Eighty years since the capitulation by the Nazis on May 8, 1945, the idea of making the date, seen as a symbol of liberation but also suffering, a public holiday in Germany is dividing the country. As a resurgent far right questions Germany's "memory culture", Thursday's anniversary will be marked in a sober fashion.
President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is due to give a speech at the Reichstag and young people will read testimonies from the end of World War II. May 8 is a holiday in France, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, as is May 9 in most ex-Soviet countries. But Germany still does not have a national holiday to mark the occasion. Only the city-state of Berlin, where the capitulation was signed, is giving residents the day off this year, as it did in 2020 for the 75th anniversary.
Several of Germany's other federal states, particularly in the ex-communist east, are marking the date with a "day of commemoration" that stops short of a full holiday. For example, Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony have designated the day as one of "liberation from National Socialism". Esther Bejarano, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, launched a petition in 2020 for May 8 to be permanently remembered as a holiday in exactly these terms. She died the following year and her petition, which gathered 12,000 signatures, has so far been unsuccessful.
Wolfgang Benz, a historian, said he was "skeptical" of the idea of a new holiday for May 8, noting that the idea came out in 1985 on the occasion of the 40th anniversary. The West German president at the time, Richard von Weizsaecker, gave a speech widely regarded as marking a turning point in Germans' appraisal of their history, saying May 8 marked "the end of an aberration in German history, an end bearing seeds of hope for a better future". At the time the supporters of the holiday had the upper hand, Benz said, but "the attempt was not followed through".
According to the Federal Agency for Civic Education (BpB), the lack of action on marking May 8 at a national level reflects a "consensus of silence over this ambivalent date which has lasted for decades". Part of the ambivalence stems from the fact that for many Germans the end of the war is linked not only to the defeat of Nazi dictatorship but also the expulsion of ethnic Germans from swathes of eastern Europe. In his speech, Weizsaecker also spoke of "the end of the war as the cause of flight, expulsion and deprivation of freedom", adding that "the cause goes back to the start of the tyranny that brought about war".
The suffering of ethnic Germans is an argument often used by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to oppose the idea of a May 8 holiday. When the far-left Linke party put forward a proposal for such a holiday in the eastern state of Thuringia, AfD state assembly member Sascha Schloesser said that "a holiday cannot do justice to this complex history". His AfD colleagues hailed the rejection of the proposal by other parties as "an important success for a more balanced culture of memory" and proof that they were "no longer alone" in this position.
The party has been bolstered in its position by its steady electoral successes since being founded in 2013. This culminated in its best-ever performance in February's general election with more than 20 percent of the vote.
During that election campaign, AfD voter Enrico Schulz in Brandenburg told AFP that "we should slowly get back to normal; there's virtually no one left who lived through all that awfulness". And in an opinion poll published in April, for the first time more people agreed than disagreed with the statement that Germany should "draw a line" under its Nazi past.
While a new holiday at this stage "wouldn't make much sense", according to Benz, he said that younger generations "must know what happened". "They should know why the German people will still be judged for what happened under Nazism in 10, 20 or 100 years' time," he said.
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