in Europe was achieved on 7 May 1945. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April during the Battle of Berlin and Germany's surrender was authorised by his successor, Reichspräsident Karl Dönitz leader of the rump administration Flensburg Government. The act of military surrender was first signed at 02:41 on 7 May in SHAEF HQ at Reims, and a slightly modified document, considered the definitive German Instrument of Surrender, was signed on 8 May 1945 in Karlshorst, Berlin at 21:20 local time. Aftermath By the autumn of 1944, Paris and the northern part of France were in Allied hands following Normandy campaign, and the southern part of France was free in the wake of the success of Operation Dragoon. Except for a few Atlantic pockets, the Allies were in full control of France, freeing their military forces to push eastward across the Rhine into Germany and towards Berlin. Meanwhile, liberation of most of metropolitan France unleashed several other overlapping events. The Provisional Government, already in existence since June 1944, moved back to the capital after Paris was liberated in late August, where it piloted an orderly transition back to republican government. The Vichy regime held its last meeting on 17 August 1944, before fleeing into exile in Sigmaringen, Germany. Within France, a wave of assaults, extra-judicial executions, and public humiliations followed of suspected collaborators, particularly of women who had consorted with German men. This was known as the ("wild purge"). At least 20,000 French women had their heads shorn. Many women in Normandy reported rapes by American soldiers; several were subsequently executed. A series of legal purges followed, ordered by courts set up for the purpose. The first free municipal elections since before the war were organized by the Provisional Government in May 1945, and women voted for the first time. The new Constitution of the Fourth French Republic was accepted in October 1946. End of Vichy Under pressure from the advancing Allied forces, Pierre Laval held the last government council on 17 August 1944, with five ministers. With permission from the Germans, he attempted to call back the prior National Assembly with the goal of giving it power and thus impeding the communists and . He obtained the agreement of German ambassador Otto Abetz to bring Édouard Herriot, (President of the Chamber of Deputies) back to Paris. But ultra-collaborationists Marcel Déat and Fernand de Brinon protested to the Germans, who changed