Germany surrenders (V-E Day)

Germany's surrender came in two signings. In the early hours of May 7, 1945, General Alfred Jodl signed an unconditional surrender at Allied headquarters in Reims, France, and a second, formal ceremony took place in a Berlin suburb late on May 8, with Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signing for the German High Command. The Western Allies marked May 8 as Victory in Europe Day, while the Soviet Union, because of the time difference, celebrated on May 9. The surrender came a week after Adolf Hitler killed himself in his bunker in Berlin on April 30, leaving Admiral Karl Doenitz as head of a short-lived government at Flensburg.¹²³

The collapse followed years of mounting defeat. Germany had started the war in 1939 and by 1942 was fighting on every front. The destruction of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad began a Soviet advance that never stopped, and the Normandy landings of June 1944 opened a second front in the west. Allied bombing wrecked German industry and cities, while the Red Army fought its way across Poland and into Germany. Soviet troops encircled Berlin in April 1945, and the Allies had already agreed at Casablanca in 1943 that they would accept nothing short of unconditional surrender.¹

The end of the fighting did not end the suffering. Much of Europe lay in ruins, millions of people were displaced or in camps, and the full scale of the Holocaust was now exposed as Allied troops reached the camps. Germany was divided into four occupation zones, and the victors met at Potsdam that summer to settle its future. The war against Japan went on until August, but in Europe the guns were silent, and the argument between the Soviet Union and its Western partners over what came next was about to begin.¹