German Empire
The high command under Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff increasingly controlled the country, but in October after the failed offensive in spring 1918, the German armies were in retreat, allies Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire had collapsed, and Bulgaria had surrendered. The Empire collapsed in the November 1918 Revolution with the abdications of its monarchs. This left a postwar federal republic and a devastated and unsatisfied populace, which later led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism.
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.