The surrender at Wageningen

On the afternoon of Saturday 5 May 1945 cars carrying German officers drew up outside the Hotel De Wereld in Wageningen, a small university town on the Rhine. The commander-in-chief of the German forces in the Netherlands, Colonel General Johannes Blaskowitz, had come at the summons of the commander of I Canadian Corps, Lieutenant General Charles Foulkes. In one of the hotel’s rooms Foulkes set out the terms on which Blaskowitz’s troops were to lay down their arms. Also at the table sat Prince Bernhard, son-in-law of Queen Wilhelmina and commander of the Netherlands Forces of the Interior. For the Dutch the day became the symbol of the end of the occupation, and they still celebrate it as Liberation Day (Bevrijdingsdag).

Popular accounts, including English-language war chronologies, say that on this day the German forces in the Netherlands “officially surrendered” and that the surrender was accepted by Prince Bernhard. Both statements need correcting. The surrender had been settled the day before: on 4 May, on Lüneburg Heath, Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg signed before Field Marshal Montgomery the unconditional surrender of the German forces in the Netherlands, north-west Germany and Denmark, effective from 8 a.m. on 5 May. At Wageningen the talks concerned the implementation of that surrender, and the Allied party to them was Foulkes. Prince Bernhard was present but, according to Dutch historians, took no part in the talks themselves. The document itself was not signed until the following day, 6 May.

Hunger and truce

The western Netherlands, with Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht, remained under occupation after the Allies’ defeat at Arnhem in September 1944. The front came to a halt on the great rivers, and the west of the country lived through the Hunger Winter, during which, according to the most frequently cited estimates, some 20,000 people died for lack of food. In the spring of 1945 the Canadians, attacking from the east, liberated the north and east of the country and reached the Zuiderzee, but did not assault the so-called Fortress Holland. The Germans, cut off from the Reich, could flood the polders around the cities, which for the starving population would have meant catastrophe.

Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart preferred to come to an understanding with the Allies, although he would not agree to surrender without orders. At the end of April, in the front-line village of Achterveld, a de facto truce was agreed: Allied aircraft could drop food under Operations Manna and Chowhound, and the Germans undertook not to fire on them and not to flood any further land. On 30 April Seyss-Inquart himself discussed these matters at Achterveld with General Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, in the presence of Prince Bernhard and a Soviet representative. The details of overland deliveries, the so-called Achterveld protocols, were signed on 2 May – also in Wageningen. The front was quiet, and the Canadians were waiting for the order to advance.

Talks at the Hotel De Wereld

News of the surrender signed near Lüneburg reached the Netherlands on the evening of 4 May; people poured into the streets, although German soldiers were still standing at their posts. The next day Foulkes summoned Blaskowitz to Wageningen, a few kilometres from the front line. The Canadian was accompanied by Brigadier George Kitching, the German by his chief of staff, Generalleutnant Paul Reichelt. According to the Dutch foundation that looks after the hotel, Blaskowitz, asked whether the Germans were ready to surrender, answered curtly: “Jawohl.” According to the historian Loe de Jong, however, the talks were longer and businesslike. The Germans agreed to the terms in principle but wanted their command in the Reich to approve several points, and were given twenty-four hours to obtain it. A Canadian interpreter recalled that they protested against some of the clauses and were told that the surrender was unconditional.

The document was entitled Orders to German commanders on surrender. It required Blaskowitz to have the troops under his command – more than 100,000 men, according to various figures – lay down their arms, to hand over equipment and depots, to maintain order until the Allies arrived, and to supply within twenty-four hours information on the disposition of units, minefields and fortifications in the western Netherlands. The Canadians needed this information for their advance westwards. The signatures were put to it on the afternoon of 6 May in the hall of the neighbouring agricultural college, from which Wageningen University later grew. According to a widespread story, no typewriter could be found on 5 May to make a fair copy of the text. Even so, the document was dated “5 May 1945, 4.30 p.m.”. In 1953 Foulkes presented the original to the town; it is kept in the Wageningen municipal archives, while the pen Foulkes signed with is claimed as an exhibit by two museums – the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa and the town museum in Wageningen.

The last days of the occupation

On 7 May Canadian and British troops crossed the front line into the western provinces, greeted by crowds in the streets of Utrecht, The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Lorries loaded with food followed them. Liberation did not pass off peacefully everywhere: German soldiers, who remained armed until the Allies arrived, clashed here and there with members of the Dutch resistance, and in Amsterdam, on Dam Square, Germans opened fire on a celebrating crowd. On the island of Texel the fighting that had begun in April between the Germans and mutinous Georgian soldiers of an Ostbataillon was still going on.

On 7 May British soldiers detained Seyss-Inquart in Hamburg; at the beginning of May he had left the Netherlands to see Dönitz in Flensburg. The Reich Commissioner was tried before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and sentenced to death. Blaskowitz was taken prisoner; in the trial of Wehrmacht commanders known as the High Command Trial he was charged with, among other things, crimes against civilians and prisoners of war. On 5 February 1948, as the trial was opening, he committed suicide in Nuremberg prison. His record was ambiguous: in September 1939 he commanded the Eighth Army in Poland, and historians hold troops under his command responsible for crimes against the population of Greater Poland; yet as a commander in occupied Poland he protested in memoranda against the murders committed by the SS and police, which damaged his career.

Place in the war

The surrender at Wageningen ended for the Netherlands an occupation that had lasted since May 1940 and, for the starving west of the country, meant the end of the worst period of the war. It did not, however, end the war for the Dutch: the Japanese still ruled the Dutch East Indies, and Dutch prisoners of war and interned civilians were still held in Japanese camps. It was also one link in the chain of partial surrenders by which Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz sought to spread the end of the war out in instalments – coming the day after Lüneburg Heath, on the same day that Army Group G surrendered in Bavaria and the uprising broke out in Prague.

In Dutch memory 5 May has endured as a symbol of freedom regained – even though the formal surrender had been made earlier, near Lüneburg, and the document was signed a day later. Since 1990 Liberation Day has been celebrated every year as a national holiday. The Dutch devote the preceding evening, 4 May, to National Remembrance of the Dead, with two minutes’ silence, and the Hotel De Wereld itself, restored in 1975 with the participation of Prince Bernhard, has become the venue for annual ceremonies attended by Canadian veterans.