Seventy years ago today, Germany’s surrender to the Allies took effect, marking the formal end of World War II in Europe.

Or did it?

Americans, Brits, and the French mark the date of the Allied Victory in Europe (V-E Day) on May 8; Russians celebrate the occasion on May 9. It’s not just a time-zone difference, but a tale of two cities, two documents, a few missing sentences, and about 75 minutes.

Rumors of a German surrender had begun to circulate in late April 1945, when the Associated Press filed what proved to be an erroneous report announcing that the Germans had capitulated during a peace conference in San Francisco. But it was clear by then that the German offensive was unravelling. Adolf Hitler killed himself in his bunker on April 30, 1945; in the days that followed, his successor Karl Doenitz oversaw a series of ceasefires. “German divisions were surrendering across Europe,” David Kiley wrote in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes on Thursday. “Allied units were liberating concentration camps. German-run radio stations were reporting that the Wehrmacht was smashed.”

On May 7, General Alfred Jodl, the chief of staff to the German army, arrived in Reims, France with Doenitz’s authorization to surrender. Kiley’s father, Staff Sergeant Charles Kiley, was in the room as a reporter for Stars and Stripes when the German general signed the document. “The surrender was signed in five minutes in the war room at Supreme Headquarters here, 55 miles east of Compiegne Forest where Germany surrendered to the Allies in the last war, November 11, 1918, and the scene of the capitulation of France to the Third Reich in this war June 21, 1940,” Charles Kiley wrote. The surrender was intended to take effect the following day, May 8, 1945, at 11:01 p.m. Central European Time.

“There were no dramatics during the surrender,” Kiley reported, noting that Jodl was “erect and expressionless, his uniform neat, his boots highly polished” and his face “impassive” as he signed.