On the 8th of May, 1945, as the guns fell silent across Europe, the first British officers landed in Oslo to accept the surrender of a German army that simply refused to believe the war was over. The Norwegian capital had been occupied for five long years, and its people poured into the streets, dancing and weeping with joy, Norwegian flags reappearing in every window. Detachments of Allied troops—30,000 British and Americans, 13,000 Norwegian soldiers trained in Sweden, and some 40,000 resistance fighters—began the slow work of disarming the 350,000 German troops still stationed across the vast country. But the sheer size of Norway and the scale of the occupying force meant the process took far longer than anyone expected.
One of the units that remained under German control for nearly a week after the formal surrender was Panzer Brigade Norwegen, the occupiers’ only tank unit. Despite its grand name, it was really a reinforced tank battalion, commanded by Colonel Georg Mecha. Its sixty-one Panzer III tanks—twenty-five armed with 50mm guns and thirty-six with 75mm guns—along with ten StuG III assault guns, had never seen combat during the entire war. Now they sat gathered, engines quiet, awaiting the arrival of the British.
On the 14th of May, 1945, members of Force 134 finally arrived to take their surrender. The British had absolutely no use for these obsolete German vehicles, so they left them for the newly liberated Norwegians. The surrender site itself would become the Norwegian Army Tank School. These very tanks went on to serve in the Norwegian Army well into the early 1950s, until they were finally replaced by American M24 Chaffee tanks.
Some of the 75mm-armed Panzer IIIs were later dug into permanent defensive positions, buried up to their turrets in concrete as a bulwark against a potential Soviet invasion, and they remained there until the 1980s. But the surrender of Panzer Brigade Norwegen wasn’t the last. In another forgotten corner of the Third Reich, the Channel Islands—a collection of British Crown Dependencies just off the coast of northwest France—had been occupied since 1940. Hitler had ordered extensive defenses built on Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, and Sark, and an entire German infantry division garrisoned the islands for the duration of the war.
When Normandy and Brittany were liberated in 1944, the islands became completely cut off from German forces in Western Europe, but they stubbornly refused to capitulate. Hitler himself had decreed that no German tanks should be sent to stiffen the islands’ defenses—instead, captured French tanks would do. So in 1941, Panzer Abteilung 213 was dispatched, equipped with twenty French FT-17 tanks, hopelessly outdated relics of the First World War. Eight went to Jersey, eight to Guernsey, and four to Alderney.
In 1942, the Germans sent more: thirty-six massive Char B1B tanks, slow and lumbering, split evenly between Jersey and Guernsey. Nine self-propelled guns built on French R-35 tank chassis also arrived, all based on Jersey. When Germany formally surrendered on the 8th of May, the islands didn’t immediately follow suit. Jersey and Guernsey surrendered the following day, the 9th.
Sark capitulated on the 10th. But Alderney—the most heavily fortified of the islands, the closest to Britain, and the site of the only SS-run concentration camp on British soil—held out longer. It was only after further negotiations that the British finally took the German surrender on Alderney on the 16th of May, a full eight days after VE Day. Even then, it wasn’t the last surrender in the Channel Islands.
That honor went to an overlooked German garrison marooned on some uninhabited rocks called the Minquiers, south of Jersey, who were accidentally discovered by a French fishing boat and surrendered on the 23rd of May, three full weeks after VE Day. But I think I found the last German Panzer unit that remained under arms after World War II. And it wasn’t in Western Europe at all. It was in the Aegean, in southern Europe.
When the Germans evacuated mainland Greece in October 1944, they left heavily fortified garrisons on certain Aegean islands like Rhodes and Crete, and those garrisons held out to the end and beyond. The British technically accepted their surrenders, but it was in name only. The Germans were not disarmed, and in fact they continued fighting—not the British, but communist partisans in the mountains around their bases. The British simply lacked the forces to organize the disarming and removal of these Germans.
Open fighting had already broken out between British forces in Greece and communist Greek partisans, and less than a year later, the Greek Civil War would erupt in full. On Crete, captured at incredibly heavy cost by German paratroopers in 1941, the garrison of 16,300 German and fascist Italian troops remained in control of a strip of the island 65 kilometers long, encompassing Souda Bay, Chania, and Maleme airfield, for weeks after the war’s end. To have disarmed them would have invited their massacre by angry locals and communist partisans. So the British left them in place—and in fact, used them in their own war against the communists.
The British sent a small number of occupation troops to Crete on the 11th of May, 1945. But the British commanding officer, a brigadier, and his escort famously had to be rescued by German panzer troops when they were ambushed by Greek communist partisans. German tanks of Panzer Abteilung Kreta intervened and beat the communists back, fighting right alongside British troops. These little battles continued for weeks.
Panzer Abteilung Kreta consisted of at least ten Panzer IIs, five Panzer IIIs, ten Panzer IVs, fifteen French Hotchkiss tanks, five Somua 35 tanks, and a few other armored vehicles. On the 23rd of May, 1945, with the arrest of Grand Admiral Dönitz by British forces at Flensburg and the dissolution of his government, the last Nazi flag was hauled down on Crete. But armed German troops remained in place even after this surrender, particularly in the area of Souda Bay, until the end of June 1945. Some 1,600 German troops were involved in anti-partisan warfare alongside the British.
In fact, the fighting was so intense that the German commanding officer on Crete radioed a request to Grand Admiral Dönitz just a few hours before his arrest—requesting the award of five Knight’s Crosses to senior officers involved in anti-partisan operations alongside the British. Dönitz approved them, backdated to the 10th of May. So, in all likelihood, a German Panzer unit remained under arms, fully staffed, until at least the 23rd of May, 1945. And perhaps with some vehicles still operational until the end of June—almost two months after VE Day.
A German tank unit fighting alongside the British against communists, weeks after the war was supposed to be over. That’s a fact I never expected to find.
