The surrender of German forces in Italy

At 2 p.m. local time on Wednesday 2 May 1945 – noon Greenwich time – the guns fell silent on the Italian front. The surrender signed three days earlier at Caserta came into force, covering all forces subordinate to the German Commander-in-Chief South-West: Army Group C, SS General Karl Wolff’s SS and police forces, and the remnants of the Fascist army of the Italian Social Republic. In the evening Field Marshal Harold Alexander, Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, announced that the German forces in Italy and in part of Austria had surrendered unconditionally. It was the first surrender of an entire German front in the war – five days before the instrument signed at Reims.

Popular war chronologies sum up the day in two sentences. Under 1 May: “the war in Italy is over, but some German units are still at large”; under 2 May: “General Vietinghoff surrenders his forces in northern Italy”. Both need qualifying. On 1 May the war in Italy was formally still going on, and its end hung by a thread. Nor did General Heinrich von Vietinghoff surrender in person on 2 May: the document had been signed on his behalf by his plenipotentiary on 29 April, and on 30 April Field Marshal Albert Kesselring had removed him from command. Whether the surrender would come into force at all was settled only by Kesselring’s consent, given in the early hours of 2 May.

1 May: a front that no longer existed

As May began, the German armies in Italy no longer existed as an organised force. In the last ten days of April the Allies had broken through at Argenta and Bologna and crossed the Po; the Germans had abandoned most of their heavy equipment on the south bank of the river, and only the infantry, often without weapons, got across the wrecked bridges. Since the first week of April almost no supplies had reached Italy from the Reich. In the great cities of the north, resistance committees had taken power: on 25 April an uprising broke out in Milan, on 28 April partisans shot Mussolini, and on 29 April Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, defence minister of the Salò Republic, gave himself up to the American IV Corps. On 1 May Graziani ordered his Army Group Liguria to lay down its arms.

The Americans of the Fifth Army were already in Milan, in Turin and on Lake Garda, and their spearheads were advancing up the Adige valley towards Bolzano and the Brenner Pass. The British Eighth Army had taken Padua and Venice, and the New Zealand 2nd Division was approaching Trieste, where an Italian uprising had been under way since 30 April and where Yugoslav troops entered on 1 May.

Even so, fighting was still going on in many places. The German garrisons of Trieste refused to surrender to the partisans. In Friuli and in the Alpine valleys retreating columns clashed with resistance units. Nor did anyone know whether the command in Bolzano would carry out what had been agreed at Caserta. This is what the remark that some forces were “still at large” meant. It was not a matter of missing divisions, but of units that had not received orders or did not want to obey them, and of uncertainty over who in the German staff still held authority.

A night in Bolzano

The crisis of command had been building since 30 April. Kesselring, who as Commander-in-Chief South was once again Vietinghoff’s superior, did not approve the surrender. When the Gauleiter of Tyrol, Franz Hofer, reported the “treason” to him, the field marshal dismissed Vietinghoff and his chief of staff, General Hans Röttiger, and had them sent before a court martial. Command of Army Group C passed to General Friedrich Schulz. The conspirators did not give in: on the night of 30 April – 1 May, on the orders of Wolff and Röttiger, the new commanders were briefly detained in Bolzano.

On the evening of 1 May German radio announced that Hitler had died “fighting against Bolshevism” and that his successor was Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. For the officers in Bolzano this meant that the oath they had sworn to Hitler no longer bound them – the argument Wolff invoked in the night-time conversations. At 1.15 a.m. Kesselring issued one more order for the arrest of Vietinghoff, Röttiger and several other officers. For several hours Wolff tried to persuade him over the telephone that every hour of fighting meant more victims and more cities destroyed. At around 4.30 a.m. Kesselring gave way: he authorised Schulz to issue the ceasefire order for the South-West theatre and revoked the arrest orders.

Formally, Vietinghoff did not regain his post at that point, but in the following days he again dealt with the Allies as commander of Army Group C. Hence the sentence that “Vietinghoff surrendered his forces” is a simplification, though not a falsehood: he and Wolff initiated the surrender, it was signed at Caserta on their behalf, and the order of 2 May was ultimately issued by Vietinghoff’s successor with Kesselring’s consent.

Noon on 2 May

The ceasefire order left Bolzano late. German radio stations broadcast it about two hours after the deadline, so in some places firing continued into the afternoon. On the Allied side they waited for confirmation from the German staff; when it came, Alexander announced the ceasefire at 6.30 p.m. In an order of the day to the soldiers of the 15th Army Group he stressed that after almost two years of hard fighting in the Italian peninsula the German armies had been virtually destroyed. That same day Prime Minister Winston Churchill informed the House of Commons of the surrender.

According to Alexander’s communiqué, nearly a million men laid down their arms in Italy and Austria; other estimates are lower – from several hundred thousand upwards – depending on whether rear services, police, the Todt Organisation and Italian Fascist formations are counted. The surrender also covered the Austrian provinces subordinate to the South-West command: Vorarlberg, Tyrol, Salzburg and parts of Carinthia and Styria.

So ended the twenty-month Italian campaign, which had begun with the landing in Sicily in July 1943. The Allies had feared fighting in an “Alpine redoubt” that would prolong the war by months. No battle in the Alps ever took place.

The last shots

The surrender coming into force did not mean that calm descended everywhere at once. In Trieste the German garrisons shut up in the castle of San Giusto, the law courts and the port surrendered only on the afternoon of 2 May – not to the Yugoslav partisans, but to General Bernard Freyberg’s New Zealand division. East of the city, on the Karst and in Istria, the German XCVII Army Corps fought the Yugoslav 4th Army for several more days; according to Yugoslav and German studies its remnants laid down their arms only around 7 May. This sector lay in the zone disputed between Yugoslavia and the Western Allies and became the seed of the Trieste crisis.

In Friuli and Venetia some retreating units – especially SS formations and the Cossack columns of the Kosakenlager, which had been stationed in Carnia in the spring of 1945 – did not obey orders at once, or forced their way towards Austria so as to surrender to the British rather than to the partisans. Crimes against civilians were committed along the way. In the village of Avasinis in Friuli, on 2 May, the day of the surrender, a German unit killed several dozen inhabitants – Italian tallies give 51 victims.

Disarmament took weeks. On 4 May near Vipiteno (Sterzing), south of the Brenner Pass, patrols of the American 88th Infantry Division of the Fifth Army met soldiers of the 103rd Infantry Division of the Seventh Army, coming from the direction of Austria – the Italian front had joined up with the Western Front. That same day General Frido von Senger und Etterlin arrived at the headquarters of General Mark Clark in Florence to receive, on Vietinghoff’s behalf, instructions for carrying out the surrender. Vietinghoff did not go in person for fear of an attack by partisans. Senger himself was nearly killed on the way.

The Polish II Corps at the end of the war

The end of the war in Italy found the Polish II Corps in reserve of the British Eighth Army, between Bologna, Imola and Rimini; the corps headquarters was north of Imola. After entering Bologna on 21 April the Poles, in accordance with General McCreery’s orders, took no further part in the pursuit across the Po. Bologna was the last battle of the corps, which had travelled the road from Monte Cassino through Ancona and the Gothic Line. In May 1945 it numbered some 56,000 soldiers.

The corps commander, General Władysław Anders, had been acting Commander-in-Chief in London since 26 February, and in the April battle his place was taken by General Zygmunt Bohusz-Szyszko. The news of the surrender was received in the Polish units with relief, but without the joy felt among the other Allies. After the Yalta Conference it was clear that Lwów and Wilno – the home regions of thousands of the soldiers – would remain in the USSR, and that Poland was ruled by a government dependent on Moscow. For many soldiers the end of the war raised the question of whether they had anywhere to go home to at all.

Paradoxically, after the fighting ended the corps began to grow rapidly. Into it were drafted Poles taken prisoner in the uniform of the Wehrmacht, into which many of them – especially from Pomerania and Silesia – had been forcibly conscripted, as well as liberated prisoners of war and forced labourers. According to the corps’ own figures, on 29 September 1945 it numbered 104,996 soldiers. At the turn of May and June its units were moved south of Ancona, where they carried out occupation duties. Only some of the soldiers chose to return home – in December 1945 more than 12,000 men travelled from Italy to Poland. In 1946 the corps was shipped to Britain, and most of its soldiers joined the Polish Resettlement Corps; in 1947 the corps was disbanded.

What came next

On the same day, 2 May, Berlin surrendered, and the surrender in Italy became the model for further partial surrenders. On 4 May, on Lüneburg Heath, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery accepted the surrender of the German forces in north-west Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark. On 5 May Army Group G surrendered at Haar near Munich, and on 7 May at Reims and on the night of 8–9 May at Berlin-Karlshorst the surrender of the entire Wehrmacht was signed. Kesselring, whose command by then covered only southern Germany and Austria, gave himself up to the Americans a few days later.

The Caserta surrender also foreshadowed disputes between the Allies. The Soviet Union suspected from the outset that the secret talks in Switzerland were aimed at a separate peace in the west. The Western Allies, for their part, feared that Yugoslavia would seize Trieste and the Julian March. The dispute over Trieste was ended only by the Belgrade agreement of 9 June 1945, which divided the region with a demarcation line.

Vietinghoff went into Allied captivity, from which he was released in 1948. Two years later he was one of a group of former generals who, at the request of Konrad Adenauer’s government, drew up the Himmerod memorandum on a West German contribution to the defence of Europe. He died in 1952. In 1947 Kesselring was sentenced to death by a British military court in Venice for crimes against the Italian population, including the Ardeatine Caves massacre; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and in 1952 he was released on grounds of ill health. Wolff managed to escape responsibility for his part in the Holocaust for almost two decades.

The war in Italy cost both sides hundreds of thousands killed and wounded, and the civilian population tens of thousands of victims of bombing, fighting and reprisals. For the Allied forces in the Italian peninsula, the Poles among them, it was the last day of fighting in Europe. Six days remained until Germany’s general surrender.