The German Instrument of Surrender of 8 May 1945 had provided only for the military capitulation of German armed forces , the German signatories being representatives of the German High Command ; consequently full civil provisions for the unconditional surrender of the German state remained without explicit formal basis . The Allies had already agreed through the European Advisory Commission a comprehensive text of unconditional surrender , intended to be used in the potential circumstances of Nazi power being overthrown within Germany either by military or civil authorities ; a post-Nazi government being set up in Germany and seeking an armistice . In the event , Nazi power remained to the last , Adolf Hitler dying in the ruins of Berlin on 30 April 1945 ; and the claims of Karl Dönitz , his nominated successor , to have established a civil government at Flensburg being unacceptable to the Allies . So the previously agreed surrender text , redrafted as a declaration and with an extended explanatory preamble , was adopted unilaterally by the four Allied Powers as the ' Declaration regarding the defeat of Germany ' on 5 June 1945 . This spelled out the Allied position that , following the gross criminal abuses of Nazism , and in the circumstances of complete defeat , Germany now had no government or central administration , and that the vacated civil authority in Germany had consequently been assumed as a condominium of the four Allied Representative Powers on behalf of the Allied Governments overall ; an authority subsequently constituted into the Allied Control Council . The principle that hostilities against Germany should continue until its armed forces laid down their arms on the basis of unconditional surrender had been adopted by the Allies in the Moscow Declarations of October 1943 . In the same declarations it was also stated that , following a German surrender , any individuals participating in atrocities within territories under German occupation would be returned to those territories to be judged and punished ; while the entire leadership of Nazi Germany - classed as ' criminals ' - would be seized and ' punished by the joint decision of the government of the Allies ' ( a formula then understood as indicating summary execution without trial , which remained British policy until April 1945 ) . The principles of the Moscow Declarations were to be elaborated in the proceedings of the European Advisory Commission to specify that the Allies would undertake that both Nazism and German Militarism would be eradicated from Europe . In this respect the British War Cabinet came to agree with the American proposal that tribunals of justice should be established ; with the consequence that all individual Nazi leaders would now be tried as criminals , and that all Nazi institutions , agencies and associations would be declared to be ' criminal organizations ' , proved membership of which would be grounds for judicial penalties . Since , in practice , by May 1945 such Nazi bodies were the only functioning institutions of German civil administration , the effect of this was to designate the entire civil apparatus of state power in Germany , and all employment within it , as ' criminal ' activity in the service of the Nazi party ; on the basis that " the Nazi state was structurally , in its genesis and throughout its existence , a vast criminal enterprise " . The preamble of the declaration asserted both German responsibility for the War and the complete legal extinction of Nazi Germany consequent on the unconditional surrender of all German armed forces and the total absence of any German central government authority ; although the text of the articles of the Declaration maintained , in several places , the continued existence of a German national people and territory which for the purpose of the Declaration was taken to be as defined on 31 December 1937 ( after the 1935 Saar referendum and before the 1938 Anschluss ) , subject to the four signatory powers also asserting their authority to determine the future boundaries of Germany . This claimed authority to determine the boundaries of Germany would shortly be exercised in the incorporation of eastern territories into Poland and the Soviet Union , and the short-lived creation of the Saar Protectorate in the west . The preamble also confirmed the four nominated representatives of the Governments of the United States of America , the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United Kingdom , and the Provisional Government of the French Republic as the " Allied Representatives " who would from then on exercise supreme civil and military authority within German territory and over former German forces . Otherwise the text of the declaration was that prepared for , but not eventually used in , the German Instrument of Surrender of 8 May 1945 , in the form previously agreed by the European Advisory Commission ; but not including the ' dismemberment clause ' proposed as being added to the agreed surrender instrument at Yalta . The Allies asserted that their assumption of sovereign powers within Germany would not effect its annexation . The Declaration consisted of 15 articles , of which the first eight were concerned with the capitulation of German Armed forces and the surrender to the Allied Powers of military equipment and intelligence assets . By July 1945 , these actions had largely been completed . The key articles for the future governance of Germany were therefore Article 11 , which provided for the arrest and trial by the Allies of Nazi leaders and other suspected war criminals ; and Article 13 , which provided almost unrestricted authority to the Allied Powers to direct German civil , economic and legal structures in the zones under their control . This latter article was extensively applied to effect the de-Nazification of public institutions and economic enterprises at all levels of German society , to extract reparations ; and also in the Soviet zone to effect a major programme of land reform , redistributing expropriated rural land from large pre-war landed estates to the ownership of surviving tenant occupiers and expellee farmers from former eastern parts of Germany
Yalta
Yalta Conference
Berlin Declaration (1945)