The End of the War

On May 8, 1945, World War II ended in Europe with the capitulation of Germany (and Austria) after the Soviet Union had conquered Berlin days earlier. The war itself would only end on September 2, 1945, when Japan capitulated after America dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

World War II had started more than five years earlier, when Germany and the Soviet Union—allied in the Hitler-Stalin-pact—had invaded Poland in September 1939. It was the bloodiest war in history: Approximately 60 million people were killed, including six million European Jews. Germany lost about ten million people including those killed by Hitler, and the Soviets around 20 million people, including those killed by Stalin.

 

The end was especially brutal: In the battle for Berlin, hundreds of thousands Soviet and German soldiers died, some only 16 and 17 years old. Two million women were raped by the Red Army. More than two million German civilians, many of them refugees, would perish in 1945 and later.

While the Soviets took Berlin, the U.S. Army under the command of Dwight D. Eisenhower waited at the river Elbe for two more months, about 50 miles west of Berlin. This was a promise Franklin Roosevelt had made to Stalin in Yalta earlier, to allow the Soviet leader to take the German Capital. Churchill felt uneasy about this already, and Eisenhower was on the fence, but Harry Truman, FDR's successor, decided to go along with it.

 

The U.S. Army arrived in Berlin in July 1945, together with the British and the French Army. Berlin was divided in four zones of occupation. Alas, the friendship of the four victorious Allies lasted for three years only, until the Soviet blockade of 1948. Nevertheless, all four Allies would govern Berlin together until the Wall came down in 1989.

 

But what happened in those months 80 years ago? Pictures of those times, together with a short historic overview, can be found in Berlin 1945. World War II: Photos of the Aftermath, by Michael Brettin and Peter Kroh. The pictures have been taken by Soviet solders and Germans in their employ, and were collected by Berliner Verlag, With a preface by Stephen Kinzer, formerly the New York Times' Berlin bureau chief.