I don’t think most of the participants were thinking of it that way and in any case that essay was kind of maximizing for cheekiness and provocation.

Mostly I think it came down to the Americans sending signals, especially with their victories in Italy and France, that they weren’t going to go for total officer-level purges, they weren’t going to make a thing of executing, starving, or enslaving surrendered troops, and they wouldn’t rape or pillage too hard. (And that, like after WWI, they’d hold the other, more revenge-minded Allies’ debt and thus the whip hand, and they’d learned from the Treaty of Versailles.)

Meanwhile the Russians were signaling opposite, and I suspect the wiser Germans were signaling that they were ready for surrender and demobilization, say in reports to HQ that they expected to be intercepted.

Now, we know from things like the Operation Paperclip files that the U.S. was laying the groundwork for German co-option even before V-E Day, and from things like Wiesenthal and the Israeli Nazi-hunters that prominent Reich figures who saw the writing on the wall were planning their outs at the same time, including putting out feelers to foreign governments. (The Catholic Church in particular, which at this time still had a sizeable geopolitical infrastructure, was a big intermediary for this sort of thing.)

So I wouldn’t rule out some Inglorious Basterds-style direct contacts, or given the way we refounded our mythos on victory, the subsequent and continuing denial of same.