VE Day roundup

This Day in History:

The eighth of May spelled the day when German troops throughout Europe finally laid down their arms: In Prague, Germans surrendered to their Soviet antagonists, after the latter had lost more than 8,000 soldiers, and the Germans considerably more; in Copenhagen and Oslo; at Karlshorst, near Berlin; in northern Latvia; on the Channel Island of Sark--the German surrender was realized in a final cease-fire. More surrender documents were signed in Berlin and in eastern Germany.

The Guardian, May 8, 1945:

In Europe, a nightmare has lifted. What the world has been saved from, Belsen and Buchenwald show. Of the victors, the British Commonwealth alone has fought continuously from the first. That is our achievement; history will rank it high. But it is not a war to end war that we have won. That war begins when peace is declared: we lost it in the 20 years after 1918. Now our second chance is coming; let us learn from looking back how to seize and hold it firm.

But VE Day is not exclusively a British celebration, says Germany's ambassador to the UK.

"VE Day was the end of a very tragic and bloody war with enormous sacrifices and this anniversary is a way of honouring the dead and respecting this," Mr Matussek says. "Of course, it was the defeat of the German army on one hand, but it was also the defeat of Nazi oppression and forced us to start from scratch."

For most Germans, VE Day also marks the defeat of totalitarianism and the start of a long, painful reconstruction that would force a nation to confront its past on a daily basis. But many Germans who live and work in positions of influence in Britain today fear - like Mr Matussek - that Britons are still obsessed with Nazism, to the detriment of a truer knowledge of the "modern democracy" that Germany has become since World War Two.

In the Baltic states of Eastern Europe, VE Day marks the beginning of decades of Soviet oppression, as President Bush noted yesterday in Latvia.

Bush cited the U.S. role at the Yalta conference in 1945, which is widely seen as having paved the way for the Soviet Union to dominate not only the Baltic states but also Eastern Europe for nearly half a century. And to make the point that the United States owns up to "the injustices of our history," he reminded his audience -- and by extension Putin -- of the shameful heritage of American slavery and centuries of racial oppression.

"The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact," Bush said, linking it to British appeasement and Soviet deal-cutting with Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s. "Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history."

Bush has asked Vladimir Putin to disavow the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, but Putin refuses. The Russian leader also disputes the assertion that that the Soviet Union "occupied" the Baltic states.

"Our people not only defended their homeland, but also liberated 11 countries of Europe," Putin said Saturday at a ceremony to unveil a new World War II memorial in Moscow, according to the Interfax news service.

And in Russia on the 60th anniversary of VE Day, Stalin, Stalin is making a comeback.

Gradually in recent years the Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Russia, has become the substitute for a national sense of mission in a country that has gone astray on the way to modernization. The meaning of victory in that brutal war goes beyond commemoration of a glorious past; it has evolved into an important element in current politics and even into a vision for the future. And increasingly it has meant the return to public discourse of the man who led Russia through that brutal conflict: Joseph Stalin.

...

In the 1960s Alexander Galich, a Russian poet with a superb grasp of the Soviet mind-set, described a phantasmagorical nightly procession of discarded Stalin statues, whole figures or just limbs and fragments -- a boot, a mustache, a button -- marching together in procession, headed by a "bronze generalissimo." They disappear with the light of dawn but lie in hiding ready to make a glorious return when their time comes. That time may not be here, but Stalin will continue to haunt Russia until it finds its way onto the path to modernization.

Primary sources:

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Surrender of Germany Italy and Japan.