Victory in Europe Day, also known as VE Day, was 8th May 1945.Adolf Hitler was Germany’s wartime leader and the leader of the Nazis. He committed suicide on 30th April 1945.After Adolf Hitler committed suicide, Karl Donitz took over as the German Leader.The Nazi forces had more tanks available at the start of 1945 than they had in 1940, but they couldn’t all be used because of fuel shortages.In 1945, the British Army was approximately 2,920,000 men, which was nearly double the amount of 1,650,000 men they had in 1940.The end of the war in Europe, which started on the 20th April 1945 and continued until 2nd May, was the Battle for Berlin. Eventually the Allied Soviet Forces raised the flag over the German Reichstag

building in Berlin and that’s when everyone knew it was over.The surrender was signed at Berlin in Germany and Reims in France. Nazi Germany admitted total defeat.Small groups of Germans still tried to carry on fighting even after the surrender was declared.Even though the war had ended in Europe, for allied troops fighting in Southeast Asia and around the Pacific, the war was not over. Japan did not surrender until August after the dropping of 2 atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Japanese Cities).Germany was split into 4 zones after the war: British, French, American and Russian. The Cold War meant that those zones became permanently separated as West Germany and East Germany, until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1990.In the United States, the president, Harry Truman dedicated the war to the memory of his predecessor, Franklin D Roosevelt. Roosevelt had been the President throughout the war and died on 12th April 1945, a month before the war officially ended.After the war had ended, food rationing went on

in the UK until 1954 and clothes rationing until 1949.The end of the war was remembered for all those who had been injured and killed. It was a war that transformed the world.Russia celebrates VE day on 9th May.In London, crowds of people formed outside Buckingham Palace where King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and Prime Minister Winston Churchill appeared on the balcony of the Palace.