75 years ago today Parisians awoke as free people for the first time in since 1940.

75 years ago yesterday, August 25, 1944, Nazi forces, which had held the city for four years surrendered.

French General Charles De Gaulle announced the liberation.

At the time, Paris was on the brink of starvation, some 43,000 Parisian Jews, about half the city’s Jewish community, had been deported to concentration camps, where an estimated 34,000 were murdered.

It would be another nine months before German forces surrendered, ending the second world war.