May 1945. Hollywood director George Stevens and a few of his camera team are making fun of the Nazis. Adolf Hitler is dead and the Wehrmacht has finally been defeated. A bit of tomfoolery, perhaps to blot out memories of the horrors of Dachau. Stevens is in no hurry to return to Hollywood. He is determined to document the end of the Nazi regime as accurately as possible.

Consequently, he and his team have also come to Berchtesgaden. Stevens has been given permission to film on the Obersalzberg, Hitler’s private refuge high above the town. The Berghof is a ruin, a symbol of the demise of a murderous ideology. From the Ober Salzburg, Stevens travelled to nearby Austria, first to Salzburg and then on to Innsbruck, sightseeing in a country which had willingly thrown itself into the arms of the Nazis.

The small camera team also drove to the Brenner pass, on the border with Italy and South Tyrol. The Wehrmacht had laid down its arms in Italy and southern Germany, but not in Austria as a whole, and the Reich government in Flensburg in northern Germany was still refusing to capitulate to the Soviet Union.

May 6, 1945. On behalf of Admiral Dönitz, Colonel General Alfred Jodl had flown to Reims in France to sign the Declaration of the Unconditional Surrender of Nazi Germany. Kirk B. Lawton, Eisenhower’s man for photojournalism in World War II, documented this major event in world history with his amateur camera.

Yordle still had hopes of securing a separate armistice with the Western Allies. Negotiations in the Allied headquarters were deadlocked for hours. Headed by General Eisenhower, The Allied delegation resolutely demanded the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces on all fronts. Jodl hesitated because this was a step he had no authority to take.

The British and Americans responded by threatening to start bombing German cities again. To avoid annoying Stalin, a high-ranking Soviet liaison officer had been invited to attend the ceremony. It was only after midnight that the German delegation received a telegram from Dönitz saying that Yordle was allowed to sign.

At 2:39 a.m. on May 7, 1945, U.S. General Walter Bedel Smith, Soviet General Ivan Suslaparov, and, as a witness, French Major General François Cévé, all signed the capitulation document. Then it was Alfred Jodl’s turn to add his signature. Then the commander-in-chief of the Allied Expeditionary Force, Dwight D.

Eisenhower, announced that, as of 11:01 p.m., Central European Time, on May 8, 1945, the war would be over. We, the undersigned, acting by authority of the German High Command, hereby surrender unconditionally to the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force and simultaneously to the Soviet High Command, all forces on land, sea and in the air who are at this date under German control.

When Joseph Stalin heard of the capitulation in Reims, he was beside himself with rage and demanded that the ceremony be repeated in his own sphere of influence. But the news from Reims had already been made public. As a result, most German soldiers surrendered voluntarily, if possible to the Americans. On May the seventh, a cameraman with Special Film Project 186 took these pictures somewhere in southeast Germany.

In Tyrol on the evening of May the seventh, author Erich Kessner wrote in his diary : Flensburg radio station has announced that Jodl has signed the capitulation document and that it will come into force tomorrow. But the radio station in Bohemia has called the report a fabrication concocted by the enemy.

In Berlin, the Russians claim to have found the corpses of Goebbels, his wife and their children. Now the radio stations have ceased broadcasting. It is quiet here. The only sound is that of cockchafers, those little armored insects flying headfirst into the illuminated window. Meanwhile, Czech resistance fighters had restored the old borders, which the Munich Agreement of 1938 had shifted in favor of the Sudeten German minority.

Over the past 2 weeks, United States General George S. Patton had advanced 30 to 40 kilometers a day, an almost incredible rate of progress. In early May 1945, his troops had crossed the border into Bohemia. On May 6, American units liberated the city of Pilsen. The next day the GI’s arrival turned into a rousing victory parade.

Thousands of Pilsen citizens welcomed the Americans with boundless joy. It was the first time cameramen with Special Film Project 186 had been able to film scenes of jubilation. Gone were people’s fears that their hometown could still be turned into a battlefield. Yet, that nearly happened.

because in Pilsen and the surrounding area the Germans still had around 15 000 troops who were determined to crush any attempts by the Czechs to revolt. However, the 2 U.S. divisions which liberated Pilsen outnumbered the Germans, so the German commander, General von Majewski, decided to surrender. At 2:15 p.m. of May 6, 1945, he signed the capitulation document and ordered his troops to seize all hostilities.

Then, in front of his staff and his wife, Majewski committed suicide. The American liberators remained in Pilsen for 7 months. The occupying Germans left Pilsen forever. 6 years of brutal suppression had left their mark. In March 1939, Hitler’s Wehrmacht had broken the Munich Agreement and marched into Czechoslovakia.

As part of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, for years the people of Pilsen, too, were at the mercy of German despotism and terror. Around 3,000 Jewish citizens were deported to concentration camps. Right up until Germany’s capitulation, Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner and his troops were entrenched in Bohemia.

Schörner was a fanatical Nazi whom Hitler, in his last will and testament, had appointed commander-in-chief of the army. In line with the maxim, strength through fear, Schörner used brutal methods to put his troops under pressure. Deserters were hanged from the nearest tree with a sign round their necks saying : “I refuse to protect German women and children.

” Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels commented on this attitude as late as March 1945. Such methods have an impact of course. At any rate, every soldier in Schörner’s combat area knows that he can die at the front and will die at the rear. The German prisoners of war were escorted out of town by Czech resistance fighters.

Things weren’t always as amicable as these pictures, taken by a United States Air Force cameraman, suggest. In places where prior to the arrival of the Allies a vacuum had formed, excessive violence was common. The aggressive mood was fuelled by the Czech president in exile, Edvard Beneš, who even before the war was over, had said : “The Germans will be paid back many times over and without mercy for all the crimes they have committed in our land since 1938.

” The Americans came across the victims of acts of vengeance time and again. It is May 8, 1945, the last day of the Second World War in Europe. The Czechs celebrated their American liberators, but they had nothing but contempt for their former tormentors. The bodies were carted away and buried somewhere.

No one in Bohemia shed a single tear for a dead German. The cameraman with Special Film Project 186 took these pictures right on the Soviet-American demarcation line. Before this Wehrmacht officer is allowed to pass the checkpoint, he has to hand over his pistol. A German general surrenders in comfort in a convertible.

A United States military policeman then drives him to a special prisoner of war camp for high-ranking officers. Anyone who was fortunate enough grabbed a ride on a Wehrmacht truck heading for the safety of the West. Among the endless convoy of German soldiers, there were also some trucks carrying jubilant Czechs.

At 12:30 p.m. on May 8, 1945, Reich President Karl Dönitz spoke to the nation. on the radio. Men and women of Germany, in my address on May the 1st in which I informed you of the death of the Fuhrer and my appointment as his successor, I stated that my first task was to save German lives. In order to attain this goal, in the night of the 6th to the 7th of May, I ordered the armed forces high command to declare the unconditional surrender of all fighting troops in all theatres of war.

At 11:00 p.m. on May 8, the guns will fall silent. Most of the defeated German soldiers had to make their way into captivity on foot. This is how one soldier remembered May 8, 1945. We were really frightened. All we could think about was what awaited us over the next few days. What would happen to us in Czechoslovakia, surrounded as we were with no way out? Then suddenly the war was over.

The new Führer of what was left of the Reich, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz announced the unconditional surrender of the Reich and the Wehrmacht. At long last the war was over. Years of destroying human lives and property were over. But what would become of us Germans now? My life had been preserved, but how would I be able to shape it? Would there be any real possibilities open to me? On May 8, United States President Harry S. Truman addressed his nation on the radio.

This is a solemn but a glorious hour. Our rejoicing is sobered and subdued by a supreme consciousness of the terrible price we have paid to rid the world of Hitler and his evil bow. The rats were leaving the sinking ship. On May 8, 1945, in Kitzingen near Würzburg, a German war hero allowed himself to be filmed by a cameraman with Special Film Project 186.

Together with his squadron, fighter and bomber pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel had flown out of Bohemia to surrender to the Americans. Rudel was the only member of the German armed forces to be awarded the Knight’s Cross with golden oak leaves, swords and diamonds. He was also a fanatical Nazi. In March 1945, while still in a military hospital after being seriously wounded by Soviet anti-aircraft fire, Rudel appeared on Joseph Goebbels’ weekly propaganda news-reel, exhorting the Germans to stand firm.

This time it is not about personal sacrifices. We all need to grit our teeth and willingly accept these sacrifices, and in the end, this nation of ours, which up to now has fought so courageously and has indeed gritted its teeth, will achieve final victory. Rudel presented himself to his American hosts as a cultivated individual who, as a soldier, had merely been doing his duty.

Rudel spent nearly a year in American captivity. After he was released, he first set up a haulage company. But in 1948, he fled via the ratline to South America. In Argentina, Rudel set up a relief organisation for Nazi war criminals and maintained close contact with fascists from Italy and Croatia who were being searched for worldwide.

Rudel ended the war as an amputee but still firmly convinced that National Socialism had been a good idea. In this respect he was totally in agreement with Lieutenant General Adolf Galland, who, like Rudel, was a highly decorated fighter pilot. After his release from American captivity, Galland also went to Argentina, where he acted as advisor to President Juan Perón’s air force.

When Perón was ousted from power, Adolf Galland returned to Germany, while Hans Ulrich Wudel served the dictators of Paraguay and Chile. In Chile, he occasionally resided in the notorious colonial Dignidad torture commune. For the rest of his life, Rudel maintained close contact with the neo-Nazi scene in Germany.

The funeral of the Nazi war hero in 1982 turned into a macabre showpiece. Old comrades bade farewell with the Hitler salute, German air force jets made a low-level pass over the cemetery, and the mourner sang all three verses of the German national anthem. In London on May 8, people gathered in the streets to celebrate the end of the Second World War in Europe.

In his memoirs, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote : “The unconditional surrender of our enemies was the signal for the greatest outburst of joy in the history of mankind.” “The Second World War had indeed been fought to the bitter end in Europe.” “The vanquished as well as the victors felt inexpressible relief.

” “Weary and worn, impoverished but undaunted, and now triumphant, we had a moment that was sublime.” “We thanked God for the greatest of his blessings, the feeling that we had done our duty.” On May 8, Churchill insisted on giving the victory in Europe broadcast himself. It was almost 5 years to the day. On May 10, 1940, he had assumed leadership of a national coalition government in Britain’s darkest hour.

Following defeat in France and the retreat from Dunkirk, Churchill predicted that the war against Nazi Germany would cost his people blood, sweat and tears. His contempt for Hitler knew no bounds. Consequently, VE Day was the biggest triumph of his life. As Churchill drove through London, the crowds cheered him, but barely 2 months later, he suffered a bitter defeat at the hands of the British electorate.

It cost Churchill the office of Prime Minister. Walking behind the sergeant at arms, who is bearing the ceremonial mace of the House of Commons, Speaker Douglas Clifton heads for Westminster Abbey, followed by the Prime Minister and his Majesty’s Government. In the Abbey, the congregation sang the hymn of Thanksgiving written by Isaac Watts in 1708.

“O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home.” The first to leave the Abbey after the service was the royal family. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and their daughters, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Plans had been put forward for the royal family to be evacuated to Canada.

But first and foremost it was the Queen who totally rejected the idea. “The children won’t go without me. I won’t leave the King, and the King will never leave.” The King and Queen remained in London throughout the war, actively giving comfort and encouragement to people, especially during the Blitz. May 9, 1945.

At a barracks in Wiesbaden, liberated Soviet slave workers celebrate victory over Germany. Most of them had been deported to the Third Reich, after the Nazis occupied the Ukraine and Belarus. The women were put to work mainly in armaments factories. For all Soviet citizens, the 9th of May was the day of liberation from Nazi fascism. That is because the Declaration of Surrender was signed after midnight, Moscow time.

Joseph Stalin had demanded that the capitulation ceremony be repeated in Berlin-Karlshorst. In his view, the pictures from Reims, in which the Soviet general seemed like a mere observer, could not symbolize the end of a war that had cost the lives of 27 million of his subjects. On May 9, a camera team with Special Film Projects 186 took this footage of the victory celebrations in Wiesbaden, at which a statement by the Soviet dictator was read out.

3 years ago Hitler declared for all to hear that his aims included the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the resting from it of the Caucasus, the Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic Islands and other areas. He declared bluntly, we will destroy Russia so that she will never be able to rise again. This was 3 years ago.

However, Hitler’s crazy ideas were not fated to come true. The progress of the war scattered them to the winds. In actual fact, the direct opposite of the Hitleries’ ravings has taken place. Germany is utterly defeated. The German troops are surrendering. The Soviet Union is celebrating victory, although it does not intend either to dismember or to destroy Germany.

On May 9, 1945, 2 United States Air Force cameramen took this footage on a road somewhere on Germany’s border with Czechoslovakia. To escape the Red Army, Wehrmacht remnants were fleeing to that part of Germany occupied by the Americans. Their supreme commander, Field Marshal Friedrich Schörner, had long since left his troops in the lurch and absconded.

On May 9, dressed in civilian clothes and with several thousand marks from government coffers in his possession, he had flown in a Fieseler Storch to Austria, where a short time later he was arrested by the Americans. Members of the SS, who in the last weeks of the war had stood out through particularly fanatical resistance, had intermingled with ordinary German soldiers.

Heinrich Himmler’s henchmen obviously felt safe in the midst of a stream of soldiers, nurses and civilian employees flooding back to Germany. These child soldiers have also survived. Some Germans were immaculately dressed when they surrendered to the Americans. Exuding self-confidence, this Lieutenant Colonel with the Waffen-SS presented himself to the Americans as an adversary on an equal footing.

But the GIs were not impressed. They knew all about the atrocities the SS had committed against the captured United States troops in the Ardennes. In the eyes of the 2 cameramen with Special Film Project 186, this officer was obviously a perfect example of the German master race. On the other side of the border in the small village of Tannenbergsthal in the Falkland region, convoys of German troops who had surrendered to the Americans were gridlocked.

Just as the supreme command of the Wehrmacht had demanded, the soldiers laid down their arms in a sorted and orderly fashion. On May 9, 1945, around 10 million Germans laid down their arms, the relics of a war which their supreme commander, Adolf Hitler, had long planned and which, worldwide, had claimed around 60 million lives.

Not a single high-ranking Wehrmacht officer felt the need to ignore Hitler’s insane orders and prevent the slaughter of the last few weeks of the war. Even after the Führer had committed suicide, the fighting still continued. Thus, in the final week of the Second World War, 95,000 German soldiers met a senseless end.

In the chaos of unconditional surrender, many an ordinary soldier try to abscond unrecognized. In Tyrol on May 10, 1945, Erich Kessner described scenes in his diary that occurred in so many places. The procession of limping soldiers is endless. They sell cigarettes to get their hands on a bit of money. There is a permanent demand for civilian clothes, but there is nothing to be had.

Wardrobes are empty. A neighbour was given 450 cigarettes for an old pair of trousers. I’d love to make that kind of deal, but the only trousers I’ve got are the ones I’m wearing. Some lance corporal offered the Steiners 3 pounds of smoked sausage, 20 cigarettes and 100 marks on cash for a civilian suit. But the deal didn’t go through.

Herr Steiner thought the price didn’t reflect the tense market situation. The Steiners had lost 2 sons in the war. When a bystander pointed out that their suits could be sold, the mood turned ugly, but the old man swallowed his anger and slammed the door. May 14, 1945 A week after Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender, a camera team with Special Film Project 186 was filming in Augsburg.

By now, people here, too, had resigned themselves to the fact that the Nazi Reich was gone and were coming to terms with their new masters. The city had surrendered peacefully to the Americans on April 28, 1945. The people of Augsburg were relieved that the war had come to an end in their city without bloodshed.

One inhabitant remembered later: “You had this double feeling of being defeated yet at the same time liberated. Defeat had to come. You could almost touch it. But only very slowly did we realize what being liberated really meant.” In an entry in her diary on May 8, 1945, another inhabitant of Augsburg wrote: “What a beautiful day! Nature is fresh and young.

” “The sun is shining and the sky is blue. You would think that a day like this would be full of jubilation and sound, that people would be laughing and weeping for joy, and that the bells would be ringing, because today the word peace is on everyone’s lips.” “Peace in our land!” “Something we almost dreamt of for 6 long years at war.

” The people of Augsburg were going to work or taking a walk as if there had never been any enthusiasm for Hitler or any war crimes. But the victors had their doubts about the seemingly unpolitical attitude of the Germans. They asked awkward questions. Who had been a member of the Nazi party ? Who had stood by as Hitler’s crimes were committed ? And who bore personal guilt ? General Eisenhower’s Proclamation number 1 stated: “We come as conquerors but not as oppressors.

” “We shall obliterate Nazism and German militarism.” “We shall overthrow the Nazi rule, dissolve the Nazi party, and abolish the cruel, oppressive and discriminatory laws and institutions which the party has created.” The Americans had precise ideas on how the Germans were to organize their future. The United States occupying forces came with well-prepared plans for the structure of administrative bodies, political parties, and cultural life in this new freedom, with everything based on the model of Western democracies. At first, many Germans had their doubts about this concept. People preferred to focus more on their everyday lives than on reappraising their country’s Nazi past. Many suppressed the guilt issue.

Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of denazification tribunals took place. The aim was to determine whether the person summonsed was to be classified as a major offender. Offender? Lesser offender? Follower or exonerated person? Roughly two-thirds of those interrogated were classified as followers or were exonerated.

At the end of the war, the victors focused first and foremost on the ruling elite of the Third Reich. In Augsburg on May 14, 1945, the United States Air Force team also took this footage of the most important representative of the Nazi regime who was still alive. Hermann Göring, here the 52-year-old, approaches the camera with a smile on his face.

The dazzling Reichsmarschall had long been Hitler’s deputy, but just before the end of the war, the Nazi leader had removed Göring from all his positions. Firmly convinced that he would become the Führer’s successor, Göring had surrendered to the Americans and been taken to the United States interrogation centre in Augsburg.

After his arrest, Göring is said to have claimed that war was like a football match. At the end, the loser shakes the winner’s hand and all is forgotten. With charm and cunning, the prominent prisoner obviously wanted to evade responsibility. Following an improvised press conference, author Klaus Mann, who was working in defeated Germany as an American reporter, had this to say about Goering: “You can’t even say that he looked particularly unsympathetic.

” “Rather the opposite, in fact.” “Admittedly, his face did display a certain brutality.” “And there was often a really evil glint in his eye.” “His overall appearance was that of a condottieri.” “Someone who, despite all the cruelty he exuded, still had a touch of joviality about him.” Had I known what was happening in the concentration camps, Göring claimed, I would have taken vigorous action.

Like most Germans, Göring, too, saw no need to account for the past. The victors took a different view. Göring was one of the main war criminals to stand trial in Nuremberg in October 1946 and was sentenced to death. But hours before his execution, he swallowed a cyanide capsule and took his own life. The main thing, he is said to have commented, is that for 12 years I had a good life.

June 1945. Hollywood director George Stevens and his camera team are on their way to Hamburg. Stevens would rather have been heading for Berlin, but Western reporters were not yet allowed into the German capital which was in Soviet hands. Stevens had been waiting for special permission ever since Germany’s unconditional capitulation.

In the meantime, it had become clear that on July 1, the Allies would be able to occupy their sectors in Berlin. Only then would Stevens also be allowed to visit the German capital. On arrival in Hamburg, Stevens and his team first went to the city’s world-famous port to do some filming. The Kehrwiederspitze was still largely intact, but around 80% of the port area had been destroyed in bombing raids.

Vast amounts of rubble and numerous wrecks had made the navigation channels impossible. Curious, a few children approached the American camera team and let themselves be filmed. The Hafenstrasse with the old Elbe tunnel. In 1943, that Hamburg became the target of devastating bombing raids, which also completely destroyed the city center.

Fortunately, the war came to an end here without hostilities. Hitler had declared Hamburg a fortress to be defended to the last bullet, but the city’s military leaders ignored the order to destroy its vital port installations. On May 3, 1945, Hamburg was peacefully handed over to the British. Stevens toured the wasteland in his Jeep.

In Operation Gomorrah, which the Allies mounted in late July 1943, hundreds of thousands of incendiaries caused firestorms of untold ferocity, which claimed 34,000 lives. Author Hans-Erich Nossack, wrote about the wholesale destruction of his hometown: “Someone might think that it is hard to stand where you had lived for many years, and where there is now nothing, that you would perhaps sigh or sob.

” “But it is not hard, simply incomprehensible, so incomprehensible that you cannot weigh it.” “Indeed, that weight is so appallingly heavy it is almost impossible to describe.” Having a roof over their head, a home and enough food to keep their families alive was the very minimum of security that people in occupied Germany now wished for.

In early July 1945, George Stevens and his team were at last allowed to leave Hamburg. Driving over the Elbe bridges, they headed for Berlin. The men still had enough rolls of 16mm colour film to document Hitler’s capital and the conference of the Big Three, Stalin, Truman and Churchill, in Potsdam.