From the DW:
“May 8, 1945: Total defeat or day
of liberation?”
The end of World War II was
followed by an ideological battle over guilt and responsibility. West Germany
was slower to face the challenge than communist East Germany with its state
policy of anti-fascism. On May 8, 1945 the guns finally fell silent. World War
II, started by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Third Reich in 1939, was over. The
unconditional surrender of Germany's armed forces, the Wehrmacht, brought to an
end the suffering of millions — initially, however, only in Europe because Nazi
Germany's ally, Japan, continued fighting and would only concede defeat in
August when the Americans had dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
For the international anti-Hitler
coalition — led by the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain and
France — May 8 was, despite all the suffering that had gone before, a day to
celebrate. That joy was not shared by most Germans. Their country had been
destroyed and then divided into four zones of occupation by the victorious
powers. Defeat had been complete and overwhelming. It triggered emotions of
guilt and shame. The Third Reich had set the terrible conflict in motion with
its invasion of Poland. Unprecedented crimes against humanity followed, above
all the systematic extermination of six million Jews. In the post-war years,
any sense of outrage over these crimes was still not enough for most Germans to
consider May 8 as a day of liberation — in contrast to the European countries
that German forces had occupied during the six years of war. Now the tables had
been turned: Germany defeated and occupied. An ideological war between the
communist Soviet Union and an alliance of democracies in the West began to take
hold, signaling the division of Germany and the division of Europe.
Theodor Heuss: 'We knew of these
things': On May 8, 1949, exactly four
years after the end of World War II, representatives of the country's political
parties gathered in the city of Bonn to enact a new constitution (Basic Law)
for the emerging Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany). The Free
Democrat Theodor Heuss (FDP) was in a reflective mood as he looked back on the
end of the war: "The fundamental fact is that for each of us May 8, 1945
remains the most tragic and questionable paradox of history. Why? Because we
were, at one and the same time, redeemed and annihilated." In September
1949, Heuss was elected as Germany's first federal president. Three years
later, his visit to the former Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp was seen as a
watershed moment. "The Germans must never forget what was done by people
of their nation during these shameful years," said West Germany's head of
state as he contemplated Germany's biggest crime — the Holocaust. And, Heuss
added, "We knew of these things."
A monument to the Red Army:
"The Liberator" : While senior
West German politicians struggled to come up with the right gestures, and the
right words, to describe the crimes committed in Germany's name, the German
Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) — founded on October 7, 1949 — had
adopted the occupying Soviet Union's state cult of anti-fascism. The most
visible manifestation of this development was the gigantic War Memorial and
Military Cemetery at Treptower Park for more than 5,000 war dead, inaugurated
on the fourth anniversary of the end of the conflict. At the heart of the
complex is a soldier cradling a small child in his arm while at the same time
crushing a Nazi swastika under the heel of his boot. With this monument,
towering 30 meters into the sky above, East Germany's leaders took a firm grip
on the imagery that would be employed to commemorate the end of the war.
"The Liberator," as the gigantic figure was called, embodied the
Soviet Union's triumph over Nazi Germany. Its political system, based on
violence and oppression, would be imposed on the whole of the Eastern Bloc by
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The
Soviet War Memorial in Berlin was built to commemorate the 80,000 Soviet
soldiers who died in WWII.
Walter Ulbricht attacks West
Germany's accession to NATO: East
Germany styled itself as a bulwark against fascism and imperialism. The
country's enemies were to be found west of the Elbe River and west of the
Atlantic: in West Germany and the USA. There was no forum for a critical
appraisal of Germany's responsibility for the horrors committed during the Nazi
era. Walter Ulbricht set the tone by, at the behest of the Soviets, imposing
the Zwangsvereinigung – the forced merger of the Communist Party (KPD) and the
Social Democratic Party (SPD) in East Germany to form the ruling Socialist Unity
Party (SED). Under his leadership, May 8 became the "Day of
Liberation," an annual ritual that East Germany instrumentalized for
propaganda purposes right through to the dying days of communism, with a focus
on current events or goals. Walter Ulbricht, for instance, used the 10th
anniversary of the end of the war to rail against West Germany's accession to
NATO. At a mass rally in East Berlin, attended by some 200,000 people, he
accused the West of blocking German reunification while East Germany, "a
peace-loving and democratic state," battled to bring the divided country
together.
Konrad Adenauer speaks of
"cleansing and transformation":
At the same time, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (CDU) spoke of
Germany's NATO membership — that he himself had forced through — as an
expression of trust in the fledgling democracy. In Paris, ten years after the
end of the war, the Christian Democrat politician argued that the German people
had paid with "boundless suffering" for the atrocities carried out in
their name by a fanaticized leadership: "In this suffering a cleansing and
transformation came to pass." To mark the 20th anniversary of the end of
the war, Adenauer‘s successor Ludwig Erhard (CDU) became the first high-ranking
politician in the West to use the word "liberation." However, he used
it to refer to curbs on freedom in communist states. If the defeat of Hitler's
Germany had banished all injustice and tyranny from the world, then humanity
would have reason enough, he said, "to celebrate 8th May as a memorial to
freedom."
Willy Brandt praises women,
refugees and displaced people: It was
to be another five years before the political elite in West Germany really
began to re-think their position on the end of the war. In 1970, under the
first social democrat chancellor, Willy Brandt, the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties
were signed. It was reconciliation with one-time enemies in war, the Soviet
Union and Poland, and milestones in what became known as the policy of détente.
It would lead, one year later, to the social democrat being awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize. In his speech marking the 8th of May Willy Brandt did not actually
use the word "liberation"but was at pains to recognize and
commemorate the role of women, refugees and displaced people in the rebuilding
of Germany. He was especially effusive in his praise for "our fellow
Germans in the GDR." They had, as he put it, in the face of great
adversity not of their own choosing, "achieved successes that they can be
proud of and which we must fully respect."
Helmut Kohl talks twice of a
"Day of Liberation": Under
Willy Brandt's former foreign minister Walter Scheel (FDP), who served as
federal president from 1974, there was a decisive change in West Germany's
approach to the meaning of May 8, 1945: "We were liberated from a terrible
yoke. From war, murder, subjugation and barbarity," he said on the 30th
anniversary of the end of the war: "But we have not forgotten that this
liberation came from outside. That we, the Germans, were not capable of shaking
off this yoke ourselves." The head of state pointed out that it was not in
1945 that Germany had lost its honor, but far earlier: in 1933, with Hitler's
seizure of power. Another federal president came to a remarkably similar
conclusion in 1985: the Christian Democrat Richard von Weizsäcker. His address
four decades after the end of the war is generally seen as the greatest and
most important on this theme. Intriguingly, he was far from being the first
person to speak explicitly of a "Day of Liberation." Chancellor
Helmut Kohl (CDU) used the same language in that same year — twice. Initially
in February in his "Report on the State of the Nation in a Divided Germany"
and then on April 21 in the presence of US President Ronald Reagan on the 40th
anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.
Richard von Weizsäcker:
"Look truth straight in the eye":
What makes von Weizsäcker's speech so special it that when he refers to
May 8, 1945 as a "Day of Liberation" nobody is excluded: "It
liberated us all from the inhuman system of violence and persecution that the
Nazis established." In East Germany, meanwhile, leader Erich Honecker
insisted on highlighting the things that divided East and West. He said the
liberation from Hitler and his fascist system gave the German people the
opportunity to build their lives on a wholly new foundation, and "We used
this opportunity." The two German states did not manage to arrive at a
similar evaluation of the end of the war until after the fall of the Berlin
Wall on November 9, 1989. For just a couple of months, East Germany was
governed by the country's only freely-elected prime minister: Lothar de
Maizière (CDU). On the 45th anniversary of the end of the war in 1990, he told
a gathering of the World Jewish Congress in Berlin that May 8 "will cast
long shadows on the post-war history of the Germans" while at the same
time demonstrating their "inability to mourn." He said the Germans
must learn, "to live with this history honestly and sincerely, to be open
to its admonishments and memories." De Maizière's words are reminiscent of
von Weizsäcker's in his famous 1985 address: "Today, on May 8, let us as
best we can, look truth straight in the eye."
^ Nazi Germany and the German
people were defeated (not liberated) by the Americans, the British, the
Canadians, the Soviets and many others in May 1945. West Germany and East
Germany tried to spin their own re-written history to make themselves feel
better about what their Fathers and they themselves did during the war and to
meet their political ideology. Reunited Germany has tried to re-write the
country’s history to portray what their Great-Grandfathers, their Grandfathers
and their Fathers did during the war and to make all Germans the victims rather
than the ones who planned, started, carried-out and covered-up the mass murder
and the war itself. I was in Germany for the 50th Anniversary of the
end of World War 2 and remember how the Germans really played that victim-mentality
up. It was disgusting to see and hear. The only victims in Germany are those
that were discriminated against by the Nazi Party (Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses,
Homosexuals, the Disabled etc.) and those that actively tried to end the war
and stop what the Nazis were doing (The
White Rose, etc.) Every other German who lived during the 1933-1945 Nazi era is just as guilty as those that pushed people
into the gas chambers, bomb cities or shot people in the back. 75 years after
1945 does not change that fact. ^
https://www.dw.com/en/may-8-1945-total-defeat-or-day-of-liberation/a-53340869
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