1945

The year in brief

1945 brought the end of the war. On 12 January the Red Army struck from the Vistula and in less than three weeks reached the Oder. On 17 January the Polish 1st Army and Soviet troops took the ruins of left-bank Warsaw, and with them came a new, communist authority; on 27 January Soviet soldiers entered Auschwitz. In February at Yalta Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin agreed on the occupation of Germany, Poland's eastern border on the Curzon Line and the “reorganisation” of the Provisional Government. In March the Western Allies crossed the Rhine, on 16 April the Berlin offensive began, on 25 April Americans and Red Army soldiers met on the Elbe, and on 30 April Hitler killed himself in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery. On 2 May Berlin surrendered, and on 7 and 8 May, at Reims and Karlshorst, the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces was signed.

In the Pacific the fighting went on. The Americans took Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the bloodiest battle of the Pacific war, and on the night of 9–10 March an incendiary raid on Tokyo killed 80,000–100,000 people. On 26 July at Potsdam Japan was called on to surrender unconditionally. On 6 August an atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, on 8 August the USSR declared war on Japan, and on 9 August a second bomb fell on Nagasaki. On 15 August the Japanese heard the Emperor announce the acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, and on 2 September the instrument of surrender was signed aboard the battleship Missouri, ending the Second World War.

For the Poles it was the end of a war that brought no freedom. On 19 January General Okulicki dissolved the Home Army; in March the NKVD arrested the leaders of the Polish Underground State, and in June they were tried in Moscow. On 28 June the Provisional Government of National Unity was formed in Warsaw, and on 5 July the United States and Britain recognised it, withdrawing recognition from the government in London. At Potsdam the lands east of the Oder and the Lusatian Neisse were placed under Polish administration, and on 16 August the Warsaw government signed an agreement fixing the eastern border along the Curzon Line – Lwów and Wilno remained in the USSR.