Once Donitz had agreed to the capitulation in Rheims, a rapidly accelerated desperate attempt was made to transport westwards troops still on the eastern front before the surrender took effect. Hurriedly, he instructed the Army Groups South-East, Ostmark and Centre to fight their way back to Eisenhower’s domain with the aim of being taken prisoner by the Americans.109 A flotilla of German ships ferried backwards and forwards across the Baltic to try to carry soldiers and—with lower priority—refugees to the west. Overland, soldiers and civilians alike fled in their droves beyond the Elbe and from Bohemia towards Bavaria. Many of the soldiers were from Army Group Ostmark, left leaderless at Rendulic?’s surrender, and now flooding back pell-mell towards the American lines, up to 150 kilometres away in the west.110 Wild rumours circulated among soldiers in the east that the Americans would set free their German prisoners and rearm them ‘to throw the Bolsheviks out of Germany’. Even though most soldiers were hoping for an end to the war, they would, one recorded in his diary, all have been prepared to fight on if they could attack the Russians alongside the Americans ‘for the homeland must sometime be liberated again’.111
Schorner endeavoured as ever through ferocious discipline and vehement exhortation to keep his army together. On 5 May he issued a final proclamation to the soldiers of Army Group Centre. ‘Only the eastern front of the southern army groups remains unbroken,’ he told them. According to the order given him by the head of state and Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht, nominated by the Fuhrer, Grand-Admiral Donitz, it was the task of his soldiers to carry on fighting ‘until the most valuable German people are saved’. It was his intention, he declared, to lead his troops in formation, heads held high ‘in proud bearing’ back into the homeland. No picture of disintegration was to be conveyed in this final phase. Any attempt to break ranks and seek an independent way back to the homeland ‘is dishonourable treason towards comrades and people and must be dealt with accordingly. Our discipline and our weapons in the hand are the guarantee for us to leave this war in decency and bravery.’112
The plight of Army Group Centre, once Donitz had been forced to agree to the capitulation in Rheims, was unenviable in the extreme. Bringing back Schorner’s troops was seen as imperative on 6 May, but the capitulation made this impossible.113 The order to retreat had come too late. The Soviet attack from the north, from Saxony towards Prague, blocked the path.114 On 7 May a British plane flew a German General Staff officer, Colonel Wilhelm Meyer-Detring, south from Flensburg to meet Schorner to explain the unavoidability of the capitulation in Rheims and press the urgent case for his men to fight their way to the west. From Pilsen, Meyer-Detring was escorted by forty American soldiers to Schorner’s field headquarters, where they met next day.115 He described the background to the unavoidable total capitulation. An orderly retreat, the colonel told Schorner, had been ruled out by the speedy conclusion of the capitulation. He gave Schorner the order to leave all heavy equipment behind and to move his divisions to the south-west as rapidly as possible. Schorner issued the command to comply with the stipulations of the surrender, though was doubtful that troops would obey if it meant abandoning their fellow soldiers fighting to escape Soviet captivity or meaning that they themselves would fall into Russian hands. The Czech uprising had led to a breakdown in communications. ‘Leadership possibilities’, he added, scarcely existed any longer ‘and he saw no possibility everywhere of preventing complete disorganization and non-compliance with the terms’. There was the danger that individual troop sectors or lower-ranking commanders would take matters into their own hands, ignoring orders and simply trying to fight their way to the west.116
In his proclamation of 5 May, Schorner had promised his soldiers: ‘You can have trust in me, that I will lead you out of this crisis.’117 But after his return from years of Soviet captivity, Schorner, facing trial in West Germany on account of his brutal treatment of his soldiers under his command,118 was forced to defend himself vehemently against accusations levelled by his own former Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Natzmer, that he, the most fervent follower throughout of Hitler and the most ferocious adherent of fighting to the last, had left his troops in the lurch at the end. It was said that on 8 May he had fled in civilian clothing by plane to the Austrian Alps, hiding for some days in a hut before handing himself over to the Americans, who a few weeks later delivered him to the Russians.119 According to Schorner’s own later account, he left Army Group Centre only on the morning of 9 May, when his command had been removed following the capitulation. He had, he claimed, been led to believe from Flensburg that the capitulation could be postponed until around 12 May, and he had until then to bring his troops home. Taken completely by surprise by the sudden news of the Rheims surrender, which, through communications difficulties, reached him only after a costly delay of several hours, he had been unable to fulfil his promise of 5 May to lead his troops back in formation and instead, on 7 May, had given the orders for an organized flight.120 To the end of his life he asserted that his flight to Austria had been with the intention of carrying out Hitler’s orders to establish an Alpine front to continue the fight.121 But although Schorner left his troops as he claimed on 9 May when his command had formally ceased following the capitulation, it remains the case that the men whose discipline he had enforced with a rod of iron were now suddenly abandoned to their fate.122 And the justification he gave for his flight to Austria shows, true or not, that even now he was prepared to argue that he was following an order from Hitler.
Army Group Centre had been the last largely intact Wehrmacht force in the field. The vast majority of its troops were taken into Soviet captivity, along with most other German soldiers still left on the eastern front at the total capitulation. It has been estimated that 220,000 soldiers were taken prisoner by the Red Army between 1 and 8 May, and as many as 1.6 million after the capitulation.123 Around 450,000 of those earlier fighting in the east had been able—though not all in the last week of the war—to reach the relative security of western lines.124 Eisenhower’s refusal to the end to contemplate any breach of the coalition with the Soviet Union, his insistence at his meeting with Jodl on 6 May upon unconditional surrender on all fronts, and the speed of the final moves to sign the capitulation had ruined Donitz’s intention of bringing the troops in the east back to the west and keeping them out of the hands of the Red Army. At a cost of continuing the war for more than a week after Hitler’s death, Donitz did partially succeed. In the overall balance, no more than around 30 per cent of the 10 million German troops entered Soviet captivity, though far more soldiers had fought in the east than in the west.125 Despite the flight to the west in the first week in May, the great majority of those on the eastern front when Donitz took office were still there at Germany’s surrender. They were marched off to the east and forced to endure years of Soviet captivity. A great many did not return. On the best estimates, about a third of those captured during the entire war in the east, around a million German prisoners of war, died in Soviet hands.126
Donitz, as we have seen, had endeavoured to postpone the inevitable defeat as long as possible, through a series of partial surrenders calculated to find time to bring back the troops—and, as a much lower priority, civilians—from the east, and also in the hope, if rapidly fading, that even now the wartime coalition of the western powers and the Soviet Union might crack. The strategy was largely, if not totally, a failure, and at a high cost. Did Donitz have an alternative? Only once Eisenhower’s ‘blackmail’ (as Donitz saw it) of complete capitulation within hours could not be avoided were the troops still engaged in the east instructed to fight their way to the west. The order, as the fate of Army Group Centre shows, came too late for most of them. Instead of gambling on the potential of a series of partial surrenders in the west, following the model which had worked in Italy, Donitz’s best option was arguably to have opened the western front completely—ordering the troops in all areas facing the Allies simply to stop fighting and lay down their arms. This would have allowed the western powers to advance their lines immediately and rapidly to the east, shortening the lines to those still trapped there. Simultaneous orders to the three Army Groups still in the east to fight their way back straight away towards the western powers might well, then, have saved far more of them than turned out to be the case, even if the flight from the east had been chaotic rather than the planned and orderly retreat that German military leaders dreamed of.127 The speculation is, of course, pointless. The mentality in the high ranks of the German leadership ran counter to such notions. Even officers in British captivity had as late as spring 1945 rejected the idea of German officers simply allowing the western Allies to break through as incompatible with military honour.128 For Donitz, whose acute sense of military honour had married so easily with his fervent belief in the ideology of National Socialism, orders to troops in the west unilaterally to stop fighting without formal capitulation would have been impossible to contemplate. So the war, even with Hitler dead, could not be immediately ended, but was forced to drag on until, with the civilian population demoralized and resigned to their fate, Germany’s armies had either been destroyed or were on the verge of destruction. This time there could be no claim, as in 1918, that the army had been defeated not on the battlefield but through subversion at home.
On 9 May the Wehrmacht issued its final report. ‘From midnight the weapons are silent on all fronts. On command of the Grand-Admiral the Wehrmacht has ended the fight that had become hopeless,’ it ran. ‘The struggle
