High Command, which had relocated to Rheinsberg. Anticipating that German-held territory would be split, separate military and civilian commands had provisionally been established on 15 April; under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring at Pullach for forces in the south and west, and under Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz at Plön for forces in the north and east; but then Hitler had stalled on transferring executive military authority to them. On 27 April Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl, of the Army High Command, met at Rheinsberg with Dönitz and Heinrich Himmler to discuss the war situation now that the fall of Berlin could not be averted. Himmler took the chair as the acknowledged deputy Führer and, since the disgrace and dismissal of Hermann Göring, Hitler's expected successor. As they were leaving Rheinsberg on 28 April, Himmler asked Dönitz to confirm that he would be willing to serve in a successor government that Himmler might form. That day however, the British and Americans published Himmler's secret proposals for a separate peace in the West (which they had rejected), to which Hitler reacted by dismissing Himmler from all posts and ordering his arrest for treason. Telegrams sent by Martin Bormann on 29 and 30 April, informed Dönitz of these developments and of Dönitz's own appointment as Hitler's successor. With both Göring and Himmler removed from the succession, Hitler in his political testament had named Grand Admiral Dönitz his successor as President and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and designated Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels head of government as Chancellor. Goebbels committed suicide in the Berlin Führerbunker on 1 May. The same day Dönitz accepted the offices of Supreme Commander and Head of State in separate broadcast addresses to the German armed forces and to the German people. Residual ministers of the Hitler cabinet, who had fled from the fall of Berlin to join Dönitz at the Wehrmacht barracks near Plön in Holstein, resigned the next day. Suspecting that Bormann might also have escaped from Berlin and be intending to seize power, Dönitz met with Hitler's former Finance Minister Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk and asked him to constitute a new Reich government. Schwerin von Krosigk's cabinet first met in Eutin, to which he and his ministerial staff had been evacuated, on 2 May. Later on 2 May, and in view of the rapidly advancing British Second Army forces which were approaching Lübeck, Dönitz met Schwerin