Furthermore, the German military continued to occupy other non-German-speaking territories in disparate and isolated locations across Europe, such as Denmark, Norway, parts of the Netherlands, the Atlantic pockets in France and the British Channel Islands.
Finally, due to factors including pressure from the Soviet Union, on 23 May British troops arrested the entire cabinet as prisoners of war and thus effectively dissolved the last surviving legal remnants of the Nazi regime.
On 27 April Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl, of the Army High Command, met at Rheinsberg with Dönitz and Heinrich Himmler to discuss the war situation now that the fall of Berlin could not be averted.
[1] With both Göring and Himmler removed from the succession, Hitler in his political testament had named Dönitz his successor as President and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and designated Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels head of government as Chancellor.
Suspecting that Bormann might also have escaped from Berlin and be intending to seize power, Dönitz met with Hitler's former Finance Minister Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk and asked him to constitute a new Reich government.
Later on 2 May, and in view of the rapidly advancing British Second Army forces which were approaching Lübeck, Dönitz met Schwerin von Krosigk, Paul Wegener, Himmler, and Keitel to discuss the urgent necessity of a further relocation.
The cabinet met in the sports school of the naval academy; while administrative offices and accommodation for the various ministries were established on the liner Patria [de], moored in Flensburg harbour.
Speer's deputy in the Economics and Production Ministry was Otto Ohlendorf, who had personally directed the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Communists in occupied Soviet territory.
Otherwise, and in spite of his subsequent claim that his government was 'unpolitical', the most consistent characteristic of those chosen was a virulent opposition to Bolshevism, and a determination to ensure that the revolutionary events in Germany attending the Armistice of 1918 would not be repeated in 1945.
Starting in March 1945, the staff of the various ministries were evacuated to resort hotels in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps – chiefly in the region of Berchtesgaden, leaving only the ministers themselves in Berlin.
With the Armed Forces High Command also located in the north – although many OKW personnel had gone south – there was, in consequence, no semblance any longer of a German central government, and most of the members of the cabinet lacked any support staff from their nominal ministries.
[14] Key to this was sidelining Himmler,[12] Joachim von Ribbentrop,[15] Alfred Rosenberg, and other former Nazi grandees who had fled to Flensburg, but whose continued participation in government would preclude any negotiation with the western Allies.
Between 16 and 28 April, the prisoners were moved eastwards and concealed by the SS in a flotilla of unseaworthy ships anchored in the Bay of Lübeck, where they then remained without food or medical attention.
On 2 May, he tried unsuccessfully to countermand the decisions of the German commander in Berlin to surrender their forces to the Soviets; and on 3 May, issued orders to the besieged defenders of Courland and Breslau to maintain their resistance.
On 3 May Dönitz sent Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, his successor as naval commander in chief, to the headquarters of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery at Lüneburg, with an offer to surrender the German forces in northwest Germany, together with the remaining elements of Army Group Vistula.
Furthermore, as it was unlikely that Montgomery would promptly be able to deploy British forces to the Danish islands under German occupation, especially Bornholm in the central Baltic, there was every possibility that the evacuation proceeding there could continue in total disregard of the agreed surrender terms.
Dönitz and Krosigk quickly realised this oversight and promptly broadcast their own, doctored, German version which differed significantly from that signed - specifically, the warships in the Baltic were not included nor was the territory in Schleswig around Flensburg itself; and especially, the surrender was described as a 'truce', not a capitulation.
On 4 May Dönitz, together with Karl Frank the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, conceived of a device whereby Army Group Centre might be able to surrender to General George S. Patton's American forces, who had been entering the Sudetenland areas of former Czechoslovakia from the west, and approaching Pilsen.
Dönitz proposed that Frank should dissolve the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and resign in favour of a puppet Czech government, who would then declare Prague an open city and invite the Americans in.
[23] The text of the definitive surrender document signed in Berlin differed from that previously signed at Reims, chiefly in that, to the second article was added the words "..and to disarm completely, handing over their weapons and equipment to the local allied commanders or officers designated by the Representatives of the Allied Supreme Command"; which had the effect of requiring German troops facing Soviet forces to hand over their weapons, disband and give themselves up as prisoners.
Instead, a simplified, military-only version was produced by the SHAEF, based largely on the wording of the partial surrender instrument of German forces in Italy that was signed at Caserta.
The German embassies to these countries had been closed down, and their property and archives held in trust by a nominated protecting power (usually Switzerland or Sweden) under the terms of the Geneva Conventions.
The protecting powers complied fully with the Allied demands: Sweden, Switzerland, and Ireland announced the breaking off of relations; consequently the German state ceased as a diplomatic entity on 8 May 1945.
On 5 May Schwerin von Krosigk had dispatched Walter Schellenberg to Sweden as a personal emissary via Folke Bernadotte, hoping to establish diplomatic relations and to expedite a partial surrender of German forces in Norway.
The departure of the SS leadership from Flensburg opened the way for the Dönitz government to offer its own version of how the murder squads, concentration camps, and killing facilities had come into being.
At the same time, the Fascist press on both sides of the Atlantic has put it abroad that conditions in Germany in 1918, when German Rightists produced similar fairy-tales of impending chaos.
With ill-disguised reluctance Eisenhower agreed to defer to the British view for a short period, but issued a clarifying statement that the continuation of the Dönitz government did not constitute his being recognised as a head of state "but only and temporarily under the instructions of the Allied Commanders to carry out duties concerning the feeding, disarming and medical care of the German Armed Forces.
[32] Dönitz, Friedeburg, and Jodl were then taken aboard the Patria, where Rooks informed them of the dissolution of the government; placing them under arrest, and ordered that they be stripped and searched for concealed phials of poison.
[33][34] The communication regarding the dissolution of the acting government and the arrest of its members was made in a formal manner, around a table on Patria's deck: Dönitz, Jodl, and Friedeburg sat on one side, with Rooks, British Navy Captain Mund and Soviet General Trusov on the other.
Faced with the prospect of being strip-searched, Friedeburg committed suicide, while Dönitz, Schwerin von Krosigk, Speer, Jodl, and other members of the dissolved Flensburg Government were taken prisoner,[33] under the responsibility of the RAF Regiment task force commanded by Squadron Leader Mark Hobden.