Victory Without Memory: How the West is Rewriting the Second World War

In Europe, the Second World War ended in a rapid-fire sequence of monumental events compressed into a three-week time span. On April 16, 1945, the Soviet Red Army began its final assault on Berlin, capturing the nerve centre of Adolf Hitler’s putative Thousand Year Reich five days later.

By the time the hammer and sickle were flying above the ruined city, the Nazi leadership, Hitler included, were well hunkered down in the Führerbunker, part of a fortified subterranean complex constructed in two phases (in 1936 and 1944) as a vast, impregnable redoubt. Here, reality finally shattered top-level Nazi denialism rooted in the inconceivability of defeat; Hitler committed suicide on April 30.

Fellow fascist caudillo Benito Mussolini was less lucky. On April 28, he was seized by Italian partisans while attempting to flee to Switzerland and summarily executed. His corpse was then taken to Milan, where anti-fascists suspended it from a metal girder above the Piazzale Loreto, one of the city’s main squares.

May 2 saw the surrender of German troops in Italy. And on May 7, at US General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s headquarters in Reims, northern France, German General Alfred Jodl signed the unconditional surrender of all German forces. At Soviet insistence, a second ceremonial signing, this time by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, was held at Soviet headquarters in Berlin on May 9.

These two events explain the apparent anomaly of two separate victory markers: Victory in Europe Day (VE Day), observed across Western Europe on May 8, and Victory Day, a public holiday held across the Russian Federation on May 9.

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In France, where I live, the public holiday that marks VE Day retains some semblance of quiet dignity. Under Nazi occupation, no part of France was exempt from brutalisation, whether in the form of casual, day-to-day humiliation or periodic eruptions of extreme violence. You can sense the echo of the past in commemorative events still held across the country: formal occasions graced by medal-wearing flag-bearers, local bigwigs, a dwindling congregation of ageing citizens, and perhaps a clutch of flower-bearing children mobilised by a historically attuned teacher. Wreaths of tricolour flowers are laid at the town’s war memorial. A set speech, sent in from distant Paris, is read aloud by the Mayor. The Marseillaise, the stirring, triumphalist French national anthem whose revolutionary origins tend to be overlooked these days, is relayed via a public address system.

Then everyone repairs to the salle des fêtes, the community hall present in every town and village, for friendship-cementing refreshments.

Commemorations like these—unpretentious local gatherings steeped in quiet reverence for past suffering—seem certain to dwindle with the passage of time and the loss of those who lived through, or in the immediate shadow of, the exigencies of globalised war. Better this, I think, than the alternative: the deliberate revamping and restyling of the Second World War; the transformation of it into some kind of template for the 21st-century Western governments with a seemingly insatiable lust for all things military.

This ongoing rebranding is evident in simplistic formulations regarding the war’s character. It was, we are assured by political mountebanks and the captured media, an unequivocally “just war”, a “war for democracy”, an immense marshalling of all those “values” that mark out Western Europe and the United States as the world’s pre-eminent moral force. As such, it merits our enthusiastic, uncritical embrace; its inspiring qualities must be harvested afresh towards the crushing of current enemies.

For Europe’s current leaders, from the grey eminence that is Friedrich Merz, Germany’s new Chancellor by a cat’s whisker margin, to the EU’s egregious empress, Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen, there is no doubting who constitutes the continent’s Number One Foe. Nobody looms with greater menace than Vladimir Putin; no greater threat to world peace or the human spirit exists beyond the bounds of the conflict in Ukraine. “No anthem played over Red Square today can cover the sound of justice coming,” intoned von der Leyen on May 9 as Russia was commemorating its 80th Victory Day. “Justice for Ukraine begins to take shape.”

Russia’s exclusion

Given this way of thinking, the irony of excluding Russia from Europe’s main 80th anniversary event, held in Berlin, was never likely to penetrate Establishment minds or provoke awkward questions in cosy media bubbles. Russia: the successor nation of the Soviet Union, whose Red Army incontrovertibly won the war, whose 27 million dead (soldiers and brutalised, starved, and massacred civilians) will always constitute a behemoth blood sacrifice, a human reckoning beyond our powers of comprehension. All of this airbrushed away.

Just as truth has a habit of surfacing at inconvenient moments, so do travesties of history, cynical manipulations of the past, and resort to language that stands reality on its head.

On the morning of May 8, French mainstream TV channels, like their counterparts across Europe, were busy doing their bit for the war effort (sorry, “victory commemoration”). Among the guests invited by BFMTV for the occasion was Alain Jakubowicz, a Lyons-based lawyer who for several years served as president of LICRA (the International League Against Racism and Antisemitism), a major French anti-racist organisation.

On camera, before an audience of millions, Jakubowicz seized the chance to characterise La France Insoumise, France’s premier Left formation, as a “fascist movement”, and to liken its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propagandist-in-chief. Almost as shocking as this outright slander was the silence with which it was greeted by all those present. Panic and disclaimers set in only later. Mélenchon has begun legal proceedings.

Back in the real world, actual living, breathing fascists and fellow travellers were already insinuating their way into Victory Day celebrations. In London, the inclusion of a detachment of Ukrainian troops in Britain’s main military parade drew shocked criticism from anyone aware of Ukraine’s murky record during the Second World War and the openly fascist elements, among them the infamous Azov Brigade, within its current armed forces.

In Paris, neo-Nazis of the C9M, a fascist formation founded in 1994, were readying themselves for their annual display of military muscle, scheduled for May 10. A quick internet search will reveal their thousand-strong contingent, women alongside brawny, often masked men, strutting through the streets of the capital under assiduous police protection. All this in Paris, 80 years after victory in Europe.

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Back to London, where the Metropolitan Police paid their own tribute to the moment by declaring a large area of the capital out of bounds for anti-Zionist Jewish demonstrators seeking to mobilise in support of Palestine on May 9. Banning Jewish people from entering a specified zone of a major Western capital: who would have thought that possible 80 years ago?

And so to Palestine, and the closing stages of Gaza’s evisceration: the Final Solution: Redux, the grand finale of the televised, happening-in-front-of-our-eyes genocide that must never be acknowledged, never be given the light of day, by those with the power to end it in an instant.

Somehow, Alon Mizrahi, an anti-Zionist Israeli and a steadfast, eloquent supporter of the Palestinian people, found words to express sentiments that are shared by millions of us across this planet. In a comment marking May 8, he wrote: “Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but if two million breathing human beings can be marked for destruction and starved to death at the centre of humanity’s attention with the perpetrator enjoying international support, WWII may be over, but Nazism has not been defeated.”

Susan Ram has spent much of her life viewing the world from different geographical locations. Born in London, she studied politics and international relations before setting off for South Asia: first to Nepal, and then to India, where fieldwork in Tamil Nadu developed into 20 years of residence.