This article chronicles the end of the European Theatre of World War II.
On April 25, 1945 United States and Russian troops linked-up at the Elbe River, cutting Germany in two.
The Holocaust
Thousands of Holocaust victims arriving at the Nazi extermination camp at Birkenau in 1944
On April 30, 1945 when all seemed lost, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker along with his long-time lover and briefly wife, Eva Braun. In his last testament Hitler appointed his successors. Karl Dönitz as the new Führer and Joseph Goebbels as the new Chancellor of Germany. However Goebbels himself suicided on May 1, 1945, leaving the new Führer to orchestrate negotiations of surrender. The final surrender documents were signed by General Alfred Jodl on May 7, 1945. May 8 was declared V-E (Victory In Europe) Day. Karl Dönitz continued to act as Führer until his arrest on May 23, 1945. The remains of the former Third Reich were subsequently partitioned by the Allies into an area of Soviet control, which later became East Germany, and an area of joint British/French/American control, which later became West Germany. Following the war, Allied soldiers discovered a number of concentration camps and other locations that had been used by the Nazis to imprison and exterminate an estimated 12 million people. The largest single group represented in this number were Jewish (roughly half the total according to the Nuremburg trials), but Gypsies, Slavs, Catholics, homosexuals and various minorities and disabled persons formed the remainder. The most well-known of these camps is the death camp Auschwitz in which about two million prisoners were killed. Although the Nazi genocide or "Holocaust" was largely unknown to the Allied soldiers fighting the war, it has become an inseparable part of the story of World War II.
In May and June 1945 thousands of refugees from Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were rounded up by the Western Allies in Austria, Operation Keelhaul, and executed or deported by the Soviets. Also defeated Finland and neutral Sweden felt compelled to extradite Ingrian and Baltic refugees in a similar manner, some of whom committed suicide before the extradition.
