The World : But How Were Germans Victims of Nazi Aggression?

With the end of the Cold War, the Age of Anxiety seems to be over. Unhappily, though, the Age of Rubbish appears to have replaced it. One chief characteristic of this new age is the creation of oppor tunistic and self-serving historical concoctions, linkages and comparisons that obfuscate historical reality.

The most recent exercise along these lines revolves around whether Germany should have been represented at the D-day commemorations. The argument goes that Germany, too, was “liberated” by the Allied armies, is now a full-fledged member of the Western Alliance and has come to be the kind of democracy for which the invading forces on the Normandy beachheads fought and died. As Susan Eisenhower and other American policy analysts have demonstrated, this position is not the exclusive property of some German politicians eager to drown the past in a sea of communal sentimentality on Omaha Beach.

What makes such an appalling idea possible? The current craze for “victimhood” certainly has much to do with it. For understandable reasons, postwar Germans were prone to think of themselves as victims. Emphasizing their status as victims was probably a necessary way for Germans to cope with the unbearable regime of Adolf Hitler and the involvement of so many in its misdeeds.

Generals could complain that they and their troops were victims of Hitler’s megalomania and military incompetence. Businessmen could claim they were victims of the Nazi state’s dominance of the economy and violations of the rules of economics. Doctors could claim they were victims of the regime’s bizarre racial ideas and disdain for medical standards. Professors could claim they were victims of the Nazi takeover of the universities.

More recently, there has been a growing literature inside and outside Germany on the plight of the millions of Germans expelled by the Czechs and Poles in ethnic cleansing that took place in the Sudetenland and parts of Germany taken over by Poland in 1945, the large number of rapes committed by Russian troops as they occupied Germany and the mistreatment of German POWs in 1945-1946.

Obviously, these are historical events that must not be neglected. But what gets lost in these waves of assaults on the beachhead of memory is the fundamental distinction between those who perpetrated the war, with its horrors, and those who were victims of Nazi aggression.

German troops did not occupy most of Europe and cause millions of deaths by invitation, and the price paid by Germans must be seen in its real historical context. D-day was not intended to liberate Germany but rather Germany’s victims. Its success probably saved Germany from being the victim of the first atomic bomb. Using the bomb would have appeared a welcome alternative to launching a second invasion. For that, we should all be thankful, just as we should be appreciative of Germany’s extraordinary achievements since 1945 and its efforts to come to terms with its past.

D-day, however, was an Allied victory, and a post-modernist fog of free-wheeling “interpretation” should not be allowed to descend on it. The defeated German enemy soldiers of 1944 cannot be represented by the German friends of today as participants in our victory. As the late and great German historian Thomas Nipperdey argued, one should accord to history that which belongs to it.

The great battle on those beaches was not some noisy and regrettable way station on the road to the current happy state of affairs, and the German troops in Normandy were not greeting our assaulting troops with towels to dry up and Wurstchen . The Germans put up a ferocious resistance, and it is hard to imagine that any expected to return for a D-day commemoration a half-century later and celebrate with the men they were trying to drive back into the sea.

The outcome of the battle was anything but certain. Gen. Omar N. Bradley actually thought the invasion was a failure during its initial phase. Furthermore, the success of the invasion in no way destroyed the morale of the German army, which fought with extraordinary tenacity for a terrible cause right through the Battle of the Bulge at the end of 1944. The German army was not at that time preparing itself for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Some of Nazi Germany’s political and military leaders even entertained the hope that the alliance between the Western powers and the Soviet Union would break up and there would be a joint effort against the Soviets. In fact, Germany’s leaders still had plans for victory in 1944-1945. The Russians were not doing as well against the Germans in 1944 as they had in 1943, while the Germans had the benefit of a consolidated front in the East. The V-1 and V-2 rockets were launched against England in the summer of 1944, and a new U-boat offensive was planned. The air war against Germany had failed to stop war production, and the Nazi leadership was ready to call up its last reserves. It is simply unhistorical, therefore, to talk about “liberating” Germany in 1944-1945. There could only be one goal--defeating Germany and imposing an unconditional surrender.

The success of D-day, after all, opened the way not only to Paris and Berlin, but also to Dachau and the other sites of Nazi horror that the invading armies were to discover. Therefore, to speak of liberating Auschwitz and of liberating Germany in the same breath is blasphemous.

The cynical notion of an alliance between Nazi Germany and the Western Allies against the Soviet Union was totally unrealistic--not only because of the Allies common interest in preventing German domination of Europe, but also because of the vileness of the Nazi regime. It is precisely the character of the regime for which the German troops at Normandy fought that makes it impossible to engage in a joint celebration of the landing today. Normandy is not like battle of Verdun during World War I--where hundreds of thousands of soldiers died as victims of a great historical rivalry now buried with them.

Whatever its faults, the Germany that fought the First World War was no more like Nazi Germany than the Germany of today. And Germany today is not the product of a German victory over National Socialism but of an Allied victory over Nazi Germany. That is a historical reality that needs to be understood by Germans and by everyone else in assessing what can be and cannot be appropriately commemorated in common.*