Just not the one you might be thinking about. Today, 8 May, is V-E day, and marks the end of the war against Germany in 1945.
The official start of WWII was on 1 September when German forces invaded Poland from the north, south, and west the morning after the Gleiwitz incident.
On the night of 31 August, a small group of German operatives dressed in Polish uniforms and led by Alfred Naujocks seized the Gleiwitz station and broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish (sources vary on the content of the message). The operation was named “Grossmutter gestorben” (Grandmother died).
The operation was to make the attack and the broadcast look like the work of Polish anti-German saboteurs. To make the attack seem more convincing, the Gestapo executed Franciszek Honiok, a 43-year-old unmarried Upper Silesian Catholic farmer, known for sympathising with the Poles. He had been arrested the previous day by the Gestapo and dressed to look like a saboteur, then rendered unconscious by an injection of drugs, then killed by gunshot wounds. Honiok was left dead at the scene so that he appeared to have been killed while attacking the station. His corpse was then presented to the police and press as proof of the attack.
17 days later, the Soviets attacked Poland from the east and by mid October Poland had ceased to exist as a sovereign entity and the world would not know peace for another 6 years.
The first German surrender was signed on May 7, 1945, when German Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl signed Germany’s surrender on all fronts in Reims, France. A second signing – insisted upon by Soviet Premier Josef Stalin – was by German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel the next day in Berlin.