are right... you clever person... the answer is Reims. Nothing is simple and the reason Reims has been largely written out of the history books takes a bit of explaining.
Before visiting Reims, I was confused as to where surrender of the European theatre actually occurred... Reims would not have been my first choice. Many of the minor theatres had their own little surrenders... we are not talking about backyard squabbles... we're talking about the whole of Europe.
I know many of you are dying to get a clear view of the months leading up to surrender, so here is a timeline:
Allied forces began to take large numbers of Axis prisoners. The total number of prisoners taken on the Western Front in April 1945 by the Western Allies was 1,500,000. Clearly, the writing was on the wall... the end was nigh.
Germans left Finland: On 25 April 1945, the last Germans were expelled by the Finnish Army from Finland and retreated into Norway.
Mussolini's death: On 27 April 1945, as Allied forces closed in on Milan, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was captured by Italian partisans. His farewell was not very pleasant.
Hitler's death: On 30 April... only three days after Mussolini's death... as the Battle of Berlin raged above him, realizing that all was lost and not wishing to suffer Mussolini's fate, German dictator Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Führerbunker along with Eva Braun, his long-term mistress whom he had married less than 40 hours before their joint suicide.
German forces in Italy surrender: On 29 April, the day before Hitler died.
German forces in Berlin surrender: The Battle of Berlin ended on 2 May.
German forces in North West Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands surrender: On 4 May 1945, the British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery took the unconditional military surrender from General Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, and General Eberhard Kinzel, of all German forces "in Holland, in northwest Germany".
German forces in Bavaria surrender: At 14:30 on 4 May 1945, General Hermann Foertsch surrendered all forces in Bavaria.
Central Europe: On 5 May 1945, the Czech resistance started the Prague uprising. Within three days, Mutschmann abandoned the city, but was captured by Soviet troops while trying to escape.
Hermann Göring's surrender: On 6 May, Nazi leader and Hitler's second-in-command, Hermann Göring, surrendered.
Now we come to the time when Reims attracted the attention of the world. Eisenhower... European commander of USA troops and supreme commander of the D-Day landing... had chosen Reims as his European headquarters... after all, it is the centre of the French champagne region.
On the 7th May 1945, Keitel sinned surrender terms in Berlin. He had already sent Jodl and Keitel to Reims to negotiate peace terms. Thirty minutes after the fall of "Festung Breslau" (Fortress Breslau), General Alfred Jodl arrived in Reims and, following Dönitz's instructions, offered to surrender all forces fighting the Western Allies.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, threatened to break off all negotiations unless the Germans agreed to a complete unconditional surrender. Eisenhower explicitly told Jodl that he would order western lines closed to German soldiers, thus forcing them to surrender to the Soviets. Jodl sent a signal to Dönitz, who was in Flensburg, informing him of Eisenhower's declaration. Shortly after midnight, Dönitz, accepting the inevitable, sent a signal to Jodl authorizing the complete and total surrender of all German forces.
At 02:41 on the morning of 7 May, at SHAEF headquarters in Reims, France, the Chief-of-Staff of the German Armed Forces High Command, General Alfred Jodl, signed the unconditional surrender documents for all German forces to the Allies. Immediately after he signed the paper, Jodl rose in his chair and asked the Allies to be kind in their treatment of the surrendering German troops... the Russian official in attendance may have taken this request with some cynicism.
The whole arrangement was put together rather quickly... and International diplomacy was not observed fully. We saw the room where the surrender document was signed. The German side of the table had 3 chairs... The Allies side of the table was 'chock-a-block' full of middle-ranking American pen pushers. Eisenhower did not attend the ceremony... no one of equivalent rank was on the German side of the table.
The big mistake for the Allies was that the only Russian in attendance was a lower-middle ranking pen pusher who signed the surrender document only as an observer. Stalin was far from happy... his country had done more than its fair share of heavy lifting in ridding Europe of Nazis... he demanded a repeat ceremony be held in Berlin on the following day.
The next day, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and other German OKW representatives travelled to Berlin, and shortly before midnight signed a similar document, explicitly surrendering to Soviet forces.
Also, on 8th May 1945, Charles de Gaul and Winston Churchill made their announcements on radio of the unconditional surrender... the same day as the duplicate document of surrender was signed in front of Russian generals. History has chosen to identify 8th of May as the official case date for World War II. Only a few of us... you and I included... know the truth... WWII officially ceased on 7th May 1945.
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