Germany’s surrender on May 7–8 brings World War II to an end in Europe. Worldwide, the war’s casualties number over 55 million people; extermination and concentration camps alone account for more than 6 million lives, 5.7 million of them Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
On June 4, under the Potsdam Agreement, the four Allied powers (the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, and France) divide Germany into four zones of occupation and Berlin into four sectors, assuming authority through the Allied Control Council. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander of Europe during the war, becomes military governor of the U.S. zone.
Germany presents an image of destruction that matches its inner state. Though the months following the war are dominated by the struggle for basic survival, social and cultural life develop rapidly under the control of the occupying powers. Parties and organizations are founded, museums exhibit art that the Nazis had banned as “degenerate,” newspapers appear again, and German radio is reorganized.
The Soviet Military Administration in Germany (Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland, SMAD) installs itself in the Soviet occupation zone with interests and measures that run counter to those of the Western occupying powers. Expropriation, reform, and centralization in the East contrast with decentralization and liberalization in the West. The resulting confrontation splits Germany for decades, physically and psychologically, politically and culturally.
In April, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies; Harry S. Truman succeeds him. In July the Manhattan Project detonates the first atomic bomb near Alamogordo, New Mexico. On August 6 and 9, U.S. forces drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. World War II comes to an end on August 15.
The first Nuremberg trial begins in November, trying twenty-four of the most important leaders of Nazi Germany for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
1945 The Zero Hour?
Shoes of murdered Jewish prisoners in the Majdanek concentration camp, Lublin, Poland (1944). Throughout Europe, a total of more than six million people were killed in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps.
View of bomb-ravaged Dresden.
In Nuremberg the trial of the main war criminals of the Nazi regime begins before the International Military Tribunal. In the dock, front row: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel; back row: Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel.
