100 Days in History: The Agony of The "Third Reich"

[Martin Antonenko]

Karlsruhe:


The commander of Hitler's former Praetorian Guard, the "SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler", SS-Oberstgruppenführer and general of the "Waffen SS", Josef "Sepp" Dietrich ...



... is arrested today by the Americans in Karlsruhe (southwestern Germany) ...:



He had tried to flee in civilian clothes (see photo above).

Dietrich has already been sentenced to death in absentia in the Soviet Union for war crimes committed by his troops during the Battle of Charkov in 1943 - but that doesn't matter much to the Americans!

They will bring him to justice for his people's war crimes (they murdered 70 American prisoners of war in Malmedy) during the Ardennes offensive in Munich in December 1944, where he will be sentenced to life imprisonment on July 16, 1946.
The next picture shows Dietrich in his cell during his trial at Nuremberg...:


Dietrich after only nine years will pardoned by the German judiciary in 1955 - like so many others!

In 1947 he will be on trial again in Munich - this time because of his role in the murder of (almost) the entire SA leadership in 1934 (the so-called "Röhm Putsch").

He will be sentenced to 18 months imprisonment for aiding and abetting homicide, of which he must serve six months at the Landsberg prison from August 1958 to February 1959 before being released - again early! - for suffering from a heart condition.

Sepp Dietrich wil die in 1966 of a heart attack in freedom ...




Reims:



Today, the three Western Allies officially prohibit the setting of the swastika flag - in the part of Germany occupied by the Red Army, this ban has been in effect for some time.



Between 1945 and 1949 there was even a separate flag for the three zones occupied by the Western Allies, the so-called "Provisorial C-Ensign"...:



However, this is so rarely used that this flag is almost unknown today ...


In the Soviet occupied zone, however, the swastika flag is often used as a communist "red flag"! The people separate the white circle with the black swastika and are so well equipped for the new times ...

Furthermore, the four victorious powers annul the blackout regulations!

 

[Martin Antonenko]

Sunday, May 13, 1945


Bleiburg (Austria):


Near the small town of Bleiburg in Carinthia...



... the units of the German "Heeresgruppe E" with all their Cossack and Croatian associations surrender to the British and (mainly!) the "Yugoslav People's Liberation Army", the Tito partisans ...:












150,000 German soldiers, 220,000 members of the former Croatian fascist "Ustascha" armed forces and about 35,000 Cossacks in German pay are captured!

The "Bleiburger Feld", where the prisoners are rounded up ...





... will gain notoriety in two days ...



Flensburg:


The chief of the German High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW), Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, is arrested by NKVD-Members at Flensburg today...:



He is arrested for the following crimes:

- Conspiracy to plan a war of aggression,

- Crimes against peace through raids on other countries,

- War crimes such as the command, the commissar, the night and fog orders, the atonement order of September 16, 1941, the murder of prisoners of war, forced
labor of prisoners of war and civilians,

- Looting of public and private property,
- Murder of the Polish elite and others

- Crimes against humanity.

(The point "Murder of the Polish elite" means the so-called Massacre of Katyn, where the Soviet NKVD murdered about 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia in April and May 1940. After the war, the Soviets accused the Germans of committing this massacre. The full truth about the Katyn mass murders only came out during the "Glasnost" period in the 1980s.)


The next picture show Keitel in his cell...:



The previous chief of the Wehrmacht Command Staff, Colonel General Alfred Jodl ...



... makes a last career leap and takes over the post of chief of the OKW on the instructions of the "Reich President" Dönitz.



Eastern Germany:


In the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, the "Berliner Rundfunk", the first radio station in German language after the war, goes into operation ...:



The Soviets appreciate the value of the radio for propaganda purposes - and putting a radio back into service was a top priority for them!

The editors are Germans - of course carefully checked by NKVD and "Smersch" beforehand ...



Here is the schedule of the first broadcast - for the Soviet censors, of course, written in Russian ...:









Wünstorf (Eastern Germany):


The Command of the Soviet Troops in Germany reports this day to the STAWKA (the highest comand staff of the Red Army) in Moscow:

"The number of prisoners on all fronts has increased by 170,000 German soldiers and officers and ten generals. Between May 9 and 14, more than 1,230,000 German soldiers and officers and 101 generals were captured on all fronts. The admission of captured German soldiers and officers on all fronts has been completed. "




Between 1941 and 1945, a total of about 3.15 million members of the Wehrmacht and the SS fell into Soviet captivity. About 1.1 million of them died ...





Conversely, the Wehrmacht and SS captured over 5 million Soviet soldiers during the same period ...:







Their death rate was far higher! Only 1,836,000 of them returned to the Soviet Union after the war ended, and many were punished again:

Stalin saw it as a "betrayal" that they had been captured, and a third of them became acquainted with the NKVD, the Soviet camp system or the notorious "Shtrafroty", the penal companies ...


**continued next post**

 

[Martin Antonenko]

Atlantic - Off The US Coast:



The German submarine U-234 under Lieutenant Johann Heinrich Fehler (pictured right)...



... surrenders off the US Atlantic coast towards the US Navy...





(Anyone who reads this text here regularly will remember that we U-234 were constricted some time ago when going offshore...)

On board there is a top secret load of German high technology - including a fully functional disassembled Me 262 jet plane with construction plans, components of the Me 163 rocket plane, components of a V2, research documents and blueprints of Germany's most important weapon developments, mercury and 560 kilograms of uranium oxide.

The blueprints of the German jet fighter...



...are particularly important to the Japanese, because they are already working on a derivative - under the name "Nakajima Kikka"...







... that looks amazingly similar to the German plane!

Aboard U-234 are also German specialists, August Bringewald and Franz Ruf, two German engineers for jet engine aircraft, the radar expert Dr. Heinz Schlicke and General der Flieger Ulrich Kessler ...



... which was intended to be the head of Japanese air defense.

Two members of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Captain Hideo Tomonaga and Frigate Captain Genzo Shoji (the next picture shows them with Dönitz) ....



... who are also on board to supervise the cargo, commit suicide at the moment of surrender.

The Americans drag the boat into their Portsmouth harbor to examine it closely ...:







Here general Kessler is leaving U-234 in Portsmouth as a prisoner of the Americans ...:



The uranium oxide is first shipped to Washington for inspection and then to the weapons factory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where it can be converted into approximately 0.5 kg of weapon-grade uranium for the American second atomic bomb "Fat Man"...



...the bomb, which will kill about 87.000 people on August 9, 1945 at Nagasaki.

The purpose of the strange structure on the foredeck of U-234 has not yet been completely clarified ...:

 

[Ferris]

So the Uranium did reach Japan in the end, although they had anticipated delivery to be different.
Ironic....

 

[Martin Antonenko]

 

[Martin Antonenko]

Monday, May 14, 1945



Hela Peninsula near Danzig:



On today's Polish peninsula Hela (north of Danzig / today Gdansk) ...





... a few hundred men of the German Wehrmacht, including parts of the "Grossdeutschland" division, have so far refused to surrender.

They have literally been pushed back to the shores of the Baltic Sea ...:



A few of them still manage to escape with self-made rafts (their fate is uncertain) ...



... today, in view of their hopeless situation, the others are now also stretching their arms in front of the Red Army - as the last German troop of the Second World War in Europe!








The Germans are loaded onto barges under the white flag by the Soviets and transported eastwards into captivity:





And because history often has a really cruel sense of humor, the war for Germany ends exactly where they fired the first shot on September 1, 1939!




Helgoland Island (North Sea):




The ruins of the island "fortress" Helgoland ...





... are occupied today by British troops (Navy personnel and a Batallion "Scots Guards") under Rear Admiral Gerard Muirhead-Gould ...:



The next picture shows the British admiral with his entourage and the battalion commander of the Scots Guards on the stairs that lead down from the Oberland to the Unterland ...:





The German commander of Helgoland, Kapitän Roeggeler, had previously signed the capitulation ...:





At Sea:

The last two German submarines, U-805 (under Korvettenkapitän Richard Bernardelli) ...




... and U-858 (under Kapitänleutnant Thilo Bode, the later very well-known journalist) ...



... are delivered to the US Navy by their crews in the Atlantic off the American coast.

Like U-234 yesterday, they are brought to Portsmouth under the US flag...:





A picture from the airship shows the tower of U-858: The US flag has just been set and the tubes of the anti-aircraft armament have been removed ...:




**continued next post**

 

[Martin Antonenko]

Vienna (Austria):

The occupying powers in Austria, the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the USA publish in agreement with the Provisional Austrian Government under Dr. Karl Renner a declaration about the independence of Austria from the German Reich.





Thus the so-called "Anschluss" of Austria as "Ostmark" to "Greater Germany" from 1938 is liquidated!

However, the now "free" Austrians cannot erase from history either their frenetic jubilation when Hitler came to Vienna...




The banner reads: "The same blood belongs in a common Reich!"



... nor their 99.73 percent agreement to the "Anschluss" in a subsequent referendum...:



This approval was higher than that in the "old" German Reich, where only 99.08 percent voted "yes" ...



American Occupation Zone in Germany:



Today, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive No. 1067 (J.C. S. 1067) ...



...becomes reality in the American zone of occupation!




This means: Germany is seen as a military enemy state and any "fraternization" with the population has to be avoided ("No Fraternization"!)


Every GI is handed out a small booklet today, which has been made exactly in a format to put in the breast pocket ...:

 

[Martin Antonenko]

Tuesday, May 15, 1945


Bleiburg (Austrian - Yugoslavian Border):


The war is over - but the murder goes ahead!

Almost 200,000 Korean-fascist "Ustascha" soldiers, along with the remains of the German "Army Group E", had saved themselves on "British" territory in Austria and surrendered there to the British two days ago, together with the Germans and their Cossack mercenaries .



So they are sure from the feared revenge of their compatriots, the "People's Liberation Army" of partisan leader Tito ..






They believed!


But the British work closely with the Tito people!

Their reason:
During the Yalta conference from February 4 to 11, 1945, it was agreed between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill that fighters who had fought on the German side should be "repatriated" to their home countries immediately - and the British are now doing so !

When this gets around, the majority of Croatians flee to the surrounding forests at every opportunity!

When the British start separating the "Ustaschas" from the Germans and round up them together on the morning of this day, a real "run" begins, although they are being lied from the British side that they are being brought to Italy and interned there.!

The British only get together 80,000 "Ustaschas", men and even women...





... and hand them over to the Tito people that same afternoon!


They now take cruel revenge on the "Ustascha" soldiers, who had persecuted them relentlessly during the war!

Even during the delivery of the Croatians, the murders of the Croatians begin under the eyes of the British, regardless of the person ...:






Anyone who falls into the hands of the "People's Liberation Army" will be shot, stabbed with bayonets, hung up, slashed, buried alive - unfortunately, human imagination is very imaginative when it comes to killing!








What begins as the "Bleiburg massacre" continues systematically and organically as the "People's Liberation Army" marches back to Yugoslav territory! The march is a death march! The title of the next card "Kolone Smrti" means "death column" ...:




At the end of May more than 60,000 of the 80,000 Croatians delivered will be dead - and the rest of them will not experience the turn of the year 1946 due to hard labor in camps or cruel conditions in prisons !



Wherever the red circles are in the next map, larger mass graves have been found, in which the dead were buried ...:



On this May 15, 1945, the seeds are planted that will grow in the 90s of the past century during the cruel Yugoslav wars ...



The Cossacks who had fought for the Wehrmacht and also surrendered to the British ...



... her Calvary is still to come!

In the meantime, they too are separated from their German brothers in arms by the British and transported - together with their German Officers - to separate camps in the Austrian Drau Valley...:





We will read about their fate here...

Incidentally, the British will also become the commander of the unfortunate "Army Group E", Colonel General Alexander Löhr ...



... deliver to the Yugoslavs (in the white jacket, with his chief of staff and a Yugolsav guard in the background) ....:



Löhr will be accused in Belgrade for many war crimes committed by his troops in the Balkans.

On February 26, 1947, he will die at the gallows in Belgrade!


**continued next post**

 

[Martin Antonenko]

Flensburg:


Meanwhile, "Reich Präsident" Dönitz in Flensburg plans to put all German citizens responsible for the establishment and operation of the concentration camps to a "Reichsgericht" (that doesn't exist yet!) and have them tried.

In any case, he expresses this today to representatives of the three "great" victorious powers, USA, Great Britain and USSR ...:



The actual reason for the meeting, which came about at Dönitz's request, was his request for help from the "big three" in "maintaining the German community".
Obviously Dönitz is afraid that the Allies will sooner or later make their four zones of occupation independent states ...


Internally, Dönitz records the meeting as a "diplomatic success", since it means something like the - at least - "indirect recognition" of himself and his "government" ...

Since he is terribly wrong - as we will see ...

 

[Nap]

Hi Martin

A incredible amount of details from all theatres of war ......reprisals seem to be happening a lot

I still am amazed at Goerings total vanity and belief in his so called power !

Thanks again

Nap

 

[Martin Antonenko]

Wednesday, May 16, 1945


Flensburg:

The Birth of a Lie!


It is really rare that one can date the point in time of a lie as precisely as in this case!

Today "Reich Präsident" gives Karl Dönitz - here in his state car in front of his official "residence" in Flensburg-Mürwick ...



... the following letter, which is formulated as an order for all German soldiers, but is actually addressed to the Allies ...:




The translation of the most important passages is:

"The press and radio of the occupying powers have recently made numerous announcements about atrocities and inhumane conditions in German concentration camps.

(...)

I note that neither I, nor the German people and the German Wehrmacht, nor the Waffen-SS fighting in their ranks in a purely soldier manner, were aware of such events.

(...)

I therefore order that the Wehrmacht and every single soldier clearly withdraw from such incidents in public.

Dönitz"


In this letter the first distinction is made between the "clean" and "chivalrous" fighting front troops and the Nazi henchmen murdering behind the front and at home, of which the vast majority of Germans knew nothing!

This point of view was an important, if not THE most important founding myth of the Federal Republic of Germany and - albeit limited and different in content - the GDR.

This myth persisted until the late 1960s, when a new generation began to critically examine its fathers' past.

Today, this view can be seen as disproved a thousand times!

However, the myth is still highly emotional, as the debates about the exhibitions "War of Extermination - The Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944" show, the first version from 1995 to 1999 and the significantly revised and objectified version from 2001 to 2004 .

However, one should be careful not to generalize!

One thing is clear: Wehrmacht soldiers have participated in murderous acts as perpetrators and helpers in murderous acts and other war crimes in an awful lot of cases - most of them on orders, some voluntarily and out of conviction.



They had previously gone through the imprint of six years of intensive Nazi propaganda and many - very many - later bitterly regretted their doing - some unfortunately not!

If one can allow the individual ordinary soldiers in many cases at the time of these acts to have been victims of incitement and seduction - their officers knew exactly what they were doing - like the Wehrmacht captain (beside an SS-officer) pictured here during a "hostage" shootout in Pancevo (Yugoslavia 1943)!



The top Wehrmacht leadership also murdered knowingly and consciously - albeit as a "desk perpetrator", as evidenced by the notorious "Kommissar-Befehl" ("Commissioner Order") formulated by the Chief of the Wehrmacht Command, Colonel General Alfred Jodl, who is nothing more than an invitation to murder !



Above the order reads: "Guidelines for the Treatment of Poilitical Commissioners" (of the Red Army).

The fighting troop is ordered to do the following:

"In this struggle (against the Soviet Union), protection or consideration under international law is wrong!

(...)

The political commissioners are the originators of barbaric and Asian methods of struggle. (...) They are therefore (...) to kill immediately with the weapon. "

And, of course, "Reich President" Dönitz is lying literally as if he said in the "order" shown above that he himself knew nothing of all of this!

Of course, the Hitler Intimus Dönitz, commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine since 1943, knew about the massive use of forced labor in war production (such as the construction of bunker submarine ports and factories!) the deportation of Jews and the brutal warfare of German troops on almost all fronts.

Even if the Navy itself was hardly involved in war crimes, this was mainly due to the fact that it was not able to do so due to the lack of possible uses.

However, Dönitz ac commander of the U Boat flotillas (since 19399 personally prohibited the submarine commanders from rescuing survivors of sunken Allied ships.

That is - as he literally said - "completely wrong and inappropriate consideration"!

Dönitz, sentenced to ten years in prison as part of the war crimes trial in Nuremberg in 1946 (which he had to serve completely!) Always claimed until the end of his life in 1980 that he knew nothing about the crimes in the Third Reich.

His biographer Dieter Hartwig writes: "For the commander in chief of a Wehrmacht section, the following cannot apply: He has always proclaimed the right to stupidity."

(cf. Hartwig, Dieter: "Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz. Legende und Wirklichkeit", Schöningh, 2010, ISBN: 9783506770271)

 

[Martin Antonenko]

Thursday, May 17, 1945


The "government" of the "Reich President" Dönitz in Flensburg is under increasing pressure today:




So far, one has been able to communicate with the "big" Western Allies Great Britain and the USA rightly and badly (who Dönitz had even granted a neutral zone with German armed guards and own ID cards around his "seat of government" in Flensburg-Mürwick!).




Now the greatest victorious power, the Soviet Union, makes clear that it is still there and the others have to count with it!

Today, a not very small Soviet military control comission leadad by general Boris SemjonowitschTelpukhowskij (next picture, center, next to Marshal Rokossowskij), arrives at the still existing "High Command of the Wehrmacht" and desires (and ultimately also has) the same say as the Western Allies - much to the annoyance of the British Field Marshal Montgomery.



In addition, the Soviets have been staging and orchestrating an extremely sharp and negative press campaign against Dönitz since today ...:



The self-confident Grand Admiral "President" doesn't like that!

And so, in confidential conversations with representatives of the USA and Great Britain, he digs up the old suggestions of the - now fleeting - SS chief Heinrich Himmler:

A common European approach, German and Western Allied troops against Communism!

The western representatives listen to Donitz kindly and promise to inform their governments ...

 

[red tom]

In the final photograph it is not Marshal Konev but Marshal Rokossovsky.

 

[Blind Pew]

Thanks as always Martin.

 

[Martin Antonenko]

Friday, May 18, 1945



The Americans agree today to cede part of their zone of occupation to France after the French have asked to get such a zone ...:





***

In addition, British and Americans decree in their zones of occupation have the immediate release of all German prisoners of war who are older than 50 years ...:



***

For other German soldiers, captivity is only just beginning today - and it will also take significantly longer than just a few days!

After all, nine days after the capitulation there are still German soldiers under arms who are still fighting! However, they are no longer an orderly force, but like armed gangs who are desperately trying to somehow avoid being captured by the Red Army!

We are talking about a few thousand former members of the former "Army Group Middle", who are partisan in an extensive forest area south of Prague - and hope for a miracle!

The Soviets were always well informed about these "partisans" and knew their exact whereabouts from the first day, since the population informed them about the hated Germans.
The fact that you only pick them up today is because you had to bring in enough troops to completely change the forest area!

Today - facing the alternatives "death" or "captivity" - these last armed members of the "Army Group Middle" surrender to the place
Tabor south of Prague ...:







What the Germans in the pictures above don't know:

By doing so, they have considerably aggravated and prolonged the suffering they are facing, because the Soviet Union will not treat them like prisoners of war but as criminals because they continued to fight after the surrender!

That means: They are all condemned to 25 years of forced labor "under tougher conditions" in summary proceedings - the Soviets also refuse to apply the Geneva Convention to them!

The few who survive the extremely harsh conditions in the forced labor camps will be among the last to be released home in the 1950s ...!

***

"Reich President" Dönitz...



... and his "government" set the short and medium-term goals of their policies!

All planning is based on:
There is no real end to the war for the German government, as long as there are differences about the future of Germany between the two "big" western allies and the Soviet Union!

(France only plays a subordinate role in the business games.)

For the politics of the "Reich Government", this means pursuing the following four goals:

1. For the time being, the German Reich takes a neutral position.

2. Anglo-Americans and Soviets should play against each other to the advantage of Germany will.

3. The Western Powers are to be countered with their own "international law" and "beaten" with it.

4. The German people should be elevated to the "factor of Europe", as it is said literally in the papers.

Rarely has a government taken more unreal positions and is so completely mistaken about its own situation!

This is also the conclusion of the Allies who read the text carefully!

Once again, the Western Powers are to be impressed by an order that Dönitz is issuing today: All admissions to German concentration camps should be examined in detail and possible "legal violations" should be punished by the courts.

When formulating this "order", Dönitz is fully aware that it has neither the possibilities nor the means of power to implement it.

In addition, he reveals with the text - albeit unintentionally! - his true disposition - he is a Nazi through and through!

This is also the conclusion of the Allies who read the text carefully!
Because he wants - supposedly! - have the reasons for the "admissions" to the camp checked, but overlooks the main point that the mere existence of the concentration camps is in itself a violation of the law - of the existence of the five large killing factories Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblika, Kulmhof, Majdanek and Belzec in occupied Poland not to mention ...



Previously, the "Reich President" had some advocates with the Western Allies, not out of sympathy, but to use him as a "joker" in the power poker with Stalin.

With this "command", Dönitz hit the last nail in the coffin lid of his "government"!

Another problem that the "President of the Reich" and his "Ministers" conceded how completely unrealistic the "government of the Reich" in Flensburg was:

Dönitz: "At the moment the empire has no flag legally." An "interim solution until the final regulation" is "urgently required".

Therefore, the mine clearing boats should first draw up a black and white triangular pennant.

In his "neural zone" around the headquarters in Mürwik, Dönitz defiantly lets the Reich war flag continue to fly with the swastika forbidden by the Allies...:



The spook will not last long ...

 

[Martin Antonenko]

Saturday, May 19, 1945


After the over 50-year-old German prisoners of war are released (or scheduled to be released), the administrators of the United States and Great Britain take stock:

In your custody there are - without the over 50-year-olds - more than seven million Germans who have been captured since they landed in Normandy.

Of these, 3,635,000 million are in British ...



... and 3,097,000 in US hands ...:



The French captured 937,000 Germans ...:



2.6 percent of the Western Allies' prisoners of war will not survive captivity.
In Southeast Europe - primarily in the states of Yugoslavia - 289,000 Germans are in captivity ...:



A very high percentage - 32.2 - of them will die.


By far the highest death rate - at 34.7 percent, more than a third! - will have the 3,150,000 prisoners in the Soviet Union ..:



(Incidentally, the original caption under this Soviet photo reads: "They wanted to Moscow - they came to Moscow.")

***


The submerged ex-chief ideologist of the NSdAP, Alfred Rosenberg...



... also ex-Reich Commissioner for by the Nazis occupied eastern territories...



... is arrested today by British troops at Flensburg, close to the Dönitz "neutral zone", to which he probably wanted to flee ...:





Rosenberg will end at the gallows in Nuremberg.


***


The German Kriegsmarine today supplies the majority of her submarines based in Narvik (Norway) to the British ...:





***


Representatives of the Soviet Union demand today that their "Western allies" immediately arrest the "Reich President" Dönitz and his "government".

The representatives of the Western Allies answere, what they ever say: They will consult their governments accordingly.

 

[Martin Antonenko]

Sunday, May 20, 1945


In a lonely mountain hut in the Upper Bavarian Alps, special investigators from the US military intelligence track down the former head of the German spy service "Fremde Heere Ost", ex-major general Reinhard Gehlen ...:





The man did hard work in his hiding place!

The Americans notice fresh traces of excavation in the immediate vicinity of the mountain hut. There are 50 steel boxes with the entire archive of the service about the Soviet Union and the Red Army!

Gehlen and his archive are immediately taken away and flown to the USA to initiate in-depth interrogations and investigations.

Gehlen will there, as Americans say, "sing like a bird"! They will start to appreciate each other.

The good relationships that Reinhard Gehlen (left in the picture with sunglasses) ...



... built up to the Americans will later help him to become the founder and chief of the first German post-war secret service, the "Organization Gehlen" under the first federal German government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1949 ...:



... from which the first Federal Intelligence Service (BND) will emerge in 1961, which will have its headquarters (the so-called "Object Nikolaus") in Pullach, Bavaria ...:







***


Today is also the day on which former SS chief Heinrich Himmler...



... is arrested by fluke because his fake papers as "Feldwebel Heinrich Hitzinger" were forged too well!



As we have already read, he kills himself by cyanide in Lüneburg after being recognized...:





***



The "incumbent Reich government" under the "President" Dönitz provides the British and Americans (and not the Soviets and French!) With a pathetic document in which they declare themselves ready for "temporary civil administration" of the German Reich.

In Flensburg-Mürwick, there are still concerns that the Allies will make their zones of occupation independent and could dismember the German state as a whole. One wants to counteract this with the offer.



***


For some of the German population, a bit of normalcy is coming back today!

In the western zones of occupation, the first banks and savings banks start operating again ...:

 

[Blind Pew]

Always a good read Martin. Fascinating how it all played out at the end.

 

[Martin Antonenko]

Two weeks this story will go on, and something more will happen...


Cheers

 

[Martin Antonenko]

Monday, May 21, 1945



The former "Reichsmarschall" of the "Großdeutscher Reich", ex-commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, designated successor to the "Führer", "Reichsjägermeister" and what else does the last foreign trip of his life begin:



Hermann Göring is placed under strict surveillance by US soldiers in the "Central Continental Prisoner of War Enclosure No. 32", brought with the code name "Camp Ashcan" in Bad Mondorf / Mondorf-les-Bains in Luxembourg!





"Camp Ashcan" is intentionally not in Germany - this is to prevent possible attempts at liberation by fanatic supporters!

The "camp" is in the former, somewhat dilapidated "Palace Hotel"...



... where the 3rd and 4th floors are reserved for prisoners ...:





Göring is already expecting the ex-Generalfeldmarschalls Wilhelm Keitel, Gerd von Rundstedt and Albert Kesselring as well as other top German military personnel and various former Nazi greats ...:





Among the 86 prisoners are those whom the victorious powers want to bring to trial at Nuremberg ...:

Hermann Göring (Reichsmarschall)...



... and:

Joachim von Ribbentrop (Reich Foreign Minister)
Robert Ley (Head of the German Labor Front)
Wilhelm Keitel (Generalfeldmarschall, chief of the OKW)
Fritz Sauckel (General Representative for Labor Use)
Walther Funk (Reich Economics Minister and Reichsbank President)
Hans Frank (Governor General of Poland)
Wilhelm Frick (Reich Minister of the Interior and Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia)
Arthur Seyß-Inquart (Governor of the Netherlands)
Alfred Rosenberg (leading ideologist of the NSDAP and head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (RMfdbO))
Reich Finance Minister Johann Ludwig Graf Schwerin von Krosigk
Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt
Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring

There are three other names on the list of victorious powers:

Julius Streicher, ex Gauleiter of Franken and editor of the anti-Semitic weekly "Der Stürmer", which is still being searched for and
"Reich Päsident" Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who is still in Flensburg and plays "government chief" and his "Commander in Chief" of the Wehrmac ht High Command" Major General Alfred Jodl ...

The prominent Nazis are guarded by a special unit of the US Military Police, the "6850th Internal Security Detachment" (here the unit's badge) ...



... under Colonel Burton C. Andrus known as "tough dog" ...:



It is the same unit that will later guard the war criminal prison and the Nuremberg courtroom ...



***


Near the city of Frankfurt am Main is in the Schloß Cransberg in the Taunus ...



... another camp of this kind has been set up, the so-called "Camp Dustbin", in which the important "technical collaborators of the Nazis" (as the Americans call them) are collected, who are also to be brought to justice ...

Both camps are emptied on August 10, 1945 and the prisoners are transported to Nuremberg for the great war crimes trial.

The next user of the castle (history sometimes has a sense of humor!) will be the former head of the Nazi secret service "Fremde Heere-Ost", ex-major general Reinhard Gehlen, we met already yesterday....:



... who from here with American abbreviation under the alias "Hans Holbein" (like the famous painter of the Middle Ages!) directs the development of the German secret service "Organization Gehlen" (later Federal Intelligence Service).

Here is Gehlen's false identity card with a US camouflage identity ...: