This is Democracy – Episode 95: 75th Anniversary of the End of WWII: Lessons and Legacies

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Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today, we are talking to two of the foremost experts in the world on the history of the Second World War. We are marking the 75th anniversary, believe it or not, of the end of World War II in Europe, what has long been called VE Day. We have with us, Dr. Gordon Nick Mueller, who is a distinguished historian and former Vice Chancellor at the University of New Orleans. He was the founding president and CEO of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. I have the great privilege of being on the counselors board for the museum and it’s an extraordinary museum, probably the best history museum in the world, I think. He’s also joined on the podcast today by a friend, Dr. Robert Citino, who is the Executive Director of The Institute for the Study of War and Democracy at the World National World War II Museum. Rob is also the Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian at the museum, and he is an award-winning teacher, taught for many years at the University of North Texas, and is a distinguished author. He has written books beyond the number I can count. Some of my favorites, the Wehrmacht Retreats, Fighting the Last War, Death of the Wehrmacht, you can sense the theme in these books, and the German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich. Nick and Rob, thank you for joining us today.

Dr. Gordon Nick Mueller: Happy to be here.

Dr. Robert Citino: Wonderful to be here, Jeremi. Thanks for the invite.

Jeremi Suri: Our pleasure. Before we turn to our World War II experts, we have Zachary Suri here, of course, with his scene setting poem. What’s the title of your poem Zachary?

Zachary Suri: And To Dust, We Shall Return.

Jeremi Suri: Wow, well, let’s hear it.

Zachary Suri: Before the war, there was dust, and it was not of bones and bodies, and it was not of rubble and toppled concrete, and it was not of war but of peace. Before the war, there was dust and it was factory smoke and subway grime, and settled in the grass of London parks, to whom death was still the friendly old man. And then there was dust, whole miles of it falling through the sky like a sandstorm in the desert, except it was noisy and filled with the sounds of terror. And then in the morning, there was still dust when they trudged out of the subway tracks to see who had been killed and which buildings were gone.

Dust, like painful reminders of biblical mechanics. Before the war, there was dust, the remnants of old porcelain and gas lamps, so peaceful, beautiful dressed in dust and it was washed away by the river. And then there was dust. It rose from hidden ovens with the remains of brutalized bodies, and it floated down over the valleys like a reminder of the existence of conscience, there’s more died and still more.

And then there was dust. We came creeping over the frown [inaudible 00:03:24] in cold February, and firebombed Saxony into extra terrestrial blood rubble and the elbow was clogged with ash and dust. And then there was dust, glass, and we sneaked in over Hiroshima and let loose over the city a hell fire we didn’t really understand. And the dust was of fingernails, crystallized blood and rubble.

After the war, there was dust, as if we had to remember always because it was always there even under the browse of the deniers. After the war, we were in awe, we watched movies of valors in theaters and we sprayed champagne in the streets and a generation came home and made a different generation. And there was the dust, floating like floatsam in the rivers, caked on the cobblestones and rebuilt palaces, and there was the dust. Remember, you are dust and to dust you shall return.

Jeremi Suri: Well, there’s a lot of dust in your poems Zachary. What does the dust symbolize?

Zachary Suri: Well, the dust is really a metaphor for the destruction of war and how war remains, and the scars of war remain even decades and decades after the war in the lives of people, and in the buildings and everything, we all have the remnants of the war within us.

Jeremi Suri: Very well said. Nick, one of the things I struggle with when describing the war to students is to describe the magnitude of the destruction. How do you think about that? How do you describe that to people?

Dr. Gordon Nick Mueller: Well, the poem is a great introduction to that answer, I guess to my answer that the war is characterized by just tremendous violence on a scale that had never before experienced in human history. When you talk about 65 million dead and 40 million of those are innocent civilians under bombs or genocide, concentration camps, and just the violence, the convulsive violence that gained so much momentum and accelerated toward the end of the war. Certainly in the last year of the war and the last months of the war, a month or so before VE Day, it was gruesome. The pincers were coming in from the allied forces on the east and west and crushing the Wehrmacht Air Force and the 15th Air Force is bombing the heck out of all of the major cities, Hamburg and the Rhineland area, and Berlin. So it was just pulverizing the country, and for America too.

Most of the 418,000, probably nearly 400,000 Americans were already dead a month or two before the war ended. It’s just gruesome and I think it’s very hard for people to get their arms around the magnitude of that violence at that time, and of course, at the same time you’ve got within Germany, the whole Third Reich is just spiraling downward. Hitler’s suicide in Wehrmacht. Rob may jump in there but I think probably half a million troops in Wehrmacht surrendered in the first week of May.

Jeremi Suri: Rob, you’re the foremost expert on this, what was happening?

Dr. Robert Citino: I come from the German perspective, mainly that’s what I’ve written about, but it’s not just a statistical matter. So in Victor Davis Hanson’s new book, he points out on the opening paragraph, if you look at the war from September 1939 to May of 1945, that is from the beginning of the war in Europe to end the war in Europe, there’s something like 20,000 people to 25,000 people died per day, per day.

The point I try to make to my students, Jeremi, when I’ve been teaching this in university, there’s an idea the war goes, it starts, and it gets real bad and then it stumbles to an end. That was not World War II and certainly not World War II in Europe. It didn’t stumble to an end. It came to a roaring climactic explosion in the last year. The last 12 months of World War II were by far the bloodiest 12 months of the war. Nick has referred to this kind of just these explosive levels of violence. I’d go back into the 19th century. I’d feel remiss if I didn’t quote the great Prussian sage, Carl von Clausewitz.

Jeremi Suri: He must be quoted.

Dr. Robert Citino: I think I will quote him once per day. That’s been the bane of my children and my wife’s existence over the years. Clausewitz talked about these reciprocal reactions that one side does something and the other side feels compelled to top it, and then it’s back to the other side. They just ratchet up the violence in these 19th and 20th century total wars until you have something at the end that you could not have imagined at the start. Nick, I’m going to toot the museum’s horn. We have a film experience that we like visitors to see first at our National World War II Museum and the film is entitled Beyond All Boundaries. To me, it’s the truest three words ever written about World War II.

Jeremi Suri: So Rob, why did the Germans surrender in early May when they did? The Japanese obviously fought through August and we know now might have even fought longer. They were very close to continuing after the two atomic bombings. But why did the Germans surrender in early May?

Dr. Robert Citino: So I heard Nick mentioned the pincers coming in from both sides. So the strategic situation, all the indicators are in the red. You might say the big Anglo-American host, fully mechanized, probably the most modern military force ever assembled in terms of its level of mechanization, it’s coming in from the west. Soviet armies just pulverizing the Germans in the east and driving to the very gates of Berlin and then eventually into the city. It’s interesting to me, Jeremi, we’re talking about VE Day, but there really were a series of them.

The Germans in Northern Italy had already had a partial surrender at the end of April, there was a surrender of the troops in Northwestern Germany and the Netherlands at the very beginning of May. There was another one in Southern Germany in Bavaria, I think May 3rd or 4th. What was going on here is that the war’s not over and the Germans were still playing strategy. They were trying to drag the process out long enough that they could make partial surrenders in the west, that they could keep fighting in the east. Every day, every week, they stayed in the field in the east. So the strategy ran, and by the way, this is not Hitler, Hitler is dead. This is the new Fuhrer, Karl Donitz, the former Naval Commander.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Dr. Robert Citino: He’s playing for time thinking that every week he can last longer in the East, more refugees and more German troops will be able to get to the West and surrender to the British or the Americans, which is presumably better treatment than you’re getting if you surrender to the Soviets. I think that’s probably true on a number of levels.

Jeremi Suri: Yes.

Dr. Robert Citino: It’s interesting to me, you know we say the Germans didn’t have a strategy. Hitler was a rotten strategist and by the way, I agree. But there’s still a strategy at the end of the war in which they’re trying to hold out, surrender partially to the West, and then be able to stay in the field a little longer in the East. Naturally, Stalin, got bruised feelings about that. He’d done the majority of the fighting and the majority of the dying to bring the Third Reich to heal. He thinks this smacks off some kind of deal, some kind of separate peace that the Western powers are making.

His complaints eventually tell and that’s when Eisenhower demands that the Germans sent representatives to Reims and occupied France. That’s General Jodl, a couple of other representatives and on May 7th, they sign a once and for all surrender to everybody to go into effect on May 8th hence V-E day. Now, I don’t want to take up too much time but Stalin then wasn’t having that. He didn’t want to surrender in occupied France. He wanted to surrender in occupied Berlin.

Jeremi Suri: Of course.

Dr. Robert Citino: He demanded another delegation of Germans, not Jodl but Keite this time, the head of the OKW, Jodl’s superior and there’s yet another surrender on May 8th. By the time everything was on the dotted line, midnight had passed. So that’s why the Soviets and the Russians today still celebrate V day, they don’t say V-E, but V Day on May 9th.

Jeremi Suri: Of course.

Dr. Robert Citino: So it’s a complicated situation. Anytime you wind up with two surrenders at the end of a war, you’re obviously in complex territory.

Jeremi Suri: I always tell students it’s in some ways a precursor to the Cold War at that moment.

Dr. Robert Citino: I would back you up on that. You had the allies threatening to follow. You have Stalin insisting on a second surrender yet, the Germans finally having the upper hand for a moment at least, they seem to hold the initiative.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Dr. Robert Citino: They have to agree to surrender.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Dr. Robert Citino: That’s the point I’ve always told my students, it’s a very complicated thing. Europe’s big and you don’t just have a referee hold up a checkered flag and suddenly the war is over, it’s too complex for that.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Dr. Gordon Nick Mueller: When the Wehrmacht started surrendering too there, that first week. They wanted to surrender to the allies to the west. So they were fleeing the Soviet troops and the recriminations and retribution they expected from the Soviet too. There was mass migrations of people in an organized way for few months before him, almost a million and a half people. what was it Rob? Operation Hannibal. Hordes of people were on the move and Velmac finally saw the end insight there and was trying to surrender to the Americans or the Brits or the Canadians before they could surrender to the Red Army.

Dr. Robert Citino: Jeremi, the thing that spikes me too and Nick is alluding to it right now. This kind of war termination is very unusual.

Jeremi Suri: That’s right.

Dr. Robert Citino: Would fight not only to the bitter end, but well beyond the bitter end. This war had been lost for a year, maybe longer than that. The professionals and the German officer core and general staff, they knew it. I mean Dönitz for example, he had been one of the hardest core supporters of Hitler. Hitler’s insane demands to hold on to the last man. Now then, it’s posing as the protector of the German civilian population in the East. That doesn’t ring completely true for me. They could have saved a lot more lives by seeing the writing on the wall a year ago and surrendering.

Jeremi Suri: Sure. Nick, how do we understand Dwight Eisenhower’s role in all of this? Can you walk us through his leadership? He comes out and legitimately is seen as a hero and we live in a time when we need heroes. What can we learn from Eisenhower at the end of the war?

Dr. Gordon Nick Mueller: Well, he stuck to his mission to destroy the army of the Nazi Germany and of course, a lot of people thought that he should have gone ahead on into Berlin but he didn’t want to give up a 100,000 American dead for the Soviet, when the Soviet Red Army was virtually almost into Berlin already. So he held to the commitments that were made about the zones of occupation and held his troops there, and I think many people regard him as a hero for that. But of course, he led as a Supreme Commander, the final destruction of Germany from D-day to the end and he managed to keep all the allied leaders, generals, and admirals, and Air Marshals working together and that was a heroic achievement of its own, more so than his military strategic field commander. Rob can talk about that too, but a lot of people think that he moved too slowly onto broader front. There’s a whole controversy about whether or not they should have let the 6th Army go in down around Strasbourg much earlier to get across the Rhine and he held that back and his boys Bradley and Patton when and where they did. Max Hastings, a great British historian, is very critical of Eisenhower and Ambrose for that. But I think from America’s point of view, he got the job done. He basked in the glory of that deservedly so and he kept the coalition together. Before Roosevelt died and then after him, Truman, everybody was worried about bringing the war to an end. The body bags were coming home in big numbers and we still had a war to fight in the Pacific but Eisenhower came out of the war with that halo around his head, I would say, for his leadership and just his great personality and everybody liked Ike. Ike was his campaign and it ranked true.

Jeremi Suri: Rob, what about the liberation of the concentration camps? That’s a pivotal moment in many ways when Eisenhower goes and comments on this and in a certain way does a fact-finding mission. What do we understand about that?

Dr. Robert Citino: You know that one of the, I think, signal moments of the end of the war is Eisenhower, of course, visiting the concentration camps, hundreds to 50-100,000 at a pop. Human skeletons, dead bodies all over the place. It’s a horror show. We know about Nazi crimes essentially because Eisenhower did that and then he insisted on having local German officials come and see it and then he insisted on having Western reporters and photographers coming to see it and he told them deliberately, “Take pictures of this so that later when people say ‘No way. That’s impossible. No one would do that to another human being,’ you’ll be ready with the evidence.” I just read a biography of Alfred Jodl, that is the German general who went and surrendered, signed the surrender instrument to Eisenhower at Reims, the first one, the one on May 7th that went into effect on May 8th. He was right next to Hitler the entire war and he claimed after the war he didn’t know a thing about the concentration camps. He said, “Even if someone had told me, it wasn’t my job, my job was to draw up military plans.” It strikes me that Eisenhower knew that leadership, modern military leadership in a global war of this sort had to have a political dimension. It wasn’t enough just to say the third division goes to the left flank and the fourth division goes to the right flank, as important as those things are. You had to have a broader vision. Going back to Clausewitz, you fight wars because of the continuation of politics, there has to be a political end in mind. So for Eisenhower, yes, destroying the armed forces of Nazi Germany, that was the mission. But at the same time, making sure that people realized what the political ramifications of Nazism had been. That, too, was part of his brief and that’s why I think Eisenhower, he stood tall on a lot of occasions in American history. He never stood taller than when he made those reporters and photographers tour the camps and get the stories and take the pictures.

Dr. Gordon Nick Mueller: And a comment there on the camps and the liberation of the camps by the Americans and the British, that moment of liberation, opening the gates, is a very powerful, very emotional moment and I’ve been out there, the Shoah Foundation, five or six times. They have that all organized. I think they have 350 just about that moment when the gates were opened and those who were liberated expressed their emotions and their feelings when the GIs came through the gates, and we have stories also. They do just that moment and how the liberators themselves felt and it is sort of the hinge of the story for our new Liberation Pavilion, which will open in about two years from now, and we have a little theater that we’ll just scroll those stories. There’s one that Rob knows how I love about Max Dorst who was at the Ebensee concentration camp, a sub-camp of Mauthausen, and he talks about they come in, these battle-hardened warriors and he says, ”We’re standing there and they’re looking at us and they’re crying and we are jubilant.” He says, ”We don’t know the words, but we’re singing Yankee Doodle Dandy.” They’re standing there crying and looking at us. It’s a very emotional moments that you have there and that’s, of course, before VE Day but, as I’ve said, that’s a very powerful hinge in the story and in the museum story too, both up through VE Day and then the fall of Japan, VJ Day, and the larger legacy of the war and what we fought for. What did it mean after all? We talk about that here recently. We’re talking about the exhibits. Was it just victory? The cost of victory? The Germans had won, as Rob says, they’d say that too, but we think it had a moral dimension to it.

Jeremi Suri: I’ve had the privilege of working with both of you in the larger museum community on the Liberation Pavilion and I will say that the emotional content of that moment is still so strong and I think it’s something that’s lost in most of the history we write, how emotional and how morally significant that moment was. Zachary has a question about popular culture.

Zachary Suri: After the war we see a burst of popular culture about World War II and about heroic American efforts in World War II. Are these accurate portrayals of American actions in the war or do they portray accurately the sheer violence and horror of the end of the war?

Dr. Robert Citino: Yeah, good question, Zachary. The films I watched growing up in the ’60s, the German soldiers seemed to be the stupidest people on the planet. American soldiers could wing you at 300 yards with a handgun. It’s just really amazing stuff, it was cartoony. I think that starting with a film like Saving Private Ryan, we recently celebrated the 20th anniversary, talk about all of us feeling a little older. Steven Spielberg really tried in the opening 20 minutes of that film to show what combat in World War II was like. The second time I use the words “it was a horror show” for everyone involved, whether you’re on the winning side or the losing side. We think we fought a good fight, we know the Nazis were fighting a bad fight, but whatever side you’re on, high explosives and bullets whizzing past your head and the chaos and the screams and the noise and the smoke. I think that’s a better evocation of World War II on screen and I don’t think it does any damage. I don’t think it does any insult to American or to Allied troops who really did rid the world of a pest in Adolf Hitler. I do think, getting back to what we talked about on the terms of the liberation of the camps, it’s entirely possible up to that point, you could be an Allied soldier saying, “This darn war, what the heck are we doing here? I just want to go home, this is stupid.” That’s how soldiers talk, right? Until you walked into Dachau or Buchenwald and then suddenly, Nick’s right, there was a moral dimension and you probably realized. So I don’t mind singing that song. I don’t mind singing a patriotic song, Zachary. I do think that there’s been some pretty silly movies made about World War II.

Dr. Gordon Nick Mueller: Yeah, and I think there were heroic moments occurred at the end of the war. I mean, there was a reason why the Wehrmacht wanted to surrender to the Americans and the Brits instead of the Soviets. I think they understood that there was a fairness there that wouldn’t exist on the other side and then you have the Monuments Men story, which we’re going also tell in the Liberation Pavilion. Here we’ve got Eisenhower and the United States Army commissioned these curators and museum directors to go find the art of the Western world that had been, sculptures, stolen and looted by the Nazis all over Europe and hidden them in caves and salt mines and here they are in the last months of the war trying to find all this and recover this precious art of Western civilization right down to the closing days and hours of the war. Altaussee, in the salt mine there had been rigged for destruction and the Ghent Altarpiece was there and other fabulous artwork and, with the help actually of the Austrian resistance, they were just hours before the end of the war, and then there’s the OSS, the great story, a book I just read recently, this Return to the Reich. Fred Mayer, a Jewish refugee to America who came back and fought in the US Army, got into the OSS. First he was stationed in Italy, but he parachuted into Austria in the Tirol, that’s out of Innsbruck, impersonating a Wehrmacht officer in the last months of the war because Eisenhower was worried that Hitler had this last [inaudible 00:26:21] up in the Alps. He was impersonating a Wehrmacht officer, he was captured by the Gestapo, waterboarded, and then convinced them the Americans were almost there and he convinced the Nazi leader of Tirol to surrender all the German troops to the Americans without firing a shot when Americans were about 30, 40 miles away. There are those heroic stories that you find and he was fluent in French and German and he pulled it off. These are amazing stories. So there’s some truth to that. It doesn’t mean that they were all perfect by any means, it’s war, and Hollywood does what they do. There’s patina, the moral patina gets exaggerated to some extent. I mean the good war mythology that erupts and America is always on the side of the angels.

Jeremi Suri: So Nick, that’s actually where I wanted to go for our closing. We always like to close our podcast episodes with a forward-looking element. How does this history help to inform us going forward? How can it help improve our democracy? What are the correct lessons? Clearly, the war was a war with a moral mission attached to it. If there was a just war, this was it. But on the other hand, that doesn’t mean that the United States was error-free. It doesn’t mean that our power had no limits. What are the correct lessons that we should learn? Especially now in the 21st century when we’re in this really difficult transition, understanding who we are as a society and where we are in the world.

Dr. Gordon Nick Mueller: I mean, I’ll answer, and Robin, have been in the thick of this for several years as we develop the major themes of the post-war era from ’45 to as far forward into the last 75 years as we can go in the liberation pavilion, we talk about the legacy of the war. We’ve sketched out a story that reflects the major values of our country with regard to FDR’s vision before the war even began for freedoms. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear and more, as he embedded those in his war aims in ionic charter and envisioned a United Nations. So his vision of victory, even nine months before Pearl Harbor was a post-war settlement that Rob talked about the soft power side of things, that human rights becomes a major of legacy of the war. That impulse or that vision was further intensified by the discovery of the Holocaust in humanity of what happened there at the Nurnberg Trials. But the United Nations was already envisioned in the Atlantic Charter, and so those values in these international institutions and partnerships that come out of the war of the NATO. Actually found that, just check in here the names, we knew we’d have this. There was a poll, like the Gallup Poll called the Roper poll. The 1st of March, they asked, would you be supportive of a world organization after the war to try to preserve peace? Eighty percent of Americans said, yes. Whereas today, United Nations might not have such a strong reputation among Americans. But I think that values were something that we fought for and the arc of history in those streams of human rights and civil rights and women’s rights at home. How it transformed our country and America at the end of colonialism, that took some years, but many of the colonial countries became democracy. So under the broad umbrella of the Pax Americana, let’s say that and Robin can talk about the hard power there.

Dr. Robert Citino: Let me jump in here Nick.

Dr. Gordon Nick Mueller: Yeah.

Dr. Robert Citino: We’re a shame liberal. Nick and I talk about this a lot. I do agree with Nick, with every word you just said, international organizations, international cooperation, the necessity to be open to the world, that is the legacy of World War II, there’s no doubt, and we hope we’re not losing that post-war legacy. But I’ll throw in a word for hard power too. World War II proved that when push comes to shove, the way to deal with the disturber of the peace is to kick him until he’s down, and keep kicking him until he disappears, which is what we wind up doing with Hitler. I think along with the United Nations, there also has to be some understanding that at the end of the day, hard and soft power have to work together to maintain peace and order abroad. Jeremi, you’re just shaping a conversation that Nick and I have been having for months.

Jeremi Suri: I think it’s so crucial, in some ways one could argue that the history of World War II and the end of the war is probably more important now than it’s been in a long time as we rethink who we are as a society and our place in the world, and your emphasis upon international cooperation, soft power and hard power, I think is so significant to our understanding of American democracy.

Dr. Gordon Nick Mueller: Since we’re talking about VE Day here May 8th I think for Americans and for freedom loving people and democracies, it was a symbol of victory of peace and aspirations for a better world. That meant a world where ultimately, in the aftermath of the war, where America exercised moral authority at home and abroad. Not always perfectly, of course, but this has been our aspirations since ’45, and I believe that up until recent years, we stood as a beacon of freedom and democracy for people in the world. So that’s part of the good war mythology that I guess I subscribed to a little bit, but recognizing the imperfections of how that’s been executed in the last 20-25 years. I think it’s disassembling that, but look, that’s a lot better than we did between World War one and World War II. So there had been another World War, 75 years.

Jeremi Suri: Rob, you agree?

Dr. Robert Citino: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I’ve spent much of my time wallowing in the Treaty of Versailles, Jeremi, much of my career. Certainly compared to the peacemakers of 1919, the peacemakers of 1945 had their eye, I think, on bigger issues than necessarily punishing the losing side. There was some of that, certainly no doubt. But I think that took a pretty broad view and I think we have a lot to be grateful for. I think really, when you get right down to the legacy of 1945, it’s one world and we have to be open to the rest of the world, and if we try to close ourselves off, we may come up with apparent solutions, but not real ones even for our own problems. So here’s hoping that we come out of the current crisis with a new appreciation for one another, not just in this country, but all over the world.

Jeremi Suri: I love it. I think that’s a wonderful note to close on. Zachary, Do you find and do others of your generation find World War II inspiring for a new world, for creating an open world and a world of human rights, what Nick and Rob have talked about? I mean, we certainly hope so at the World War II Museum because we need your generation to come and visit the Museum. So Zachary, how do you think about World War II?

Zachary Suri: I think that my generation finds World War II very fascinating and a very important topic. I think it really brings forth the values that American society was founded on, and it allows us in many ways to see if we’ve met those goals or if we haven’t. In many ways, the end of World War II is a benchmark that we need to meet as a society, and it allows us to re-examine that every year when the anniversary on May 8th comes up again.

Jeremi Suri: Well said. I think we’ve only scratched the surface here, but we’ve had, I think a wonderful discussion about the historical resonances from 1945 to today. The difficulties of that moment, the uncertainties, the violence, the suffering and sacrifice, and the legacies and lessons for us going forward. Rob and Nick, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for the crucial educational role you play.

Dr. Gordon Nick Mueller: Thank you very much. Jeremi keep on doing your good work too and we’re glad that you’re part of our national World War II Museum family.

Jeremi Suri: I’m delighted to work with both of you and Zachary, thank you for your wonderful poem as always, and thank you to our listeners for joining us on This Is Democracy.

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