Panzer units were supposed to be finished by May 1945. History books say the tanks surrendered with everything else, but the truth is more complicated. At least three German armored formations remained intact and under arms long after the formal surrender of Germany, and the last of them was still operational nearly two months after VE Day. The third-to-last surrender happened in a part of Europe that had seen no real fighting since 1940: Norway.
The Germans had stationed a massive garrison there, roughly 350,000 troops, because Hitler refused to pull units out of the country. He feared a British landing on the coast, and Norway, along with Denmark, secured the supply of Swedish iron ore and ball bearings that the Nazi war economy could not survive without. The west coast of Norway was also part of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. After Hitler died on the 30th of April 1945, the forces in Norway came under the command of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler’s successor, whose headquarters sat in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany.
The German commander-in-chief in Norway, General Franz Böhme, stayed completely loyal to the new Nazi government at Flensburg. On the 5th of May, Denmark surrendered to the British. But Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery had only about 30,000 troops to spare, and he had no desire to try to force 350,000 Germans in Norway to comply with the surrender by military action. So on the 8th of May, an Allied military mission arrived in Oslo to present the terms of surrender to General Böhme personally.
The first British officers came across the Skagerrak to Oslo to receive the surrender of the Germans still holding the country. Norwegian flags reappeared from every window. Until late into the night, people danced and celebrated in the streets, and the pent-up emotions of five years finally broke loose. Air Commodore Darrell decorated a woman patriot of Oslo, and Norway belonged to Norway again.
Detachments of Allied troops then began arriving to disarm the large German force. There were 30,000 British and American soldiers, 13,000 Norwegian troops who had been trained in Sweden during the war, and about 40,000 members of the Norwegian resistance who had risen across the country. But Norway is enormous, the German occupying army was enormous, and the Allied force was small. It took a long time to actually take the surrenders and disarm the troops scattered across the country.
One unit in particular was Panzer Brigade Norwegen, the occupiers’ only tank unit. Despite its name, the unit was really a reinforced tank battalion. Formed in July 1944, it was commanded in May 1945 by Colonel Georg Mecha. The unit was equipped entirely with the Panzer 3, a tank generally considered obsolete by 1945.
It had 61 Panzer 3s on strength: 25 Ausführung H models armed with a 50 mm gun and 36 Ausführung N variants with the 75 mm gun, plus an attached 10 StuG III assault guns. The unit had seen no action during the war, and its men had gathered all of their vehicles and equipment together to await the British. Members of Force 134 arrived on the 14th of May 1945 to take the unit’s surrender. The British had absolutely no use for such obsolete equipment, so it was left to the newly liberated Norwegians, who pressed these vehicles into their own service.
The place where the Germans surrendered became the Norwegian Army Tank School. These German vehicles served in the Norwegian Army into the early 1950s, until they were replaced by American M24 Chaffee tanks. The 75 mm gun Panzer 3s were later dug into the ground up to their turrets and set in concrete as permanent defensive positions in case of a Soviet invasion starting in 1953. They remained in use until the 1980s.
Some have since been dug out and are currently being preserved. The surrender of Panzer Brigade Norwegen on the 14th of May 1945 was not, however, the last Panzer unit still under German control. The second-to-last one comes from another forgotten corner of the Third Reich: the Channel Islands. When the Germans captured the Channel Islands in 1940, a collection of British Crown Dependencies just off the coast of northwest France, Hitler ordered the construction of very extensive defenses on the islands of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, and Sark.
He wanted to guard against any British plan to snatch them back, and he integrated the islands into the wider Atlantic Wall defenses. One entire German infantry division garrisoned the islands for the duration of the war. After the Allied liberations of Normandy and Brittany in 1944, the Channel Islands became cut off from the German forces in Western Europe and completely isolated, though they refused to capitulate. Back in June 1941, Hitler had ordered that a tank unit be dispatched to the islands to stiffen their defenses.
And Hitler himself had decreed that rather than sending German tanks, captured French tanks should be sent instead. The Germans had captured thousands of French tanks and other armored vehicles in 1940, and many were reactivated in German units to help guard the Third Reich. In France, they provided extra muscle against the French resistance and helped maintain public order in places like Paris. The unit sent to the Channel Islands was Panzer Abteilung 213, equipped with World War I vintage French FT-17 tanks.
Most of them had actually been built in the interwar period. The Germans had captured an astounding 1,704 FT-17s. They used 100 of them for airfield defense and 650 for patrolling across Europe. They were hopelessly out of date, but they could be quite effective against irregular forces and partisans.
20 FT-17s were dispatched by ship to the Channel Islands and doled out to the individual islands. Eight went to Jersey, eight to Guernsey, and four to Alderney. Large numbers of FT-17 turrets, either mounting a 37 mm gun or an 8 mm Hotchkiss machine gun, were also sent out and dug in by the Germans on top of bunkers to beef up the defenses. In 1942, the Germans sent more tanks to the islands.
This time it was the big but very slow Char B1B French tanks. 36 were sent: four command tanks, 24 standard models, and 10 flamethrower-equipped tanks. They were split evenly between the islands of Jersey and Guernsey, with none going to Alderney. Interestingly, the Tank Museum at Bovington has a Char B1B tank that was captured on Jersey by the British at war’s end.
Finally, a self-propelled gun built on the chassis of the French R-35 tank was also sent. The Panzerjäger 35R 731F was armed with a 47 mm Czech anti-tank gun, and nine of these vehicles were based on the largest island, Jersey. When Germany surrendered on the 8th of May 1945, the Channel Islands did not immediately follow suit. Jersey and Guernsey surrendered the following day, the 9th of May.
Sark capitulated on the 10th of May, but Alderney held out a bit longer. Into the harbor of St. Peter Port on Guernsey, a British warship steamed with the white ensign flying. A tumultuous welcome awaited the liberators of the islands, incidentally the oldest British possession and the only British territory to be occupied by the Germans during the war.
The German guard marched out from the ancient castle. The German commander was marched away, and all equipment was handed in. The proclamation of liberty was read, and the Union Jack was hoisted. With their rightful flag flying once again above them, the islanders gave themselves over to Victory Day celebrations.
Alderney was the most heavily fortified of the Channel Islands, being the closest to Britain, only about 60 miles away across the sea. It also contained the only SS-run concentration camp on British soil. It was only after further negotiations that the British took the German surrender on Alderney on the 16th of May 1945, a full eight days after VE Day. Incredibly though, it still was not the last surrender in the Channel Islands.
That honor goes to an overlooked German garrison marooned on some inhabited rocks called the Minquiers, south of Jersey. They were accidentally discovered by a French fishing boat and surrendered on the 23rd of May 1945, a full three weeks after VE Day. The surrender of the four FT-17 tanks of Panzer Abteilung 213 stationed on Alderney is, in my opinion, the second-to-last surrender of a Panzer unit from World War II. As for the fate of those Alderney FT-17s, it is something of a mystery.
It seems likely that they were dumped after the war in the 100-foot-deep waters of Alderney quarry, which is also filled with German artillery guns. They may yet be found. But the last German Panzer unit still under arms after World War II was not in Western Europe at all. It was in the Aegean, in Southern Europe.
Though the Germans had evacuated mainland Greece in October 1944, heavily fortified fortress garrisons were left on certain Aegean islands, such as Rhodes and Crete, and they held out to the end and beyond. Though the British took the surrenders of these island garrisons, it was in name only. The Germans were not disarmed. In fact, they continued fighting, not the British, but communist partisans in the mountains around their bases.
The British lacked the forces to organize the disarming and removal of these Germans, largely because open fighting had broken out between British forces in Greece and communist Greek partisans. Less than a year later, the Greek Civil War would break out. On Crete, which had been captured at very heavy cost by German paratroopers in 1941, the garrison of 16,300 German and fascist Italian troops were left in control of a strip of the island 65 kilometers long, encompassing Souda Bay, Chania, and Maleme airfield, at war’s end and for some weeks afterwards. To have disarmed the Germans at the end of the war would have invited their massacre by angry locals and communist partisans.
So the British left them in place and, in fact, used them in their own war against the communists. The British sent a small number of occupation troops to Crete on the 11th of May 1945. But famously, the British commanding officer, a brigadier, and his escort had to be rescued by German panzer troops when he was ambushed by Greek communist partisans. German tanks of Panzer Abteilung 212 Kreta intervened and beat the communists back, fighting alongside British troops.
These little battles continued for weeks afterwards. Panzer Abteilung Kreta consisted of at least 10 Panzer IIs, five Panzer IIIs, 10 Panzer IVs, 15 French Hotchkiss tanks, five Somua 35 tanks, and a few other armored vehicles. On the 23rd of May 1945, with the arrest of Grand Admiral Dönitz by British forces at Flensburg and the dissolution of his government, the last Nazi flag was also hauled down on Crete. However, armed German troops remained in place even after this surrender, particularly in the area of Souda Bay, until the end of June 1945, with 1,600 German troops involved in anti-partisan warfare alongside the British.
In fact, the fighting was so intense that the German commanding officer on Crete radioed in a request to Grand Admiral Dönitz just a few hours before he was arrested, requesting the award of five Knight’s Crosses to senior officers involved in anti-partisan operations alongside the British. Dönitz approved these awards, backdated to the 10th of May. So, in all likelihood, a Panzer unit continued under arms and fully staffed by Germans until at least the 23rd of May 1945. Perhaps some vehicles remained operational until the end of June 1945, almost two months after VE Day.
Which is a pretty amazing fact, if you ask me.