Strategic Surrender German Surrender in May 1945 XVII .

Mondo Military Updated on 2024-02-05

Selective surrender

The abrupt change in military affairs in the summer of 1944 (the breakthrough of the Allied forces in France, and the collapse of the Eastern Front in Poland during the same period) shattered the hopes of the opposition. This mutation undermined the basis of Gotaile's concept of negotiating on the basis of strength. According to this theory, it is too late to act. On July 12, Baker told a conspirator, Giesvius, that he thought the right time to strike at Hitler had been missed. The total fall of Germany was inevitable.

Until such a military catastrophe occurs, it is difficult to convince the Baker-Gotaile group that only surrender can end hostilities. Even before mid-1944, Gisvius saw this. He did not believe that the "unconditional surrender" demanded by the allies could be ignored. The only possibility, for him at the time, was to suck the Allies into Germany before the **men entered Germany, making the surrender as "selective" as possible. In the spring of 1944, Baker and Goetler finally turned around. Giesvius had been in contact with Alan Dulles in Switzerland, and they tried to see through Giesvius whether the Americans would be willing to accept an anti-Nazi Germany** and surrender alone. The conspirators probably thought that after a new German ** asked them to surrender, the attitude of the Allies towards Germany would change. They intended to provide active military assistance to the allies, which included the landing of paratrooper units in Germany. Ritter summed up the situation as follows: The opposition leaders were now (in the spring of 1944) actually preparing to accept the principle of "unconditional surrender" face to face with the Western powers, which of course was kept secret. Within the camp of the Western powers, calm political reason crushes the stubborn will. The common interest in preserving Western civilization would come to the fore and would save the Germanic states from destruction.

The above points make it clear that what they had in mind was not an armistice on the shortened Western Front (an Italian-style armistice), but a merger of the Germans with the Anglo-Saxon forces. They simply wanted the Allies to occupy Germany from the west immediately before the Red Army swept Poland to reach the German border, followed by peace negotiations between the victorious and the defeated. However, the negotiating party will be a new German **, thanks to which it has significantly shortened the final phase of hostilities, and they have pledged to recognize it**.

Later, the opposition finally worked out a final strategy to get the victorious countries to "lay down". But this strategy was put on hold by the failure of the anti-Hitler coup. Even if the coup succeeds, it is still uncertain how much this "let go" strategy will be. The Allies were reluctant to admit that they had potential conflicts of interest with Soviet Russia. They reacted in total to the opposition's early appeals, the exaggerated appeal to the crisis of Bolshevization.

Settle on the Eastern Front?

Because of the firm position of the Western allies, those in the German opposition turned to Soviet Russia and offered the idea of a selective surrender. Adam von Trotter Zoul Salz warned Allen Dulles that the German opposition would have to try to establish contact with the West if it was rejected by the West. According to Ghisvius, there was a part of the opposition that looked to the East rather than to the West, and he considered Stuffenberg, Trotter and others to be representatives of the pro-Soviet faction. However, according to Rothfels, neither Stauffenberg nor Trotter had any intention of being friendly with Soviet Russia. In fact, they wanted to create a natural solidarity between the oppressed Germans and the ** people, to unite against their totalitarian masters (and also against the Western bourgeoisie).

Some conservatives in the opposition, such as Gotaile and Hassel, weighed the possibility of leaving their Western partners on a more practical basis. In the autumn of 1943, when Ribbentrop's envoy Peter Kleist spoke to the Soviet delegates about the peace seekers, Gottele, Hassel, and Schulenburg, the former German ambassador to Moscow, held a meeting in Berlin to discuss the possibility of negotiating with Stalin. Schulenburg said that the relationship between Soviet Russia and Western countries was not inextricable. He also said that Stalin was a sober strategist who made decisions based on what he had contributed to him. However, these conspirators finally gave up on taking the ** route. On the one hand, they did not believe in the possibility of permanent cooperation with the Communists. On the other hand, their approach is fundamentally pro-Western.

In the eyes of the conspirators, only a pro-Western approach was acceptable. According to Alan Dulles, around Christmas 1942, old members of the Social Democratic Party, including Carl Millendorff, Theodore Howe**, Emil Hank, and members of the Cressau group, met in the mineral springs in the Bavarian mountains. According to Emil Hank, the Social Democrats decided to influence their conspirators to hold off on the assassination of Hitler until the American and British armies were firmly established on the continent, at least to compete with the East for control of Germany. They commissioned Milendorf to persuade Lauschner (a member of the Social Democrats) and to send Count Moltke to negotiate the matter with Beck. Although Liu Shiner saw the danger of delay, he agreed. I don't know how Beck reacted, but since the assassination of the Führer in early 1943, it seems that both he and Gotaile were in favor of killing Hitler, and it doesn't matter who killed the deer.

To be continued).

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