tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/topics/ve-day-16763/articles
VE Day – The Conversation
2022-04-29T11:37:23Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/182107
2022-04-29T11:37:23Z
2022-04-29T11:37:23Z
Russia: Victory Day 2022 and why commemoration of the end of WWII matters today
<p>Even in the darkest days of the pandemic in 2020 Russia didn’t cancel <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-53152725">Victory Day</a>, its anniversary of the end of the second world war – it was just postponed. This year, the Kremlin <a href="https://rg.ru/2022/04/27/kak-v-rossii-i-mire-provedut-9-maia.html?ysclid=l2i3kuqer3">promises a parade</a> on May 9 with 11,000 servicemen and women plus 62 airplanes and 15 helicopters. Eight MiG-29s will form the letter Z, the symbol adopted by supporters of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. </p>
<p>For the 2022 ceremony in Moscow’s Red Square the Kremlin is desperate to have a victory from the Ukraine war to announce. <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/international/3270471-what-is-russias-victory-day-and-what-might-it-mean-for-ukraine/">Commentators suggest</a> that the recent military reorientation towards Ukraine’s Donbas region was driven by a May 9 deadline. More worrying, <a href="https://static.rusi.org/special-report-202204-operation-z-web.pdf">some fear that</a> if that victory proves elusive, the day might instead be used as a “<a href="https://static.rusi.org/special-report-202204-operation-z-web.pdf">fulcrum</a>” for a wider mobilisation of forces. </p>
<p>But why is this anniversary such a powerful force in Russian politics? During the worst days of the second world war, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was conspicuously absent from his country’s media. The cult that had been constructed around him in the 1930s seemed to have been abandoned. But then came victory in Europe, celebrated on May 9, a day after VE Day (fighting stopped a day <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/victory-in-europe">later in Russia</a>). On a radio broadcast on May 9 1945 Stalin announced: </p>
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<p>Glory to our heroic Red Army, which upheld the independence of our Motherland and won victory over the enemy! Glory to our great people, the people victorious! Eternal glory to the heroes who fell in the struggle against the enemy and gave their <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1945/05/09v.htm">lives for</a> the freedom and happiness of our people!</p>
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<p>In the weeks that followed, the first demobilised soldiers returned home. In cities across the Soviet Union, activists organised <a href="https://eprints.ncl.ac.uk/162595">receptions</a>: banners, flowers, portraits of Stalin, throngs of happy citizens celebrating the end of war, and paying tribute to the soldiers.</p>
<p>The story of how those war veterans were treated – and their war commemorated – has been rather complex. In 1945, with the economy in ruins, and the Soviet people injured, grieving and traumatised, remembering the war was <a href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1947-2/veterans-return/">painful and potentially divisive</a>. It took at least two decades for war remembrance to emerge as a core component of Soviet – and later Russian – patriotism. </p>
<p>After the happy homecomings, life was often hard for <a href="https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199237562.001.0001/acprof-9780199237562-chapter-3">veterans in the late 1940s</a>. Promises were <a href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1947-2/veterans-return/demobilization-order/">made to them</a> – a free ticket home, a job waiting, a new suit of clothing and footwear, monetary recompense for their service, financial help building or repairing homes – but the reality fell drastically short. Many veterans, especially those who had been injured in the war, found themselves homeless and jobless. Veterans became buskers, fortune tellers and beggars. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-recap-donbas-braces-for-a-knife-fight-181370">Ukraine recap: Donbas braces for a 'knife fight'</a>
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</em>
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<p>One group of workers wrote directly to Stalin to complain about the state’s failure to provide for the veterans. <a href="https://lib.memo.ru/book/3695?">They told him</a>: “We don’t want to see our heroes – our victorious warriors – standing in queues, trading at the market, living from hand to mouth, but instead fully provided for materially, well-dressed (preferably in a special uniform), living in light apartments and with the highest weekly allowances and privileges that our possibly [sic] in our great Soviet country.” In December 1947, only two years after it was launched, May 9 was downgraded: no longer a state holiday, it became a regular working day again.</p>
<p>Under Stalin, victory in the war was celebrated primarily in terms of his own genius as leader. The 1949 film <a href="https://sovietmoviesonline.com/drama/padenie-berlina">Fall of Berlin</a> conceived as a gift to Stalin for his 70th birthday was the climax of this post-war leader cult. In a tremendous finale Stalin, clad all in white arrives in Berlin to oversee the soldiers’ joyous celebrations; the hero-soldier and his love interest are reunited, but almost immediately she turns to Stalin and asks <em>him</em> for a kiss, gushing gratitude for all he had done for the people. </p>
<p>After Stalin died in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev began to dismantle many aspects of the <a href="https://digital.library.pitt.edu/collection/stalinka-digital-library-staliniana">Stalin cult</a>, including his reputation as a great military leader. In his famous “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/26/russia.theobserver">secret speech</a>” of 1956, Khrushchev <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/1956/02/24.htm">ridiculed Stalin</a> and his leadership. Films made in this period of political and cultural thaw turned the spotlight away from Stalin and began to probe the experiences of a generation that suffered so much. Soviet filmmaker<a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001789/"> Andrei Tarkovsky</a>’s 1962 <a href="https://sovietmoviesonline.com/drama/ivanovo-detstvo">Ivan’s Childhood</a> is perhaps the most powerful of these.</p>
<p>It was not until the mid-1960s that the Soviet Union began to actively celebrate the second world war once more. In 1965, May 9 became a national holiday again. Two years later a new tomb of the unknown soldier was unveiled by the Soviet leader <a href="https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/resource/cold-war-history/leonid-illyich-brezhnev">Leonid Brezhnev</a>. The desperate poverty people had experienced in the immediate aftermath of war had eased, and the veterans – now moving into middle and old age – were made into heroes. Each May 9, veterans would visit local schools, recount their experiences, and be presented with bouquets of flowers. Historian <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Living-Dead-Rise-World-Russia/dp/0465071597/ref=sr_1_1?crid=34JLH5OZ8B97A&keywords=nina+tumarkin+living+dead&qid=1651232784&sprefix=nina+tumarkin+living+dead%2Caps%2C44&sr=8-1">Nina Tumarkin</a> writes: </p>
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<p>“From 1965 on, the Great Patriotic War continued its transformation from a national trauma of monumental proportions into a sacrosanct cluster of heroic exploits that had once and for all proven the superiority of communism over capitalism.”</p>
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<p>What would happen to this patriotic celebration of the war once communism fell was not at all clear. In the 1990s, it seemed as if Russia’s memory politics might go in a number of <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8306.00303?casa_token=712gS3jQiSAAAAAA:H1ncKk0SucqZW0MR6MEFXfvIu7Df_GrIAG3GTBmL53SRnqHfu6rn48o60TuoUnqY0knHTc3KTIoOlg">different directions</a>. What kind of national identity would post-Soviet Russia embrace, and how would history be used in its construction? Since 2000, Putin has developed a clear direction: his brand of Russian nationalism is primarily an imperial one and he has called the disintegration of the Soviet Union a “<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-rues-soviet-collapse-demise-historical-russia-2021-12-12/">major humanitarian tragedy</a>”. </p>
<p>For Putin, not all of Soviet history is attractive, however. The violent regime change of 1917 was not a centenary he was inclined to celebrate, for example. In contrast, the end of the second world war continues to serve him well. The year 1945 can be commemorated as the moment when Moscow’s global reach was at its greatest, while the veterans – few of whom are still alive – can be celebrated for their patriotic self-sacrifice and discipline. Another young generation are now being asked to do the same.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/182107/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Miriam J Dobson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Russia’s annual Victory Day parade is being seen as a symbol of how well the Ukraine war is going.
Miriam J Dobson, Reader in Modern History, University of Sheffield
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/138840
2020-05-19T14:27:17Z
2020-05-19T14:27:17Z
Colonial amnesia and Germany’s efforts to achieve ‘internal liberation’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/336018/original/file-20200519-152292-nulqys.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Protesters in Berlin demand that the 1904-1908 mass killings in Namibia be recognised as the first genocide committed by Germany.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Supplied/Courtesy of Joachim Zeller</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Speaking at the 75th commemoration of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/08/european-leaders-mark-heroics-of-war-generation-after-75-years">VE (Victory in Europe) Day</a>, German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier <a href="https://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Reden/2020/05/200508-75-Jahre-Ende-WKII-Englisch.pdf?__blob=publicationFile">said</a> it was a day of liberation “imposed from outside”, by Allied military forces, including the Soviets. But as he stated, “internal liberation”, the coming to terms with the heritage of dictatorship and above all the horrific mass crimes, remained “a long and painful process”.</p>
<p>In 1985 the West German head of state, Richard von Weizsäcker, for the first time used the term “liberation” for the <a href="https://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Reden/2015/02/150202-RvW-Rede-8-Mai-1985-englisch.pdf?__blob=publicationFile">unconditional surrender of German troops</a> that marked the end of the second world war in Europe. This sparked considerable protest and controversy, a sign that even as late as the mid-1980s, Germany was having difficulty coming to terms with its past.</p>
<p>Steinmeier’s more consistent plea to “accept our historic responsibility” met broad consensus. “Internal liberation” had come some way – leaving aside comparatively weak statements by the <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/afd-what-you-need-to-know-about-germanys-far-right-party/a-37208199">right-wing Alternative für Deutschland</a>.</p>
<p>The culture of remembrance, concerning also dire aspects of the past, that’s been engendered in Germany is viewed by many as exemplary. But it nevertheless has some grave shortcomings. Notably, the remembrance of <a href="https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/auschwitz">Auschwitz</a> as a substantial part of German state rationale has come about through a halting and conflicting process. For all its merits, still, by virtually singling out the Shoah (the genocide of the Jews in Europe), it marginalises and disregards other mass crimes of the Nazi period. </p>
<p>As recalled during the VE-Day anniversary, such elision from memory includes over 30 million victims of the war against the Soviet Union and the occupation of eastern territories in what are today Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, Moldavia, Poland and the Baltic states. This blank spot relates to an ingrained culture in Germany of discrimination against Slavic people and refuses to acknowledge the crimes perpetrated by the millions of <a href="https://www.neues-deutschland.de/artikel/1136440.ns-zeit-die-wehrmacht-warrs-auch.html?sstr=Hannes%7CHeer">ordinary German soldiers</a>.</p>
<p>Another glaring lacuna concerns Germany’s past as a colonial power. This period lasted from <a href="https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/German_colonial_empire">1884 to 1919</a>. Despite the relatively short duration, this experience had a great impact on Germany’s violent trajectory during the first half of the 20th century. Since 1945, however, this history has been largely forgotten.</p>
<p>Today many Germans are not even aware that their country once ruled colonies in Africa, Oceania and China. Such public amnesia about <a href="https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/Standpunkte/Standpunkte_9-2018.pdf">Germany’s colonial past</a> does not imply only a lack of knowledge. Rather it manifests in the refusal to acknowledge the practice of German colonialism and countenance the consequences. </p>
<p>A prominent case is the <a href="https://theconversation.com/has-the-relationship-between-namibia-and-germany-sunk-to-a-new-low-121329">genocide of 1904-1908 in then South West Africa</a>. Germany admitted the fact in 2015. But bilateral negotiations with Namibia <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14623528.2020.1750823">have not yet reached any result</a>.</p>
<h2>Selective amnesia</h2>
<p>Complacency about German culture of remembrance tends to isolate the Shoah as the mainstay of canonised public memory. There was a period when the entire field of comparative genocide studies was scrutinised as undermining the singularity of the Shoah. American political scientist and historian <a href="https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/fr/document/genocide-theory-search-knowledge-and-quest-meaning.html">Henry Huttenbach</a> pointed to the imbalance</p>
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<p>that the Holocaust became the paradigm for all genocides by default.</p>
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<p>This also eroded the vital call of “Never Again” by the survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp <a href="https://www.blurb.com/b/828859-never-again-buchenwald">in 1945</a>. If comparison is tabooed, the Holocaust cannot stand as a warning that organised mass extinction might yet be repeated. </p>
<p>But, unfortunately, we have to stand guard against the very real possibility of current and future cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.</p>
<p>The persistent lack of awareness was shown once again in a mid-2019 foreign ministry <a href="https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/blob/2298392/633d49372b71cb6fafd36c1f064c102c/transitional-justice-data.pdf">position paper on transitional justice</a>. It “advocates a comprehensive understanding of confronting past injustices” and refers to “reparations and compensation for National Socialist injustices”. It suggests that</p>
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<p>Germany can provide information about basic requirements, problems and mechanisms for the development of state and civil-society reparation efforts.</p>
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<p>Strikingly, however, the term “colonialism” does not feature even once in the 32 pages.</p>
<p>Rather, German diplomacy is seen as aggressively keeping things apart. This attitude is self-congratulatory and discriminating at one and the same time. </p>
<h2>Namibian genocide</h2>
<p>The issue was epitomised when Ruprecht Polenz, the German special envoy in the negotiations with the Namibian government about the consequences of the genocide, met a delegation of Namibian descendants of genocide survivors in 2016. They challenged him for not being part of the negotiations. They pointed out that Germany had negotiated with other non-state agencies, such as <a href="https://www.bpb.de/apuz/162883/wiedergutmachung-in-deutschland-19451990-ein-ueberblick?p=all">the Jewish Claims Conference</a>.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/336022/original/file-20200519-152284-f31qfv.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/336022/original/file-20200519-152284-f31qfv.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/336022/original/file-20200519-152284-f31qfv.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/336022/original/file-20200519-152284-f31qfv.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/336022/original/file-20200519-152284-f31qfv.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/336022/original/file-20200519-152284-f31qfv.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/336022/original/file-20200519-152284-f31qfv.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Graves of forced labourers from a concentration in Lüderitz, Namibia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reinhart Kössler</span></span>
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<p>Polenz stressed that it was inappropriate to draw comparisons in cases such as genocide. But at the same time he pointed out that the Holocaust was qualitatively different from the genocide in Namibia. The meeting exploded in protest by the Namibian delegates – and <a href="http://genocide-namibia.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/PRESS-RELEASE-NOV-2016.pdf">a walkout</a>. They saw disrespect in belittling what happened to their ancestors as well as discriminating against them as Africans.</p>
<p>Already in 2001, Namibia’s foreign minister, Theo-Ben Gurirab, commented at the <a href="https://nhri.ohchr.org/EN/Themes/Racial/Pages/2001-World-Conference-Against-Racism.aspx">World Conference Against Racism</a> on the lack of a German apology to Namibians in contradistinction to Europeans. He concluded that if there was a problem in apologising because Namibians were black, <a href="http://www.freiburg-postkolonial.de/Seiten/melber-reconciliation2006.htm">that would be racist</a>.</p>
<h2>The challenges of ‘internal liberation’</h2>
<p>German memory politics and practices are not quite as exemplary as the Foreign Office would like to make us believe. In fact, the engagement with the violent past particularly of the first half of the 20th century is an ongoing and painful as well as conflictual process. Inasmuch as this process has been seen to consecutively encompass crimes and victim groups that had been silenced before, such an observation can only underline the magnitude of the task.</p>
<p>The urgency of addressing such challenge emerges from revisionist efforts, spearheaded by the Alternative für Deutschland. The group’s honorary chairman, Alexander Gauland, infamously termed Nazi rule as “bird’s shit” in comparison to <a href="https://www.afdbundestag.de/wortlaut-der-umstrittenen-passage-der-rede-von-alexander-gauland/">Germany’s “successful” history</a>.</p>
<p>The party has drawn up a parliamentary draft resolution calling for a positive reassessment of <a href="https://dipbt.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/19/157/1915784.pdf">colonialism’s modernising achievements</a>. It makes explicit reference to a 2018 statement by the personal representative of the <a href="https://africasacountry.com/2019/01/a-technocratic-reformulation-of-colonialism">German Chancellor for Africa</a>. He maintained that German colonialism contributed to liberate the African continent from archaic structures.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/surviving-genocide-a-voice-from-colonial-namibia-at-the-turn-of-the-last-century-130546">Surviving genocide: a voice from colonial Namibia at the turn of the last century</a>
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<p>These developments show that there are limits to Germany’s accomplishment of coming to terms with its violent past. This was also reflected in the vigorous objection by German officials to <a href="https://wiser.wits.ac.za/users/achille-mbembe">Achille Mbembe</a>, the Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist, being invited as keynote speaker at this year’s Ruhrtriennale, a renowned cultural festival. He had been asked to address the issue of <a href="https://presse.ruhrtriennale.de/pressreleases/ruhrtriennale-2020-beschliesst-die-zwischenzeit-mit-internationalem-programm-2983369">“Reparation”</a>.</p>
<p>A deputy of the Liberal Party in the <a href="https://fdp.fraktion.nrw/sites/default/files/uploads/2020/03/25/offenerbrieflorenzdeutschanstefaniecarpwegenachillembembe-ruhrtriennale2020.pdf">North Rhine Westphalia Diet</a> alleged that Mbembe had refuted Israel’s right to exist as a state, and had “relativised” the Holocaust by comparing the practices of separation under apartheid with the Palestinian situation. The federal government’s antisemitism commissioner <a href="https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/german-antisemitism-commissioner-rejects-bds-academic-at-festival-624577">joined this
protest</a>.</p>
<p>This intervention sparked a controversy that stands as a warning that the postcolonial situation of Germany is very much at stake. By reducing the conflict to issues of antisemitism, it has been trapped in the pitfalls of colonial amnesia. But inner liberation remains hard work. It means conflict and pain, and it must never end.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/138840/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Henning Melber has been a member of SWAPO since 1974.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Reinhart Kössler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The culture of remembrance in Germany is viewed by many as exemplary. But it has some grave shortcomings.
Henning Melber, Extraordinary Professor, Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria
Reinhart Kössler, Professor in Political Science, University of Freiburg
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/137717
2020-05-08T10:00:16Z
2020-05-08T10:00:16Z
Post-war reconstruction involved taxing richest – it could be a model for building a low carbon economy
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333354/original/file-20200507-49589-1mf1hsi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4167%2C3362&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/seamless-pattern-red-poppy-flowers-1023842122">Maria_Galybina/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Amid the worst public health crisis in a generation, an economic disaster is brewing. Experts predict the fallout from COVID-19 could cause a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52566030">historic downturn</a>. Meanwhile, <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/04/28/1910114117">a recent study</a> indicated that more than 3 billion people can expect to live in places with <a href="https://theconversation.com/will-three-billion-people-really-live-in-temperatures-as-hot-as-the-sahara-by-2070-137776">“near unliveable” temperatures by 2070</a>. In order to create <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/05/green-stimulus-can-repair-global-economy-and-climate-study-says">long lasting prosperity</a>, the post-pandemic recovery will also need to <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52547885">tackle the climate crisis</a>.</p>
<p>It will take <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/9e832c8a-8961-11ea-a109-483c62d17528">government investment</a> to accelerate a green transformation of the economy, so that energy, heating and transport systems can reach net-zero emissions as soon as possible. So how could some of that money be raised?</p>
<p>A recent example from France shows exactly how not to do it. A fuel tax hike by Emmanuel Macron’s government – intended to nudge people to use less petrol, diesel and heating oil – <a href="https://theconversation.com/emmanuel-macrons-carbon-tax-sparked-gilets-jaunes-protests-but-popular-climate-policy-is-possible-108437">sparked widespread protests</a> throughout 2018 and 2019. The gilets jaunes (or “yellow vests”) movement tapped into discontent about the rising cost of living, but also a deep resentment that the public were having to shoulder the cost of decarbonisation.</p>
<p>If ordinary people, who have been <a href="https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/14821">hit hard</a> by the pandemic – and have <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51906530">relatively small carbon footprints</a> – are expected to cough up to fund a green economic stimulus, the programme is unlikely to be <a href="https://theconversation.com/with-the-right-guiding-principles-carbon-taxes-can-work-109328">popular</a>. But <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/ve-day-16763">75 years on</a> from the UK’s last great recovery effort, it’s worth remembering how Britain pulled together in the past.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333335/original/file-20200507-49565-1db2szl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333335/original/file-20200507-49565-1db2szl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333335/original/file-20200507-49565-1db2szl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333335/original/file-20200507-49565-1db2szl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333335/original/file-20200507-49565-1db2szl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333335/original/file-20200507-49565-1db2szl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333335/original/file-20200507-49565-1db2szl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The gilets jaunes protests were sparked by a carbon tax that hit poorer consumers hardest.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/paris-france-1st-december-2018-demonstrators-1246504660">Alexandros Michailidis/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Why should the richest contribute more?</h2>
<p>The UK’s millionaires and billionaires <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Carbon-Inequality-The-Role-of-the-Richest-in-Climate-Change/Kenner/p/book/9780815399223">hold more responsibility</a> for climate change as a result of their lifestyles and investments. <a href="http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ChancelPiketty2015.pdf">One study</a> estimated that the average greenhouse gas emissions per person of the richest 1% in the UK is equivalent to around 147 tonnes of CO₂, compared to an average of four tonnes for someone in the poorest 10%. One of the reasons that the rich have larger carbon footprints is because they <a href="https://theconversation.com/these-celebrities-cause-10-000-times-more-carbon-emissions-from-flying-than-the-average-person-123886">fly further and more often</a> than the average person. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/these-celebrities-cause-10-000-times-more-carbon-emissions-from-flying-than-the-average-person-123886">These celebrities cause 10,000 times more carbon emissions from flying than the average person</a>
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<p>The richest 1% also invest their wealth in companies whose operations are highly polluting. I created a <a href="http://whygreeneconomy.org/the-polluter-elite-database/">database</a> where I calculated the greenhouse gas emissions connected to the shares held by senior executives and directors at major oil, gas and mining companies. Since I pioneered this methodology, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/green">Bloomberg Green</a>’s work has helped identify the world’s ten richest billionaires whose fortunes help fuel climate change. Warren Buffet – the world’s fourth richest man – owns Berkshire Hathaway, a conglomerate that <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-emissions-billionaires/?srnd=green">holds shares</a> in several airlines and energy utilities. According to Bloomberg Green’s analysis, Buffett’s conglomerate “was directly and indirectly responsible for 189 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2018”. That’s the same as burning 21 billion gallons of gasoline, or fully charging 24 trillion smartphones.</p>
<p>The UK has a history of making the richest contribute more at a time of national crisis. To fund the war effort and post-war reconstruction after 1945, the UK government <a href="https://election2017.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn25.pdf">raised taxes</a> on income, inheritance and <a href="https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1940/apr/23/purchase-tax">luxury goods</a>, like motor cars. In many ways, carbon inequality was <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Elite-Mobilities-1st-Edition/Birtchnell-Caletrio/p/book/9780415655804">even more pronounced</a> in the early part of the 20th century, as only the richest could afford cars. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333330/original/file-20200507-49542-o4xcxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333330/original/file-20200507-49542-o4xcxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333330/original/file-20200507-49542-o4xcxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333330/original/file-20200507-49542-o4xcxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333330/original/file-20200507-49542-o4xcxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333330/original/file-20200507-49542-o4xcxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333330/original/file-20200507-49542-o4xcxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Car ownership once indicated significant wealth and prestige.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/137713221@N04/24115960511/in/album-72157658692036094/">Crownbrook/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The top marginal income tax rate went up from 75% in 1938 <a href="http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014TechnicalAppendix.pdf">to 98%</a> in 1941, and it stayed at this level until 1952, only dropping below 89% in 1978. The top inheritance tax rate went up from 50% in 1938 <a href="http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014TechnicalAppendix.pdf">to 65%</a> during the war, and it increased to 80% between 1949 and 1968. With that, Britain built a welfare state and the NHS.</p>
<p>In 2020, income tax on those earning over £150,000 <a href="https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/882269/Table-a2.pdf">is 45%</a>, while inheritance tax <a href="https://www.gov.uk/inheritance-tax">is set at 40%</a>. Since millions of working people have been pushed <a href="https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/about-us/how-citizens-advice-works/media/press-releases/millions-facing-financial-cliff-edge-when-coronavirus-protections-end2/">into unemployment and debt</a> by the pandemic, they should be the first to get help. </p>
<h2>A bailout for workers</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://theconversation.com/oil-price-futures-markets-warn-it-wont-recover-after-coronavirus-137556">global collapse in demand for oil</a> has <a href="https://www.energyvoice.com/oilandgas/north-sea/237706/up-to-30k-oil-industry-jobs-could-be-wiped-out-due-to-covid-19-energy-sector-impact-oguk-report-warns/">cost thousands of people their jobs</a> in the North Sea oil and gas sector. Around <a href="https://oilandgasuk.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/OGUK-Business-Outlook-2020-Security-of-Supply.pdf">270,000 people</a> depend on this industry – that’s a lot of people facing an uncertain future. But their skills could be redeployed for better purposes.</p>
<p>Starting in the 1970s, the UK government enabled the extraction of oil and gas in the North Sea through massive incentives and investment, and it continues to incentivise extraction through tax breaks. The same could be done for offshore wind energy, which is already well established.</p>
<p>The transferable skills that most workers in the North Sea oil and gas supply chains already have can be used to make the UK a global powerhouse for <a href="https://foe.scot/resource/sea-change-climate-report/">offshore wind energy</a>. For those with specialist skills, retraining could be provided.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333334/original/file-20200507-49569-u3pgt9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333334/original/file-20200507-49569-u3pgt9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333334/original/file-20200507-49569-u3pgt9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333334/original/file-20200507-49569-u3pgt9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333334/original/file-20200507-49569-u3pgt9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333334/original/file-20200507-49569-u3pgt9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333334/original/file-20200507-49569-u3pgt9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The future of energy in the North Sea?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/wind-farm-north-sea-on-coast-1091969441">Riekelt Hakvoort/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Raising income and inheritance taxes on the richest who have most responsibility for climate change could raise revenue to secure the livelihoods of oil and gas workers, and their grandchildren, by addressing climate change. Just as those with the broadest shoulders were asked to make their contribution to the war effort, so should the wealthiest help communities get back on their feet today.</p>
<p>Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said the pandemic is a national crisis on a par with <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/17/coronavirus-blitz-spirit-uks-sanctions-compare-second-world/">the Second World War</a>. In 2020, people are celebrating the anniversary of VE day during another hour of need. Just as it did 75 years ago, the government should ask those with more resources – and the largest carbon footprints – to contribute more to the country’s green reconstruction.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137717/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dario Kenner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Just as it did 75 years ago, the UK government has a chance to build back better from a crisis.
Dario Kenner, Visiting Fellow, Anglia Ruskin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/138138
2020-05-07T15:41:53Z
2020-05-07T15:41:53Z
When Dame Vera Lynn said ‘we’ll meet again’ to me – the incredible enduring appeal of a British wartime legend
<p>“We will meet again,” the Queen declared in an <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-52174772/the-queen-s-coronavirus-address-we-will-meet-again">April 5 Coronavirus address</a> the UK. Suddenly, a line the British people indelibly associate with the second world war was in the news again. The monarch’s reassurance to people separated from loved ones by lockdown struck a chord. </p>
<p>The phrase will reverberate again in the UK on the 75th anniversary of VE Day, when the country marks the end of the conflict. After the Queen makes another address at 9pm, Britons will be <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/ve-day-dame-vera-lynn-singalong-well-meet-again-lyrics-a9496291.html">invited to sing We’ll Meet Again</a>, the song made famous by the original “Forces’ Sweetheart”, Dame Vera Lynn, who is now 103 years old. </p>
<p>In August 2005, I <a href="http://interlitq.org/glasgowvoices/kate_mcloughlin/job.php">interviewed Dame Vera</a>. As a university lecturer specialising in war literature, I was fascinated by the way that she was relentlessly dragged back to the past (the second world war) and under equally relentless demand to sing a song about the future. A courteous handwritten reply came back to my request for an interview, inviting me to her home in Ditchling, East Sussex. As I drove, the weather was bright and I smiled to myself at the thought that I was going to meet Dame Vera on a “sunny day”.</p>
<p>Born in 1917, Vera Lynn began singing at the age of seven in the clubs of east London. She grew from child star to professional crooner, featuring on records with dance-band leaders Joe Loss and Charlie Kunz and making her first radio broadcast in 1935. In 1937 she became a vocalist with British bandleader Bert Ambrose and his orchestra. By 1939, Lynn was a well-known stage and radio performer on the verge of a solo career. It was then that she came across the song that was to make her a national icon.</p>
<h2>Forging the connection</h2>
<p>Lynn discovered We’ll Meet Again in the autumn of 1939. It was the work of the well-established London-based songwriters Ross Parker and Hugh Charles, with Charles providing the lyrics for Parker’s melody. Lynn first sang it (along with You Can’t Black Out The Moon) that autumn on tour with the Ambrose Orchestra. </p>
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<p>Though today We’ll Meet Again is inseparable from the second world war in most people’s minds in the UK, it was actually Lynn who forged the connection, turning a song about absence in any situation into a classic expression of wartime optimism. Lynn was broadcast singing the song throughout the war and its message of hope and resilience lifted national morale. </p>
<p>As she wrote later in her 1975 memoir, Vocal Refrain: “Ordinary English people don’t, on the whole, find it easy to expose their feelings even to those closest to them.” We’ll Meet Again would go “at least a little way towards doing it for them”. </p>
<p>In later years, the song, with its reminders of home and exhortations of courage, has become an indispensable part of national commemorations. And, with its swooping and strangely haunting melody, it has entered into popular culture. It forms an ironic accompaniment to the explosion of atom bombs in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964); it is deployed with alienating effect in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68V0CPrtCyg">Pink Floyd song Vera</a> (The Wall, 1982); and it provides the eerie aural backdrop to the Tower of Terror ride in Walt Disney World, California. </p>
<p>But when Lynn began singing it at the age of 22, she had little idea that she would be singing it for the rest of her life.</p>
<h2>Memories of war</h2>
<p>On that August day in 2005 it was an 88-year-old Dame Vera Lynn who opened the door to me: elegant, striking, perfectly made up. She welcomed me warmly and went off to make tea. I sat in her large sitting-room. There were photographs everywhere, family intermingled with the great and the good. There was Dame Vera at Buckingham Palace and there she was with … was it really Bing Crosby?</p>
<p>Dame Vera came back with the tea and we began to talk. Knowing myself what it was like to become immersed in the second world war, I asked if she ever got tired of talking about it. Never, she replied – how could she when so many young men had given their lives in it?</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333432/original/file-20200507-49579-50yh16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333432/original/file-20200507-49579-50yh16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=809&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333432/original/file-20200507-49579-50yh16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=809&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333432/original/file-20200507-49579-50yh16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=809&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333432/original/file-20200507-49579-50yh16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1017&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333432/original/file-20200507-49579-50yh16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1017&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333432/original/file-20200507-49579-50yh16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1017&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Vera Lynn Visits a Munitions Factory in 1941.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Lynn#/media/File:Vera_Lynn_Visits_a_Munitions_Factory,_UK,_1941_P551.jpg">Wikimedia/Imperial War Museum</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I was itching to hear her sing it, but I knew that she had stopped performing publicly and was too shy to suggest it to her. But what if <em>I</em> sang it to her? No singer, I launched myself into it and to my joyous amazement, she joined in. </p>
<p>I finished my list of questions and put my notebook away. Dame Vera sighed with relief. “Shall we have another cup of tea and now have a proper chat?” she asked. And so it was that we began to talk freely. I have no notes of this part of the conversation but details stand out in my memory. </p>
<p>How she felt like a personal family representative when she visited British servicemen in hospital in what was then Burma. How the heat made her lipstick run. How she spent her clothes coupons on a tight-fitting pink chiffon dress. How important it was to look attractive to wounded soldiers who hadn’t seen their womenfolk for months, even years. </p>
<p>It was over all too quickly. We said goodbye on the doorstep. “Perhaps…” I began, tentatively, “… we’ll meet again some sunny day”, sang Dame Vera, quick as a flash.</p>
<p>Most likely, I won’t meet her again. But, as the Queen understood, what keeps us going in times of war and pandemic is the thought that we will be reunited with our loved ones, when the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/138138/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kate McLoughlin receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust. </span></em></p>
Popularised during the second world war, the song has found new resonance during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Kate McLoughlin, Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/137726
2020-05-07T12:58:12Z
2020-05-07T12:58:12Z
VE Day: ‘memory war’ continues between Europe and Russia even under lockdown
<p>How happy the Austrians will be that the Bleiburg commemorations <a href="https://balkaninsight.com/2020/04/21/croatias-controversial-bleiburg-commemoration-cancelled-due-to-pandemic/">won’t be happening in 2020</a>. Each year, groups of Croatians normally gather at Bleiburg in Carinthia to remember the tens of thousands of Nazi-supporting <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14623528.2010.508273?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=cjgr20">Ustaša fighters</a> murdered in Austria by Yugoslavian partisans at the end of the war in Austria. The Carinthian authorities, embarrassed by this show of far-right nationalism, have so far been unable to stop the commemorations. Until the advent of the coronavirus. </p>
<p>The German chancellor Angela Merkel, meanwhile, who <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/merkel-wont-attend-moscow-wwii-victory-day-parade/a-18307917">skipped the May 9 Moscow victory parade in 2015</a> in symbolic protest at the Russian annexation of Crimea, must surely be relieved that she hasn’t had to formally decline Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invitation to the May 9 military parade in Moscow in 2020 – because that won’t be happening either. It all eases the diplomatic stress. </p>
<p>One might hope, then, that the scaling down or cancelling of end-of-war commemorations might have a salutary effect by giving pause for thought. Unfortunately, there is little room for optimism.</p>
<p>For years now, historical arguments have been raging throughout Europe, with the fault lines often running between <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/memory-wars-polish-and-russian-fight-over-world-war-ii-shifts-to-auschwitz/30386948.html">Russia and other eastern European countries</a> such as <a href="https://icds.ee/russias-memory-wars-poland-and-the-forthcoming-75th-victory-day/">Poland</a> and the Baltic states, or the Czech Republic. They centre on whether or not the Soviet Union should be seen in these countries as a liberator from Nazism, or as the oppressive bringer of communism. </p>
<p>The Red Army was of course both – but while Putin’s view of history focuses on liberation, the view in Poland and elsewhere in eastern Europe focuses on oppression. </p>
<p>The Hitler-Stalin Pact has also become a bone of contention: Poland argues that Stalin was as much to blame as Hitler for starting the second world war, while Putin blames the west’s appeasement of Hitler, and, in December 2019, accused Poland’s envoy to Nazi Germany in 1939, Józef Lipski, of being an “<a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/12/25/putin-calls-former-polish-ambassador-anti-semitic-pig-a68739">antisemitic pig</a>”.</p>
<p>The European Union didn’t help matters when it passed a resolution in 2019 effectively supporting the Polish position on the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Putin’s history war with eastern Europe is now firmly one with western Europe, too. </p>
<h2>Liberation and oppression</h2>
<p>When the Cold War ended in 1989, the EU attempted to create a European memory around the Holocaust, but encountered resistance from some eastern European member states reluctant to confront the memory of the extent to which they had collaborated. Now the EU has swung round to centering its memory on totalitarianism: Hitler and Stalin. Most European countries can agree on that. But not Putin.</p>
<p>These disputes have been playing out for years – and memorials and commemorative events have been a key battleground. There are few signs that the current commemorative lull imposed by lockdown is going to change this. </p>
<p>The diplomatic spat between Russia and the Czech Republic over the removal of a <a href="https://theconversation.com/soviet-war-memorials-in-eastern-europe-continue-to-strain-relations-with-russia-101687">statue of Ivan Konev</a> is still rumbling on. Konev led the Red Army troops that liberated Prague in 1945, but he is remembered by many Czechs for his brutal role in suppressing the Prague Spring. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333350/original/file-20200507-49556-zgckvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333350/original/file-20200507-49556-zgckvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333350/original/file-20200507-49556-zgckvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333350/original/file-20200507-49556-zgckvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333350/original/file-20200507-49556-zgckvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333350/original/file-20200507-49556-zgckvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333350/original/file-20200507-49556-zgckvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333350/original/file-20200507-49556-zgckvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The statue to Marshall Konev in Prague being dismantled, April 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gampe via Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Prague took down the statue <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/10/russia-opens-criminal-case-after-czech-officials-remove-soviet-statue">in early April</a>, whereupon – according to the most extraordinary rumour – a Russian intelligence operative was apparently flown to Prague to <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52455223">poison the city’s mayor</a>. While he was reportedly put under police protection along with two other Prague politicians critical of Russia, at the time of writing the Russians and Czechs are bickering over what to do with the statue. </p>
<p>When Berlin’s mayor Michael Müller invited representatives of Russia and Ukraine to a small-scale commemoration of the liberation of Berlin on May 2, Ukraine’s ambassador in Berlin, Andrij Melnyk, described the idea as his “<a href="https://www.unian.info/politics/ukraine-envoy-turns-down-berlin-mayor-s-invitation-to-ww2-memorial-event-over-russian-ambassador-10981871.html">worst nightmare</a>”. The event went ahead without him.</p>
<h2>Shifting sentiment</h2>
<p>International commemoration reflects and possibly intensifies present-day tensions rather than defusing them. As long as eastern Europe feels threatened by Russia, there will be no agreement on what “liberation” in 1945 meant. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333353/original/file-20200507-49589-anuse4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333353/original/file-20200507-49589-anuse4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333353/original/file-20200507-49589-anuse4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333353/original/file-20200507-49589-anuse4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333353/original/file-20200507-49589-anuse4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333353/original/file-20200507-49589-anuse4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333353/original/file-20200507-49589-anuse4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=465&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Victory Day celebration in Moscow, May 9 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kremlin.ru</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There are signs, too, that shifting end-of-war commemoration to a later date, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52311934">such as September 2020</a>, because of the pandemic will merely cause new problems. Putin recently decided to commemorate the end of the war against Japan on <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-signs-bill-marking-end-of-wwii-september-3/30574608.html">September 3</a> (the day China commemorates it) rather than on September 2 (when the US marks the occasion). He may decide to turn any belated May 9 event into a demonstration of improving Sino-Russian relations in face of Trump’s anti-Chinese stance.</p>
<p>The pandemic has led some countries to remember the end of the war within a purely national framework, but this is leading to self-indulgence. German newspapers are currently full of articles about German suffering at the end of the war – far more so than was the case in 2015, during the 70th anniversary. </p>
<p>In Britain, for purposes of commemoration, homes are being re-imagined as <a href="https://inews.co.uk/news/ve-day-commemorations-2020-well-meet-again-dame-vera-lynn-prince-charles-2553284">private-public interfaces</a>, with citizens being encouraged to engage in doorstep singalongs and make their own flags. Evoking the community spirit during lockdown is commendable. I feel less happy about the British Legion’s “<a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8289421/Mark-VE-Day-75-putting-Tommy-Window-RBLI-campaign-support-veterans.html">Tommy in the Window</a>” campaign: I doubt Commonwealth soldiers will feel embraced by the term “Tommy” (which refers to the fictitious archetypal English soldier, “Tommy Atkins”) – or even the Scots, Irish and Welsh. </p>
<p>Whether on the international or national stage, jingoism is often the bane of commemoration.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137726/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>WIlliam Niven does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
There’s a widening split over rival interpretations of the end of the second world war and its aftermath.
WIlliam Niven, Professor in Contemporary German History, Nottingham Trent University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/137911
2020-05-07T07:42:17Z
2020-05-07T07:42:17Z
VE Day and coronavirus: this time, let’s not forget the efforts of migrants and ethnic minorities
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333104/original/file-20200506-49546-6xtuiz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C11%2C2496%2C1646&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Joy to the world: but especially for white British people, apparently.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Piranhi via Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>During the second world war, millions of people arrived in Britain from all over the world, including occupied Europe. They kept essential industries going as war workers, served in the armed forces, worked at the BBC and nursed the sick. Britain’s war effort was <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/mixing-it-9780198735762?cc=us&lang=en&#">multinational and multiracial</a> – just like the effort to save people’s lives and keep essential work going <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/19/foreign-nhs-workers-coronavirus-frontline-nhs-surcharge">during the coronavirus pandemic</a>. </p>
<p>As I discovered during my research, the migrants and minorities involved in this effort were <a href="https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/2305">celebrated in the British wartime media</a>. But when the war was over, the focus shifted to a national story – to the war fought by the British: their courage and resolve, their finest hour, their victory. The presence of Americans in Britain is widely known, but not the bigger picture of large-scale wartime movements to Britain from all parts of the British empire and Europe. </p>
<p>Dunkirk is a name that resonates in British memories, but not the multinational evacuations from ports in western France in 1940 which brought Belgian, Czech, French and Polish troops to Britain, nor the multinational ships involved. Six European armies in exile were stationed in Britain from 1940: Belgian, French, Czechoslovakian, Dutch, Norwegian and Polish. </p>
<p>The escape of prisoners from the Stalag Luft III camp in latterday western Poland is well known from the classic movie The Great Escape. But who would guess from the movie that the 50 airmen murdered by the Gestapo after their recapture included people from eight European countries and four nations of the British empire. Before capture, most had been serving with the RAF. One of them, Porokuru Pohe, was the first Maori in the force. </p>
<p>In 1939, when he applied to join the Royal New Zealand Air Force, he was asked whether he was “of pure European descent” and wrote no but enlisted later after the rule was suspended. Who now remembers that, when the war began, British subjects who did not fit this racial category were barred from service in the armed forces in Britain? Or that this rule applied across the British commonwealth – in Australia and Canada as well as in New Zealand.</p>
<p>During the coronavirus pandemic, the multiethnic, multinational, multiracial NHS has been <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/03/uk-doctors-coronavirus-deaths-highlight-crucial-role-bame-medics">very evident</a>. So too all the other people applauded during the weekly clapping ceremony – including those who empty dustbins, work on public transport, deliver post, food and other goods or work in social and domiciliary care. This is for many a rare, joyful moment – coming together to clap, bang saucepans, whistle and whoop, creating a clamorous cacophony. </p>
<p>Many of those applauded, who risk their lives, are on <a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-shows-key-workers-need-better-pay-and-protection-heres-what-has-to-change-137037">minimum wages or zero-hour contracts</a>. Are people who oppose immigration aware that they are clapping immigrants and their descendants? It is surely the first time in Britain that their work has been celebrated with whoops and cheers.</p>
<h2>Thank you and goodbye</h2>
<p>If the second world war is anything to go by, these celebrations will not last long. Already, in wartime, the government had made plans for black troops and war workers from the empire to be demobbed back home so that they did not settle in Britain when the war was over. </p>
<p>Post-war government planning included the deportation of Chinese seamen who had served in the wartime merchant navy. In 1946, <a href="http://www.halfandhalf.org.uk/dr.htm">1362 Chinese seamen were duly repatriated</a>. Most British-born wives, partners and children of Chinese seamen who were repatriated and deported never saw them again.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333113/original/file-20200506-49584-ssni0u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333113/original/file-20200506-49584-ssni0u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333113/original/file-20200506-49584-ssni0u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333113/original/file-20200506-49584-ssni0u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333113/original/file-20200506-49584-ssni0u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333113/original/file-20200506-49584-ssni0u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333113/original/file-20200506-49584-ssni0u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Battle of Britain Memorial in Dover includes the names of many Polish airmen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many who stayed on, or returned to Britain, remember a change of climate in the aftermath of war – one that was more hostile and in which their wartime contributions were forgotten. Poles fought in the Battle of Britain but when the war was over, walls near Polish Air Force stations were daubed with “Poles Go Home” and “England for the English”. </p>
<p>Renee Webb, who served as an airman – first in Jamaica and then in Britain – remembers: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I was terribly concerned at that time that people should have forgotten so easily … I mean of the many questions that were asked of me, one of the main ones was: ‘When are you going back?‘ </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the 21st century, under the “hostile environment” policy, many men and women from the Caribbean were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/mar/19/lambs-to-the-slaughter-50-lives-ruined-by-the-windrush-scandal">told by the UK government to go back</a>. Some were sacked from jobs in the NHS. Others who were detained, threatened with deportation, or charged for NHS treatment had arrived in Britain as children to join mothers who were working as NHS nurses.</p>
<p>The British Medical Association recently reported that 64% of Black, Asian and ethnic minority (BAME) doctors have felt <a href="https://www.bma.org.uk/news-and-opinion/bame-doctors-hit-worse-by-lack-of-ppe">pressured to work with inadequate personal protective equipment</a> compared to 33% of white doctors. One of the reasons why so many BAME people working in the NHS have <a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-is-hitting-bame-communities-hard-on-every-front-136327">died during the coronavirus crisis</a> may be a fear of losing jobs, and being reluctant to speak out about their lack of protective equipment as a result.</p>
<p>How historians will write about coronavirus times is a question that is sometimes raised. Will this history be written and remembered as a multinational, multi-ethnic, multiracial effort to save lives in Britain?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137911/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Wendy Webster receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council</span></em></p>
Just like now, Britain’s war effort depended on the sacrifice of migrants and minorities. But this was soon forgotten.
Wendy Webster, Professor of Modern Cultural History, University of Huddersfield
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/137938
2020-05-06T14:26:52Z
2020-05-06T14:26:52Z
VE Day: victory celebrations hid fear of an uncertain future for many Britons
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333050/original/file-20200506-49579-1g4hf7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C6%2C2048%2C1450&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Jubilation in London as Britain rolled out the barrel to celebrate victory in Europe.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Imperial War Museum</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The popular image of VE Day is as familiar to the British people even today as Spitfires over Kent or Winston Churchill glowering into the camera. Huge crowds dancing in the streets, people climbing lamp posts, wading in the fountains in Trafalgar Square and everyone waving flags. There were Union Jacks, Stars and Stripes, even French Tricolours – ribbons in red, white and blue were available off the ration for the occasion, though some spivs made a killing by selling it at vastly inflated prices. </p>
<p>The songs of VE Day are familiar too, if only as period pieces: Knees Up Mother Brown, Bless ‘Em All, the Hokey Cokey and Roll Out the Barrel, played on this occasion by a young Humphrey Lyttelton on his trumpet while being pushed along on a handcart.</p>
<p>After six years of having put up with rationing, shortages, blackouts, bombing and the ever-present fear of death – either your own or of someone you loved – suddenly the British people let their hair down in spectacular fashion. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NEavcsrMoMw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>They crowded to Buckingham Palace and demanded to see the king; they cheered Churchill to the skies as he saluted them with his famous V for Victory sign – and they did so secure in the knowledge that, not only had they survived the war, but they had won it and, moreover, they had been right to win it.</p>
<h2>Victory in a ‘just war’</h2>
<p>The weeks leading up to the German surrender in Europe had brought an unexpected shock as allied armies overran Germany’s concentration camps. The notorious killing centres of Auschwitz and Majdanek were uncovered by the Russians, but the Americans were horrified by what they found in Dachau and Buchenwald; and the British, who had a film crew and a BBC reporter with them, by the horrific scenes they encountered in Belsen.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-bergen-belsens-1945-liberation-is-ingrained-in-british-memory-39956">Why Bergen-Belsen's 1945 liberation is ingrained in British memory</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The footage from Belsen was shown in cinemas and caused widespread revulsion: some people left in tears and there was anger when some well-meaning cinema managers tried to soften its impact by following it with a Donald Duck cartoon. But this shocking evidence of the true nature of Nazi rule merely served to underline that – in this war at any rate – Britain had undoubtedly been on the right side. It’s a message that has been repeated and stressed ever since.</p>
<p>This image of victory in a just war is important because, inevitably, the current pandemic, like every other crisis Britain has gone through since 1945, has been <a href="https://theconversation.com/breaking-news-world-war-ii-is-over-britain-is-a-european-country-56047">compared to the war</a>. With the queen’s channelling of Vera Lynn at the <a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-how-europes-monarchs-stepped-up-as-their-nations-faced-the-crisis-136057">close of her televised address</a>, and Boris Johnson, himself a biographer of Churchill, calling on us all to show the same resolution as the wartime generation, it is inevitable that people still facing a deadly enemy should seek solace in the heroic memory of VE Day, a simpler time, when our leaders were giants and right and wrong were easy to know.</p>
<h2>End of empire</h2>
<p>But, of course, it was nothing like so simple. VE Day marked the end, not the summit, of British military power: the patriotic exuberance of the day could not hide the fact that the war had been won by American and Soviet military muscle: even Churchill’s day was over - he would be <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/politics97/background/pastelec/ge45.shtml">voted out of office</a> only a few weeks later. </p>
<p>The German surrender tried to divide the allies: a partial one to Britain’s General Bernard Montgomery followed by a <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/germany-surrenders-unconditionally-to-the-allies-at-reims">full surrender to his US counterpart Dwight Eisenhower</a>, and only then – with great reluctance – to the Russians. This foreshadowed the new global divisions of the cold war, in which Britain would play only a secondary role. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333057/original/file-20200506-49546-eyoec1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333057/original/file-20200506-49546-eyoec1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333057/original/file-20200506-49546-eyoec1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333057/original/file-20200506-49546-eyoec1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333057/original/file-20200506-49546-eyoec1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333057/original/file-20200506-49546-eyoec1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333057/original/file-20200506-49546-eyoec1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">General Alfred Jodl, German chief of staff, signing unconditional surrender in Allied HQ in Reims, France, May 7 1945.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">US Library of Congress</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The fighting had carried on right up to the moment of surrender and <a href="https://www.warhistoryonline.com/news/nazi-werewolves-hitler.html">in some cases even afterwards</a>, so that some people in Britain learned of a loved one’s death shortly before VE Day, or even on the day itself. Not surprisingly, they did not feel like celebrating. </p>
<p>Prisoners of war, returning from a captivity which was a lot harsher than the jolly escape films suggest, similarly tended to want to return home quietly rather than dancing in the street. Adjusting to life after years of separation was not easy and the <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/articles/victoryineuropedayhowworldwariichangedtheuk/2015-05-08">divorce rate soared after the war</a>.</p>
<p>Above all, there were those with good reason to hold back with some distaste, because their war was far from over. The war in Asia was still going on, and as the Japanese were driven back in Burma and across the Pacific, so their resistance toughened and casualties mounted. For those with a father or husband in the far east, VE Day seemed a cruel mockery.</p>
<p>But perhaps most surprising – and most instructive for today – were those who could not bring themselves to celebrate because the war was their life. Young people had known nothing else since childhood; young women had had opportunities to pursue fulfilling and important work beyond anything peacetime could offer. For many people, ending the war meant letting go of a world they knew for a new and very uncertain one. Adversity – and even lockdown – can carry its own unexpected comforts.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137938/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sean Lang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
It was a great celebration, but not everyone was jubilant.
Sean Lang, Senior Lecturer in History, Anglia Ruskin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/137906
2020-05-05T12:49:14Z
2020-05-05T12:49:14Z
VE Day as reported by British newspapers: relief, joy and a saucy comic strip
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332667/original/file-20200505-83769-hw9r8d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C48%2C4601%2C3400&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Daily Herald's front page for VE Day: 80% of the UK public read a newspaper during the war.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Philip Bird LRPS CPAGB</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1945, Britons were the world’s most enthusiastic newspaper readers. The habit of buying daily national newspapers extended throughout every social class. About 80% of British families <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1461670X.2012.680810">read one of the mass circulation London dailies</a> and two-thirds of middle-class families also bought a serious title such as The Times, Manchester Guardian or The Scotsman.</p>
<p>The BBC is rightly given the lion’s share of credit for bolstering the British wartime effort on the Home Front. But newspapers also served massive audiences of engaged readers and, crucially, they could and did perform roles the BBC could not. Newspapers were better able to hold the wartime government to account on issues that mattered to ordinary Britons. Examples of this include coverage of the overseas evacuation of children, air raid shelter policy and food rationing. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332674/original/file-20200505-83721-bv3aeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332674/original/file-20200505-83721-bv3aeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332674/original/file-20200505-83721-bv3aeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=762&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332674/original/file-20200505-83721-bv3aeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=762&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332674/original/file-20200505-83721-bv3aeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=762&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332674/original/file-20200505-83721-bv3aeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=958&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332674/original/file-20200505-83721-bv3aeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=958&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332674/original/file-20200505-83721-bv3aeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=958&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">How the Mirror reported VE Day.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Daily Mirror</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some also brought a sense of irreverent fun to alleviate the hardship of what the Daily Mirror, most successful of the wartime titles, described on VE Day as “five years eight months and four days of the bloodiest war in history”.</p>
<h2>Britain’s ‘secret weapon’</h2>
<p>But such candour about the endurance that brought victory was not the element in the Mirror’s editorial mix that did most to attract left-leaning servicemen and made it the most popular daily for Britain’s fighting men and their families. </p>
<p>That was sex appeal delivered with a dose of demotic humour in the form of the cartoon beauty Jane. The cartoon strip had been created in 1932 by the cartoonist Norman Pett as “<a href="https://thecartoonmuseum.wordpress.com/2018/02/02/janes-journal-the-diary-of-a-bright-young-thing-1932-1959/">Jane’s Journal, the Diary of a Bright Young Thing</a>”. Pett had originally used his wife Mary as the model for Jane but as the war advanced the role was taken over by former champion swimmer and model Chrystabel Leighton Porter. </p>
<p>She became a potent symbol of British cheerfulness and <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1377473/Death-of-Jane-the-model-who-helped-win-war.html">Winston Churchill described her</a> as the country’s “secret weapon”. Jane was certainly the British serviceman’s favourite and, on VE Day, Pett took the unprecedented step of portraying her entirely naked.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332660/original/file-20200505-83730-1p9qn2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332660/original/file-20200505-83730-1p9qn2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332660/original/file-20200505-83730-1p9qn2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=768&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332660/original/file-20200505-83730-1p9qn2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=768&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332660/original/file-20200505-83730-1p9qn2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=768&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332660/original/file-20200505-83730-1p9qn2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332660/original/file-20200505-83730-1p9qn2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332660/original/file-20200505-83730-1p9qn2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Jane’ was originally based on artist Norman Pett’s wife, Mary, before model Chrystabel Leighton Porter took over.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Daily Mirror via Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the cartoon published on page seven, Jane first appears in full army uniform seated on a table in a bar. She holds a glass of champagne in her left hand. A male soldier friend stands in the doorway carrying a Union Jack. Raising her glass, Jane declares: “Victory at Last, Smiler! I shall soon be out of my uniform now!”. In the next frame Jane is mobbed by a group of British squaddies all demanding “a souvenir” of their favourite pin-up girl. In the final frame, Jane emerges from the crush naked except for a loosely held but strategically draped Union Jack. Smiler jokes: “You’ve said it Jane - You’ve been demobbed already”. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332661/original/file-20200505-83721-1qm1amu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332661/original/file-20200505-83721-1qm1amu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=253&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332661/original/file-20200505-83721-1qm1amu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=253&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332661/original/file-20200505-83721-1qm1amu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=253&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332661/original/file-20200505-83721-1qm1amu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332661/original/file-20200505-83721-1qm1amu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/332661/original/file-20200505-83721-1qm1amu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">VE Day or not, this hasn’t aged well.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Daily Mirror</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This clearly passed as humour for the audience of the day.</p>
<p>Though far short of the Mirror’s antics with Jane, even the decorous BBC played with sexual humour in its wartime programming. Mrs Mopp, Cleaning Lady, one of the stars of the popular comedy <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lnhq6">It’s That Man Again</a> (ITMA), was popularly known for her catchphrase “Can I do you now, sir!”</p>
<h2>‘Concourse of joy’</h2>
<p>If cartoon nakedness did not appeal to readers of the popular Conservative Daily Mail, its proprietor, the <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/media-families-22-the-rothermeres-1250650.html">second Viscount Rothermere</a> and his low-profile editor Bob Prew certainly understood that pictures gave them an advantage with which radio news could not compete. The Mail’s banner headline declared “VE Day - It’s all over. All quiet till 9pm then the London crowds went mad in the West End”. The front page picture depicted huge crowds in Piccadilly Circus. Beneath it appeared the caption: “The face of Victory – Daily Mail pictures give you a vivid impression of the great concourse of joy.”</p>
<p>Throughout their reporting on May 8 1945, newspapers reflected public frustration that the official announcement of the end of hostilities in Europe had been postponed. The surrender of all German forces had been agreed at Reims on May 7. But the chief of the German high command, Field-Marshall Keitel, did not sign the formal instrument of unconditional surrender until shortly before midnight on May 8. </p>
<p>Working throughout the evening of the May 7 among the crowds in central London, Daily Mail reporter Guy Ramsey captured the popular reaction to this delay: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>London, dead from six until nine, suddenly broke into victory life last night. Suddenly, spontaneously, deliriously. The people of London, denied VE Day officially, held their own jubilation. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the VE Day edition of the elite, establishment Times, a parliamentary correspondent diligently recorded why May 8 is recognised to this day as the official end of the war in Europe. Churchill would make “the official announcement” at 3pm. There would be simultaneous announcements in Washington DC and Moscow. </p>
<p>The Times reported the previous evening’s festivities with restrained and decorous pride: </p>
<p>“Although by 9 o'clock last night the expectation of a victory declaration by the Prime Minister had been dispelled by official warnings of its postponement, civilians and service men and women thronged the road and pavements carrying flags and paper hats. Cheering demonstrators climbed the roofs of buses. Cars trying to press through the crowds emerged with dozens of men and women clinging to the bonnets.</p>
<p>After six years of blackouts, the Times was thrilled to note that "Large bonfires ringed London and most public buildings were floodlit”.</p>
<h2>On a serious note</h2>
<p>At the smaller, more graduate-oriented – though equally liberal – Manchester Guardian, an international flavour was apparent. “Nations Rejoice at Victory” was the headline on one prominent news story. This recorded that King Gustav of Sweden had broadcast “warmest congratulations to Denmark and Norway now that our Nordic neighbours have once again become free and independent nations”. </p>
<p>The Guardian paid particular attention to neutral Ireland, where only days earlier the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, had called on Dr Hempel, the German ambassador to <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/de-valera-s-expression-of-sympathy-to-diplomat-condemned-1.17065">express condolences for Hitler</a> who had committed suicide on April 30. The Guardian reflected on the deep divisions apparent in Irish society noting that, on VE Day, people in central Dublin “‘were surprised to see students of Trinity College hoisting the Union Jack and the Red Flag over the main entrance to the University”.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Students assembled at the windows and sang 'God Save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia’. This provoked an outburst of booing from the crowd. The Guardian noted that ‘police were drafted in and windows were broken’.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Guardian also recorded a note of caution that was present throughout Britain’s wartime press on VE Day. “We dare not forget” it reminded readers “that war still rages over a quarter of the globe, that British, Americans and Chinese are being wounded or killed every hour of the day and that many of the men who have won this victory in Europe will have again to screw their courage to the sticking point and risk their lives in the Far East”. </p>
<p>Small wonder so many of them were pleased to be temporarily distracted by Jane’s cartoon antics in the Daily Mirror.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137906/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tim Luckhurst has received research funding from News UK and Ireland Ltd. He is a member of the Society of Editors </span></em></p>
Britain’s newspaper’s reported some wild scenes as the nation celebrated, but none wilder than in the Daily Mirror’s cartoon strip.
Tim Luckhurst, Principal of South College, Durham University. He is a newspaper historian and an academic member of the University's Centre for Modern Conflicts and Cultures., Durham University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/96196
2018-05-07T14:15:49Z
2018-05-07T14:15:49Z
As we remember VE Day, remember too the German women who were raped
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217868/original/file-20180507-166884-61o1v9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Canadian soldiers display a Nazi flag removed from a building in Xanten, Germany as the Second World War was coming to an end in 1945. Recent research has revealed thousands of German women were raped by Allied forces after fighting stopped in Europe.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(CP PHOTO/National Archives of Canada/K. Bell )</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Second World War in Europe ended when <a href="https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/07/may-7-1945-nazi-germany-surrenders-in-world-war-ii/">Nazi Germany signed an unconditional surrender</a> on May 7, 1945. As the Allies gained control over the Western and Eastern Fronts in 1944 and 1945, German soldiers were not the only casualties.</p>
<p>Recent historical research has revealed German women and girls were also targets, subjected en masse to a wide range of sexual violence allegedly committed by <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/book-claims-us-soldiers-raped-190-000-german-women-post-wwii-a-1021298.html">American</a>, <a href="http://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8080/bitstream/handle/1828/3180/Hugh%20Gordon%20PhD%20Dissertation%20Cheers%20and%20Tears%20final%20copy.pdf?sequence=1">Canadian</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Crimes-Unspoken-German-Women-Second/dp/1509511202">British, French</a> and Soviet soldiers.</p>
<p>By the spring of 1945, Nazi Germany was crumbling and the Soviets were racing toward Berlin. The Red Army swept across the Eastern Front, first taking Poland, then East Prussia, Austria and Czechoslovakia. While sexual violence against German civilians was committed by all Allied powers, the Soviet rapes are considered the most prevalent and severe.</p>
<p>The exact number of rapes is unknown, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32529679">to millions</a>. It is clear, however, that this violence was driven in no small part by a <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1059601108329751">desire to exact revenge</a> on the Germans for atrocities committed in the East, including mass sexual violence perpetrated against “non-Aryan” women.</p>
<h2>Remembering Soviet atrocities</h2>
<p>Over the last decade, with only the last survivors still living, there has been a <a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106687768">surge of interest</a> within German society in stories of the Soviet rapes. The film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1035730/?ref_=nv_sr_1"><em>Eine Frau in Berlin</em></a> (“A Woman in Berlin”), released in 2008 and nominated for a German National Film Prize, dramatically represented one journalist’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/books/review/a-woman-in-berlin-my-city-of-ruins.html">anonymous diary</a> of her experiences during the fall of Berlin. Another woman, Gabriele Köpp, published the first <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/harrowing-memoir-german-woman-writes-ground-breaking-account-of-ww2-rape-a-680354.html">non-anonymous account</a> of the rapes in 2010.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/xEZxcSf9HwM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The women and girls who were subjected to Soviet sexual violence suffered intensely. Many endured multiple violations or found themselves impregnated by their assailants.</p>
<p>However, wartime sex between soldiers and enemy civilian women occurs within a complex sexual economy. During the Second World War, it was common for both German women and women living in German occupied zones to enter into negotiated relationships of exchange, wherein sex was traded for protection and provision.</p>
<h2>Consent in a ‘coercive environment’</h2>
<p>The international law that deals with wartime atrocity, however, rejects the ambivalence of these kinds of interactions. When it adjudicates the war crimes of rape and sexual violence, the International Criminal Court considers a woman’s actual consent to sexual activity irrelevant when that consent is obtained by a male soldier taking advantage of a “<a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/NR/rdonlyres/336923D8-A6AD-40EC-AD7B-45BF9DE73D56/0/ElementsOfCrimesEng.pdf">coercive environment</a>.” </p>
<p>This approach makes virtually all wartime sex between civilians and enemy soldiers criminal, regardless of whether the women involved saw it that way. The reality is that women engage in strategic bargaining under wartime conditions, often using their sexuality as a lever of power. Many of these women regard their exchange of sex for survival as a choice; a constrained one, to be sure, but nevertheless a meaningful choice. </p>
<p>Social memory of sexual violence always has a politics. German society’s recent remembrance of the 1945 rapes, much like the structure of the #MeToo movement that came later, emphasizes women’s victimhood over their sexual agency. In both instances, women are encouraged to think of ambiguous sexual encounters primarily through the lens of victimization and trauma.</p>
<h2>An open secret</h2>
<p>German women’s experiences of the 1945 rapes, we are told, were silenced for nearly 70 years. Knowledge and discussion of these events were a kind of <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Philipp_Kuwert/publication/6113152_The_unspoken_secret_Sexual_violence_in_World_War_II_3/links/09e4150879270a77b8000000/The-unspoken-secret-Sexual-violence-in-World-War-II-3.pdf?origin=publication_detail">open secret</a>, especially within the <a href="https://libcom.org/library/left-rape-why-we-should-all-be-ashamed-left%E2%80%99s-role-covering-rape-2-million-women">former East Germany</a>, where the regime depended on portraying the Soviets as liberators from Hitlerite fascism.</p>
<p>The question of how we should make sense of Allied sexual violence perpetrated against German women must be considered within the broader context of political struggles over wartime cultural memory. Feminist mobilization around the rapes, led in part by the activist and filmmaker <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/1993-09-27/entertainment/ca-39505_1_human-rights">Helke Sander</a>, began in the 1990s and was explicitly structured around the idea of silence-breaking for the purpose of combating a patriarchy premised on women’s sexual subjugation.</p>
<p>But the “remembering” of these rapes has been accompanied by another set of wartime memories. </p>
<p>Revelations of <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/rape-murder-and-genocide-nazi-war-crimes-as-described-by-german-soldiers-a-755385.html">Wehrmacht atrocities</a>, along with the realization that many ordinary soldiers knew about the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe, belied the myth that the regular German military had been insulated from the worst Nazi crimes.</p>
<p>As Germany was forced to reckon with the grim reality of the criminal complicity of ordinary soldiers and <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/02/bsp/hitler.html">civilians alike</a> for the horrors of the Second World War, there <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/25/world/neo-nazis-battle-german-leftists-over-anti-nazi-exhibit.html">was a backlash from neo-Nazi</a> and more moderate right-wing groups. </p>
<h2>A matter of public interest</h2>
<p>This generated a cultural discussion about wartime <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/crime-and-punishment/">German victimhood</a>. No longer limited to the sphere of feminist activism, discussion of the 1945 rapes became a matter of public interest. </p>
<p>But any movement that focuses on German suffering during the Second World War is a <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/lingering-fears-is-the-world-ready-for-german-victimhood-a-383263.html">fraught enterprise</a>, to say the least. Feminist projects that seek to unearth stories of sexual harassment, assault and other forms of misconduct can easily appeal to right-wing political groups with regressive policy agendas.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217869/original/file-20180507-166903-1k8sris.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/217869/original/file-20180507-166903-1k8sris.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217869/original/file-20180507-166903-1k8sris.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217869/original/file-20180507-166903-1k8sris.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217869/original/file-20180507-166903-1k8sris.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=768&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217869/original/file-20180507-166903-1k8sris.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=768&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/217869/original/file-20180507-166903-1k8sris.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=768&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">German children displaying surrender flag in Sogel, Germany, on April 10, 1945.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(CP PHOTO/ National Archives of Canada/Alexander Mackenzie Stirton )</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Key to the German victimhood debate was a series of memory projects related to the <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/brutal-peace-postwar-expulsions-germans/">forced mass population transfer</a> effected by the Allies at the end of the war.</p>
<p>Millions of Germans — most of them women and children —who had been living in East Prussia, the Sudetenland, and areas of what are now Poland and Russia, fled the Red Army during the last months of the war. (All of those areas used to have large ethnic German populations — the German Reich at the beginning of the war was much larger than Germany today.) After the war, those who remained were expelled into what is present-day Germany, and those who had already left were forbidden from returning to their homes in the East.</p>
<h2>Flight and expulsion</h2>
<p>Today, Germans often remember these events together as the <em>Flucht und Vertreibung</em> (“flight and expulsion”). According to many, including some women survivors that I interviewed for a research project, this Allied-sponsored event is one of the great unrecognized crimes of the war. </p>
<p>Many of the 1945 rapes were committed while women and girls fled westward. During the <a href="http://blog.berlinbiennale.de/en/projects/remembering-piece-by-piece-first-objects-for-the-future-exhibition-22180">2012 Berlin Biennale</a>, there was even an art exhibit devoted to artifacts of the <em>Flucht</em>, including the diary of a sexual violence survivor.</p>
<p>Legal and cultural claims related to the rights of the <em>Vertriebene</em> (“expellees”) have historically been made on behalf of far-right constituencies. In 2006, a group of German “refugees,” calling themselves the Prussian Trust, <a href="https://www.neweurope.eu/article/german-expellees-file-complaint/">filed a controversial suit</a> with the European Court of Human Rights, asking for compensation from Poland for property lost as a result of the expulsion. </p>
<p>And after much political wrangling, <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/religious-symbols-at-heart-of-german-search-for-identity-a-1205572-2.html">AfD-aligned politician Erika Steinbach</a> succeeded in establishing the federally funded <a href="https://www.sfvv.de/en">Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation Foundation</a> in Berlin, which is mandated to research, document and memorialize the expulsion.</p>
<p>In German politics, the <em>Flucht</em> is often a dog whistle for right-wing nationalism. The German right has used the 1945 rapes to build a narrative of sexual victimhood to gain support. Regarding all wartime sex as rape, regardless of the circumstances, makes it more likely the issue will be exploited by dangerous forces.</p>
<p>Countless German women and girls suffered deeply during the last months of the Second World War. While their suffering was often caused by sexual violence, it was also brought about by hunger, disease and exposure to the elements: In other words, the simple material conditions of a country on the brink of losing a war.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/96196/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Heidi Matthews does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Recent historical research has revealed that after the Nazis surrendered at end the Second World War, thousands of German women were raped by Allied forces.
Heidi Matthews, Assistant Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/42311
2015-05-25T13:28:07Z
2015-05-25T13:28:07Z
Victory in Europe remembered
<p>Memorial Day honors men and women who died in military service. It follows hard on the heels of Victory in Europe (V-E) Day. Both commemorations encourage us to reflect on the political and personal meaning of liberation and sacrifice. </p>
<p>As a child, Ned Lebow was a refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe and just old enough to remember VE Day. He is a political scientist who has devoted most of his career to studying the causes of war and ways of preventing it. </p>
<p>Christian Wendt was born in postwar Germany, and knows first-hand the incentives he and his peers had to develop a commitment to democracy and tolerance. He is also a professor of ancient history and has studied the relationship between liberation and democracy in ancient Athens.</p>
<h2>Celebrations in New York</h2>
<p>On Victory Europe Day, 8 May 1945, Ned was a young lad in New York City living in a neighborhood of row houses and apartment buildings with many immigrants. </p>
<p>We were a mix of Jews, Italians, Germans, and other Europeans, most of whom had voted with their feet against Nazi and Fascist regimes. </p>
<p>The German family across the street were anti-Hitler Social Democrats from Hamburg. The breadwinner was a carpenter and his two sons served in the American air force. One was missing in action. </p>
<p>On the morning of VE Day, my mother and I watched through our front window as a staff car pulled up and an officer knocked on their door and disappeared inside. He delivered good news: the missing son had been liberated from a POW camp by the British Army and, with the wounded, had the highest priority for shipment home. </p>
<p>There was a grand street party that night to celebrate victory, with everybody drinking to the good fortune of this family, but also wondering about the fate of overseas relatives and those still engaged in the war against Japan.</p>
<p>For my family and our neighbors the commitment to tolerance, the rule of law, and respect for others transcended national identifications and cultural differences.</p>
<p>Liberation of Europe meant more than the defeat of barbaric regimes and freeing occupied countries and their peoples. </p>
<p>It was a triumph of our values and we looked forward – naively, it turned out – to a world where they would be universally cherished and practiced. </p>
<h2>The ‘liberation’ of Germany</h2>
<p>As to the Germans, like Christian, born in post-war Germany they understood why German president Richard von Weizsäcker described VE Day as <a href="http://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Reden/DE/Richard-von-Weizsaecker/Reden/1985/05/19850508_Rede.html">“the liberation”</a> of the country. </p>
<p>Today commitment to the rule of law, toleration of political, religious, and cultural differences is deeply entrenched in Germany, but far from universal or secure as the rise of <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30685842">Pegida</a> (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West) and violence against immigrants demonstrates. </p>
<p>Some Germans regard the comments of Weizsäcker (or what they heard about them) as relieving them of any responsibility and even allowing them to portray their countrymen – as novelist Günter Grass partly did – as <a href="http://www.tagesspiegel.de/meinung/portraet-guenter-grass-auch-deutsche-unter-den-opfern/4570368.html">passive victims</a>. </p>
<p>Freed citizens must not become complacent or construct liberation from Fascist or Communist regimes in an illiberal and self-serving way. Liberation is equally a task for the victors; they must remember what they, and especially those we remember on Memorial Day, fought for. </p>
<p>Liberation requires all of us to strive to become truly autonomous, freeing ourselves from problematic and destructive assumptions that are in the way of commitment to tolerance, sacrifice for the good of the community, and respect for the rule of law. This is not a moment in history, but a constant necessity. </p>
<p>Because of its democratic and economic success, Germany risks, in our view, becoming a lazy place where there is no real struggle for liberation from a past of nationalism and racism or the more recent present of self-centered materialism.</p>
<p>But Germany is not unique. </p>
<h2>The growth of anti-immigrant sentiment</h2>
<p>Nationalism is on the rise everywhere in Europe. </p>
<p>The popularity of anti-immigrant parties such as the <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/01/marine_le_pen_and_the_national_front_on_the_rise_france_s_far_right_party.html">National Front</a> in France, <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24346993">Golden Dawn</a> in Greece, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/life-in-the-land-of-ukip-britain-election/390369/">UKIP</a> in Britain, the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/14/sweden-democrats-flex-muscles-anti-immigrant-kristianstad">Sweden Democrats</a> and <a href="http://www.euronews.com/2015/01/16/hungary-s-orban-warns-economic-migration-endangers-europeans/">Fidesz</a> in Hungary (where it controls the government), all testify to this phenomenon. </p>
<p>In Britain and elsewhere, the tragic plight of the Mediterranean boat people has led to an escalation of anti-immigrant rhetoric. </p>
<p>The UK’s second most popular tabloid, the Sun, published a piece by TV personality and regular columnist Katie Hopkins <a href="http://www.itv.com/news/2015-04-18/katie-hopkins-compares-migrants-to-cockroaches-and-suggests-using-gunships-to-stop-them-crossing-the-mediterranean/">calling</a> for the use of gunships against would-be immigrants. Her remarks were <a href="https://www.change.org/p/the-sun-newspaper-remove-katie-hopkins-as-a-columnist">widely condemned,</a> but it is troubling that she found a voice in a national daily. </p>
<p>More vicious anti-immigrant and racist commentary infects the blogosphere. Some right-wing groups have adopted outright the symbols of Nazism or do so in coded ways, as the comedian and activist Dieudonné M'bala M'bala in France has used his “quenelle” or “vaguely menacing hand gesture” (in the words of the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/world/europe/concern-over-quenelle-gesture-grows-in-france.html">New York Times</a> to incite support for Hitler and hatred of Jews. </p>
<p>All these events indicate the precariousness of Europe’s liberation.</p>
<p>Freedom of speech must remain inviolate. </p>
<p>But those of us revolted by hate-mongering and troubled by the willingness of mainstream parties and their leaders to legitimize anti-immigrant sentiment by courting votes among this segment of opinion must stand up for our beliefs. </p>
<p>We can do this at the ballot box, but voting is not enough. We must support the rule of law, tolerance and respect for others, whether citizens or not, through our daily practices. Victory brings the same responsibility in this regard for Americans that defeat does for Germans.</p>
<p>This is the best way to remember the victims of Nazi and Fascist tyranny, honor those who gave their lives to oppose them on the front lines and home fronts, and make liberation a living truth, not a fast-fading historical memory.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/42311/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christian Wendt receives funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Ned Lebow does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
On Memorial Day, reflecting on the meaning of the ‘liberation’ of Europe 70 years on.
Richard Ned Lebow, Professor International Political Theory at Kings College, London and James O Freedman Presidential Professor Emeritus of Government, Dartmouth College
Christian Wendt, Professor of Ancient History , Freie Universität Berlin
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/41113
2015-05-08T05:29:44Z
2015-05-08T05:29:44Z
Why the VE Day narrative in Germany is becoming even more complicated
<p>A fiercely patriotic <a href="http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik/russischer-motorradclub-auf--siegestour--nachtwoelfe-wollen-dachau-besuchen,10808018,30606998.html">Russian biker gang</a> has ridden across Russia and Germany, in emulation of the Soviets’ march to victory in 1945 and will commemorate the Soviet victory over fascism with a <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/10670244/Meet-the-Night-Wolves-Putins-Hells-Angels.html">parade</a> around Berlin. </p>
<p>The German foreign office tried to annul the The Night Wolves’ visas, citing the political nature of such commemorative acts, to no avail. The wider German public were also offended. I find this <a href="http://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/nachtwoelfe-111.html">reaction</a> bewildering: May 8 has always been complex in Germany, yet to see the narrative of a victory over fascism as offensive feels like a throwback to the political memory battles of the post-war years. </p>
<p>For East Germany, formally the German Democratic Republic (GDR), May 8 was always a day of overblown governmental parades, thanks to the Soviet liberators. But West Germans – initially at least – remembered the end of the war as a moment of defeat and expulsion. The Soviets, or Russians, were remembered as an “Asiatic” menace that had ushered in the true catastrophe of World War II: its violent end. </p>
<p>Only a generational change in West Germany from the late-1960s challenged that view, though it never fully disappeared. The reappearance of an anti-Russian discourse has yet again brought to the fore the intricacies of remembering Nazism, the war, and its end in Germany. </p>
<h2>The German VE Day</h2>
<p>The complexities of German public memory have their origins in the intricacy of the the end of the war. That big date – May 8 1945 – was experienced differently throughout Germany and its occupied territories. In the town Monschau, in the Eifel region, <a href="http://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/kriegsende-in-monschau-als-die-historie-in-die-eifel-einmarschierte-13155052.html">the war ended in September 1944</a>. The Americans took the town without any resistance and for the rest of the war the good people of Monschau went about rebuilding a postwar society. So May 8 made no real difference to the northern Eifel region. </p>
<p>Other areas, by contrast, witnessed ferocious fighting right up until and even after 8 May 1945. The Dutch island of Texel, about 50km north of Amsterdam, <a href="http://www.texel.net/de/uber-texel/geschichte/der-aufstand-der-georgier/">played host to absurd fights</a> between German soldiers and Georgian auxiliaries until May 20. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80868/original/image-20150507-1230-10yrdrg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80868/original/image-20150507-1230-10yrdrg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80868/original/image-20150507-1230-10yrdrg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80868/original/image-20150507-1230-10yrdrg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80868/original/image-20150507-1230-10yrdrg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=744&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80868/original/image-20150507-1230-10yrdrg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=744&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80868/original/image-20150507-1230-10yrdrg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=744&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Scene of destruction in a Berlin street.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© IWM (BU 8604)</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Silesian city of Breslau/Wrocław lived up to its name – Festung Breslau (fortress Breslau) – with fierce fighting until May 6. Berlin was torn to bits in the final months of the war with widespread civilian casualties and victims of sexual violence. </p>
<p>So no decisive day here. And even once the fighting had stopped the war continued for many Germans. Expulsions, local violence, expropriation as well as coping with the devastation of German towns and cities meant that May 8 remained a contentious and complex date in Germany history. Nevertheless, decades of introspection, painful (and almost tortured) self-criticism, and expositions of the “sins of the fathers” transformed the German public sphere – especially since reunification – into a forum for critical memory. </p>
<h2>The mature response</h2>
<p>It has become commonplace to hold up German commemoration of the war as a standard-bearer for other societies to follow: mature, self-critical, open. What other society would dedicate <a href="http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/startseite.html">a large chunk or prime real estate</a> in the centre of their capital to remind themselves of their own crimes?</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80867/original/image-20150507-1207-1jp7885.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80867/original/image-20150507-1207-1jp7885.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80867/original/image-20150507-1207-1jp7885.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80867/original/image-20150507-1207-1jp7885.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80867/original/image-20150507-1207-1jp7885.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80867/original/image-20150507-1207-1jp7885.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80867/original/image-20150507-1207-1jp7885.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Holocaust Memorial.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">andersphoto/shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yet some very obvious cracks are beginning to emerge. The current vein of anti-Russian feeling throughout Europe has certainly had an effect on commemoration in Germany. Many now think it fair to write the Russian victory out of the memory of World War II. Rather than foregrounding German responsibility, public discussion has focused on <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/putins-nachtwoelfe-sollten-einreisen-duerfen-kommentar-a-1031156.html">Russian connivance in abusing history</a>. And in September last year President Joachim von Gauck used <a href="http://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Reden/DE/Joachim-Gauck/Reden/2014/09/140901-Gedenken-Westerplatte.html">his speech in Gdańsk</a> on the 70th anniversary of the German attack on Poland to warn of contemporary Russian aggression. </p>
<p>Yes, this could be a belated reaction to 40 years of wooden Soviet war remembrance in the former GDR. But there is evidence that this is a broader challenge to the established memory morals of German public discourse. </p>
<h2>Muddied moral grammar</h2>
<p>Last summer, at the height of the Gaza conflict, I witnessed four teenagers waving a Palestinian flag on top of one of the stone pillars of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. They were chased away by two security guards. They also happened to have an “immigrant background”, to use the German word (<em>Migrationshintergrund</em>). </p>
<p>This blurring of current events with the Holocaust was also seen during last year’s spike in anti-Semitic incidents, when some <a href="http://www.amadeu-antonio-stiftung.de/die-stiftung-aktiv/themen/gegen-as/antisemitismus-heute/chronik-antisemitischer-vorfaelle-1/chronik-antisemitischer-vorfaelle-2014/">muddled up</a> global political issues with the history and memory of the Holocaust.</p>
<p>The moral grammar surrounding the Holocaust, the war, and its end has been an absolute certainty for at least three decades, embedded into the education system. Yet this concept of <em>Vergangenheitsbewältigung</em> (critical engagement with the past) – in part borne out of the History Workshop movement of the late-70s and 1980s – assumed a common social relationship to the German past. And now there have been <a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/43056754?searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dholocaust%2Beducation%2Bgermany%2Bturks%26amp%3Bacc%3Doff%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3Bfc%3Doff%26amp%3Bgroup%3Dnone&resultItemClick=true&Search=yes&searchText=holocaust&searchText=education&searchText=germany&searchText=turks&uid=3737864&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21106311241931">suggestions</a> that the memory culture of German responsibility is beginning to unravel in the education system, especially among young people with an immigrant background. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80870/original/image-20150507-1215-1t7d0wx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80870/original/image-20150507-1215-1t7d0wx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80870/original/image-20150507-1215-1t7d0wx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80870/original/image-20150507-1215-1t7d0wx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80870/original/image-20150507-1215-1t7d0wx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80870/original/image-20150507-1215-1t7d0wx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80870/original/image-20150507-1215-1t7d0wx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">People need to be careful about the comparisons they draw.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Q Speaks/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="http://www.zeit.de/2010/04/Editorial-Umfrage">A poll from 2010</a> for example, published in the German newspaper Die Zeit, highlighted ambiguous German-Turkish attitudes towards the Holocaust. Around half of the respondents felt Holocaust memory should be a central issue for all Germans, yet 68% also admitted to knowing little about the Nazi past. And the Federal Agency for Civic Education has <a href="http://www.bpb.de/geschichte/zeitgeschichte/geschichte-und-erinnerung/39851/erinnern-unter-migranten?p=all">documented a growing trend</a> among school children with an immigrant background to link the Holocaust to Middle Eastern politics, which also leads to a rejection of the relationship between Jewish victims and German responsibility. </p>
<p>German Green politicians <a href="http://www.zeit.de/2010/04/Cem-Oezdemir">Cem Özdemir</a> and <a href="http://www.sven-kindler.de/2014/07/gewalt-und-antisemitismus-auf-free-palestine-demonstration-in-hannover">Sven Christian Kindler</a> have also highlighted the connection between a rejection of Holocaust memory and present-day politics. And similar developments are also happening in France, as <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/mar/05/france-on-fire/">Mark Lilla recently pointed out</a>. </p>
<p>Of course this is also part of a general “Holocaust fatigue”, yet the underlying politics of it all is worrying. In a climate in which memory is being re-politicised, politicians would do well to heed these telltale signs of a growing challenge to German moral memory.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/41113/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Koranyi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Commemoration and memory is being re-politicised, and this could have worrying consequences.
James Koranyi, Lecturer in History, Durham University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/41064
2015-05-07T11:31:00Z
2015-05-07T11:31:00Z
VE Day anniversary celebrations will be starkly different to 1945
<p>May 8 2015 not only marks the end of an extraordinary general election and the beginning of the struggle for government. It is also the 70th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day (VE Day), and so is a day well used to times of change. </p>
<p>The occasion is being commemorated with <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/ve-day-70th-anniversary">three days of events across the UK</a>. The plans include a parade, street parties, the lighting of beacons, a service of thanksgiving, and a “star-studded concert in central London”. The aim is to pay tribute to all those who contributed to the allied cause during World War II.</p>
<p>These events are designed to invoke the spirit of 1945. The street parties, bonfires and church services which marked the surrender of German forces have become a part of British national identity. The image of vast crowds gathered in central London to hear Winston Churchill announce victory is similarly ingrained. But those who experienced VE Day first hand are unlikely to recognise our contemporary re-imagining of them.</p>
<p>The idea of marking Germany’s surrender had been discussed by government since mid-April 1945. The celebrations held on May 8 were the result of careful deliberation between British, American and Russian authorities. But the events came after a week of frustrating rumour and were an anachronism to many who had lived through the war. VE Day failed to meet the expectations put upon it.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80824/original/image-20150507-1258-932fi2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80824/original/image-20150507-1258-932fi2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80824/original/image-20150507-1258-932fi2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80824/original/image-20150507-1258-932fi2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80824/original/image-20150507-1258-932fi2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=569&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80824/original/image-20150507-1258-932fi2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=569&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80824/original/image-20150507-1258-932fi2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=569&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ground crew on a RAF Bomber Command station in Britain return the V-sign to a neighbouring searchlight crew.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© IWM (CH 15165)</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Delayed announcement</h2>
<p>The surrender of German forces had long been expected. Newspaper headlines had forecast the end of the war for weeks. Reports of <a href="https://theconversation.com/hitler-the-unstoppable-zombie-why-we-dont-let-the-dictator-die-40787">Adolf Hitler’s suicide</a> had been released. But the lack of definite news caused frustration. According to reports from the time, “every anti-climax added a little to people’s slowly increasing apathy and frustration”. Some thought it was “a calculated policy to deflate people completely”. </p>
<p>The government’s decision not to announce the military surrender (which took place in the early morning of May 7 1945) hardly allayed popular scepticism. No official announcement was made until 20.30, by which time the news had been leaked to the press. The social research organisation <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/ve-day-70th-anniversary-how-ordinary-britons-celebrated-the-end-of-war-in-europe-10230302.html">Mass Observation</a> reported that most of the people they interviewed felt that this had been badly mishandled.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80822/original/image-20150507-1258-1g6e4rd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80822/original/image-20150507-1258-1g6e4rd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80822/original/image-20150507-1258-1g6e4rd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80822/original/image-20150507-1258-1g6e4rd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80822/original/image-20150507-1258-1g6e4rd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80822/original/image-20150507-1258-1g6e4rd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80822/original/image-20150507-1258-1g6e4rd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Winston Churchill about to broadcast to the nation on the afternoon of VE Day.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© IWM (H 41843)</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>There were spontaneous celebrations on May 7. The Daily Mirror reported that “London Had a Joy Night” as thousands of people amassed in the capital. In the words of its excited undercover reporter: “This is it – and we’re all going nuts!” But those who gathered outside Downing Street in the hope of seeing Churchill were left disappointed.</p>
<p>Although VE Day was designated a public holiday, very little else was officially organised. Tens of thousands again descended on central London, but there was no timetable so most simply drifted from place to place. The historian Correlli Barnett, who was in London on May 8, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05s2x26">recently recalled</a> people “aimlessly milling about in the streets like zombies”. The lack of catering facilities was a particular bugbear. And Mass Observation reported: “People seem unimpressed by official attempts to lend significance to the day.” The vast majority had simply stayed at home.</p>
<h2>No sudden glory</h2>
<p>The main reason why VE Day did not live up to the myth that now surrounds it was the nature of World War II. The day did not mark a sudden, glorious victory. Nor did it signify the end of fighting. The same Daily Mirror which reported “a glorious night” also reminded its readers of the war against Japan. There was “no peace, no holiday, no paper hats” for those in the Far East. This was a very different atmosphere to the end of World War I.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80823/original/image-20150507-1212-1r53fpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80823/original/image-20150507-1212-1r53fpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80823/original/image-20150507-1212-1r53fpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80823/original/image-20150507-1212-1r53fpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80823/original/image-20150507-1212-1r53fpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=583&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80823/original/image-20150507-1212-1r53fpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=583&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80823/original/image-20150507-1212-1r53fpy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=583&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Huge crowd gathered in Whitehall to listen to Churchill’s Victory speech.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© IWM (D 24586)</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
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<p>It’s clear that the festivities meant even less to those whose loved ones had been killed, or were being held in prisoner-of-war camps. More than <a href="http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/prisoners-of-war-in-europe-during-the-second-world-war">170,000 British troops</a> had been taken prisoner in Europe alone. Thousands were still being held in the Far East. Many felt that the German surrender was not a time for abandoned rejoicing.</p>
<p>The future was equally daunting. The British public had been subjected to four-and-a-half years of devastating war. And it was not clear what peace would mean. There were questions about Europe. Britain’s relationships with the United States and Russia was already strained. And the news of Nazi atrocities was only just beginning to be released. One unnamed RAF Officer surely spoke for many when he feared that: “it’s going to be a phoney peace”. VE Day marked an end of certainty.</p>
<p>This was linked to other, more practical, reasons for the lack of enthusiasm. It was not just that plans for the day had been botched: Churchill’s coalition government was unable to offer a vision for the peace and bodies such as the wartime Ministry of Information – which might have been expected to organise the celebrations – were being wound down.</p>
<p>Mass Observation, which sought to give voice to the people, concluded that “VE behaviour” was “the product of many conflicting emotions”. Yes, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11578414/Unlike-the-BBC-we-were-deliriously-happy-on-VE-Day.html">people bought flags and held street parties</a>. But they also felt scepticism, restlessness, guilt and fear. And we need to remember both when we commemorate the 70th anniversary of these events.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/41064/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Henry Irving has previously received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).</span></em></p>
VE Day came after a week of frustrating rumour and failed to meet the expectations put upon it.
Henry Irving, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.