May 8, 1945: for us French and Europeans, nothing to celebrate...

[yankeedoodle]

Stalan and de Gaulle during his trip to Moscow in December 1944

May 8, 1945: for us French and Europeans, nothing to celebrate...
https://jeune-nation.com/actualite/actu-france/8-mai-1945-pour-nous-francais-et-europeens-rien-a-celebrer

MECHANICALLY TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH

May 8, 1945, is a non-event from a French point of view. And more generally, there is nothing to celebrate.

 

In France
In France, on this May 8, 1945, nothing special is happening. By this date, the Americans had been landing in Normandy for 11 months, in Provence for 9 months, and the Germans were retreating. The French government no longer existed; it had no hold since the forced evacuation of a Government Commission to Sigmaringen in September 1944. And French territory had been completely retaken since the Allies reached the Rhine on February 9, 1945.

On the other hand, the "purge" has been raging for many months. Far from only affecting "collaborators" with blood on their hands, it affects many French people for reasons as arbitrary and varied as supposed "sympathies" for Vichy to pure, irrational and uncontrolled personal revenge. Sometimes even without distinction for women, children, or the elderly...

De Gaulle wanted it:

"France, all of France, is rising up in resistance while waiting for it to do so in organized revenge!" (De Gaulle, September 18, 1941, on London radio)

And in France, on the ground, this purge-vengeance was the work of the communists . This purge, a true ferment of civil war, strangely resembles all those that the countries of what would become the Eastern bloc also experienced, triggered by the communist parties as a preliminary to the entry of the Red Army.

But in France, the communist coup d'état will not happen: de Gaulle and Stalin have established "a privileged relationship" which suggests "a decisive interweaving in many respects both politically and strategically" from which the "French" Communist Party will benefit, reintroduced to the heart of the political game and the state apparatus, casting into oblivion its conduct during the Phoney War and its twenty-two month collaboration with the Third Reich...

In Europe
More generally in Europe, on May 8, the Germans signed the surrender with the Allies, and on May 9 with the Soviets. This was the moment when the Yalta Agreement could take full effect, including its secret clauses.

Stalin confirmed the results of previous inter-allied conferences, which outlined a plan for dividing Europe into "zones of influence" for the post-war period. He obtained half of Europe and had his "territorial and political glacis" for half a century. These results led to the "Cold War."

Churchill's belated remorse on March 5, 1946, changed nothing: "We have killed the wrong pig."  The Anglo-Saxons waged war on Germany on the pretext of violated borders and the occupation of neighboring countries, but they ratified the Soviet yoke and the territories occupied by the Red Army, without consideration for the peoples, nations, and borders of Eastern Europe...

And what's more, they added the moral fault. Solzhenitsyn, in "The Gulag Archipelago" was the first to reveal how Churchill and Roosevelt, through these secret clauses of the Yalta agreements , cowardly agreed to hand over to the Soviets 2 million Russians (1) who, in 1945, were in West Germany in the power of the English and American armies to which they had surrendered. In two months, the Allies handed over 1,398,902 people to the Soviets and the operations were to last for many months...

No, really, in view of May 8, 1945, for us French and Europeans, there is nothing to celebrate.

We prefer to replace it with a commemoration of another May 8: in 1429, Joan with the Dauphin's troops completed the liberation of Orléans . And to do her justice, join us at the traditional tribute to Joan of Arc on May 11, 2025 in Paris .

Note :

(1) These were the Russian units that had transferred to the German army under the command of General Vlasov, the Cossack divisions of the "atamans" Naumenko, Krasnov, Chkouro, the Caucasian Division of Sultan Klych Girey, the XVth Cossack Cavalry Corps commanded by the German General Helmut von Pannwitz, all troops that had not fought against England and the United States, but only against the Soviets. There were still, by the tens of thousands, prisoners of war, refugees, displaced persons, former émigrés, Croats, Poles from the marches annexed by the Soviets, etc.