The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945

In north-west Germany, East Frisia and Schleswig-Holstein were not yet occupied, and further north Denmark and Norway remained in German hands. On 2 May Jodl sent out instructions to Field-Marshal Ernst Busch, Commander-in-Chief of Army Group North-West, to fight on in order to ‘gain time’ for negotiations. The orders were, however, swiftly overtaken by events, which were by now moving far too rapidly for Dönitz to have any hope of controlling them. The British advance to Lüneburg and the American push through Schwerin to Wismar meant that overnight the last gateway for Germans to escape westwards from Pomerania and Mecklenburg was sealed off. Army Group Vistula, the 12th Army and the remains of the 9th Army were left to fight their way back to western lines as best they could. With this development, it was acknowledged that there was no longer any point in fighting on against the western forces in northern Germany. It was decided to try to open talks with Montgomery as quickly as possible.⁷⁸

On 3 May, the date on which the city of Hamburg capitulated under threat of renewed British bombing,⁷⁹ Admiral-General von Friedeburg was, therefore, dispatched to try to negotiate an armistice in north-west Germany with the British military commander. When Montgomery refused unless German forces in Holland, Denmark, Frisia and Schleswig stopped fighting, offering only to treat Germans fleeing from the east as prisoners of war and not hand them over to the Soviets, increasingly chaotic circumstances in the west forced Dönitz’s hand. German troops had flooded back in disorder westwards through Mecklenburg while there was still a chance to escape from the Red Army. And there were signs of disintegration in those troop units already in the west—where the civilian population was said to oppose any continuation of the war with the western Allies—amid fears that they would take matters into their own hands and simply refuse to fight any longer.⁸⁰

After discussing the dilemma with Krosigk, Speer, Keitel, Jodl and Gauleiter Wegener, Dönitz saw no alternative but to comply with Montgomery’s demands. On 4 May he approved the signing of the partial capitulation under the terms laid down. At the same time he ordered a halt to the U-boat war. (The order was not, in fact, received by all U-boats. Four further attacks on Allied shipping took place. In the last U-boat attack of the war, on 7 May, shortly before the total capitulation of the Wehrmacht, two freighters were sunk off the Firth of Forth.) On 5 May hostilities officially ceased in the Netherlands, Denmark and north-west Germany. Against earlier intentions to scuttle warships rather than allow them to fall into enemy hands, the Germans agreed to sink no ships. Montgomery left open their continued use for refugee transportation.⁸¹

Norway, however, where the Commander-in-Chief, Colonel-General Georg Lindemann, was still claiming that his troops (remarkably even now around 400,000 strong⁸²) were ready to fight on and requested (in vain) the continued use of the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting, remained under German occupation. As late as 3 May Dönitz had continued to regard Denmark and Norway as possible bargaining counters with the western powers. Only now did Dönitz take steps to discard still lingering features of the Hitler regime. Actions of the Werwolf—though only in the west—were now banned and deemed contrary to laws of combat. The ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting was at last prohibited in the Wehrmacht. Pictures of Hitler were on British orders to be removed from government offices.⁸³ And only on 6 May did Dönitz finally ban all destruction or temporary dismantling of factories, canals, and rail and communications networks, finally reversing Hitler’s ‘scorched earth’ orders of March.⁸⁴