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Dutch resistance, who handed them over to the Canadians. They then fell victim to a typical wartime muddle. When Montgomery accepted the German surrender on May 4, there were not enough Allied troops inHolland to disarm the Germans or feed the POWs. For the time being German officers were allowed to remain in command of their men. The two unfortunate German deserters were placed among other German soldiers in a disused Ford assembly plant outside Amsterdam. A German military court was hastily improvised by officers keen to assert their authority for the very last time, and the men were sentenced to death. The Germans asked the Canadians for guns to execute the “traitors.” The Canadians, unsure of the rules and unwilling to disrupt the temporary arrangement, complied. And the men were swiftly executed. Others apparently met a similar fate, until the Canadians, rather too late, put a stop to such practices. 4
    The official date for the end of the war in Europe, V-E Day, was in fact May 8. Even though the unconditional surrender of all German troops was signed in a schoolhouse in Rheims on the evening of May 6, the celebrations could not yet begin. Stalin was furious that General Eisenhower had presumed to accept the German surrender for the eastern as well as western fronts. Only the Soviets should have that privilege, in Berlin. Stalin wanted to postpone V-E Day till May 9. This, in turn, annoyed Churchill.
    People all over Britain were already busy baking bread for celebratory sandwiches; flags and banners had been prepared; church bells were waiting to be tolled. In the general confusion, it was the Germans who first announced the end of the war in a radio broadcast from Flensburg, where Admiral Doenitz was still nominally in charge of what remained of the tattered German Reich. This was picked up by the BBC. Special editions of the French, British, and U.S. newspapers soon hit the streets. In London, large crowds gathered around Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, expecting Churchill to announce victory so the biggest party in history could finally begin. Ticker tape started raining in the streets of New York. But still there was no official announcement from the Allied leaders that the war with Germany was over.
    Just before midnight on May 8, at the Soviet HQ in Karlshorst, near my father’s old labor camp, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the brutal militarygenius, at last accepted the German surrender. Once more, Admiral von Friedeberg put his signature to the German defeat. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, expressionless, rigid, every inch the Prussian soldier, told the Russians that he was horrified by the extent of destruction wrought on the German capital. Whereupon a Russian officer asked Keitel whether he had been equally horrified when on his orders, thousands of Soviet villages and towns were obliterated, and millions of people, including many children, were buried under the ruins. Keitel shrugged his shoulders and said nothing. 5
    Zhukov then asked the Germans to leave, and the Russians, together with their American, British, and French allies, celebrated in style with teary-eyed speeches and huge amounts of wine, cognac, and vodka. A banquet was held in that same room the following day when Zhukov toasted Eisenhower as one of the greatest generals of all time. The toasts went on and on and on, and the Russian generals, including Zhukov, danced, until few men were left standing.
    On May 8, crowds were already going crazy in New York. They were also pouring into the streets in London, but a peculiar hush still fell over the British crowds, as though they were waiting for Churchill’s voice to set off the celebrations. Churchill, who had decided to ignore Stalin’s wish to postpone V-E Day till the ninth, would speak at 3 P.M. President Truman had already spoken earlier. General Charles de Gaulle, refusing to be upstaged by Churchill, insisted on making his announcement to the French at exactly the