Europeans Mark ‘Triumph of Good’ : World War II: Global leaders gather in Paris and Berlin for 50th anniversary of Nazi defeat. Vice President Gore says real winner in victory over evil was ‘human spirit.’

On a day for remembering war and celebrating peace, world leaders converged Monday in Europe, gathering on a bright morning at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, where the World War II victors had danced for joy, and later on a rainy evening in Berlin, where the Nazi regime had surrendered in ruin.

The 50th anniversary of Victory in Europe was celebrated by tens of thousands of people across the Continent in ways big and small but nowhere as poignantly as here and Berlin, in consecutive ceremonies attended by French President Francois Mitterrand, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and dozens of international leaders.

In Paris, on a day celebrated as a national holiday, 10,000 leaders, war veterans and other dignitaries watched a military parade in which the flag of democratic Germany joined the colors of the Allied powers. A jet flyover sent smoke streams of red, white and blue--the French national colors--down the famed Avenue des Champs Elysees.

Although no public holiday was declared in Berlin, where the half-century-old memories still stir controversy, bells of the city’s churches tolled for 15 minutes.

At the Schauspielhaus theater, a downtown concert hall constructed from wartime ruins, Vice President Al Gore, Mitterrand and German President Roman Herzog--joined by Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin and British Prime Minister John Major--preached unity.

“We gather to celebrate a triumph of good over evil, a victory not of any one nation nor of any one people, but a victory of the human spirit,” Gore said. “It is fitting that we commemorate this victory here in Berlin, gathered now as friends and allies.”

Herzog said it was healthy for his country to debate whether the end of World War II marked a victory for Germans oppressed by the Nazi dictatorship, as most Germans believe, or a bitter defeat. And, in surprisingly frank remarks, he suggested it was both.

“Germany unleashed the most terrible war there had ever been and it experienced the most terrible defeat that one could imagine,” Herzog said.

But the spirit of reconciliation in Berlin was perhaps best exemplified by Mitterrand--the retiring, 78-year-old French president who had seen both sides of the war, belonging to the collaborationist Vichy regime before joining the Resistance.

Recalling his time as a prisoner of the Nazis, Mitterrand said that, even then, he saw many of his guards beginning to resist Nazi ideology.

“The enemy of yesterday is the friend of today,” declared Mitterrand, who, in his 14 years as president, has forged closer ties between France and Germany. V-E Day, he said, “was a victory of Europe over itself.”

Although Europe’s calendar has been filled with World War II commemorations, beginning with the 50th anniversary of the D-day landings 11 months ago, many cities took time again Monday to remember the end of the war.

In London, where world leaders had gathered Sunday for ceremonies, Queen Elizabeth II and the 94-year-old Queen Mother appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on Monday, as they had done 50 years earlier to share the nation’s relief at the end of the war in Europe.

In Rome, under one of the original Roman gates of the city, Domenico Corcione, the defense minister, dedicated a war memorial to the 87,000 Italian soldiers killed in what, for Italy, became a war to liberate the country from occupying Nazis and Italian Fascists.

In Reims, northeast of Paris, where the German surrender was signed at the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force under Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, 45 American and British members of that unit gathered with their families.

Alan Reeves--a retired political scientist from San Francisco who worked as a French interpreter and investigator during the war--said from Reims: “To be perfectly honest, it’s hard to remember back 50 years. I recall it was a mixed bag. We still had a war against Japan to fight, after all.”

But he said he had been deeply touched by his return to France. “I’m not a super-religious man,” said Reeves, 73. “But I’ll tell you my gut feeling. I still feel that Ike is up there somewhere watching over us. I just feel he’s still with us.”

As most of Europe basked in the memories of victory, commemorations in Poland--where World War II started in September, 1939--took a bitter turn when President Lech Walesa delivered a scathing speech to a special session of Parliament.

Criticizing the Western Allies for abandoning Poland after the war by handing it over to the Soviet Union, Walesa declared that V-E Day should be remembered as the day when “the door to liberty was shut” and five decades of Communist enslavement fell upon Eastern Europe.

“For Poland, the struggle for independence did not end in May, 1945,” he said. “It lasted a half-century longer.”

And Walesa warned that Poles, although now living in a democracy, should not forget having been forsaken by their friends. “Our great sacrifice and bloodshed did not win the respect and appreciation of our Western allies,” he said. “History has taught us that the memory of the greatest powers of this world is very short and that indifference and self-interest usually prevail.”

Some veterans complained that Walesa’s view of history belittled their wartime accomplishments. But at least one veterans group seated in the visitors’ gallery in Parliament stood and applauded.

Commemorations in Poland, which included special worship services and an evening concert, had been debated for months. Because of the mixed legacy that defeat of Nazi Germany brought to his country, Walesa refused to attend events outside of Poland, including those scheduled today in Moscow.

Walesa argued that the anniversary should be set aside as a time of national reflection. Opinion polls showed strong support for his decision. But the coalition government, afraid of offending the Russians and alienating Poland from the rest of Europe, opted to send a representative to Moscow anyway.

Continental Europe’s festivities had begun at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, where Nazi soldiers goose-stepped daily during their occupation of the city. Mitterrand, in his last important official act in France, arrived in a limousine, escorted by helmeted cavalrymen.

Among the spectators who lined the Champs Elysees was Paul G. Randolph, a history professor at Pepperdine University who was in high school when the war ended. “For sure it’s important to be here in Paris for this,” he said, “because we must try and prevent such a war from happening again.”

The commemoration was more subdued in Berlin, where the country seems exhausted by the extensive, painful and often embarrassing discussions of World War II that have filled the spring calendar.

The most recent debate has centered on whether Germany has the right to mourn the suffering of the millions of Germans who, at war’s end, were brutally driven out of what are now Poland and the Czech Republic. Survivors of those expulsions held a wreath-laying ceremony at one Berlin plaza.

But Herzog, the German president, didn’t mince words about German culpability in the Holocaust and the war. “Germans today know very well--probably more clearly than 50 years ago--that it was their government and many of their fathers who were responsible for the Holocaust and who brought ruin upon the nations of Europe,” he said.

Other world leaders carefully avoided placing blame. Gore recalled that it was Eisenhower himself who said the success of the war effort wouldn’t be known until the 50th anniversary of V-E Day. If Germany is a stable democracy, Eisenhower had said, “then we will have succeeded.”

“As a young American born after World War II,” Gore added, “I wish to report to Gen. Eisenhower: Mission fulfilled.”

Times staff writers Dean E. Murphy in Warsaw and Mary Williams Walsh in Berlin contributed to this report, as did Janet Stobart of The Times’ Rome Bureau and Sarah White of The Times’ Paris Bureau.