“Victory-in-Euorpe Day”
Written by: Kim Cox
Victory-in-Europe Day (V-E Day) was a celebration of the end of war in Europe. On May 8, 1945 V-E Day was proclaimed and celebrated in Western Europe, Britain and the United States, and in the Soviet Union the following day. There was dancing in the streets and fireworks. Newspaper photographs showed the jubilation exhilarated by the relief from war time sorrows, hardships and privations.
Although for many civilians and soldiers that were injured or had died, the war ended much earlier, V-E Day was the focal point of memory and celebrations.
In Normandy and Northern France liberation had begun with D-day, the end of spring the year before from June, 1944 through July, 1944 and Paris civilians had celebrated their freedom in August.
Those freed from Auschwitz, who survived the “death marches’ were freed in April 1945 as were many prisoner-of-war camps, holding hundreds of thousands Allied soldiers, airmen and sailors. Some of these had been held captive for over five years.
The beginning of the end started by the end of March, 1945. Allied armies were on both borders, East and West. Belgium and France had already been freed though fighting continued in Northern Italy, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Remaining under German occupation were Norway, Denmark and Holland. The prospect of renewed German submarine offensives and the terrors of bombs were over, as were the threat of Hitler’s secret weapons.
Fighting on German soil continued at the beginning of April. Germany winning was no longer a possibility once the American Ninth and Third armies encircled the Rhur, thereby severing Germany from its industrial heartland. This was done on April 1st when the two armies met in Lippstat—an accomplishment that shocked all Allied observers.
Once deep into Germany on April 4th, American troops found a camp like none they’d ever seen. Laying in the ground around the barracks were more than three thousand emaciated corpses. This camp, Ohrdruf was a slave labor camp.
On April 6th, in the town of Merkers, deep in a mine, American soldiers found paintings that the Germans had looted from the art galleries of Europe. Also found were paintings from Berlin’s art galleries hid there for safe keeping. Other than works of art, a hundred tons of gold bars were discovered—some made from the gold fillings and gold teeth taken from the murdered Jews mouths at Auschwitz and a dozen other camps. Why didn’t the Germans move the treasures before the American troops approached the mine? Because German railway workers insisted on observing Easter Sunday.
On April 11th, two more concentration camps were liberated, Nordhausen (Mittlebau-Dora factory—a vast slave labor camp)and Buchenwald. Soldiers active in this liberation saw mounds of dead bodies, piled high and naked. They vomited from the sight and the stench.
The death of President Franklin D. Rossevelt on April 12th gave the Germans a ray of hope that his successor, Harry Truman would settle for an armistice. Millions of Americans had wept when they heard of their President’s death, and American soldiers were troubled by the loss of their Commander-in-Chief. But nothing would weaken the resolve to see the battle through to an unconditional surrender from the Nazis. This had been Roosevelt’s demand to which Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin had endorsed. This remained the Allies aim.
On April 15th, British soldiers came upon the first of the largest concentration camps. Belsen is where tens of thousand of Jews were brought from the slave labor camps of eastern Europe where they were left to starve and to rot with almost no food or medical help. At Belsen, they had no work for them to do. So why were they brought here you might ask? So they wouldn’t fall into the hands of the Russians. The soldiers felt an outrage from what they found. Here, they didn’t have gas chambers, but the victims were left to die of starvation and disease.
When the British tank rolled into the camp of Belsen, he opened the door and yelled into a bull horn the sweetest words the prisoners would ever hear, “You are free. You are free. You are free.” Though thousand lays dead because they no longer had the strength or the will to live, those that were still alive became free. This was a moment to be engraved in the memories of those behind the barbed wire with the first British tank entered.
This was a moment that transformed the Allied perception of the war. Before the liberation of Belsen, the full nature of the tyranny they’d been out to destroy had not been grasped. There was a rave of outrage as photographs and films of ten thousand unburied bodies, stacked in piles in the camp and scattered between the huts were seen. Many of the living men and women who didn’t look much different from the dead. This brought anger and loathing toward the Nazis.
In the days and weeks that followed many more concentration camps were liberated. The death of Hitler on May 1st was broadcast over Hamburg Radio. Negotiations began. General Hans Krebs asked for a truce, but Stalin insisted upon an unconditional surrender. But Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, both were determined not to give in.
On May 2, the last 40,000 Germans in Italy surrendered. On May 4, four German officers signed a document of surrender. Cease-fire was to take effect at 8 o’clock on May 5. All German forces in Holland, Denmark and northwest Germany would lay down their arms. The war was ending all over Europe.
On May 4, 446 American sailors were killed when in the Pacific, off Okinawa, seven American ships were hit by Japanese suicide aircraft.
There were many more surrenders during the span of May 5 through May 7, but at one minute past midnight on May 8, the so awaited V-E Day came.
May 8, 1945, celebrations commenced, hundreds of flags and pennants and bunting flew from most of the buildings in the center of town. Winston Churchhill and heads the minsters of the wartime coalition appeared on a balcony overlooking Whitehall while the crowds cheered. Celebration caused chaos in the streets of London. Tables full of joyous people sat in the street at an open-air street party in London. Victory parades were held throughout Europe to welcome home returning soldiers. Though for those still fighting in the Pacific, the end of the war didn’t end until Victory in Japan (V-J Day) on August 15, 1945.
Source:
“The Day The War Ended: May 8, 1945” by Martin Gilbert
Copyright in 1995 by Martin Gilbert. Published by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
