Honoring the Fight to Save Civilization

Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Allied powers 50 years ago Monday brought to an end Europe’s most destructive war and with it an evil unmatched for its barbarism. It was a war launched by Germany’s drive for imperial domination on the continent and sustained in no small part by labor and property that Germany stole from conquered populations. It was a war that ended only after much of Eastern and Southeast Europe and ultimately Germany itself lay in ruin, and only after tens of millions had died, most of them civilians, many deliberately murdered in circumstances of unspeakable horror and cruelty.

A full accounting of the war’s staggering human costs is impossible. In the east especially, entire villages were obliterated with no one left to record those who perished. In the war’s beginning and ending phases hordes of nameless refugees died, some in the fighting, others because of the harsh conditions accompanying their flight. By the best estimates, civilian and military deaths together could easily have totaled 40 million. Six million Poles--one-fifth of the country’s prewar population--died, half of them Jews who were the special targets of the ideological insanity that motivated the Nazi effort. The Soviet Union’s casualties alone have been officially put at about 26 million, again most of them civilians.

Nor did the killing stop when the guns fell silent. Hundreds of thousands of repatriated Soviet war prisoners were locked away and eventually died in remote Siberian camps, their only crime being Stalin’s suspicion that they might somehow have been ideologically contaminated during the incredibly harsh captivity they suffered at German hands. Some Jewish survivors of Nazi death camps were murdered in pogroms when they tried to return to their homes in Poland. The postwar toll for Germans was especially great. Up to 14 million were summarily expelled from East Prussia, Silesia, the Czech Sudetenland and other enclaves. The historian John Keegan writes that 1 million may have died in the weeks after the surrender.

But the frightful human destruction of the war years was only a preview of what would have followed had Nazism prevailed. Summing up the objectives of Hitler and his fellow conspirators, Gerhard L. Weinberg writes that “the Germans looked first to a complete demographic reordering of the Eurasian land mass in which tens of millions would be slaughtered, sterilized or deliberately left to die of starvation. . . . “ That a new and permanent Dark Age did not fall on Europe is due in no small part to American participation in the war, to the enormous productive capacity the United States brought to bear and to the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of American lives. A half-century after Nazism was crushed, the world remains a less than perfect place. For all that, the fight to liberate Europe can honestly be counted as nothing less than a fight to save civilization. Its success will be honored for as long as our civilization endures.