Nazi Germany Collapses: All Forces Surrender

Nazi Germany signed documents of unconditional surrender at a schoolhouse in Reims, France, on May 7, 1945, with the formal ratification taking effect on May 8, ending the European theater of the Second World War. General Alfred Jodl signed on behalf of the German High Command before General Eisenhower's chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith. Eisenhower himself refused to attend the ceremony, sending word that he would meet the German delegation only after the documents were signed. The surrender came less than two weeks after Adolf Hitler's suicide in his Berlin bunker and the fall of the German capital to Soviet forces. Allied troops had already liberated the concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Buchenwald, and the full machinery of the Holocaust was being documented as the war ended. Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov presided over a separate ratification ceremony in Berlin-Karlshorst the following day at Stalin's insistence, recognizing the Eastern Front's enormous sacrifice. The timing difference between the Reims signing and the Berlin ratification explains why VE Day is May 8 in Western nations and May 9 in Russia. Within weeks of the surrender, the Allied powers began the process of dividing Germany into occupation zones, prosecuting war criminals at Nuremberg, and confronting the devastation of a continent in which entire cities had been reduced to rubble, millions of refugees were moving across broken borders, and the political order that had governed Europe since 1919 had been obliterated.