Word: v-e
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...official said, "The President read it and looked up in astonishment. He took off his glasses and said, 'Hell, do you see what this says?' "Reagan later in the week told several audiences that he had only then realized that he had been officially invited to mark V-E day with a visit to a death camp...
Kohl confronted his nation's continued anguish in a speech prepared for delivery Sunday at Bergen-Belsen, where he had long planned to make his first official V-E day observance. "Bergen-Belsen, a place in the center of Germany," he said, "remains the mark of Cain burned into the memory of our people . . . the site of a deluded will to destruction." Kohl recalled that the Nazis' "totalitarian regime was directed mainly against the Jews . . . The decisive question is why so many people remained indifferent . . . even if Auschwitz was beyond the power of human comprehension, the unscrupulous brutality...
...this sound and fury must seem terribly mysterious to Ronald Reagan--a national uproar over visits to a German cemetery. Are we not the future-facing republic? Is it not right to celebrate V-E day with a show of American magnanimity? The nation's response has been a loud and firm no, but it is a no that derives from history, not from meanness of spirit. The nightmare of World War II is simply not to be smiled away, first because the war touched everywhere, not just the Western Front, but Piccadilly and the Champs Elysées and Stalingrad...
...should one celebrate V-E day 40 years later, with the Europe that was set free now cut in half, and much of the great new world closed tight? One sees little hugging at the Elbe these days. Only a few weeks ago, a Soviet soldier in East Germany shot and killed a U.S. military officer for trespassing. Perhaps V-E day requires a more sober and moderate reaction than celebration. There are things simply to consider: the selfless heroism of the millions who fought to prevent Hitler's onslaught; the cooperation of proud powers in a right and necessary...
...V-E day--was a day for which millions of people had fought and worked and prayed and died. Yet, ironically, it was a day on which little of substance actually happened. There were speeches, cheers and parades, but the German surrender had been signed early on May 7, and almost all the fighting had ended well before that. "We play softball every afternoon," a member of the U.S. 667th Field Artillery Battalion, at a German village near the Czech border, wrote in his diary. "I've had a shower, two movies and a U.S.O. show." Wrote...