Germany Surrenders Unconditionally: V-E Day Ends Europe's War

Church bells rang across Europe for the first time in six years. On May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender took effect, and the continent that had endured history's most destructive war erupted in relief and celebration. Victory in Europe Day, V-E Day, marked the end of a conflict that killed approximately 40 million Europeans, reduced cities to rubble from Stalingrad to London, and revealed the Holocaust's full horror to a world still struggling to comprehend it. The formal surrender ceremony took place at Soviet military headquarters in Berlin-Karlshorst, where Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed the ratified instrument of unconditional surrender shortly before midnight on May 8. This ceremony, insisted upon by Stalin, followed the initial signing at Reims the previous day. Marshal Georgy Zhukov presided, with British Air Marshal Arthur Tedder and American General Carl Spaatz as co-signatories. Celebrations began before the ink was dry. In London, crowds packed Trafalgar Square and the Mall, and Winston Churchill appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace alongside King George VI and the royal family. Churchill addressed the nation by radio: "We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing, but let us not forget for a moment the toils and efforts that lie ahead." In Paris, two million people flooded the Champs-Elysees. In New York's Times Square, the spontaneous celebration lasted through the night. The euphoria was not universal. Soviet forces had borne the war's heaviest burden, with an estimated 27 million dead, and celebrations in Moscow were tempered by exhaustion and grief. In concentration camps across Germany and Poland, liberated prisoners were too weakened by starvation and disease to celebrate. In the Pacific, American forces were still fighting on Okinawa, and the war with Japan would continue for three more months. Europe on V-E Day was a shattered continent. Germany's infrastructure was destroyed, millions of displaced persons wandered roads without homes or countries, and the political map was being redrawn by occupying armies. The peace that followed would divide the continent along an Iron Curtain for the next forty-five years. Victory had been won, but the world that emerged from the war bore little resemblance to the one that had entered it.