Dunno if this is a known fact or not but during the last few months of the war a lot of high German officials were competing to be the one surrendering the nation.

In the sick powerplay of the final day's of the Third Reich surrendering the nation was, internally, seen as equal as being appointed as the next person in line to command the nation in the post war.

It was more or less known for months that uncle Addie wasn't going to stick around to let himself be captured, so a lot of the higher officials used whatever excuses they could find to bail out of Berlin before the Soviet Boogie came to town.

This started a competition to see who would be the one that would get the chance to surrender Germany and use that position to try to appoint himself as a provisory Chanceler.

Himmler had this mind boggling plan to drive to the Brits and more or less present himself as the only person with authority to keep control of the Nation and in his mind the Allies would welcome the SS as a police force in the post nation.

Goering planned to present himself as the leader of the only major branch of the German military that were "clean" of warcrimes and a lot of propaganda was created around it, something that stuck to this day by the way.

At the end Donitz was chosen by Hitler for the task, since he was seen as the least power hungry of the trio. A fact that was both false and led to a lot of unnecessary deaths in the final days as Donitz wanted to try to secure his position before the surrender.

All three, and some other more, had presentation pistols chosen to be used for the occasion. While they packed an assortment of other side arms to give away if they got captured in the process or self defense.

The more interesting about this is that most of them survive to this day.