Holding balloons with the words: "Thank you" and "No to Nazis", some 5,000 people assembled before the Brandenburg Gate, a few hundred metres from Adolf Hitler's now-demolished bunker, to give thanks for liberation from Nazi rule.
"The overwhelming majority of Germans are against the Nazis," said Sigrid Schwarz, 62, from Hamburg, as rock stars, politicians, Jewish leaders and trade unionists came together under the slogan "day of democracy". "I was two when the war ended. I remember British soldiers putting sweets in my doll's pram. I'm still grateful," Mrs Schwarz said.
The event had been organised to distract attention from another demonstration nearby by neo-Nazis in Berlin's former communist east. In the end, though, only about 3,000 supporters of the far-right National Party of Germany turned up, amid a heavy police presence.
Elsewhere in Europe, the US president, George Bush, paid tribute to American lives lost in the second world war at a cemetery in the Netherlands.
In Paris, the French president, Jacques Chirac, laid flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe. Jets flew over the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, streaking the sky with red, white and blue smoke, the colours of the French flag.
Thousands of people also attended a ceremony in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria to mark its liberation in May 1945. It was the last big Nazi death camp to be freed at the end of the war.
In Moscow, Russian veterans gathered ahead of today's Red Army victory parade, which will be attended by about 50 world leaders, including Mr Bush and - in an unprecedented move - Germany's chancellor, Gerhard Schröder.
Speaking in Warsaw, Poland's prime minister, Marek Belka, said he hoped today's ceremony would "pay homage to all soldiers of the anti-Hitler coalition".
The crowds at the Brandenburg Gate, meanwhile, watched Germany's president, Horst Köhler, say that 60 years after the end of the war, it was impossible for Germany to "draw a line under its history".
In a speech to Germany's parliament, relayed on giant TV screens in front of the Brandenburg Gate, Mr Köhler said that Germans "looked back with shame and horror" at the war and the Holocaust. "We have the responsibility to keep alive the memory of all this suffering and of its causes, and we must ensure it never happens again," he said.
