Lessons of WWII Go Unlearned, Pope Says : Vatican: In letter marking V-E Day, pontiff decries terrorism and ‘logic of arms’ in Balkans and Caucasus.

On the eve of his 75th birthday, Pope John Paul II looked somberly back across a momentous half a century to conclude Tuesday that humankind has still not learned the lessons of World War II, which he witnessed in traumatic fashion in Poland.

“Sadly, the end of the war did not lead to the disappearance of the policies and ideologies which were its cause or contributed to its outbreak. Under another guise, totalitarian regimes continued and, indeed, spread, especially in Eastern Europe,” the Pope says in a war and remembrance letter marking the 50th anniversary of V-E Day.

Scoring incessant bloodshed, savageries uncounted, destruction unimaginable, genocide against Jews and the atom bombing of Japan, John Paul’s letter deplores the “bleak consequences of death, hatred and violence” visited on the world by a “culture of war” still not overcome.

The Pope--who himself endured wartime privation in a Nazi-occupied homeland where millions were slaughtered--urges European Roman Catholics to ask forgiveness for allowing the disaster of an apocalyptic world war to rage on their continent.

Worse, the Pope laments, true peace did not come and systematic violation of human rights did not end with Germany’s surrender in May, 1945.

“It was not understood that a society worthy of the person is not built by destroying the person, by repression and by discrimination. This lesson of World War II has not yet been learned completely and in all quarters. And yet it remains and must stand as a warning for the next millennium,” the Pope says in a letter sent to world leaders and meant for reflection by Catholics.

The world, Europe in particular, plummeted toward the “enormous catastrophe” of war in 1939 because its people lacked “moral strength” to oppose the totalitarianism that “destroys fundamental human freedoms and tramples upon human rights,” in the papal analysis, offered half a century later.

Karol Wojtyla was 19 when war began, a factory worker in his native Krakow during the occupation that followed Germany’s invasion of Poland. He entered a clandestine seminary during the war. As a devastated Poland stumbled into barbed Soviet embrace, he was ordained in 1946.

The Pope calls World War II a turning point for humanity.

“Memories of the war must not grow dim,” he says, “rather, they ought to become a stern lesson for our generation and for generations yet to come.”

Alas, the Pope finds, the lesson is largely unlearned.

“Violence, terrorism and armed attacks have continued to darken these last decades,” he says, decrying strife in the Balkans and the Caucasus, “where arms are still roaring, and human blood continues to be shed.”

The Pope, who celebrates his 75th birthday Thursday, insists that societies “cannot and must not yield to the logic of arms.”

He pledges Vatican support for nuclear non-proliferation and respect for human rights. And he appeals for strengthened international mechanisms to control the arms trade and to intervene in local disputes before they erupt into warfare.

John Paul, who is at once the first Polish Pope and history’s most traveled pontiff, goes back on the road this weekend for a two-day visit to the Czech Republic.