ABSTRACT
On 30 April 1945, Hitler committed suicide, and power passed to the new Reich President Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. On 1 May 1945, Dönitz took up the reins of government in Flensburg. But after unsuccessful attempts ‘to bargain terms through partial ceasefires in the west’ (Burleigh 2000:794), Germany capitulated. It was Chief of the Operations Staff of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW), Alfred Jodl, representing Dönitz, who signed the capitulation of the Wehrmacht to the Allies at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims (France) on 7 May 1945. According to the terms, the war came to an end on 8 May at 23.01 CET. The Soviets, however, were unhappy at the fact that the capitulation had been signed in territory occupied by the Western Allies. They insisted on a repetition of the ceremony in Soviet-occupied east Berlin. So, shortly after midnight on 9 May, after the ceasefire had come into effect, Chief of Staff of the OKW Wilhelm Keitel was made to sign a second capitulation at the Red Army Headquarters in Berlin-Karlshorst. It is therefore open to debate which day should be identified as the day of capitulation. Throughout the years of the Cold War, the Soviets, on 9 May in East Berlin, symbolically re-enacted the Keitel capitulation, while celebrations in the West tended to take place on 7 and 8 May. The two acts of capitulation in May 1945 were evidence of a growing rift between the Western and Soviet Allies, and anticipated the divided memory of 8 May in West and East Germany. The subsequently separate sets of commemorations on different days-Americans, British and French here, Soviets there-implied that there had been two wars, and two sets of victors.
