Surrender at Reims
Hours before dawn on the morning of 7 May 1945, a cluster of correspondents and press and newsreel photographers waited at one end of the G-3 war room at SHAEF forward headquarters in Reims. In the center of the room stood a large, empty table. At 0230, ten Allied officers entered and took seats around three sides of the table. Generals Smith and Morgan headed three-officer U.S. and British delegations; Gen. Francois Sevez represented France; and Maj. Gen. Ivan Souslaparov, a colonel, and a lieutenant were the Soviet contingent. When all were seated, Morgan called in the Germans, Generaloberst Alfred Jodl and two others. They entered, clicked their heels, and gave small military lows. At the table nobody moved except Smith, who waved the Germans to seats on the unoccupied side of the table where they sat facing a large wall snap showing the Allied forces' latest dispositions. Maj. Gen. Kenneth W. D. Strong, SHAEF-2, acting as interpreter, stood behind the Germans and read out the surrender terms, more for the benefit of the press than for the Germans, who were familiar enough with them already. After Strong finished, Jodl rose and declared, in the name of the German Army, Navy, and Air Force, that he surrendered unconditionally. The document was then signed, and Jodl and his party left the room.1
SHAEF's wartime mission was completed, but with a last-minute twist. What the Germans signed at Reims was the "Act of Military Surrender," written three days before in the SHAEF G-3, not the painstakingly negotiated EAC surrender instrument. The chief author of the surrender document signed at Reims was a British colonel, John Counsell, an actor and theatrical manager in civilian life, who had cheerfully "cribbed" much of it from the terms for the German surrender in Italy (2 May) published in Stars and Stripes. 2 Its six short paragraphs -none more than two sentences long- simply affirmed the German High Command's unconditional surrender, to take effect fifty-nine minutes before midnight on 8 May.3
SHAEF had included the EAC surrender instrument in the ECLIPSE plans and had assumed it was the document the Germans would sign if they signed one at all, which by the time jodl arrived had begun to seem unlikely. The EAC was by then at work on an Allied proclamation of the German defeat, and nothing had been done to clear up several deficiencies in the surrender instrument that had developed since it was approved by the governments.
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