Reims today celebrates its often overlooked role in history as the place where the second World War ended, writes Lara Marlowe.
The second World War ended 60 years ago today in a red-brick secondary school beside the railway tracks in the French city of Reims. Yet, because of a temper tantrum by the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, most of the world believes the war ended in Berlin two days later.
In February 1945, Gen Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces, set up his headquarters in Reims, in the College Moderne et Technique, since renamed the Lycée Franklin Roosevelt.
It was here, in the war room left untouched since May 7th, 1945, that Eisenhower planned the advance of allied troops across Nazi Germany. After Hitler's suicide on April 30th, it seemed the natural place to receive the German surrender.
The only change in the L-shaped war room is the brass name plaques showing where the 12 Americans, Britons, Soviets, Germans and one French officer sat around the large oak table. The military maps hung across blue-green walls show the state of battle on May 7th, 1945: the zig-zagging red line represents Western allied forces; the pink line the Soviets; yellow lines, international boundaries.
The room became a museum two months after the surrender and was visited by 13,684 people last year.
Eisenhower kept out of the signing because he outranked the German chief of staff Gen Alfred Jodl, who'd been brought from northern Germany with his aide de camp in a US aircraft named Mary Lou II, with a pin-up painted on its fuselage.
Eisenhower's chief of staff, Gen Walter Bedell-Smith, acted for the US. Bedell-Smith suffered from a stomach ulcer, and he is the only Allied officer who does not look euphoric in the photographs taken by Eisenhower's photographer, Sgt Albert Meserlin.
After the 2.41am signing, the men went to Eisenhower's office, above the war room. Gen Jodl asked to speak.
"With this signature, the German people and the German armed forces are, for better or worse, delivered into the hands of the victors," he said. "In this hour, I can only express the hope that the victor will treat them with generosity." Jodl was hanged the following year, after the Nuremberg war trials. Admiral von Friedeburg was the only German who participated in the partial surrender at Lüneberg on May 4th, and in the unconditional surrenders at Reims and Berlin. Friedeburg committed suicide 10 days later.
Sgt Meserlin's photographs of the entire surrender process, and the victory parade through Reims on May 8th, have been brought together by the Surrender Museum's curator Marc Bouxin in a special exhibition until the end of this year.
WE SEE EISENHOWER holding the two pens with which the surrender was signed in a V for Victory. Captain Kay Sommersby, Eisenhower's mistress, stands behind his right shoulder. Meserlin immortalised Allied officers drinking champagne in Eisenhower's office at 3am. Cpl Susan Heald, the British secretary who typed the surrender, told curator Bouxin she spent five hours re-typing the one-page document, then collapsed in a chair, weeping, to be revived with a glass of champagne.
Gen Ivan Sousloparov, the chief Soviet liaison officer in Reims, signed the document on behalf of the Soviet Union. Neither he nor his assistant, Col Zenkovitch, were ever seen or heard from again, and there is a suspicion that Stalin had them liquidated because he wanted to erase the memory of the Reims surrender.
The Soviet Union lost 300,000 men in the 15-day assault on Berlin alone - more than all US casualties in the second World War. The USSR turned the tide by holding out through the German siege of Stalingrad in 1942. Stalin was furious that the Reims surrender portrayed the US as chief victors. He demanded that the surrender be re-enacted two days later in the Soviet sector of Berlin, accepted not by a liaison officer but by Marshal Zhukov.
The slight to Reims was somewhat repaired on July 8th, 1962, when Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer consecrated Franco-German reconciliation in Reims Cathedral.
THE CITY'S MAYOR, Jean-Louis Schneiter, spent the last two years preparing three days of 60th anniversary festivities, only to see Reims slighted again. President Jacques Chirac will not attend because he's travelling to Moscow for President Putin's ceremony.
The end of the second World War is an awkward commemoration for France. Not only was is it not clear whether it should be celebrated on the 7th, 8th or 9th of May, but, "if the French thought too much about the second World War, they had to think as much about defeat as victory," says Prof Julian Jackson of the University of London, author of The Fall of France 1940. "De Gaulle talked about 'the 30 years' war' because by melding the two, it became something you could be proud of," Jackson continued. "As a 30-year war, the French war was heroic. If you look at is as a five-year war, their role was marginal."
The US, USSR and Britain saw themselves as the "club of five million soldiers" who defeated Nazi Germany. By enlisting hundreds of thousands of Resistance fighters in the last months of the war, de Gaulle brought French troop strength up to nearly one million. He demanded the participation of French generals at surrender ceremonies in Reims and Berlin.
"It was an extraordinary feat of magic that de Gaulle involved the French in the end of the war at all," Jackson says. "Throughout the war, Roosevelt took the view that France no longer existed."
De Gaulle and Winston Churchill had a love-hate relationship, but it was largely thanks to Churchill that France regained what de Gaulle considered her "rightful place" among world powers.
At the Tehran Conference in November 1943, Churchill told Stalin and Roosevelt that "a world deprived of a flourishing France" was "unimaginable". The British prime minister supported de Gaulle's demand for a seat on the nascent UN Security Council, and relinquished part of Britain's occupation zone in Germany to France.
Le Musée de la Reddition, 12 rue Franklin Roosevelt, Reims, is open 10am-noon, 2-6pm every day except Tuesday