Watch how Paris celebrated V-E day in 1945

Seventy years ago today, World War II officially ended in Europe.

It's hard to imagine the joy Europeans must have felt on May 8, 1945. Tens of millions of people had died in five years of war against the Nazis and their Axis alliance. Cities across the continent had been bombed to rubble. For nearly six years since Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Europe suffered through a state of total war.

Then it was over.

Here's how the people of Paris celebrated after the German army that occupied them from 1940 to 1944 finally surrendered.

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