VE Day: Third Time Lucky

On May 9, in Moscow's Red Square, military parades marked VE Day for the Russians. But how come when the Germans actually surrendered on May 8, 1945 - the date the US and western Europe recognises as the big day? But then there's also May 4, when German forces surrendered to Field Marshal Montgomery in a carpeted tent on Luneburg Heath near Hamburg. It's complicated, as were most things when WW2 drew to its very messy close. A key figure in this story is Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, whom Hitler had designated his successor - after dismissing Himmler, the deputy Fuhrer, for attempting to negotiate separately with the West. After Hitler's suicide on April 30, Donitz set up a rump German government in Flensburg, near the Danish border. The admiral later told his American captors that, after taking power, he immediately set about arranging the surrender of German forces, but in fact he prolonged the war as long as he could. Knowing that the Allies planned to partition Germany between them, Donitz's chief concern was to avoid abandoning tens of thousands of German soldiers and their equipment in the designated Soviet zone. To buy time for these troops to move to the Allied lines in the west, he planned to negotiate separate and protracted surrenders with the British and Americans. The Luneburg ceremony of May 4 only covered German forces in the north-west (including occupied Holland and Denmark) and was signed on the German side by an admiral and a staff colonel. Allied commanders then insisted that a separate unconditional capitulation of all German forces on all fronts must be signed by the top commanders of the German high command. Donitz wanted to make a separate deal for German forces on the Western front only, but when Eisenhower threatened to resume bombing and close the borders to those Germans fleeing from the east, the admiral authorised Colonel General Alfred Jodl, German Chief of Staff, to sign the broader surrender. This duly took place at 2.41 on the morning of May 7 at a schoolhouse in the French city of Reims, which was then serving as the Supreme HQ of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF): all German soldiers everywhere were to lay down their arms by 23.01 the next day, May 8. But then came a glitch. The Soviets, who had been represented at Reims by a relatively junior general, started quibbling about technicalities in the agreement. It soon became clear that Stalin wanted a much grander, more symbolic ceremony of surrender, in Berlin itself and in the presence of his victorious generals, chief among them Field Marshal Zhukov. It had also occurred to the British that the top German military leadership, by not signing the surrender in person, might try to shift the blame for the war's defeat - as they'd done at the end of WW1. In the event, in the late afternoon of May 8, all the signatories to the third formal capitulation of German forces (among them this time the Wehrmacht's C-in-C, Field Marshal Keitel, and the top-ranking navy and air force commanders) arrived at Berlin's Tempelhof airport, from where the Soviets ferried them across the ruined city to the virtually unscathed district of Karlshorst. Here, after some hours delay because a Russian translation of the surrender agreement had to be prepared (and an improvised flag found to represent the French), the officers' mess hall of a former German army engineering college became the site of the final signing. The document was unchanged from Reims and, though not finally signed till well after midnight (that is, on May 9), still stipulated that the full German surrender took place at one minute past eleven on the night of May 8. This precise timing couldn't be changed because after Reims it had already been communicated to the armies on the ground. So the delegates at Karlhorst simply fudged the time and date. However, in 1944 Moscow was two time zones ahead of Berlin. In the Soviet capital it was already May 9 when the 11.01 pm deadline of May 8 kicked in. Thus a very human narrative of pride, defiance, subterfuge, resolution, and simply making do amid chaotic circumstances, finally got a deal to end the war over the line. Arguably, a separate Victory Day in Russia has merely underlined Moscow's conviction that the Russian contribution to the defeat of Hitler was a special one. Few would deny that - at least 27m Soviet soldiers and citizens died in WW2 - but that narrative has been perverted by Putin to promote his claim that fascism is again on the rise in Europe and only Russia is challenging it. History, as ever, lies in the eye of the beholder.

Field Marshal Keitel and the German delegation sign the unconditional surrender

If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again.

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