VE Day (1945): Victory in Europe and the German Surrender

VE Day, or Victory in Europe Day, is the name given to 8 May 1945, the day the Allies formally accepted Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender and the Second World War in Europe came to an end. The surrender was signed first at Reims in France on 7 May and again in Berlin late on 8 May, and was greeted by vast celebrations across Europe and North America.

After almost six years of war in Europe, which had begun with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and had cost tens of millions of lives, VE Day became one of the most widely remembered dates of the twentieth century.

Background

By April 1945 the Third Reich was collapsing. Soviet forces were fighting their way into the capital in the Battle of Berlin, while British, American, Canadian and French armies were advancing across western and southern Germany. On 25 April Soviet and American troops met on the Elbe at Torgau.

On 30 April Adolf Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker. In his political testament he named Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor as head of state. Dönitz set up a government at Flensburg near the Danish border and tried to delay a general surrender, hoping to move as many German soldiers and civilians as possible westward, away from the advancing Red Army.

The scale of what had happened was only now becoming fully visible. In April Allied troops had liberated concentration camps such as Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, and newsreels of the victims shocked audiences around the world. Much of Europe lay in ruins, millions of people were homeless or displaced, and the war in Europe had cost tens of millions of lives, the majority of them civilians.

Partial surrenders

In the final days, German forces surrendered in stages. German troops in Italy had signed a surrender at Caserta on 29 April, which took effect on 2 May. Berlin’s garrison surrendered to the Soviets on 2 May.

On 4 May, at Lüneburg Heath, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery accepted the surrender of German forces in north-west Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, effective the next morning. German forces in Bavaria and western Austria surrendered to the Americans on 5 May, the same day German forces in Denmark laid down their arms. Dönitz hoped to continue this piecemeal approach, but General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, refused anything less than total surrender on all fronts at once.

The surrender at Reims

Dönitz sent General Alfred Jodl, chief of operations of the German armed forces high command, to Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims, housed in a technical school building. Faced with Eisenhower’s threat to close the Western front to German refugees and soldiers, Jodl was authorised to sign.

At 2:41 am on 7 May 1945 Jodl signed the act of military surrender. Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, signed for the Western Allies, and General Ivan Susloparov, the Soviet liaison officer, signed for the Soviet Union. The French General François Sevez signed as a witness. All hostilities were to cease at 23:01 Central European Time on 8 May.

The second signing in Berlin

Stalin objected that the Reims surrender had been signed by a Soviet liaison officer without proper authority, and that the surrender should be signed in Berlin, the centre of Nazi aggression, before the representatives of all the Allied commands. The Western Allies agreed to treat Reims as preliminary.

Late on 8 May, in a former military engineering school in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg and General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff signed the definitive act of surrender. Marshal Georgy Zhukov signed for the Soviet high command and Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder for Eisenhower, with General Carl Spaatz of the United States and General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny of France as witnesses. By the time the ceremony was complete it was after midnight in Moscow.

Celebrations

News of the surrender leaked before the official announcement. German radio at Flensburg broadcast it on 7 May, and the Associated Press correspondent Edward Kennedy broke a news embargo to report the Reims signing, for which he was suspended. The British government announced that 8 May would be a public holiday.

In London, crowds filled Trafalgar Square, Whitehall and the Mall. At 3 pm Winston Churchill made a radio broadcast announcing that hostilities would end officially at one minute after midnight. He later spoke to crowds from a balcony of the Ministry of Health in Whitehall, telling them, “This is your victory.” King George VI and Queen Elizabeth appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace several times, joined by Churchill, and the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were allowed to go out among the crowds.

In the United States, President Harry Truman, whose 61st birthday it was, announced the victory in a radio address. Celebrations in New York’s Times Square and elsewhere were large but more restrained than in Europe, because Franklin D. Roosevelt had died less than a month earlier and the war with Japan continued. In Canada, celebrations in Halifax, Nova Scotia, turned into two days of rioting and looting on 7 and 8 May, one of the few occasions when the day was marred by disorder. In Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and other liberated cities, people danced in the streets. In the Soviet Union, Victory Day was celebrated on 9 May with a salute of 30 artillery salvos from 1,000 guns in Moscow.

In Norway, where around 350,000 German troops were stationed, the occupation ended peacefully on 8 May, and the Norwegian government-in-exile and Crown Prince Olav returned in the following weeks. The Channel Islands, the only part of the British Isles occupied by Germany, were liberated on 9 May. In Germany itself, many civilians greeted the end of the fighting with relief mixed with fear of what the occupation would bring.

A war not yet over

VE Day did not end all fighting even in Europe. In Prague, a Czech uprising that began on 5 May continued until Soviet forces arrived on 9 May. Some German units, such as those trapped in the Courland pocket in Latvia, surrendered only on 9 and 10 May, and others held out longer.

The war in the Pacific continued. Hundreds of thousands of Allied troops, including British, Commonwealth and American soldiers in Europe, expected to be sent to fight Japan. The Soviet Union, as agreed at the Yalta Conference, declared war on Japan on 8 August, exactly three months after the German surrender.

Key people

Karl Dönitz headed the short-lived government that authorised the surrender. He and his ministers were arrested by the British at Flensburg on 23 May 1945, and Dönitz was later sentenced to ten years in prison at Nuremberg.

Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel, who signed the surrender documents, were tried at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity and executed in October 1946.

Dwight D. Eisenhower insisted on unconditional surrender and reported the end of the war to the Allied governments with a famously brief message stating that the mission had been fulfilled.

Legacy

VE Day is commemorated every year across Europe. In France it is a public holiday, and in the United Kingdom major anniversaries, such as the 50th in 1995 and the 75th in 2020, have been marked with national events. In Russia and several former Soviet republics, 9 May is Victory Day, traditionally the most important secular holiday and marked by military parades.

In Germany, the meaning of 8 May changed over time. For many Germans in 1945 it represented defeat, occupation and the loss of homes and family members. In a widely cited speech to the Bundestag on the 40th anniversary in 1985, President Richard von Weizsäcker described it as a day of liberation from the Nazi regime, a view that has since become broadly accepted in German public life.

For veterans and civilians in Britain and the Commonwealth, VE Day was also bittersweet. Many families still had relatives fighting in Burma and the Pacific or held as prisoners by Japan, and some celebrations were tempered by grief for those who would not return.

The date also marked the start of the post-war order in Europe: the occupation and division of Germany, the Potsdam Conference, the war crimes trials and, before long, the Cold War.

Timeline

• 1945, 30 April: Hitler kills himself in Berlin; Dönitz becomes head of state.
• 1945, 2 May: The Berlin garrison and German forces in Italy surrender.
• 1945, 4 May: German forces in north-west Europe surrender to Montgomery at Lüneburg Heath.
• 1945, 7 May, 2:41 am: Jodl signs the unconditional surrender at Reims.
• 1945, 8 May: VE Day is celebrated in Britain, the United States and western Europe.
• 1945, 8 May, late evening: Keitel signs the definitive surrender in Berlin-Karlshorst.
• 1945, 9 May: The Soviet Union celebrates Victory Day; Soviet troops enter Prague.
• 1945, 23 May: The Dönitz government is arrested at Flensburg.

Why it matters

VE Day marked the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of a war that had devastated Europe and made possible the Holocaust. It closed one chapter of the Second World War and opened the post-war era, and its different dates in East and West still reflect the divided memory of that victory.