The Waterbury Democrat (May 8, 1946)
Emotions drowned in poverty –
Europe, hungry and battered, marks V-E Day with mediocre military show and ceremonies
BERLIN (UP) – The first anniversary of the official V-E Day today found Europe hungry and battered, giving slight heed to the emotions of a year ago.
Little glossy military show and few public ceremonies commemorated the end of a struggle that swayed from the gates of Moscow to the skies of London, and from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert.
Everybody wanted to forget the war. It was a big enough job just trying to live.
Late on May 8, 1945, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, German chief of staff, signed his armies into oblivion in the Berlin headquarters of Soviet Marshal George K. Zhukov before a delegation of American, British, French and Russian military leaders.
The next day Grand Adm. Karl Doenitz issued the final German communique. It told every soldier to lay aside his weapons proud and erect, and “set to work in these gravest hours in our history with courage and confidence to safeguard the undying life of our people.”
Today, Keitel and Doenitz stood on trial as war criminals before the Allied tribunal at Nuernberg.
No ceremonies were held in Berlin today, but tomorrow a few hundred French, Russian, British and American soldiers will march through the streets as a slight reminder to the Germans. May 9 was chosen for the Berlin observance because the capitulation document became effective at one minute past midnight on the 8th.
Gen. Joseph T. McNarney, American commander in Europe, sent an anniversary message to his occupation troops stating that three negative objectives of the occupation – demilitarization, denazification and deindustrialization – were nearly complete.
McNarney said the American occupation still had before it the essential tasks of re-education of the Germans, restoration of self-government to the German people and recreation of the German economy.
“All of these are necessary if Germany is not to again become a festering sore continually threatening the peace of Europe and the world,” the general said.
In Italy, the day was a holiday. Allied troops put on a military show at the Caserta headquarters and brought German prisoners of war to watch it.
At the red brick technical college in Reims, France, 1,200 French students went about their classroom business on the spot where the first, and basic, German surrender was signed at 2:41 a.m. on May 7. The prosaic building then was the SHAEF headquarters of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.
Mayor Michel Sicre said Reims couldn’t take a holiday, because every day was needed to rebuild France.
The table on which the Reims surrender was signed stands as an unpretentious shrine. A few visitors came to read the name plates on it, recalling those who participated. Two keys to the SHAEF war room, now gold plated, were displayed in a glass case.
Maps depicting the final battle lines hang on the wall. Beside them is a casualty chart showing that the Western Allies lost 122,072 dead and 661,900 wounded in the Western Front campaign.
In the forest of Compiegne, where the victorious Allies signed the end of the first great war to end war, French peasants gathered wood in an empty clearing.
No visitors could pay homage in the railway car where the Germans of 1918 surrendered, and which Adolf Hitler later hauled to Germany as Nazi booty. It has vanished, apparently blown to bits by Allied bombs.