The dance of victory

At the far end of Whitehall in Trafalgar Square and at Piccadilly Circus, the crowd was dancing and singing. American soldiers were exulting...

At the far end of Whitehall in Trafalgar Square and at Piccadilly Circus, the crowd was dancing and singing. American soldiers were exulting with British and Commonwealth servicemen, and the ordinary people of London, to celebrate what five years earlier had seemed an unattainable outcome. Then, with the German armies bursting into France and driving the defenders before them into rout, Churchill had started his aim to the House of Commons, as: “Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be.”

The road had been harder than even he had feared. Fifty million people had died, much of Europe had been destroyed, millions had been driven from their homes and were wandering the highways of Europe, displaced and starving. The liberators were making terrible discoveries as they penetrated the frontiers of Germany to find so-called camps full of sick and emaciated people. Many were dying at the moment they were brought freedom, the consequence of the Nazi’s terrible policy of racial purification…

In Prague…German defenders were battling against the advancing Russians but also against the Russian turncoats of the Vlasov army who, hoping to save their skins, had turned back in the moment of defeat to fight for Russia again. There was still sporadic fighting in Berlin, where on April 30, Hitler had committed suicide in his bunker. The strangest survival of Nazi power was at Flensberg on the Danish border, where Grand Admil Donitz, named by Hitler to be his successor, had set up government in the buildings of the German naval academy. His “government” was to continued to function, issuing empty orders, until May 17, when British troops at last arrested its members, taking Donitz off to stand trial for war crimes at Nuremberg.

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On May 3, on Luneberg Heath, Field Marshal Montgomery had received the surrender of German forces in northern Germany. Although celebrated as an historic event, the capitulation was a hole-and-corner affair. The Germans sent not a general but an admiral to perform the surrender formality…The suspicion lingers that the mission was an act of German impertinence.

The formal act of surrender to the Allied armies in the West was made at Rheims on May 7, when Gen Albert Jodl, Hitler’s operations officer, who would be sentenced to death at Nuremberg, signed in the presence of Eisenhower. The surrender to the Russian took place in Berlin on VE Day itself — May 8. Field Marshal Keitel, Hitler’s chief of staff, also to be hanged at Nuremberg, signed before Marshal Zhukov and the British Air Marshal Tedder. The terms, long made public, were unconditional surrender. Indeed, the German state thenceforth ceased to exist…

Excerpted from ‘The Daily Telegraph’, May 5