On May 8th 80 years ago, what remained of the Nazi regime offered its unconditional surrender to Alled forces, bringing an end to the second World War in Europe. There were joyous celebrations in London, which five years earlier had stood alone against Hitler, but many of Europe’s other great cities lay dark and destroyed.
Three more onths would pass before hostilities in the Pacific theatre concluded with Japan’s surrender, but VE Day marked the end of the bloodiest conflict in European history. Estimates still vary widely, but up to 50 million were dead, the majority of them civilians who had perished in genocides, famines and the mass slaughter of in undustrialised warfare. Much of he continent lay in ruins and millions of the displaced and disposessed were on the move.
The post-war period which followed would have its own dark narratives, including the the Cold War and the suppression of civil liberties in central and eastern Europe. But it also saw the rebirth of democracy, and , with US support via the Marshall Plan, a remarkably swift and long-lasting economic reconstruction.
A generation of European leaders began the painstaking process of building new transnational institutions that would bind former adversaries together and render another continental war, they hoped, unimaginable. Europeans still live in the new post-war order which they dreamed of amid the rubble of May 1945.
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For Ireland, one of the few European nations to remain neutral throughout the conflict, VE Day also brought relief. Thousands of Irish citizens had fought on the Allied side and many more contributed to the war effort by working in British factories. Neutral Ireland may have favoured the Allied cause more than was appreciated or acknowledged at the time but the country’s absence from the fight against fascism remains an ambiguous and sometimes contested part of the State’s history. And isolation during the war was followed by stagnation in the years that followed.
On this particular anniversary, as the second Wold War slips from living memory and into the history books, there is reason to be fearful that its lessons are now being forgotten. The largest European military conflict since 1945 is currently being prosecuted by a Russian dictator against democratic Ukraine. Across the continent, countries are hurrying to rearm. Demagogues spouting blood and soil nationalism are resurgent. In Germany, a party that flirts openly with Nazi symbolism leads in some opinion polls. And the transatlantic alliance which underpinned the European post-war recovery is fraying.
This, then, is a day to remember not just those who fought for victory over Nazism but the work of those who built a better Europe fron its ashes, whose values are now once more under attack.
