80 years ago, World War II ended

80 years ago, on May 8, 1945, World War II ended in Europe. The German capitulation meant the end of six years of struggle, but it did not mean the liberation of the continent from the rule of authoritarianism. Central Europe fell under the control of the USSR for half a century.

At the beginning of 1945, the military and political situation of the Third Reich seemed to be sealing its fate. The great Soviet offensive launched in June 1944 led to the loss of a huge part of Central Europe by Germany, and the losses in equipment and people were impossible to recreate. The failure of the last great offensive in the Ardennes destroyed German dreams of concluding a compromise peace with the Western powers and continuing the war with the Soviet Union. The continued co-operation of the allies meant that for observers realistically assessing the situation in Germany, it was clear that a repetition of the situation of November 1918, when the war ended with an armistice, was out of the question. The Big Three's aspiration was to achieve unconditional surrender of Germany and its complete subordination to the will of the United Nations.

On February 8, the Allies launched Operation Veritable Grenade, the aim of which was to capture bridgeheads on the eastern bank of the Rhine. Almost four weeks of fighting ended with an unexpected breakthrough. On March 7, American troops captured an undamaged bridge over the Rhine at Remagen. Before the Luftwaffe destroyed the bridge, the Americans managed to transfer the 1st Army. More units crossed over using pontoons. In the following weeks, almost the entire Allied forces were on the western bank of the Rhine.

The situation in the Ruhr proved crucial for the fate of the Western Front – the defeat in this region led to the creation of a 200 km gap in the German defence. Attempts to organise a defence no longer brought any results. German units no longer had not only the means to fight, but also the will to continue it. Hitler ordered the cessation of any resistance to the forces of the Western countries.

On April 24, the 1st Armored Division of General Stanisław Maczek began its last battle. The goal was to capture the fortress and port of Wilhelmshaven. On the morning of May 5, the Poles accepted the surrender of the German defenders. At the same time, Allied forces entered occupied Denmark and accepted the surrender of all German forces in the northern part of the Reich. In the south, General George Patton marched on the capital of Czechoslovakia. On May 6, he reached Pilzno and, under the influence of political pressure from his superiors, stopped further attack.

On April 20, 1945, Adolf Hitler celebrated his last birthday in a bunker under the Reich Chancellery. On that day, the first Soviet artillery shells fell on Berlin. Just four days earlier, Soviet troops and the 1st Polish Army had crossed the Oder and broken through the German defense. On April 25, the encirclement ring around the capital of the Third Reich was finally closed, and Soviet artillery began shelling the city.

The German defense was collapsing. On April 30, Hitler and his wife Eva Braun committed suicide. That same evening, the Soviet flag was raised over the Reichstag, and resistance was only offered by units occupying heavily fortified buildings, but it did not last long - on May 1, the Spandau fortress capitulated, and on May 2, at seven in the morning, Soviet troops captured the Reich Chancellery building. That same day, in the building at Schulenburgring 2 in the Tempelhof district, where General Vasily Chuikov's headquarters were located, General Helmuth Weidling signed the capitulation of all units of the Berlin garrison.

Following Hitler's will of 28 April, the position of chancellor was assumed by the then Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. On the evening of 1 May, Goebbels and his wife, who had previously poisoned their six children, committed suicide. The position of Reich President, restored after eleven years, was assumed by Admiral Karl Dönitz, who was residing in Flensburg. After receiving information about Goebbels' death, he appointed a new government with Johann Ludwig Graf Schwerin von Krosigk as chancellor. Its main task was to transfer as much of the remaining forces to the west as possible, so that the soldiers and officers would not fall into Soviet hands. Dönitz and his entourage still counted on a possible outbreak of conflict between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union.

On May 4, Dönitz agreed to the surrender of all German forces in northern Germany. At the same time, his envoy met with General Dwight Eisenhower and tried to start negotiations for the surrender to the Western Allies. The Supreme Allied Commander, in accordance with the earlier arrangements of the Big Three, stated that the surrender must apply to all forces on both fronts. In this situation, Dönitz entrusted the mission of signing the surrender to General Alfred Jodl. On May 7, at 2:41 a.m., the capitulation act was signed at the headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Reims, France. The Reich was represented by representatives of the three branches of the armed forces - the army, the air force and the navy. The Allies were represented by American General Walter Bedell Smith and the representative of the Red Army, General Ivan Susloparov. The French representative signed as a witness.

In the capitals of Western Europe, preparations were underway, agreed between the leaders, to announce the day of victory. They were thwarted by Joseph Stalin, who demanded another ceremonial signing of the capitulation in the capital of the collapsing Reich, which he controlled. On May 8, 1945, a British plane delivered a three-person German delegation to Berlin's Tempelhof Airport, headed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. The prepared document contained the same terms of unconditional surrender of German troops as those agreed the previous day in Reims.

The ceremony took place in the former officers' casino of the sapper school in the Karlshorst district of Berlin. In addition to Keitel, Hans-Georg von Friedeburg and Air Force General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff signed the capitulation as representatives of the main branches of the German armed forces. Marshal Georgy Zhukov acted as the signatory as the representative of the Soviet High Command; the Western Allies entrusted this task to British Air Force General Arthur Tedder. In addition, the document was signed as witnesses by the Commander-in-Chief of the American Strategic Air Force, General Carl A. Spaatz, and the commander of the French First Army, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny (as a witness and acceptor of the capitulation). Earlier, there had been a procedural confusion surrounding the representative of France, who threatened to commit suicide if he was not allowed to sign the act of surrender and if the French flag was not in the hall. Field Marshal Keitel maliciously noted that the French general's signature should appear on both sides of the act - the victors and the vanquished. According to the Reims agreements, the Reich's act of capitulation came into effect at 23:01 Central European Time. In the USSR it was already 1:01. Hence the one-day difference in celebrating Victory Day between Western countries and the Soviet Union and modern Russia.

The formal capitulation of the Reich did not end the fighting in some corners of Europe still controlled by the remnants of the Wehrmacht and SS forces. In the Czech Republic, the Germans still had almost a million soldiers under the command of Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner. After the capitulation of Berlin, the forces of the 1st Ukrainian Front under Marshal Ivan Konev were sent against them, including the 2nd Polish Army and the Czechoslovak 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps. On May 5, an uprising broke out in Prague. Despite their enormous military advantage, the Germans decided to start talks and simultaneously break through to the Western Front. The SS did not obey the orders, brutally pacifying the city. It was not until the evening of May 9 that the SS troops surrendered to the approaching Soviet troops. Some of the Germans retreating westward resisted until May 11. The day before, the remnants of German forces defending themselves since autumn 1944 on the Baltic Sea – in Hel, Żuławy, Kępa Oksywska, the Vistula Spit and Kurland – had surrendered. Some of the isolated German units, including those on the Channel Islands, surrendered without a fight only on 16 May. On 11 June, the crew of the German weather station surrendered on Spitsbergen. On 17 August, the last active German submarine, U-977, reached Argentina.

Despite the capitulation of all German forces in Flensburg, the Reich government was still in operation. It was not until May 23 that the British decided to arrest its members. The existence of Dönitz's government caused particular concern in Moscow. Stalin believed that it was an element of the Western Allies' preparations for aggression against the USSR and its satellites. On June 5, 1945, the Allied Control Council for Germany took over power over Germany, thus ending the history of the Third Reich.

The war in the Far East ended with the unconditional surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945. The largest conflict in history claimed over 50 million victims – those killed, murdered, and those who died as a result of war operations. According to data presented in the publication of the Institute of National Remembrance "Poland 1939–1945. Human losses and victims of repression under two occupations", edited by Prof. Wojciech Materski and Prof. Tomasz Szarota, between 5.6 and 5.8 million Polish citizens died during World War II.

Michał Szukała (PAP)

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