Dulles and Gaevernitz's report on SUNRISE-CROSSWORD: 'The First German Surrender' (1945)

Three weeks after the German armies in Italy laid down their arms, Allen Dulles, head of the Office of Strategic Services post in Bern, wrote up the affair for his chief, William Donovan. The report is dated Bern, 22 May 1945, and signed jointly with Gero von Gaevernitz, a German-born economist who had become his closest assistant and who appears in the text as "G.G."; Dulles is "A.W.D."^1,4. It runs to 19 numbered chapters, from the first approach in February to the cease-fire on 2 May¹. Two decades later Dulles turned the same story into his book The Secret Surrender (1966).

The story it tells

The code names explain themselves, the authors say: the negotiations were a "crossword" puzzle, and the word "Sunrise" headed every message to keep distribution narrow¹. The opening chapters set the scene: Gaevernitz's interviews with captured German generals in late 1944, and, in late February 1945, an approach through the Italian industrialist Baron Luigi Parrilli on behalf of SS General Karl Wolff, the senior SS and police commander in Italy¹.

On 8 March Wolff came to Zürich in person. As a token of good faith he had freed two Italian resistance leaders, the resistance leader Ferruccio Parri and Major Usmiani, both friends of Dulles; Wolff's credentials included a list of references beginning with Rudolf Hess and the Pope¹. Dulles insisted that only unconditional surrender was on offer. Allied Force Headquarters at Caserta sent two staff generals, Lyman Lemnitzer and Terence Airey, who met Wolff at Ascona on 19 March, in civilian clothes and under cover¹.

The middle chapters are a record of setbacks: Kesselring's transfer to the Western Front, Himmler's interference, Wolff's summons to Berlin, where he says he saw Hitler, and an instruction from Washington, received on 21 April, to break off contact. They also give the communications arrangements that made the deal possible, above all a Czech OSS radio operator, "Little Wally", installed in SS headquarters in Milan and then in Bolzano; a footnote gives his real name and wartime history¹. When contact was restored, two German envoys flew to Caserta and signed the surrender on 29 April; the cease-fire took effect on 2 May after a day of uncertainty over whether the German command would honour it^1,2. The report closes with translations of Wolff's and Vietinghoff's own statements and with Churchill's figure of nearly a million men surrendered¹.

What it leaves out

The report is the Bern station's own story, written by its principals in the glow of success. It barely touches the diplomatic storm that SUNRISE caused: Moscow protested at being excluded from the Bern contacts, and Stalin accused the western Allies of a separate deal, which Roosevelt denied in April 1945³. It says nothing about Wolff's own record in the SS, or about what Wolff hoped to gain¹.

The copy

This is a CIA-released copy of a typescript, approved for release in 2023, with a 1992 release stamp on the cover¹. There is no text layer and the OCR is rough, especially on the last pages; read the page images. Gaevernitz, its co-author, was not a US official. For the operation itself, see Operation Sunrise.