History of Germany during World War I
In November 1918, with internal revolution, a stalemated war, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire suing for peace, Austria-Hungary falling apart from multiple ethnic tensions, and pressure from the German high command, the Kaiser and all German ruling princes abdicated. On 9 November 1918, the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a Republic, in cooperation with the business and middle classes, not the revolting workers. The new government led by the German Social Democrats called for and received an armistice on 11 November 1918; in practice it was a surrender, and the Allies kept up the food blockade to guarantee an upper hand. The war was over; the history books closed on the German Empire. It was succeeded by the democratic, yet flawed, Weimar Republic.
Berlin Declaration (1945)
The German Instrument of Surrender of 8 May 1945 had provided only for the military capitulation of German armed forces, the German signatories being representatives of the German High Command; consequently full civil provisions for the unconditional surrender of the German state remained without explicit formal basis. The Allies had already agreed through the European Advisory Commission a comprehensive text of unconditional surrender, intended to be used in the potential circumstances of Nazi power being overthrown within Germany either by military or civil authorities; a post-Nazi government being set up in Germany and seeking an armistice. In the event, Nazi power remained to the last, Adolf Hitler dying in the ruins of Berlin on 30 April 1945; and the claims of Karl Dönitz, his nominated successor, to have established a civil government at Flensburg being unacceptable to the Allies. So the previously agreed surrender text, redrafted as a declaration and with an extended explanatory preamble, was adopted unilaterally by the four Allied Powers as the 'Declaration regarding the defeat of Germany' on 5 June 1945. This spelled out the Allied position that, following the gross criminal abuses of Nazism, and in the circumstances of complete defeat, Germany now had no government or central administration, and that the vacated civil authority in Germany had consequently been assumed as a condominium of the four Allied Representative Powers on behalf of the Allied Governments overall; an authority subsequently constituted into the Allied Control Council.