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| From 1939 Weizsäcker served in the Potsdam Infantry Regiment 9, which belonged to the 23rd Infantry Division. He took part in the invasion of Poland and the struggle against the Soviet Union |
Speech in the Bundestag on 8 May 1985 during the Ceremony Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the End of War in Europe and of National-Socialist Tyranny
I
Many nations are today commemorating the date on which World War II ended in Europe.
Every nation is doing so with different feelings, depending on its fate. Be it victory or
defeat, liberation from injustice and alien rule or transition to new dependence, division,
new alliances, vast shifts of power - 8 May 1945 is a date of decisive historical importance
for Europe.
We Germans are commemorating that date amongst ourselves, as is indeed necessary.
We must find our own standards. We are not assisted in this task if we or others spare our
feelings. We need and we have the strength to look truth straight in the eye – without
embellishment and without distortion.
For us, the 8th of May is above all a date to remember what people had to suffer. It is also
a date to reflect on the course taken by our history. The greater honesty we show in
commemorating this day, the freer we are to face the consequences with due
responsibility. For us Germans, 8 May is not a day of celebration. Those who actually
witnessed that day in 1945 think back on highly personal and hence highly different
experiences. Some returned home, others lost their homes. Some were liberated, whilst for others it was the start of captivity. Many were simply grateful that the bombing at night
and fear had passed and that they had survived. Others felt first and foremost grief at the
complete defeat suffered by their country. Some Germans felt bitterness about their
shattered illusions, whilst others were grateful for the gift of a new start.
It was difficult to find one's bearings straight away. Uncertainty prevailed throughout the
country. The military capitulation was unconditional, placing our destiny in the hands of
our enemies. The past had been terrible, especially for many of those enemies, too.
Would they not make us pay many times over for what we had done to them? Most
Germans had believed that they were fighting and suffering for the good of their country.
And now it turned out that their efforts were not only in vain and futile, but had served the
inhuman goals of a criminal regime. The feelings of most people were those of
exhaustion, despair and new anxiety. Had one's next of kin survived? Did a new start from
those ruins make sense at all? Looking back, they saw the dark abyss of the past and,
looking forward, they saw an uncertain, dark future.
Yet with every day something became clearer, and this must be stated on behalf of all of
us today: the 8th of May was a day of liberation. It liberated all of us from the inhumanity
and tyranny of the National-Socialist regime.
Nobody will, because of that liberation, forget the grave suffering that only started for
many people on 8 May. But we must not regard the end of the war as the cause of flight,
expulsion and deprivation of freedom. The cause goes back to the start of the tyranny that
brought about war. We must not separate 8 May 1945 from 30 January 1933.
There is truly no reason for us today to participate in victory celebrations. But there is
every reason for us to perceive 8 May 1945 as the end of an aberration in German history,
an end bearing seeds of hope for a better future.
II
8 May is a day of remembrance. Remembering means recalling an occurrence honestly
and undistortedly so that it becomes a part of our very beings. This places high demands
on our truthfulness.
Today we mourn all the dead of the war and the tyranny. In particular we commemorate
the six million Jews who were murdered in German concentration camps. We
commemorate all nations who suffered in the war, especially the countless citizens of the
Soviet Union and Poland who lost their lives. As Germans, we mourn our own compatriots
who perished as soldiers, during air raids at home, in captivity or during expulsion. We
commemorate the Sinti and Romany gypsies, the homosexuals and the mentally ill who
were killed, as well as the people who had to die for their religious or political beliefs. We
commemorate the hostages who were executed. We recall the victims of the resistance
movements in all the countries occupied by us. As Germans, we pay homage to the
victims of the German resistance – among the public, the military, the churches, the
workers and trade unions, and the communists. We commemorate those who did not
actively resist, but preferred to die instead of violating their consciences.
Alongside the endless army of the dead mountains of human suffering arise – grief at the
dead, suffering from injury or crippling or barbarous compulsory sterilization, suffering
during the air raids, during flight and expulsion, suffering because of rape and pillage,
forced labour, injustice and torture, hunger and hardship, suffering because of fear of
arrest and death, grief at the loss of everything which one had wrongly believed in and
worked for. Today we sorrowfully recall all this human suffering.
Perhaps the greatest burden was borne by the women of all nations. Their suffering,
renunciation and silent strength are all too easily forgotten by history. Filled with fear, they
worked, bore human life and protected it. They mourned their fallen fathers and sons,
husbands, brothers and friends. In the years of darkness, they ensured that the light of
humanity was not extinguished. After the war, with no prospect of a secure future, women
everywhere were the first to set about building homes again, the "rubble women" in Berlin
and elsewhere. When the men who had survived returned, women had to take a back
seat again. Because of the war, many women were left alone and spent their lives in
solitude. Yet it is first and foremost thanks to the women that nations did not disintegrate
spiritually on account of the destruction, devastation, atrocities and inhumanity and that
they gradually regained their foothold after the war.
III
At the root of the tyranny was Hitler's immeasurable hatred against our Jewish
compatriots. Hitler had never concealed this hatred from the public, but made the entire
nation a tool of it. Only a day before his death, on 30 April 1945, he concluded his socalled
will with the words: "Above all, I call upon the leaders of the nation and their
followers to observe painstakingly the race laws and to oppose ruthlessly the poisoners of
all nations: international Jewry." Hardly any country has in its history always remained free
from blame for war or violence. The genocide of the Jews is, however, unparalleled in
history.
The perpetration of this crime was in the hands of a few people. It was concealed from the
eyes of the public, but every German was able to experience what his Jewish compatriots
had to suffer, ranging from plain apathy and hidden intolerance to outright hatred. Who
could remain unsuspecting after the burning of the synagogues, the plundering, the
stigmatization with the Star of David, the deprivation of rights, the ceaseless violation of
human dignity? Whoever opened his eyes and ears and sought information could not fail
to notice that Jews were being deported. The nature and scope of the destruction may
have exceeded human imagination, but in reality there was, apart from the crime itself, the
attempt by too many people, including those of my generation, who were young and were
not involved in planning the events and carrying them out, not to take note of what was
happening. There were many ways of not burdening one's conscience, of shunning
responsibility, looking away, keeping mum. When the unspeakable truth of the Holocaust
then became known at the end of the war, all too many of us claimed that they had not
known anything about it or even suspected anything.
There is no such thing as the guilt or innocence of an entire nation. Guilt is, like
innocence, not collective, but personal. There is discovered or concealed individual guilt.
There is guilt which people acknowledge or deny. Everyone who directly experienced that
era should today quietly ask himself about his involvement then.
The vast majority of today's population were either children then or had not been born.
They cannot profess a guilt of their own for crimes that they did not commit. No discerning
person can expect them to wear a penitential robe simply because they are Germans. But
their forefathers have left them a grave legacy. All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and liable for it.
The young and old generations must and can help each other to understand why it is vital
to keep alive the memories. It is not a case of coming to terms with the past. That is not
possible. It cannot be subsequently modified or made undone. However, anyone who
closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present. Whoever refuses to remember the
inhumanity is prone to new risks of infection.
The Jewish nation remembers and will always remember. We seek reconciliation.
Precisely for this reason we must understand that there can be no reconciliation without
remembrance. The experience of millionfold death is part of the very being of every Jew in
the world, not only because people cannot forget such atrocities, but also because
remembrance is part of the Jewish faith.
"Seeking to forget makes exile all the longer; the secret of redemption lies in
remembrance." This oft quoted Jewish adage surely expresses the idea that faith in God
is faith in the work of God in history. Remembrance is experience of the work of God in
history. It is the source of faith in redemption. This experience creates hope, creates faith
in redemption, in reunification of the divided, in reconciliation. Whoever forgets this
experience loses his faith.
If we for our part sought to forget what has occurred, instead of remembering it, this would
not only be inhuman. We would also impinge upon the faith of the Jews who survived and
destroy the basis of reconciliation. We must erect a memorial to thoughts and feelings in
our own hearts.
IV
The 8th of May marks a deep cut not only in ,German history but in the history of Europe
as a whole. The European civil war had come to an end, the old world of Europe lay in
ruins. "Europe had fought itself to a standstill" (M. Stürmer). The meeting of American and
Soviet Russian soldiers on the Elbe became a symbol for the temporary end of a
European era.
True, all this was deeply rooted in history. For a century Europe had suffered under the
clash of extreme nationalistic aspirations. At the end of the First World War peace treaties
were signed but they lacked the power to foster peace. Once more nationalistic passions
flared up and were fanned by the distress of the people at that time.
Along the road to disaster Hitler became the driving force. He wipped up and exploited
mass hysteria. A weak democracy was incapable of stopping him. And even the powers of
Western Europe – in Churchill's judgement unsuspecting but not without guilt –
contributed through their weakness to this fateful trend. After the First World War America
had withdrawn and in the thirties had no influence on Europe.
Hitler wanted to dominate Europe and to do so through war. He looked for and found an
excuse in Poland. On 23 May 1939 he told the German generals: "No further successes
can be gained without bloodshed... Danzig is not the objective. Our aim is to extend our
Lebensraum in the East and safeguard food supplies... So there is no question of sparing
Poland; and there remains the decision to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity...
The object is to deliver the enemy a blow, or the annihilating blow, at the start. In this, law,
injustice or treaties do not matter."
On 23 August 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact. The
secret supplementary protocol made provision for the impending partition of Poland. That
pact was made to give Hitler an opportunity to invade Poland. The Soviet leaders at the
time were fully aware of this. And all who understood politics realized that the implications
of the German-Soviet pact were Hitler's invasion of Poland and hence the Second World
War.
That does not mitigate Germany's responsibility for the outbreak of the Second World
War. The Soviet Union was prepared to allow other nations to fight one another so that it
could have a share of the spoils. The initiative for the war, however, came from Germany,
not from the Soviet Union. It was Hitler who resorted to the use of force. The outbreak of
the Second World War remains linked with the name of Germany.
In the course of that war the Nazi regime tormented and defiled many nations. At the end
of it all only one nation remained to be tormented, enslaved and defiled: the German
nation. Time and again Hitler had declared that if the German nation was not capable of winning the war it should be left to perish. The other nations first became victims of a war
started by Germany before we became the victims of our own war.
The division of Germany into zones began on the 8th of May. In the meantime the Soviet
Union had taken control in all countries of Eastern and South-eastern Europe that had
been occupied by Germany during the war. All of them, with the exception of Greece,
became socialist states. The division of Europe into two different political systems took its
course. True, it was the post-war developments which cemented that division, but without
the war started by Hitler it would not have happened at all. That is what first comes to the
minds of the nations concerned when they recall the war unleashed by the German
leaders. And we think of that too when we ponder the division of our own country and the
loss of huge sections of German territory. In a sermon in East Berlin commemorating the
8th of May, Cardinal Meißner said: "The pathetic result of sin is always division."
