LONDON — Even if the end of World War II in Europe spawned one of the most joyous days the continent ever lived, Thursday’s 80th anniversary of V-E Day is haunted as much by the specter of current-day conflict as it celebrates the defeat of ultimate evil.
Hitler’s Nazi Germany had finally surrendered after a half-decade of invading other European powers and propagating racial hatred that led to genocide, the Holocaust and the murdering of millions.
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That surrender and the explosion of hope for a better life are being celebrated with parades in London and Paris and towns across Europe while even the leaders of erstwhile mortal enemies are bonding again.
Germany itself again expressed gratitude for the change that May 8, 1945, brought to the world and to itself.
“It was Germans who unleashed this criminal war and dragged all of Europe with them into the abyss,” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier told parliament. “Today, 80 years later, our profound thanks still go to the Allied soldiers and the European resistance movements who mustered all their strength and endured great losses in order to defeat the Nazi regime.”
Gloomy outlook
Steinmeier’s comments underscore that former European enemies may thrive — to the extent that the 27-nation European Union even won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize — but that the outlook has turned gloomy over the past year.
The body count continues to rise in Ukraine, where Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion started the worst war on the continent since 1945. The rise of the hard right in several EU member states is putting the founding democratic principles of the bloc under increasing pressure.
“We are not celebrating this 8 May today in a spirit of calm self-assurance. Because we can see that freedom is not the grand finale of history,” Steinmeier warned. “We therefore no longer need to ask: Did 8 May free us? But we ask: How can we stay free?”
Such warnings made the continuation of the unlikely stretch of peace in most of Europe anything but a given.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which assured peace in Europe under the U.S. nuclear umbrella and its military clout, is under internal strain rarely seen since its inception.
There too, the German president, who has a largely ceremonial role but embodies the moral resolve of the nation, also took a not-so-veiled swipe at the U.S. administration of President Donald Trump, saying the way the United States is turning away from the international order “is a shock on an entirely new scale.”
U.S. contributions to the war effort
The United States was instrumental in turning the tide of the war in Europe, invading along with Allies the D-Day beaches in France’s Normandy on June 6, 1944, in what proved to be the tipping point of the war in Europe that inexorably led to the invasion of Germany and the defeat of the Nazis.
On Wednesday, Trump proclaimed Thursday as a day for the United States to celebrate victory in World War II, insisting the country should better recognize its essential role in the war.
“We are going to start celebrating our victories again!” he said.
The war did drag on beyond Europe, especially in the Pacific against Japan, but even Taiwan joined in marking the day for the first time — and highlighting current-day threats. Instead of Russia, it was centering on China, its immediate rival. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory to be annexed by force if necessary.
“Military aggression against another country is an unjust crime that is bound to fail,” Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te said, adding that both Taiwan and Europe were “now facing the threat of a new authoritarian bloc.”
European celebrations
Commemorations have been going all week through Europe, and Britain has taken a lead. Here, too, the current-day plight of Ukraine in its fight against Russia took center stage.
“The idea that this was all just history and it doesn’t matter now somehow, is completely wrong,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said. “Those values of freedom and democracy matter today.”
In London, a service was held at Westminster Abbey, where the royal family took time to chat with the veterans, bending over to hear the older veterans in wheelchairs, many of whom the royals have now met at previous services.
In France, where the date is a public holiday, President Emmanuel Macron presided over a wreath-laying ceremony in Paris in front of a statue of Gen. Charles de Gaulle, who refused the Franco-German armistice in 1940. De Gaulle fled to London and founded the French Free Forces, organizing networks of resistance fighters and overseeing anti-Nazi sabotage missions in France.
In Berlin, Chancellor Friedrich Merz will again highlight how Germany has remodeled itself into a beacon of European democracy by laying a wreath at the central memorial for the victims of war and tyranny.
Symbolically, President Vladimir Putin will be totally out of lockstep with the rest of Europe as Russia celebrates its Victory Day one day later with a huge military parade on Moscow’s Red Square to mark the massive Soviet contribution to defeat Nazi Germany.
Raf Casert reported from Brussels. Mike Corder in Wageningen, Netherlands, Samuel Petrequin in Paris and Jamey Keaten in Geneva, contributed to this report.