He May 8, 1945about noon, they landed at the Tempelhof airport, in the urban center of Berlinhigh military positions of the three Western allies, USA, United Kingdom y France. In the devastated capital of the Reich the Soviet general was waiting for them Gueorgui Zhúkovwhose soldiers had already raised the flag of the hoz and the hammer on the Reichstag. The committees crossed Berlin until they reached Karlshorstthe peripheral villa where the historic signature of the Capitulation of the Third Reich. It was a three -quarter time ceremony, between vodka or champagne toast, according to the current Karlshortst museum. There, in addition to old Russian tanks, the document of the Unconditional surrender of the Wehrmachtthe Nazi army. The previous day there was a similar act in the French city of Reims. But Moscow insisted that it should be formalized in the presence of the maximum rank military of the defeated country and in Karslhortst, an ancient casino of the Nazi officers who had become its headquarters in the war rales. On the German part, the Marshal stamped his signature Wilhelm Keitel, Death sentenced a year later in Nuremberg.
The defeat of the third Reich had been sentenced for months. The Soviet troops had entered Germany in January. On April 16, Berlin had reached outskirts; Something further south, in Saxony, the first meeting between the Soviet allies and the Americans occurred on the 25th of that same month. Adolf Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, had already committed suicide in their bunker on the 30th, the same as the propaganda minister would then do, Joseph Gobbes, and suddenly Magdaafter poisoning their six children. May 2, the General Helmuth Weidling informed the Berliners that the Führer had left them in the stake and proclaimed the surrender of the capital. The Karlshorse appointment was, for Moscow, a way of documenting before the defeated country and before the allies the role of the red army in what in Germany is known today by Liberation Day.
Hitler and Goebbels during a walk through the Obersalzberg in June 1943 / ARCHIVE
The Soviet Union It had been the last power that joined the alliance against Nazism. Hitler had signed in 1939 the non -aggression pact with Josef Stalin. That both dictators were in the ideological antipodes had not prevented them from distributing Eastern Europe. The Führer was convenient for Soviet neutrality to invade Poland. The pact sank in June 1941, when Hitler overestimated his abilities and attacked the Soviet Union. From there there were four allied powers against Nazism. He Communist Colossus I linked forces to the DAmerican emotionthe French Republic and the British empire. On May 8, 1945 a war was closed that left 60 million dead27 million of which Soviet citizens.
USA and Russia, two hemispheric imperialisms
For the first time in its history, Germany remembers the date of capitulation or liberation with a feeling of abandonment by the country that for decades was its unconditional ally, USA. He never fied on the Soviet Union or his heiress, Russia. The distrust of Moscow even starts much earlier, as evidenced by a map with the populations where there were German surrender conatos before the signing of Karlshortst. “Almost all occurred in the south, as the American allies advanced by Bavaria, or by France or even in the north, with the British. There were very few cases in the east,” explains the head of the Department of Historical Memory of Berlin, Maria Bering, from the Resistance Museum against Hitler. The population felt dreadful to the advance of the Red Army. The bombings of the British or American allies ceased with the surrender. But what followed May 8 was not perceived as a release. Neither that day nor the following. Nails 860,000 women or girls were rapedmostly in what was the Soviet sector. The ban was opened to pillage. As of 1949, with the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (RDA)German-organic citizens attended from afar to the miracle of a West Germany that resurfaced from their ashes. The postwar period was marked by the images of the Soviets dismantling and taking to the train tracks of the territory under their domain, while in the Western Berlin, under the 1948 Soviet block, American aviation would help the population with the population with The phenomenal air bridge of the ‘Rosinenbomber’or bombardments of the treats, as they nicknamed, because in addition to medicines and food they threw chucheías for children.
The president of the United States, Trump, reveals new tariffs on the so -called Liberation Day / Kent Nishimura / EFE
“In Germany we assist stunned to the coexistence and voracity of two hemispheric imperialismsthe one we already knew of Russia and the new generated by the administration of Donald Trumpthat we do not know how far it will go, “observes the director of the German Foreign Policy Society (DGAP), Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff. Expansionist Ansias The US president is reflected not only in the geographical, with his claims on Greenland or the Panama Canal, but also in the political. Its environment supports the ultra -rightist alternative for Germany (AFD), second force at a national scale, in which neo -Nazis currents and links converge with the Russia of Vladimir Putin.
The Maltrecho Franco-German Axis and the Brexit sequels
While Moscow turned the RDA and the United States into satellite country exercised a ‘soft’ domain over West Germany, France and United Kingdom They soon forgot their role as guardian powers over the defeated country. Berlin went from the first division in four sectors to the traumatic partition of the Wallsince its construction, in 1961 to its fall, in 1989. For Western Germany, that France would go from being a historical enemy to the Puntal of the European Union, by the call Franco-German axisit is a source of pride or example of overcoming the monstrous Nazi. That axis is somewhat stuck is considered survey. There are enough examples of emblematic duos, from Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle to Helmut Kohl with François Mitterrand, even those of Angela Merkel with Nicolas Sarkozy or Emmanuel Macron. Of the new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is expected to be better than that of Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron.
Germany has behaved for decades as a shy and saving power in defense, which has been backed in the French atomic umbrella or the US bases in its territory. Among Merz’s unappealable commitments is the rearmealready started under Scholz following the invasion of Ukraine. But in Germany there is no talk of breaking the great taboo that would be to rise to atomic power. The fact that United Kingdom Keir Starmer is approaching Europeandespite Brexit, it facilitates that Germany will not be the need to address what will happen with the umbrella if Macron is happening lepenism.
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