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—— ON THIS DAY ——
MAY 8, 1945
London, Berlin, Paris, Moscow, New York
80 years ago
British troops march through Berlin in the Victory Parade of 1945 — Allied soldiers in the capital of the nation that had launched the war that killed an estimated 70 to 85 million people worldwide.
On May 8, 1945, Germany's unconditional surrender took effect at 11:01 p.m. Central European Time — ending the Second World War in Europe after nearly six years of combat that had killed an estimated 70 to 85 million people, roughly 3 percent of the world's population. The celebrations that erupted across the Allied world were unlike anything that had come before. In London, more than one million people poured into the streets. Churchill appeared on a balcony in Whitehall. The King and Queen appeared eight times on the balcony at Buckingham Palace.
The joy was real and the grief was inseparable from it. There were people celebrating in Piccadilly Circus whose brothers were still in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in Burma. There were families who had spent five years under Nazi occupation and emerged to find their cities destroyed. There were survivors of the concentration camps, liberated in the weeks before, who were too sick to celebrate anything. VE Day was the end of the European war — not the end of the war, and not the end of suffering.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The front page of the Daily Mirror on Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945 — one of the most celebrated front pages in British newspaper history.
The formal signing of Germany's surrender had taken place the day before, on May 7, at SHAEF headquarters in Reims, France. The Soviet Union, which had borne the largest share of the fighting and the dying — an estimated 27 million Soviet citizens died during the war — insisted on a separate signing ceremony in Berlin. That ceremony took place in the early hours of May 9, which is why Russia and most of the former Soviet world observe Victory Day on May 9, not May 8.
Churchill's broadcast to the nation at 3 p.m. on May 8 was heard by millions. He spoke with characteristic directness: the German war was over. The war in the Pacific continued. He warned against complacency. He acknowledged the cost. 'We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing,' he said, 'but let us not forget for a moment the toils and efforts that lie ahead.' Three months later, atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Six weeks after that, the war in the Pacific ended too.
What VE Day inaugurated was as consequential as what it ended. The decisions made in the weeks and months that followed — about Germany's division, about the shape of postwar Europe, about the United Nations, about the Marshall Plan, about the nuclear order — determined the structure of the world for the following forty-four years. The Cold War that replaced the hot war was already visible in the tensions over Berlin, Poland, and the Eastern European countries that Soviet forces had liberated.
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—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
VE Day marked the complete military defeat of European fascism for the first time in a generation. Fascist regimes had seized power across Europe beginning in 1922. Their defeat was not merely a military event — it was the beginning of a process of reckoning with what they had done that is still ongoing.
The world that emerged from VE Day was organized on fundamentally different principles than the one that preceded it. The United Nations, the Nuremberg trials, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Marshall Plan, the NATO alliance — all were direct products of the decision to reconstruct rather than simply victimize the defeated nations. The contrast with 1918 was deliberate.
The Soviet experience of the war — and of VE Day — permanently shaped the post-war world. The USSR's insistence on celebrating on May 9, its domination of Eastern Europe, and its nuclear weapons program were all direct products of what the Soviet Union had suffered and achieved between 1941 and 1945. The Cold War was the long shadow of the Second World War.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On May 8, 1945, the European war ended. Millions celebrated in the streets of cities that had been bombed, occupied, and devastated. The rejoicing was genuine and the grief was alongside it. What came next — the reconstruction, the Cold War, the nuclear age — would determine whether the sacrifice had meant what people that day believed it had.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
"We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing, but let us not forget for a moment the toils and efforts that lie ahead."
— Winston Churchill, broadcast to the British people, May 8, 1945
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about VE Day, the terms of Germany's surrender, the Soviet perspective on victory, and the new world that the Allied powers began constructing on the ruins of the old one?
