The arrest of the Flensburg government

On the morning of 23 May 1945, in the harbour at Flensburg, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, General Alfred Jodl and Generaladmiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg were summoned aboard the passenger ship Patria, where an Allied control commission had been working for almost two weeks. The American Major General Lowell W. Rooks informed them that, on the orders of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight Eisenhower, and in agreement with the Soviet command, the so-called Reich government and the High Command of the Wehrmacht were dissolved, and that they themselves were to consider themselves prisoners of war. At the same time British units surrounded the Mürwik district, where the offices of Dönitz and his ministers were housed, and detained everyone they found there.

So ended the existence of the last government of the Third Reich – a cabinet that for three weeks after Hitler’s death had tried to act in the name of the German state, even though from 8 May it had neither an army nor any territory over which it could exercise authority. The decision to wind it up was taken by Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in agreement with Moscow, and it was carried out by British troops, in whose zone Flensburg lay.

A successor named in a testament

In his political testament, dictated in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery on 29 April 1945, Hitler named Dönitz – until then Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine and for the past few days commander of the northern area – as Reich President and Supreme Commander of the armed forces. Joseph Goebbels was to become chancellor, and Hitler entered in the new cabinet the names of ministers most of whom Dönitz did not even know. He expelled Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler from the party and from all their offices for their attempts to negotiate with the Allies on their own account – Himmler after Hitler learned of his offer conveyed through Count Bernadotte.

After Hitler’s suicide on 30 April, Dönitz, who was at his headquarters at Plön in Schleswig-Holstein, received a telegram from Martin Bormann about his appointment, and on 1 May the news of the Führer’s death. That evening the Hamburg radio station announced that Hitler had “fallen at his command post, fighting Bolshevism to his last breath”; the new Reich President spoke on the radio immediately afterwards, announcing that the fight in the east would go on “for as long as necessary”. The same day the Goebbels couple committed suicide in Berlin, which wrecked the division of power laid down in the testament. In any case, Dönitz had no intention of sticking to Hitler’s list.

The Schwerin von Krosigk cabinet

On 2 May Dönitz entrusted the leadership of the government to the former finance minister, Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, who took the title of “leading minister” (leitender Minister) and also took charge of foreign affairs. The first meeting was held that day at Eutin. As the British Second Army approached Lübeck and Kiel, the Reich President’s headquarters moved on 3 May to Flensburg, near the Danish border, to the Naval Academy complex at Mürwik. There the so-called Mürwik special area (Sonderbereich) was set up, and some of the offices occupied the ship Patria, moored in the harbour.

On 5 May the make-up of the cabinet was announced. Besides Schwerin von Krosigk (foreign affairs and finance), it included Albert Speer as minister of the economy and production, Wilhelm Stuckart as minister of the interior and culture, Herbert Backe as minister of food and agriculture, Julius Dorpmüller as minister of transport and posts, and Franz Seldte as minister of labour and social affairs, while justice was entrusted to Herbert Klemm. It was a cabinet of specialists and senior officials, but all of them had served the regime for years: Backe was a co-author of the hunger plans for the occupied East, Stuckart had taken part in the Wannsee Conference, and Speer had run a war economy built on forced labour.

Dönitz kept the most compromised dignitaries out of the government. Himmler, who had come to Plön hoping for a high post and had taken part in discussions for several days, was dismissed from all his functions on 6 May. The former foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was not given a portfolio in the new government either. This did not, however, change the character of the new regime: it was a government of men appointed by Hitler, who invoked his testament as the source of their legitimacy.

Playing for time, and surrender

Dönitz’s chief aim in the first days of May was to delay a general surrender so that as many soldiers and refugees from the east as possible could get through to the west, into British and American hands. Against all the signals, he also hoped to split the coalition and reach a separate arrangement with the Western powers. Hence the attempts at partial surrenders: on 4 May Friedeburg signed, at the headquarters of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the surrender of the German forces in north-western Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark. Eisenhower, however, rejected any further arrangements of this kind and demanded a complete surrender to all the Allies simultaneously. On 7 May Jodl signed it at Reims, and late in the evening of 8 May Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Admiral Friedeburg and General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff repeated the act at Karlshorst in Berlin before Marshal Georgy Zhukov and Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder.

The instrument of surrender was signed by representatives of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, not of the government. It was a military surrender, and Dönitz and his circle concluded from this that the German state and its authorities still existed. The cabinet continued to meet at Mürwik, issued communiqués and decrees, prepared memoranda on the country’s economic and food situation, and sought recognition as a partner in matters of administration. Schwerin von Krosigk, who had announced the unconditional surrender on Flensburg radio on 7 May, presented the government as a transitional authority indispensable for bringing the chaos under control. In the special area the old ranks still applied, people saluted, and officials wore party badges – which Allied correspondents described with astonishment.

The commission on the Patria

On 12 May the Allied Control Commission to the High Command of the Wehrmacht arrived in Flensburg, headed by Major General Lowell W. Rooks of SHAEF, with the British Brigadier E. J. Foord as his deputy. It took up quarters on the Patria. It was soon joined by a Soviet delegation under Major General Nikolai Trusov. The commission’s main task was to supervise the German commands’ compliance with the terms of surrender and to take over records and oversee disarmament. Dönitz and his ministers, however, saw it as a channel through which they could put their proposals to the Allies. Rooks discussed only military matters with them.

On 13 May the British arrested Keitel, who as chief of the OKW had signed the instrument at Karlshorst; Jodl took his place. During the same days the hunt for other dignitaries of the regime was under way: Hermann Göring had been in American hands since 7 May, while Himmler, dismissed by Dönitz, had left the Flensburg area and was trying to go into hiding.

Meanwhile a political dispute was growing over the existence of the Flensburg government. Winston Churchill was inclined to use the German administrative apparatus for a time to maintain order and supplies in the British occupation zone. The Soviet press, on the other hand, attacked the “Dönitz government” as an attempt to save a fascist regime under Western protection, and in Britain and the United States people asked why Hitler’s men were still in residence at Mürwik. In mid-May the Allied command concluded that continuing to tolerate the cabinet was doing more harm than good: it undermined Moscow’s trust and suggested that a sovereign authority still existed in Germany. Eisenhower, with the agreement of the governments, ordered it to be dissolved and its members arrested.

Operation Blackout

On 22 May Rooks summoned Dönitz, Jodl and Friedeburg to the Patria for the following day. The meeting on 23 May lasted only a few minutes. The three Germans sat on one side of the table; on the other sat Rooks, the British Captain Mund and General Trusov. Rooks read out the statement on the dissolution of the government and the OKW and the arrest of its members. Dönitz accepted it without protest – according to those present, he remarked only that any words were superfluous.

At the same time the operation code-named Blackout began. At about 10 a.m. soldiers of British infantry regiments – the Cheshire Regiment and the Herefordshire Regiment – supported by tanks of the 15th/19th Hussars and covered from the bay by Royal Navy destroyers, surrounded the special area at Mürwik and arrested ministers, staff officers and officials. Those detained were subjected to a humiliating body search, including a search of their clothes and bodies for hidden poison capsules – the Allies knew that many dignitaries carried cyanide and wanted to prevent suicides among the prisoners. According to British accounts, some 5,000 people had been taken prisoner by 11.30 a.m.

Friedeburg, who on returning from the Patria had been given permission to pack his belongings, took poison in the bathroom, according to witnesses, and died. Dönitz, Jodl and Schwerin von Krosigk were shown to correspondents and press photographers in the courtyard of the Flensburg police headquarters; photographs of the three dejected men under the guns of British soldiers went round the world as a symbol of the end of the Third Reich. Speer was detained at Glücksburg Castle, where he had been living.

From Mürwik to Nuremberg

The most important prisoners were flown to Luxembourg, to the Palace Hotel at Mondorf-les-Bains, where the Americans had set up a camp code-named Ashcan for the leading dignitaries of the Third Reich; Göring, Keitel and Ribbentrop were also taken there. Speer and some of the specialists were later moved to the Anglo-American interrogation centre Dustbin at Kransberg Castle in the Taunus, where they were questioned about the war economy and German technology.

On 5 June 1945 in Berlin, Eisenhower, Zhukov, Montgomery and the French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny signed the Berlin Declaration. It stated that there was no government or authority in Germany capable of maintaining order and carrying out the victors’ demands, and that the governments of the four powers assumed supreme authority in Germany, including all the powers of the government, of the high command and of authorities at every level. The country was divided into four occupation zones, and the Allied Control Council was set up to manage matters affecting Germany as a whole. The arrest of the cabinet at Flensburg was thus a precondition for this step: the victors wanted no German partner that could claim to represent the continuity of the state.

The fate of the members of the government was decided over the following years. Dönitz, Jodl, Keitel and Speer stood trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (PL). On 1 October 1946 Jodl and Keitel were sentenced to death – they were hanged on 16 October – Speer to 20 years’ imprisonment, and Dönitz, found guilty of waging aggressive war and of crimes against the laws of war, to 10 years. He served them in Spandau Prison until 1 October 1956. Schwerin von Krosigk and Stuckart were tried by an American tribunal in the so-called Ministries Trial; Schwerin von Krosigk received 10 years and was released under an amnesty in 1951, while Stuckart was freed, his time in internment being counted towards his sentence. Backe committed suicide in Nuremberg prison in April 1947; Dorpmüller had already died in July 1945.

Significance

The Flensburg government existed for little more than three weeks, and its authority never extended beyond a narrow strip of Schleswig-Holstein. It nevertheless played a role that cannot be ignored. By playing for time at the beginning of May, Dönitz helped hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians escape westwards ahead of the Red Army – but at the same time he prolonged a fight in which people on both sides of the front were dying, while prisoners were still dying in the camps and on the death marches. It was on his authority that representatives of the Wehrmacht signed the unconditional surrender at Reims and Karlshorst that ended the war in Europe.

After the surrender the cabinet tried to survive as an “ordinary” administrative authority, detached from the regime’s crimes, and foreshadowed the narrative its members would go on to develop in their trials and memoirs: the picture of apolitical specialists and soldiers who had merely saved what could be saved. The Allies did not accept this narrative. The arrest of 23 May 1945 closed the history of the state that Hitler had created in 1933: from then until the founding of two German states in 1949, authority in Germany was exercised solely by the victors.