Germans’ postwar attitude evolves from loss to liberation
BERLIN — When Chancellor Angela Merkel thanked the Allies for the D-Day invasion and the “liberation” of Germany in World War II, she might have raised some eyebrows internationally. To those at home, the statement was unremarkable.
There’s no denying that the machine guns and howitzers firing at the Allied forces landing in Normandy 75 years ago were manned by German soldiers. But over the decades, Germans’ attitudes toward the war have evolved from a sense of defeat to something far more complex.
While the leaders of France, Britain, the United States and Canada went to England to commemorate the troops’ sacrifice and duty on Wednesday, Merkel listened quietly. After the ceremony was over, she told reporters that she considered her invitation “a gift of history.”
When those other leaders went to Normandy for ceremonies on D-Day itself on Thursday, Merkel was back in Berlin, holding a regular meeting with governors and discussing bilateral relations with the prime minister of Kosovo.
As the generation that elected Adolf Hitler and fought his genocidal war dies away, most Germans today see World War II through the prism of guilt, responsibility and atonement. And almost all agree that the defeat of the Nazis was a good thing. That hasn’t always been the case.
Many Germans who survived World War II had supported Hitler and the Nazi race ideology that led to the murder of 6 million Jews in Europe — and they were devastated by the downfall of the Third Reich.
“After 1945, Germans first referred to the end of World War II as ‘collapse,’ ” said Johannes Tuchel, director of the German Resistance Memorial Center.
Their children, however, were faced with rebuilding the country from the ground up from the total defeat of the Nazis, and they saw potential rather than defeat.
“In the 1950s, it became ‘hour zero’ ” — a new beginning, Tuchel said.
After the country was back on its economic feet, younger Germans started to question their elders, culminating in the “1968 movement” in which students confronted their parents with the atrocities committed during the Third Reich.
Out of that era has grown today’s complex attitude.
“It has been a process to the point today where it is seen as Germany’s liberation from the Nazis by the Allied forces,” Tuchel said.
German leaders have largely followed the changing attitudes — and in some cases led them.
In 1985, then-West German President Richard von Weizsaecker called the Nazi defeat Germany’s “day of liberation” in a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the war’s end. His words were supported by most Germans, and to this day they are often cited by politicians and taught in schools.
Merkel praised his speech when he died in 2015, calling it “a necessary, clear statement that was significant for our German self-image.”
Another key moment came in 2004, when then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder marked the 60th anniversary of Col. Claus von Stauffenberg’s failed attempt to kill Hitler with a briefcase bomb. Schroeder called von Stauffenberg a hero — erasing the Nazis’ “traitor” label that had lingered after the war.
Merkel, who at 64 is the first chancellor born after World War II, has taken the new German self-image even further.
On Tuesday in Portsmouth, the embarkation point for the Allied force that invaded Nazi-occupied France in 1944, Merkel called D-Day a “unique, unprecedented military operation that eventually brought us in Germany the liberation from National Socialism,” the Nazi political movement.
She noted that the war’s end brought Germany’s rebirth as a leading European democracy, saying it was D-Day that set in motion the “reconciliation and unification of Europe, but also the entire postwar order that has brought us more than 70 years of peace.”