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He's not seen exactly as a good German, but he's, you know, he's not seen as one of the really awful ones, but he's terrible. He's an absolutely despicable human being and deserves to be completely condemned, not only for his role in the wider war, but particularly how he behaves at the end. Anyway, be that as it may, they're trying to hold out and get the best conditions they possibly can. So they start sort of negotiating with. With reams, which is Shafe, which is Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force. This is Eisenhower, who's the supreme Allied commander in the west, and he has his headquarters in this building in Reims in northern France. And they get approached and negotiations begin. And initially the German negotiators say, well, you know, this is just an early foray. You know, you can't really kind of, you know, we can't sign any. And, you know, Eisenhower has absolutely no truck with this whatsoever. And he says, you know, basically, get lost until you're ready to talk. And, you know, unconditional surrender means unconditional surrender. It means surrender without conditions. And negotiating team come back on the 6th of May. There's sort of talks into the night. Eisenhower is not present. He doesn't want to go anywhere near kind of people like General Yodel, Alfred Yodel, who is kind of number two at the okw, which is the Overkommando de Wehrmacht, which is the German General staff combined General staff. And eventually, in the kind of early hours, it's sort of 2:47 or whatever it is in the morning, they sign the surrender, and that's it. That is the surrender. But the Soviet Union, Stalin is not happy about this at all. You know, he wanted to have the surrender. And he goes, well, you can't surrender now until, you know, we say so. So the Arabs go, okay, fine, but we'll have a sort of ceasefire and we'll announce it, you know, at a time that is convenient to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union said, well, we want to do it on the 9th of May. And they're like, what? You know, it's like two days time. But they sort of go, okay, well, you know, maybe we should. Churchill's outraged by this talks to President Truman. Truman is kind of, you know, anxious not to rock the boat with the Soviets at this delicate time. So I said, well, I think, you know, we should probably kind of play along with Stalin, it's agreed that it's going to be kept secret until the night of May when the Russians are ready, and they're going to have a ceremony in Berlin and that will be the formal end of the Second World War. The problem is, is German radio then announces it on the afternoon of the 7th, and immediately there's an American journalist from AP News who reveals it and suddenly it's out and everyone knows that the war's over. So celebration starts happening in New York and Washington and London and all the rest of it and everyone starts cheering. And Churchill quite rightly points out that this is just absurd, that everyone knows and they're kind of having to go, you know, no comment, no comment. I mean, you know, clearly it's all happening. So Churchill and Truman agree that they will announce VE Day Victory in Europe Day on the 8th of May. And that is what we in the west consider the final war. Stalin is absolutely seething about this. But on the other hand, he's still got this great victory. Keitel is. Is brought down from Flensburg, which is where the new German government is under Donitz, and brought down to Berlin and driven down to Karlshorst, which is a former barracks in southeast Berlin, where they have the surrender ceremony. And that takes place in the early hours of the 9th of May. And that is it. That's the end of the war. So it's kind of. It's a sort of slightly bizarre end to the war because it's a surrender of two surrenders with a Victory in Europe Day on the day that isn't a surrender at all. So it's sort of, frankly, all a bit of a mashup. But that's how it happens. The Germans, what they're fighting for, they understand that they've got to lay down their arms and they've got to sort of prostrate themselves at the feet of their victors. What they're holding out for is the terms of that, laying down of arms. So in the case of the negotiations with SHAEF headquarters in Reims, it's about trying to allow German troops to the west beforehand. They're trying to buy time, although, you know, as we've already discussed completely pointlessly and to no end. So that's what that's really about. It's not that the Germans are trying to sort of get a better deal, it's the terms of actually laying down the arms that is the point of debate. And, you know, the Allies are very good at just going, no, you know, Monty does the same. He just goes, nope, you know, I'm not interested. It's unconditional surrender or nothing at all. You know, when you're ready, come back. Otherwise we'll just carry on killing all your men. And you know, they see the light pretty quickly, to be honest, because of course they're absolutely stuffed and have been really since February. Well, you know, you could argue they've been stuffed since the end of 1941, but there's certainly stuff by February 1945. And I think February 1945 is a sort of key moment really. You know, the Battle of Bulge has been gone in the west. This huge large scale German counterattack launched on the 16th of December 1944, you know, it's completely failed. It's got the maps that you know where. Then in January, you know, there's another offensive on the Eastern Front as well. And they've got nowhere to go. But February's really is where the Reichsbahn, which is the glue that's been keeping the kind of fragile Wehrmacht together that really starts to kind of just sort of disintegrate. And the Reichsbahn is the German railway network. They don't have much oil, so they're dependent on coal driven steam locomotives to sort of get troops and supplies from A to B. And that's so badly bombed by this stage because, you know, the ability of the Luftwaffe to defend the Reich is getting ever more lessened and ever more numbers of bombers are coming over around the clock. You know, it's not just sort of 1,200 B17s and B24s from the 8th Air Force and the 15th Air Force in Italy attacking by day. It's also kind of, you know, a thousand bombers of Bomber Command coming over and that relentless sort of 2002 and a half thousand bombers on a kind of 24 hour cycle just pummeling Germany and mainly aiming for marshalling guards. I should should hasten to add more than kind of almost any other target. It just brings about the complete collapse of Germany. This is this sort of attack on the oil network and the transportation system. So they've got no means of sort of moving anything and moving anything from A to B. And so the whole thing just sort of crumbles to a halt really, albeit that there is still some extremely violent fighting going on right up to the very end.
