Death of Last Witness to the German WW2 Surrender

by Kathryn Hadley

In March, I wrote an article about the death of Susan Hibbert, the last British witness to the signing of the German surrender in Reims in May 1945. Hibbert was a British staff sergeant in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) and was working at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in Reims. She was responsible for typing the English version of the Act of Military Surrender. In March, there remained only one surviving witness to the surrender, Albert Meserlin, who was Eisenhower’s American staff photographer.
Meserlin passed away, however, on March 29th, aged 88.
He was also present at the D-Day Landings on Utah Beach, as part of a small photography unit that was responsible for taking photographs for newspapers and military archives.