EUROPE : V-E Day Events Present Paradox for German Psyche : Anniversary stirs debate over whether Allied victory was a defeat or a liberation from tyranny under Hitler. Nation's neighbors fear revisionist view that might lead to repeat of the past.

By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

May 5, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

BERLIN —

Again, again, again for the Germans, the sorting out of their spectacularly unbelievable past. This time, sensibly enough, it is the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe that has set off the sometimes admirable, sometimes god-awful inventory of the contents of the nation’s soul.

Sixty-three years ago, Germans democratically made Adolf Hitler’s Nazis the strongest party in their national legislature; 50 years ago Monday, their country lay a smoking ruin as a result, disgraced and in the tight custody of its enemies.

But was V-E Day really a day of defeat for the Germans? Or was it, as the perennially optimistic Chancellor Helmut Kohl has said over and over this spring, more a day of liberation, of the coming of freedom from the tyranny of Hitler and his National Socialists?

Was it just historical chance that Hitler came to power here and not, say, in Turkey or Portugal? Or was there something about the German character, something in the national DNA, that made fascism and Germany such a neat fit? And if so, has that rogue gene been successfully engineered into extinction?

The questions are old hat, but they are getting an especially heavy workout this spring, as Germans and their neighbors in Europe prepare for the 50th anniversary of the Third Reich’s surrender to the Allies. On Monday, Vice President Al Gore will come to Berlin, along with the prime ministers of Britain and Russia and the president of France, to commemorate the German surrender with an evening of carefully modulated music and speeches.

Helping to push along this spring’s role-of-Germany debate was the publication in April of a brief yet arresting “open letter” to the German people, signed by a group of well-credentialed conservatives. The letter called on Germans not to forget that May 8, 1945, “remains a tragic and debatable paradox for each of us . . . because we were saved and wiped out at the same time.”

To the United States--blessed with more than half a century of prosperity and peace, at least within its own borders, and an ally of rehabilitated Germany--the suggestion that some Germans would like to mourn the suffering of their parents and grandparents may not be the stuff of great moral quandaries.

But here in ghost-ridden Europe, many see the suggestion that Germans were also victims in World War II as yet another alarming piece of evidence that Germany is internationally arrogant and can’t--or won’t--take to heart the lessons of its past.

David Anderson, director of the Berlin office of the Aspen Institute, a Colorado-based foreign-policy institute, believes that the open letter’s between-the-lines message is that some Germans cannot shake their predilection for eastward expansion and would, even today, like to find a way of reclaiming lost “German” lands in Poland and the Czech Republic.

“It’s not that they want East Prussia back, or Koenigsburg, or the Sudetenland,” says Anderson, who also served as an adviser on German affairs to former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. “It’s that they have been made to suffer, and that they think they should be compensated for it. And that usually means land.”

On a collective level, no country has, since World War II, done a more thorough job than Germany of reflecting on the past and atoning for its wrongs.

Berlin is home to a series of well-planned, moving and unflinchingly honest exhibits and memorials on the war years and their many victims. A visitor cannot walk the streets for long without encountering thoughtfully inscribed plaques, sculptures and graveyards--and noting the impressive numbers of young Germans usually on hand, silently studying the displays.

The reconstituted German army, the Bundeswehr, is a North Atlantic Treaty Organization bulwark; its code of conduct is the most assertive in the world when it comes to the rights of soldiers to disobey orders on moral grounds.

And it is a punishable offense here to make any suggestion that millions of Jews were not murdered by the Nazis after all.

Still, suspicions linger across Europe that some intrinsic German quality, half a century after capitulation, continues to push this well-intentioned country toward world hegemony.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the reaction from London and Paris was not rejoicing but alarm.

“(German) union will be a powerful force of disequilibrium in their favor,” warned future French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, while President Francois Mitterrand said he feared the possible return of “a Europe in conflict.”

Guarding against such disarray, until now, has been the common sense of Germany’s political leaders, says Yuli Kvitsinsky, former Soviet ambassador to Bonn. Kvitsinsky notes that Kohl and others spent their formative years cleaning up the wreckage of a militaristic and expansionist country.

“But I often think that this generation will disappear in a few years,” Kvitsinsky says, “and then I think there will be a temptation, as the Germans say, to think the unthinkable.”

To the west, the Netherlands recently signed an agreement with Germany abolishing various border controls; although the Dutch are eager to do more business with the deep-pocketed Germans, they are now showing signs of apprehension.

Older Dutch who remember that about 120,000 Dutch Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis are unhappy at the sight now of uniformed German police zipping into Holland in hot pursuit of criminals. And in the coastal Zeeland, so many Germans have been snapping up vacation homes that the authorities have set limits on German buying.

To the south, in the Balkan bear pit, lingering anti-German sentiment takes a different form. With war flaring once again in the former Yugoslav republic of Croatia, many Croatian-born Serbs are arguing that the violence is largely Germany’s doing.

Germany, the Serbs’ reasoning goes, was the first major country to recognize Croatia when it declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. This move prompted other countries to recognize Croatia, leaving minority Serbs feeling isolated and abandoned by the international community--and ready to fight to protect themselves.

Germany recognized Croatia, the nationalist Serbs go on, because it was allied with Croatia’s Fascist government during World War II--when tens of thousands of Serbs died resisting the Nazis.

Such history-bound views of German behavior help explain why Germany has not, until now, committed troops to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslav federation--or in any of the many places where a German presence might be considered part of the problem rather than a help.

In recent years, however, the United States has been pressuring Germany to join such overseas troop deployments. But not everyone is comfortable with a Bundeswehr presence outside Germany. While Kohl entertains his foreign guests Monday, another group will be trying to commemorate V-E Day with a “peace festival” in downtown Berlin, with calls for a liberal foreign policy and a renewed ban on the foreign commitment of Bundeswehr troops. City officials have refused to give the event a permit.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

German Attitudes 50 Years Later

How Germans feel about WWII and Hitler, according to a poll taken in 1994 by the newspaper Die Woche:

Who was guilty of causing World War II?

Germany: 56%

Overall geopolitical situation: 25

All countries: 6

All countries except Germany: 3

Are you glad that Germany lost the war?

Yes: 56%

No: 13

Partly: 18