Europe Recalls Agony of War on 40th Anniversary of V-E Day

Forty years after it ended, Europe recalled the agony of World War II today. West Germany’s president proclaimed Hitler’s defeat a day of liberation and Queen Elizabeth II led Britain in a nationwide commemoration of “the day they sounded the last all-clear.”

President Richard von Weizsaecker told the West German Parliament that all Germans, whether or not they participated in Nazi war crimes, must accept the past.

“We have no reason to take part today in victory celebrations. But we have every reason to recognize May 8, 1945, as the end of an erring way in German history,” he said.

“The 8th of May was a day of liberation. It freed us all from the system of National Socialist (Nazi) tyranny,” Von Weizsaecker said solemnly. “There was no zero hour. It was a chance for a new beginning, and we have used it as well as we could.”

Weizsaecker said Germans must take responsibility for World War II and its results, including millions of deaths, postwar hardships, and a Europe divided between East and West.

A West German pollster said a “silent majority” of the West Germans see nothing worth commemorating in public.

In Britain, the queen, her husband, Prince Philip, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher led a congregation of 2,000 in a solemn service at Westminster Abbey.

“The cost was heavy in a war which engulfed Europe and extended far beyond it,” Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie said, recalling the liberation of Holland, the bombing of Coventry and a memorial in Leningrad to 1 million people who died during the German siege.

The war “was not a panacea for every ill. But the victory which closed down Belsen, Buchenwald and Auschwitz is in itself sufficient cause for thanksgiving,” he said.

Thatcher had asked that the service not be a formal state occasion because she was “concerned that the spirit of reconciliation with Germany must be uppermost in people’s minds,” Press Assn. reported.

Several London newspapers reprinted their V-E Day front pages, and in an unusual broadcast interview, Queen Elizabeth reminisced about the day 40 years ago when, as a 19-year-old princess, she slipped out of Buckingham Palace with her sister, Princess Margaret, to mill anonymously with the cheering throngs surging through London in celebration.

Elsewhere Britons held a series of street parties meant to evoke the jubilant atmosphere following Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s announcement of the end of the war.

French commemoration of the anniversary started Tuesday when Premier Laurent Fabius visited the schoolroom in Reims in eastern France where the Germans first signed their unconditional surrender May 7, 1945. They signed again in Berlin late the next day.

In Paris, 200 young Germans took part in a ceremony on the Champs Elysees displaying the battle flags of all the French armed forces.