The surrender at Caserta

On Sunday 29 April 1945, at 2 p.m., in the Royal Palace of Caserta near Naples, the headquarters of the Allied command in the Mediterranean, two German officers put their signatures to an instrument of unconditional surrender. Lieutenant Colonel Viktor von Schweinitz signed on behalf of the commander of Army Group C, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, and Major Eugen Wenner (holding the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer) on behalf of the Highest SS and Police Leader in Italy, SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff. For the Allies the document was signed by the chief of staff of Field Marshal Harold Alexander, Lieutenant General William Morgan. The Soviet General Aleksey Kislenko sat at the table as an observer.

The document covered all land, sea and air forces under the German Commander-in-Chief South-West – including the troops of the fascist Italian Social Republic – and ordered hostilities to cease at 12 noon Greenwich Mean Time on 2 May 1945. It was the first surrender of an entire German front in the war, six days before the general surrender of Germany came into force.

Popular chronologies state that on 29 April “all forces in Italy officially surrendered and a ceasefire was announced”. This is a simplification: on 29 April the instrument was merely signed, and whether it would come into force at all was decided over the next three days by a drama played out in German headquarters. The ceasefire took effect at midday on 2 May.

Operation Sunrise

The surrender at Caserta was the fruit of secret talks that the Americans called Operation Sunrise and the British Operation Crossword. They began in February 1945 in neutral Switzerland. The intermediaries were the Swiss intelligence officer Max Waibel and the educationalist Max Husmann, and on the Italian side Baron Luigi Parrilli. The Germans’ interlocutor was Allen Dulles, head of the American OSS intelligence station in Bern.

On 8 March 1945 Karl Wolff met Dulles in person in Zurich. As a token of goodwill he brought with him two freed leaders of the Italian resistance, among them Ferruccio Parri. Wolff was a deeply compromised figure: as former head of Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff, in 1942 he had sought railway wagons for the transports of Jews to Treblinka, and in Italy he was responsible for the war against the partisans, waged with great brutality. Many historians believe he was counting on the surrender to secure him impunity; at first he even sought to have Army Group C allowed to withdraw to Austria and fight on against the Red Army. Dulles rejected such proposals – only unconditional surrender was on the table.

On 19 March at Ascona on Lake Maggiore Wolff met two officers of Alexander’s staff who had come to Switzerland incognito: the American General Lyman Lemnitzer and the British General Terence Airey. The talks, however, stalled. On 10 March Vietinghoff had taken over command in Italy when Albert Kesselring left for the Western Front, and the new commander would not hear of a “premature” surrender. Kesselring is said to have told him that there could be no question of ending the fighting while the Führer was alive. Himmler, who had learned of Wolff’s trips, forbade him to travel to Switzerland again.

The Bern incident

The talks in Switzerland provoked the sharpest dispute within the Grand Alliance before the end of the war. On 12 March the American ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, informed Vyacheslav Molotov of possible negotiations with a German general. Molotov replied that the USSR had no objection provided representatives of the Soviet command took part in the talks. On 16 March Moscow was told that its officers would not be admitted – the Americans and British explained that Bern was only a matter of sounding out, and that any surrender would in any case be signed at Caserta, where the Soviets could be present.

On 22 March Molotov, in a note, called talks conducted “behind the back of the Soviet Union” “absolutely inadmissible”. An exchange of letters followed between Joseph Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On 3 April Stalin wrote bluntly that according to his “military colleagues” an agreement had been reached in Bern under which the Germans would open the Western Front to the Anglo-Americans in return for easier peace terms. Roosevelt replied with a sharpness unusual for him: he expressed “bitter resentment” towards Stalin’s informers and called their reports “vile misrepresentations”. Stalin softened his tone, and in his last message before his death, on 12 April, Roosevelt spoke of “minor misunderstandings”.

Historians judge this episode in different ways. For some, Stalin’s suspicion was a sign of paranoia and a harbinger of the Cold War; for others, it was an understandable reaction to talks that Dulles had conducted with a senior SS officer on his own initiative and – as the American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote – against the orders of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, carried away by the vision of a “great success”. On 20 April the new President, Harry Truman, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff instructed Alexander to break off all contact and consider the matter closed.

To Caserta

The outcome of the talks was decided on the battlefield. Between 9 and 24 April the Allied spring offensive shattered the German armies on the Po; Army Group C lost most of its heavy weapons and vehicles, and it had received no supplies from the Reich since the beginning of April. Wolff, summoned to Berlin in mid-April, returned convinced that Hitler no longer had any plan. On 22 April at Recoaro, at Vietinghoff’s headquarters, he agreed with the commander of Army Group C and his chief of staff, General Hans Röttiger, to send plenipotentiaries to the Allies. The Gauleiter of Tyrol, Franz Hofer, who demanded guarantees for “his” Tyrol, was also invited to the meeting.

On 23 April Wolff reached Switzerland with the plenipotentiaries, but Dulles – bound by Washington’s ban – could not meet them. Only on 27 April, when the Allied command obtained permission to receive the German envoys, did Schweinitz and Wenner, accompanied by Dulles’s associate Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz, fly from France to Caserta, which they reached on the evening of 28 April. Wolff remained in Italy; on 26 April, during the rising in the north, partisans surrounded him in a villa on Lake Como, and he was extricated only by men of the OSS and Swiss intelligence. Meanwhile, on 26 April, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, defence minister of the Italian Social Republic, authorised Wolff to sign the surrender on behalf of the fascist forces as well; two days later Mussolini died at the hands of partisans.

The negotiations at Caserta went on from the morning of 29 April. Schweinitz voiced doubts as to whether his powers were sufficient and pressed for certain concessions for the German soldiers; in the end he accepted the text as presented by the Allies. The instrument was signed at 2 p.m., and the two envoys set off on the return journey via Switzerland to Bolzano, where Vietinghoff’s and Wolff’s headquarters were located.

Three days of uncertainty

The signature at Caserta did not settle the matter. In the last days of April Kesselring, as Commander-in-Chief South, was once again Vietinghoff’s superior, and he had approved nothing. On 30 April, when Hofer reported the “treason” to him by telephone, Kesselring relieved Vietinghoff and Röttiger of their commands and ordered them before a court martial. Army Group C was taken over by General Friedrich Schulz, with General Friedrich Wentzell as his chief of staff. The conspirators did not give way: in the early hours of 1 May in Bolzano, on the orders of Wolff and Röttiger, the new commanders were briefly detained, and Röttiger, though formally already relieved, went on issuing orders preparing for a ceasefire.

On the evening of 1 May German radio announced the death of Hitler. During the night of 1–2 May, at 1.15 a.m., Kesselring issued one more order, for the arrest of Vietinghoff, Röttiger, Schweinitz and several other officers, but after hours of telephone conversations with Wolff he gave way: at 4.30 a.m. on 2 May he authorised Schulz to issue a ceasefire order limited to the South-West area, and withdrew the arrest order. At 2 p.m. local time – noon Greenwich Mean Time – the guns in Italy fell silent. The Germans broadcast the orders by radio two hours late, and Field Marshal Alexander announced the ceasefire at 6.30 p.m.

The surrender covered the whole of Army Group C, Wolff’s forces and Graziani’s units – according to various estimates from several hundred thousand to nearly a million men, depending on whether German rear services, the police and Italian fascist formations are counted. Some units, especially around Trieste and on the Yugoslav border, laid down their arms only in the following days. Earlier, on 29 April, the German 148th Infantry Division and the remnants of Italian units had surrendered to the Brazilians at Fornovo.

What came next

The surrender at Caserta was the first surrender of an entire German front and a model for those that followed: on 4 May at Lüneburg the German forces in north-western Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark surrendered, and on 7 and 8 May at Reims and Berlin the entire Wehrmacht. The Italian campaign, begun in Sicily in July 1943, ended without a battle in the Alps; plans for an “Alpine redoubt” proved a pipe dream.

Wolff, who regarded himself as one of the architects of peace, did not stand trial at Nuremberg. After the war he appeared as a witness, and in denazification proceedings in 1948 he was sentenced for membership of the SS to five years, later reduced to four; he was released in June 1949. Only in 1964 did a court in Munich sentence him to 15 years’ imprisonment for complicity in the deportation of Jews to Treblinka; he was released in 1971. Kesselring was sentenced to death in 1947 by a British military court in Venice for crimes against the Italian population, and the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

The Bern dispute left a lasting mark. For Stalin it confirmed that the Western Allies were prepared to strike a deal with the Germans behind his back; for Washington and London it was proof of Soviet distrust. Both sides drew a lesson from it for the weeks that followed: at the surrenders at Reims and Berlin care was taken to ensure that representatives of all three powers were present.