Germany's first D-Day ceremony

Germany's first D-Day ceremony From correspondents in Arromanches, France June 07, 2004

HEADS of state and government from 16 countries were welcomed by a 21-gun salute today to the main ceremony commemorating the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944.

For the first time, the ceremonies included Germany, whose forces resisted the 135,000 Allied troops who waded ashore in the biggest seaborne invasion in history and the 20,000 who were parachuted or flown in to assist them.

A military band played the French national anthem, the Marseillaise, as President Jacques Chirac and his guests stood to attention beneath a giant white canopy erected near the midway point of the 100-kilometre stretch of the coast seized at a cost of some 4000 Allied lives.

The officials then sat but rose to their feet again as 142 war veterans from the 14 countries that took part in the landings marched past, campaign medals glittering on their chests.

The capture of the five beaches - codenamed Omaha, Utah, Juno, Sword and Gold - triggered the collapse of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.

Chirac was flanked by his wife, Bernadette, and Queen Elizabeth II, head of state of the four Commonwealth countries represented: Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Beside Bernadette Chirac sat US President George W Bush and beyond his wife, Laura, was President Vladimir Putin, the first Russian leader to attend the D-Day ceremonies.

While Russia was an ally in World War II, it had long argued with the western powers over the need to open a separate front and relieve the pressure on its own armed forces.

National flags of the allies were projected in fluttering images onto nine large vertical placards arranged on the sea front.

Beyond them, out to sea, could be seen the remains of the Mulberry harbours, one of the Allies' most daring and imaginative exploits - concrete casings which were towed across the Channel from southern England and sunk in a great semi-circle about two kilometres wide, to form a man-made port on the exposed shore.

Further offshore the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle stood by along with other warships due to sail past during the ceremony.

You can't say "I was only obeying my orders" when what you're doing is no longer war, but just mass-scale crime. The soldier who's ordered to rape a woman or kill a newborn child indeed must stand up against this order. But only a fraction of German soldiers - from the Wehrmacht, not the SS outfits - did things like that.

Most of them were just waging war, a war they had been told was a just cause. Officially, Polish troops attacked Gleiwitz. Then France and Great Britain declared war on Germany. Even if some soldiers may have had some doubts about the Polish attacks, the fact is two European powers had declared war on Germany, and so, I suppose, fighting this war to the very end was seen as a patriotic duty. And when the tide reversed, and the fighting came closer to their homes and families, what German soldiers would have refused to fight ? I guess at that time it no longer mattered if the war was just or not.

My grandfather lost a brother in 1940, in Belgium. He was from a mechanized division, and he faced German armored unites. He had been mobilized and did his duty. The German soldier who killed him had been mobilized and did his duty. Now that times has passed, what can I say of this German soldier ? Their two countries were at war, each side thought he was waging a just war, one died and one lived.

Now, if you want to talk about the SS panzer troops that wiped Oradour sur Glane from the surface of the planet, or that organized mass hangings at Tulle, I won't ever forget or forgive what happened there, that's for sure. But I won't allow these sorry excuses for a human being to cast a shadow over all the soldiers, who, even if they were fighting for the Axis, showed compassion and humanity. When the cadets of the Saumur cavalry school fought to the last cartridge in 1940, the German soldiers that had fought them bitterly for days presented arms to them when the defenders finally surrendered, and treated them well. When the Italians ceded occupied Provence to the Germans in 1942, the Bersaglieri took many French Jews with them, because they feared the Nazis would kill them.

While I agree with you about the farce that took place at the ceremonies commemorating the sacrifices made by American, British, Canadian and Australian forces on D-Day six decades ago; I don't think that you can categorize all Europeans in the same broad strokes.

There are battles raging in almost every part of Western Europe (Italy, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and even France), over the future of this continent.

Not everyone living there is in favor of a suprastate confederated of smaller Euro states, which will be empowered to control every aspect of European's lives. Not to mention, will be devoid of any reference to Martin Luther, St. Peter, or virtually any other human responsible for shaping the Christian values that made Europe into a global superpower.

As for Hitler, I don't believe that systematically extirpating every last vestige of political opposition-culminating in the immolation of the Reichstag-exactly qualifies as coming to power through "democratic" channels.

While the German people bear full culpability for the actions of Hitler after he had assumed the title of Fuhrer, I don't think that his rise to power was the result of any sort of upwelling of populist sentiment, other than that stoked by The Great Depression, the ineptitude of the Weimer Republic's fiscal policies, and the connivance of some powerful German industrialists in the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Don't forget that Hitler's most powerful and dogged opponents-and some of the only people to resist his tyranny after Germany had faded into night-were the communists.

While I tend to agree with the overall thrust of your comments, I believe that you selectively omit some very important details from the body of your argument.

You guys make some good points, and my arguments are not complete. I think we are talking about two different things here:

National guilt. Touchy and maybe wrong for an American to bring up just after the D-day anniversary, and I apologize.
Personal guilt. This is the burden a war criminal faces.

Figuring out what #1 means is a major undertaking. I do think the principles outlined in the Magna Carta make it clear that governments ultimately get their power from their people. Once we agree that people supply the force behind a government, then they must take on some sort of responsibility for evil geopolitical decisions such as the deeper invasion of China or Operation Barbarossa.

I'm not accusing the fictional Herr Mueller und seiner lieber Frau of being war criminals. I'm accusing them of loving Hitler or shuttering their windows and ignoring the truth. Either or both were all that was required for WWII to occur. Of course the Treaty of Versailles was critical in shaping the thoughts of Herr und Frau Meuller. So would Weimar socialism.

In 1919, the Big 4 met in Paris to negotiate the Treaty Lloyd George of Britain, Orlando of Italy, Clemenceau of France, and Woodrow Wilson of the U.S.

I don't know.

I think the only legitimate causus belli at the time was the crumbling Ottoman Empire's treatment of its Armenian minorities.

It's unfortunate that most people only recall the petty territorial disputes that occurred between the Central Powers and their Western foes, and forget that the most poignant moment of the war came when besieged Armenians in Van made a last ditch effort to save themselves from massacre at the hands of the Turkish military and their personally trained chetes.

All of the other issues that putatively sparked "The Great War"-with the possible exception of Serbian nationalism, which precipitated the fight in the first place-are petty when compared to what was occurring throughout Turkey during this period.

The massacre of the Armenians in 1925 was the first modern example of mechanized, universally applied ethnic genocide in the 20th Century. It set the example-not only in moral terms, but in terms of actual real world applications-for Hitler's execution machine.

Don't mistake my comments, for an endorsement of the widely held view that it was Gavrilo Princip who sparked the first 'World War.' I realize that his assassination was merely used as a pretext to set in motion a chain of events that had been simmering for over half a century.

What I meant to convey in my remarks was that the Balkan movement toward independence was what initially triggered the events that led to "The Great War."

I'm not accusing the leaders of these movements of some nefarious purpose-in fact, they should be congratulated for their actions in destroying two reprehensible empires-I'm simply laying out the facts of how this conflict evolved in the first place.

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