The War's End

By early 1945, Germany's defeat was certain. President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Churchill, and Soviet Premier Stalin met at Yalta, in the USSR, in February to plan the postwar settlement. They agreed that the nations of Europe should be allowed to determine their own form of government, and agreed to establish an international organization, the United Nations, to help resolve future disputes between nations.

On April 12, President Franklin Roosevelt died, and was succeeded by Harry S. Truman, who oversaw the conclusion of the American war effort. On April 30, Hitler, along with his mistress Eva Braun, committed suicide in their underground bunker in Berlin. On May 8, the German government surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. May 8 became known as V-E Day ("Victory in Europe Day") and was celebrated in cities across the United States and Europe.

Western governments had been aware of Hitler's hatred of Jews since the 1930s. As early as 1942, the U.S. and Great Britain knew that the Nazi regime was systematically rounding up Jews (as well as homosexuals and other so-called "undesirables"), shipping them to concentration camps, and murdering them. Hitler termed this extermination the Final Solution. The United States did little to assist Jews, refusing to increase immigration of Jewish refugees from Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s. During the war, the U.S. government refused to attack the concentration camps directly, or to bomb rail lines used to transport Jews to these camps.

Allied troops saw firsthand the devastation that World War II had brought to Germany. They also saw the prison camps that the Nazis had built to exterminate European Jews, which stood as monuments to the depth of Nazism's barbarity. Some Jewish survivors were liberated when Allied armies reached these camps. Approximately six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis during the war, both in the camps and in their communities.

In 1939, physicist Albert Einstein had informed President Franklin Roosevelt about the possibility of creating an atomic bomb, and the U.S. had begun an expensive, top secret effort to make such a weapon. As Roosevelt's vice president, Harry Truman had not been informed about America's effort to develop the atomic bomb. He learned of this effort, called the Manhattan Project, only after becoming president. In July 1945, the U.S. successfully tested the world's first atomic bomb. Truman, determined to speed the end of the war against Japan and prevent further American casualties by avoiding an invasion of the Japanese homeland, ordered the new weapon's use. On August 6, 1945, an American bomber, the Enola Gay, piloted by Col. Paul Tibbets, dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb killed approximately 100,000 people instantly, and thousands more died of radiation poisoning over the next few years. Three days later, the United States dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki. After this second bomb, the Japanese government surrendered. World War II was over.