Death at Luneberg Heath

After Hitler’s suicide on 30 April 1945 Admiral Doenitz, at Flensburg near the Danish border, was determined to surrender to the British first. The following day, Field Marshal Keitel, with Doenitz’s authority, contacted Field Marshal Montgomery. Keitel wanted to surrender to him the three armies that were frantically withdrawing between Berlin and Rostock in front of the advancing Red Army. Montgomery was adamant that they would have to surrender to the Soviets. Keitel’s representatives were alarmed at what might happen to these forces and the civilians under their protection.

‘I said the Germans should have thought of all these things before they began the war,’ recalled Montgomery, ‘and particularly before they attacked the Russians in June 1941.’ Lecturing them on the horrors of Coventry and Belsen concentration camp, Monty expressed no sympathy for the fate of German soldiers or civilians at the hands of the Red Army.

Lieutenant General Eberhard Kinzel was part of the military delegation that formally surrendered to Montgomery on Lüneberg Heath on 4 May. Kinzel stood out physically and professionally and immediately impressed Allied officers and reporters. ‘He was a magnificent looking officer about 6’ 5”, in his late 40s,’ recalled Monty’s Canadian PA, Lieutenant Colonel Trumbull Warren, ‘complete with monocle – a real professional Prussian.’ War correspondent R.W. Thompson remembered, ‘General Kinzel, thick-set, tall, monocled …’

Along with four other German officers, Kinzel’s name was on the surrender document acting on behalf of the Wehrmacht in north-west Europe. Even Monty was impressed by him and said, ‘Kinzel is a very able and very highly trained staff officer and I shall keep him at my Tac HQ with a team of German liaison officers to work between myself and Busch.’ Monty’s chief of staff, General Freddie de Guingand, was equally affected, ‘He was undoubtedly a most efficient staff officer, and one could not help being impressed by his attitude and quickness’.

However, broken by his experiences, Kinzel and his girlfriend, Erika von Ashcoff, took their own lives shortly afterwards. Montgomery noted, ‘Of the four Germans who arrived at my Tac[tical] Headquarters … on 3rd of May … three died violent deaths. Von Friedeburg poisoned himself. Kinzel shot himself, and Freidel was killed in a motor accident.’

Kinzel’s suicide was understandable, as he had known from the very start that Hitler and his cronies simply could not win a war of attrition against a country the size of the Soviet Union. He had the misfortune of witnessing not only the beginning of the terrible slaughter on the Eastern Front but also its bloody climax on the streets of Berlin. Such were the pressures of war that Kinzel’s marriage broke down and he abandoned his wife and two children. Choosing to die together, he first shot his girlfriend in the head and then pulled the trigger on himself. Theirs was one of thousands of such tragedies enacted across defeated Nazi Germany. General de Guingand felt responsible for Kinzel’s death because he allowed him to keep his pistol. ‘Without knowing it I no doubt helped him on his way,’ recalled Guingand. ‘He wore an eyeglass and was in every respect the typical Prussian General Staff officer. If he had lived he might have made a fortune in Hollywood.’

General Jodl, the German chief of staff, formally surrendered to the Americans in the French city of Reims on the morning of 7 May. The following day, he presented himself at Marshal Zhukov’s Berlin headquarters and very reluctantly surrendered to the Soviets. The bloody slaughter on the Eastern Front was at an end – the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany had been achieved at colossal cost to the Red Army. Zhukov concluded:

The fall of Berlin and the link-up between the Soviet Army and the troops of our allies led to the final collapse of Nazi Germany and its armed forces. The disorganised German Army was no longer capable of resistance. Everywhere in Italy and Western Europe, German troops began to capitulate. On 8 May representatives of the German command signed the Act of Unconditional Surrender, thus acknowledging their total defeat.

The people of Moscow celebrated and saluted the victorious Red Army and Navy the following day with thirty thunderous salvoes by 1,000 guns. Also on 9 May, Doenitz signalled the Wehrmacht, ‘From midnight the guns have been silent on all fronts’. He then acknowledged what Hitler would not, ‘The German armed forces have been overcome, finally, by a superior force’.

Extract from Anthony Tucker-Jones, Slaughter on the Eastern Front: Hitler and Stalin’s War 1941-1945, Stroud: The History Press, 2017