How did it end in Europe?

World War II ended in Europe with the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945. The final Allied push had begun a year earlier with the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944, after which American, British, and Canadian forces drove east while Soviet armies advanced from the east in massive offensives such as Operation Bagration in Belarus. Germany's last major counteroffensive in the west, the Battle of the Bulge from December 16, 1944 to January 25, 1945, failed at the cost of nearly 100,000 German casualties.

By March 1945 Allied troops crossed the Rhine into Germany at Remagen, Wesel, and elsewhere. Soviet forces under Marshal Georgy Zhukov launched the Berlin Strategic Offensive on April 16, 1945, and reached the city by April 23. American and Soviet troops met at the Elbe River near Torgau on April 25, 1945, in a famous handshake that split Germany in half.

With Soviet artillery shelling the city and street fighting raging block by block, Adolf Hitler killed himself in his underground bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery on April 30, 1945, along with his new wife Eva Braun. Hitler had named Grand Admiral Karl Donitz as his successor in his political testament. The Berlin garrison surrendered on May 2.

Donitz authorized representatives to seek a general capitulation. General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations Staff of the German Armed Forces High Command, signed the instrument of unconditional surrender at General Dwight D. Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters in Reims, France at 2:41 a.m. local time on May 7, 1945, with the cease-fire to take effect at 11:01 p.m. on May 8. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin demanded a second signing in Berlin to underline the Soviet role, and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed a separate surrender document in Karlshorst, a Berlin suburb, late on May 8, 1945.

Western Allies celebrate V-E Day on May 8, while Russia and many former Soviet states celebrate Victory Day on May 9 because the Berlin signing took place after midnight Moscow time. Allied forces occupied Germany, divided it into four zones, and arrested surviving Nazi leaders for trial at Nuremberg later that year.