Unconditional Surrender: The Policy That Prolonged World War II

by Thomas Fleming

  When the two Allied intelligence chiefs reported to their superiors, however, the reception was, if possible, even more venomously negative. For Canaris, the disappointment was crushing - and it soon became doubly depressing when his enemies in the Nazi hierarchy, who had long suspected the Abwehr of harboring traitors, began to strike at some of his most trusted subordinates.

  First, Oster and one of his assistants were caught laundering money to aid escaping Jews. Next, Count Moltke attended a garden party at which a number of indiscreet things were said about the regime. After one more futile trip to Ankara in the last weeks of 1943 to try contacting the American ambassador to Cairo, an old friend, the count, too, was arrested and Canaris’ grip on the Abwehr was threatened by investigators from several branches of the Nazi apparatus.

  Intransigence Is Measured in Lives

  While the German resistance struggled to win recognition from Roosevelt, his antipathy toward them and the German people was hardening. In May 1943, Churchill came to Washington, D.C., for a conference code-named Trident. Probably reacting to the attempts to reach him through Donovan, Roosevelt told the prime minister he wanted to issue a declaration saying that he would refuse to negotiate with the Nazi regime, the German army high command, or any other group or individual in Germany. Churchill, once more demonstrating his dislike for taking such an intransigent public stand, managed to talk him out of it.

  But the prime minister himself was not innocent of calling for total war and total victory in terms that made unconditional surrender seem like a threat of annihilation. In a speech to the House of Commons in September 1943, Churchill distinguished between the treatment he planned to mete out to the Italian and German people. He saw little or no obstacles to the Italians regaining “their rightful place among the free democracies of the modern world.” Not so the Germans.

  “Twice within our lifetimes, three times counting that of our fathers, they have plunged the world into their wars of expansion and aggression. They combine in the most deadly manner the qualities of the warrior and the slave. They do not value freedom themselves and the spectacle of it among others is hateful to them.” He went on to denounce Prussia as “the core of the pestilence.” Nazi tyranny and Prussian militarism had to be “rooted out” before Germany could return to the family of nations. This was pure Vansittartism. Lord Robert was saying virtually identical things in the House of Lords.

  While this war of vituperation raged, the Americans and the British were encountering rude shocks in the shooting war. In North Africa and Sicily, German tanks repeatedly demonstrated their superiority over American-made armor, and the veteran German infantryman proved an equally formidable foe. Then came the invasion of Italy, in which the policy of unconditional surrender ruined an easy conquest.

  Shortly after Sicily fell, King Victor Emmanuel dismissed Benito Mussolini and appointed Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio as premier. He immediately opened secret negotiations with American emissaries to get Italy out of the war. Everything seemed to be moving toward a stunning capitulation, which would have opened a huge gap in Hitler’s Festung Europa (Fortress Europe). But Roosevelt insisted the only terms he would accept were unconditional surrender and the removal of the king and the field marshal. Badoglio angrily withdrew from the negotiations and, for over six weeks, the talks were stalled while Eisenhower, Churchill, and others desperately tried to persuade the president to let them cut a deal that would have saved thousands of British and American lives.

  By the time Roosevelt relented and permitted the king and Badoglio to remain in power, the Germans had poured 24 divisions into Italy and the Italians had no country to surrender. Canaris, incidentally, did his utmost to bring about a secret surrender, making a personal trip to Italy and reporting back to Berlin that there was nothing to the rumors of Italian treachery. That gesture did much to pull the last props from under his position as the head of the Abwehr.

  When the Americans landed at Salerno, they found the Germans and their panzers and .88-millimeter cannon in the hills awaiting them. Only massive bombardments from the escorting fleet and the insertion of the elite 82nd Airborne Division into the collapsing beachhead prevented a debacle. Instead of reaching Rome in a week or two, as optimists had predicted, the British and Americans found themselves up to their axles in mud and confronted by thousands of Germans manning the mountainous Gustav Line 100 miles south of the Eternal City. Unconditional surrender had begun to look like a slogan printed in bright red blood.

  Stalin’s Criticism Is Ignored

  When Roosevelt finally met Stalin at Teheran in November of 1943, the man for whom the policy had supposedly been tailored bluntly told the president it was a very bad idea. The Russian dictator said he thought its vagueness and implied threat only served to unite the German people. He favored an explicit statement of terms. Churchill, who rarely agreed with Stalin on anything, emphatically endorsed his idea. Neither man succeeded in changing Roosevelt’s mind.

  In July 1943, Stalin had demonstrated his idea of how to approach the Germans. A National Committee of Free Germans, high-ranking prisoners taken at Stalingrad, began broadcasting from Moscow, assuring the Germans that the Soviet Union had no desire to destroy them as a people. They only wanted to help them get rid of Hitler. Spontaneously, the Soviet dictator was saying the very thing Canaris and his friends wanted so desperately to hear from Roosevelt.

  At Teheran, Stalin revealed his real intentions for Germany. They had little to do with the generous sentiments displayed by the Free Germans committee. The Russian dictator favored dismembering the country into four or five ineffective parts - and shooting 50,000 German army officers. Although the latter recommendation was made in a sardonic, joking tone, Churchill almost exploded, crying that the British people had always been opposed and always would be opposed to mass vengeance.

  Roosevelt’s reaction alarmed Churchill even more. The president suggested a compromise - shooting 49,000. This feeble attempt at humor was lost on Churchill. The prime minister knew they were dealing with a man who had massacred more than 15,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest and nearby death sites in 1940. Roosevelt was equally aware of this grisly fact. Churchill had sent him confidential British evaluations of Nazi propaganda about the massacre, which concluded that the Russians were unquestionably guilty.

  Assassination Plan Takes Shape

  At Teheran, Stalin and Roosevelt forced Churchill to agree to a cross-channel invasion, which was scheduled for May. The invasion now became the focus on both sides of the battle lines. With the Russians advancing relentlessly from the east, Canaris realized the Germans were running out of time. Early in 1944, his Nazi enemies succeeded in ousting him from control of the Abwehr. However, they were unable to make their suspicions of treason into a factual case against him, and Hitler put the admiral in charge of a small agency supervising the civilian war effort. Canaris was able to leave behind numerous subordinates in the Abwehr who were still committed to Hitler’s destruction.

  A younger man now assumed the leadership of the conspiracy. Thirty-seven-year-old Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had no connection to the Protestant, East German Junkers and Prussians on whom Churchill, Roosevelt, and Vansittart focused their antipathy. He was a Catholic and a descendant of the nobility of the principality of Württemberg in southern Germany, an area which even Vansittart admitted, in an unguarded moment, had democratic tendencies. Nazism’s vicious deeds had filled Stauffenberg with loathing for Hitler, and the Anglo-American bombing offensive convinced him that it was time to act. “A thousand years of civilization are being destroyed,” he said.

  Stauffenberg had no doubts or hesitations about the necessity of killing Hitler - and he was in a position to do it, as well as seizing control of Germany. Badly wounded in Tunisia by an Allied air attack in which he lost an arm, an eye, and all but two fingers on his remaining hand, the colonel had become chief of staff of the Home Army, composed of training units, divisions in rest areas, and convalescent
s numbering about 600,000 men. They were organized into a formal army to make sure Germany’s millions of slave laborers did not attempt an uprising. Stauffenberg proposed to kill Hitler and use this force to wrest power from the Nazis.

  Unknown to the conspirators, they were acquiring allies on the other side. As British and American planners contemplated the harsh realities of attacking the 1.5 million-man German army in France, doubts about the policy of unconditional surrender escalated. It soon became evident that virtually no one in either government supported the policy except Roosevelt and his White House circle.

  On March 25, 1944, General Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted a memorandum to the president urging “that a reassessment of the formula of unconditional surrender should be made . . . at a very early date.” The Joint Chiefs proposed a proclamation to assure the Germans that the Allies had no desire to “extinguish the German people or Germany as a nation.”

  On April 1, 1944, Roosevelt replied with an outburst that revealed as never before his hatred of Germany. “A somewhat long and painful experience in and out of Germany leads me to believe that German Philosophy (sic) cannot be changed by decree, law or military order. The change must be evolutionary and may take two generations.” In his opinion, the very word Reich had to be scoured from the German soul.

  General Marshall was dismayed by FDR’s response. He told General Sir John Dill, the British liaison officer in Washington, that they were “up against an obstinate Dutchman.” In London, Marshall’s protégé and D-Day commander, Dwight Eisenhower, was even more disappointed. Ike decided to try to change the president’s mind on his own. On April 14, Eisenhower met with Edward R. Stettinius, who had recently become undersecretary of state, and asked him to request that Cordell Hull intercede with Roosevelt to give the Germans a “white alley” - a path down which they could surrender with honor.

  Eisenhower was drawing on his experience in Italy, reasoning that if the Allies had gone along with installing an Italian field marshal as premier, what was wrong with the same approach for Germany? In his cable to Hull, Stettinius, obviously quoting Eisenhower, said the United States should try to encourage the emergence of a German Badoglio. The cable also suggested that, after the beachhead was established in France, Eisenhower should call on the German commander in the west to surrender.

  The White House response to this extraordinary message was another bout of silence. Eisenhower was encouraged and ordered the preparation of a proclamation that, under the influence of his psywar experts, became a warm personal chat with the German soldier, urging him to trust the Allies. A copy of the speech was rushed to the White House - and again the response was silence.

  On May 31, Eisenhower’s speech was attacked from an entirely unexpected quarter. Winston Churchill wrote an uncharacteristically violent letter to the supreme commander, accusing him of “begging before we have won the battle.” Never, he claimed, had he ever read anything “less suitable” for soldiers. In light of Churchill’s previous strong reservations about unconditional surrender, his letter was incomprehensible - unless he was doing a favor for his devious American counterpart in Washington, D.C.

  A few months earlier, when they had disagreed about the composition of the Italian government, Churchill rather plaintively reminded Roosevelt that he had “loyally tried to support” any statement to which the president was “personally committed.” By now, it was evident that literally nothing in the war was as personally important to Roosevelt as unconditional surrender.

  Churchill’s blast finished Eisenhower’s attempt to modify unconditional surrender. He swallowed his doubts and led his army to the beaches of Normandy and beyond as an obedient supporter of the policy. But the German army, after yielding the beachhead, still demonstrated a ferocious readiness to fight in Normandy’s hedgerows, causing other people to have severe doubts.

  On July 19, Churchill came under heavy attack in the House of Commons from both Laborites and Conservatives concerned about unconditional surrender. Again and again, members demanded to know why the prime minister’s government refused to state peace terms for Germany. The next day, Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, the voice of Lord Vansittart in the House of Commons, replied by sternly endorsing unconditional surrender and punishment of the entire German nation. “I say Hitler is symptomatic of the entire German mentality,” he declared. “The German people put [him] where he is.”

  The Plot Takes Wing - and Crashes

  While Eden was proclaiming these hate-filled sentiments, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was on a plane to the Wolfsschanze, Hitler’s East German headquarters near Rastenburg, to confer with the führer about the readiness of the Home Army. In his briefcase he carried two powerful bombs supplied by the Abwehr. By noon, the bombs had exploded and the colonel was on his way back to Berlin, certain that Hitler was dead.

  Stauffenberg flashed a coded signal to the capital, where the commander of the Home Army put another code word, Valkyrie, on the army’s teleprinter circuit. This alert was supposed to bring all units rushing to their assigned posts, guns in hand. At the Bendlerblock, the huge German army headquarters on the Bendlerstrasse in Berlin, General Ludwig Beck planned to broadcast a statement to these soldiers, announcing he was their new commander. Stauffenberg was ready to broadcast to the nation the news of Hitler’s death and the formation of a republic with Beck and Goerdeler among the chief figures - and their determination to bring the war to a swift end.

  But Hitler, the seat blown out of his trousers, his coat ripped up the back, and both eardrums ruptured had survived the blast. At the last moment, Stauffenberg’s briefcase had been moved by a staff colonel as he leaned over a map to explain a troop movement to Hitler.

  In France, the German commander, General Günther von Kluge, had been approached by Beck and promised to join the plot. But when he found out that Hitler had survived, his resolution unraveled. In Berlin, many members of the Home Army - particularly the young commander of a battalion of elite Prussian Guards who had been ordered by Beck to arrest Goebbels - wanted proof that Hitler was dead. At Goebbels’ headquarters, the propaganda chief put through a call to Rastenburg and learned that Hitler was still alive. The commander and other younger officers turned violently against the conspirators. Before the night was over, Beck was dead by his own hand, and Stauffenberg and three others had been executed against the wall of the Bendlerblock.

  On the day Stauffenberg triggered his bomb, Roosevelt was en route to Hawaii on a Pacific inspection tour. Churchill was aboard the cruiser Arromanches off Normandy. Both learned of the failed attempt almost immediately. Roosevelt said nothing, and Churchill confined himself to a gloating remark about “a very great disturbance in the German machine.” The only nation that praised the conspirators was the Soviet Union. A member of the Free Germans committee broadcast: “Generals, officers, soldiers! Cease fire at once and turn your arms against Hitler. Do not fail these courageous men!”

  Morgenthau’s Scorched-Earth Plan

  In Hawaii, on July 29, Roosevelt gave a press conference at which someone asked him whether unconditional surrender also applied to Japan. After answering in the affirmative - making the eventual use of the atomic bomb inevitable - Roosevelt heaped scorn on those who had criticized the policy. He claimed they did not understand his historical comparison. He then proceeded to give a totally erroneous description of Robert E. Lee’s conversation with Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, in which the president maintained that Grant kept saying unconditional surrender while Lee pleaded with him for food for his starving soldiers. When Lee finally accepted unconditional surrender, according to FDR (in fact, the term was never mentioned at Appomattox), Grant gave Lee food and permitted his officers to keep their horses for spring plowing. Roosevelt seemed to be implying that if the Germans surrendered unconditionally, they too could expect decent treatment. This history lesson demonstrated the dangers of awarding a “gentleman’s C” at Harvard.

  Roosevelt soon belied his pro
mise of humane treatment to a surrendered Germany. In August 1944, Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau visited England and returned to tell Roosevelt that he thought the British were much too benevolent in their postwar plans for Germany. “Give me 30 minutes with Churchill and I can correct this,” Roosevelt told Morgenthau. “We have got to be tough with Germany and I mean the German people, not just the Nazis. You either have to castrate [them] or you have got to treat them . . . so they can’t just go on reproducing people who want to continue . . . [as] in the past.”

  Morgenthau added fuel to the presidential ire by showing FDR a copy of a “Handbook of Military Government” prepared by the War Department. Roosevelt denounced it in a fiery letter to Colonel Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, saying it “gives me the impression that Germany is to be restored just as much as the Netherlands and Belgium.” Morgenthau left the White House convinced he had received a mandate to create a better plan to deal with a prostrate Germany.