45-9-4 Forgotten German Unit Surrenders

A small group of German soldiers deployed on Svalbard in Operation Haudegen to establish and man a weather station there lost radio contact in May 1945; they surrendered to some Norwegian seal hunters on 4 September , 1945, two days after the Surrender of Japan.

The Forgotten Wehrmacht Unit | Last Germans to Surrender after WW2 > .

On the 7th of May 1945, the German General Alfred Jodl signed the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany at the Allied headquarters in Reims, France. It meant the Second World War had come to an end, at least, in the European theatre of war.

But… the war didn’t end for a small Wehrmacht unit consisting of 11 men that were housed at Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. The Wehrmacht unit was tasked with a secret mission named Operation Haudegen. They had to establish meteorological stations on Svalbard. In the chaos following the German capitulation, this Wehrmacht unit was forgotten… And these men would eventually, stuck on an island in the freezing cold, far from civilization, months after Germany’s capitulation. They would become the last German soldiers to surrender after the Second World War.

Hitler’s Holdouts – Meet the Last German Troops to Surrender in WW2: 
VE Plus 119 - The very last German troops of the Second World War to call it quits turned themselves in to a band of Norwegian seal hunters on the remote Bear Island in the Barents Sea on Sept. 4, 1945 – nearly four months after VE Day! The small detachment had been sent to the distant Arctic outpost to establish a weather station sometime late in the war. Having lost radio contact with headquarters in May. They gave up without a fight.