Eisenhower's appeal to the Germans

On the last day of March 1945 Allied radio stations broadcast, and the press – among others the New York Times – published, instructions from the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight Eisenhower, addressed to German soldiers and to the foreign workers labouring in the Reich. “Soldiers of the German Wehrmacht! To spare yourselves further useless sacrifice and loss of life, this is what you must do” – so began a text that set out in detail how units were to stop fighting and surrender.

The statement found in war chronologies that Eisenhower “demanded Germany’s surrender in a broadcast” oversimplifies matters. It was neither an ultimatum to the Reich government nor a call for the formal surrender of the state – that demand, in the form of the principle of unconditional surrender, the Allies had already proclaimed at Casablanca in January 1943, and they had no intention of negotiating over it. The appeal of 31 March was a set of practical instructions addressed to ordinary soldiers, unit commanders and workers: it was meant to persuade them to abandon a fight that – as it argued – could no longer change anything.

A front in disarray

Eisenhower spoke at a moment when the German defence in the West was collapsing. In March the Allies had captured the bridge at Remagen and forced the Rhine at several points, and on 24 March the two airborne divisions of Operation Varsity had landed on the lower Rhine. On 29 March the Americans took Frankfurt am Main, and their armoured columns were closing the ring around the Ruhr, where on 1 April the whole of Field Marshal Walter Model’s Army Group B was trapped in a pocket. A few days earlier the Supreme Commander had given up the drive on Berlin, directing the main thrust into the centre of Germany, towards Leipzig and Dresden.

In the east the Reich’s situation was just as bad. The Red Army stood on the Oder; on 29 March its troops entered Austria, and on 30 March they took Gdańsk. The Germans were losing their last industrial regions, they were short of fuel, and Allied aircraft were bombing practically unhindered. In March tens of thousands of soldiers a week were already being taken prisoner on the Western Front.

What the soldiers were to do

The instructions to the Wehrmacht comprised four points. Units that had lost contact with the German command and were receiving no orders were to stop fighting and assemble in one place; their existing commander was responsible for discipline. The surrender was to be arranged by an envoy sent under a white flag to the nearest Allied command post, and the surrender itself was to be carried out in good order and with military discipline. Units not yet in contact with the Allies were to remain under the orders of their officers, who were responsible for discipline and supplies. Scattered soldiers were to report to the nearest Allied unit showing signs of surrender – without weapons, helmets or equipment; assembly points were designated along the main roads.

The text made no appeal to politics or ideology. It assumed that the German command was losing control of the front and that a soldier or a battalion commander could decide on his own to end the fighting – and it showed him how to do so without the risk of being taken for a combatant.

What the workers were to do

The second part of the appeal was addressed to the millions of foreigners working in the Reich – forced labourers from Poland, the USSR (the so-called Ostarbeiter), France and other countries, as well as prisoners of war employed in industry. By cautious estimates there were more than 7 million of them in Germany at the time. Eisenhower called on them to keep away from all targets of attack: factories, railway lines, marshalling yards and bridges. When the Allied armies approached, they were to seek shelter away from military installations and stay under cover until the fighting was over, and then report to the officials of the Allied military government, which would organise their return home.

This part had a dual purpose. It protected the workers from the bombing and fighting in which they were dying in their thousands, and at the same time it struck at the German war economy, which relied to an enormous extent on forced labour. It made no mention, however, of the concentration camp prisoners, whose fate in the last weeks of the war – death marches and mass executions – was the most tragic of all.

Psychological warfare

The appeal was part of a wide-ranging campaign of psychological warfare conducted by the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF. Aircraft dropped millions of leaflets over Germany, among them safe-conduct passes signed by Eisenhower that guaranteed surrendering soldiers treatment in accordance with the Geneva Convention. Allied radio stations gave the Germans news from the front that they did not hear from their own propaganda. In a letter to President Roosevelt written that same day, Eisenhower noted that Allied stations were constantly telling the Germans that they ought now to be sowing grain for the coming winter instead of fighting.

In the same letter he predicted that there would be no “clean” military surrender on the Western Front and that victory day would simply have to be proclaimed, because German resistance would not collapse in a single act but would peter out gradually, sector by sector. This accurate diagnosis explains the nature of the appeal: since nobody in Berlin intended to surrender, the Allies addressed themselves directly to those who could stop fighting on their own initiative.

The regime’s response

The Nazi leadership did everything it could to prevent this. On 19 March Adolf Hitler had issued the so-called Nero Decree, ordering the destruction of industrial plants, transport installations and supplies before the enemy arrived; the Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, by his own account sabotaged its execution. At the beginning of March flying courts martial were set up which, behind the front, sentenced to death officers and soldiers accused of cowardice or retreat; after the loss of the bridge at Remagen several officers were shot. Civilians who hung out white flags also faced punishment, and the families of deserters could be held responsible for their actions.

Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda promised a fight to the end and universal resistance in the occupied areas. The watchword of this campaign became Werwolf – a network for sabotage behind enemy lines, planned since the autumn of 1944 under SS supervision. On 25 March a commando unit infiltrated behind the lines murdered Franz Oppenhoff, the American-appointed mayor of Aachen. The day after Eisenhower’s appeal, on 1 April, “Radio Werwolf” began broadcasting, calling for the killing of “traitors” and occupiers. Werwolf’s military significance, however, proved negligible; it was a threat above all to Germans themselves suspected of “defeatism”. Older men and boys from the Volkssturm were also thrown into the last battles.

Significance

The appeal of 31 March did not bring about a mass surrender of the Wehrmacht – resistance went on for more than five more weeks, until the acts of surrender at Reims and Berlin on 7 and 8 May. On many sectors of the Western Front, however, the fighting did peter out just as Eisenhower had predicted: whole units surrendered without a fight and the number of prisoners snowballed – in the Ruhr Pocket alone more than 300,000 soldiers were taken prisoner in April. At the same time fanatical SS units and troops held to obedience by the terror of their own courts resisted to the end.

The appeal also shows how the Allies envisaged the end of the war: not as negotiations with the Reich government, but as the gradual disarming of the army and the assumption of power by military government. The instructions to the workers foreshadowed one of the greatest challenges of the first months of peace – the return home of millions of people deported to Germany, among them more than one and a half million Poles.