The surrender at Lüneburg Heath

On the evening of 4 May 1945, on the low hill of Timeloberg near the village of Wendisch Evern, a few kilometres south-east of Lüneburg, five German officers entered an army tent in which Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was waiting for them. On a table covered with an army blanket stood two BBC microphones. Montgomery read out the text of the document in English and called on the members of the delegation one by one to sign. At 6.30 p.m. British time the German forces in the Netherlands, in north-west Germany including the islands, and in Denmark – together with all ships in those waters – surrendered unconditionally to the commander of the British 21st Army Group. The guns were to fall silent at 8 a.m. the next day.

It was the first surrender of so large a part of the German forces on the Western Front, and one of the steps by which Hitler’s successor, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, tried to break the end of the war down into several separate, regional acts. At the same time it showed the limits of that tactic: Montgomery accepted the surrender of the forces facing the British, but refused to accept the surrender of the armies fighting the Red Army. The event that in the Netherlands and Denmark is remembered as the beginning of freedom remained almost forgotten in Germany for many years, and the site of the signing now lies within a closed Bundeswehr training area.

A Reich in tatters

After Hitler’s suicide on 30 April, Dönitz, by virtue of Hitler’s testament, assumed the powers of head of state and Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht; he was based at Plön and, from the beginning of May, at Flensburg-Mürwik, near the Danish border. The Reich was by then cut up into several separate areas. On 2 May Berlin surrendered, and in Italy the surrender of the forces of Army Group C, signed a few days earlier at Caserta, came into force. In northern Germany the 21st Army Group, which in March had crossed the Rhine at Wesel, had reached the Elbe and crossed it. On 2 May the British 11th Armoured Division took Lübeck, and paratroopers of the British 6th Airborne Division reached Wismar a few hours ahead of units of Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian Front. This cut Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark off from the rest of the country. On 3 May the British entered Hamburg without a fight; the local Gauleiter, Karl Kaufmann, had decided to surrender the city to spare it further destruction after the bombing.

To the west of the British, in the western Netherlands, stood the German 25th Army under the overall command of Colonel General Johannes Blaskowitz, cut off from the Reich since the Canadians had reached the Zuiderzee in April. Since the end of April a de facto ceasefire had been in force there, allowing the Allies to drop food to the starving population in Operations Manna and Chowhound. In Denmark there was a large German garrison, and some quarter of a million German refugees from East Prussia and Pomerania, brought across the Baltic in Operation Hannibal, had also taken refuge there. In the east, between the Elbe and the Oder, the remnants of Army Group Vistula were disintegrating as they fell back before the Red Army towards the American and British lines.

Dönitz’s strategy

Dönitz had no illusions that the war could still be won. What he wanted was to gain time. According to his later accounts and the findings of historians, his aim was to hold the front in the east for as long as possible, so that as many soldiers and civilians as possible could get through to the west and go into British or American captivity rather than Soviet. In the west, on the other hand, he intended to surrender in stages, army by army and region by region. He also hoped – as Himmler had in his offer – that the alliance between the Western powers and the Soviet Union would crack at any moment. From documents captured from the Allies the Germans knew the planned boundaries of the occupation zones and knew that Mecklenburg and Brandenburg would fall in the Soviet zone.

The tactic of partial surrenders was not Dönitz’s invention – Hitler had rejected it, but while he was still alive, in Italy, General Karl Wolff and his associates had spent several weeks negotiating a surrender behind Berlin’s back. Now, however, the initiative came from the head of state himself. Dönitz sent to Montgomery his successor as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg. He considered that as head of state he should not negotiate with the field marshal in person.

The first visit: 3 May

The British had taken Lüneburg on 18 April. Montgomery set up his headquarters in a villa at Häcklingen, and on 1 May moved his tactical headquarters – with the famous caravans in which he had travelled throughout the war – to Timeloberg, a hill on the edge of Lüneburg Heath that had for years served the Lüneburg garrison as a training ground. Before noon on 3 May the German emissaries arrived there by car: Admiral von Friedeburg; General Eberhard Kinzel, chief of staff of Army Group Vistula; Rear Admiral Gerhard Wagner of the naval staff; and Major Hans Jochen Friedel. Montgomery received them under the British flag in front of his caravan and asked – as he later described it – who they were and what they wanted.

Friedeburg handed over a letter from Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. The Germans offered the surrender to the British of the three armies of Army Group Vistula retreating before the Russians in Mecklenburg, and asked for permission for fleeing civilians to be let through the British lines. Montgomery refused. Those forces were fighting the Red Army and should surrender to it; if individual soldiers came in from the east with their hands up, they would be taken prisoner, but there could be no question of the surrender of whole armies. In return he demanded the unconditional surrender of all German forces on his western and northern flank: in the Netherlands, the Frisian Islands and Heligoland, Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark. According to the CBS correspondent Bill Downs, he told the Germans bluntly that if they did not agree, he would go on fighting “with pleasure”.

Friedeburg had no authority for so broad a surrender. He therefore drove back to Flensburg with Major Friedel, while Montgomery gave the Germans until the evening of the following day and, for the duration of their journey, halted air attacks on the roads they were using. Kinzel and Wagner remained at British headquarters. In Flensburg Dönitz, after consulting his entourage – Keitel, the Chief of the OKW Operations Staff, General Alfred Jodl, and Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, who headed the government – accepted Montgomery’s terms. He judged that surrender to the British did not wreck his plan: after all, it did not cover the Eastern Front, and it opened the way to further talks with the Supreme Commander of the Allied forces, General Dwight Eisenhower. The next day, 4 May, he also ordered the U-boats to cease operations and return to port – at sea, the U-boat war was coming to an end.

Signatures in a tent

On the afternoon of 4 May Montgomery called the journalists together at his headquarters and told them that a surrender would take place that evening. Friedeburg returned at around 6 p.m. with an additional member of the delegation, Colonel Fritz Poleck, representing the OKW. Before the Germans were led into the tent, Friedeburg confirmed in the field marshal’s caravan that they were ready to sign. Montgomery read out the document and announced that if it were not signed at once and without discussion, the fighting would go on. Friedeburg, Kinzel, Wagner, Poleck and Friedel signed in turn, and finally Montgomery, who added the date and time. The ceremony was filmed by British newsreel cameramen and recorded for radio by the BBC; the commentary was given by the Australian correspondent Chester Wilmot. Most sources give the time as 6.30 p.m.; some German studies give 6 p.m., when the delegation arrived on the hill.

The document consisted of seven short clauses. The German command agreed to the surrender of all armed forces in the Netherlands, in north-west Germany including the Frisian Islands, Heligoland and all other islands, in Schleswig-Holstein and in Denmark, together with all ships in those areas. Fighting on land, at sea and in the air was to cease at 8 a.m. on 5 May, British Double Summer Time. The German commands were to carry out further Allied orders without argument, and disobedience would be regarded as a breach of the surrender terms. The fifth clause stipulated that the instrument was independent of any future general surrender of Germany and would be superseded by it. The English text was authoritative.

Formally it was a military surrender at the level of an army group, like the one at Caserta – not the surrender of a state. Montgomery took care not to exceed his authority: he accepted no political commitments, and the document expressly subordinated itself to future arrangements by all the Allies. According to estimates cited in German literature, between 1.6 and 2 million soldiers laid down their arms under it, although these figures also include thousands of men who had crossed to the west from the Eastern Front in the last days.

Candles in the windows

The news reached Denmark that same evening. At 8.36 p.m. the Danish service of the BBC in London interrupted its broadcast with an announcement that Montgomery had proclaimed the surrender of the German forces in the Netherlands, north-west Germany and Denmark. People poured into the streets, tore the blackout paper from their windows and placed lighted candles in them – a custom the Danes repeat every year on the evening of 4 May. From the morning of 5 May members of the Danish resistance, wearing armbands, occupied public offices and arrested collaborators. In places this led to shoot-outs with German soldiers and with members of Danish collaborationist formations, in which people were killed. The Wehrmacht in Denmark, commanded by Colonel General Georg Lindemann, by and large complied with the surrender, and the Reich Plenipotentiary Werner Best was soon placed under arrest. On 5 May the first British soldiers and an Allied military mission flew into Copenhagen; that same day a “liberation government” including representatives of the resistance was formed, and King Christian X, who had remained in the country throughout the occupation, regained his freedom of action. For Denmark, overrun by the Germans in a matter of hours on 9 April 1940, the occupation had lasted five years and just under a month.

In practice, however, the surrender did not cover the whole country. The garrison on the island of Bornholm, far to the east in the Baltic, refused to surrender to the Russians, and only after Soviet air raids on Rønne and Nexø and a landing did the island pass into the hands of the Red Army, which stayed there until April 1946. The Danish authorities also had to deal with the quarter of a million German refugees, who were held in camps for years afterwards; the last of them left Denmark in 1949.

In north-west Germany the troops laid down their arms unit by unit. In East Frisia, where the Polish 1st Armoured Division of Major General Stanisław Maczek had been fighting hard to the very last day, the guns fell silent on the morning of 5 May before Wilhelmshaven, one of the Kriegsmarine’s two main bases. After talks with the German fortress command, on 6 May the deputy commander of the 10th Armoured Cavalry Brigade, Colonel Antoni Grudziński (PL), accepted on Maczek’s behalf the surrender of the fortress and naval base command, the “Ostfriesland” fleet, the 10th Infantry Division and eight infantry and artillery regiments. Polish units entered the town, and in the port – according to Polish figures – more than two hundred warships and auxiliary vessels fell into their hands. The division, which in 1944 had fought at Falaise, in Belgium and in the Netherlands, ended the war in the port where in 1939 the Reich’s battleships had been based. Polish units remained stationed in and around Wilhelmshaven for the following months.

The Netherlands and further talks

In the Netherlands the surrender at Lüneburg Heath meant the end of the war, but its implementation still had to be agreed. On 5 May, at the Hotel De Wereld in Wageningen, the commander of I Canadian Corps, General Charles Foulkes, handed Blaskowitz detailed orders for laying down arms, in the presence of Prince Bernhard, commander of the Netherlands Forces of the Interior. Canadian and British troops entered the western part of the country over the following days. Today the Dutch celebrate 5 May as Liberation Day (Bevrijdingsdag), because at 8 a.m. on that day the surrender signed near Lüneburg came into force.

Dönitz at once took the next step. On 5 May Friedeburg travelled from Montgomery’s headquarters to Reims, to Eisenhower’s headquarters, with an offer to surrender the remaining German forces in the west. That same day Army Group G surrendered to the Americans in Bavaria. Eisenhower, however, bound by his undertaking to Moscow that Germany would surrender to all the Allies simultaneously, refused any further partial surrenders and demanded a complete surrender, on all fronts at once. Dönitz had to give way – the few days of manoeuvring he had counted on allowed tens of thousands more soldiers and civilians to get through to the west, but changed nothing in the victors’ political calculations.

Friedeburg went on to sign both instruments of Germany’s unconditional surrender, at Reims and in Berlin. On 23 May, the day the members of the Dönitz government were arrested at Flensburg, he committed suicide. Kinzel took his own life on 25 June 1945. Montgomery named Timeloberg “Victory Hill” and erected a memorial on it with an inscription commemorating the unconditional surrender of all land, sea and air forces in north-west Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. It was guarded by German civilians, but even so its bronze plaque was stolen in 1955. In 1958, on Montgomery’s instructions, the stone was taken to Britain, to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where his career had begun. In 1995 a new stone bearing the words “Never again war” was put up at the edge of the hill.

Place in the war

The surrender of 4 May ended the war along the whole northern wing of the Western Front, almost a year after the Normandy landings and less than eight months after the Allied defeat at Arnhem, which had put off the liberation of the western Netherlands until the spring. It spared the Netherlands and Denmark fighting in the last days of the war, and the starving cities of the western Netherlands the threat that the defending Germans would flood the polders. For Montgomery it was the culmination of a road that had begun at El Alamein.

For Germany it meant less than Dönitz had hoped. Montgomery kept to the principle that no ally would accept the surrender of forces fighting another ally, and he would not be drawn into a game in which the Germans tried to separate the West from the Soviet Union. The partial surrenders – in Italy, on Lüneburg Heath, in Bavaria – hastened the disintegration of the Wehrmacht, but in the end Germany had to sign a complete surrender to all the Allies at once, first at Reims and then, at Moscow’s insistence, at Karlshorst in Berlin.