However, as the military capitulation of the German High Command was taken as constituting the extinction of the German state and the assumption of all state authority by the Allied Powers, all embassies remaining in neutral countries were immediately ordered by the Western Allies to be closed down, their diplomatic staff recalled and their records taken over into one or another Allied embassy.[1] Those neutral countries that had been nominated as protecting powers in respect of Germany and the Allies under the Geneva Conventions were notified that this function had now been terminated, and were requested by the State Department to hand all embassy records and German state property in their trust over to the western Allies. All the protecting powers complied fully with the Allied demands, formally breaking off diplomatic relations; consequently the German state ceased as a diplomatic entity on 8 May 1945.