A GROUND-FLOOR FLAT WITH A PAST: THE SIGNING OF THE SURRENDER ORDER
Today in Berlin: May 2, 1945
On this day in 1945 in Berlin, in a ground-floor flat in Schulenburgring 2 in Tempelhof, a surrender order was signed by the corps commander and the last commander of the Berlin Defence District, General Helmuth Weidling.
Weidling‘s attempt at negotiating conditional surrender failed and with the „beloved Führer“ dead, there was not much left to do but give in. On May 1, 1945 Goebbels took the easy way out, too. In Berlin, the still operating remains of German military troops, teams of young teenage boys in uniforms and civilian defence groups, only 72 hours earlier still mercilessly whipped into senseless action and ordered to fight for a lost cause, were now told to stop the fire. For Berlin the war and the Third Reich were over.
General Weidling, who arrived in Tempelhof from Bendlerblock - now a temporary seat of his and his staff’s operations - capitulated on behalf of the Wehrmacht and the city to the Red Army General Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, the head of the Soviet 8th Guards Army (former 62th Army renamed to honour their courage at Stalingrad) and the new military commander of Berlin.
And it was Chuikov, who was the reason why this historic event took place in a regular flat of a regular residential building in Berlin-Tempelhof. Chuikov refused to set up his headquarters inside the Zentralflughafen Tempelhof, just around the corner from Schulenburgring. Instead, he went for a something less official.
The flat, a tad ironically perhaps, belonged to one Anni Goebels. With a single „b“, though.
Many years later the same house at Schulenburging No. 2 would become the home to one of Berlin’s Governing Mayors, a Social-Democrat Michael Müller. Who after having been voted out and now also reduced his political activities moved into his childhood flat in the house where he grew up again.
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