FIELD NOTES / SECOND WORLD WAR

VE Day 8 May 1945: From Collapse to Surrender — Politics, People & Memory // Log 005

Second World War heritage artwork for the Gallus VE Day Field Notes article

VE Day, 8 May 1945. The photographs are familiar: crowds in Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, flags, dancing, Churchill on the balcony, families celebrating the end of nearly six years of war in Europe. The danger is that the familiar photographs make the ending look cleaner than it was.

I served 24 years in the British Army, including multiple operational tours. That makes me wary of history that becomes neat only because we already know the ending. The people living through April and May 1945 did not know exactly when organised resistance would stop, who would surrender to whom, what the Soviet advance meant for post-war Europe or when relatives would actually come home. VE Day is therefore best read as both a military ending and the beginning of a difficult political and human aftermath.

At a glance

  • 30 April 1945: Adolf Hitler kills himself in Berlin.
  • 2 May: the Berlin garrison surrenders to Soviet forces.
  • 4 May: German forces in the Netherlands, Denmark and north-west Germany surrender to Field Marshal Montgomery at Lüneburg Heath.
  • 7 May, 02:41: General Alfred Jodl signs the unconditional surrender of German armed forces at Reims.
  • 8 May, 23:01 Central European Time: the surrender comes into force.
  • 8 May: Britain, the United States and other Allied states mark Victory in Europe Day.
  • 8–9 May: a second formal signing takes place in Berlin-Karlshorst at Soviet insistence; because of the time difference, the Soviet Union marks victory on 9 May.
  • The war is not over globally: fighting against Japan continues until August–September 1945.

The road to VE Day: Germany was collapsing in pieces

The end did not arrive as one single front suddenly stopping. By spring 1945 Allied armies were closing on Germany from west and east. The Western Allies had crossed the Rhine, while the Red Army drove through eastern Germany and encircled Berlin.

On 25 April American and Soviet forces met at the Elbe near Torgau. Berlin fell days later. Hitler killed himself on 30 April, and Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz became head of the remaining German state.

Dönitz’s government had no realistic path to victory. Its remaining strategy was to surrender selectively in the west where possible and move soldiers and civilians away from the advancing Soviet forces. The Western Allies refused to permit a separate peace that allowed Germany to keep fighting the Soviet Union.

4 May: the north-west surrender

At Lüneburg Heath, German forces in the Netherlands, Denmark and north-west Germany surrendered to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. This was one of several local and regional capitulations that preceded the final unconditional surrender.

That sequence matters because “Germany surrendered on 8 May” is correct as the public shorthand, but the military collapse was a chain of commands and signatures across several days.

7 May: Reims

At Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in Reims, General Alfred Jodl signed the unconditional surrender on behalf of the German High Command at 02:41 on 7 May.

The document required all German forces on land, sea and in the air to cease operations at 23:01 Central European Time on 8 May. Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith signed for Eisenhower’s headquarters; Major General Ivan Susloparov signed for the Soviet High Command, and Major General François Sevez signed as the French witness.

Read the surrender document and transcript at the US National Archives →

Why there was another signing in Berlin

The Soviet leadership objected to the Reims ceremony being treated as the definitive surrender. The war in the east had carried an immense Soviet human cost, Berlin had been captured by the Red Army, and Moscow wanted a formal capitulation in the German capital before the principal Allied powers.

A second signing therefore took place at Berlin-Karlshorst late on 8 May. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed for the German armed forces, with Marshal Georgy Zhukov representing the Soviet High Command and Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder representing the Western Allies, alongside French and American representatives.

The surrender was already due to take effect at 23:01 Central European Time. In Moscow that was after midnight, which is one reason Soviet and later Russian remembrance centres on 9 May rather than 8 May.

The political leadership on 8 May

Winston Churchill — Britain

Churchill announced victory to the British public and addressed Parliament. His political position was unusual: he was the wartime leader at the moment of victory but was governing through a coalition that would soon dissolve. Within weeks Britain would hold a general election, and Churchill would lose office to Clement Attlee despite his central role in the wartime story.

That alone is a reminder that victory did not freeze politics. The country celebrating in May was already arguing about reconstruction, housing, employment, welfare and what peace should look like.

Harry S. Truman — United States

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died on 12 April 1945, less than a month before Germany’s surrender. Harry Truman therefore announced victory as a president who had only recently inherited both the office and an enormous unfinished war.

In his 8 May broadcast Truman called it a solemn as well as glorious moment and reminded Americans that the war against Japan continued. Read Truman’s VE Day broadcast at the Truman Library.

Joseph Stalin — Soviet Union

Stalin’s government viewed the defeat of Nazi Germany through the experience of a war that had devastated the Soviet Union on a scale difficult to overstate. Soviet insistence on a Berlin surrender ceremony reflected military, political and symbolic concerns at the same time.

The Red Army now occupied much of central and eastern Europe. The coalition that had defeated Hitler was therefore already entering the political arguments that would become the Cold War.

Karl Dönitz — Germany

Dönitz’s brief government tried to preserve enough command authority to surrender forces and move people west while avoiding unnecessary destruction. That did not make it a neutral caretaker administration; it was the final government of the Nazi state. Its room for manoeuvre narrowed rapidly as Eisenhower and the Soviet leadership insisted on unconditional surrender.

The crowds and the private endings

For many people, VE Day meant relief before it meant history. Blackout, air raids, rationing, casualty telegrams, separation and fear had shaped daily life for years. The public celebration was therefore genuine.

But the date did not mean the same thing to every family. A soldier might still be overseas. A prisoner of war might not yet be home. A family might have received confirmation of a death only weeks earlier. Someone liberated from a concentration camp might be alive but homeless, sick and unsure whether any relatives had survived.

National dates and private dates sit on top of one another. That is why remembrance becomes thin when it uses only the photograph of the crowd.

Liberation and what Allied armies found

As Allied forces crossed Europe they liberated concentration camps and uncovered the scale of Nazi persecution and mass murder. By May 1945 camps including Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen and others had exposed troops and the wider public to evidence of the Holocaust and other crimes of the regime.

VE Day therefore marked not merely the defeat of a rival army but the destruction of a state responsible for genocide, occupation, forced labour and mass killing.

It also created immediate humanitarian problems on a continental scale: displaced persons, former prisoners, forced labourers, refugees and liberated camp survivors all needed food, shelter, medical treatment and decisions about where they could safely go.

Europe was victorious and devastated

Much of the continent had been physically destroyed. Cities, railways, bridges, factories, farms and ports were damaged. Borders and governments had changed. Millions of military personnel and civilians were dead, missing or displaced.

The Allied powers now had to move from coalition warfare to occupation and political reconstruction. Germany would be divided into occupation zones; arguments over Poland, eastern Europe and reparations would deepen; war-crimes trials would follow.

The clean phrase “war in Europe ended” therefore conceals a vast set of problems that began the next morning.

The war continued in Asia

British and Commonwealth forces were still fighting Japan. American forces had suffered enormous casualties at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Prisoners of war remained in captivity. Plans for further operations were continuing.

For servicemen earmarked for the Far East, VE Day could mean the European war was over without meaning their own war was over.

Japan announced its acceptance of surrender terms in August, with the formal instrument signed aboard USS Missouri on 2 September 1945.

Contemporary voices

“This is a solemn but a glorious hour.”

Truman’s wording is useful because it holds the two emotions together rather than pretending celebration erased the cost.

“We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing.”

Churchill’s public message similarly recognised victory while making clear that the war against Japan was unfinished.

The strongest contemporary records are not only speeches. Cabinet papers show detailed planning for how victory would be announced; unit diaries record men continuing ordinary duties; newspapers show celebration alongside casualty notices. The closer you get to individuals, the less uniform “VE Day” becomes.

Why 8 May and 9 May are both historically real

The different dates are not evidence that one side “got the day wrong”. They reflect the two surrender ceremonies, the effective time of the capitulation and the time zone in Moscow.

That matters now because remembrance dates can become political symbols. The historian’s job is to explain why the traditions diverged before deciding what the divergence means in later politics.

What I notice through a service lens

Orders have to reach people. A surrender signed at headquarters only becomes real when commands move down through armies, air forces, ships and isolated units and the shooting actually stops.

Administration follows combat immediately. Prisoners, displaced civilians, captured equipment, medical needs, food, transport and occupation duties do not wait for the victory parade to finish.

The last casualty does not know he is the last casualty. The closer an end date approaches, the easier it is retrospectively to see every late death as especially futile. The soldiers involved still had to act on the information they possessed at the time.

Coming home is an operation too. Demobilising millions of personnel and reintegrating them into civilian life is not an epilogue. It is part of what peace requires.

Why remembrance can become decoration

A poppy, date, unit badge or battlefield name can carry real meaning. It can also become generic visual shorthand once the history behind it is removed.

For Gallus, the standard has to be higher than “this looks military”. If a design uses Normandy, the Somme, a campaign date or a remembrance symbol, the reader should be able to follow that design back into a sourced story.

The purpose of Field Notes is to keep the people, uncertainty and ground attached to the object.

Wear the history

Sources & further research

I treat VE Day here as the end of organised war against Nazi Germany in Europe, not as the end of the Second World War globally. The different 8/9 May remembrance traditions belong to the surrender chronology and should not be reduced to a modern political shortcut.

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