By Shashi Malla
Three-Quarters of a century ago on May 8, 1945, the terrible guns of war finally fell silent – at least in the European theatre. The most devastating war waged by men against fellow men – World War II came to an end in Europe.
The war was mainly fought between the Axis Powers – Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan and the Western Allies – Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union.
The origin of World War II can be traced to the dictated ‘Peace’ Treaty of Versailles following World War I, when Imperial Germany was unfairly brought to its knees and economically shattered.
Right-wing forces slowly rose in Germany demanding an end to the crippling reparations and a just place in the comity of nations. The failure of the League of Nations – precursor of the United Nations – was also a major factor in the breakdown of peace.
The Austrian Adolf Hitler slowly rose to power in the then Weimar Republic. He secretly rearmed Germany and occupied the Rhineland in 1936, in contravention of the Versailles Peace Settlement.
This same year, the Italian fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, joined Hitler in the Berlin-Rome axis, and in 1937 Italy pledged support for the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan.
In the infamous 1938 Anschluss [now with a sinister connotation], Hitler annexed [German-speaking] Austria into the Third Reich [which had superseded the Weimar Republic], and in the same year invaded Czechoslovak Sudetenland with its sizable German majority.
Previously, Hitler had bulldozed British prime minister Neville Chamberlain into following a policy of appeasement and signing the egregious Munich Pact. Hitler also signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact with Joseph Stalin in August 1939.
This despicable Nazi-Communist collusion encouraged Hitler to invade the Polish Corridor and carve out Poland between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Stalin’s initial deplorable deal with Hitler would have devastating consequences for his own country.
The dead in this world war have been estimated at 15 million military. Another estimated 35 million civilians died, with some 6 million Jews perishing in Nazi concentration camps, in mass murders in Eastern Europe.
Germany Rises Again
The end of the war was an occasion to celebrate for the international anti-Hitler coalition. But for Germans it was indeed the end of the unending horror and terror of war – but there was no light at the end of the tunnel. Their country had been destroyed and then divided into four zones of occupation by the victorious powers – the Soviet zone in the east, the British in the north, the American in the south and the French in the south-west. “Defeat had been complete and overwhelming. It triggered emotions of guilt and shame” (DW/Deutsche Welle, May 5, 2020).
However, because of enlightened leadership, Germany like the legendary phoenix was ready to rise from the ashes. Just four years the new constitution or Basic Law for the emerging Federal Republic of Germany [FRG/West Germany].
Immediately after the war, Konrad Adenauer, the former mayor of Cologne emerged as the most outstanding leader. He became President of the Parliamentary Council, and co-founder and first leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). As the first chancellor of the FRG (1949-63), he presided over its reconstruction.
Adenauer worked relentlessly to reconcile Germany with its former enemies, especially France, and together with General Charles de Gaulle laid the foundation of German-French cooperation.
He had no faith in the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the Communist world, and was, therefore, a strong advocate of the policy of containmentin the Cold War.
Adenauer also rejected the notion that Germany be neutralized and adopt a position of non-alignment between the Western and Eastern ideological blocs.
Adenauer worked tirelessly for his country until the ripe age of 83 and was lovingly and respectfully titled “Der Alte” [‘the Elder’] by his fellow citizens. The British politician and historian Roy Jenkins designated him “the oldest statesman ever to function in elected office.”
Another of the framers of the [new] German constitution was Theodor Heuss, who had been a political journalist and lecturer at the Berlin College of Politics and a member of the Reichstag (lower house of the federal parliament) for the German Democratic Party (DDP) in the Weimar Republic. He had studied economics, history and political science in Munich and Berlin and received his doctorate from Munich.
He helped to found the Free Democratic Party (FDP/Liberals). His cordial nature contributed to the stabilization of democracy during the Wirtschaftswunder [economic miracle] years. Dr. Heuss must have been in a reflective mood as he looked back to the tumultuous years between the two world wars: “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” (DW).
Dr. Heuss was elected as West Germany’s first federal president in September 1949. Three years later he made a visit to the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp – a watershed moment in the history of the new republic. His words were momentous: “The Germans must never forget what was done by people of their nation during these shameful years,” he conceded as he contemplated Nazi Germany’s colossal crime of the Holocaust.
Sham Republic in the East
In the meantime, under the tutelage of their Soviet masters, the East German Communists had founded the so-called German Democratic Republic (GDR/DDR) in the eastern Soviet occupied zone.
The erstwhile capital Berlin was itself encircled by the GDR and also divided into four occupied zones.
In the post-war years, the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany was the leitmotiv in European geo-politics. Its political system based on totalitarian oppression was imposed on the whole of the Eastern or Soviet block, and an “Iron Curtain” descended separating it from the democratic West (Winston Churchill).
The GDR styled itself as a bulwark against fascism and imperialism, and its main enemies were the FRG, west of the Elbe river and the U.S. west of the Atlantic. On the 10th anniversary of the end of WW II, Walter Ulbright, the Communist leader railed against West Germany’s accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and accused its leaders of blocking Wiedervereinigung(reunification) with East Germany, “a peace-loving and democratic state” [!]
However, to keep their people from voting with their feet, i.e. escaping to the West, the East German Communist leaders with Soviet backing constructed the infamous Berlin Wall [German: ‘Berliner Mauer’] which physically and ideologically divided the city from 1961-89. The Communists called it ‘the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart’[!], whereas Willy Brandt condemned it as an offence against history and humanity.
Twenty-Two months after its erection, the charismatic U.S. President John F. Kennedy delivered perhaps the most famous anti-Communist speech near the Mauer, when he also declared to the world: “Ich bin ein Berliner” [I am from Berlin], underlining unwavering American support for West Germany, Re-unification and freedom in general.
West Germany Marches On
Undeterred by Soviet and East German threats, the resolute West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had forced through the FRG’s NATO membership to anchor Western trust in the fledgling democracy. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician argued forcefully 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” (DW).
Adenauer’s successor Ludwig Erhard,the architect ofGermany’sWirtschaftswunder[economic miracle]used the term ‘liberation’ in an allegorical sense of possible freedom in Communist states. He stated that if the defeat of Hitler’s Germany had [only] banished all injustice and tyranny from the world, then humanity would have reason enough “to celebrate 8th May as a memory to freedom”, implying that it was still a work in progress.
Social Democrats Take a New Turn
When the Social Democrats came to power under Willy Brandt, the former Governing Mayor of Berlin, they took a great leap forward and a new direction in West Germany’s relations with the Soviet block.
In 1970, the FRG signed reconciliation treaties with one-time enemies in war, the Soviet Union and Poland. This peaceful Ostpolitikwas the genesis of West Germany’s policy of détente. One year later, Brandt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Liberal Walter Scheel, who had served as Brandt’s foreign minister and was federal president from 1974 onwards, charted a decisive direction 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 substantiated at the 30th anniversary of the end of the war (DW). He also established that it was not in 1945 that Germany had lost its honour, but already in 1933, with Hitler’s seizure of power.
Four decades after the end of the war, Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU) was the first German statesman to speak explicitly of the “Day of Liberation”.In February 1985, he used this remarkable phrase in his “ Report on the State of the Nation in a Divided Germany,” and again on April 21 in the presence of US President Ronald Reagan on the 40th anniversary of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
President Reagan himself on March 8, 1983 referred to the USSR as an ‘Evil Empire’.
But it was another German head of state, Richard von Weizsaecker also in 1985 who made the greatest and most important statement on the revered theme of ‘liberation’ by making it all-inclusive: “It liberated us all from the inhuman system of violence and persecution that the Nazis established” (DW).
In contrast, meanwhile in East Germany, the Communist leader Erich Honecker insisted on highlighting the issues that divided East and West.
The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 finally led the two German states to a similar evaluation of the end of the war. For East Germans it was truly liberation and freedom. In the interregnum before formal reunification, East Germany’s only freely-elected premier Lothar de Maiziere stated that May 8 “will cast long shadows on the post-war history of the Germans.” He reminded his compatriots that they must learn “to live with this history honestly and sincerely, to be open to its admonishments and memories.”
His words were reminiscent of von Weizsaecker’s famous 1985 address: “Today, on May 8, let us as best we can, look truth straight in the eye.” The rest – as they say – is history.
The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com
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