VE Day is all about remembrance, not moral equivalence

The 75th anniversary of VE Day, Germany’s unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945, will not be marked by the intended procession down The Mall, the service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey, or the many other events planned for years until coronavirus made them too dangerous.

Thankfully, the virus will not stop all forms of celebration. The Queen’s broadcast is likely to be historic, since she and her younger sister, Margaret, appeared 75 years back on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with their parents. Later the princesses slipped away to join a mass of fellow teenagers and others, crazy with joy, packed around the Palace, knowing for the first time in years that they no longer needed to fear bombs and doodlebugs.

That VE Day comes so soon after the the popular hero of the Covid-19 crisis, Captain Tom Moore, turned 100 years old brings home the reality that ever fewer who fought in the Second World War are likely to be with us for future round number anniversaries. Not many years after that, there will be no one left who had even been born by 1945.

Will the passage of time make public remembrance of the Second World War outdated? Will new generations know only the most rudimentary things, or nothing at all about Churchill, the Battle of Britain and the Holocaust?

For a noisy lobby, the death of memory cannot come too soon. Its most effective assault weapons have been jokes and insults about an alleged British obsession with the War which, if the ridiculers are to be believed, is mentioned in almost every breath. Even Christmas Day, we are told, would not be complete for millions of British families without watching the umpteenth replay of a war film on TV.

The reason the British clutch so much more than others to re-enactments of the defeat of Hitler, again according to this version, is that 1939-45 was the last time Great Britain could claim to be great. Exhausted by the effort, the UK’s economy fell behind those of countries in Western Europe which had suffered far greater damage. Britain lost its empire. In 1962, the former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously remarked that a weakened Britain had “not yet found a role”. With brutal frankness he continued that “Britain’s attempt to play a separate power role — that is, a role apart  from Europe… this role is about played out.”

By this time, Britain had failed in its efforts to keep pace with the US in advanced technology. In 1952, Britain brought the world’s first commercial jet airliner into service, but the Comet suffered three disastrous crashes in the following months. Then the Blue Streak missile, built to deliver the UK’s nuclear deterrent, was abandoned in 1960, so that the Prime Minister , Harold Macmillan, had to go cap in hand to meet President Kennedy in Bermuda to ask for an American substitute. This was provided in the form of Polaris. The UK’s independent nuclear deterrent became less independent.  

Our domestic cynics warn, for instance this week in the Guardian , that “we don’t have to live on the borrowed symbolism of some imagined time.” We should resist nostalgia.

On top of the argument that the UK needs to abandon the great power pretensions underlying excessive memorialising of 1939-45, there are further typical arguments in favour of moving on. Britain needs to be modest about its own morality in view of its “ war crimes ” in carpet -bombing civilians in Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin and many other cities, especially Dresden.

Germany, it is said, deserves to be praised for recognising Hitler’s responsibility for the War and its attendant atrocities. Other countries need to recognise the profound changes for the better in Germany since 1945. They need also to appreciate that the 12 years of Nazi rule were an aberration. More attention needs to paid to the Germany of Bach, Beethoven and Meissen porcelain: less Goebbels and more Goethe. The former director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, argued passionately along these lines in a 30-part series on BBC Radio 4, aired in 2014 before he resigned his position to move to Berlin.

The premise of most of the critics of public remembrance ceremonies is that we would do well to learn from Germany in abandoning the nationalisms which led Europe to disaster. I cannot help feeling that — obviously with important exceptions — Germany has been considerably more nationalistic and Britain less so than many suppose when it comes to the politics and the practice of memory.

Some of the most respected German historians of Nazi rule peddled views for decades which, when examined closely, imply that nationalism has continued to trump objectivity. While they were living, I had revealing exchanges with two of the country’s most famous historians, Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Hans Mommsen. Though widely admired as a centre-left moderate, Mommsen argued that neither Hitler’s notorious speech of 30 January 1939, warning of the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe in the event of a war in Europe, nor the report of the Wannsee meeting concerning the “ final solution ” should be taken at face value. Using theoretical forms of analysis, such as the “functional” interpretation of the Holocaust, he frequently explained away the terrible events of those times.

In their cultural diplomacy, German politicians and civil servants have tended to operate at two levels. Praiseworthy and, we must presume, sincere acknowledgements that Germany was responsible for the Second World War have long become de rigeur. At the same time, German governmental and private bodies have worked avidly to block or to manipulate instruments of remembrance in the US and in Britain.

There are credible reports of the strong representations by German authorities against erecting the statue of Sir Arthur Harris that was unveiled by the Queen Mother outside St Clement Danes Church in 1992. A Washington Post reporter, Marc Fisher, published a book in 1995, revealing official but intentionally deniable German lobbying to influence the contents of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. According to Fisher, Chancellor Helmut Kohl “was very much opposed to the Holocaust Museum”.

Much as it may be denied, the bombing of Dresden on 13-15 February 1945 by the Royal Air Force and the United States Air Force has become a core element of the campaign to establish a degree of moral equivalenc e between Nazi Germany and the Allies. During the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh’s visit to Germany in 2015, the Queen used her speech at the state banquet with the then German President, Joachim Gauck, to give what appeared to be partial (but not full) acknowledgement of what may have been German demands. “Earlier this year my cousins visited Germany to mark with you, Mr President, more recent and painful anniversaries. The Duke of Kent visited Dresden and the Duke of Gloucester visited Bergen-Belsen. I myself shall visit Bergen-Belsen on Friday. These visits underline the complete reconciliation between our countries.”

Of the merits of reconciliation, there can be no reasonable doubt. Nor can we ignore the reality that the history and implications of the Second World War remain to a considerable extent contested. It would be extraordinary if one side had a wholly exemplary record. Neverheless, it is important to recognise that public perceptions of the Second World War are influenced by careful, often costly, back-stage governmental operations. As a scholar specialising in the study of “money in politics”, I am accustomed to inquiring who has paid the bill for international conferences, scholarships, professorships, cultural visits, grants, publications and the like.

Research suggests that Germany — and before 1990 each of its two states — were particularly active in making such soft power investments. As successor states to the Third Reich, they could not dare to exercise direct military muscle. But the power of the purse is weighty in the field of cultural affairs and memory diplomacy.

When I attended a meeting of European alumni of the prestigious Woodrow Wilson Center, I was surprised that though it took place in Krakow and in the very building occupied by Hans Frank when he headed the Nazi government of occupation of the area of Poland known as the General Government, though Auschwitz was close by, though the topic was reconciliation, the discussion was almost entirely about improving links between Germany and Poland. Of the Holocaust, there was nary a mention. The programme became less of a mystery when it was revealed that one of the German political foundations had been the principal funder of the gathering.

It is commonplace to remark that history is written by the victors. In the case of the Second World War, two related factors ensured that the reverse was, to a considerable extent, the case. Within days of VE Day, 8 May 1945, Churchill felt obliged to commission an internal study titled “Unthinkable” to investigate the likely outcome if Britain should choose to attack the Soviet Union. The Cold War began even before the German surrender. This gave a powerful Western incentive to be done with the International Criminal Tribunal at Nuremberg and to reconstruct the American, British and French zones of occupation as soon as possible into a prosperous sovereign state.

Connected with this, economic aid to West Germany and the country’s own industriousness produced rapid economic recovery. By the late 1950s, West Germany set about putting money into soft power projects. These included, but were not limited to, the operations of the largely publicly-funded “political foundations” (Stiftungen).

We must remain open to evidence, which may sometimes throw unfavourable light on aspects of our war record. At the same time, we must be aware of and robustly resist propaganda urging us to minimise the huge stakes in victory over Nazism. We need have no shame in remembering and passing memories on to younger generations of the titanic, necessary struggle of 1939-45.

Critics rightly have a free role in our society. This does not mean that we have to pay attention to them while we raise our glasses to celebrate and to be grateful to all those who sacrificed their lives to make VE Day possible.