If China and Russia instrumentalize the war for the purposes of revived nationalism, the weird thing in the West is the peculiarly bloodless quality of people’s collective memory. Particularly in what might be called reformist discourse, the war stands as a moment of collective organization and mobilization—but with the violence taken out.
The Blitz is invoked as an image of national solidarity while denying the rather harsher truth that the civilian casualties in London, Birmingham, and other southern cities of England were as bad as they were because of the threadbare air raid precautions deliberately adopted by a cost-conscious Conservative government. Radical think tank experts advising U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez invoke Roosevelt’s waves of bombers, powered of course by high-octane aircraft fuel, while passing over the fact that those aircraft were meant to rain down fire and destruction on the cities of Europe and Japan. In imaginative rearrangement, Bretton Woods comes to figure as a postwar conference at which world powers agreed on a cooperative world economic order, rather than a wartime meeting—coinciding with the breakout battle at Normandy and the destruction of the Army Group Center on the Eastern Front—of a victorious coalition presided over by the United States.
The height of historical reimagining is reached when French and German diplomats look back to 1945 and piously assure each other that this was the moment when they learned to get along better and not to repeat the mistakes of the vindictive Treaty of Versailles. In fact, the reverse is closer to the truth. The Allies learned that forcing Germany to a mere unconditional surrender had been a mistake. As the fighting finally ended in May 1945, the first best option was simply to erase Germany from the map.
One of the historically remarkable things about 1945 is precisely how late Germany’s surrender actually came. For the most obtuse members of the Wehrmacht leadership, it was clear from June 1944, when the D-Day invasion was not hurled back into the sea, that Germany’s cause was lost. But the Third Reich steeled itself and its population to fight to the bitter end, at huge cost both to the Germans and those who had to pay the price of crushing them. We associate Japan with the kamikaze myth, but it surrendered before the Home Islands were invaded. German resistance ended when Soviet and American forces joined hands with no live Germans in between. Not surprisingly, as the end approached, many in and around Adolf Hitler’s regime were haunted by apocalyptic imaginings of finis Germaniae (“the end of Germany”), an outcome which they were doing their best to make come true through their own actions.
The point of insisting on this violence is not to question its legitimacy in a self-righteous armchair exercise in ethics. The point is to put in question the 21st-century memory of 1945 that leaves the violence out and imagines the world that came after as made out of the positive energies of solidarity, mobilization, and cooperation alone. What this causes us to do is to lose sight of the war itself and how it remade the world. Three types of war came together to consume the Third Reich in the spring of 1945, each of which helped shape the world down to the present day.