End of World War II
▶ Explore on the mapThe second world war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945 and in the Pacific on 2 September 1945, after six years and perhaps seventy million deaths. Germany surrendered unconditionally after Hitler killed himself in the bunker in Berlin on 30 April and Donitz's government signed at Reims and Berlin; the eastern front had destroyed the Wehrmacht, and Soviet forces took the Reichstag in May. In the Pacific the war went on after Germany's defeat: the United States island-hopped towards Japan, took Iwo Jima and Okinawa in 1945, and on 6 and 9 August dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only uses of nuclear weapons in war. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on 8 August and invaded Manchuria. The emperor announced the surrender on 15 August, the formal instrument was signed on board the Missouri in Tokyo bay on 2 September, and the occupation under Douglas MacArthur began. The war left Europe divided, Germany occupied, the United Nations founded in 1945 and the two new superpowers facing each other; its crimes produced the Nuremberg trials and the convention on genocide. The war's end also opened the atomic age and the long cold war that followed for decades.