Of course Germany was unwilling to surrender. Britain under Churchill was equally unwilling to surrender.NO : the essential factor that kept the war going until Europe was nearly destroyed was the unwillingness of Germany to surrender :if in november 1941 (when Wagner said that Barbarossa had failed definitively) Germany had surrendered, the lives of millions of people would have been saved (including Germans).
The difference is that in 1940, Hitler was willing to negotiate peace with Britain, a peace that would have left the latter an independent country still in possession of all its assets.
It was the unwillingness of Churchill to negotiate a peace with Germany that kept the war going. That unwillingness was cemented into Allied policy with the demand for unconditional surrender issued at Casablanca early in 1943.
Of course Germany was not going to accede to a demand for unconditional surrender as long as it was able to go on fighting, just as Britain would never have acceded to such a demand. But the fact is that Germany never demanded unconditional surrender from Britain, just as it had not demanded unconditional surrender from France.
Irrelevant. It was specifically stated by the Allied Governments that the terms of the Atlantic Charter did not apply to Germany.also to stress that distinction:
point 6 of the atlantic charter: 'Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want;'
The policy of the Western Allies toward a defeated Germany was developed by the US Department of Treasury, oddly enough, and was accepted de facto by both Churchill and Roosevelt and incorporated in Allied control orders, although never officially proclaimed. That policy was to abolish the German State and to divide its territory into three small zones, with the German population being expelled from the western zone containing the Ruhrgebiet, Germany's industrial heartland, which was to be resettled with non-Germans brought in from other European countries. Apart from the partition of the country, all industry was to be dismantled so that the territory of the former Germany would become a purely agricultural area with a greatly reduced population living at a subsistence level, essentially an undeveloped country.
The only thing that prevented that policy being implemented was the start of the Cold War. In the British and US zones of occupation, massive resistance was organised by Communist activists, in the form of large-scale strikes that greatly hampered the extraction of coal and other assets. Coupled with that resistance by the German labour force was the fact that the local native administrations set up by the occupation authorities were all dominated by Communists and other Leftists, who also controlled the press.
Such was the scale of Communist influence in the Western Zones that the US Government feared that there might be a Communist-led uprising in those zones, leading to their joining the Soviet Zone to create a Communist German state under Soviet control, which would pose an existential threat to the rest of Western Europe. It was that fear that led to the abandonment of the policy of destruction of Germany as an industrial power, and its replacement by the policy of rebuilding a German State out of the three Western Zones, with a puppet government headed by the British creation, Adenauer.
