On 8 May 1945, World War II officially ended in Europe, where it had begun precisely 1,953 days earlier. Hitler, surrounded by Allied troops, had killed himself in his underground bunker in Berlin on 30 April, leaving his successor Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz to negotiate Germany's surrender, which was unconditional.

It was the day the Allies – and the vast majority of Europe – were desperately waiting for and had been expecting for a few months by then, as the collapse of the Axis became more obvious. It was the much-awaited end to a conflict that proved to be the continent's deadliest ever. 

 

 

On 8 May, 1945 in Britain more than one million people took to the streets to celebrate the end of the war. It was the triumph of hope, and the streets of London were massed with dancing, singing crowds. In France, Charles de Gaulle, who had led the Free French Forces during the war, declared that Germany was defeated: church bells rang and celebrations continued for two days.

Len Gibbon, a lorry driver in the British Army, was dispatched to Germany by the end of the war, having been in Normandy for the Allied invasion, and then in the Netherlands. Now 96 years old and on a quest to reproduce the iconic 104 miles journey across the Channel on an exercise bike, he remembers that on VE Day he was driving on a German Autobahn: "The roads were alight, overwhelming, and the German ammunition dumps were blowing up," he says. "This spitfire came down and he almost touched the ground. And he'd gone up, done a loop, opened his cockpit, waved his thumbs up and told me the war was over." 

For Gibbon, victory meant he could soon go back to his wife, whom he married in 1944, late at night even though people weren't allowed out at that time. "We got married and spent the night under the stairs, because of the air raids. And then I didn't see her for six months. We used to write every day."

 

 

"I was enlisted into the army in 1943 and I continued until the end of the war, after the end of the war, I was not demobilized until 1947," remembers another British veteran, Peter Hawkins, 95.

"I was in North-East Germany on VE Day," he says. "There I was standing in the middle of the war. And it wasn't the end, there was still a lot of boys fighting out there."

While Europe could finally breathe a sigh of relief from the tragedy of the war, the conflict went on for other five months in the Pacific. And even in Europe, the end of the war was welcomed with different feelings across the continent. "You have the whole European continent embroiled in a five-year – more than five years in some parts of it – conflict," explains historian Guy Bud. "But it's a hugely different experience depending on which part of Europe you're in."

He adds: "By May 1945, some bits of it are really almost in the middle of a localized civil war. Other bits of it really actually haven't suffered so badly. Obviously, that's mostly true in the neutral countries. But even somewhere like Britain, the experience of being a civilian was vastly, vastly different from being in, for example, Germany, and by 8 May, obviously, everything in Germany was collapsing. Millions of people were displaced across the continent and there was real chaos."

The war against Nazi Germany was won in the continent, but ahead laid another challenge: how to rebuild a war-torn Europe, where millions of lives were lost, cities were destroyed?

 

 

Europe's 'Year Zero'

After World War II it was impossible for Europe to go back to 'business as usual'.

On the same day the victory against Germany was announced, Churchill reminded his people of the challenges still ahead: "We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing; but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead."

The cities and towns in ruins across Europe were full of people who had lost their homes, there were orphans, and displaced people. Railways and roads had been blown up by bombs, leaving countries without proper transport infrastructures.

"Ironically, in many respects, the years just after World War II, so 1946 and 1947, in many ways were a lot worse for European citizens," says Martin Evans, professor of modern European history at Sussex University in the UK.

"There was the displacements caused by World War II, including the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia and from Eastern Europe. Also in some places, like France, rationing was worse than it had been during the war. So then it became a big challenge to rebuild Europe."

At the end of World War II, Europe wanted to move on. In Germany, midnight on 8 May 1945 was declared "Stunde Null", or Hour Zero, marking the beginning of a new Germany, which wanted nothing to do with the memory of Nazism.

The war had been such a traumatic event that change was necessary – and demanded – throughout the whole continent. "We think of the Second World War as a military confrontation and, of course, that is true," says historian Bud. "But it was also something that pulled the populations of all of these countries into a conflict the like of which had never been seen, in ways that hadn't been seen before.

"So, in the sense that every aspect of life was touched by war, equally every aspect of life was touched by the end of it. And that's why, in a way, we think of VE Day as the sort of 'Year Zero' point."

The memory of the 1920s and 1930s becomes very important among Europeans in the wake of VE Day, to the extent that people wanted to avoid making the same mistakes that had brought them to such a disastrous war. "People had a very strong memory of the economic depression and their sense was that the economic depression had fostered Fascism and Nazism and therefore played a key role in the outbreak of World War II," explains Sussex University's Evans.

Europeans were looking back at the last two world wars, which had destroyed their nations, and thinking "never again."

 

 

Forgetting the past to forge the future

"People didn't wake up on the morning of 9 May and start this whole new life," says Evans. "They actually had all this baggage from these past five years of suffering and tried to process the future in light of that."

One of the most pressing problems Europe had to deal with was what to do with those who had been active participants in the conflict, former Nazis in Germany, former fascists in Italy, collaborationists in France or Austria, many of whom had simply changed sides right at the end of the war.

The Allies made a symbolic act of justice in the trials against senior Nazi officials in Nuremberg, but a more widespread process of de-Nazification in Germany was soon abandoned, as the task would have left the country without a proper workforce. 

Austria was renamed "the Nazis' first victim," a slogan that allowed the country to deny its role in the crimes committed by Nazi Germany and to be treated as a liberated country rather than a defeated one. The "victim theory" supported the reintegration in the new nation of those Austrians who had supported Hitler.

In France, the memory of the resistance, which likely involved 2 to 3 percent of the population according to Evans, was emphasized against the memory of collaboration. The same happened with the memory of the resistance in Italy.

"I think the legacy of the Second World War really is perhaps best summarized as this big process of forgetting, selective forgetting," says Bud.

Depending on what side of the conflict and which side of Europe people were on, the memory of the conflict could vary wildly. But the majority of the nations looked back at partisan movements to legitimate and root their roles in the new societies to come.

"There is an amazing capacity in the human mind to look back selectively over a shared experience and come up with some quite self-affirming conclusions about where one sits in a particular ideological, political, historical tradition," says Bud.

"The ability of Europeans across the continent in the aftermath of the Second World War to look backwards into that hugely chaotic period and find a way of affirming their own virtue or their own national identity or their own collective suffering is perhaps the one truly shared part of the Second World War experience."

 

 

A new way of doing politics

After World War II, Europe wasn't able to maintain the authority it had once had in the world order. Many countries had been humiliated by the war, and even the victorious ones wouldn't have made it without external help. The European economy was in a mess, military and financial resources depleted. 

The European empires – still existing by the end of the war – had been weakening since 1939 and were by 1945 starting to disintegrate among rising nationalist movements and the utter incapacity of the European states to financially and militarily maintain their dominance over the colonies. The British left India in 1947, the Dutch conceded independence to Indonesia in 1949, and the French lost Indochina in 1954. The empires in Africa became independent in the 1950s and 1960s.

From the end of the war, two new superpowers had emerged: the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which for decades to come would fight for supremacy, through the Cold War until the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

Not only power had shifted in the global political landscape: at a national level, politics was deeply influenced by the terrible memory of the war, and many countries abandoned their previous systems for establishing democracies. 

"There was certainly in Western Europe, a move towards a very new type of democracy," says Bud. "It's quite easy to forget, living in modern Europe today, that democracy in the 1930s – even outside the ones that had collapsed like Germany and Italy – was widely unpopular."

The new states that were created in 1944-1945 had to rebuild a very different type of democracy. New Christian Democratic parties emerged on the right, Social Democratic parties on the left. A new way of doing politics emerged, much more moderate than had been the case before the war in Europe. It was not the case in Eastern Europe, where there was an expansion of the new Soviet socialist republics, with very radical economic programs.

Out of the experience of the war, people across Europe had developed the idea that the state should take care of its citizens, pushing forward the agenda for a welfare state able to provide basic care. After the war, the National Health System (NHS) was created in Britain. 

In France and Italy, where women had played an active role in supporting their countries through the war, women won the right to vote respectively in 1944 and 1945. The Italian women allowed to vote participated to the elections that in 1946 ruled out the monarchy, to create a democratic government in Italy.

In China, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, politics also underwent a radical change with the rise of communism.

And those changes still influences the political landscape of today. 

"I think that on the one hand, if you look at the structures of the United Nations, the role that the British and the French play within the United Nations, being on the Security Council, is a legacy of World War II," says Bud.

Memories of World War II still linger in the politics of today. The families of those who were killed or injured during the war show less trust in others and in politics, accompanied with more involvement in political activism – a legacy that doesn't fade in time with younger generations.

 

 

The economic miracle

It took time to rebuild the economy in Europe. Many war-time restrictions, for example, remained in place in the UK after the end of the war: clothes rationing was in place until 1949 and food rationing until 1954.

But the quarter-century that followed the end of World War II is considered the most remarkable period of economic growth and social progress in Europe, often referred to as the European 'economic miracle.' How was that possible?

"Our best explanation for the post-war miracles is that they were not miracles," says Tamas Vonyo, professor of economics history at the University of Bocconi, Italy.

"First, fast growth in the 1950s and even the 1960s can be attributed to a simple reconstruction effect. Especially in Western Europe, where the supply of both human capital and productive equipment was substantially greater at the end of the 1940s than 10 years earlier, the potential to 'spring back' to normal levels of output and capacity utilization after the war generated very fast growth without any need for innovation.

"Second, the institutional foundations for economic growth after 1945 were much better than after 1918. Macroeconomic stability, relatively peaceful industrial relations, and restored international economic cooperation meant that European economies could implement investments in new technologies and new production capacities that they neglected in the previous three decades. This is why the post-war era was a period of convergence among advanced nations, as other industrialized economies began to catch up with the United States in productivity and, thanks to that, in living standards."

The U.S. played a key role in kick-starting the recovery of the European economy, pumping money into Western Europe with the Marshall Plan, which amounted to $128 billion in today's money. "In many ways, in 1945, capitalism seemed to finish," says Sussex University's Evans.

"The economic depression had produced a war. There was a real belief that that sort of state intervention was the solution. But the impact of the Marshall aid from America – which obviously had an agenda about stopping the spread of communism in Europe – that really is crucial in kick-starting the Western European economic miracle. And, ironically, now historically, 1944-45 is seen as the beginning of what has become known as the 30 glorious years of kind of from 1944 to 1974, the kind of economic crash of the euro crisis. Those are years of unprecedented rising living standards within Western Europe and kind of the growth of consumer society."

The Marshall Plan managed to bring the devastated German economy back to its role as the main economic driver in Europe. 

Some of the foundations of the European post-war economic recovery are still standing today – the international institutions the UN, the IMF, NATO and the EU.

 

 

The dream of a united Europe

The aftermath of World War I had been a process of assigning guilt, re-adjusting borders, and demanding reparation from the victorious to the defeated countries. The consequences of this had been so catastrophic that Europe had learnt from these mistakes. The reconstruction of Europe after World War II was based on creating collaborative institutions and mechanisms that aimed to create so much integration between European countries that a future conflict would prove impossible.

"The experience of the Second World War, while very different in different parts of it, created a shared sense that whatever the political differences that existed between different states, particular political factions, there was still a very strong desire to avoid armed conflict and therefore to work together," says historian Bud. 

"Obviously, the European Coal and Steel Community that emerged, which is the origin of the modern European Union, came very much from this desire to avoid war by linking different countries' economies in Western Europe. And from that, it's quite easy to trace an origin in a parallel between that and the modern European Union. Equally, the United Nations, created at the end of the Second World War as this body to regulate conflict between states."

 

 

After World War II, multinational organizations became an accepted way of resolving differences and conflicts between states in a way that really was not the case in the 1930s.

"What was needed was a movement towards European unity," says Evans. "This really takes off obviously in Western Europe in the context of the Cold War. The threat of the Soviet Union pushes countries together, Italy and the emerging West, West Germany and France. But also you have French economists and politicians like Monnet who really believed that the solution to not repeat the state mistakes the 1920s and 30s was through European unity. The idea of pooling sovereignty will prevent people from going to war."

Evans compares the current COVID-19 pandemic, which has been described as the greatest challenge since World War II, to this European idealism born out of the ashes of the war. "I really wonder if, out of this, we're going to see great a kind of resurgence of the European Union, because ultimately the only way the virus is going to be overcome is through global cooperation. To follow the path of just following nation states, trying to do things on their own will only end in failure."