1945: The End of the War, Liberation, Occupation

At 11:01 p.m. on May 8, 1945, the Second World War in Europe officially came to an end. This moment was set by the Instrument of Surrender, signed by Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, the plenipotentiary of the German Reich, on May 7 at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Reims. The ceremony continued during the night of May 8–9 at the headquarters of the Supreme Commander of the Red Army in Berlin-Karlshorst. There, shortly after midnight, representatives of all three branches of the Wehrmacht signed the revised version of the surrender document in the presence of senior military officials from the victorious Allied powers. This twofold act resulted in differing commemorative dates: in the West, May 8 became the day to mark the end of the war, whereas in the Soviet Union—and soon throughout the emerging Eastern Bloc—it was celebrated on May 9. This division persists to this day, with not only the Russian Federation but also several post-Soviet states continuing to hold their victory celebrations on May 9.

For Germans, the end of the war was marked by complex and highly personal experiences, caught somewhere between liberation and defeat. How people experienced that day depended not only on their individual proximity to or distance from National Socialism. It also hinged on whether the end of the war meant a return to personal freedom or the beginning of captivity and forced labor; whether it meant escaping the danger of death or injury in combat, or, on the other hand, falling victim to violence, arbitrary treatment, and deportation now that the fighting had stopped. Above all, women in areas occupied by the Red Army experienced the end of the war as a time of personal threat and humiliation, as they were exposed to the arbitrary power and revenge of the victors, many becoming victims of sexual violence.

More broadly, people experienced the end of the war very differently depending on where they lived or happened to be at the time. Germans in the western occupation zones could at least hope that international legal standards would be upheld. In the Soviet zone, that was only partly the case. The concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, taken over by the Soviet Military Administration and run until 1950 as a "special camp" — where thousands of people died — is just one example. It also mattered whether one’s home lay inside or outside the new borders for postwar Germany set by the victorious powers. Those living beyond the new boundaries inevitably lost their homeland. The Allied powers had not only decided to reduce Germany’s territory but had also agreed that German minorities in those territories and East Central Europe in general should be removed. The result was the forced resettlement of millions of ethnic Germans from across the continent.

It would be 40 years before Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker, in his famous speech on May 8, 1985, found the words to express the conflicting emotions of the German people at the end of the war:

The feelings and experiences of the people in Eastern Central, Northeastern, and Southeastern Europe, in light of the war's end and its consequences, were even more varied and contradictory. They had often witnessed the withdrawal of German troops months before the official end of the war on May 8th/9th 1945. However, this was followed by the Red Army’s occupation, which most did not perceive as a true liberation. It made little difference whether, like Poland, one had been part of the anti-Hitler coalition and thus theoretically one of the victorious powers, or whether, like Hungary and Romania, one was counted among the collaborators. Both groups experienced how the Soviet leadership in Moscow, in collaboration with local forces, installed pro-Soviet governments that were initially little more than agents carrying out Soviet interests under the guise of anti-fascism. Those who refused to collaborate or resisted were politically persecuted. For these people, the end of the war simply meant the beginning of a new form of tyranny.

The war itself had already uprooted millions of people. Some had been torn from their familiar surroundings as soldiers and sent to battlefields far from home. Others were forcibly recruited by the German occupying authorities as laborers and transported to foreign places to serve the German war economy. Additionally, there were the millions of Jews who had initially been deported and herded into ghettos across Eastern Europe before the German leadership decided in the autumn of 1941 to systematically murder them, marking the beginning of the Shoah.
Furthermore, millions of non-Jewish people were affected by forced resettlement and deportation during the war. Hundreds of thousands of Polish nationals were deported from the " Incorporated Territories Incorporated Territories Areas of western Poland annexed after the invasion  in 1939. The “incorporated territories” included the Reichsgaue Danzig-West Prussia and Wartheland, the administrative district of Zichenau,  annexed to East Prussia, and East Upper Silesia, which was incorporated into German Silesia. For the most part, these were territories that had been ceded by Germany  under the Treaty of Versailles in 1918/19, after the First World War. " to the "" or from the eastern Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union to Siberia and Central Asia. Germans, too, had become victims of forced resettlement during the war. In 1940, the German government brought about half a million ethnic Germans from the Baltic States, Volhynia, Galicia, the Dobrudja, and Bukovina "home to the Reich," which was only nominally voluntary. In 1941, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviet authorities deported 800,000 ethnic Germans from the western parts of the country to Siberia and Central Asia.

The end of the fighting did not bring an end to forced resettlements. In total, 14 million Germans—whether or not they held German citizenship—were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Romania on the orders of the victorious powers. Most arrived in postwar Germany with nothing but the clothes on their backs and were forced to find makeshift shelter in ruins, barracks, corrugated iron huts, or on farms. The fate of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia, who were deported to Hungary after the war, was hardly different. Nor was it different for the nearly two million Poles who had to leave the Polish territories ceded to the Soviet Union, or for the 500,000 Ukrainians who were no longer tolerated in postwar Poland and were deported to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. They were forced to leave their possessions behind and make new lives in the homes and ruins left by those who had lived there before. Also in the Soviet Union, which had now expanded westward, people experienced yet another wave of forced resettlements at the end of the war. Stalin had members of ethnic groups deemed politically unreliable deported en masse from the Baltic States, from Crimea, and from the northern Caucasus into the interior of the Soviet Union.
For all those who endured these forced resettlements (if they survived the ordeal at all) the end of the war meant being uprooted and losing their homeland.

Similar experiences befell the approximately 700,000 so-called  Displaced Persons (DPs)

Displaced Person

also:

D. P., DP, Displaced Persons

After the Second World War, the Allies used the term “Displaced Person” (DP) for the approximately eleven million civilians outside their home country due to the war or persecution. These mainly included liberated concentration camp prisoners, forced laborers and deportees, prisoners of war and survivors of Nazi persecution(particularly from Central and Eastern Europe) as well as those people and their families who because of their previous experiences fled West from the renewed Soviet rule in the Baltic states. They often suffered from poor health and malnourishment. The Allies and international aid organizations made efforts to return the DPs (some of whom were temporarily housed in former concentration camps) to their home countries.  who, after the end of the war, were either unable or unwilling to return to their home countries. Camps were established for them in the western occupation zones of Germany, some of which remained in operation for years. Among them were survivors of the Shoah, waiting for an opportunity to emigrate to the United States, Canada, Palestine/Israel, or another Western country. Others were non-Jewish Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and others who had been brought to Germany due to the upheavals of war and now refused to return to their homelands, which were under the rule of communist parties. For all these people, the end of the war meant being uprooted and having to start a new life in a foreign land. The same was true for the millions of people in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union who, after the war, moved into the territories abandoned by the Germans—often because they had nowhere else to go or because (amid general hardship) they hoped to find better living conditions there.

While in Western Europe and North America there was every reason to celebrate the end of the war with exuberance, the situation in Central and Eastern Europe was entirely different. Here, it was a time of great economic hardship, a time of hunger and cold. Trees in city parks were cut down, vegetable gardens and rabbit hutches sprang up everywhere as people struggled to provide for themselves. Coal was stolen from freight trains and trucks. Anyone who had the chance to get hold of something took it. Meanwhile, children and the elderly became resourceful organizers in the face of scarcity and the black market thrived in every corner. Amidst the ruins, the art of barter flourished, and anything that was not bolted down was sold off. It would take years before shortages eased and a sense of order gradually returned.
Yet even so, the end of the war in Central and Eastern Europe was also a moment of hope—hope for a life in peace, for the reunification of families torn apart by the war, for the stabilization and improvement of personal circumstances, for the reconstruction of cities destroyed by war, and for the creation of a political order that promised a better future.
From today’s perspective, the post-1945 future of East-Central, Northeastern, Southeastern, and Eastern Europe may seem almost inevitable, particularly the Soviet Union’s dominance in the region and the establishment of state-socialist governments and economic systems. But at the time, the situation was far less clear-cut. For many, the future still seemed open.

As complex and confusing as the end of the war was for the people of Central and Eastern Europe, the memory of 1945 and its aftermath remains just as varied—and at times selective. For people in Russia, the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in the " Great Patriotic War

Eastern Front

also:

Eastern Front of World War II, Nazi-Soviet War, Soviet-German War, German-Soviet War, Russian Campaign, Eastern Campaign, Great Patriotic War

Codename for the German Wehrmacht's war of aggression against the Soviet Union, initiated on June 22, 1941. " from 1941 to 1945 still stands as one of the pillars of national pride. This memory of triumph is something the Russian leadership continues to exploit today to justify its war against Ukraine and rally support at home. Meanwhile, for Ukraine and its allies, the memory of the Second World War also continues to shape how people think and act, but in a different way. Here, it is not victory that takes centerstage, but the horrors of war—and the belief that Hitler’s expansionist ambitions should have been confronted more decisively and earlier.

War did not just now return to Europe recently. But now, eighty years after the end of the Second World War, holds more of a presence in the minds of Europeans than it has for decades.

The contributions collected here do not claim to be exhaustive. They seek instead to reflect the diversity—and the many contradictions—of the experiences that shaped the lives of people across Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the war in 1945.