Germany Surrenders

In the first week of May 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allied powers, ending the war in Europe after nearly six years. The date celebrated in Britain and the United States as Victory in Europe Day, 8 May, marked the formal end of combat operations. It brought down a regime responsible for the Holocaust and for a war that had devastated a continent, and it opened the postwar era of occupation, division, and reconstruction.

By early 1945 Germany's defeat was a matter of time. After the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944 and the vast Soviet offensives on the Eastern Front, German forces were being squeezed from both sides. Allied armies crossed the Rhine in March, while the Red Army fought its way across eastern Germany toward Berlin. Cities had been battered by years of strategic bombing, industry and transport were collapsing, and millions of soldiers, civilians, and forced laborers had died or been displaced.

The final weeks were chaotic. Soviet forces encircled Berlin in late April, and Adolf Hitler died by suicide in his bunker on 30 April, having named Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor. Dönitz sought to surrender mainly to the Western Allies, hoping to save as many German soldiers as possible from Soviet captivity, but General Dwight Eisenhower insisted on surrender to all the Allies at once. German representatives signed an act of military surrender at Reims on 7 May, to take effect at the end of 8 May. At Soviet insistence, a second signing followed in Berlin late on 8 May, which is why Russia and other former Soviet states commemorate Victory Day on 9 May.

Celebrations broke out in London, New York, Paris, and elsewhere, but relief was mixed with exhaustion and grief. Much of Europe lay in ruins, with enormous numbers of refugees and displaced persons, shortages of food and housing, and the full scale of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps only recently exposed. The war against Japan also continued until August.

The consequences shaped the rest of the century. Germany was divided into four occupation zones, and Berlin was likewise split among the victors. The Allies pursued denazification and prosecuted leading Nazis at Nuremberg. Disagreements between the Soviet Union and the Western powers hardened into the Cold War, and Germany itself was divided into two states in 1949. The surrender is remembered in Germany as both a defeat and a liberation, a view that became more widely accepted in the decades that followed.