Jodl and Keitel surrender all German armed forces unconditionally: Thirty minutes after the fall of "
Festung Breslau" (
Fortress Breslau), General
Alfred Jodl arrived in
Reims and, following Dönitz's instructions, offered to surrender all forces fighting the Western Allies. This was exactly the same negotiating position that von Friedeburg had initially made to Montgomery, and like Montgomery the
Supreme Allied Commander, General
Dwight D. Eisenhower, threatened to break off all negotiations unless the Germans agreed to a complete unconditional surrender to all the Allies on all fronts.
[24] Eisenhower explicitly told Jodl that he would order western lines closed to German soldiers, thus forcing them to surrender to the Soviets.
[24] Jodl sent a signal to Dönitz, who was in
Flensburg, informing him of Eisenhower's declaration. Shortly after midnight, Dönitz, accepting the inevitable, sent a signal to Jodl authorizing the complete and total surrender of all German forces.
[22][24]
At 02:41 on the morning of 7 May, at SHAEF headquarters in Reims, France, the Chief-of-Staff of the
German Armed Forces High Command, General Alfred Jodl, signed an unconditional
surrender documents for all German forces to the Allies; committing representatives of the German High Command to attend a definitive signing ceremony in Berlin. General
Franz Böhme announced the unconditional surrender of German troops in Norway on 7 May. It included the phrase "All forces under German control to cease active operations at 2301 hours
Central European Time on May 8, 1945."
[18][25] The next day, Field Marshal
Wilhelm Keitel and other German OKW representatives travelled to Berlin, and shortly before midnight signed an amended and definitive document of unconditional surrender, explicitly surrendering to all the Allied forces in the presence of Marshal
Georgi Zhukov and representatives of
SHAEF.
[26] The signing ceremony took place in a former German Army Engineering School in the Berlin district of
Karlshorst; it now houses the
German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst.