Eighty years ago, on May 8, 1945, Nazi Germany capitulated, bringing the Second World War in Europe to an end. Paris had been liberated nine months earlier in August 1944, and almost all of France was no longer occupied by the Germans by the spring of 1945. But there were several "pockets" where German resistance held out, all of them port cities. Dunkirk, best known as the site of the remarkable evacuation of mostly British and French troops in the spring of 1940, was one of them. Left in ruins, the city was only liberated the day after the capitulation, the German soldiers having been ordered to hold out until the bitter end.