The termdebellatio or "debellation" (Latin 'defeating, or the act of conquering or subduing', literally, 'warring (the enemy) down', from Latinbellum 'war') describes a situation in which aninterstate war ends not with apeace treaty nor aceasefire, but with the catastrophicstate collapse of the losing party as a result of comprehensive military defeat, typically resulting in the disintegration of the institutions capable of issuing an authoritative instrument of surrender.
Israeli law professorEyal Benvenisti definesdebellatio as "a situation in which a party to a conflict has been totally defeated in war, its national institutions have disintegrated, and none of its allies continue to challenge the enemy militarily on its behalf."[1]
In some cases debellation ends with a complete dissolution andannexation of the defeated state into the victor's national territory, as happened at the end of theThird Punic War with the defeat ofCarthage byRome in the2nd century BC.[2]
TheAmerican Civil War did not end with the issuance of a formal instrument of surrender by theConfederate States. By April 1865, theUnion had occupied most of the Confederacy's notional territory, including its capital, all major ports, and most of its industrial capacity. Moreover, a comprehensiveUnion blockade had effectively cut off the Confederacy's access to foreign trade. Militarily, theConfederate States Army was disintegrating. TheConfederate States Congress ceased to function on 18 March, seven days before thefall of the capital, adjourningsine die with the last entry in itsofficial journal being "the Confederate Congress, with its work still undone went silent forever".[3] TheConfederate cabinet continued to meet to manage the increasingly desperate war effort but was unable to stave off collapse. On 9 April, following theAppomattox campaign,Robert E. Lee surrendered the main remaining Confederate force, theArmy of Northern Virginia, atAppomattox Court House.
Despite the evident futility, Confederate PresidentJefferson Davis continued to attempt military resistance with such forces as remained under the control of the rapidly-disintegrating Confederate government, principally theTrans-Mississippi Department; Davis intended to cross the Mississippi and make alast stand. He attempted to organize a new army but was told this was impossible.[4] Having failed to raise any new forces, and with the surrender of theArmy of Tennessee and other forces underJoseph E. Johnston on 26 April depriving what remained of the Confederate government of some 100,000 additional troops, Davis accepted the inevitable. On May 5, he convoked theConfederate cabinet, such as it remained, inWashington, Georgia, and issued a proclamation declaring the dissolution of the Confederate States.[5] On 9 May, Union PresidentAndrew Johnson declared that therights of the Confederacy as a belligerent power had come to an end.[6] After 9 May, anyone fighting in the name of the now-nonexistent Confederacy was considered not a legitimate soldier but abandit; asUlysses S. Grant's General Order 90 put it, "any and all persons found in arms against the United States, or who may commit acts of hostility against it ... will be regarded as guerrillas and punished with death."[7]
Nonetheless, military resistance by the remnants of the Confederate army continued for some weeks. The last substantial engagement of the war, theBattle of Palmito Ranch, was fought on 12–13 May in Texas, and theTrans-Mississippi Department underKirby Smith, the last major Confederate force under arms, did not surrender until 26 May. On the same day, theCamp Napoleon Council of the Confederacy'sindigenous allies was held to appoint representatives to negotiate the surrender of their forces; the last of these, underStand Watie, stood down on 23 June. The last Confederate unit to surrender was the commerce raiderCSSShenandoah, which did not learn of the surrender until 27 June, and surrendered to the British government atRock Ferry on 6 November.
The Confederate government never issued any formalcapitulation or other instrument of surrender. By the time that President Davis accepted that defeat was inevitable, the Confederate capital had been taken and the government had effectively disintegrated, with the armed forces not far behind.Joseph E. Johnston stated of the situation at the time that "[w]ith such odds against us, without the means of procuring ammunition or repairing arms, without money or credit to provide food, it was impossible to continue the war except as robbers."[8] The proclamation of 5 May dissolving the Confederacy simply acknowledged the situation as it was; by then, there had been no functional government for some weeks (at least since thefall of Richmond); the cabinet, such as it was, managed only a rapidly shrinking group of armies.
From a legal perspective, the victorious Unionconsidered the entire existence of the Confederacy illegal; the absence of a formal instrument of surrender from a government that did not legally exist was irrelevant. Nonetheless, on 9 May, PresidentAndrew Johnson formally extinguished the rights of the Confederacy as a belligerent power. The war legally came to an end on 20 August 1866,[9] though there had been no fighting for more than a year by that point.
TheGerman Reich never issued a formal capitulation to theAllies. By 30 April 1945, theday of Adolf Hitler's suicide,Nazi Germany was on the verge of defeat. The Nazi armed forces had been repeatedly defeated in theBattle of Berlin, giving theSoviet Union a clear path intoEast Germany. Moreover, in the west, theUnited States,United Kingdom andFrance had pushed as far as theCzechoslovak border, and had taken the vast majority of Germany's industrial capacity. By this time, the German government controlled only a thin strip of territory running from the Austrian border through Berlin intooccupied Denmark, but it was obvious to all involved that this would soon be split into northern and southern pockets. Even before Hitler's suicide, separate command points had been established for north and south.
Beginning in March, by which time Berlin was already under threat, civil servants were evacuated to resort hotels in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps – chiefly in the region ofBerchtesgaden, leaving only the ministers themselves in Berlin. On 13 April, the remaining foreign embassies and the diplomatic corps were evacuated toBad Gastein. Finally, on 20 April, all the ministers and their personal staff were ordered to make their way southwards; but as by then the roads had been cut and there were insufficient transport aircraft available (and, even had there been, the Allies had achieved near-totalair superiority, making flying in a Nazi aircraft less than safe), some had perforce headed north instead.
In spite of its repeated relocations, theMilitary High Command continued to function, its organisation and structures having been maintained. But the same was not true of any other arm of government.Hitler's will had had designatedKarl Dönitz as his successor as head of state, and theGoebbels cabinet as the successor tohis own. Nonetheless, Goebbels committed suicide the next day, and Dönitz appointedLutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk as "Leading Minister" in theFlensburg Government. Despite this, most of the members of the cabinet lacked any ministries to head. Thus the government of Germany was, at the death of Hitler, split over six centres. The Propaganda Ministry, the personal fiefdom ofJoseph Goebbels, had remained with him in Berlin, as had theNazi Party Chancellery underMartin Bormann; while theLuftwaffe High Command had relocated to Berchtesgaden, having been until his abrupt dismissal on 23 April the counterpart fiefdom ofGöring.Himmler had retained his personal powerbase in the offices of the SS and security apparatus, which was established in Lübeck in the north and then relocated to Flensburg. Other government ministries and ministers were then variously located at Berchtesgaden and Dönitz's headquarters in Plön. This chaotic division meant that there was no longer a functional central government after Hitler's suicide, aside from the High Command.
The Allied position was thus that following the signing of theGerman Instrument of Surrender, the last functional component of the German state was extinguished. Insofar as theFlensburg Government was not recognized by any foreign power, even its erstwhile allies, the German Reich was claimed to cease to exist as a subject of international law; the Reich's dissolution was backdated to 30 April by the Allies in theBerlin Declaration, which asserted that German sovereignty became vested in the Allied Control Council from that point.
Theunconditional surrender ofNazi Germany (in the strict sense, only theGerman Armed Forces) at the end ofWorld War II was, at the time, accepted by most authorities as a case of debellatio, insofar as:
Other authorities, supported in the judgements of the GermanFederal Constitutional Court, have argued that a German state remained in existence from 1945 to 1949, albeit dormant and without any institutional or organisational component, on the basis that:
The official position of the Allied-occupied government as well all subsequent German governments since has been and remains that the Nazi regime was "illegal", with laws and verdicts imposed during the Third Reich regularly being declared facially invalid. The Allies did not consider the German people and the Nazis indistinguishable, rather the opposite.[18][19][20] Following the surrender, the Nazi party was and remains to this day outlawed; various restrictions were imposed on former Nazi party members, including bans on running for or holding public office, though these laws were later scaled back. Following the end of the Allied occupation, West Germany assumed a certain degree of responsibility for the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany and agreed to make major reparation payments to its victims.[21][22]
The dictionary definition ofdebellation at Wiktionary