Surrender Museum Reims

Surrender Museum, Reims - This is the historic place where the first surrender of the Third Reich was signed on 7 May 1945. The next day there was another, grander, more formal ceremony in Berlin (see Karlshorst ), but it was in Reims that Germany actually surrendered first. The room in which this took place has been preserved and a museum was developed around it that provides more information about the surrender itself as well as some of the wider context. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: Germany ’s surrender in WWII was actually a rather complicated matter. There’s no scope here to go into the full details (there are plenty of other sources to consult for that), but suffice it to say this much: A text serving as the “ Instrument of Surrender ” had already been worked on by the Allies from ca. mid-1944 , i.e. after the D-Day Landings in Normandy, and versions and reworked bits of text were also the subject of the Yalta Conference in early 1945. Main elements of the discussed paper were that the surrender had to be unconditional and must be signed by the German Military High Command , in order to avoid what happened after Germany’s surrender in WW1 , namely that only the civilian government signed. This later paved the way for the “Dolchstoß”, or ‘stab-in-the-back’, legend that militarily Germany had not actually been defeated on the battlefields, but that it was “betrayed” – by republicans, social democrats, Jews … you see the pattern emerging, which soon indeed formed a crucial part in the emerging Nazi propaganda. This, so the Allies in WWII agreed, must be prevented from repeating itself.