After the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, the war continued for nearly a year until the Liberation. Germany was caught in a pincer movement between Allied troops in the West (notably the Americans) and in the East (the Soviets).
In January 1945, as the Soviets approached, the Nazis hastily evacuated the Auschwitz camp and attempted to erase the traces of the extermination. In the biting cold, the surviving deportees—exhausted, starving, and thirsty—were driven like human herds toward Germany. Most of them perished during this dismal death march. Other camps were evacuated under similarly appalling conditions.
On May 8, 1945, in Berlin, the unconditional surrender of Hitler’s Germany was signed. The Second World War came to an end in Europe.
Nazi barbarism was defeated.
In Paris, the Hotel Lutetia, which had been requisitioned by the Germans during the war, was occupied by Resistance fighters until September 1945 to welcome survivors from the extermination camps. These survivors, primarily Jews of immigrant origin, were most often unable to recount the horror they had experienced. Furthermore, they had to face the distress of the families of the missing and the dead.
In France, despite the Occupation and the state-sponsored antisemitism of the Vichy government, more than two-thirds of Jews were able to escape deportation. The specific Jewish Resistance, their individual combativeness, the support of the Resistance in general, and the solidarity of a portion of the French population made it possible to save many of the persecuted.
In 1945, no one could imagine the exact scale of the genocide in Europe: approximately 6 million victims.
