Today, 8 May 2025, marks the 80th anniversary of VE Day (Victory in Europe Day) when people in Britain and Allied nations across the world celebrated the unconditional surrender of Germany in the Second World War. While it was not the end of the conflict (it was August 1945 before the war against Japan ended) the sense of relief for people who had been living under total war for 6 years was huge. In Britain VE Day was declared a national holiday and people took to the streets to celebrate and commemorate in a huge release of collective tension. This blog posts pulls together just a small selection of our digital library resources that will help you find out more about VE Day, the events leading up to it and the aftermath.

What did the papers say?

Mentions of VE Day or Victory in Europe Day start before the 8th May, as people were aware of and anticipating the likely German surrender. So some preparations were already underway and some people began to celebrate early, on the 7th, when in Britain it was announced on the radio that the war in Europe was over.

The Library subscribes to a large number of digitised newspaper archives that will allow you to see what events were being reported on at the time and how they were being reported. Read full text articles, compare how different newspapers were covering the same issues and stories and track coverage of VE Day and beyond.

You can search individual titles, such as The Times, The Scotsman, The Guardian and The Observer, The Daily Mail, The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Amsterdam News, The Irish Times, Pravda, The Times of India, etc. Or you can cross-search a range of titles, through databases such as UK Press Online (includes Daily Express, Daily Worker, etc.,), British Library Newspapers (includes national and regional newspaper titles), Irish Newspaper Archive (the largest online database of Irish newspapers in the world), Chinese Newspaper Collection (includes around a dozen English language newspapers published in China), etc.

Service Newspapers of World War Two

The Library also has access to Service Newspapers of World War Two which contains an extensive range of digitised rare (and well-known) wartime publications for soliders serving in major theatres around the world. Publications are included from many key nations involved in the conflict from around the world and both Allied and Axis publications are included, offering a broad view of the war and the experiences of those on the front lines.

All digitised newspaper and periodicals/magazines archives available via the Library can be accessed from the Newspapers, Magazines and Other News Sources guide.

What do the archives tell us?

The Library has access to a large range of primary source databases and digital archives that allow you to search for and view digitised primary source material from libraries, archives and museums across the world.

The Churchill Archive is a fantastic resource for anything related to World War Two. It includes more than 800,000 pages of original documents, produced between 1874 and 1965, ranging from Winston S. Churchill’s personal correspondence to his official exchanges with kings, presidents, politicians, and military leaders.

Or if you want to see the public record of what Churchill and other politicians and peers said in the House of Commons or House of Lords, ProQuest’s UK Parliamentary Papers is the complete file of 18th to 20th-century papers, spanning nearly 11 million pages from 1715 to the present, with supplementary material dating back to 1688.

Interested in something other than the official documents and journalist reports? Then Mass Observation Online may be what you are looking for. This superb resource gives you access to one of the most important archives for the study of Social History in the modern era, that studied the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain (from 1937 until the early 1950s). This digital archive includes original manuscript and typescript papers (such as diaries, day reports, questionnaires, observations, etc.) created and collected by the Mass Observation organisation, as well as printed publications, photographs and some interactive features.

As you can imagine this is a particularly rich resource for looking at the lives of ordinary Britons during the Second World War. It captures the juxtaposition of people living through these momentous events all the while getting on with their normal lives. And highlights that VE Day was not a massive celebration for everyone. For those who had lost loved ones during the war it was a painful reminder and for many it was an anti-climax.

You can access these and a large range of other databases that will allow you to explore VE Day, the Second World War and its aftermath from the Digital Primary Source and Archive Collections guide.

What research has been done already?

You can use the Library’s research databases (abstracting and indexing databases) to search for journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, conference reports, theses, etc. This enables you to find scholarly research on the Second World War, VE Day and much more.

Historical Abstracts would be a good database to start with for this area of research. Historical Abstracts provides a bibliographic reference to the history of the world (excluding United States and Canada – for equivalent database use America: History and Life) focusing on the 15th century forward. The database covers over 2,600 journals published worldwide, providing an incomparable research tool for students and researchers of world history. The database provides indexing of historical articles in over 40 languages, published from 1955.

There are other bibliographic databases that would also be useful for this area of research e.g. America: History & Life, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Bibliography of British and Irish History, JSTOR, etc. Take a look at Research a Topic on our History subject guide for relevant databases. Why not also search DiscoverEd to see what books, articles and other material you can find in the Library related to VE Day and the end of World War Two.

What to watch?

You can use some of the Library’s moving image and video streaming databases to search for and view films, documentaries, interviews, plays, TV programmes, etc., on or related to VE Day and the end of the Second World War. And as you can imagine there is a lot out there.

Box of Broadcasts (BoB) allows you to view or listen to previously recorded TV and radio programmes from over 60 stations, you can also record programmes yourself, create clips and create playlists. From films such as a A Royal Night Out, the fictionalised account of Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret getting to join the VE Day celebrations, to documentaries such as VE Day: Countdown to Peace, VE Day: The Lost Films, World War II in Colour: Victory in Europe, VE Day 80: We Were There, Elizabeth and Margaret’s Royal Night Out, Victory in Europe, VE Day: Remembering Victory, Love on VE Day, etc.

Academic Video Online is a multidisciplinary collection of videos that allows you to analyse unique and valuable content from over 500 producers and distributors around the world. With 1000s of videos already available on the site, around 400 new titles are added to the site every month. While it does include TV programmes and films from the UK, it has more (than BoB) from the perspectives of Britain’s allies, particularly the United States, including news resports from the time via United News newsreels and France Actualites.

You can access BoB, Academic Video Online and other video streaming and moving image databases from Video Resources.

And if home videos are of interest, BFI Player currently have a collection of free to watch home videos from VE Day – BFI Player: VE Day collection.

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As we get further away from the Second World War and conflict continues across the globe, it can be hard to remember or understand just what VE Day meant to people in the UK and around the world. But by looking at the past through primary sources of the time and the secondary sources written about this time, you can begin to get some idea of the mixture of trauma and elation felt by generations before us.

All resources mentioned above, aside for the BFI Player VE Day collection, are only available to current students and members of staff at the University of Edinburgh. But there is a wealth of freely available resources on this topic from organisations such as the Imperial War Museums, The National Archives (UK), British Library, National Library of Scotland, and more.