The Second Surrender: Stalin’s Vanity and the Theatre of Victory

In the early hours of that day, at 02:41 CET, in the modest French town of Reims, the German High Command signed the Act of Unconditional Surrender. The document bore the signatures of:

• Colonel General Alfred Jodl for the German Wehrmacht,

• General Walter Bedell Smith on behalf of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF),

• and General Ivan Susloparov representing the Soviet Union.

The surrender was set to take effect at 23:01 CET on May 8th — a time designed to ensure the ceasefire would begin simultaneously across all fronts. The war, in military and legal terms, was over.

But one man — far from the battlefields, entrenched in Moscow’s corridors of power — was not satisfied.

Stalin’s Problem With Peace

Joseph Stalin, the self-styled “architect of victory,” was enraged that such a momentous occasion had unfolded without sufficient deference to Soviet theatricality — and, crucially, without his personal stamp on history. The war had been won, yes — but not properly, not his way.

It wasn’t enough that the Soviet Union had suffered the heaviest losses, or that the Red Army had taken Berlin at immense human cost. Stalin wanted a Soviet ceremony, on Soviet terms, with Soviet cameras rolling.

And so, the Allies — eager to avoid further frictions so close to the war’s end — indulged him.

The Berlin Re-Enactment

On the night of May 8th to 9th, a second signing was staged in Karlshorst, a suburb of Berlin. The cast returned: German officers, now fully subdued, signed yet another copy of the same document. Marshal Georgy Zhukov presided on behalf of the USSR. French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny was added to the table for cosmetic balance.

The cameras flashed. The flags unfurled. Stalin's generals stood tall in their rows of medals. And the world got the version Stalin wanted.

But let us be clear: this was not a new surrender. It was a political encore — a second curtain call for a war that had already ended.

Victory or Vanity?

From a legal perspective, the surrender signed in Reims is the one that mattered. Even the Soviet General Staff — in Directive No. 11082, signed by Stalin himself at 22:35 on May 7th — acknowledged the validity of the Reims document. The second signing in Berlin was a symbolic performance, meant to satisfy the ego of a man for whom symbolism often mattered more than substance.

That performance lives on. To this day, the Russian Federation celebrates Victory Day on May 9th — not because it reflects historical reality, but because it reflects a narrative created to serve Stalin’s personal mythology.

History as Stagecraft

In retrospect, the second surrender stands as a symbol of something larger: the Soviet regime’s enduring obsession with controlling the script of history. Even the end of World War II — arguably humanity’s most painful and unifying triumph — had to be edited, rehearsed, and reshot to fit Stalin’s preferred framing.

It is not unusual for nations to commemorate events with pomp and ceremony. But when ceremony replaces history, when rituals are divorced from facts, we risk surrendering the truth to the very forces that once sought to rewrite it.

So yes — May 9th does mark a victory. But not the one you think.

It marks the victory of vanity over humility, of pageantry over fact, and of a dictator’s pride over a world’s relief.