In the first days of May 1945, the war in Europe was ending.

Not cleanly, not all at once, but in the way that large things end unevenly and with enormous variation from place to place.

some sectors collapsing into peace while others continued fighting with a violence that seemed almost incomprehensible given that everyone involved knew the outcome was already decided.

The German army was not one thing in those final days.

It was a h 100,000 different situations.

Each one being resolved according to the specific calculations of the specific men involved.

And those calculations were being shaped by a factor that had not been present earlier in the war and that was changing everything about how the end was unfolding.

The factor was the Russians.

The Soviet advance from the east had been moving with a momentum and a scale that dwarfed even the dramatic operations of the Third Army.

Entire German army groups had been encircled and destroyed.

Cities had changed hands in battles that lasted days and left nothing standing.

and the German soldiers and civilians who had experienced or witnessed what the Soviet advance looked like on the ground or who had heard from others who had experienced it were operating with a level of fear about falling into Soviet hands that was qualitatively different from their fear of falling into American hands.

This was not simply propaganda, though the Nazi regime had certainly used the fear for its own purposes.

It was based on something real.

The eastern front had been fought with a brutality that the western front had not matched, and the men on both sides knew it, and the consequences of that knowledge were visible everywhere in the final days as German units and German commanders made choices that would have been unthinkable a year earlier.

The most significant of those choices in terms of its military scale and its political implications involved a German force that was operating in Czechoslovakia in the first week of May 1945.

The force was what remained of Army Group Center commanded by Field Marshal Ferdinand Sherner and it was substantial.

Not substantial in the sense of being capable of changing the outcome of the war, which was already decided, but substantial in the sense of being one of the largest coherent German military formations still in the field with hundreds of thousands of men and significant equipment and a command structure that was still functioning in the particular way that German military command structures continued to function long after the situation had become hopeless.

Sherner himself was a complicated figure.

He was a committed Nazi and a brutal disciplinarian who had maintained order in his command through methods that his own officers found extreme even by the standards of the Vermacht in 1945.

He had been promoted to field marshall by Hitler personally in the final weeks which was less a military honor than a political signal.

Hitler’s way of identifying the commanders he believed would fight to the end regardless of the military reality.

Sherner would eventually flee his own command in the final hours, abandoning the men he had led, which was the end that his particular combination of fanaticism and self-preservation instinct produced.

But in the days before that end, the commanders beneath Sherner were making their own calculations.

And one of those commanders, a general named Herman Burma, who was responsible for a substantial portion of the forces in the Czech theater, had arrived at a conclusion that was both militarily rational and politically extraordinary.

He had decided that he was not going to surrender to the Russians.

He was going to find a way to surrender to the Americans.

And he was going to bring as many of his men with him as he possibly could.

And he was going to do this even though the agreed Allied boundaries placed his forces in the Soviet zone of operations, which meant that what he was proposing was not simply a military surrender, but a deliberate political act that cut across the agreements that Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin had made at Yaltta.

The force Bumma was proposing to bring across to the American side was not a regiment or a division.

It was an army.

Hundreds of thousands of men with their equipment and their supply trains and their command structure moving west through Czechoslovakia toward the American lines while simultaneously trying to stay ahead of the Soviet advance that was closing from the east.

The logistics of this movement were staggering.

The political implications were enormous and the time available was measured in hours because the Soviet forces were moving fast and the window between the German lines and the American lines was narrowing with every passing hour.

Bumma sent emissaries to the American lines.

The emissaries reached Patton’s headquarters, and Patton, reading the proposal that had come through his forward units, found himself at the center of one of the most consequential decisions of the entire Western campaign.

A decision that was simultaneously military and political and human in ways that did not resolve neatly into any of the categories that military training prepared commanders to handle.

The military case for accepting Bulma’s surrender was straightforward.

Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers coming across to the American side meant hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were not fighting, not causing casualties, not requiring combat operations to neutralize.

It meant a clean end to a major German formation without a battle.

It meant American soldiers going home instead of dying in the last days of a war that was already won.

The political case was more complicated.

The Yaltta agreements had drawn boundaries.

The Soviet zone was the Soviet zone.

German forces in the Soviet zone were supposed to surrender to Soviet forces.

Accepting Bumma’s army meant violating those agreements, meant taking something that had been allocated to the Soviets, meant making a decision that was above Patton’s authority.

And that had implications for the post-war relationship between the Allied powers that Patton was not empowered to resolve by himself.

Patton knew all of this.

He had not survived 30 years in the American military without understanding where his authority ended and where the authority of his superiors began.

He referred the matter up the chain.

He contacted Bradley.

Bradley contacted Eisenhower.

And at the highest levels of the Allied command structure, the question was debated with the urgency that the timetable demanded.

because every hour of debate was an hour in which the Soviet advance was closing the window through which Burma’s forces were trying to move.

The decision that came back was a compromise that satisfied nobody completely and that was probably the only decision possible given the constraints.

Patton was authorized to accept the surrender of German forces that reached the American lines.

He was not authorized to actively facilitate their movement or to hold the lines open in ways that could be construed as a deliberate policy of diverting German forces from the Soviet zone.

The distinction was fine enough to be almost meaningless in practice, but it gave Patton the legal and political cover he needed, and he used it.

He met Bulma at a Forward American headquarters in the first days of May.

The meeting was, by every account of the people present, one of the strangest of the entire war.

Bulma was a German general who had spent years commanding forces on behalf of a regime that was now collapsed.

Who was surrendering an army of hundreds of thousands of men to an enemy general in order to avoid surrendering to a different enemy.

And who was doing all of this in the full knowledge that the political arrangements of the postwar world were being shaped in real time by the decisions being made in rooms like this one.

Patton looked at Bulma across the table and asked him directly how many men he was bringing across.

Bulma gave a number.

Patton looked at the number for a moment.

Then he asked Bulma whether he understood that the men he was bringing across were going to be processed as prisoners of war in accordance with American and international standards.

That they were not being recruited into any other service.

or given any guarantees about their post-war treatment beyond the protections of the Geneva Convention and that Boom’s cooperation in an orderly surrender was the only thing that Patton was in a position to offer him.

Boom said that he understood.

He said that it was enough.

Patton said that it was going to have to be because it was all there was.

Then Patton said something that the officers present remembered afterward as the most direct summary of the situation they heard from anyone during the entire final days of the war.

He said that he understood why Bumma had made the choice he had made and that he was not going to pretend otherwise and that the fear of the Soviet advance was a real thing based on real events and he was not going to insult Bulma’s intelligence by suggesting it wasn’t.

He said that the men coming across were going to be treated correctly and that he intended to keep that promise because he kept his promises and because the men coming across were soldiers who had fought in a war that was now over and that whatever they had done in that war was a matter for the processes that were being established to deal with it.

But then he said something else.

He said that he wanted Burma to understand something clearly.

He said that the Soviet Union was an ally of the United States and that the arrangements that had been made between the Allied powers were arrangements that Patton operated within regardless of his personal views about them.

He said that his personal views about the Soviet Union and about what the post-war world was going to look like were not relevant to this conversation and that he was not going to share them.

He said that what was relevant was that Burma was surrendering to the United States Army and that the United States Army was going to process that surrender according to its agreements with its allies and its obligations under international law and that Bulma needed to understand that the surrender he was making was to the institution, not to the individual and that the institution had obligations that extend extended beyond anything Patton personally might think or feel about the situation.

It was, the officers present agreed, a remarkable piece of self-discipline from a man who was not known for self-discipline.

Patton’s views about the Soviet Union were not a secret within the Third Army.

He had expressed them with his characteristic directness on multiple occasions [snorts] and in ways that had reached Eisenhower and had contributed to the growing sense at the highest levels of Allied command that Patton was becoming a political problem as well as a military asset.

He knew what he thought and he chose in this meeting with this German general who had brought hundreds of thousands of men across to the American side partly because he shared some of those thoughts to say none of it to represent the institution rather than himself to keep the conversation where it needed to be.

The surrender was processed.

The men came across the numbers were staggering in a way that even Patton staff who had been processing surrenders for weeks found difficult to absorb.

Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers moving through the American lines in an operation that was simultaneously a military surrender and a mass human migration.

men who had been fighting for years and who were now simply trying to get to the right side of a line before the line moved.

The Soviets protested.

The protest went through diplomatic channels and produced the kind of carefully worded responses that diplomatic channels produce, which satisfied nobody and resolved nothing and papered over a tension that was going to define the next 50 years of European history.

Patton was not involved in those diplomatic exchanges.

He had done what he had been authorized to do and he had done it within the boundaries he had been given and the political consequences were above his level and he knew it and was content to leave them there.

He wrote about the meeting with Bulma in his diary.

He wrote that Bulma was a professional soldier who had made a rational decision in an irrational situation and that he respected the decision without necessarily respecting everything that had led to the situation in which the decision had to be made.

He wrote that the men who had come across were now prisoners and that they were being treated correctly and that this was the right outcome.

He wrote that the end of the war in Europe was producing situations that no military training had prepared anyone to handle and that the only tool available was judgment and that judgment was an imperfect tool.

But it was the only one there was.

He wrote that he hoped the decisions being made in these final days were the right ones.

He wrote that he was not certain they were.

He wrote that certainty was not available and that this was something he was going to have to live with, which was not a sentence that came easily to a man who had built his entire identity around the proposition that certainty was the fundamental quality of command.

The war in Europe ended on May 8th, 1945.

The men who had come across with Burma were an American prisoner of war facilities.

When the end came, they were alive.

They were going to go home eventually to whatever Germany was going to become, to whatever lives were possible in the aftermath of what had happened.

That was not nothing.

In the spring of 1945, it was very far from nothing.

Patton was in his headquarters when the formal surrender came through.

His staff expected something, a statement, a reaction, something that matched the scale of what had just ended.

What they got was Patton sitting quietly for a moment and then asking what was next because the occupation of Germany was beginning and there was work to do and George Patton had never in his life been comfortable with endings, only with what came after them.

What came after for Patton was six more months of a world that was not sure what to do with him now that the thing he had been built for was finished.

He died in December 1945 in circumstances that remain disputed in a hospital in H Highleberg from injuries sustained in a car accident that may or may not have been an accident depending on which account you find most credible.

He was buried in Luxembourg among his men in the ground of the country his army had helped liberate.

And the question of what he would have done with the postwar world if he had lived to engage with it fully is one of the more interesting unanswerable questions of the 20th century.

Bow survived the war and was eventually tried for war crimes related to his command in Norway earlier in the war before Czechoslovakia before the final days.

He was convicted and sentenced and served his sentence and was released and died in Germany decades later.

whether the choice he made in the first days of May 1945, the choice to bring his men across to the American side rather than leave them to the Soviet advance was calculated into his case in any way is not clearly documented.

It was the kind of choice that the processes established to deal with the aftermath of the war were not designed to weigh because the processes were designed to look backward at what both of those things were part of the same person and the same story and the same war.

And that was the nature of the ending of the Second World War in Europe.

That almost nothing about it resolved cleanly.

that almost everything about it required holding two true things at the same time without letting either one erase the other.

Patton had understood that in the room with Bulma.

He had represented his institution and kept his personal views where they belonged and processed the surrender and written in his diary that he hoped the decisions were right without being certain they were.

For a man of his temperament, that was an extraordinary accommodation to the complexity of the moment.

It was probably the most sophisticated thing he did in the entire war.

And it happened in a room that most people have never heard of.

At a meeting that most histories of the war pass over quickly in the first days of May 1945 when everything was ending and nobody quite knew what was beginning.