60 years can't erase memory of war in Europe

Their hair is silvery and sparse, their eyes ringed by old age, their faces crinkled by time and the wartime tale they tell is of upheaval, trauma, horror or glory.

Now in their 80s, Europe's World War II generation are fading away, but the conflict that shaped their lives and redrew the continent's map remains a toxic legacy.
For all the talk of a European sense of community, the mood on Victory in Europe (VE) Day, when the Third Reich capitulated on May 8, 1945 after the suicide of Adolf Hitler, will be mainly parochial and inward-looking.

From the Atlantic to the Urals and from the Baltic to the Balkans, nations will dwell on their shame, grief or valour as they struggle to assess their roles.

In some, resentment and jingoism will lurk below the surface.

"Sixty years on, the memories of war, Holocaust, gulag and occupation are still everywhere - not just in stone and concrete, but on television, in the newspapers, in conversation," says British historian Timothy Garton Ash.

These turbulent emotions will swirl at a ceremony in Moscow on May 9, which Russia celebrates as VE Day. Hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin and billed as the opportunity to turn the page, the commemoration will be attended with frank reluctance by many Eastern European leaders, who see it as a potential show of Russian nationalism and a rewriting of history.

For Russia, World War II is a simple but mighty epic.

It is a saga of heroic suffering, in which 27 million Russians were killed, of resolve and ultimately of triumph in the face of the Nazi peril.

Many Russians today, adrift after the collapse of the Soviet Union, see the "Great Patriotic War" as the high tide of national greatness and justification for Stalin's iron hand.

This black-and-white account causes seething resentment in Eastern Europe, for it leaves out the inconvenient fact of the Nazi-Soviet Pact - the 1939 deal between Hitler and Stalin under which Germany and the Soviet Union carved up Poland and allowed Moscow to annex Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Germany broke the treaty in 1941 and occupied the three Baltic states until the end of the war, when the Soviets again took control. Their domination continued until 1991.

The leaders of Estonia and Lithuania are snubbing the Moscow ceremonies, demanding that Putin use the anniversary to condemn the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Yalta conference of 1945, which gave the Soviet Union hegemony over Eastern Europe.

Polish President Aleksandar Kwasnieski and Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga have said they will attend the ceremonies, but urged Russia to give a reassessment of Soviet actions in their countries.

Britain, the only other European victor, seems to be locked in the same time-warp. Unlike Moscow, it has no historical skeletons rattling in the cupboard. But it shares the instinct to exult in World War II as an iconic national moment.

The conflict is a touchstone of history whose contact provides warm and fuzzy feelings - the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, Churchill, el-Alamein, the Normandy Landings are frequently trotted out to give a feel-good moment.

And a screening of the movie The Dambusters is a frequent TV ritual.

On May 8, a two-hour free show, entitled A Party to Remember, will take place in London's Trafalgar Square, the scenes of mass jubilation six decades earlier, and parades, street parties, commemorations and exhibitions around the country.

There is a clear downside to World War II nostalgia in Britain, for it can take a deviant form, becoming the vehicle for xenophobia. For the mass-circulation tabloids, it is almost as if 60 years had never passed and the European Union (EU), which has done so much to dampen vicious nationalism, had never been created.

"From Hitler Youth to Papa Ratzi" headlined the Sun after the German cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger, was elected Pope, quietly neglecting the fact that the new pontiff had been dragooned into the Nazi militia like almost every young German male of his generation.

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer laments the way the British media portrays his country. He denounces it as wildly inaccurate but also potentially harmful to relationships between people.

"If you want to learn how the traditional Prussian goosestep works, you have to watch British television because in Germany in the younger generation - even my generation - nobody knows how to perform it."

For the past 60 years, Germany has never stopped apologising for the war, and it has never shown any sign of wanting to shirk its historical responsibility.

Indeed, the war goaded the country into becoming a strong and resilient democracy, rooted in national humility.

"Germany has changed in a dramatic, positive way," says Fischer. "Today this is a democracy. Two or three generations have grown up as real democrats."

Many European countries, though, remain in an emotionally troubled grey zone.

Austria, for instance, was declared by the Allies to be a "victim" of Nazism, yet Austrians - of whom Hitler himself was one - were among the Third Reich's most enthusiastic and reliable members.

Italy, too, started out an ally of Germany but at the end was under German rule, thus enabling it to claim victim status in part and erase some of the need for atonement.

"If we look back at the 20th century, we see pages of history that we wish we could forget. But we cannot forget," says Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

In countries that were under Nazi occupation, painful memories linger of collaboration, of young men who eagerly volunteered for the SS, of settling of scores after the conflict, of Jews denounced to the Gestapo.

Only now, for instance, is France starting to come to terms with the traumatic treatment that was meted out to children born to women who had affairs with German troops.

Even countries that were neutral in the conflict are perturbed by the past. Ireland, its Government stuffed with Anglophobes, was the only country in the world to send a message of condolence to Germany after Hitler's death. Sweden made a fortune in selling iron ore to Germany. The Swiss banking industry connived in the Nazis' theft of Jewish assets.

The last shots of World War II were fired six decades ago, but the Battle of Memory endures.