Himmler asked Churchill and Truman to surrender to them, and not the Russians. Truman and Churchill refused.
Why the hell didn’t Himmler order his guys to surrender to the USA and Brittan, and hope for the best with the Soviet Union?
Pretty hard to decide you’re going to surrender to the Americans while the Russians are blowing the crap out of you and through you.
Himmler wasn’t offering that the German Army surrender, but that they be allowed to move from the Western Front to fight the Soviets. And he had no authority to either order a surrender or to move the troops. Hitler was still alive and was outraged when he found out about the offer.
The Western Allies weren’t about to betray Stalin and reach a separate peace with the Nazis or even slow their advance so the Wehrmacht could shift their forces eastward. So long as there were any Germans fighting, we were going to go after them. For all the concern about Soviet expansion they were still our allies and were bound by certain conditions (and we wanted their help against the Japanese).
In particular, Himmler’s overall plan required a coup-d’etat. Once he had the deal in place, he would go to the Wehrmacht and make a deal with them to bypass Hitler.
As you said, as it stood at the time, Himmler had no authority to do much of anything regarding troops.
For a short time in the winter of '45, Himmler was in charge of Army Group Vistula on the Eastern Front. But the Wehrmacht marginalized him and he didn’t have any detailed authority. He was stripped of command in March.
(He may have had some lingering authority regarding the Volkssturm, but when the units were deployed for military, vs. police, purposes they were 100% under the authority of the Wehrmacht.)
De facto, at the very end, German troops did, as far as possible move west to surrender there rather than be captured by the Russians. It was one of the reasons why Dönitz’s successor government and the High Command took an extra few days before formally surrendering, but by that stage it was more of a sauve qui peut.
Right. Himmler’s plan pre-supposed that Hitler would be dead or out of the picture in a few days.
Actually that’s the last thing we wanted. The race was on after Germany’s defeat to obtain the surrender of Japan before the Russians could get involved and stake a claim in the post-war settlement.
I believe the USA and Britain wanted Russian help against Japan until they knew that the bomb worked.'Stalin, of course, new that it worked, too.