Eighty years ago this week a shrivelled Reich surrenders in the midst of diplomatic squabbles

 

The German surrender on May 8th now appears inevitable. Hitler had killed himself. The Soviets had taken Berlin. The Red Army and the US Army had met on the Elbe, severing the Reich. The German forces in Italy had surrendered unconditionally. Attempts by first Goebbels, then Himmler and finally the new head of government Doenitz to surrender in the West to the Americans and British, implicitly to continue fighting the Soviets, had been rejected out of hand. But much territory was still in the hands of the Reich: southern Germany, Austria, Denmark and Norway. The garrisons of the French Atlantic ports and the Channel islands were still holding out. Fighting actually continued for another week in the Balkans.

Eamon de Valera the head of the Irish government commited one of the worst blunders of his career when he paid a well-publicized  visit to the German embassy in Dublin to pay his condolences on the death of Hitler (there was no book of condolence, so he could not have signed it as legend has it). De Valera was deep in a venomous argument with the US ambassador, who had demanded that the German embassy be handed over; the two men detested each other. De Valera had visited the US embassy to present his condolences on the death of Roosevelt three weeks before, so in his mind de Valera was merely parading Eire's neutrality by showing similar solicitude to Germany.

Pierre Laval the former Vichy prime minister fled to Spain in a German aircraft presenting the Franco government with a diplomatic embarassment. Laval was imprisoned and Franco would happily have put him over the border at Gibraltar where the British could have done what they wished with him,  but the Allies treated the question as a French one and de Gaulle demanded that Laval be put over the French border which was unacceptable to Spain. In the event he was flown back to Austria, still in the hands of the Reich, albeit and soon arrested by the Americans.