On May 8, 1945, the Second world War officially ended, with the signing of the armistice. Officially because it was on September 2, 1945 that the war really ended, after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Japan, in August 1945.
Six years of fighting marked by millions of deaths.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939 with the invasion of Poland by the army of the III German Reich. This war remains to date the deadliest conflict in the history of humanity.
We are therefore in 1939, Chancellor Adolf Hitler has all powers in Germany. The country is at most economically bad after its defeat in the first World War. The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 provides that Germany must pay immense sums to France as repairs and concede the province of Eastern Prussia to Poland.
A desire for revenge in Hitler
Klaus-Peter Sick is a specialist in contemporary history, he works for the Marc Bloch Center in Berlin. According to him, the loss by Germany of a few square kilometers after the First World War led to the war in 1939. Adolf Hitler had a project of domination of the world, as explains Klaus-Peter Sick.
“There was an extremely strong desire for revenge in him against the Treaty of Versailles and against the loss of German territories in the east of Europe, in Poland. The Renaissance of Poland itself was for a revengeful being and nationalist like Hitler, an injury.”
Klaus-Peter Sick continues: “So he wanted to come back to the result of the First World War. To that (added) a feeling of disabilities and a feeling of revenge. This radicalized and extreme nationalism took the form in Hitler of a speech of world domination, that is to say also a fight against the United States on the one hand, and of course against the Soviet Union, communism on the other.”
The Second World War made between 40 million and 60 million deaths, including six million Jews. Germany has lost millions of soldiers and civilians, more than seven million in all.
With the end of the war also comes for the time to return to the horrors committed during the Third Reich. This follows the greatest wave of suicides in German history. In the village of Demmin in eastern Germany, for example, more than 900 people committed suicide while the Red Army of the former Soviet Union approached.
May 8: Liberation day for the Germans
A form of embarrassment seizes the Germans after the war: the country is certainly released from the Nazi Hitler dictator. This is the end of nationalism, of the Shoah. But Germany is collapsed, destroyed.
On the “day of democracy” in Berlin, in memory of the 60th anniversary of the end of the war, of the Germans called to demonstrate against a scheduled demonstration of the ultra -nationalist NPD party, founded by former far -right activists of the Hitler party.
“It was a military defeat. But Germany was released from the Nazis. We are now democracy.”
“Now we are free, have survived and we have rebuilt. I am a child of the war.”
Between embarrassment, joy after the liberation where Germany is located today? Klaus-Peter Sick explains that “This debate today is very, very largely a debate of the past. From 85,000,000 Germans who live today in Germany, 3,000,000 roughly were born before 1940 and therefore have any memory of children, young adolescents of the Nazi era”.
There are still a handful of veterans, that is to say the last ones who were mobilized. Those born in 1927. Only a few men remain, they are over 96 years old [aujourd’hui]. So, this debate on collapse and liberation, between those who lived the time is largely a ended debate. So, the fact remains that for us today: it is clear, on May 8, 1945 is a day of liberation.
The historian establishes three Cesures which indicate how on May 8, 1945 constitutes for the Germans a release.
“A first big caesura was the speech of the former President of the Republic Richard von Weizsäcker, 40 years ago. A second caesura, it was the invitation of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 2005 in Moscow, in the Russians, therefore, the great victorious power in the east of Europe. And we can add to this a third caesure. Where he also talked about liberation, but of a liberation from the Germans of themselves, that is to say that the Germans in the end, after all these years left behind, once and for all, anti-Western traditions. “
-To Klaus-Peter Sick, the debate is located elsewhere today: “The debate moves from this memory of the extreme violence perpetrated by Germans against others, today also towards violence which was suffered by Germans also after the end of the war, that is to say the shortage of food, the problems of housing and above all, and it is at the moment a great subject of debate, the memory between Germans. These 10,000,000 Germans who had to leave the territories in the east of the border Who are Polish or Russian today in the center-east of Europe. ”
German refugees on European roads
In 1945, millions of people were on the roads of Europe. The historian Philippe Burrin estimates that 12 million of these refugees were Germans: those who resided in the provinces of eastern Reich and annexed by Poland and the USSR at the end of the war and the Germans who had long lived in the Balkans or in Eastern Europe.
In 1945, Germany was divided and placed under the leadership of the 4 Allied powers that won the war. The United States, the United Kingdom and France occupy entire sections of the territory of western Germany and in the East, it is the Soviets who give the La. In 1949, this led to the creation of the FRG, to the west, then to the GDR, to the east. These two separate Germany, symbols of the Cold War, could not meet until 1990.
During the Second World War, some African soldiers fought alongside the Wehrmacht, the Reich army. They formed what was called the “Deutsche Afrikakorps” and were deployed in particular in North Africa in support of the army of fascist Italy, ally of Germany. Among them a handful of soldiers from sub-Saharan Africa, according to Klaus-Peter Sick.
“Fortunately, there is a new generation of African, Moroccans, Senegalese historiansconstate Klaus-Peter Sick who take care of the memory of African troops, but who have fought much more obviously on the side of the Western allies, especially French and British. ”
Because, many African soldiers fought alongside French and British troops against the German, Italian and Japanese armies in particular.
Two parallel and emblematic destinies.
Issoufou Joseph Conombo fought for France during the Second World War. Sick, he was admitted to the hospital in 1974 in France, in the middle of the year of the 30th anniversary of the Normandy landing: no mention of African soldiers during the commemoration, he complains. He died at the age of 91, on December 20, 2008, 30 minutes before the landing of his plane which left France, after being a deputy, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and former Prime Minister of Burkina Faso. Before his death, Issoufou Joseph Conombo wrote a book: Souvenir de war by a Senegalese skirmisher, a work published in 1989 by Editions de l’Harmattan.
The Ghanaian Miike Ajevon fought under British command against Japanese troops, in Burma. For example, he would have liked the European settlers going to Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. For example, he would have had the possibility of meeting friends and officers that he had not seen since the war.
“It is some of the branches somewhere in any case of this tragedy,” deplores Amadou Fall, Senegalese historian. For him, “we have understood absolutely nothing, controlled nothing in our history. And the recognition of France even less”.
“It is true that President Hollande once came to Senegal and spoke precisely about the participation of the Senegalese skirmishers, Dela Tragedy of Thiaroye. But we stopped there, we stopped there.”
The Thiaroye massacre took place in December 1944. African skirmishers were massacred by the French colonial Forces when they claimed the payment of their arrears of sales. French President Emmanuel Macron recognized last November that the French colonial forces had committed a massacre. The French authorities of the time admitted the death of 35 people. Several historians advance a much higher number of victims, up to 400.
Senegalese president Bassirou Diomaye Faye announced on December 1 that the history of the massacre of African skirmishers is now taught in schools.
A new page in history
Senegalese historian Amadou Fall believes that France and African countries must be able to speak frankly.
“And France and us, Africa, we must exchange, discuss, restore the historical truth, the truth of the facts that are there, these palpable facts, the archives, but also of living witnesses, that we talk about it, that we try once and for all, is it not to speak to us, to reconcile and to go together. And this recognition must go first in moral recognition. really, without falsification of the facts. “
He adds: “In France, even a few military camps would have to bear the name of Senegalese skirmishers. That there is a kind of moral recognition! And that’s, in truth, which can allow us tomorrow to open a new page and therefore to enter a new story.”
Colonized countries have not only provided important raw materials for war at derisory prices but also provided millions of soldiers and forced workers to the Allied Armed Forces, said the German Federal Center for political education . Which recalls that without the contribution of the colonized, the Second World War would have taken a different course and the liberation of the world of German and Italian fascism and the madness of the great Japanese power would have been even more difficult and longer.
