When Chancellor Angela Merkel immensely expressed gratitude to the Allies for the D-Day invasion and the “liberation” of Germany in World War II, she possibly might have elicited some surprises internationally. To those at home, the statement was, however, unremarkable.
There’s no debunking the fact that the machine guns and howitzers shooting at the Allied forces landing in Normandy close to a century ago was handled by German soldiers. However, over tens of years, Germans’ attitudes toward the war have evolved from a sense of defeat to something far more complex.
On Wednesday, while the leaders of France, Britain, the United States and Canada went to England to commemorate the troops’ sacrifice and duty, Merkel listened silently. After the ceremony was done, she told reporters that she considered her invitation “a gift of history.”
On Thursday, when those other leaders travelled to Normandy for ceremonies on D-Day itself, Merkel stayed back in Berlin, holding a periodical meeting with governors and discussing bilateral relations with the prime minister of Kosovo.
As the generation that chose Adolf Hitler and fought his genocidal war fades, most Germans now see World War II through the prism of guilt, responsibility and atonement. And almost all agree that the defeat of the Nazis was a good thing.
However, that hasn’t always been the case.
Many people from Germany who survived World War II had fully supported Adolf Hitler and the Nazi race ideology that ultimately led to the killings of 6 million Jews in Europe — and they were purely left shambled by the downfall of the Third Reich.
“After 1945, Germans first referred to the end of World War II as ‘collapse,'” said Johannes Tuchel, director of the German Resistance Memorial Center.
Their children, however, were faced with rebuilding the country from the ground up from the total defeat of the Nazis, and they saw potential rather than defeat.
“In the 1950s, it became ‘hour zero'” — a new beginning, Tuchel said.
After the country was back on its economic feet, younger Germans started to question their elders, culminating in the “1968 movement” in which students confronted their parents with the atrocities committed during the Third Reich.
Out of that era has grown today’s complex attitude.
“It has been a process to the point today where it is seen as Germany’s liberation from the Nazis by the Allied forces,” Tuchel said.
German leaders have largely followed the changing attitudes — and in some cases led them.