Victory in Europe: End of WWII

In that same eventful month of April 1945, the German army in Italy gave up. Mussolini was captured and killed by Italian guerrillas. He was then taken to Milan, where his corpse was shot five times by a mother who had lost five sons in the war. He was then hung by the ankles in front of a small shop. Later that month, American soldiers met their Soviet counterparts in eastern Germany. On April 30, Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin underground bunker. His body was then soaked with gas and burnt. Even though his remains were never found, there is no serious disagreement about his death. The Russians were attacking Berlin at the time and were permitted to march into the city first on May 2, 1945. On May 7, U.S. General Eisenhower received a format uncondi­tional surrender by German forces; on May 8, a formal surrender was also made to Soviet General Zhukov. The date May 8, 1945, has since been proclaimed as Victory in Europe Day, the day of victory in Europe. To the relief of millions, the war in Europe had come to an end.

One unanticipated horror of the war shocked the Allies as they marched through Europe while attacking German soldiers. This was the discovery of the torture and death inflicted on innocent civilians by the Nazis in concentration camps and death camps. The most seri­ously targeted of these civilians were Jews, victims of the Holocaust. This word refers to the intentional persecution and murder of European Jews by the Germans from 1933 to 1945. Six million were exterminated, mostly in camps such as Auschwitz, Dachau, and Treblinka. The planned exter­mination of a group of people because of their religion, race, or ethnicity is called genocide. The genocidal tactics of the Nazis were a horrible extension of Hitler's anti-Semitic attitudes. Although there were instances of Jewish resis­tance, such as the uprising of 1943 in the Warsaw Ghetto, the outside world stood by and did nothing while these deadly tactics—gas chambers, ovens, fir­ing squads—were being used. Among other groups who suffered in the camps because the Nazis had labeled them as inferior human beings were homosexu­als, Jehovah's Witnesses, gypsies, Slavs, and mentally retarded persons.

Questionnaire:

• Explain more about the victory in Europe during World War II.