At 2:41 on the morning of May 7, 1945, in a converted French schoolhouse forty miles from the German border, General Alfred Jodl put a fountain pen to paper and signed the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich. Twelve minutes later, the man who had been Hitler’s chief of operations staff for six years was led down a narrow hallway to the private office of the American who had defeated him. Jodl came to attention, bowed his head, and waited to be received as an officer who had lost with honor. Dwight Eisenhower did not stand.
He did not offer a chair. He did not extend his hand. Two questions, two answers, sixty seconds, and the door closed. Eighteen months later, Jodl would hang at Nuremberg.
Eight years later, Eisenhower would be sworn in as the thirty-fourth president of the United States. But the refusal of that handshake had been decided three weeks earlier, in the rain, at a place called Ohrdruf. Alfred Jodl was born in Würzburg in 1890, the son of a Bavarian army officer. He entered the cadet corps at ten, was commissioned in 1910, and served with distinction on the Western Front in the First World War, earning the Iron Cross First Class.
When the war ended, he remained in the shrunken Reichswehr, a reliable, careful staff officer who appeared to care little for politics. In 1939, Hitler personally selected him as chief of the operations staff of the High Command of the Armed Forces, making him the second most powerful military figure in the Reich. Jodl was the man who translated Hitler’s visions into military plans, briefing the Führer three times a day for six years. In 1941 he drafted and disseminated the Commissar Order, which directed troops in the Soviet Union to execute captured political officers without trial, a license to murder that cost an estimated ten thousand lives.
The following year he transmitted over his own signature Hitler’s Commando Order, ordering the execution of captured Allied commandos even in uniform, in direct violation of the Geneva Convention. Dwight Eisenhower, born the same year as Jodl in Denison, Texas, had graduated from West Point in 1915, sixty-first in a class of 164. Denied a chance to fight in the First World War, he spent the conflict commanding a tank training school in Gettysburg. For twenty years he served in the peacetime army, including a difficult seven years under Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines, where MacArthur once dismissed him as the best clerk he had ever had.
But Chief of Staff George Marshall saw in Eisenhower the one man who could hold an Allied coalition together, and by June 1944 Eisenhower sent 156,000 men across the English Channel on D-Day, carrying in his wallet a note accepting full responsibility for failure that he never had to read. By April 1945, the two men born in the same month of the same year were on a collision course. Eisenhower had established his forward headquarters in a boys’ technical school in Reims, in the city where French kings had been crowned for centuries and where American soldiers had emptied the champagne cellars after liberation. On April 12, he visited Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald, the first Nazi concentration camp any senior American commander had seen with his own eyes.
He walked through every barrack, looked at the piles of the dead and the living left unable to stand. Patton vomited. Bradley did not speak for the rest of the day. Eisenhower sent a cable to Marshall, writing that the evidence of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality was so overpowering as to leave him a bit sick, and that he had made the visit deliberately to be in a position to give firsthand evidence if anyone ever tried to charge these allegations to propaganda.
He ordered every American soldier in the area not directly engaged to be brought through the camp, and ordered German civilians from the nearby town to walk through as well. That evening, in the cold April rain, he decided he would never again shake the hand of a German officer. The war was nearly over. Berlin had fallen to the Red Army, and Stalin had refused Eisenhower’s request for a joint surrender ceremony in the German capital.
Against Eisenhower’s wishes, the surrender would take place in Reims. On May 5, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler’s successor, sent General Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg to Reims with instructions to delay, divide, and surrender only in the west, hoping to buy time for German soldiers and civilians to flee the Soviet advance. Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, bluntly told Friedeburg to look at the map, tapped the last patches of German-held territory, and demanded the authority to sign an unconditional surrender on all fronts. Friedeburg began to cry, and radioed Dönitz, who sent Jodl.
Jodl arrived in Reims on the afternoon of May 6. In the map room, where the walls were covered floor to ceiling with the colored-chalk front lines that had been updated every six hours, Jodl asked where General Eisenhower was. Smith told him the Supreme Commander would not see him. Negotiations went nowhere: Jodl asked for forty-eight hours to prepare troops in the east, a request Eisenhower dismissed as a lie meant to move two million men westward.
Eisenhower’s answer was delivered with brutal finality: if Jodl did not sign at once an unconditional surrender covering all fronts simultaneously, the Western Front would be closed, no German soldier or civilian would be allowed through, and every German east of the Elbe would be delivered to the Soviet army. Jodl had one hour to decide. His radio message to Dönitz brought the reply at 1:52 in the morning: full authority to sign. At 2:41, at a woodworker’s bench covered in requisitioned felt, Jodl signed the Act of Military Surrender, followed by Friedeburg and by Major General Ivan Susloparov, the Soviet representative who signed without authorization from Moscow and would spend the rest of his career in obscurity.
Jodl asked to make a statement, saying that the German people and armed forces were delivered into the hands of the victor, and expressing hope that the victor would treat them with generosity. No one responded. Then Jodl was brought to Eisenhower’s office. He stopped three paces from the desk, came to attention, and bowed.
Eisenhower did not stand, did not gesture to a chair, did not speak beyond two questions: did Jodl understand the terms, and would he be held personally accountable if they were violated. Jodl answered, bowed again, and was led out. The meeting lasted under a minute. Eisenhower then typed a fourteen-word message to Washington: “The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241 local time, May 7th, 1945.
” He signed it and sent it on its way, and the champagne Churchill had sent sat unopened while the correspondents poured into his office, where he held up the two gold pens that had signed the surrender in the shape of a V. The wait for the official declaration of victory was short-lived. Associated Press correspondent Edward Kennedy broke the embargo and cabled the news to the world before Eisenhower authorized its release, setting off celebrations in Times Square twenty-four hours before Victory in Europe Day was officially declared. Kennedy was fired for it.
The Associated Press would formally apologize in 2012. Jodl was flown back to Germany, arrested on May 23, and tried at Nuremberg on four counts, including war crimes for the Commissar and Commando orders. He was found guilty and hanged on October 16, 1946. Friedeburg, who had wept in the map room at Reims, bit down on a capsule of potassium cyanide during his own arrest and was buried in an unmarked grave.
Dönitz served ten years in Spandau and died in 1980. Susloparov was reprimanded and reassigned to a quiet career as a lecturer, his name absent from Soviet histories of the surrender until Russia officially acknowledged his role in 1992. Eisenhower returned home to serve as Army chief of staff, president of Columbia, and first Supreme Allied Commander of NATO before winning the presidency in 1952. He ended the Korean War, desegregated the federal government, built the Interstate Highway System, sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, and warned against the military-industrial complex.
He died in 1969 and was buried in Abilene, Kansas, in a plain army coffin. The schoolhouse in Reims still stands, preserved as the Museum of the Surrender. The maps are still on the walls, the colored chalk exactly as the intelligence officers left it, the woodworker’s table still at the center of the room, the chairs marked with the names of the men who sat in them. The office where Eisenhower refused the handshake has been left as it was, down to the framed photograph on the desk.
There is no photograph of a handshake in the building, because there was never a handshake to record. There is no handshake because for Eisenhower the decision had been made in the rain at Ohrdruf three weeks earlier: some things once seen cannot be forgotten, and no soldier has the authority to forgive them with a gesture of professional courtesy. And so, in a small French office at three in the morning, the war in Europe ended in sixty seconds of silence, and that silence has never been broken.