VE Day marked with events across Northern Ireland
On Wednesday night, some landmark buildings in Belfast were lit up to mark VE Day, including Belfast City Hall in red, as well as Parliament Buildings in blue.
Belfast City Hall lit up in red on Wednesday night for the 80th Anniversary of VE Day (Rebecca Black/PA)
The City Hall hosted a tea party for celebrations on Thursday afternoon, as well as the Ulster Aviation Society's replica spitfire in its grounds.
Annie Cherry, 83, from the Shankill Road was among those taking part in the festivities.
'(Those that fought) gave us a better life and maybe a bit more happiness,' she said.
'One of my brother-in-laws was taken captive during the war, he was in a concentration camp, when he came home there was hardly any flesh on him, it must have been hard.'
Later on Thursday, beacons will be lit across a number of locations including Bangor, Newtownards, Lisburn, Armagh, Enniskillen, Coleraine, Londonderry and Coleraine to symbolise the light and hope that emerged from the darkness of war.
Today we honour the courage and sacrifice of all those who served in World War Two. And to veterans from Northern Ireland and beyond, we thank you for your service, your bravery and the part you played in securing peace and freedom. https://t.co/zpsR73mVm5
— Hilary Benn (@hilarybennmp) May 8, 2025
Mr Benn took part in a number of visits across the region.
He officially opened a special Second World War exhibition at Antrim Castle Gardens, before travelling to the Ulster Aviation Society, where he met veteran Fred Jennings.
He also visited the NI War Memorial Museum, which focuses on Northern Ireland's role in the Second World War and the impact that the war had on its people, and attended a Service of Remembrance at St Patrick's Church of Ireland Cathedral in Armagh.
Mr Benn said the cost of peace must never be forgotten.
'VE Day 80 is our opportunity to remember and to honour the extraordinary courage of that great generation of World War Two veterans,' he said.
'Today should remind us all that the cost of peace must never be forgotten.
'As we hear the stories of those who served and express our profound gratitude to them, let us remember that it was their sacrifice that enabled us to live in peace and freedom.'
Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly attended VE Day events in Lisburn, Co Antrim.
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Reuters
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Times
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This was part of a clandestine international campaign to try to suppress unflattering depictions of the Third Reich's war machine, which is detailed in a landmark historical study of the postwar West German government. It was an era in which Germans still widely believed in the myth of the 'clean Wehrmacht', which maintained that the Nazi military and its generals were mere soldiers doing their jobs and innocent of war crimes. Where atrocities had been committed, the theory held, the Nazi dictatorship and its 'party soldiers' in the SS were to blame. Later scholarship demonstrated conclusively that this was not the case: the Wehrmacht had in fact committed numerous war crimes on its own initiative, including the massacres of thousands of prisoners of war, the killing of tens of thousands of civilians and the rape of as many as ten million women. However, the West German state under Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor from 1949 to 1963, insisted on its innocence as a matter of policy. This was not just a political strategy to court the votes of millions of Wehrmacht veterans; it was also viewed as an essential part of the justification for West Germany's rearmament against the threat from the Soviet bloc from the early 1950s. • Secret files reveal the Nazis chosen to run West Germany In 1951 Adenauer had even persuaded Dwight Eisenhower, who had led the Allied assault on Nazi Germany and then became the supreme commander of Nato forces in Europe, to issue a statement absolving the 'great majority' of German soldiers. This belief was so entrenched that West German officials were outraged by postwar films that shed light on the Third Reich's crimes against humanity. 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In 1965 the embassy planted articles in the Staats-Zeitung und Herold, one of the biggest German-language newspapers in the US, that called on Americans with German roots to lodge protests with the broadcasters, the sponsors and their local congressmen. It explicitly called this a 'campaign … with the goal of curbing anti-German television broadcasts'. Not even WGBH, a worthy public broadcaster in Boston that relayed programmes from West Germany, was spared. The embassy criticised it for making an English-language version of a German documentary about everyday life in a concentration camp instead of picking up an 'excellent' television adaptation of Friedrich Schiller's play Don Carlos. 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He cabled to Bonn: 'There is scarcely any western country where the experience of the war has remained so alive as it has here. Britain had to fiercely defend its existence and mobilise the very last of its strength in two world wars.' Braun also found intriguing evidence that Britain might have meddled in the German media on at least one occasion. In the 1950s the Overseas News Agency, a New York-based entity that was secretly funded by what is now known as MI6, approached the BPA with a plan to plant positive articles about the history of soldiery, from Alexander the Great to the present day, in dozens of local newspapers. The BPA, which thought the idea fit with its own secret strategy of 'counter-infiltration', handed the agency 2,700 deutschmarks (a little over €8,000 in today's terms) to help it deliver the texts to 90 West German publications. 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The study is published in Das Kanzleramt: Bundesdeutsche Demokratie und NS Vergangenheit (The Chancellery: West German Democracy and the Nazi Past) by Jutta Braun, Nadine Freund, Christian Mentel and Gunnar Take
Reuters
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Russian parliament speaker to visit China, Vedomosti says
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