May 8th in the light of remembrance: Our country must be capable of peace!

The "removal of all Jews from the German national community" was Hitler's goal since he came to power on January 30, 1933. More than 6 million European Jews, including one million children, were systematically murdered by bullets or gas by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators. The poet Paul Celan wrote in "Death Fugue": "Death is a master from Germany." Due to the SS deployment of troops, there were no longer any Jews in the cities of the Soviet Union. In his extreme anti-Semitism, Hitler saw the Soviet regime as the "representatives of a Jewish Bolshevism."

May 8th must remain a day of remembrance, a day of reflection on peace and a commitment to humanity. On May 7th, 1945, Colonel General Jodl signed the unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht to General Eisenhower in Reims, France. At the urging of the Soviets, the process was repeated on May 8th, 1945, in Berlin-Karlshorst by Field Marshal Keitel for midnight on May 9th. In the Pacific, the Second World War only ended after the dropping of two American atomic bombs on Hiroshima on August 6th and Nagasaki on August 9th, with the surrender of Japan on September 2nd, 1945.

Today, war is raging in Europe again: the Russian war against Ukraine. For this reason alone, it is imperative to remember the crimes of the Second World War, which knew no bounds, and to recognize the paramount importance of peace. The most important thing is to protect people's lives and find paths to peace. That is what we must focus on today, also bearing in mind Germany's own history.

Crowds flock to the municipal homeless shelter in Berlin due to the severe housing shortage and unemployment in Germany. (Photographed: January 1, 1929–December 31, 1929) SZ Photo/picture alliance

Let's look back : No war comes out of the blue. At the beginning of the 1930s, following the great economic crisis that began with "Black Friday" on the New York Stock Exchange on October 25, 1929, the global economy was devastated. More than 30 million people were unemployed; in Germany, the number was six million. Political instability increased, democracies weakened, and authoritarian movements gained strength. In Germany, the Weimar Republic was put under pressure by nationalist forces. On January 30, 1933, Hitler seized power.

On October 3, 1935, the fascist Kingdom of Italy began its last major colonial conquest campaign against independent Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in East Africa, carried out with extreme brutality. Following a firefight at the Marco Polo Bridge, Japan seized control of resource-rich Manchuria, a region belonging to China. On July 7, 1937, the Second Sino-Japanese War began, which after 1941 became part of World War II in the Pacific. Disguised as a "volunteer unit," 25,000 soldiers of the Condor Legion supported the nationalist putschists under General Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939). Their brutal air raid on the civilian population of Guernica on April 26, 1937, became infamous.

Hitler's Germany's expansion began southeastward: with the Anschluss of Austria, then the Sudetenland, and finally the "rest of Czechoslovakia." This overturned the international order over the course of the decade. The League of Nations, initiated by American President Woodrow Wilson in the Treaty of Versailles in 1918 and based on Immanuel Kant's 1795 treatise "On Perpetual Peace," proved too weak to maintain peace and settle international conflicts. Since the mid-1920s, several right-wing authoritarian regimes had gradually established themselves in the East Central and Southeast European states located between Germany and the Soviet Union.

In the run-up to the Great War, Great Britain, and in its wake France, had ceded the German-speaking border regions of Czechoslovakia to the German Reich under the "Munich Agreement" of October 29, 1938, rendering Czechoslovakia militarily defenseless. The thoroughly calculated and motivated policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany pursued by the victorious European powers in the First World War, as well as the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939 (Hitler-Stalin Pact), with its secret supplementary agreement on the partition of Poland and the delimitation of spheres of influence, is part of the immediate prehistory of the Second World War. Under pressure from Hitler, Lithuania also ceded the Memel region to the German Reich in March 1939.

After months of escalating interstate tensions, triggered in part by conflicts between ethnic Poles and the German-speaking minority, Hitler's Germany launched a major offensive on its eastern neighbor on September 1, 1939, with 57 Wehrmacht divisions, supported by Slovak troops. This offensive was legitimized by a self-orchestrated and transparent attack on the German radio station in Gleiwitz. In the first "Blitzkrieg," Polish resistance was crushed within five weeks. Poland surrendered as early as September 27. Between 60,000 and 100,000 Polish and 10,000 to 14,000 German soldiers, as well as 25,000 civilians, were killed. At least 400,000 Poles were taken prisoner. Half of occupied Poland was directly annexed to the German Reich and was to be "Germanized"; The rest became a kind of colony known as the "General Government," a kind of legalized exploitation; Eastern Poland went to the USSR. The plan was to eradicate the Polish nation through the extermination of the leading and educated classes, especially the minor nobility, trade unionists, priests, and Jews, and to grant the majority of the population a helot status that no longer allowed for any nationality.

German soldiers at a border crossing into Poland, September 1, 1939. United Archives International/imago

Contrary to Hitler's expectations, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, but without taking military action. Months of anxious waiting followed. Before the German Reich launched its major offensive on the Western Front on May 10, advancing through the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, ignoring their neutrality, it had occupied the neutral Scandinavian states of Denmark and Norway, where initial fighting with landed British troops took place. Hitler wanted to pursue his main goal of "conquering living space in the East" "after short, decisive strikes to the West."

With a surprise tank offensive through the Ardennes, the Wehrmacht was able to win the French campaign within a few weeks. On June 22, Army General Huntzinger signed the surrender. More than 90,000 French soldiers had fallen, and many more were missing or captured. Up to 49,000 German soldiers died. In Vichy, an authoritarian collaborationist regime was established under the leadership of Marshal Pétain, which for a long time enjoyed considerable support among the population, especially among the upper class. While the "Free French," who formed the alternative pole in London under General de Gaulle, initially remained largely isolated.

The British Expeditionary Force had been effectively surrounded in Normandy since the start of the war, but was evacuated back to the island in a spectacular rescue operation supported by numerous civilians. The new British government under Churchill showed determination in the fight against Hitler's Germany, hoping for support from the restrained USA, whose intervention had decided the First World War. First, however, Great Britain had to endure the Battle of Britain that began in July 1940 and the bombing of London, which left a total of 43,000 dead and 143,000 injured civilians and was intended to force London to surrender. The strategically important British colony of Malta in the Mediterranean became the most bombed location of the war, with more than 3,300 air raids.

With its declaration of war on June 10, 1940, Mussolini's Italy entered the fray against the already virtually defeated France and Great Britain. Rome's expansionist interests, however, were focused on the Mediterranean. There, with the help of the British, Greece was initially able to repel an Italian invasion of the Suez Canal, Egypt, and the British and French colonies in North Africa. Because the troops proved too weak, however, Hitler sent Wehrmacht units into the campaign against Yugoslavia, as well as Greece and North Africa, in April 1941.

Operation Barbarossa: This was the name given to the German invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II. United Archives International/imago

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched a broad-front attack on the Soviet Union with a total of more than three million soldiers. Operation Barbarossa was the largest and most brutal military conflict in human history. Hitler hoped to defeat the western Soviet Union, whose population had suffered the most from the war, in a short campaign. Subsequent small-scale wars in the Urals were anticipated.

Not solely, but primarily in the understanding of the Nazi leadership, this was an expansion motivated by existential and racial ideology, in which neither humanitarian considerations nor valid laws of war and international law could be taken into account. By subjugating the European Soviet Union, Hitler intended to create a long-term, unshakable continental empire with its capital Germania, also by appropriating its raw material reserves and agricultural surplus areas, which would provide space for new German settlements in the East. The National Socialists wanted to create "living space in the East," where ethnic groups were considered "inferior." "Jewish Bolshevism," which in Nazi ideology strived for world domination, was to be destroyed; the starvation of a large portion of the Eastern Slavs was planned. The surviving remnants were destined for primitive servitude. The primary purpose of the eastward expansion was to deprive Great Britain of its hopes of a German-Russian conflict that would result in the USSR joining the anti-Hitler camp.

In the first few months, the Eastern Campaign went well for the German Wehrmacht. The Soviet units stationed far to the west were to be eliminated in major encirclement battles, but in the autumn the advance stalled. After the Wehrmacht's anticipated capture of Moscow failed, the Red Army launched a counteroffensive. It was able to push back the German forces. Only with great effort did the German front hold. In the summer and autumn of 1942, the German troops were to advance to the Volga, firstly to block the important waterway, primarily for armaments from the USA to central Russia, at the operational objective of the symbolic industrial center of Stalingrad, which had been renamed after the Soviet leader in 1925. Secondly, to capture the Caucasus with its important oil fields around Maikop, Grozny, and Baku and its vast reserves of raw materials.

The Battle of Stalingrad, from August 23, 1942, to February 2, 1943, was the most brutal battle of World War II. A "rat fight," in which 250,000 German soldiers were encircled in temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius. Nevertheless, Hitler ordered the fight to the last bullet. An estimated 200,000 German soldiers died or were severely injured in Stalingrad. The Red Army suffered almost five times as many losses and still managed to hold its ground. Of the 91,000 prisoners taken, the vast majority died during forced marches or in prison. Only 6,000 German and Romanian soldiers returned home.

In the winter of 1943/44, the Red Army soldiers pushed the Wehrmacht back from large parts of Ukraine. The region around Kursk became the last major tank battle on the Eastern Front. Approximately 6,000 tanks clashed, and almost 4,000 aircraft were involved. On July 5, 1943, the Wehrmacht, with 900,000 soldiers, attacked the Russian armed forces, which had mobilized approximately 1.3 million soldiers and 500,000 reserve men. Thanks to the Red Army's efforts to throw mines in front of approaching tanks, the Wehrmacht's advance was halted by July 16. The Red Army was able to advance westward. The price was high: In total, over a million soldiers lost their lives.

The Battle of Stalingrad: On February 2, 1943, the remnants of the Wehrmacht's 6th Army surrendered in Stalingrad. UIG/imago

With the US entry into the war in December 1941 and the simultaneous impending failure of Operation Barbarossa, a major German victory had already become improbable. With the turn of the year 1942/43, the victory over the 6th Army at Stalingrad, the failure of the Afrika Korps at El Alamain, and the looming defeat of the German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic, due to new long-range bombers and the decryption of the Enigma codes, it became virtually impossible.

The tide had turned. Following the Wehrmacht's surrender in North Africa on May 13, 1943, the Western Allies landed in Sicily on July 9. The Grand Fascist Council deposed Mussolini, and the king stepped out of the shadows and had the "Duce" arrested. However, despite the new Italian government's change of sides, the German Wehrmacht was able to stabilize the front. After the spectacular liberation of Mussolini, a satellite republic was established. Rome was not liberated by the Western Allies until June 4, 1944.

In May 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed on a landing in France twelve months later, codenamed Operation Overlord. Stalin had repeatedly called for the establishment of a front in the West to relieve the pressure on the Red Army. On June 6, 1944, the landing of 156,000 soldiers from the USA, Great Britain and Canada began on five beaches in Normandy at 6:30 a.m. Over the next ten months, 2.5 million soldiers and 500,000 military vehicles arrived in France. After fierce fighting in Normandy, the German troops were driven out of the country by the end of 1944. A final German offensive, the Ardennes Offensive, failed after initial successes, primarily due to Allied air superiority. On March 8, 1945, the Americans crossed the Rhine at Remagen.

Two weeks after D-Day in Normandy, the Red Army began a frontal attack from the east with 2.4 million soldiers across Belarus to the west. This effectively led to the destruction of Army Group Center. The Wehrmacht lost 300,000 men and was overrun in Ukraine by mid-July. In February 1945, the Red Army was 64 kilometers from Berlin; the final battle had begun. The Auschwitz-Birkenau labor and extermination camp had previously been liberated on January 27, 1945. Only 7,000 prisoners remained there, including 180 children who had been abused for medical experiments. 1.3 million people, including around one million European Jews, were murdered in the concentration camp's six gas chambers.

The first concentration camp run by the SS was in Dachau. After the annexation of Poland, the crime of the century, the extermination of the Jews, the Shoah, was systematically carried out there in five extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka). The foundations for the deportation for the industrial extermination of Jews from all over Europe, including Sinti, Roma, and homosexuals, were laid at the secret Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, by 15 representatives of the Reich government and SS leadership. The decision for the Holocaust had already been made with the mass murders in the occupied eastern territories. Whether this was based on a pre-conceived plan or whether the so-called Final Solution resulted from the cumulative radicalization of the Nazi regime is of secondary importance.

February 1945: Children in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Reinhard Schultz/imago

With the bombing raids of the Western Allies, primarily on densely populated residential areas, German territory was drawn into the war beginning in 1942 and increasingly so from 1943 onwards. In the first four months of 1945 – Germany had effectively been defeated long ago – American and British bombers bombarded German cities with 1.5 million tons of explosives, killing more than 600,000 people. Dresden was worst hit; after heavy bombing in February 1945, it burned for weeks and suffered more than 25,000 civilian casualties. Berlin was bombed 310 times. Between 30,000 and 49,000 civilians were killed, 500,000 homes were destroyed, and another 100,000 were severely damaged.

From April 16 to May 2, 1945, the attack on Berlin, involving 2.5 million Red Army soldiers and Polish forces—Germany had effectively been defeated long ago—began in mid-April. It began with the battle on the Oder River for the Seelow Heights against the "last contingent," the "Volkssturm," and remnants of German army groups. The fighting in and around Berlin claimed an estimated 150,000 casualties, around 500,000 wounded, and tens of thousands of civilians killed.

In the Pacific, the war continued after Germany's surrender, until the terrible escalation of the atomic bombings on September 2, 1945, when the Imperial Japanese Army surrendered under General Yoshigiro on the US battleship Missouri. Finally, the USSR also entered the war against Japan.

The invasion of the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, and the Philippines was intended to create a "Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere" to achieve Japan's economic autonomy. The Pacific War became World War II on December 7, 1941, with the surprise attack by Japanese aircraft on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. This was intended to secure Japan's supremacy in the Pacific for the years to come. This was a clash between the imperial interests of two emerging superpowers. Only Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declaration of war by Germany and Italy enabled U.S. President Roosevelt, who had already supported Great Britain and the Soviet Union with arms deliveries, to officially enter the war and give priority to Europe.

The war spread throughout the Pacific and led to costly battles between Japan and the Allied forces over Midway, the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, Leyte, Mindoro and Luzon (Philippines), and finally Burma. By early 1945, American forces and their allies, especially the British, had gained the upper hand. The USA still had to capture two islands south of Japan before attacking the Empire itself. The fighting for Iwo Jima and Okinawa ushered in the final phase of the Pacific War. Brutal battles raged over the islands. A statement by the Japanese military command stated: "A great tragedy awaits these islands. We will defend the islands to the end. This will be a fight to the death." And so it happened: Of the 20,000 heavily armed Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, only 216 survived. The conquest of the main island of Okinawa was even bloodier.

Raising the American flag on Iwo Jima. Photo12/imago

In the final phase of the war, death rained from the skies. On March 9 and 10, more than 300 American B-29 Superfortresses dropped incendiary bombs on Tokyo. They set fire to around 250,000 houses, killed almost 100,000 people, and left millions homeless. It was the most devastating bombing raid of all time. But the horror did not end there. On August 6 and 9, 1945, atomic bombs were used for the first time on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The moral and ethical concerns presented to the American president – ​​now Harry Truman after Roosevelt's death – in the Franck Report were brushed aside. The report also included possible alternatives, such as dropping the bombs on uninhabited Japanese areas or at least providing early warning to the population.

The bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a brilliant flash, heat, and radiation, followed by a shock wave that destroyed virtually every building within a 1.6-kilometer radius and ignited a firestorm in the cities. The atomic bombings resulted in more than 120,000 immediate deaths in the two port cities and around 226,000 deaths from radiation in the following months. Eisenhower expressed his doubts about the approach: "The Japanese were ready to surrender, and it was not necessary to hit them with this horrific thing." But the nuclear age had begun, and the East-West conflict that would shape the next decades was looming. The bombing was also intended as a threat to the Soviet Union, which, however, conducted its first nuclear weapons test just four years later in Semipalatinsk. Today, nine states possess a total of around 13,600 nuclear warheads, of which the USA and Russia possess more than 90 percent.

The toll is gruesome. The 20th century was bloodier and more gruesome than any of its predecessors. If one adds the civilian war deaths from famine and genocide to the fallen soldiers, more than 150 million people died during the two world wars.

In World War II alone, the USSR lost around 27 million people: more than 11 million soldiers and up to 17.5 million civilians, including at least 1.2 million killed during the Siege of Leningrad between 1941 and 1944. In the western Soviet Union, 1,710 cities, more than 70,000 villages, and six million houses were severely or completely destroyed, and 25 million people were left homeless at the onset of the harsh winter of 1941/42. By 1945, well over ten million soldiers were involved in the fighting on the "Eastern Front." And of the approximately six million Soviet soldiers who were taken prisoner by the Germans, half died of starvation and disease.

The United States lost approximately 400,000 soldiers. The British also lost approximately 400,000, the same number as the Commonwealth countries, including 87,000 Indians, 45,000 Canadians, and 40,000 Australians. The German Wehrmacht lost half a million soldiers on the Western Front and more than 2.3 million on the Eastern Front. China suffered the highest losses in Asia, with four million soldiers killed, ahead of Japan with more than two million.

A picture from the then-Polish city of Lwow in 1941 after a Nazi attack. Picture alliance/AP Images

In World War II alone, probably 40 million civilians lost their lives. In China, more than 16 million died under Japanese occupation. Poland suffered the greatest percentage loss (including the murdered Jews), with 5.6 million people, more than a fifth of its population. In Yugoslavia, 1.2 million civilians and partisans were killed. In Greece, 300,000 people starved to death during the German occupation. In Germany, 2.8 million civilians died.

In the big cities, reconstruction became a mammoth task. In Poland, 30 percent of the buildings were destroyed. In Germany, the 49 largest cities lost at least 40 percent of their residential buildings to bombing. The Second World War was not only the bloodiest, it was also by far the most expensive in history. And it had enormous global political consequences. Great Britain, the hegemon of the 19th century, lost control of the empire. The decolonization of the global South began on a large scale. Algeria, for example, also saw May 8, 1945, as the day of liberation from French rule. In response to the demonstrations, French colonial troops carried out a horrific massacre.

The Soviet Union and the superpower USA remained the world powers, and their rivalry would dominate the coming decades. A systemic conflict quickly developed, with one bloc claiming responsibility for freedom, the other for social progress. During the Cold War, humanity teetered on the brink of nuclear war several times. The most dangerous confrontation, the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, provided the impetus for gradually initiating a policy of détente, which, although punctuated by setbacks, played a key role in dissolving the bloc confrontation by the end of the 1980s.

A U.S. Navy reconnaissance aircraft flies over the U.S. warship USS Barry (front) and the Soviet freighter Anosov off the coast of Costa Rica. UPI/dpa

Even a conventional war—the use of "tactical" nuclear weapons was nevertheless envisaged early on in military considerations in the event of war—would have left little of Germany, divided along the line of confrontation. Germany's exposed location led to widespread popular resistance to the stationing of American medium-range missiles in the early 1980s. Today, however, there has been too little protest against NATO's planned stationing of three American medium-range systems in Germany by 2026, including the Dark Eagle hypersonic missile, a first-strike weapon capable of carrying a nuclear weapon.

The decisions of the war and post-war conferences in Yalta (February 1945) and Potsdam (July/August 1945) de facto entailed the division of the world, more specifically the Northern Hemisphere, and a peace at the expense of the defeated and divided Germany. However, they also contained the new world order with the creation of the United Nations and the beginnings of a forward-looking approach to international relations.

The liberation of Europe was only made possible by the sacrificial struggle of the peoples of the Soviet Union, who paid for the war with much blood ; by the steadfastness of the British people, who contributed to the turning point of the war by giving it more time on their territory; and by the historic alliance between the liberal-capitalist USA and the communist USSR, which, above all, brought the world money for weapons. With heavy sacrifices, especially by the Soviet Union, Hitler's fascism was defeated. In Germany, too, in 1945, not only the anti-fascist minority but also the disoriented majority recognized that a break with the historical error that had led the world to catastrophe was necessary.

The Buchenwald Oath remains a hope and commitment for a peaceful future. But 80 years after the end of the Second World War, humanity has not freed itself from the demon of war. Since 1945, especially in the southern hemisphere, a multitude of civil wars, interstate wars, and wars of liberation have taken place, often as proxy wars. Many of these violent conflicts have not been and continue to be with us. Yet even in the last 25 years, millions of people have died in war. In the Second Congo War alone, up to 2003, 3.6 million died; in the Afghanistan War, up to two million; and in the Somali Civil War, the Iraq War, and the Syrian Civil War, at least half a million died each year. The average number of war deaths is estimated at 180,000 per year, and war has impoverished one million people each year. Worldwide, the poverty rate is rising, both in absolute and relative terms. There are currently 21 wars and 171 military conflicts.

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