Defeat or Liberation? May 8, 1945, Again

Gert Krell

I have engaged in a controversy with a former colleague and old friend about May 8, 1945. I had sent him my lecture, which we posted on our blog, and he sent me a paper which he had presented to his students. He thinks my lecture is too radical, I consider his too mild.

My friend builds his paper around the tension between “defeat versus liberation”. Of course, great majorities in the countries conquered, oppressed, or devastated by the German armies and their allies felt and actually were liberated, as were the survivors in the camps. In Germany, however, in contrast to those in the camps, in the prisons, in hiding or in exile, the great majority rather felt defeated, even though most of them were glad that the war had finally come to an end. They feared for their future, their freedom, or even their lives. Many became prisoners of war, others went to gaol, millions had to leave their homes and flee, and yes, very many died. For the great majority who survived, everyday-life was extremely harsh.

But these were not the only reasons why the concept of liberation was rejected by most Germans at the time. Even though almost everybody accepted that the mass murder of the Jews had been a monstrous crime and the attack on Russia at least a “mistake”, and even though many were critical of Nazis bosses, less of Hitler himself, their identification with the regime and much of its ideology and practice had been so great that they felt disillusioned at best, not liberated.

So one would think that the gradual acceptance of the term, over years, even decades represented progress and a growing disassociation from the Nazi past. In fact, our Federal President Richard von Weizsaecker said as much in his speech at the Bundestag on May 8, 1985: “(…) with every day something became clearer, and this must be stated on behalf of all of us today: the 8th of May was a day of liberation. It liberated all of us from the inhumanity and tyranny of the National-socialist regime.” The old and the new Nazis did not like this speech at all and many conservatives had problems with it. Yet many Germans and many officials and common people among Germany’s allies and former enemies considered it one of the best speeches

Richard von Weizsaecker

ever given by a high-ranking German politician in the post-war years.

Well, use of the term liberation is neither unequivocal nor uniformly positive and Weizsaecker’s speech not as faultless as it may seem at first glance.
The Communists had quickly declared May 8, 1945 the “day of liberation of the German people from Hitler’s fascism”; in 1950 it became a public holiday in the German Democratic Republic. One of at least two bitter ironies in this was, of course, that they threw East Germany into another, although much less powerful dictatorship. The other was that they rejected any responsibility for the consequences of the Nazi regime and also denied the historical co-responsibility of the Soviet Union, the Communist International, and the German Communists for the destruction of the European order and German democracy between the wars. In 1975, the GDR even celebrated May 8 as the day of victory!

In his famous speech, Richard von Weizsaecker describes and analyzes (West) Germany’s moral, political, and historical place in the community of nations 40 years after May 8, 1945. The speech is well worded, very open, and very honest. (It is available in English under www.mediaculture-online.de/fileadmin/bibliothek/weizsaecker_speech_may85/
weizsaecker_speech_may 85.pdf). He strongly connects May 8, 1945 with January 30, 1933, i.e. the defeat and the burdens which it brought on the German people with Hitler’s regime, and he lists all the damages and suffering which it caused, including not only the suffering of Russians and Poles and the mass murder of the Jews but also – which is rarely done – of Sinti and Roma, of homosexuals, of handicapped children and adults. He calls for remembering the victims of the resistance in territories occupied “by us” and he honors the victims of the resistance within Germany, including the Communist resistance, rarely acknowledged officially in West Germany.

He also states very clearly that every German, even if he or she had not been involved in the Holocaust directly, could have seen what happened to the Jews. Whoever wanted to know could easily find out that trains were deporting people: “When the unspeakable truth of the Holocaust then became known at the end of the war, all too many of us claimed that they had not known anything about it or even suspected anything.” So Weizsaecker acknowledges that the elder generation had left a grave legacy to the majority of the Germans of 1985, who were born during or after the war: “All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and liable for it.”

There is much more which is valuable and important in Weizsaecker’s speech, but in a few places he was not honest enough or too timid, for whatever reasons. He says, for example, that Hitler made the entire German nation “a tool of (his) immeasurable hatred against our Jewish compatriots,” but that the genocide of the Jews, unparalleled in history, had been “in the hands of a few people”. He does call for everyone who directly experienced the Nazi era to “quietly ask himself about his involvement then”. The English translation is very generous here. Weizsaecker uses the term “Verstrickung”, which suggests much less agency than the term “involvement”; it might easily be translated as “becoming enmeshed in” or as “getting entangled or caught up in”.

Later in the speech, Weizsaecker says: “Along the road to disaster Hitler became the driving force. He wipped up and exploited mass hysteria. (…) The initiative for the war (…) came from Germany, not from the Soviet Union. It was Hitler who resorted to the use of force. (…) In the course of that war the Nazi regime tormented and defiled many nations.” So Hitler and the Nazi regime again become the central agents of the great European catastrophe. Where are the German elites, where the many rank and file who not only supported the regime but were its active participants? About half a million Germans alone had been involved, in different roles, in the murder of the Jews, and millions more in the German armies had fought a war of aggression, conquest, destruction and annihilation, particularly in the East. How could it be that “most Germans had believed that they were fighting and suffering for the good of their country”, as the Federal President says at the beginning. How could conquest, aggression, and war crimes have been regarded as a way of “fighting for the good of your country”?

Nowhere does Weizsaecker mention that too many of the active perpetrators had never been called to account for their deeds, or only in very limited ways. Too many of them had made easy fortunes again in the liberated Germany. Yes, of course we had been liberated on May 8, 1945, from a terrible regime and from the war. But liberation from Nazism in German hearts and minds took much, much longer, and it still has not been fully completed. And for many Germans, liberation became a way of liberating themselves from their responsibilities. Hitler and the Nazis had not come over Germany and fortunately been taken away again.

Toward the very end of his speech, Weizsaecker says: “We in the older generation owe to young people not the fulfilment of dreams but honesty. (…) We want to help them to accept historical truth soberly, not one-sidedly, without taking refuge in utopian doctrines, but also without moral arrogance. (…) let us face up as well as we can to the truth.” But how can I – without moral arrogance – begin to forgive my father for his involvement, if he never told me the complete truth about it? What he told me was only part of the truth, and what he told my half-brother was at least partly a cover-up. Weizsaecker spoke big and important truths; his speech was a huge step forward. But even he did not tell the complete truth. Perhaps he made a deliberate decision that it would be imprudent, even counterproductive, to address more of the taboos in the German debate about the Nazi era and May 8, 1945 than he already had.

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