Some six or seven years ago I happened to see an Academy Award-winning documentary, “The Last Days,” directed by James Moll and with Steven Spielberg as executive producer. It was of interest to me because, like the novel I was then writing, it dealt with the Holocaust and tangentially with the role of African American troops in World War II.

In the film, Paul Parks, an African American WW II veteran and civil rights activist, recounts being one of a number of black troops of the then-segregated U.S. Armypresent at the liberation of Dachau, the first concentration camp the Nazis built and one of the last to be liberated. Although it was not one of the six death camps created specifically for mass murder, many thousands of people died there during the Third Reich. The historical and moral significance of African American troops taking part in the liberation of Dachau was of interest to me.

Subsequently I learned that “The Last Days” and “Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II” — a 1992 PBS documentary that also drew attention to the presence of black troops at Dachau — were roundly attacked either for their unquestioning acceptance of claims by allegedly dishonest black veterans or for allegedly fabricating the story.

I was curious about the motives of each side in this dispute. Why would black veterans say there were black troops present if there were not? There are plenty of examples of the heroism of African American soldiers in WW II. It is also generally accepted by historians that the all-black 761st Tank Battalion had taken part in the liberation of a satellite of Mauthausen concentration camp, Gunskirchen, on May 5, 1945. There was no need to make up a role for black GIs in the liberation of Dachau.

Equally perplexing to me was the vehemence of the deniers. Why would the assertion by black veterans that they had helped liberate Dachau engender a rebuttal so passionate that it seemed to have the hallmarks of a campaign? Could racism be a factor? And, in any event, how do you prove a negative? If a given white veteran, or even a number of them, failed to see any black soldiers at Dachau at the relevant time and then testified honestly to this effect, does that prove that no black troops were there?

In terms of the evidence, there were black veterans asserting their presence and their role in the liberation of the camp, and there were people who could find no white veteran to say there were any black troops there. Surely, I thought,U.S. militaryrecords could clear this up.

Not really. Apparently black outfits were frequently split up and “lent out” to other outfits. The 761st, for example, was often called a “bastard outfit” because it didn’t seem to belong to anybody. This meant that often nobody “officially” knew where all of its members were at any given time. Nevertheless, given the controversy the two documentaries had generated, in 2006 I contacted the Army. The result was inconclusive. The U.S. Army Center of Military History reported that it had no records “to prove or disprove that there were African American units that participated in the liberation of Dachau.”

After my novel was published in Australia last year, a reader there contacted me to ask whether there really was, as is portrayed in the novel, a controversy concerning the presence of black troops at the liberation of Dachau. She had grown up hearing her Polish Jewish father tell the family about his liberation from Dachau, and the story always contained his wonderment on seeing a black person for the first time. As soon as was possible I met with the woman, checked her story and interviewed her father.

An initially reluctant interviewee, her Holocaust survivor father did indeed confirm the presence of black troops at the liberation of Dachau. The momentousness of his liberation notwithstanding, he distinctly recalls seeing, and being astonished by the presence of, black soldiers there that day. Coming from a Polish shtetl, this man had never seen a black person before.

Thus the accounts of African American veterans, and in particular of the late Paul Parks, are supported by the testimony of at least one Jewish survivor. Is it time to apologize to the Parks family? One wonders whether there are still some people for whom the eyewitness testimonies of an African American veteran and a Polish Jew are not enough proof.

On Jan. 24, 1943, 230 French women who had been arrested for resistance activities were put on a train at Compiegne, outside Paris, and sent to Auschwitz. The youngest had just celebrated her 17th birthday; the oldest was 67. They were teachers and seamstresses, students and farmers’ wives; there was a doctor, a dentist and several editors and chemists. They were to be a lesson to other would-be troublemakers.

The women were not Jewish, so they were not sent immediately to be gassed. However, they were subjected to interminable roll calls in arctic conditions, crushingly tough physical labor and the random, ceaseless brutality of the SS guards. Typhus was rife in the camp. There was very little to eat and almost no water to drink. Minor transgressions were punished with excessive savagery.

Even so, 49 of these women lived to return to France in the late spring of 1945. It was an exceptionally high proportion: More than 1 in 5 made it through the war in a camp in which death was virtually inevitable.

The fact that the women were not Jewish but déportées politiques, or resisters, was important to their survival, but not as much, those who lived would later say, as luck. Luck governed life and death in Auschwitz: the luck not to catch typhus, not to lose your shoes (being barefoot in below-freezing winter temperatures meant certain death), not to fall and attract the attention of the guards and their whips, not to be mauled by the SS dogs.

But there was another characteristic shared by these French women that played a critical part in their survival: their commitment to a cause.

One hundred and nineteen of the women were communists, supporters of Léon Blum’s prewar Popular Front. Many of them had spent the 1930s protesting against fascism in Spain and Italy and against the Nazis in Germany. They has assisted refugees fleeing into France. Together, they had been to meetings and dreamed of a fairer, more equal world. Others fought hard against the German occupiers and their Vichy collaborators as Gaullists, or they fought simply out of personal convictions so strong that to do nothing was impossible.

As a group, they were committed and accustomed to fighting for their beliefs, even if they were unpopular. This was particularly true for the communist women, who had spent the two years after the signing of the German-Soviet nonaggression pact in August 1939 as pariahs, driven to conduct their battles underground. The courage all these women carried with them to Auschwitz — their determination to survive in order to bear witness to the atrocities of the extermination camps — had been shaped long before, as they helped to print and distribute anti-Nazi posters and newspapers, ferried Jews to safety across the demarcation line into unoccupied France or carried weapons in the baskets of their bicycles.

When I began research for a book about the women in 2009, six of the 230 were still alive. They were formidable and humorous, daunting in their toughness and fortitude, and it was impossible not to wonder which of us would have behaved so bravely in similar circumstances.

“It was different for us,” one of the women, Madeleine, told me. “We weren’t victims; we knew what we were risking. It gave us a strength, a desire to live, to see a better postwar world. It kept our spirits strong.”

More than half of those who survived had been the most politically disciplined and committed before the war. Like Madeleine, Cécile, another survivor — a robust, outspoken Breton in her late 80s — was an active communist. She told me that when she was forced to go into hiding in Paris because the Gestapo was closing in on her, she had asked her mother to look after her 11-year-old daughter. “How can you do this,” her mother had said, “when you have a child?” “It is precisely because I have a child,” Cécile had replied, “that I am doing it. I do not want her to grow up in a world of German occupiers and French collaborators.”

And there was something else that defined these women: They were unusually close friends. Held together in a fort outside Paris, they had looked after one another, shared food and stories, comforted those whose husbands were shot, watched over the younger and cared for the older. And it was as friends that they faced, together, month after month, experiences that lay at the very outer limits of human endurance. It was a luxury not afforded many of the inmates of the Nazi camps.

None had known, in the early years of the German occupation, what might happen to resisters. Their courage was that of ordinary people, outraged by events and behavior that seemed to them too repugnant to endure, and it is something of this spirit and passion that drives the Arab Spring today, with its belief that there is a better world that can, and must, be fought for, whatever the personal danger.

Would the women have been so brave, so heedless of their own safety, had they known what they risked?

Probably not. There were many mothers of young children among them, and they would surely not have left them in such a way. But, finding themselves in a situation of extreme adversity, they did what fighters and believers do: They held themselves together, helped their friends, resisted their oppressors, planned for a better world. It was a cast of mind, the strength that comes with moral clarity and the commitment to a cause, an utter determination not to be defeated, that brought so many home.

By the time I arrived in West Berlin, in 1962, the wall was a year old. The half-city was a hysterical, intellectually exciting place; the wall, whose construction began 50 years ago today, made it more so. From the East and West radio and TV stations you heard competing, mutually exclusive versions of every event. Worldviews counted more than facts. And there were spies everywhere. For fun, a journalist told me, he’d count the intelligence services operating in West Berlin; he stopped at 30.

I could sense the pain and anger unleashed by the wall. Families, lovers and friends were separated. The freedom of movement and the imagination of Berliners, even the air they breathed, were cut off. The city’s streets, subways and express trains were suddenly blocked. Only the sewer water could circulate freely.

Yet it is astounding how quickly that anger changed into habit, almost acceptance. While the wall meant the end of freedom of movement for the Germans in the East, the West Germans realized they didn’t miss much. Their anger was reduced to annoyance about the harassments during border crossings.

The wall faded in our political imagination, too. In West Berlin, and in West Germany, a split developed over the “German question.” While the Christian Democrats and the conservative Springer publications continued to call for national unity, they spoke to a thinning audience, while the left and the Social Democrats concluded that such incantations would achieve nothing politically.

In this fallow land of East-West confrontation, Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor in the early 1970s, and his adviser Egon Bahr planted the shoots of their policy of détente, the partial normalization of relations. But it came with a high price. In order not to endanger talks with the Communists, they accepted the loss of contact with dissidents in East Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union.

Key phrases like “overcoming the German division” and even “reunification” became taboo. The most important German theme — the split and how to heal it — became an ideological plaything.

In 1980 I went on a half-year lecture tour through Latin America. When I returned, I looked at the wall with a foreign eye. It’s the most absurd and over-analyzed structure in the world, I thought, but we knew nothing about it or what it did to the people in its shadow.

As I began to research it, though, I was met with skepticism from friends. Wasn’t this the territory of the right, which a leftist like me was not to enter? The left held that the split was the price Germans had to pay for the crimes of the Third Reich. Nobody asked why the East Germans should pay this price alone. And why should the Czechs and Poles — who paid the price as well — be so generously included? Then again, it took little brilliance to recognize the longstanding “wall in the mind,” which I described in my book “The Wall Jumper.” I saw it everywhere, even among intellectuals.

I recall a meeting with my friend the East German author Heiner Müller in June 1989 in the Paris Bar, in West Berlin. I explained how much the East German government’s commentary about the Tiananmen Square massacre upset me. The East German news media was constantly going on about the “bandits” who had killed allegedly unarmed Chinese soldiers. If anyone had the authority, I said, to raise his voice against what was obviously a preparation for a similar “solution” for the East German pro-democracy movement, it was he. To my amazement, Mr. Müller, who was always ready with a joke, replied: “I believe that you don’t realize how many Taiwanese” — that is, anti-Beijing interlopers — “were present in Tiananmen.” I tossed my glass of red wine on his shirt.

But the fall of the wall, 28 years after its construction, did not mean the end of the “wall in the mind.” Indeed, the East German rulers opened it for the same reason they built it: to stop their citizens from leaving! It didn’t work either time.

But why should they believe otherwise? For decades Germans, particularly in the West, had imagined the two countries as permanently estranged. While the people of Central and Eastern Europe were storming the bastions of the dictators, the West Germans and their allies were still rubbing their eyes in amazement. Even among the Christian Democrats, Helmut Kohl, the chancellor at the time, admitted last year, hardly anyone had believed that the wall could fall or that reunification was possible.

It will take a generation before the “wall in the mind” is overcome, but the process is under way. It is not merely about Westerners bringing Easterners into the fold; there is also what I call the “Easternization” of the West going on.

Consider the career of Angela Merkel, a scientist from the East who became our first female chancellor. She did so not just by mastering the Western political structure, but in part by surreptitiously replanting left-wing, “Eastern” values — like social justice — in the garden of her party, the conservative Christian Democrats, and elevating their importance among the country as a whole.

It is fitting that Mrs. Merkel should be doing her political gardening in Berlin. Before the wall fell, it was nearly the only place where one could still feel the division between East and West. In the 20 years since, it has become the best place to watch that division disappear.

On Saturday, Germany will mark the 50th anniversary of one of the biggest and grimmest construction projects in history — the building of the Berlin Wall. Photographs of the wall, which overnight brutally severed streets, rail lines and families, have been on display in front of Berlin government buildings for several months. On Saturday, the memorial events will last all day and include a wreath-laying ceremony honoring the victims of the former communist East German government.

The 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall, in 2009, attracted a lot more attention in the U.S. It was a victory we like to claim, especially triumphalist conservatives. It seemed to vindicate Ronald Reagan’s assertive approach toward the Soviet Union — the Reagan who in perhaps the most iconic moment of his presidency demanded at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

But the right has constructed a bogus version of history. The toppling of the wall in 1989 had little to do with Reagan, and even less to do with bellicose confrontation.

In the actual event, it was something of a fluke — the result of miscommunication between East German leaders and border guards who unilaterally decided to let easterners and westerners move freely across the border. In broader terms, it was diplomatic caution that helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet empire. In retrospect, for all its tragedy and hatefulness, the Berlin Wall was something of a geopolitical blessing in disguise.

The Cold War is often depicted as an era of stability, but Berlin was a flash point that Soviet and Western leaders feared could trigger atomic war. The Soviet Union regarded Berlin as its personal prize: At an enormous cost in lives, the Red Army had single-handedly liberated Berlin from the Nazis in 1945. Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered American and British troops to hold back and was content to let the Soviets absorb the brunt of the attack.

After the war in Europe ended, Josef Stalin, Harry Truman and Clement Attlee met in Potsdam, outside Berlin, where they formally divided their conquered territory into what would become East and West Germany. Berlin, an island in the eastern sector, was also divided. Once the Cold War began, Stalin tried to starve the west side of the city with a blockade that lasted 11 months in 1948 and 1949. Truman responded with the Berlin airlift, and West Berlin became a powerful symbol of Western resolve.

But Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who called the continued existence of West Berlin a “bone in my throat,” was determined to solve the problem. He made a variety of bloodcurdling threats about the possibility of nuclear war over Berlin and bullied the inexperienced President John F. Kennedy when they met in Vienna in June 1961. “He savaged me,” Kennedy acknowledged privately.

The stakes could not have been higher. Khrushchev and East German leader Walter Ulbricht faced a potential catastrophe: Tens of thousands of East Germans were voting with their feet, heading for the western sector and especially West Berlin. Khrushchev signed off on Ulbricht’s plan to create a national prison in the form of a wall, a sinister but effective solution — and not one that the Western powers were prepared to challenge.

On the contrary, Kennedy had it right when he warned his aides, “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” Even the patriarchal West German leader at the time, Konrad Adenauer, acceded, focusing not on the East but on closer ties with France and America. Only Willy Brandt, the youthful mayor of West Berlin in the early 1960s, pushed hard against the divide, ultimately enunciating a policy of detente with the East as the only way to bring about unification of the two Germanys.

As the socialist German chancellor in the 1970s, Brandt presided over “change through closeness.” A web of economic and other ties were established between East and West Germany. Relatives from East and West were allowed to contact one another. Brandt also reached out to the Eastern bloc and the Soviet Union to show genuine repentance for Nazi war crimes. Every subsequent German leader followed Brandt’s path.

The wall forced West Germans to face reality: The U.S. wasn’t going to war over the Berlin Wall; East Germany wasn’t going away; and trying to isolate it would only strengthen the hand of communist hard-liners. The shrewder policy was to encourage as much contact as possible with the West. The more East Germany was exposed to the West, the more it was coaxed out of its communist shell. The idea promulgated by the Eastern hard-liners, that West Germany was a military threat on the order of Nazi Germany, became increasingly implausible. Ultimately, detente amounted to a liberation policy.

Absent Brandt’s insistence on detente, a new generation in the Kremlin, led by Mikhail Gorbachev, would never have had the confidence to allow East Germany to reunite with the West. Instead, they might well have clung to the vision of West Germany as a hotbed of revanchist Nazis that Stalin’s and Khrushchev’s generation saw.

Germany and the U.S. have drawn widely varying conclusions from the fall of the wall. German political leaders believe that diplomacy is the key to the spread of democracy, which is why Germany opposed the Iraq war and abstained from endorsing NATO’s Libya venture.

Obviously, there are times when military action is imperative. But the true lesson of the Berlin Wall is that reaching out to the East did not amount, as conservatives constantly claimed, to a policy of appeasement. The wall created the stability between the superpowers that was the precondition for the peaceful demise of communism several decades later. The rollback of communist Eastern Europe that conservatives championed occurred mainly because of diplomacy.

Had the West followed the right’s advice and tried to bludgeon the Soviets into submission, the Berlin Wall might be standing today.

El nuevo edificio de la Filarmónica de Hamburgo, obra de los suizos Herzog & de Meuron, que abrirá sus puertas dentro de un año, está concebido para ser fotografiado desde el agua. En las simulaciones puede verse la cresta de vidrio y sus puntas en forma de ola rompiente recortadas contra el cielo a 37 metros de altura, pero también reflejadas como fantasma luminoso en el negro espejo del puerto. O, para mayor exactitud, en uno de los remansos acuáticos de HafenCity, que es como se llama la ampliación de la ciudad hanseática. La denominación de PuertoCiudad, aunque poco imaginativa, es exacta, ya que está creciendo sobre la antigua Speicherstadt, la zona de almacenamiento formada por gigantescas bodegas de ladrillo. Se ha reservado de la demolición una línea de bodegas a lo largo de un canal, memoria del viejo puerto hamburgués. Son como una teoría de bellas esfinges rojas en un bosque de acero y cristal.

El grandioso proyecto, a orillas del estuario que forma la confluencia de los ríos Aster y Elba en su desembocadura marítima, ocupa 157 hectáreas, en las cuales se levantan o levantarán, según su grado de acabamiento, 78 proyectos, todos ellos colosales. La sede de la Filarmónica, el llamado Elbphilharmonie Concert Hall, es quizá el más brillante y fotogénico, pero allí están también la central de Unilever, el grupo Spiegel, el Centro de Ciencias Marítimas (quizá la ocasión de que Koolhaas escape al tedio), la compañía Lloyd/Alemania (cuenta con 16.000 empleados) o el Museo Marítimo, además de casi 6.000 viviendas.

Con mis compañeros de viaje, Carlos, Patricia, Alfonso, Josep, todos ellos arquitectos, recorremos aquella explosión constructiva entre admirados y sobrecogidos. ¿Cómo se financia una ciudad semejante? ¿De dónde sale tal ingente cantidad de cientos de miles de millones de euros? Algunos aspectos son admirables, como el hecho de que toda la ciudad se alce ocho metros sobre el nivel del mar para evitar las crecidas del Elba, las cuales alcanzan los tres metros en circunstancias normales, pero el doble con galerna. Sin embargo, no se puede evitar la sensación de estar ante un efecto del petrodólar, una Lagos del norte, un Dubai nevado. Lo cual, evidentemente, es engañoso.

El puerto de Hamburgo es el segundo de Europa, detrás de Rotterdam, pero supera a este último en número de contenedores. Todos los que hemos visto la serie The Wire sabemos que en los contenedores viajan las mercancías más insospechadas, desde carne humana hasta residuos radiactivos. Es humanamente imposible controlar toda la carga cuando suma tantos millones de unidades. La extensión gigantesca de algunos edificios de HafenCity son simplemente espacios para la acumulación de mercancías, y allí aguardarán el momento estratégico de su distribución. En un proyecto de este tipo están interesados absolutamente todos los hombres de negocios que transportan algo, lo que sea, legal o ilegal, de un continente a otro. Aquí llegan mercancías oceánicas, asiáticas, africanas, americanas o europeas, y aquí comienza su distribución. Un jovial perito del puerto, gordo, cervecero y fanático del Barça, al saber que mis arquitectos eran catalanes, afirmaba con sonoras carcajadas: “¡Jamás tendrrréis un corrredor mediterrráneo, echadle la culpa a Matrrrit, perrro quienes lo impiden están aquí… o en Brrruselas!”. ¿Una competencia portuaria mediterránea a estos dos titanes, Hamburgo y Rotterdam? ¿Un atajo para las mercancías asiáticas que evite el Atlántico? ¡Ni en sueños!

La ciudad hanseática tiene menos de dos millones de habitantes, y la región metropolitana, algo más de cuatro. Es aproximadamente la escala de Barcelona y su área. Quizá por esta razón hay una nutrida colección de profesionales barceloneses trabajando en el proyecto hamburgués. Para un técnico vocacional ha de ser una oportunidad fabulosa esta de crear una ciudad enteramente nueva con todos los elementos tecnológicos puestos al día. Y con ese presupuesto. Un presupuesto para el que no existe crisis porque estamos hablando del dinero verdadero, no del coyuntural. Estamos hablando de los amos del mundo.

Camino por los terrenos de un futuro parque, aunque creo que no es el que va a construir Beth Galí: me he perdido parte de la explicación, nuestra guía habla a una velocidad vertiginosa y solo confunde constantemente, pero eso es inevitable, los géneros. Me parece encantadora cuando dice “la sindicata”. El parque está al borde del agua y será sin duda un lugar de cafeterías, terrazas, bicicletas y paseos familiares. El clima es riguroso, pero los hamburgueses, gente extraña en Alemania, gente que perteneció a Dinamarca durante más de dos siglos (de 1640 a 1864, el barrio de Áltona, por ejemplo, que es por donde paseo), son también rigurosos. En los terrenos de este parque se alzaba, antes de la II Guerra Mundial, la estación de ferrocarril. De aquí salieron los trenes cargados de judíos hacia los campos de exterminio. Hay una leve referencia a la masacre, un sobrio homenaje a las víctimas, no podía faltar, pero los habitantes de Hamburgo pagaron cara la arrogancia y la barbarie germanas.

El 28 de julio de 1943 un ataque combinado de la fuerza aérea británica y la Armada norteamericana arrojó 10 toneladas de bombas incendiarias sobre el puerto y las zonas residenciales de la ciudad. El relato puede leerse en uno de los mejores trabajos de W.G. Sebald, Sobre la historia natural de la destrucción (Anagrama), de donde lo transcribo. Dice Sebald: “Un cuarto de hora después de la caída de las primeras bombas, todo el espacio aéreo, hasta donde alcanzaba la vista, era un solo mar de llamas”. Las bombas explosivas de 4.000 libras estaban construidas de modo que arrancaran de cuajo puertas y ventanas, tras lo cual llegaban las bombas incendiarias ligeras que prendían en cubiertas y tejados. Por fin, las bombas incendiarias pesadas penetraban por todas las brechas y corrían como ríos de lava hasta inundarlo todo. Al quemar el oxígeno aceleradamente las llamas provocaron un huracán con vientos de 150 kilómetros por hora, mientras la columna de humo se alzaba hasta 8.000 metros de altura. Cuando los relojes marcaron la llegada del día, seguía siendo de noche. Así permanecería durante semanas bajo una capa plomiza de cenizas en suspensión, pero nadie lo vio.

Se calcula que un millón y cuarto de la población salió huyendo, lo que viene a ser su totalidad descontados los 200.000 muertos. Comenta Sebald, con razón, que nunca sabremos la cifra exacta porque hay innumerables testimonios de masas humanas mudas y enajenadas, cubiertas de harapos y quemaduras, vagando por los campos y pueblos hasta tan lejos como Berlín. Si alguien trataba de ayudarles y se les acercaba, escapaban aterrados o se quedaban paralizados en una atonía similar a la que años más tarde se podría ver en Hiroshima. Nadie sabe qué fue de toda aquella gente. Tan tarde como en otoño de 1946, el escritor sueco Stig Dagerman escribía que viajando en tren por la zona de Hamburgo observó durante más de 20 minutos un paisaje lunar sin un solo ser humano visible. Nadie, dice Dagerman, miraba por las ventanillas, y supieron que era extranjero porque yo sí miraba.

Sobre ese cementerio ahora se levanta la nueva HafenCity, opulenta, poderosa, rampante. El bombardeo de arrasamiento de 1943 se llamaba Operación Gomorra por la fama de que gozaba el barrio rojo de Hamburgo, uno de los prostibularios más notorios del mundo. Ahora ya no queda nada de aquel pasado. Cuando a veces se me ocurre elogiar a los alemanes por su energía para vencer el remordimiento, la culpabilidad y el resentimiento, siempre hay alguien que comenta despectivo lo aburrida y sosa que le parece aquella gente comparada con nuestra jovial, despreocupada y simpática campechanía. Lástima que tantas virtudes mediterráneas no sean reconocidas más que por gente campechana, despreocupada y, eso sí, muy simpática. Sin embargo, en ocasiones se puede preferir la grandeza.

I was blown away when my son told me he wanted to do his sixth grade research project on Japan’s human torpedoes, the manned missiles that crashed themselves into enemy ships toward the end of World War II.

Since then I’ve been watching to see if an 11-year-old boy growing up in an officially pacifist country — Japan’s Constitution renounces war and the country only has forces for defense — can fathom a time when thousands of frenzied young men signed up to ride torpedoes, or planes in the case of the better known kamikaze pilots, to meet certain death in the name of the emperor and their country.

Nationalism is a remote concept for Japanese children today. The flag and national anthem remain controversial symbols of war-time militarism in some sectors. The government encourages public schools to raise the flag and sing the anthem, but my son’s private school never mandates those acts. My son cannot recite the lyrics to the anthem even though it happens to be one of the shortest in the world, with only 11 measures.

The human torpedoes were named kaiten, literally “turn heaven,” and shorthand for “shake up the heavens and change the course of the war,” reflecting Japan’s desperate desire to reverse the steady string of U.S. victories in the Pacific. They were the brainchild of the Imperial Navy officers Hiroshi Kuroki and Sekio Nishina who eyed the stockpiles of torpedoes sitting in sheds after Japan had shifted its focus of fighting from sea to air. The missiles were redesigned to have a tiny pilot’s chamber, an engine and a gyroscope so they could be steered into their targets. They began shipping out in 1944, the year before Japan’s defeat.

To get a first-hand look at a kaiten, we visited Tokyo’s Yushukan military museum. The area was heavily guarded by police as the museum sits on the grounds of Yasukuni Shrine, controversial for deifying the war dead, including Class A war criminals. The sleek missile, nearly 15 yards long, was striking in its length compared to the narrow one-yard diameter into which the soldier would squeeze. Painted in white on the hatch was a chrysanthemum floating on water, the family crest of a samurai loyal to the emperor. “The 1.5 tons of explosives in its bow instantly sank a ship,” reads the museum pamphlet.

What it doesn’t say is that the more than 100 kaiten launches resulted in only two major sinkings of enemy vessels; the oiler U.S.S. Mississinewa and the destroyer escort U.S.S. Underhill. The torpedoes had limited maneuverability and often set out at night amid rough waters, making it difficult to reach their targets. U.S. ships frequently detected the submarines before the kaiten could even be deployed. And more than a dozen pilots died during training missions, having rammed their missiles aground.

An avid reader, my son immersed himself in books filled with letters, wills and diaries of the soldiers. The volunteers — if the men who signed up for the missions under immense pressure can be called that — were mostly in their late teens and early 20s. Their writings describe a calm acceptance of their fate along with words of gratitude and affection to their families. Some are poetic, like the one of the 18-year-old who wrote, “I am the sea. I am normally calm and blue. The turbulent swirls are the angry me.”

My mother became worried that her grandson was getting brainwashed after she heard him say in an admiring tone, “They did it for the emperor.” She pointed out that the officers were men not that much older than him and how they often addressed their final messages to their mothers. “That lunch box was really delicious. I should have asked you to make some more,” were the last words written by one 21-year old.

At the Kaiten Memorial Museum on a small island off the coast of Western Japan’s Yamaguchi Prefecture, stone tablets bearing the names of the dead dot what was once the parade ground of the country’s largest kaiten base. My son skipped around the tiny monuments, calling out the names he recognized.

“What’s he famous for?” I asked him about one of them. Taro Tsukamoto made an audio recording of his will, my son told me. Sure enough, at the Yushukan museum one can hear through the static, the voice of the 21-year-old reminiscing about gathering silver grass for moon-viewing parties and having snowball fights.

“I wish I could live happily like that forever,” he says. “But I must not forget that I am foremost a Japanese. … May my country flourish forever. Goodbye everyone.”

Six months after he started research, I asked my son what he thought about the kaiten. “I can’t say,” he said, causing me to momentarily worry about the outcome of his report. But then he explained, “You can’t describe in words how sad it is.”

On Sept. 1, 1945 — 65 years ago this week — I arrived in Leyte Gulf, the Philippines, aboard a Navy transport ship. Along with other newly commissioned ensigns in the Navy Civil Engineer Corps, I was prepared to join one of the Seabee battalions being mustered for an invasion of the Japanese mainland. However, as we had learned during our voyage across the Pacific, the A-bombs had been dropped and Japan had capitulated. As the fates would have it, the day after our arrival — Sept. 2, 1945 — a peace treaty was signed aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

The war was over. But we all agreed that it would take years — perhaps a generation — before our hatred of the enemy would diminish.

I joined the 29th Naval Construction Battalion, whose postwar assignment saw us traveling to Truk (now called Chuuk), an atoll in the Caroline Islands that had served as headquarters for the Japanese fleet. This formidable base had been bombed into rubble, and now the Navy had decided that the main airstrip should be rebuilt, along with a basic military camp. Under a unique provision in the surrender agreement, 3,000 Japanese were to remain on Truk to perform the necessary construction, working under the direction of an American force. Our battalion was selected to be that American force.

Arriving at Truk, we found ourselves surrounded by the erstwhile enemy: approximately 40,000 warriors noted for their ferocity in battle. Marines had preceded us to assure security, but one could not help feeling a little edgy.

As the youngest and newest officer, I was put in charge of one of the less imposing projects: building a small earth-fill dam on a mountain stream for our water supply system. I had no experience with earth-fill dams, but using handbooks, and with guidance from colleagues who were knowledgeable engineers, I developed a rudimentary plan. Rising some 25 feet from the bottom of a small gorge, the dam was not exactly Grand Coulee; but for me, it was a challenge. For work in the field, I was given three experienced men from our battalion and a Japanese crew of about two dozen under the command of one of their lieutenants.

On the appointed day, the two teams gathered at the construction site and for what seemed like a long time simply stared at each other. Was there hostility or fear? I cannot say for sure. Friendly feelings? Certainly not.

It was up to me to make the first move. I walked over to my Japanese counterpart and ceremoniously unrolled the drawings I had prepared, showing him the outlines of the job. I set up a basic surveyor’s transit, and within minutes my men were driving pointed stakes at designated spots and stretching cord between them. Soon, under orders from their officer, the Japanese soldier-workers were attacking the earth with shovels and picks.

The Seabee threesome provided supervision, first hesitantly, then with increasing zest. To my amazement, they and the Japanese workers were soon engaged in attempts at banter and pantomime. I had arranged for a clay-like soil to be brought to the site by truck and wheelbarrow, and the Japanese devised a wooden pounding tool with which to compact the material. Within a few days the two groups had settled into an efficient working routine interspersed with episodes of playfulness.

The Japanese lieutenant and I, inhibited by notions of military protocol, did not warm up to each other right away. But enthusiasm for the task at hand, and pride in the progress made, led to mutual respect and, eventually, to friendship. I knew that there had been a breakthrough when he encouraged me to call him “Moe,” an abbreviation of a name that I had difficulty pronouncing.

The anticipated generation-long era of fear and hatred seemed to have been reduced to mere days.

After several weeks, the project was complete and we planned a dedication ceremony. Moe surprised me with the gift of a small ceramic statue, accompanied by a message that had been translated by one of his fellow officers and transcribed painstakingly onto a white kerchief. It read (I’ve retained the original spelling and punctuation):

April 2, 1946. The souvenir of the water plant completion. This is a statue of Admiral of The Fleet Count Hehachiro Togo, I.J.N. He was born at Kagoshima in Kyushu about a hundred years ago. He won the great victory in the Naval Battle of the Japan Sea. Namely he defeated the great Russian fleet (the Barutic Fleet). But some years ago he had a natural death. The world people say that he is the Nelson of the east. I pray that you may be able to make a great work as well as his achievement.

Lt. Moe

Today the statue stands on a shelf in my office, and the white kerchief, framed, hangs on the wall beside it. Perhaps one shouldn’t generalize from this somewhat idyllic tale, but I do. Recalling the events on a small Pacific atoll in 1945, I am reminded how camaraderie can spring up in the unlikeliest situations.

París sufrió un triste verano del 42 y no creo que lo pueda recordar con nostalgia. Se sabe que algunas ciudades del mundo arrastran un infierno colectivo en su memoria. En el Buenos Aires de los años setenta ese infierno existió, pero muchos de sus habitantes no se enteraron o no quisieron enterarse. Madrid y tantas ciudades españolas también lo sufrieron durante la inmediata posguerra. París sin lugar a dudas es dueño de un infierno apenas conocido. Probablemente todavía un infierno secreto para muchos parisienses de nuestros días.

No tengo la menor idea de qué pedagogía escolar haría falta para llenar esa laguna atroz. Y cuando hablo de pedagogía me refiero a una manera eficaz de inculcar en los ciudadanos la memoria sobre hechos horrorosos que llenan de vergüenza al género humano. No creo que se pueda resolver contándolo como se cuenta una heroica batallita del pasado. Ni con un monumento, ni con una placa en una plazoleta recóndita o con el nombre de una irrelevante calle.

La primera vez que asocié la ciudad de mis sueños de juventud con un ejemplo de barbarie histórica fue leyendo Dora Bruder, de Patrick Modiano. La segunda se produjo con la lectura de Velódromo de Invierno, de Juana Salabert. Y hubo una tercera vez: Suite francesa, de la novelista de origen ruso Irène Némirovsky. Aquella desdichada jornada tiene una fecha y hora exactas: 16 de julio de 1942 a las cuatro de la madrugada. Y un lugar preciso: el Velódromo de Invierno de París (distrito XV). ¿Qué ocurrió ese tórrido día? Miles de judíos fueron conducidos al Velódromo de Invierno. Después de ser internados en condiciones humillantes, se los condujo a Auschwitz. Unos 4.000 eran niños menores de 16 años.

Hagamos un poco de historia. Es evidente que en Francia las condiciones estaban dadas. Una tradición antisemita que venía de lejos en toda Europa. Esa fuerte corriente antisemita, por ejemplo, hizo que la residencia de intelectuales judíos extranjeros en París durante entreguerras no fuera todo lo hospitalaria que se esperaba (de los 270.000 judíos que había en Francia en 1940, 170.000 eran extranjeros). En un ensayo sobre esta cuestión (la de los exiliados judíos en la Ciudad Luz) uno de ellos comentaba que en cinco años no había logrado que ningún parisiense (gentil) lo invitara a cenar a su casa.

Pero eso era una cosa y otra exponencialmente muy distinta la inhumana y trágica decisión de acabar con todos los judíos de Francia. En términos de logística, dicha decisión se había tomado el 20 de enero de 1942, en una villa a orillas del lago Wansee, en Alemania. Ese todavía bucólico lago es una zona de esparcimiento para los berlineses de hoy. En medio de una espesa arboleda, se llega a la villa de mediocre arquitectura. Entre sus paredes se decidió la Solución final al problema judío (Endlösung der Judenfrage, en alemán), con sus respectivos protocolos para llevarla milimétricamente a cabo. La unidad alemana responsable de la iniciativa recayó en la sección IVB4 de la Gestapo, dirigida a la sazón por Adolf Eichmann, cuyos delegados de las SS Theodor Danneck, Heinz Rothke y Alois Brunner (probablemente muerto en Damasco en los años noventa), dieron la orden a la policía francesa, con el beneplácito del Gobierno de Vichy, para iniciar la operación llamada Viento Primaveral, que haría que 12.884 judíos fueran arrestados (4.051 niños; 5.802 mujeres; y 3.031 varones, ciudadanos franceses que habían sido condecorados, algunos de ellos, en la I Guerra Mundial).

Los gendarmes y policías franceses (9.000) se afanaron en perfeccionar la redada hasta su máxima crueldad. Cien prisioneros se suicidaron.

Un amigo holandés me contó un día que había propuesto a un colega extranjero un paseo por Ámsterdam. Bordeando los canales, llegaron casi sin pretenderlo (aunque eso no podría asegurarlo, acotó freudianamente mi amigo) a la casa de Ana Frank. A la puerta del legendario domicilio, se agolpaba una larga cola de visitantes. Ante la disyuntiva de hacer la cola o seguir caminando, el colega catedrático le contestó a mi amigo que preferiría proseguir la ruta, entre otros motivos, se disculpó, porque estaba un poco cansado del tema “judío”. “Lo dijo con tanta educación y flema que llegué casi a convencerme de que el tema judío podía realmente llegar a cansar”, comentó mi amigo. “Es evidente que mi colega no era antisemita. Pero practicaba esa distancia, indiferencia y desapego, que mucho me cuesta no interpretar como, sin nunca serlo, a la connivencia con el antisemitismo”, reflexionó dolido.

Por mi amigo holandés, que no es judío, supe de la existencia del libro de Modiano. En el verano del 42, en París, desapareció la adolescente judía Dora Bruder. El escritor francés encontró, años después en un diario de la época, una nota donde sus padres rogaban a quien supiera algo de su hija que se pusieran en contacto con ellos. El mismo 16 de julio es arrestada Irène Némirovsky y conducida al siniestro velódromo (derruido en 1957). Quién sabe si Dora e Irène se conocieron. De Dora Bruder, Modiano no pudo averiguar nunca su último paradero. Irène Némirovsky murió gaseada el 17 de agosto del mismo verano.

¿Importó a alguien aquellas redadas antisemitas? No importó a casi nadie, salvo, todo hay que decirlo, a algunos parisienses de bien que se jugaron la vida protegiendo a sus conciudadanos judíos. Pero en general, todo el mundo siguió en lo suyo. Se denunció a cambio de prebendas. Escritores de la talla literaria de Céline ya se sorprendían en 1941 de que los soldados alemanes no mataran a tiros por las calles a los judíos.

Si uno lee La agonía de Francia, de ese gran periodista que fue el andaluz Manuel Chaves Nogales, verá que en sus páginas se describen con sorprendente lucidez, en el momento exacto de los hechos observados, la escasez moral de la mayoría de parisienses, y sobre todo la falta de entereza de su burguesía, clase solo atormentada por el temor a que no la dejaran acudir a sus habituales cabarets para bailar la danza de moda en esos días, como si nada luctuoso se cerniera sobre su ciudad. Sobre su país. Y sobre Europa.

El 22 de julio, es decir seis días después de la detención de Némirovsky, un oficial de la Wehrhmacht visita el estudio de Pablo Picasso. Toman café y hablan sobre todo de los paisajes en En los acantilados de mármol, novela del oficial. El oficial posee una vasta cultura y acusa cierta incomodidad cuando una tarde ve a tres chicas judías con la estrella de David cosida en sus estivales mangas, aunque esa imagen no le dice nada, ni le impele a abandonar su unidad ni le presagia la inminente hecatombe. Una lacerante casualidad hace que el mismo día que muere asesinada Némirovsky en Polonia, el mismo oficial de la Werhrmacht tome el té (cada infusión según las circunstancias) con la esposa del escritor y antisemita confeso Paul Morand.

El verano del 42 las terrazas de los cafés parisienses estaban llenas de gente satisfecha con su vida. Los enamorados no judíos podían, bajo los cielos encendidos de París, hacerse promesas de amor eterno. Los artistas, proseguir su sublime obra. Se seguían también haciendo negocios, algunos muy espirituales, como el que planeó el editor Gaston Gallimard: pujar el 20 de enero del mismo año por la adquisición de la editorial Calmann-Lévy, cuyos anteriores propietarios eran judíos.

En 1995, Chirac reconoció la responsabilidad francesa. Hace unos meses se preestrenó en París el film La rafle, del director galo de origen catalán Roselyn Bosch, donde se narran estos dantescos hechos.

Que Israel esté gobernado actualmente por la derecha más recalcitrante, con el soporte del ala más intolerante y fundamentalista de sus religiosos, no obliga a ignorar aquel verano del 42. Tampoco en su nombre, a justificar cualquier tipo de avasallamiento, llámese asentamientos o ataques preventivos. Pero ese ignominioso verano existió. Y solo para los judíos.

Los prejuicios, los lugares comunes, las reservas y las desconfianzas son invenciones humanas. La Historia, la verdadera, con mayúscula, anda por otro lado. Si usted pasea por el distrito cuarto de París, por la ribera derecha del Sena, frente a las hermosas fachadas, a los imponentes portones de la isla San Luis, encuentra una callejuela y una flecha que indica la cercanía del Museo de la Shoá. No tengo tiempo de entrar al Museo, que exige, me dicen, para la visita, un buen estado de equilibrio nervioso, pero paso y doblo a la izquierda por la ahora llamada Alameda de los Justos. Estamos en el centro del llamado Marais, del Pantano, terrenos ganados para la ciudad en el siglo XVII, durante la regencia y después el reino de Luis XIII, el segundo de la dinastía francesa de los Borbones. No hay álamos en esta alameda, pero en el largo muro de piedra del lado del sur hay una lista nutrida de nombres. Son los justos, los que no pertenecían al judaísmo, pero por sentido de justicia, por sentimientos de generosidad, de solidaridad humana, ayudaron a salvar a judíos, muchas veces con riesgo de sus propias vidas, durante los años de la ocupación nazi. El caso más conocido, a través del cine, es el de Schindler y su lista.

Pero entre los nombres anotados en este muro, bajo un año bastante reciente, figura una María Errázuriz, con el apellido mal escrito (Errazzuriz), y sigue la palabra París. Uno piensa de inmediato en Madame Errázuriz, doña Eugenia Huici, que fue heroína en materias de arte, amiga y mecenas de Picasso, conocida de Erik Satie, de los directores de los Ballets Rusos, de muchos otros, pero la época no coincide. Eugenia Huici, mujer, según entiendo, del pintor José Tomás Errázuriz, amante, según las malas lenguas, de Pablo Picasso, era de una generación anterior. Y si uno averigua un poco más, y tiene personas amigas con quienes informarse, llega a la conclusión de que la mujer anotada en el muro es María Edwards Mac Clure, casada en primeras nupcias con un señor Errázuriz y, por lo tanto, conocida en Francia por el nombre de su marido.

¿Qué méritos tiene María Edwards para estar inscrita en la lista de los justos y con el nombre de la ciudad al lado del suyo? Es una historia que en Chile se conoce muy poco, que solo ahora, con lentitud, con nuestros acostumbrados recelos y prejuicios, se empieza a desempolvar. Como ya lo he contado, cuando conocí a Neruda en su casa de Los Guindos, en épocas ya remotas, lo primero que me dijo fue lo siguiente: ser escritor en Chile y llamarse Edwards no es nada de fácil. Y ser héroe de la Resistencia, de cualquier resistencia, me digo ahora, tampoco lo es. Porque María, mujer mundana, muy conocida por los embajadores de entonces, por el señor Alemparte, por Gabriel González Videla, frecuentaba también a los sectores más encopetados de la sociedad francesa y se había hecho amiga, al parecer, de una baronesa de Rothschild. Además, detalle no desdeñable, tenía una relación amistosa con Colette, la novelista, como lo comprobé al encontrar una novela de la francesa cariñosamente dedicada a la chilena en una biblioteca privada del Valle Central de Chile. Es decir, he seguido una pista y he anudado cabos sueltos, con curiosidad, con relativa tenacidad, pero he recibido en estos días una ayuda inesperada de la que hablaré en otra parte, a lo mejor en mis futuras memorias.

La probable amistad con la baronesa llevó a nuestro personaje a trabajar en un hospital relacionado con esa familia en los comienzos de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, en los primeros tiempos de la ocupación nazi de París. Puede haber otra explicación de la llegada de María Edwards a ese hospital, pero la frecuentación del París mundano y de la familia Rothschild me parece la más verosímil. Se conocen pocos detalles de su trabajo, pero consta que tenía una oficina dentro del recinto hospitalario y que nunca cobró su sueldo.

El hospital todavía existe y se encuentra al lado de la actual Fundación Rothschild. Y se sabe, además, lo siguiente: que llegaban a ese lugar muchas mujeres judías que luego eran detenidas y enviadas a los campos de exterminio por la Gestapo, y que ellas entregaban a sus hijos a la primera persona que encontraban para que los escondiera y tratara de salvarlos.

María Edwards, que usaba una gruesa capa de enfermera, empezó a recoger niños judíos con disimulo, a sedarlos y a sacarlos del hospital escondidos debajo de su capa. Afuera se los entregaba a un señor, también judío, que se ocupaba de darlos en adopción a familias francesas. No se conocen todos los detalles, pero se calcula que María salvó a más de 60 niños.

Un buen día, el señor que se hacía cargos de ellos, profesional de buena situación económica, no estaba en el lugar de encuentro. Había sido sorprendido por la Gestapo, había escapado por los techos de los alrededores de su casa y había sido ametrallado. Muy poco después, María misma fue detenida y torturada por los esbirros nazis, pero no denunció la red de protección de los niños que la había ayudado en el interior mismo del hospital y afuera. Se supone que la Embajada chilena intervino a favor suyo, y que el hecho de que Chile no hubiera roto relaciones todavía con los países del Eje y no hubiera entrado a la guerra en el campo aliado ayudó a salvarla.

Hacia el final de la guerra, María regresó a Chile. Más tarde volvió a su amado París y se casó, o ya se había casado antes, no sabemos esto a ciencia cierta, con Jacques Feydeau, hijo del celebrado y prolífico dramaturgo Georges Feydeau.

A mediados de los años cincuenta veíamos en Chile la película Ocúpate de Amelia (Ocupe-toi d’Amélie), donde actuaban Jean-Louis Barrault y Danielle Darrieux, nos reíamos a carcajadas, porque era una de las películas más divertidas de aquella época, y no se nos pasaba por la cabeza que pudiera tener algún tipo de relación con nosotros, con nuestro mundillo chileno.

Nos faltan muchos datos sobre María Edwards, heroína desconocida, pero podemos asegurar, por lo menos, que las investigaciones sobre el tema van por buen camino. Algunos de los niños salvados por ella, que ahora son adultos mayores, comenzaron hace algún tiempo a escribir cartas a Chile, a las embajadas, a los posibles parientes, y han dado con pistas certeras. El Estado de Israel declaró en forma solemne, hace pocos años, que era una de las justas, y la hizo inscribir en el muro recordatorio. El año de las inscripciones corresponde al de este reconocimiento oficial. El lugar, París, es el del sitio donde los hechos ocurrieron. En cuanto al nombre, habría que corregir la ortografía y completarlo. Y consagrar de esta manera, aunque muy tarde, a la heroína chilena desconocida.

While channel surfing the other night, I came across a news report showing a Japanese woman, a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing in August 1945, saying she would never go to America. To this day, even though her country has become the world’s second richest nation with U.S. assistance, she hates the Americans.

But while many Japanese understandably have bitter memories of World War II, many of us throughout Asia, whose countries the Japanese occupied during that war, have our own searing memories.

When the Japanese call for an American apology for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it revives in me the anguish of the war — the anguish I experienced as a young man, the anguish I want to forget, but cannot. War is terrible, vengeance does nothing, but when the past is taken out of context it doesn’t do anyone any good.

I was 17, a student in Manila, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 8, 1941. That same day, the airfield in Manila and other military installations in the Philippines were also bombed. Schools were immediately closed and I returned to my hometown, Rosales, about 30 miles from Lingayen, where, within the same month, the Japanese landed. Soon after they came to Rosales.

In the first month of occupation, the Japanese behaved correctly — you could say they were even cordial. Then, two months into the occupation, the sentries started slapping people for no apparent reason. Soon after, stories about the Death March following the U.S. surrender of Bataan drifted to us.

In July 1942, I went to the prison camp at Capas to look for a cousin, Raymundo Alberto, who had not returned from Bataan. All of the horror stories we had heard were confirmed on that trip — I saw hundreds of Filipino prisoners sick and dying. My cousin was not there.

During the occupation, food, medicine, clothing, and other basic necessities like soap and matches, became very scarce. I sometimes went to Manila to bring rice to my relatives there.

On one such trip I was stopped in Moncada, in Tarlac Province. My half sack of rice was confiscated by the Japanese and I was beaten up.

I was in Manila during the first American air raid in September 1944. By that November, people in the city were starving; some were forced to eat rats.

My mother, a cousin and I returned to Rosales — we walked all the way, passing empty towns. In the daytime, the skies were full of American planes flying so low we could see the pilots. At night, the Japanese marched — we could hear them as we camped in the abandoned houses along the highway.

We reached Rosales after a week and shortly after, the Americans landed in Lingayen. I immediately joined the U.S. Army as a civilian medical technician.

Since our unit was with the combat engineers, we were often the first to reach liberated towns and villages. We would be met by grateful and starving Filipinos as we offered gifts of fresh eggs and live chickens.

Manila was liberated in March 1945 and I received permission to visit the city to see relatives. There had been heavy fighting — the city was devastated. It seems as if it were only yesterday that I beheld the ruins and smelled the carrion in Ermita-Malate, where the Japanese massacred thousands. It has been said that Manila, next to Warsaw, was the most devastated city in World War II. I found my relatives; luckily they were unharmed.

Being in the U.S. Army, I thought I would take part in the coming invasion of Japan — and I relished the thought. But that August, when atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war came to an end. There was much rejoicing all over the Philippines and, even more so, among the GI’s.

When I first visited Japan in the early 1950s, the country was still poor. Streetcars still rumbled in the streets of Tokyo, and there were no skyscrapers.

I was uneasy meeting with the Japanese and thought I would never be able to have a social relationship with them. Since then, however, I have made Japanese friends, including the late novelist Hirabayashi Taiko, who was imprisoned with her husband by the wartime government, for their opposition to the war. I also made friends with my translator Matsuyo Yamamoto, the late Yoshiko Wakayama of the Toyota Foundation, the art gallery owners Reiko and Akira Kanda, and so many others.

Some 20 years ago, my wife and I were in Kawazaki near Tokyo for a writers’ conference. In the first plenary session, a delegate from Calcutta started excoriating the U.S. for incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was incensed, I stood from the floor and shouted, “Mr. Singh, your country was never occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army!”

That weekend, the entire foreign delegation was invited to Kyoto; only my wife and I were excluded from the trip.

Five years ago, I visited the Yasukuni shrine honoring Japan’s war dead, including some who were war criminals. My wife and I drifted into the shrine’s museum and came across exhibits that were blatant propaganda.

Outside, six Japanese war veterans, wearing their old uniforms, stood together. As the facility closed for the day, they grouped in formation, and the sound of their military commands hurtled me back to the past.

Deep within me, I know I have forgiven the Japanese for what they did to my country. I pray, too, that the world is one day rid of atomic weapons and that my grandchildren will never know the bone-deep pain, fear, hunger and sorrow engendered by war.

El viernes 18 de junio, Nicolas Sarkozy y David Cameron se reunieron en Londres con veteranos franceses y británicos con el fin de conmemorar el 70º aniversario del histórico llamamiento por radio de Charles de Gaulle a los franceses para que siguieran luchando contra Hitler. El 18 de junio de 1940, el mismo día en el que De Gaulle transmitió su mensaje desde Londres a través de la BBC, Winston Churchill pronunció en la Cámara de los Comunes su famoso discurso de “la hora más gloriosa”, con la declaración de que la Batalla de Francia había terminado y la Batalla de Inglaterra estaba a punto de comenzar.

Verano de 1940. Churchill y De Gaulle. Ese es el momento, esos son los hombres que han servido de inspiración a Gran Bretaña y Francia desde entonces. Toda la política exterior británica desde 1940 consiste en apostillas a Churchill; toda la política exterior francesa, en apostillas a De Gaulle. Los mitos del churchillismo y el gaullismo, iniciados por aquellos dos oradores, escritores y hombres de Estado, no dejan de crecer, como robles imponentes. Los mitos de todos los demás políticos británicos y franceses de la posguerra, incluso el de Margaret Thatcher, son meros arbolillos ensombrecidos por ellos.

La pregunta es: ¿qué debemos pensar de ese legado? ¿Qué significa hoy ser churchilliano o gaullista? ¿No ha llegado el momento de que el Reino Unido supere el churchillismo y Francia el gaullismo? ¿Y en qué dirección? ¿Juntos, o separados?

En Londres, ante el cuartel general de guerra de De Gaulle en el número 4 de Carlton Gardens y en una gran concentración en el Royal Hospital de Chelsea, este 18 de junio se vivió como la alegre celebración de una camaradería en tiempo de guerra. No se mencionó un dato que registra Jonathan Fenby en su nueva biografía The General: que el Gobierno británico, al principio, pensó que la emisión del mensaje de De Gaulle era “indeseable”. La prohibición la tuvo que revocar el propio Churchill, que no había asistido a la reunión porque estaba preparando su discurso. Tampoco se mencionó más que de pasada la trágica decisión británica de hundir la flota francesa en Mers-el-Kébir pocas semanas después, para impedir que cayera en manos alemanas. Y también se pasó a toda prisa por las volcánicas disputas entre Churchill y De Gaulle, que culminaron cuando, según se dice, Churchill afirmó que la cruz más pesada de las que que tenía que soportar durante la guerra era la Cruz de Lorena (el símbolo de la Francia Libre de De Gaulle).

Cosas olvidadas o mencionadas de pasada; ¡y con razón! Porque lo que importa de aquellos años es la gran lucha común. Por feroces que fueran las discusiones entre los dos líderes -que a veces adquirían un tono cómico, por el francés macarrónico de Churchill (“Si vous m’obstaclerez, je vous liquiderai!” [Si me obstaculiza, ¡lo liquido!], advirtió en una ocasión al general)-, el primer ministro británico sabía que, si hubiera estado en el lugar de De Gaulle, habría actuado exactamente igual que él.

En cualquier caso, también ellos fueron, en su día, maestros del arte de barrer los hechos inconvenientes bajo una alfombra bordada de mitos inspiradores. El mito de Churchill era la sempiterna camaradería de los pueblos de habla inglesa; el de De Gaulle, la Francia unida, verdadera, eternamente resistente, ante la que la realidad colaboracionista de Vichy y la Francia ocupada no era más que una aberración. Ambos sabían a la perfección lo que estaban haciendo al crear esos mitos. “Levanté el cadáver de Francia con mis brazos e hice pensar al mundo que estaba viva”, contaba André Malraux que dijo el general al final de su vida.

En un nuevo y sutil libro titulado Le mythe gaullien, el historiador de Oxford Sudhir Hazareesingh utiliza algunas de las numerosas cartas que enviaban al general ciudadanos corrientes para demostrar hasta qué punto penetraron su ejemplo y su mito en la psique popular. Exactamente lo mismo podría decirse de Churchill y el churchillismo. Los dos estadistas y bardos nos contaron su versión de quiénes éramos los británicos y los franceses, y, como les creímos, nos convertimos, en cierta medida, en los pueblos que ellos habían inventado.

Lo malo es que nuestros mitos nacionales nos llevaron en distintas direcciones. Las lecciones extraídas por Churchill y De Gaulle del trauma de 1940 y lo que siguió, totalmente opuestas, han inspirado la política exterior de nuestros respectivos países hasta hoy. En pocas palabras, Churchill llegó a la conclusión de que Gran Bretaña no podía seguir dependiendo de Francia y debía garantizarse la supervivencia, la seguridad y, en la medida de lo posible, la prolongación de su esplendor, a través de una relación especial con Estados Unidos. De Gaulle llegó a la conclusión de que era preciso restaurar la grandeza de Francia a base de independizarse de Estados Unidos y Gran Bretaña y encontrar otros socios en el continente europeo.

Poco antes del desembarco del Día D, Churchill dijo a De Gaulle que cada vez que Gran Bretaña tuviera que “decidir entre Europa y el mar abierto, siempre escogeremos el mar. Cada vez que tenga que decidir entre usted y Roosevelt, siempre escogeré a Roosevelt”. De Gaulle nunca lo olvidó, e incluyó la preferencia crónica de los británicos por su relación transatlántica entre las razones para decir “non” cuando el Reino Unido pidió la incorporación a lo que entonces se llamaba la Comunidad Económica Europea. De Gaulle prefirió construir una relación especial de Francia con Alemania.

Esta conducta ha tenido excepciones, por ejemplo con Edward Heath y Georges Pompidou, o en los primeros años de Tony Blair. Pero a la hora de la verdad, en Irak, Londres y París se aferraron al estereotipo. Blair acusó de traición a Francia para entrar en Irak con Estados Unidos. Jacques Chirac despotricó contra “los anglosajones”. En la crisis de Irak, Blair y Chirac se comportaron como unas caricaturas espantosas de Churchill y De Gaulle. Fue la reducción del churchillismo y el gaullismo al absurdo.

Hay que reconocer que Sarkozy ha superado con decisión la típica posición gaullista en relación con Estados Unidos. La cuestión ahora es si Cameron puede vencer la posición criptochurchilliana y euroescéptica de alinearse siempre con Estados Unidos en vez de con la UE. Y si, juntos, pueden desarrollar lo que más necesitamos, una nueva estrategia churchillo-gaullista o gaullo-churchilliana, que consistiría en construir una Unión Europea que hable con una voz más fuerte y unida en el mundo y sea un socio estratégico -no un rival celoso- de Estados Unidos. Alemania, con su actitud deprimida y defensiva actual, no va a tomar la iniciativa. Solo las dos antiguas potencias mundiales europeas, que poseen una tradición de pensar y actuar en una dimensión mundial, pueden dar el impulso necesario, aunque, por supuesto, no pueden obtener resultados por sí solas.

Dicen que los Gobiernos británico y francés están buscando áreas de cooperación estratégica, sobre todo en política de defensa y seguridad. Un buen comienzo sería que -70 años después de que el Gobierno británico propusiera una unión total entre los dos países-, por lo menos, nos digamos mutuamente dónde están nuestros submarinos nucleares, para que no se choquen unos con otros por accidente, como ocurrió el año pasado. También es crucial que la cooperación franco-británica en defensa se entienda como una contribución a una labor europea más general (incluida la adquisición de material de defensa) y no, como parece querer el ministro de Defensa británico, Liam Fox, como una alternativa a ella.

Pero nuestra época, llena de peligros, exige una audacia y una capacidad de visión muy superiores a todo lo que es objeto de discusiones en estos momentos entre Londres y París. En un mundo de retos sin precedentes y potencias emergentes no occidentales como China, y con la crisis existencial de la eurozona, Europa se enfrenta a una especie de 1940 civil. Lo que hay que preguntar sobre Churchill y De Gaulle no es qué hicieron entonces, sino ¿qué harían ahora?

Five years ago, Russia Profile, the English-language, government-funded but editorially independent publication I run, came under attack from an overzealous government official for trying to analyze Victory Day — the sacred Russian holiday that marks the end of World War II in Europe — from several different standpoints.

One of our publication’s presumed sins was that, along with traditional fare such as interviews with veterans, we commissioned a Polish writer to do an article on the resentment in much of Central and Eastern Europe over the fact that liberation from Nazi occupation was followed by Soviet domination. We also analyzed how over-reliance on our World War II victory was being used as the basis for forging a modern Russian identity.

But the Kremlin’s effort to cement Russia’s status as world power by clinging as much a possible to the post-1945 era was short-sighted. It is clear today that the 60th anniversary of the World War II victory in 2005 was the peak of ideological efforts to rehabilitate Soviet symbols and consolidate the population of the Russian Federation — that nation in the making — on the basis of the Soviet, essentially Stalinist, concept of the Great Patriotic War.

Back then, our government tried to impose this perception on the rest of the world. We got a negative reaction, mainly from Poland, but also from people in the Baltic states, as well as in Ukraine. We remember well all the talk about those who refused to come to the parade in Moscow, as well as other similar developments, like the scandal in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, over efforts to move the monument to the Soviet soldier away from the city center.

Several months ago, as the build-up for the 65th anniversary began, I worried that the neo-Stalinist trend would lead to more exercises in chest-banging that would once again alienate our neighbors and reinforce the Soviet-like image of modern Russia. I was afraid it would be even worse than it was five years ago.

But I was wrong. In fact, things turned out much better than they did five years ago. It would be a simplification to say that it is all due to President Dmitri Medvedev, as opposed to his predecessor, the current prime minister, Vladimir Putin.

The remarkable Russian-Polish reconciliation, which began with the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre in early April, reportedly originated from Mr. Putin’s office. It was magnified by the crash of the Polish presidential plane in Smolensk and the outpouring of popular sympathy, which did much to lift the centuries-long animosity between the two nations, something no inter-government commissions could have ever achieved.

Yet Mr. Medvedev as clearly left a personal, softer mark on the ceremonies last Sunday. Having foreign military units from the United States, Britain, France, Poland and former Soviet nations march in the Red Square parade — that bulwark of selfish nationalism framed in a distinctly Soviet setting — was a definite breakthrough. There were quite a few unhappy Communists, but they had to swallow their complaints.

There was not a single aggressive statement in the president’s speech at the parade — a must in the previous years, always along the lines that some unnamed power (presumably the United States) was nurturing plans to achieve global hegemony. Instead, Mr. Medvedev emphasized that the victory was achieved together with the other Allies — although, of course, the Soviet Union played a decisive role. And it was the small details — like Beethoven’s 9th Symphony played by the international military band, or Mr. Putin shown on television chatting with Chancellor Angela Merkel, presumably in German — that created a dignified framework for this traditional show of military might. It made me feel proud of my country and not ashamed of its Soviet flavor.

Of course, the Great Patriotic War is a complicated matter. In the face of an existential threat, the historical Russia somehow re-emerged in the Soviet Union during the war — and then was eclipsed again. At the same time, there were quite a few people who saw World War II as a continuation of the Russian Civil War, who saw the Nazis as a lesser evil and collaborated with them, not because the collaborators were traitors, but because that was how they saw their patriotic duty.

But there were others, including some far from the U.S.S.R., who saw the war from the outset as a patriotic one. On the day Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, my great-grand uncle, Lt. Gen. Pyotr Makhroff, one of the highest-ranking officers of the anti-Bolshevik White Army, long an émigré in France, formally requested to be enrolled in the Red Army. For that, the Vichy Regime had him incarcerated in a prison camp in Algeria.

For many Russians, commemorating our nation’s greatest national sacrifice is a question of measure, detail and interpretation. Although it is impossible in our memories and commemorations of World War II to fully escape Soviet symbolism, Russia dealt pretty well with this latest Victory Day anniversary. It has been an important, coming-of-age experience for our old nation, and our new one.

The tragic death of Polish President Lech Kaczynski, together with dozens of military commanders, politicians and top advisers, has fixed the spotlight on the Katyn massacre of 70 years ago and the context in which it occurred. This will have a sobering effect on Polish-Russian reconciliation unless all the facts about World War II are finally acknowledged by leaders of the Russian Federation – the legal inheritor of the Soviet Union.

While Russian leaders celebrate the 65th anniversary of World War II Victory Day in Moscow on May 9, awkward questions will be asked about the infamous Soviet-Nazi alliance that made World War II possible. In recent years, the Kremlin, in claiming Russia’s “great power” continuity, has sought to downplay or disguise the origins of the war. Indeed, official statements and history books continue to depict the Soviet Union as a victim and victor rather than as a co-conspirator with Hitler when it invaded Poland in September 1939, murdered tens of thousands of Polish citizens and deported more than a million into Siberian exile.

The air crash near Katyn will refocus Polish-Russian relations and give new urgency to recent moves by both capitals toward reconciliation. Indeed, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had been lauded for inviting Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to a commemoration ceremony in Katyn before the fatal air crash, thereby acknowledging its importance for the Polish nation.

However, Mr. Putin’s objective may not have been so clear-cut. Plainly, the Kremlin can no longer brazenly deny that the Katyn murders were perpetrated by the Soviet security services. Instead, it is seeking to contextualize them and thereby minimize their significance. Russia has avoided issuing a formal state apology to Poland; it depicts Katyn as one of several atrocities by the faceless “totalitarian regime” and refuses to call the Katyn massacres a war crime.

The reasoning is logical. If Katyn were defined as a war crime, one would need to ascertain who was at war with whom. Why did more than 20,000 Polish officers and more than a million Polish citizens find themselves in the Soviet Union in September 1939, prevented from defending Poland from the Nazi invasion? Russia’s current leaders want to avoid discussion about the Soviet invasion of Poland, the Hitler-Stalin pact and the close collaboration between the two dictators before and during World War II aimed at carving up Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. The Soviets only became anti-Nazi when Hitler decided he no longer needed Moscow as an ally.

Instead of acknowledging facts about the origins of World War II, the Kremlin is engaged in a massive deception, seeking to convince the world that Russia was the key to victory in Europe. It fails to point out that under Josef Stalin, the Soviet Union also was the key to defeat for many Europeans. The Soviet Union enabled Hitler to launch the blitzkrieg against Poland; provided vital economic, energy and military supplies to Berlin, enabling Hitler to launch the conquest of Western Europe; and assisted in creating the conditions for the Nazi Holocaust while conducting its own mass murdersand deportations from subject nations.

It is not surprising that Mr. Putin wanted to push Katyn to the sidelines before the May 9 anniversary and calculated that Polish leaders would reciprocate for his minimal acknowledgement of Katyn by attending the celebrations and thus giving credence to Moscow’s skewered version of history. The Katyn air crash may undermine this strategy, as the mass murders of 70 years ago have become a live subject for public debate amidst calls for closer scholarly scrutiny.

Ironically, the second Katyn tragedy provides an opportunity to initiate a genuine Russian-Polish reconciliation if Russia’s leaders undertake several crucial steps. First, they will need to acknowledge publicly that the Katyn murders were a war crime perpetrated against Poland and an attempt to decapitate the leadership of a country that the Stalin regime wanted to occupy and annex, which it did after the war.

Second, all the archives sealed in Russia pertaining to the atrocity will need to be opened to historians in order to gain all pertinent facts on the precise identity of the perpetrators and how the crime was covered up for more than 50 years.

Third, the Russian authorities must begin to tell the full truth about Stalin and the Soviet role during World War II as a co-conspirator with Hitler as well as one of Hitler’s eventual victims. Without such courageous measures, the Warsaw-Moscow thaw will simply remain a layer of loose earth over the permafrost.

Sixty-five years ago this week, the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, while the Americans were approaching Dachau. For a survivor of these two infernos to still be alive and well, with a new family that has resurrected for me the one I had lost, seems almost unreal. When I entered Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele’s gruesome universe at the age of 13, I measured my life expectancy in days, weeks at the most.

In the early winter of 1944, World War II was coming to an end. But we in the camps knew nothing. We wondered: What is happening in the world outside? Where is God? Where is the pope? Does anyone out there know what is happening here to us? Does anyone even care?

Russia was devastated. Britain had its back against the wall. And America? It was so far away, so divided. How could it be expected to save civilization from the seemingly invincible forces of darkness?

It took a long time for the news of the American-led invasion of Normandy to slip into Auschwitz. There were also rumors that the Red Army was advancing quickly on the eastern front. With the ground shrinking under their feet, the Nazis were becoming palpably nervous. The gas chambers spewed fire and smoke as never before.

One gray, frosty morning, our guards ordered those of us still capable of slave labor to line up and marched us out of the camp. We were to be shunted westward, from Poland into Germany. I was beside myself with excitement — and dread. Salvation somehow seemed closer — yet we also knew that we could be killed at any moment. The goal was to hang on a little longer. I was almost 16 now, and I wanted to live.

We marched from camp to camp, day and night, until we and our torturers began to hear distant explosions that sounded like artillery fire. One afternoon we were strafed by a squadron of Allied fighter planes that mistook our column for Wehrmacht troops. As the Germans hit the dirt, their machine guns blazing in all directions, someone near me yelled, “Run for it!” I kicked off my wooden clogs and sprinted into the forest. There I hid, hungry and cold, for weeks, until I was discovered by a group of American soldiers. The boys who brought me life were not much older than I. They fed me, clothed me, made me a mascot of their regiment and gave me my first real taste of freedom.

Today, the last living survivors of the Holocaust are disappearing one by one. Soon, history will speak about Auschwitz with the impersonal voice of researchers and novelists at best, and at worst in the malevolent register of revisionists and falsifiers who call the Nazi Final Solution a myth. This process has already begun.

And it is why those of us who survived have a duty to transmit to humankind the memory of what we endured in body and soul, to tell our children that the fanaticism and violence that nearly destroyed our universe have the power to enflame theirs, too. The fury of the Haitian earthquake, which has taken more than 200,000 lives, teaches us how cruel nature can be to man. The Holocaust, which destroyed a people, teaches us that nature, even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man when he loses his moral compass and his reason.

After so much death, a groundswell of compassion and solidarity for victims — all victims, whether from natural disasters, racial hatred, religious intolerance or terrorism — occasionally manifests itself, as it has in recent days.

These actions stand in contrast to those moments when we have failed to act; they remind us, on this dark anniversary, of how often we remain divided and confused, how in the face of horror we hesitate, vacillate, like sleepwalkers at the edge of the abyss. Of course, they remind us, too, that we have managed to stave off the irrevocable; that our chances for living in harmony are, thankfully, still intact

World leaders, Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans gathered at Auschwitz on Wednesday to mark the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp. Poland has long shouldered responsibility for preserving this tragic site, which has become a virtual synonym for the Holocaust. Its gas chambers and crematoria, rail platforms and endless rows of wooden barracks were evidence of the systematic and mechanized murder of European Jews that the Nazis had perfected. The ashes of over a million victims are in its soil.

But the situation was different for over a million victims in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In countless towns and villages, Jews were rounded up by Nazis and their local collaborators, and then shot one by one. Frequently, they were forced to dig their own graves — sometimes at the edge of town, sometimes by a Jewish cemetery, sometimes in a nearby forest.

Patrick Desbois, a French cleric who has led teams searching for these graves, has described these mass killings as a “Holocaust by bullets.” Elderly eyewitnesses who will not share their secrets with Jewish researchers have been willing to tell in excruciating detail what they saw to this visiting Frenchman in a clerical collar. Over the past few years Desbois’ teams have researched and identified hundreds of mass graves in Ukraine and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. Most are unmarked, unkempt and neglected. They have been ravaged by nature and, worse, by scavengers who think they will find something of value by digging up these human remains.

Entire Jewish communities were destroyed in the Holocaust. No Jews remain today even to care for the overgrown cemeteries, let alone the mass graves. Local governments, already overburdened, have little interest in taking on the responsibility. Surviving relatives in the United States or Israel may contribute money to erect a monument or memorial marker. But more often than drawing mourners, that thoughtful gesture draws grave robbers.

The German government seems poised to play a lead role in resolving this issue. A decade ago several members of the German Bundestag researched the fate of Jewish residents of their districts. That investigation led the legislators to Latvia, where these victims were deported to provide slave labor, and ended on the outskirts of Riga, the capital city, where the Jews were buried in Bikernieki Forest with other Nazi victims.

The parliamentarians turned to the German War Graves Commission, an agency supported by private and public funds and devoted to identifying and caring for the graves of German soldiers abroad. They argued successfully that German Jews buried in a mass grave also were “German war victims” and deserved similar attention. The mass graves of Bikernieki Forest were sealed and protected, and a memorial was erected.

On Jan. 20, the president of the German War Graves Commission joined Jewish leaders and foreign diplomats in Berlin to call for similarly protecting and memorializing the hundreds of mass graves so far identified. He offered the commission’s support and its willingness to undertake the work if German funds are allocated. The European Shoah Legacy Institute, established by the 46 countries attending the Prague Holocaust-Era Assets Conference last summer, has agreed to make this one of its first initiatives.

In the past 15 years, since Polish President Lech Walesa first presided over international ceremonies marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, many countries have taken on responsibility for preserving Holocaust-era memories and related issues. Germany, France and Austria have provided compensation to Holocaust victims and their heirs. Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and other Eastern European countries established their own educational programs and commemorative events.

Today, even a child survivor of Auschwitz is well into retirement, and the day when no eyewitnesses will be left is coming soon. As we remember the Holocaust and all its victims, let us recommit to collecting their scattered bones and protecting their mass graves.

Sixty-five years later, the least we can do is provide a proper burial.

En Garbo, el espía, el documental recientemente estrenado de Edmon Roch sobre Joan Pujol, alias Garbo, un burgués catalán que acabó reclutado por los servicios secretos británicos como doble agente y cuya tarea fue decisiva a la hora de intoxicar a la inteligencia nazi con falsa información sobre el desembarco de Normandía, se cita, muy de pasada, a quien fue el oficial del caso en el seno del MI5: Tomás Harris (1908-1964). Quizá la peripecia de Pujol sea demasiado compleja (hay todavía páginas de sombra en su biografía, muchos personajes difuminados en el retrato de su vida) como para sintetizarla en tan sólo 90 minutos. El resultado constituye sin duda un esfuerzo admirable y una estimulante aportación al género y a la difusión de uno de los episodios más espectaculares de la historia del espionaje, pero es una lástima que la figura de Harris, indisociable de la de Pujol, no haya tenido el protagonismo que merece.

Es verdad, por otra parte, que la vida del case officer de Garbo daría, por su insólita versatilidad, para otro documental monográfico. Inglés de madre española, Tommy Harris fue pintor, galerista, anticuario, coleccionista compulsivo, millonario, erudito especializado en arte español -su nombre figura en el Prado, entre los principales donantes del museo-, espía y legendario anfitrión. A los 14 años empezó a estudiar pintura y escultura en la Slade School of Art de Londres, donde coincidió con Sir William Coldstream y Claude Rogers y estudió bajo la tutela del profesor Henry Tonks. Tras una estancia en Roma dedicado a la escultura, siguió en Londres los pasos de su padre como galerista y comerciante de antigüedades. Desde los años treinta hasta finales de los cuarenta, Harris dirigió la Spanish Art Gallery, una de las galerías más prestigiosas de Inglaterra, escaparate de la mejor pintura clásica, no tan sólo española, sino también italiana y flamenca. Roger Fry, por ejemplo, descubrió entusiasmado la pintura de El Greco en esas salas. Y el formidable retrato de Góngora pintado por Velázquez, por citar tan sólo una de las innumerables obras maestras que poseyó, fue exhibido en las galerías de Harris, quien acabó vendiéndolo al Museo de Boston, donde todavía se encuentra.

Cuando estalló la guerra, Harris fue reclutado por los servicios secretos, primero como anfitrión de una escuela de espías llamada Brickendonbury Hall, al norte de Londres, donde conoció al que sería uno de sus más íntimos y peligrosos amigos: Kim Philby, el tercer miembro del círculo de Cambridge, los sofisticados topos de la Unión Soviética al servicio de Su Majestad. Cuando la escuela cerró, Harris ingresó en el MI5, concretamente en el departamento de contraespionaje. Su profundo conocimiento de la cultura y la sociedad españolas le convirtió rápidamente en uno de los miembros más valorados y respetados de The Circus, como era conocido el servicio entre sus agentes. Fue crucial su intervención, por ejemplo, a la hora de desarticular la red de espías que Franco intentaba organizar en Inglaterra, pero sin duda el momento de gloria llegó cuando sus superiores le nombraron oficial del caso Garbo, la estrategia de diversión más delicada y deslumbrante del siglo XX.

Juntos, Harris y Pujol crearon una telaraña ficticia de 27 agentes diseminados por toda Inglaterra que presuntamente le proporcionaban a Garbo información confidencial sobre los movimientos de los aliados en la isla, que a su vez Arabel -el sobrenombre de Pujol para los alemanes- filtraba al Abwher, el servicio secreto de Hitler, a través de sus enlaces alemanes en Madrid. Lograron así convencer a los nazis de que el desembarco aliado se produciría en el paso de Calais y no en Normandía -lo que se llamó operación Fortitude-. No hay duda, como el documental de Roch minuciosamente explica, del talento de Pujol para la fabulación, el engaño, la improvisación y el riesgo, pero no es menos verdad que sin Harris, Garbo no hubiera cosechado el extraordinario éxito que hoy se le reconoce.

Pujol, a diferencia de lo que a menudo se supone, no estuvo nunca en las oficinas del MI5 y tan sólo muy tarde supo para qué organización trabajaba exactamente y cuál era el sentido último de su labor. Harris se convirtió en su sombra y en el verdadero coreógrafo de la fenomenal farsa que acabó por decidir el curso de la guerra. En un apartamento de Jermyn Street, Harris y Pujol, asistidos por una secretaria, Sarah Bishop, imaginaban y orquestaban, como Próspero y Ariel, las vidas de los espectrales agentes, sus perfiles biográficos, sus movimientos, sus percances, a veces incluso su repentina muerte. Entre sus criaturas había nacionalistas galeses, un camarero de Gibraltar, funcionarios del Ministerio de Información. Harris, que tenía acceso a las fuentes de máxima seguridad, seleccionaba, dosificaba y exponía la información que luego Pujol manejaba y distribuía, mientras el día D se acercaba. Su capacidad de persuasión resultó tan imbatible que incluso dos días después de que los aliados desembarcaran en las playas de Normandía, el 6 de junio de 1944, los alemanes seguían creyendo que el ataque decisivo se produciría en Calais.

Tras la guerra, Pujol, por razones de seguridad, tenía que desaparecer y empezar una nueva vida y Harris, que en el fondo fue siempre un ilusionista, un mago en la sombra del escenario, se ocupó de ello. Hizo con Pujol un largo viaje que les llevó primero a Nueva York y Washington, donde J. Edgar Hoover, el temible dictador del FBI, les invitó a cenar para conocer al dúo que había revolucionado los servicios de inteligencia y cuyos métodos quería conocer de viva voz. De ahí se fueron a Venezuela, donde Pujol decidió establecerse con la nueva identidad que le había proporcionado Harris: profesor y especialista en arte. Harris regresó a Inglaterra para difundir la noticia de que Pujol había muerto de malaria en Angola, teoría que se dio por buena hasta 1984, cuando el escritor Nigel West descubrió el paradero de Pujol.

Por su parte, Tomás Harris, agotado por las tensiones de la guerra, decidió vender sus negocios en Londres y dedicarse exclusivamente a su propia pintura. El rey Jorge VI le había nombrado Oficial de la Orden del Imperio Británico (OBE) e incluso el general Eisenhower había querido agradecerle personalmente su contribución a la victoria. Para su retiro eligió Camp de Mar, una bellísima cala mallorquina, donde compró y remodeló una casa que convirtió en residencia y estudio. Allí se entregó febrilmente a su obra: grabados, óleos, litografías, escultura, cerámica, vidrio y cartones para tapices. Engrosó también sus colecciones de muebles, sarcófagos, joyas renacentistas, tejidos del XVI, pintura y grabados, principalmente de Goya, Durero y Rembrandt. Llegó a reunir la colección privada de la obra gráfica de Goya más importante del mundo, hoy en el British Museum con el nombre de The Tomás Harris Collection. La pasión por los grabados de Goya le llevó a escribir, muy al final de su vida, un impresionante catálogo razonado: Goya, engravings and litographs (Oxford, Bruno Cassirer, 1964), todavía hoy de referencia ineludible.

Tomás Harris murió en un accidente de tráfico, en enero de 1964. Desde entonces su nombre se fue apagando y revivió tan sólo cuando fue acusado injustamente, en los años ochenta, de pertenecer a la red de espías soviéticos, debido a su estrecha amistad con los principales miembros del círculo de Cambridge: Guy Burgess, Philby y Anthony Blunt. Pero ésa es otra historia que merecería incluso otro documental. En lo que se refiere a su relación con Joan Pujol, hay un detalle hasta ahora inédito que revela mejor que nada su personalidad y su peculiar sentido del humor. Cuando volvió de Venezuela, tras haber hecho desaparecer a Pujol, se trajo consigo unos óleos en los que había estado trabajando y que mostró en una exposición que tuvo lugar en el Museo de Arte Moderno de Madrid, la primera que celebró en España, inaugurada en junio de 1947. Entre paisajes caribeños y alguna naturaleza muerta, los visitantes pudieron apreciar un retrato de un hombre en blancos y verdes. El cuadro llevaba por título Retrato de Joan. Ahí estaba, para quien quisiera verlo.

Sixty-Five years ago, in November 1944, the war in Europe was at a stalemate. A resurgent Wehrmacht had halted the Allied armies along Germany’s borders after its headlong retreat across northern France following D-Day. From Holland to France, the front was static — yet thousands of Allied soldiers continued to die in futile battles to reach the Rhine River.

One Allied army, however, was still on the move. The Sixth Army Group reached the Rhine at Strasbourg, France, on Nov. 24, and its commander, Lt. Gen. Jacob L. Devers, looked across its muddy waters into Germany. His force, made up of the United States Seventh and French First Armies, 350,000 men, had landed Aug. 15 near Marseille — an invasion largely overlooked by history but regarded at the time as “the second D-Day” — and advanced through southern France to Strasbourg. No other Allied army had yet reached the Rhine, not even hard-charging George Patton’s.

Devers dispatched scouts over the river. “There’s nobody in those pillboxes over there,” a soldier reported. Defenses on the German side of the upper Rhine were unmanned and the enemy was unprepared for a cross-river attack, which could unhinge the Germans’ southern front and possibly lead to the collapse of the entire line from Holland to Switzerland.

The Sixth Army Group had assembled bridging equipment, amphibious trucks and assault boats. Seven crossing sites along the upper Rhine were evaluated and intelligence gathered. The Seventh Army could cross north of Strasbourg at Rastatt, Germany, advance north along the Rhine Valley to Karlsruhe, and swing west to come in behind the German First Army, which was blocking Patton’s Third Army in Lorraine. The enemy would face annihilation, and the Third and Seventh Armies could break loose and drive into Germany. The war might end quickly.

Devers never crossed. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander, visited Devers’s headquarters that day and ordered him instead to stay on the Rhine’s west bank and attack enemy positions in northern Alsace. Devers was stunned. “We had a clean breakthrough,” he wrote in his diary. “By driving hard, I feel that we could have accomplished our mission.” Instead the war of attrition continued, giving the Germans a chance to counterattack three weeks later in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge, which cost 80,000 American dead and wounded.

Garrison Davidson, then Devers’s engineering officer and later a superintendent of West Point, believed Devers’s attack would have succeeded and pre-empted the Bulge, writing, “I have often wondered what might have happened had Ike had the audacity to take a calculated risk, as General Patton would have.” Patton wrote in his diary that he also believed Eisenhower had missed a great opportunity; the Seventh Army’s commander, Lt. Gen. Alexander Patch, felt the same way.

Why did Eisenhower refuse to allow Devers to cross? Eisenhower disliked Devers — a prim teetotaler who rubbed many gruff Army commanders the wrong way — and refused to include him among the generals fighting in northern France. Devers was appointed to lead the southern invasion by the Army chief of staff, George Marshall. Eisenhower would likely have fired Devers once the Sixth Army Group fell under his command in September 1944, but Devers had powerful patrons in Marshall and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Eisenhower was also a cautious, some would say indecisive, commander who favored a “broad front” strategy with all Allied armies moving in tandem on a solid front. His military objective was Germany’s main industrial area to the north, the Ruhr. Devers was operating too far south to help that effort.

True, the Germans knew the Ruhr was vital to them and fiercely defended it. But, as we know from several of their generals’ postwar memoirs, what they really feared was an incursion across the Rhine, which would have been a military catastrophe and a devastating symbolic blow to the German people.

The Rhine wasn’t crossed until March 1945. Had Eisenhower let Devers make his attack, we might now be celebrating the 65th anniversary of a cross-Rhine attack that quickly ended the war in Europe. Instead, we will soon mark the anniversary of the costliest battle in American history, the Battle of the Bulge.

Se conmemora ahora el 70° aniversario del inicio de la segunda guerra mundial. El primer acto fue la invasión alemana de la vecina Polonia en septiembre de 1939. El acto oficial, con la presencia de los dirigentes políticos europeos, tuvo por eje ese episodio militar. También muchos de los análisis realizados lo son en este registro. Sin embargo, creo que muy poco se ha hablado ahora sobre cómo se cimentó esa locura que daría lugar a 60 millones de muertos. Las acciones bélicas empezaron entonces, aunque un año antes la anexión de Austria y de los Sudetes marcó el rumbo hacia el cual, inexorablemente, como destino casi obligado, se encaminó la humanidad en una de sus mayores tragedias colectivas. Pero todo empezó bastante antes.
Todavía sigo impactado por uno de los libros que este verano cayó en mis manos. Historia de un alemán (Memorias 1914-1933) es un relato estremecedor y revelador de la situación de Alemania antes de la llegada de Adolf Hitler al poder por vía democrática, y sus actuaciones en los primeros meses. El texto lo escribió Sebastian Haffner (seudónimo) y no sería descubierto y, por tanto, publicado hasta el 2000, después de la muerte de su autor. Es pavoroso ver cómo un libro escrito bastante antes del inicio de la guerra analiza con amenidad y gran lucidez en primera persona las bases psicológicas, sociológicas y políticas que llevaron a toda una nación a una locura.

En la génesis de ese gran desastre tendría gran valor el acuerdo de aquel mismo verano, cuando la Alemania nazi y la Unión Soviética se aliaron y repartieron el mundo. Ello daría alas a las ansias expansivas de los alemanes. De un modo particular las tres repúblicas bálticas, Estonia, Letonia y Lituania, sufrirían con gran virulencia las brutales represiones de sus sucesivos ocupantes. El pacto se rompería en 1941, y precisamente la gran contribución y sufrimiento de la URSS fue decisiva para derrotar al nazismo. Otra cosa es que, además de cobrarlo luego en Yalta, la intervención soviética estuviese sustentada sobre una ideología opresiva, y que Stalin fuera, junto con Hitler, uno de los mayores asesinos de la historia. Pero eso es geopolítica y lo que ahora quiero resaltar es la lección a aprender.
Como antes indiqué, doy gran valor al análisis de lo que llevó a producir los hechos de ahora hace 70 años. Hitler llegó al poder tras las elecciones en 1933, seis años antes del inicio de la contienda bélica. Pero ya en ese periodo, e incluso antes, se fueron conjugando los elementos que desembocarían en lo ya conocido. De todos ellos, quiero centrar mi análisis en el silencio. El silencio cobarde, el silencio vergonzante, el silencio cómplice de muchos fue esencial para que el nazismo fuera arrasando la ética de un pueblo que asistiría, inicialmente callado y luego enfervorizado, al lavado de cerebro colectivo propio hoy de las sectas. La inmensa mayoría de alemanes permaneció en el país. Solo huyeron algunos preclaros, como el propio autor del libro, al que el nazismo le parecía grosero y dictatorial, aunque acabaría, casi sin darse cuenta, levantando el brazo y exclamando Heil Hitler. Hacía la pasantía para ser abogado y tendría que realizar, como en tantos otros sectores, cursos de «camaradería» en los que la conciencia iba debilitándose hasta salir adoctrinada o narcotizada.
El silencio de los juristas, el silencio de los partidos democráticos, el silencio de las iglesias, el silencio de los demás países de una inexistente comunidad internacional. Ocurrieron muchas cosas en ese largo periodo hasta el inicio de la guerra, pero sobre todo se registró un desolador silencio interior y exterior. El fracaso que después sería la guerra se asentó sobre él. La insolidaridad de los grupos inicialmente no afectados por la aniquilación colectiva fue trágico y premonitorio de lo que sucedería con todos. Asentado en la mentira, como todo régimen dictatorial, hay que recordar cómo, evocando a Nerón, Hitler mandó incendiar una noche el Reichstag (Parlamento). La propaganda expandió que los autores habían sido los comunistas. Una mentira para prohibirlos y clausurar el Parlamento. Silencio de los demás partidos opositores. Fue solo una muestra de aquella parábola de Martín Niemöler: vinieron a por los comunistas, pero como no lo era…; vinieron a por los judíos, pero como no lo era…

Los silencios ante hechos que socavan la justicia, las libertades y la democracia en cualquier país del mundo también son lamentablemente reales hoy. Tapar la corrupción porque son de los nuestros; callar «por cortesía» ante los rebrotes fascistas que renacen manifiestamente en comportamientos totalitarios e inmorales; no dar valor a la creciente y gravísima censura y control de los medios de comunicación en varios países latinoamericanos; aceptar que se pueda liberar a un terrorista libio preso para favorecer a una empresa petrolera nacional; silenciar la existencia de detenciones ilegales y cárceles fantasmas para fortalecer al amigo empeñado en una lucha contra el terror como coartada del todo vale, incluidas restricciones de derechos elementales; mirar hacia otro lado ante la clara regresión democrática de un potente país del cual tenemos dependencia energética, etcétera.
El gran desastre de hace 70 años se cimentó sobre muchos factores. Pero, sobre todo, en el silencio de muchos. Que sepamos aprender esa lección.

“Los actuales intentos, asquerosos e hipócritas, de los europeos para dar otro sentido a la II Guerra Mundial, para rebajar el papel heroico de nuestra nación en la destrucción del nazismo, y la monstruosa mentira de los europeos a la hora de comparar Alemania y la Unión Soviética en su responsabilidad por la guerra demuestran que a los europeos el nazismo les resulta más próximo que el comunismo”. Con estas palabras, llenas de intención aunque algo faltas de lógica, concluyó el moderador Viktor Kozhemyako, redactor de Pravda, el coloquio de historiadores sobre el papel de Stalin y el Partido Comunista de la URSS en las vísperas de la II Guerra Mundial.

Según Pravda, el objetivo del coloquio fue responder “a los falsificadores de la historia: tanto extranjeros como rusos”. Y es que, según el periódico ruso, “últimamente existe en Europa una tendencia a igualar a Stalin con Hitler, el comunismo y el nazismo, y a intentar quitarnos a los rusos el derecho de enorgullecernos de nuestra incomparable Victoria de la Patria Soviética en la Gran Guerra Patriótica”. (Las mayúsculas son de Pravda).

El coloquio de historiadores, convocado por Pravda, se celebró en las vísperas de la conmemoración, en la ciudad polaca de Gdansk, de los 70 años del comienzo de la II Guerra Mundial. El 1 de septiembre de 1939, la Alemania nazi encendió la guerra al invadir Polonia, sólo unos días después de que su ministro de Asuntos Exteriores, Joachim von Ribbentropp, firmara un pacto de no agresión mutua con su colega ruso, Viacheslav Molotov. De acuerdo con su pacto con Hitler para dividir Europa, dos semanas más tarde las tropas soviéticas también invadieron Polonia.

Mientras los dirigentes alemanes han pedido perdón reiteradamente por los crímenes del nazismo, ningún mandatario ruso se ha atrevido a condenar los crímenes soviéticos durante la II Guerra Mundial. Los polacos, por ejemplo, esperaban que Putin pidiera disculpas por la masacre de los bosques de Katyn, donde en 1940 más de 20.000 oficiales polacos, prisioneros de guerra, fueron ejecutados por la KGB. Sin embargo, Putin no ha admitido ninguna culpa de su país; al contrario, ha disculpado a Stalin. En cuanto a la masacre, se ha limitado a afirmar que el pueblo ruso “comprende bien la sensibilidad de los polacos sobre lo ocurrido en Katyn”.

Siguiendo la actual tendencia oficial rusa, Putin rechaza cualquier responsabilidad de la Unión Soviética en la II Guerra Mundial, enfatizando el papel de los soviéticos como víctimas del conflicto bélico y echando la culpa de la invasión soviética de Polonia al Reino Unido.

¿Cuál es esa tendencia oficial de acuerdo con la cual actúa Putin? Es la que establece una comisión, fundada y liderada por el actual presidente ruso Dmitri Medvedev y su gabinete, y llamada Comisión para prevenir la falsificación de la historia en detrimento de los intereses de Rusia. El enunciado lo dice todo: la comisión quiere velar por los “intereses” de Rusia, no está destinada a esclarecer los hechos. La comisión se dedica, pues, a fijar “la verdad histórica” de acuerdo con esos “intereses” y a procesar a todos aquellos que intentan “reescribir la historia”. La propuesta de la ley, que ha presentado el Gobierno ruso, pretende que la “falsificación de la historia” se considere una ofensa criminal y que se pueda penalizar con entre 3 y 5 años de cárcel, aplicables indiscriminadamente a rusos y extranjeros. La oposición rusa ha apuntado que el intento de monopolizar la verdad histórica por parte de dicha comisión se parece al comportamiento de las instituciones soviéticas que monopolizaban la verdad ideológica y la situaban por encima de la científica y la académica.

Según esta ley, podría llegar a ser condenada cualquier persona que cuestione el hecho de que en 1945, tras los acuerdos de Yalta, los Aliados entregaron a Rusia dos millones de “víctimas de Yalta”, básicamente prisioneros de guerra y exiliados, que a su llegada a Rusia fueron ejecutados o enviados al gulag. O cualquiera que critique los libros de texto vigentes en Rusia que describen a Stalin como un “gestor eficaz” y retratan las represiones masivas en los años treinta, cuarenta y cincuenta como la única manera que tuvo Stalin para salir de las grandes dificultades económicas y de seguridad. O, sin ir tan lejos en el pasado, a cualquiera que desapruebe la afirmación de Putin según la cual el colapso de la Unión Soviética fue “la mayor catástrofe geopolítica del siglo XX”.

Los críticos echan en cara a Moscú que quiera ocultar el impulso que Stalin, junto a Hitler, dio a la II Guerra Mundial y que, en vez de admitir haber ayudado, a través del pacto Ribbentropp-Molotov, a perpetrar la destrucción de Europa, siga con la retórica estalinista de considerarse víctima y posterior vencedor.

Rusia sigue valorando su historia en función de su propia grandeza y no de los valores compartidos con el resto de las naciones. Es por ello que, mientras el mundo condena el estalinismo como un régimen abyecto, Rusia lo ensalza como el sistema que la consagró como una de las dos grandes potencias.

An apology that comes too late is likely to exacerbate rather than end a quarrel. Thus Vladimir Putin’s letter to the Poles – in which he appears to unreservedly apologise for the fact that in September 1939 the Soviet Union was allied with Nazi Germany – has not been received with either gratitude or appreciation. On the contrary, by suggesting that the Soviet Union had made its full contribution to the ultimate defeat of the common enemy, the Russian PM’s remarks have been interpreted as an underhand excuse. Even his admission that Polish officers were massacred at Katyn has not satisfied the Polish public.

This is not the first time that a Russian politician has referred to controversial historic events of the second world war. Back in the 80s, former president Mikhail Gorbachev broke with the previous Soviet policy of refusing to make any reference to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and made a commitment that the “blank spaces” in Soviet history would be investigated. Why is it though that the Poles feel that not enough had been done and why has Putin’s letter been greeted with bewilderment rather than being seen as an act of reconciliation?

The first reason for the Polish response lies in the fact that Putin had implied that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was the final act on the road to war. He has skillfully raised the issue of the Munich agreement and the fact that at that time Poland collaborated with Nazi Germany in destroying Czechoslovakia. He then equated the Katyn crime to the fate of the Soviet prisoners of war captured by the Poles in 1920. Neither fact is incorrect, but it is debatable that historic events can be cancelled out by presenting a balance sheet.

The second and more important reason is that 1 September is seen in Poland as a beginning of its enslavement, first under Nazi domination and then, after the war, to Soviet domination. 1 September is a time of grieving. One can’t really expect Poles to see this as a date for reflection on the shortcomings of their own governments’ policies in 1939 and subsequently. Thus Putin has on the one hand accepted that the Soviet Union was wrong, but he has also publicly reminded the Poles that they too have to address some unsavoury moments in Poland’s history. The fact that he spoke of the Russian people being victims of both Stalinism and of Nazism has done little to soothe Polish anger.

Polish-Russian relations might improve in due course, in particular because most politicians agree that the letter contains positive suggestions for the opening of a dialogue on the basis of a partnership, something Poles have been trying to do since the fall of communism.

If the thaw is slow that will be because victimhood is a role the Poles have liked to play and no one does it better than President Lech Kaczyński, who needs to improve his standing if he is to win the forthcoming election. He will win votes by playing the strong patriotic card to an audience bewildered by Putin’s suggestion that Poles might also investigate their recent past. This is not a president known for his oratorical finesse, nor for his skills in the conduct of foreign policy. True to form, Kaczynski opened with a speech at the Westerplatte commemorations this morning, declaring that Poland has no reason to apologise.

If any lesson can be drawn from this interesting exchange it is that foreign policy cannot be played out in public. Since both the Soviet Union and Poland were victims of the second world war further exchanges are of little use. Both sides are referring to historic facts, but they are interpreting them in their own way and with an eye on their own constituencies.

El 1 de septiembre de 1939 es la fecha convencional del estallido del segundo conflicto mundial cuando las tropas alemanas invadieron Polonia. Y, 48 horas más tarde, Reino Unido y Francia declararon la guerra al Tercer Reich. El mundo en que vivimos es tributario de las repercusiones de la época que entonces dio comienzo.

En términos numéricos la historiografía sobre la II Guerra Mundial ha sobrepasado la generada por uno de los conflictos que le precedieron, el español, pero todavía subsisten autores que disminuyen la relación entre una y otro. Suelen ubicarse entre quienes defienden la racionalidad de la política de apaciguamiento de los dictadores fascistas que impulsó uno de los más desastrosos políticos británicos del siglo XX, Neville Chamberlain, o entre quienes sobreenfatizan el trastocamiento de frentes que se produjo en la escena europea en comparación con la española.

La diferencia sustancial suele ligarse en el último caso al cambio de alineación de la Unión Soviética, que pasó de oponente de la expansión fascista a presunta promotora del pacto Molotov-Ribbentrop del 23 de agosto de 1939. Éste, innegablemente, permitió a Stalin mantenerse al margen de lo que no tardó en caracterizar, de forma mendaz y camelista, como guerra intra-imperialista.

Se trata de una explicación favorecida por los historiadores franquistas y neofranquistas, empeñados en presentar ayer y hoy el conflicto español como una pugna grandiosa contra el comunismo. Tal interpretación se mantuvo del principio al fin y la propagaron policías, soldados, clérigos, periodistas y académicos complacientes. Fue la pieza esencial para defender la contribución de Franco a la defensa del mundo libre durante la guerra fría. Un centinela de Occidente. El primero y más preclaro.

Es labor del historiador sustituir el mito por el dato, la construcción político-ideológica por la reconstrucción documental. En los archivos que han ido abriéndose en los últimos años surgen evidencias que permiten contrastar aquellos planteamientos.

Investigadores ingleses, norteamericanos, alemanes, franceses e italianos, entre otros, han analizado la génesis del pacto Molotov-Ribbentrop. No respondió a un proyecto oculto que el Kremlin hubiese acariciado mientras los españoles se entremataban. Fue el resultado de una valoración muy fría de Stalin en tres circunstancias precisas: a) La profunda suspicacia ante el comportamiento de Chamberlain unida al desencanto por el fracaso del apoyo a la República dada la timidez de las potencias democráticas en generar una respuesta robusta a la expansión fascista. b) La renuencia de Londres y París en llegar a un acuerdo de defensa mutua, nuevo objetivo tras el mero fortalecimiento de la política de seguridad colectiva, hundida después de los acuerdos de Múnich en septiembre de 1938. c) Los intensos esfuerzos nazis de seducción del Kremlin para llegar a un acuerdo, primero en el plano económico y comercial pero desde julio de 1939 también en el plano político y de seguridad.

Dado que sus espías tenían al corriente a Stalin de las reflexiones que iban desarrollándose en Alemania para conseguir su neutralidad ante el ataque contra Polonia, en un rasgo de supremo jugador oportunista optó por aproximarse a Hitler y echar por la borda la estrategia que había seguido durante los cinco años precedentes. La mutación produjo una conmoción inmensa en los partidos comunistas nacionales. Muchos de los españoles no la soportaron. En Francia los comunistas fueron objeto de una colérica persecución, que también afectó a los exiliados republicanos.

El resultado, desde el punto de vista de los inmediatos intereses soviéticos, fue espectacular: dividida la Europa oriental en zonas de influencia respectivas a tenor de lo previsto en dos protocolos secretos (el primero anejo al pacto), los rusos invadieron Polonia y no tardaron en extender su incipiente glacis imperial también a los países bálticos, algo que estos nuevos miembros de la UE no han olvidado. Les costó sudor y lágrimas, eso sí, vencer la tenaz resistencia finlandesa. Al avanzar sus fronteras hacia el oeste, en teoría, aunque no en la práctica, la URSS hubiera debido estar en mejores condiciones para hacer frente a la máquina de guerra nazi. Stalin no las aprovechó. Dos años después la Wehrmacht lo comprobaría.

¿Y desde el punto de vista opuesto? La versión convencional afirma que fue el pacto Molotov-Ribbentrop la clave que hizo posible la agresión alemana y, por ende, el conflicto que el apaciguamiento había tratado de evitar. Sin embargo, la decisión de Hitler de atacar Polonia estaba tomada en firme. El pacto con Stalin cumplió no sólo funciones externas sino también internas. Dos fueron fundamentales: a) Tranquilizar a los sectores todavía no suficientemente nazificados. b) Asegurar el suministro ininterrumpido de materias primas, pues la hambrienta economía alemana no aguantaría sin ellas el ritmo de rearme dado el estrangulamiento exterior. Lo que dio el tono fue que Hitler temía que la ecuación estratégica terminaría tornándose en contra suya si esperaba. Contaba con que las potencias democráticas no hicieran efectiva sus garantías a Polonia, pero incluso cuando fue acumulándose la evidencia de que tal no sería el caso no se echó para atrás.

Quienes tuvieron razón fueron los republicanos españoles. Desde principios de septiembre de 1936, cuando confirmaron que de los triunfos militares de Franco eran partícipes las potencias fascistas, no se cansaron de subrayar que lo que pasaba en España era el preludio de lo que tarde o temprano terminaría ocurriendo en Europa. No era propaganda. Fue una valoración genuinamente sentida por la mayor parte de quienes conocían las realidades internacionales de la época, ya fuesen políticos, funcionarios o dirigentes de partidos. Nunca tuvieron éxito. Como señaló Orwell, los escenarios que la izquierda británica aclaraba en panfletos de tres peniques no penetraron en la conciencia de los decisores últimos de las potencias democráticas y, en particular, de Chamberlain y su guardia pretoriana. Las voces discrepantes, que hubo y muchas, tampoco lograron nada. Ni las dimisiones, a veces sonadas.

El caso francés fue igualmente emblemático. Hace ya años que Duroselle acuñó el concepto de “decadencia” para caracterizar su política exterior y de seguridad. El temor ante y la fascinación por el fascismo corroyeron la capacidad de decisión autónoma, debidamente trabajada por los británicos. Uno de los más nefastos políticos de la época, Georges Bonnet, ilustra hasta qué punto vivir en dependencia se había convertido en el destino de Francia.

Sólo los republicanos, abandonados a su suerte, hicieron ver que la contención del fascismo no era del todo imposible. Cinco meses después de que la época de sangre y fuego individualizada llegara a la inevitable conclusión a que la condujo en España la no intervención, para empezar otra más solapada bajo la Victoria, tocó el turno a franceses y británicos. Sus estrategias fueron un fracaso total. No se doma a un tigre hambriento por el mero hecho de echarle carnaza.

Nada de lo que los historiadores han ido desentrañando ha impedido que continúe la manipulación del pasado. Las conveniencias del presente se imponen en el mundo político e ideológico cuando no mediático. El pacto Molotov-Ribbentrop es un ejemplo. La Guerra Civil española otro. Hay que penetrar en lo que hubo detrás de los hechos y derribar los mitos.

Un historiador británico, Adam Tooze, se ha “cargado” algunos de los relacionados con el Tercer Reich y su conducción de la guerra. No es otro el destino que aguarda a las interpretaciones neo-franquistas sobre el conflicto español. En el plano científico está en juego cómo en el futuro deberá presentarse una historia que sigue manipulándose. En el plano ético el antecedente de los valores democráticos, entonces ahogados con sangre y fuego. Y en el ámbito metapolítico la determinación de cuál sea la experiencia colectiva con que cabe entroncar los orígenes de nuestra democracia. No fue la franquista.

Hoy es un día perfecto para reflexionar sobre la interrogante que titula estas líneas. El día 1 de septiembre de 1939, hace setenta años, comenzaba la mayor guerra de la historia de la humanidad con el asalto a Polonia de las tropas alemanas del régimen nacionalsocialista acaudillado por Adolfo Hitler. Cuando terminó, el 14 de agosto de 1945, con la rendición del Japón imperial ante los aliados, cuatro meses antes en Europa tras la caída de Berlín, la guerra, que afectó de una forma u otra a los cinco continentes, había causado la muerte de más de 50 millones de seres humanos. Los heridos, desplazados, enloquecidos, las viudas y huérfanos, las vidas quebradas, en suma, son aún menos calculables.

La fecha del final de las guerras tradicionales, con vencedores y vencidos, suele estar bien definida. Por la firma de la rendición o armisticio. No así su principio. En la madrugada del 1 de septiembre de 1939, el acorazado alemán «Schleswig Holstein» abrió fuego contra una pequeña guarnición polaca en la Westerplatte, muy cerca de Gdansk (Danzig), en la costa báltica. Horas después, la inmensa maquinaria bélica alemana rodaba hacia el este bajo un cielo oscurecido por sus bombarderos y cazas. Es el día aceptado como el primero de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Se suele olvidar que al mismo tiempo el Ejército Rojo de Stalin iniciaba la ocupación de toda Polonia oriental, hasta el río Bug. Y algunos no quieren recordar que aquello respondía a un acuerdo entre los caudillos de las dos grandes ideologías totalitarias que habían surgido en Europa durante el primer tercio del siglo XX. El 23 de agosto, el nazismo alemán y el comunismo soviético firmaron un Pacto de Amistad cuyo primer objetivo era la repartición de Polonia y la posterior ocupación soviética de los estados independientes bálticos. ¿Comenzó por tanto la guerra cuando Hitler y Stalin acordaron el 23 de agosto que el 1 de septiembre ocurriera lo que ocurrió? Evidente es que la firma del pacto entre el nazismo y el comunismo, que duró casi dos años hasta el asalto alemán a la URSS, dejó las manos libres a Hitler para arrasar Polonia pese a la feroz resistencia polaca. Tardó la Wehrmacht en cumplir la misión unas semanas, poco menos que en ocupar Francia en 1940 en un paseo militar y expulsar a los británicos del continente por Dunkerke. No, la fecha del 23 de agosto es una más. Poco menos de un año antes, los días 22 y 23 de septiembre de 1938, Adolfo Hitler recibió con pompa y respeto simulado en Bad Godesberg al primer ministro británico, Neville Chamberlain, para hablar de la entrega de la región de los Sudetes de Checoslovaquia al Tercer Reich. Una semana más tarde Hitler volvía a ser anfitrión de un encuentro. Esta vez en la tristemente célebre conferencia de Múnich. Allí, el Führer ya trató al británico Chamberlain y al francés Daladier con abierto desprecio y les planteó un ultimátum. Los dos pacifistas -«Peace for our time», decía aún al regresar de Múnich a Londres el pobre Chamberlain-, optaron por la traición y la deshonra para evitar la guerra. Tuvieron las tres cosas, como les recordaría Winston Churchill. Ambos dieron a Hitler su consentimiento para invadir al vecino en su ilusoria intención de aplacar al dictador alemán. Pocas maniobras políticas en la historia conjugan tan bien oprobio, cobardía y fracaso. Francia no dudó en romper su Pacto con Checoslovaquia para ganarse el favor de Hitler. Poco más de dos años más tarde, las tropas alemanas se paseaban por París más cómodas y seguras que por Praga. ¿Arrancó allí la tragedia? Sí y no. Con la misma autoridad se puede argüir que había comenzado meses antes, cuando el mundo aceptó que Hitler anexionara Austria en marzo de 1938. O con el primer gran éxito internacional de Hitler, que, dos años después de llegar al poder, ya había conseguido la reanexión del territorio del Sarre a Alemania, tras quince años gobernado por la fantasmal Sociedad de Naciones y explotado en su industria y minería por Francia. Gloria máxima para Hitler entre los alemanes.

En realidad, muchos creemos que la II Guerra Mundial comenzó con los acuerdos de Versalles, Trianon, Saint Germain y Neuilly en aquellas conferencias de paz en el entorno de París. Allí se unieron el instinto de revancha, el pacifismo primitivo, la supina ignorancia de los vencedores sobre los pueblos cuya suerte y división se dirimía en esta reinvención forzosa de Europa. Allí se generaron las condiciones para que, a lo largo de tan sólo dos décadas, se instalara sobre Europa esa constelación maldita que hizo pronto añicos la pretendida «paz perpetua». Los veinte años transcurridos entre 1919 y 1939 se convirtieron en mero paréntesis antes de la continuación de la tragedia. Dos grandes diferencias hay entre las guerras europeas del siglo pasado. Una está en que la primera fue una clásica guerra por supremacía, territorio e intereses nacionales, en esencia no diferente a las habidas antes. La segunda estuvo dominada por unas ideologías totalitarias surgidas durante la falsaria Paz de Versalles. Mientras las democracias fracasaban estrepitosamente. La otra diferencia, no menor, está en que la primera habría sido evitable y la segunda no. La Gran Guerra, como se llamaba a la contienda de 1914-1918, cuyo detonante fue el asesinato del archiduque austriaco Francisco-Fernando en Sarajevo, el 28 de junio de 1914, a manos de un joven serbio bosnio, Gavrilo Princip, no tuvo por qué ser. Quien sea aficionado a los juegos malabares con hipótesis históricas puede entretenerse con las conjeturas sobre lo que habría sucedido de no haberse producido. Si en Viena y Berlín, en Londres, París y en Moscú, en Belgrado y en Roma, los gabinetes de dirigentes intrigantes, políticos y militares ambiciosos hubieran fracasado en sus intentos de convertir aquel incidente bosnio en un «casus belli» que les permitiera sustituir al agónico imperio otomano como potencias en los Balcanes y en Oriente Medio. Podemos poner fecha del 1 de septiembre al comienzo del asalto nazi alemán sobre Polonia. Ponérselo al comienzo de la guerra es acaso imposible. Sin los Tratados de Versalles, tal como se redactaron, quizá la República de Weimar habría sobrevivido. Y Hitler habría sido un charlatán lumpen condenado a morir en algún psiquiátrico austriaco de provincias. Y millones de judíos habrían seguido ejerciendo como la levadura de excelencia y cultura de las sociedades del viejo continente. Sin aquella primera guerra, quizás el bolchevismo habría quedado en anécdota. Quizá Stalin habría muerto en algún atraco a un banco. Y Lenin y Trotsky podían haber terminado sus días jugando al ajedrez en cafés de Zúrich o Viena. Las ideologías redentoras surgidas aquí y entonces no se habrían extendido por todo el mundo causando decenas de millones de víctimas de los totalitarismos y las guerras. Y éstas habrían tenido oportunidad de vivir sus vidas y hoy entre nosotros vivirían muchos millones de sus nietos, biznietos y tataranietos, exterminados sin haber sido concebidos.

Europa no viviría marcada por unos traumas que le impiden ser más libre y resuelta en la defensa de sus intereses legítimos. Que en parte se deben al hecho incontestable de que su libertad y su bienestar, primero en el oeste en 1945 y después en el este, en 1989, son un mérito menos propio que la responsabilidad en las tragedias provocadas por aquellas ideologías europeas. Dos hechos ciertos para concluir. Hitler fue culpable de la guerra y Polonia fue asaltada por la Wehrmacht el 1 de septiembre de 1939. Y una advertencia que quizás en nuestro país, que no estuvo directamente implicada en aquellos avatares, sea pertinente. Sólo las catástrofes naturales se producen de repente. Las causadas por el hombre -que no son sólo guerras- se gestan, muchas veces muy lenta e imperceptiblemente, por la acumulación de errores de los gobernantes, su obcecación en ignorarlos -y por tanto no subsanarlos- y por la ceguera ante sus efectos. «No pasa nada». Esa fue, era, probablemente la frase más común en aquellos años que separan Versalles de la Westerplatte.

Cuando, hoy hace setenta años, la Segunda Guerra Mundial dio comienzo, se habían cumplido cinco meses del final de la contienda civil española. Por lo tanto, a pesar de contar con un ejército entrenado y relativamente bien armado, España no estaba en condiciones de embarcarse en un nuevo conflicto. La reconstrucción del país era la primera prioridad para el nuevo régimen político. Ahora bien, desde los primeros momentos y más aún una vez que, a lo largo de 1940, Alemania conquistaba -como si de un castillo de naipes se tratara- cada uno de los países europeos que invadía, no faltaban las voces que sugerían a Francisco Franco que se uniera a la ‘guerra relámpago’ de Adolf Hitler.
Precisamente su cuñado, el ministro de Asuntos Exteriores Ramón Serrano Súñer, era quien mejor representaba a los germanófilos, entre quienes se contaban también numerosos líderes falangistas. Aunque los falangistas no ocultaban sus distancias respecto del racismo que impregnaba la ideología nazi, sentían gran fascinación por la recuperación económica que Alemania había experimentado desde que Hitler ascendió al poder y por el feroz anticomunismo que sus dirigentes despertaban. De todos modos, los falangistas -y el resto del régimen- experimentaban mayor afinidad ideológica con la Italia fascista de Benito Mussolini que con los nazis.

La entrevista de Hendaya en octubre de 1940 entre Hitler y el general Franco iba encaminada a resolver el papel de España en la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Entonces Hitler se encontraba en su mejor momento, con media Europa bajo su poder. Finalizada la Segunda Guerra Mundial, la historiografía franquista ha expuesto aquel encuentro, como una hábil maniobra de Franco, en la que éste exageró sus pretensiones ante Hitler, con el fin de que el führer se viera obligado a rechazar la participación de nuestro país en la contienda.

Pero no parece que realmente fuera así. Ciertamente, ni para Franco ni para Hitler la entrada de España en la guerra era una prioridad. Lo que España hiciera o dejase de hacer estoy seguro de que nunca le quitó el sueño a Hitler. En aquellos días, lo que verdaderamente le preocupaba era obtener la derrota definitiva de Reino Unido y ultimar los preparativos para la invasión de la Unión Soviética. Derrotada y controlada Francia, España apenas poseía valor estratégico para Hitler, si bien el concurso de nuestro país en la guerra le habría ayudado a controlar el Estrecho de Gibraltar.

Lo más probable es que Franco acudiese a la estación de Hendaya a negociar abiertamente la intervención de España en la guerra. El desacuerdo provino, seguramente, de las exigencias de Franco sobre Marruecos, entonces bajo la autoridad del gobierno francés de Vichy, firme aliado de Alemania.

Meses después, en 1941, cuando Alemania invadió la Unión Soviética, volvieron a aflorar las presiones de los germanófilos. En esos instantes, España optó por una solución intermedia. Conservando su ‘no beligerancia’, que no ‘neutralidad’, envió casi 50.000 soldados al ‘frente ruso’, encuadrados dentro del ejército alemán y con uniforme de la ‘Wehrmacht’. Era la ‘División Azul’. En aquellos meses, obviamente, España vivió los momentos más tensos con los Aliados.

Así, durante la contienda, Franco formuló la peculiar teoría de la ‘guerra de los tres frentes’, aunque, naturalmente, era más propia de un oportunista que de un estadista. En Europa Occidental, España se mantendría neutral, no apoyando ni a Reino Unido ni a Alemania. En Europa del Este respaldaría, sin remilgos, a la Unión Soviética y, en el Pacífico, se pondría del lado de Estados Unidos.

Entretanto, soldados y oficiales alemanes cruzaban la frontera española con total impunidad, con sus vistosos uniformes. Por ejemplo, en Vizcaya, y en concreto en el balneario de Carranza, coincidiendo con el avance de los Aliados en Francia, un batallón de infantería alemán buscó refugio hasta su repatriación al finalizar la guerra.
A principios de 1943, tras la victoria soviética en la batalla de Stalingrado y los avances de los Aliados en el norte de África, todo hacía presagiar que Alemania no podía vencer. El Gobierno español ordenó el regreso de la derrotada División Azul -perdiendo la décima parte de sus efectivos- y declaró la estricta neutralidad. El nuevo ministro de Asuntos Exteriores, el monárquico Francisco Gómez-Jordana, es el encargado de pilotar el giro de la política internacional española. Quería ofrecer al mundo la imagen de un régimen católico y anticomunista.

No faltaron, incluso, los acercamientos de España hacia los Aliados. En los últimos meses de la guerra, las matanzas perpetradas por los japoneses en las islas Filipinas, en las que murieron decenas de españoles, implicaron que España rompiese sus relaciones diplomáticas con el ya debilitado país nipón e, incluso, que sopesara declararle la guerra. No hacía cincuenta años que Filipinas había dejado de ser territorio español y en aquel alejado archipiélago aún vivían miles de españoles -varios cientos eran misioneros-, que simpatizaban, desde luego, más con los norteamericanos que con los japoneses.

La declaración de guerra contra Japón sólo habría sido simbólica, ya que difícilmente España habría sido capaz de trasladar tropas hasta Extremo Oriente, ni los Aliados lo habrían permitido. Pocos años más tarde, Franco quiso también ponerse a disposición de Estados Unidos, durante la Guerra de Corea, simplemente para ganar su simpatía política y concluir su aislamiento internacional.

Debe apuntarse un hecho no muy conocido y es que en 1944, en pleno retroceso de las tropas del III Reich, un grupo conformado por unos pocos miles de exiliados republicanos penetraron en el valle de Arán, buscando precipitar una intervención de los Aliados, para que éstos invadiesen España y lograsen deponer el régimen de Franco. Pero esta operación fracasó estrepitosamente en todos los sentidos y, enseguida, el ejército español controló la situación.

Mientras tanto, vemos que la política exterior española -durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial- pivotó más sobre el oportunismo político que sobre la convicción ideológica. Impresionado por los acontecimientos internacionales, el joven régimen de Franco maniobró, fundamentalmente, con el único afán de sobrevivir. Y lo consiguió.

It is 70 years since war broke out in 1939, but historic questions remain. “Appeasement” is still a dirty word, but so is “war-monger”. President Bush repeatedly used the memory of Winston Churchill in 1940 to justify his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Revisionist historians question whether Neville Chamberlain, the architect of the 1930s appeasement policy, had any choice. One witness was Sir Nevile Henderson, who published his account in Failure of a Mission.

Henderson was Neville Chamberlain’s Ambassador to Germany in the period immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War. He arrived in Berlin early in May 1937. As Ambassador he came to know all the leading Nazis, and had several interviews with Hitler himself. He was chosen as the envoy for Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement.

Before he left for Germany, Henderson had interviews with the outgoing Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and with his successor, Chamberlain. “Both Mr Chamberlain and Mr Baldwin agreed that I should do my utmost to work with Hitler and the Nazi party and the existing Government of Germany … nobody strove harder for an honourable and just peace than I did. But that all my efforts were condemned to failure was due to the fanatical megalomania and blind self-confidence of a single individual.”

We are all familiar with a collective portrait of the Nazi leaders derived from Hitler’s last days in the bunker and the Nuremberg Trials. Henderson’s book was written in the period immediately after the war had begun, even before the fall of France. May 1937 seen from April 1940 is very different from May 1937 seen from our postwar perspective.

“Hitler had been in power for over four years, and during that period had achieved gigantic progress in the military, industrial and moral reorganisation of Germany. It was patent that she could no longer be coerced except by the actual use of force . . . Germany was being militarised from the cradle to the grave.”

In 1937, Henderson was invited by Hermann Goering to stay at his hunting lodge and shoot a couple of stags. They discussed Anglo-German relations. “His idea of an understanding between Great Britain and Germany was an agreement limited to two clauses. In the first, Germany would recognise the supreme position of Great Britain overseas and undertake to put all her resources at the disposal of the British Empire in case of need. By the second, Great Britain would recognise the predominant continental position of Germany in Europe, and undertake to do nothing to hinder her legitimate expansion.”

Hitler certainly attached importance to the idea of an Anglo-German entente, giving Germany a free hand in Europe. In such an agreement Britain would have inevitably become the junior partner, dependent on Germany and indeed on Hitler.

Henderson recounts the tragic process to war as he observed it; the takeover of Austria in March 1938 accelerated the tempo of the crisis. On March 3, Henderson had an interview with Hitler. “I was received in the old Reich Chancery, and was asked to sit down on a big sofa against the wall facing the window. On my left, on a small stool, was Dr Schmidt taking notes. On his left again, in a semi-circle sat Hitler, and next to him and facing me, Herr von Ribbentrop … Hitler was in a vile temper, and made no effort to conceal it.”

After Austria came Czechoslovakia and the Munich crisis of late September 1938, in which Henderson believed that Goering led a peace party inside the Nazi leadership. At least according to the propaganda spin, there was a meeting at which Goering attacked Ribbentrop for incitement to war — itself hardly seen as a crime among Nazi leaders. Goering apparently shouted that he knew what war was and did not want to go through it again. If, however, the Führer said “march” he would go himself in the first aeroplane. His one condition would be that Ribbentrop should be in the seat next to him. He also called Ribbentrop a “criminal fool”. Both men ended up in the dock at Nuremberg; Goering committed suicide and Ribbentrop was hanged.

At Munich Germany acquired the Sudetenland; in March 1939, Hitler occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. Step by step, the world was taken to war. On August 23, Germany signs a non-aggression treaty with the Soviet Union; on September 1, Germany invaded Poland. On September 3 Britain declared war.

On August 25 Hitler gave his last interview to Henderson. This was two days after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact and six days before the invasion of Poland. In effect, Hitler repeated the offer that Goering had made two years before. He even attempted to counter the argument that such a deal would put Germany in the dominant position.

“The British Empire embraces 40 million square kilometres; Russia 19 million square kilometres, America nine-and-a-half million square kilometres, whereas Germany embraces less than six hundred thousand square kilometres.” Hitler went on to propose that Germany should guarantee the British Empire. Hitler’s offer was conditional on a settlement of the Polish dispute; Chamberlain himself was pressing the Poles to surrender Danzig.

Hitler stated: “If the British Government would consider these ideas, a blessing for Germany and also for the British Empire might result. If it rejects these ideas there will be war.” There was war.

The conclusion seems to be that war could not have been avoided in 1939, because Hitler could never be trusted and because he actually wanted a war. At least the British public knew that Chamberlain had wholly devoted himself to his failed mission of peace. Perhaps Chamberlain was the right Prime Minister in 1937, as Churchill certainly was in 1940.

Seventy years ago next week — at 4:45 a.m. Sept. 1, 1939, to be precise — the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein began to shell the Polish military base near Gdansk. For Germans, for Poles, and for the British and French, who immediately declared war on Germany, that was the beginning of World War II. The Soviet Union, having signed a secret agreement with Nazi Germany, did not declare war but was itself preparing to invade Poland and the Baltic states. Which it did, two weeks later, on Sept. 17.

None of these basic facts is in dispute. And two generations have passed since the war ended. Nevertheless, all of its signature events continue to be remembered, contested and commemorated in every anniversary year ending with 5 or 0. I remember joking with a friend on May 8, 1995, the 50th anniversary of the Nazi capitulation, that now, finally, we had reached the end of the anniversaries. But we had not. On Tuesday, the chancellor of Germany and the prime ministers of Russia, Poland, France, Britain and 20-odd other European countries will meet near Gdansk to launch the cycle of 70th anniversaries — with those of the 65th barely over. Why?

The answer cannot lie in the personal experiences of any of the statesmen involved, since none was alive at the time. It lies, rather, in the way that memories of the war have come to be central to the national memory and, therefore, to the contemporary politics of so many of the countries that fought in it.

Certainly everything about modern Germany is the way it is because of the war, from its devotion to the European Union and its pacifism to the architecture of its capital city. War guilt is built into the political system, and it only becomes controversial when some Germans seem to want to abandon it: The new wave of interest in the fate of Germans who fled or were expelled from Central Europe after the war, for example, or the popularity of books about Allied bombings of German cities, worries many in the region. Hence, Angela Merkel’s presence in Gdansk (and she was the first to confirm): No German chancellor wants any of Germany’s neighbors to doubt that Germany is still very sorry about 1939 (even if some are rather indifferent). And none wants Germany’s neighbors to fear German aggression today.

For Poles, this 70th anniversary has a different significance: It’s the first time this particular event has been commemorated by a Polish government that is firmly a member of both the European Union and NATO. The British and the French will be there for the same reason — Central Europe in general and Poland in particular now have a large number of votes in European institutions. By and large, they have to be taken more seriously than they used to be. Senior U.S. politicians presumably will be absent because they, by contrast, have no special reason to take Central Europeans seriously and increasingly don’t mind demonstrating that fact. Generally speaking, the former Allies prefer to remember the bits of the war — D-Day, for example — that contribute to their memory of the 1945 Triumph of Democracy, preferring to forget that the war’s initial raison d’etre, the independence of Poland and the freedom of Central Europe, was not really achieved until 1989.

The Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, seems to have rather different reasons for attending. Last weekend, Russian state television ran a long documentary essentially arguing that Stalin was justified in ordering the 1939 invasion of Poland and the Baltic states — and in making a secret deal with Hitler — on the grounds that Poland itself was in a “secret alliance” with the Nazis. Putin will probably not defend this startling and ahistorical thesis himself — judging from an article he has written for the Polish media — though he may well try to “contextualize” the pact between Hitler and Stalin by comparing it to other diplomatic decisions. Lately other Russians have expressed similarly positive views of the events of 1939 in a well-coordinated attempt to justify the Hitler-Stalin pact. (That is, if they have any views: The majority of Russians, a recent poll shows, do not know that the Soviet Union invaded anybody that year.)

But from the perspective of the Russian ruling elite, such interpretations make sense: By praising Stalin’s aggression toward the Soviet Union’s neighbors 70 years ago, they help justify Russia’s aggression toward its neighbors today, at least in the eyes of the Russian public. Certainly they serve to make Russia’s Central European neighbors anxious — precisely the opposite of the effect Merkel hopes to achieve. Thus can the same event have multiple meanings, thus do Germans and Russians express their radically different feelings about their place in Europe — and thus do the anniversary celebrations carry on, every five years, without fail.

Anne Frank would have celebrated her 80th birthday this month. The diary she wrote as a teenager in a cramped Amsterdam attic lives in the hearts of readers across the world. Her story has been a continuing inspiration to many and made her one of the most enduring voices of World War II.

I became connected to her story 50 years ago, when my father asked me to be associate producer of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” the first American motion picture to deal with the Holocaust. He and I flew to Munich in May 1957 to begin our research. This was my father’s first time in Europe since his service as a lieutenant colonel in charge of a combat motion picture unit photographing the war in Europe. It was a rare opportunity for a son to relive his father’s war.

We rented a car in Munich and drove to the small town of Dachau, where we viewed the remnants of the concentration camp that Hitler established in the 1930s. That camp operated until it was liberated in April 1945 by U.S. Army units that included my father’s. What those troops found at Dachau, and what my father filmed, were scenes of unimaginable horror. That film became a permanent record of what had happened there, making it difficult in later years to deny Hitler’s ravages with any credibility. I snapped a photograph of my father in a tan raincoat standing in the doorway of a building with the word “Brausbad” — “shower bath” in German — written on its pediment. The expression on his face made clear the memories that this grim facility evoked.

We went on to Normandy on the French coast. We walked the D-Day beaches and drove through the hedgerow country where the Americans broke a fierce German resistance. He said then that he realized that at the time of the Battle of the Bulge, he was within a few hundred kilometers of Anne Frank.

Next we went to Amsterdam to meet Anne Frank’s father. Otto Frank was a tall, dignified man in his late 60s who welcomed us warmly to his modest office. He was an officer in the German army during World War I but left Germany with his family after Hitler came to power. He and his wife raised their two daughters, Anne and Margot, in Amsterdam, where he managed a small but thriving spice factory. In July 1942, as persecution of Jews in the Netherlands intensified, Otto Frank decided to take his family into hiding in the top-floor attic of the spice factory, a setting that Anne referred to as the Secret Annex.

The Franks lived there with another family until they were discovered by the Gestapo in 1944 and transported to concentration camps. Anne Frank and her sister died of typhus at Bergen Belsen in March 1945, a few weeks before British troops liberated the camp. Otto Frank and his wife, Edith, were sent to Auschwitz, where he came close to death but survived. Edith died at Auschwitz.

We spoke for a few minutes before Mr. Frank pulled open a filing-cabinet drawer and removed an object carefully wrapped in cloth. After placing it on the table, he unfolded the cloth and there before us was a small book with a red-and-white plaid cover. This was the diary his daughter had written in her own distinctive hand and illustrated with photos and newspaper clippings while the family was hiding in the Secret Annex.

Mr. Frank was composed. He said he wanted to do everything possible to help my father make a film that was true to the experience — and he invited us to go with him to the spice factory at 263 Prinsengracht. The three of us entered the four-story building at the center of a block of rowhouses overlooking a canal. The building was empty and had been out of use for some time. We climbed the stairway until we were in the fourth-floor rooms where the families had hidden. Otto Frank described the day the Gestapo broke through the bookcase door that concealed the entrance. It was determined later that Gestapo Oberscharfuhrer Karl Silberbauer was the man in charge. He snatched Mr. Frank’s briefcase and emptied the contents on the floor. He gathered up the silverware and a Hanukkah menorah and left behind papers and other contents as they herded the two families down the stairs.

Anne’s diary remained on the floor.

On that day the normally efficient German war machine failed. Silberbauer left behind evidence — a document that would one day make Anne Frank’s voice and spirit an important part of world literature, a voice for humanity and tolerance. Her memory became an enduring presence that would grow in importance as the once-powerful voice of Adolf Hitler faded into ignominy.

When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.

He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, “a bluish light, something like an electrical short”, after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. “I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead.” Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.

In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb’s blast. It was the first big lie. “No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin” said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. “I write this as a warning to the world,” reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called “an atomic plague”. For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared – and vindicated.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate “good war”, whose “ethical bath”, as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.

The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. “Even without the atomic bombing attacks,” concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, “air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that … Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including “capitulation even if the terms were hard”. Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the US air force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb”. His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.” The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the “overwhelming success” of “the experiment”.

Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus “war on terror”, the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make “pre-emptive” nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current “threat”. But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK – just as the lies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.

The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That America’s Defence Intelligence Estimate says “with high confidence” that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to “wipe Israel off the map” is of no interest. But such has been the mantra of this media “fact” that in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.

This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.

In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country’s political and military establishment, threatened “an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland”. This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.

The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that “we did not know”? Do we hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called “a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence”? Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.

Lester Tenney, an 87-year-old veteran of World War II, plans to travel to Japan today to seek a meeting with the prime minister and an apology for the hardship and misery he and other American prisoners of war endured in that country. For a variety of reasons, beginning with the State Department’s stance on the issue, it is an apology that he is unlikely to receive.

In the fall of 1940, Mr. Tenney enlisted in the 192nd Tank Battalion, Company B, of the Illinois National Guard, which was sent to the Philippines a year later.

When the Japanese attacked in December 1941, the American and Filipino forces were unprepared. A three-month siege on the Bataan Peninsula left Mr. Tenney and his comrades starving and sick. On April 9, 1942, the American commanders surrendered, and the 65-mile Bataan Death March began.

The march lasted four to seven days (for some it was 14), in the tropical sun with no food, water, medicine or rest. The Japanese guards beat, beheaded, bayoneted, buried alive and shot the Americans and Filipinos at will.

When they reached the town of San Fernando, the P.O.W.’s were herded into boxcars and packed so tightly they could hardly move. Men gasped for air in the rising heat and died standing up. Those who survived the four-hour ride then had to stumble six miles to Camp O’Donnell.

But Mr. Tenney’s ordeal was just beginning. Herded onto a “hell ship,” he and his comrades were sent to Japan to work in mines and factories and on docks owned by companies like Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Kawasaki and Nippon Steel. Beatings and other abuses continued. Food and medicine were in short supply; Red Cross food boxes were never delivered to prisoners. Mr. Tenney spent more than two years in a Mitsui coal mine so dangerous that some Japanese miners refused to work there. The death rate for the Allied prisoners of Japan in World War II was 27 percent, far greater than the rate for British and American soldiers in German captivity, about 4 percent.

Since the war ended, the Japanese government has either ignored or denied efforts by American former prisoners of war to obtain compensation or an apology. Japanese companies have sought to suppress historical documentation of forced P.O.W. labor. In 2005, one of Japan’s most prominent magazines, Bungei Shunju, published an article arguing not only that the Bataan Death March was less severe than reported but also that the testimony of the survivors was “gathered based upon the assumption that an atrocity of the Death March did take place.” Remarkably, members of Japan’s Parliament plan to introduce a bill having to do with prisoners of World War II — but it is meant to provide back pay and pensions for Korean and other non-Japanese camp guards who had been convicted as war criminals for abusing Allied P.O.W.’s.

More troubling in some ways, however, is the American government’s attitude toward the legal claims that former P.O.W.’s have filed in American and Japanese courts. In many cases, the State and Justice Departments have supported arguments by Japanese corporations that the 1951 San Francisco Treaty between the Allies and Japan waived all compensation claims. The State Department has also on occasion joined forces with the Japanese Embassy to argue against legislation in Congress asking for compensation from either the American or Japanese governments.

Australian, British and Dutch prisoners held by Japan during World War II have received apologies from Japanese prime ministers and invitations to visit Japan to encourage healing, understanding and education. Their own governments have also compensated them.

Lester Tenney, the current and most likely the last commander of the veterans’ organization American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, wants only the same: an apology and an honorable closure of this horrible chapter in American-Japan relations. And he hopes that this time the American government, which so far has not supported his request for a meeting with Japanese officials, will not abandon him.

Now it is clear that Saddam Hussein had no WMD, that al-Qaida has become stronger in Iraq, and that liberal democracy has failed to spread through the Middle East, one fallback justification for the Iraq invasion remains: it overthrew a murderous, fascist dictator.

Even if it went catastrophically wrong, runs the argument, the invasion had a good, liberal, humanitarian cause embedded in it. In that sense, as Tony Blair often suggested, it was like the second world war. Much of what the allies did between 1939 and 1945 – the blitz on German towns and cities, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – may have been morally questionable, but the ultimate war aim of overthrowing fascist regimes was irreproachable.

But was the second world war quite what we think it was? I have just read Human Smoke, by the American author Nicholson Baker. It has caused controversy in the US, and will probably be the most hotly debated book of the year when it reaches Britain next month.

Essentially, Baker puts the pacifist case against the second world war. I am not a pacifist and, therefore, do not accept it. The historical evidence that Baker adduces is selective and sometimes unreliable: for example, Hugh (later Viscount) Trenchard, the founder of the RAF, is frequently quoted as though he were a figure of some importance which, by the 1940s, he wasn’t.

Baker’s account, however, reminds us that the war was not fought for humanitarian or democratic ends. Britain fought Germany for the same reason it had always fought wars in Europe: to maintain the balance of power and prevent a single state dominating the continent. America fought Japan to stop the growth of a powerful rival in the Pacific.

The book ends on December 31 1941. At that moment, he says, “most of the people who died in the second world war were still alive”. They included nearly all victims of what we now call the Holocaust. Did waging the war “help anyone who needed help”? Baker asks rhetorically, and gives his answer through a series of documentary snapshots. But, historically, it’s the wrong question. The war wasn’t supposed to “help” anybody.

The idea that wars can be “helpful” is a relatively new conceit. The second world war was fought as an instrument of British and, later, American foreign policy. To be sure, it started when Britain went to “Poland’s aid”. As AJP Taylor pointed out in The Origins of the Second World War: “In 1938, Czechoslovakia was betrayed. In 1939, Poland was saved. Less than one hundred thousand Czechs died during the war. Six and a half million Poles were killed. Which was better – to be a betrayed Czech or a saved Pole?” Both countries, he might have added, were ultimately “liberated” from Hitler only to be handed over to Stalin.

We have given the second world war such a retrospective glow that many now believe that it was fought because Hitler was beastly to the Jews. Yet at the time, almost nobody talked about the Jews. Hitler’s intention to murder every Jew in occupied Europe was well corroborated by December 1942. In that month Rabbi Stephen Wise, head of the American Jewish Congress, presented President Roosevelt with a 20-page dossier called Blueprint for Extermination. The House of Commons stood for a minute’s silence after it heard of this “bestial policy”. Yet nobody in authority gave more than a few minutes’ thought to how Jews could be saved.

Would the Holocaust have happened if there had been no war or if the western democracies had acted against Nazi Germany earlier? We can never know – though it is likely that, if Britain had made peace in 1940 after the fall of France, the Jews would have been sent to Madagascar. What is certain is that the war prevented any concerted attempt at rescue.

Resources used to help Jews would be diverted from the war. Any mass movement of refugees ran the risk of the Germans planting agents among them. Oil supplies were too vital to Britain to risk upsetting Arabs by evacuating them to Palestine. Any of the suggested swaps – Jews for German PoWs, for example – might suggest allied weakness. Besides, why should the allies assist Hitler to rid Europe of Jewry? The best we could do, as Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, observed in 1944, was to “hope that the German government will refrain from exterminating these unfortunate people”.

Once we were at war with Germany, we existed on a similar moral plane. Baker records how the British, not the Germans, started the night bombing of civilian populations, and how Churchill wouldn’t allow food relief to occupied Europe. Towards the end of the war, Eden acceded to Soviet demands that Russians found in previously Nazi-controlled areas should be returned home, knowing full well that many of them would be shot. “We cannot afford to be sentimental about this,” he wrote to Churchill. Because of our alliance with Stalin, our moral superiority by 1945 consisted almost entirely in our not having instigated the Holocaust. But because we were indifferent, even that superiority was qualified.

Romanticising the second world war has led us into foreign policy traps ever since. We look for new crusades against new Hitlers and new Mussolinis. We yearn to cheer our young men into “good wars”, to fight once more against the simple badness of fascism. Tony Blair thought he could detect a national interest in fighting Saddam because he was so anxious to emulate Churchill and defeat “evil”. Hitler was monstrous and wicked; but we fought him, not for that reason, but because he was trying to make his country a rival great power, using force where necessary.

Other leaders, including British and American, have pursued similar foreign policies. As Taylor observed, there was nothing especially wrong with Hitler on the international stage except that he was a German. Equally, there was nothing wrong with Saddam except that he was an Iraqi. The difference between him in 2003 and Hitler in 1939 was that the latter posed a genuine threat and there was no need to quote liberal or humanitarian justifications.

Nicholson Baker, a supremely talented novelist, has written a surprising book of nonfiction titled “Human Smoke.” It is composed primarily of snippets taken from contemporary newspapers in the run-up to World War II and makes the daring argument that the war — our supposedly “good” war — was not good at all. We shouldn’t have fought it.

To my mind, the book is dead wrong and very odd. This, though, has not stopped it from getting a respectable front-page review in the Los Angeles Times Book Review — “It may be one of the most important books you will ever read,” wrote Mark Kurlansky — or from grabbing the bottom perch (No. 15) on the New York Times‘s important bestseller list. Baker’s a hit.

It takes a fair amount of audacity to challenge the conventional wisdom about World War II. This is especially the case since the war has become conflated with the Holocaust, the evil of which cannot possibly be argued. If you throw in the atrocities committed by the Japanese — everything from massacres to the conscription of local women in conquered territories as sex slaves — then World War II not only seemed right and urgent at the time but right and a bit too late now. Hitler could have been stopped earlier.

Baker, though, is a pacifist. He dedicated his book to the memory of “American and British pacifists” who, he writes, never really got their due. “They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right.”

No, they were not. But that, for the moment, is beside the point. A contemporary context for Baker’s book may not be World War II but the war in Iraq. The former, of course, is the good war, and the latter is the bad one, but in Baker’s view they undoubtedly are both wars that made things worse, not better. To make a further connection, countless neocons cited the pre-World War II Munich agreement — appeasement! — to suggest what would happen if Saddam Hussein and his regime were not confronted and brought down. Iraq was going to be yet another good war.

The parallels, strained though they may be, do not end there. Not only was the retro term “fascist” applied to Hussein, but it is now lathered on vast numbers of militant and anti-American Islamists: Islamofascists, they are called. It says something about the durability and plasticity of the term — fascismo — coined by Benito Mussolini in Italy in the early 20th century that it can be used to describe a goat herder in Afghanistan in the 21st.

The question, of course, is whether there is anything worth fighting for. Initially, I thought bringing down Saddam Hussein was a good cause. I was wrong — not about the cause, but about its practicality. I still feel that anytime we can stop someone from killing someone else, we ought to try. I think, too, that such attempts help establish the expectation that the wholesale abuse of human rights will not be tolerated.

What’s worrisome about the Baker book is that the attention it has gotten — much of it critical — is not just a testament to his reputation as a writer but also to the questions he has raised about war itself. Is any war, outside of direct self-defense, worth fighting? Baker suggests that even World War II was not — that the Jews perished anyway and that the war consumed more lives than anyone could have imagined and that, somehow, pacifism would have worked its magic. (Gandhi, in a quote I got from another source, suggested in 1938 that Germany‘s Jews should commit mass suicide. That “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.”)

One casualty of a bad war such as that in Iraq is the growing feeling that no war is worth the cost. This was an important sentiment in Europe after the horrors of World War I, and it produced the supine response to Hitler and the celebrated 1933 declaration by the young debaters of the Oxford Union “that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” In the end, of course, they did. In the end, they had to.

The most horrible weapon in any arsenal is the madness of men. We see this time and time again, and sometimes the only way to stop them is by war. “War is an ugly thing,” John Stuart Mill wrote, “but not the ugliest of things.” Far uglier, he wrote, is the feeling that nothing in life is worth fighting for. World War II was fought for several reasons but above all — and proudly — because the only way to stop the killing was to stop the killers.

En agosto de 1941, una joven belga de 24 años, pequeña y atractiva, se presentó en el consulado británico de Bilbao. Aquella mujer era Andrée de Jongh, pero todos la llamaban ‘Dédée’. Hasta entonces había trabajado como agente de arte y como enfermera, pero una idea muy distinta le bullía en la cabeza. En la conversación trató de persuadir al vicecónsul de su idea de organizar una red para rescatar a pilotos aliados y llevarlos a través de Francia y España, de modo que volvieran a Londres vía Lisboa o Gibraltar. Ante el escepticismo del vicecónsul, temeroso de una trampa de los alemanes, Andrée de Jongh le presentó a los tres hombres que la acompañaban: dos belgas y un escocés, traídos desde Bélgica y deseosos de combatir contra el nazismo. Aquello parecía serio, y el vicecónsul pidió a la joven unos días para consultar con sus superiores.

Pasado el tiempo convenido, y tras una segunda entrevista, empezaba a funcionar la red Comète, llamada así por la velocidad que ‘Dédée’ quiso imprimir al viaje de los refugiados. Quizá de entonces es también el lema latino de la red: ‘Pugna quin percutas’ (‘Lucha pero no mates’). La financiación correría a cargo de los británicos (aunque la caja se estrenó con la venta de las joyas de ‘Dédée’), pero la dirección estaría en manos de los belgas. El plan consistía en establecer diversos puntos de acogida hasta el País Vasco francés. Desde allí, experimentados ‘mugalaris’ (expertos en los pasos fronterizos) conducirían a los aviadores a tierras más seguras, contando con la neutralidad oficial de España en la Segunda Guerra Mundial y la vigilancia de las embajadas aliadas en España. La entrega de combatientes aliados a los nazis desde España, una vez que habían logrado pasar la frontera, no era conveniente para los franquistas, que podían sufrir las represalias consiguientes, sobre todo en el ámbito económico.

No fue lo más difícil organizar el paso de la frontera. Personas como la saratarra Kattalin Agirre, el hernaniarra Florentino Goikoetxea o el vitoriano Ambrosio San Vicente, junto a otros muchos, vascos o no vascos (como Jean François Nothomb, tío-abuelo de la novelista Amélie Nothomb), lo hicieron posible. Para la cuestión de los carnés de identidad o permisos de desplazamiento, se contó con personas que trabajaban o estaban introducidas en ayuntamientos y otras instituciones. Una vez pasada la muga, la acogida estaba asimismo garantizada por muchos, entre ellos Tomás Arakama, que tenía un garage en Donostia. La propia ‘Dédée’ pasó la frontera decenas de veces.

Hasta la detención de Andrée de Jongh en Urruña, por una traición, el 15 de enero de 1943, la red Comète sacó de Francia, Bélgica, Holanda y Luxemburgo a unos 750 aviadores. Al interrogarla, los alemanes no se creían que ‘Dédée’ pudiera ser la cabeza de la red Comète. No contaban con la fuerza enorme de aquella mujer, a quien su padre (que trató de continuar con la red en París y fue fusilado en marzo de 1944 en Mont-Valérien, muy cerca de la capital), llamaba ‘el pequeño ciclón’, y a la que un coronel británico de la Embajada en Madrid designaba como ‘pura heroína de leyenda’. Al cabo de poco tiempo ‘Dédée’, y tras pasar por varias cárceles, estaba en el campo de concentración de Mauthausen y después en el de Ravensbrück. Salió de aquel infierno en las postrimerías de la guerra, en abril de 1945, con la salud muy quebrada. Con más suerte, eso sí, que no pocos evadidos y miembros de la red Comète, que murieron en campos de concentración o ametrallados en la huida.

Terminada la contienda, ‘Dédée’ recibió no pocos homenajes, empezando por los de su país: se la nombró condesa, teniente coronel del ejército y miembro de la Orden de Leopoldo. Además, tenía la medalla de la Legión de Honor francesa, la medalla George (la más alta condecoración civil británica para extranjeros) y la medalla de la Libertad norteamericana. Pero ella deseaba seguir ayudando a los demás, y hasta 1955 trabajó en hospitales y leproserías del Congo, Etiopía, Camerún y Senegal. No en vano los dos modelos de Andrée de Jongh fueron la enfermera inglesa Edith Cavell, que en la Primera Guerra Mundial trabajaba en Bélgica para la Cruz Roja y se ocupaba también en pasar a la Holanda neutral soldados ingleses y franceses, causa de su fusilamiento por el ocupante alemán en 1915, y el belga Joseph De Veusterel (1840-1889), más conocido como ‘Père Damien’, el apóstol de los leprosos muerto por contagio en Molokai, en las Islas Hawai (recuérdese la película ‘Molokai’, de 1959, dirigida por Luis Lucia y protagonizada por Javier Escrivá).

Todos los años, en los primeros días de septiembre, la asociación de amigos de la red Comète y el club de montaña Urdaburu de Errenteria organizan tres días de conmemoraciones en Donibane, Anglet y Ziburu. Aquí, en el bellísimo cementerio delante del ancho mar, se depositan flores en las tumbas de Kattalin Agirre y Florentino Goikoetxea (ambos miembros de la Legión de Honor y con otras condecoraciones). Es el punto de partida de una caminata repartida en dos etapas, hasta Oiartzun, pasando por Urruña y atravesando el Bidasoa a pie (a veces con dificultades), como lo hacían aquellos evadidos, y con una última parada, en el caserío Sarobe, de la familia Iriarte, en el barrio Ergoien de Oiartzun. En el caserío, entre amigos, los aviadores se sentían al fin seguros. Ahora, en la conmemoración, en un ambiente muy amable propiciado por los dueños de la casa, es un momento para departir con supervivientes de aquellos años oscuros o con sus familiares, y con decenas de personas de todas las edades. Entre ellas está el historiador Juan Carlos Jiménez de Aberásturi, autor de varios trabajos sobre la red Comète, y especialmente de dos libros excelentes: ‘En passant la Bidassoa. Le réseau Comète’, con su traducción castellana: ‘Vascos en la 2ª Guerra Mundial. La red Comète en el País Vasco’ (1995 y 1996, respectivamente) y ‘Askatasunaren bidea: Florentino Goikoetxea eta beste hernaniar batzuk nazismoaren aurkako borrokan bigarren Mundu Gerran’, en su versión castellana ‘El camino de la libertad: Florentino Goikoetxea y otros hernaniarras en la lucha contra el nazismo durante la II Guerra Mundial’ (2006). Los dos libros son piezas muy importantes dentro de una extensa bibliografía sobre la red creada por ‘Dédée’.

Andrée de Jongh murió el pasado 13 de octubre en Bruselas, a punto de cumplir 91 años. Descanse en paz la mujer valiente y generosa, que contó con vascos nobles y bravos en la lucha contra el totalitarismo.

My mother, who is 88, told me last month that it had been a long time since she’d seen Paul Tibbets in the Bob Evans restaurant on the east side of Columbus, Ohio. She thought this was odd; she ate lunch there so often, and he ate lunch there so often, that his absence worried her.

When he died this month at age 92, the obituaries centered, of course, on the controversy over the dropping of the atomic bomb from the B-29 piloted by Mr. Tibbets and named in honor of his mother, Enola Gay. The half-century-old debate did not rivet him. Perhaps people expected him to be surprised when the subject came up, as if he was somehow unaware of what he had somberly been asked to do by his government during wartime.

Pictures of American exhilaration on V-J Day in 1945 — people dancing in the streets, sailors kissing girls — the country has always cherished. The nation seemed not quite as eager to commemorate the actions that brought the peace. Mr. Tibbets understood. He knew that when the United States decided it was time to bring World War II to a sudden end, it wasn’t in need of a poet or a philosopher. “They were looking for someone who wouldn’t flinch,” he told me once. “That was me.”

He was a precise and careful man, consumed by details. In the sky above Japan that August day, he polled his crew: “Do we all agree that this is Hiroshima?” Afterward, he noted that he could taste the bomb in his mouth. “It tasted like lead.”

I was fortunate enough to spend time talking with him and traveling with him and writing about him. On the road, I would see him make up his hotel room or clear his plates in a restaurant. When I would tell him that other people would do that, he would say that no able-bodied man should expect another person to do this work for him.

Once — this was when some championship sports team or other had been invited to the White House for congratulations — I asked him if any president had ever invited him for a visit.

He said it only happened once — right after the war, when he got word that Harry Truman wanted to see him. “We met in an irregular-shaped room,” Mr. Tibbets said, almost certainly referring to the Oval Office. “It was short and quick. He offered me a cup of coffee. Truman asked me if anyone was giving me a hard time, saying unpleasant things to me because of the bomb. I said, ‘Oh, once in a while.’

“Truman said, ‘You tell them that if they have anything to say, they should call me. I’m the one who sent you.’”

On this Veterans Day I will think about the men and women in their 70s and 80s whom I would see when I was with Mr. Tibbets. These were soldiers and sailors, now grown old, who had expected to be sent to Japan for the land invasion, and perhaps die on those shores. Instead, they came home. In Mr. Tibbets’s presence they would sometimes weep, barely managing to say: “Thank you.” He would mostly nod, a little embarrassed.

His hearing was almost shot, the result of years of airplane pistons pounding near his ears. He sometimes seemed a little lonely, and I don’t think I have ever known someone for whom the phrase “carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders” had at one time been more literal.

Of the quiet flight back from Hiroshima, he said he had two enduring recollections: “The memory of being so tired. And of believing that the war was finally over.”

It was reported that he claimed never to have lost a night’s sleep after the mission, and some saw this as a show of indifference. It was the opposite. He slept well, he told me, because “we stopped the killing.” He was at peace, he said, because “I know how many people got to live full lives because of what we did.”

There’s an application on my computer called the “Ken Burns effect.” It can dress up my picture slideshows by inserting pans and zooms, adding a feeling of motion to the still images. It mimics the technique filmmaker Ken Burns uses to hold the attention of viewers in his epic documentaries, which rely heavily on historic paintings and photos.

As a Latina, I’ve unfortunately run across another kind of Ken Burns effect, one that leaves Hispanics largely invisible in those documentaries.

For ” The War,” his 14 1/2 -hour PBS series that begins tomorrow, Burns concentrated on how World War II affected the lives of people from Sacramento; Waterbury, Conn.; Mobile, Ala.; and Luverne, Minn.

I recently attended a screening of highlights of “The War.” I found it stunning, moving and sadly incomplete. Deftly cutting between the battle lines and the home front, Burns shows the cruelty of war in intimate detail. We see hundreds of bodies floating in the ocean during the Pacific campaign. We see the injustice of a black soldier from Mobile serving his country in a segregated Army. We see law-abiding Japanese Americans herded off to internment camps.

During a segment on the liberation of Nazi death camps, a Jewish American veteran bitterly describes the atrocities he saw there. A woman in the row behind me began sobbing audibly as the film illustrated the veteran’s words with shots of emaciated survivors.

Yet nowhere in the powerful original production did Burns include the stories of Latinos affected by the war. As many as half a million Hispanics served in World War II and earned at least 13 Medals of Honor. They returned to a country where they, like blacks, were treated as second-class citizens.

Some critics of Burns have previously noticed the way he ignores Latinos, pointing out that in his 19-hour documentary saga “Jazz,” Latinos rated only 3 1/2 minutes of airtime and that many of the greats of Latin jazz, who played alongside whites and African Americans, were overlooked.

In his 23-hour production “Baseball,” Burns devoted only six minutes to Latinos, who now play a dominant role in the sport. Six minutes, so help me A-Rod.

It’s odd behavior for a filmmaker so adept at chronicling the black experience in this country. “Race is at the center of all of American history,” Burns has said. Yes, it is. But there is more to the story than just black and white.

In a question-and-answer session after the screening I attended, Burns said that one reason Hispanics were overlooked in “The War” was that “no one came forward” from the Latino community when he and his team solicited stories. So why didn’t they exercise a bit of journalistic due diligence and reach out to people? He also said it was impossible to tell the stories of every minority group involved. True, but in this case, a significant element had been omitted.

Because Sacramento was one of the places profiled, I phoned a Latino veterans group in that area of California. Within an hour I had the names of four men, still living, who had served honorably in World War II and had interesting stories about their experiences.

Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has overseen an extensive project to collect the oral histories of Latino veterans of World War II. No one from Burns’s team contacted her during production of “The War.” Rivas-Rodriguez is a member of Defend the Honor, a group that pressured PBS and Burns to amend his documentary.

Despite strong initial resistance, Burns and PBS relented. “The War” now includes the stories of two Latinos and a Native American who fought in World War II. There are 28 minutes’ worth of new interviews and pictures. It’s unclear, though, whether these additional segments will be included in the companion books, DVDs and educational materials that are part of the project.

Burns said at the screening I attended that some Latinos were reacting as if “The War” would be the definitive account of World War II. Others could produce documentaries on this subject, he noted. I doubt, however, that PBS or any commercial network would be willing to spend millions of dollars on another World War II project anytime soon. And no other filmmaker would receive the attention or editorial freedom Burns gets.

In discussing the criticism, Burns told the Los Angeles Times this month that he noticed that Hispanic groups hadn’t pressured Latino filmmakers to tell the stories he omitted. “No, no, no — it has to be Ken Burns,” he said. “In a way all of this was an extraordinary compliment.” Yes, it was. Latinos recognize that Burns is the country’s preeminent documentary filmmaker. We want him to recognize us and our contributions to America.

On a bluff above the sand and a half-mile from the ocean’s edge at low tide, which was the condition when the first Allied soldiers left their landing craft, a round circle of concrete five feet in diameter provides a collar for a hole in the ground. On the morning of June 6, 1944, the hole was Wid erstandsnest (nest of resistance) 62, a German machine gun emplacement.

Hein Severloh had been in it since shortly after midnight, by which time U.S. aircraft were droning overhead, having dropped young American paratroopers Severloh’s age behind the beaches to disrupt German attempts to rush in reinforcements. Severloh had been billeted near Bayeux, home of the 11th-century tapestry depicting a cross-channel invasion that went the other way, taking William, Duke of Normandy, to become William the Conqueror, England’s sovereign.

Severloh believed that he killed hundreds of GIs, so long and slow was their walk to the safety, such as it was, of the five-foot embankment where the beach meets the bluff. Severloh returned here in sorrow and was consoled by survivors of the forces that waded ashore.

Today, in an America understandably weary of a war of choice that has been defined by execrable choices, a frequently seen bumper sticker proclaims: “War is not the answer.” But here, especially, it is well to remember that whether war is the answer depends on the question.

War was the answer to what ailed Europe in 1944. “In 1942,” writes Timothy Garton Ash of Oxford and Stanford’s Hoover Institution, “there were only four perilously free countries in Europe: Britain, Switzerland, Sweden and Ireland.” Twenty years — a historical blink — later, almost all of Western Europe was free. Twenty years after that, Spain, Portugal and Greece had joined the liberal democracies. Today, for the first time in 2,500 years, most Europeans live under such governments.

Ash argues that Europe cannot define itself negatively — as not America or not Islam. “Europe’s only defining ‘other’ is its own previous self” — its self-destructive, sometimes barbaric past. “This is,” Ash says, “still a very recent past.”

In 1951, just seven years after Severloh and some other Germans surrendered on June 7 to Americans at the village of St. Laurent, Europe began building the institutions that it hoped would keep such young men out of machine gun emplacements. It created the European Coal and Steel Community, precursor of the Common Market (1958), which led to the single market in 1993 and the common currency in 2002.

The implicit hope was that commerce could tame Europe’s turbulent nations. The perennial problem of politics — mankind’s susceptibility to storms of passions — could perhaps be solved, or at least substantially ameliorated, by getting Europe’s peoples to sublimate their energies in economic activities. The quest for improved material well-being would drain away energies hitherto tapped and channeled by demagogues.

Reminders of Europe’s problematic past were recently found a few miles from St. Laurent. Workers preparing a foundation for a new house overlooking Omaha Beach came upon parts of the bodies of two German soldiers. There was scant media attention to this because such discoveries have not been rare.

Also near here, 21,160 German soldiers are buried at La Cambe Cemetery. Thirty percent — more than 6,000 — were never identified, so some German parents conducted “assumed burials.” They placed metal markers bearing the names of their missing sons near the graves of unknown soldiers who were known to have died near where the parents’ sons were last known to be fighting.

Such heartbreaking stories are written into Normandy’s lovely landscape. At the American Cemetery overlooking this beach, amid the many rows of white marble gravestones, are two, side by side, marking the burial places of Ollie Reed and Ollie Reed Jr., a father and his son. The son, an Army first lieutenant, died in Italy on July 6. His father, an Army colonel, was killed July 30 in Normandy. Two telegrams notified the father’s wife, the son’s mother. The telegrams arrived in Manhattan, Kan., 45 minutes apart.

The 19th-century French scholar Ernest Renan, from a Brittany town on the English Channel, defined a nation as a community of shared memory — and shared forgetting. Europe’s emotional equipoise, and the transformation of “Europe” from a geographical to a political expression, has required both remembering and forgetting. Americans who make pilgrimages to this haunting place are reminded of their role, and their stake, in that transformation.

George Bush’s favourite role model is, famously, Jesus, but Winston Churchill is close behind. The US president – who was yesterday again comparing the struggle in Iraq with the allies’ efforts in the second world war – admires the wartime prime minister so much that he keeps what he calls “a stern-looking bust” of Churchill in the Oval Office. “He watches my every move,” Bush jokes. These days, Churchill would probably not care for much of what he sees.

I thought a great deal about Churchill while working on my book Troublesome Young Men, a history of the small group of Conservative MPs who defied Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler, forced Chamberlain to resign in May 1940, and helped make Churchill his successor. I thought my audience would be limited to second world war buffs, so was pleasantly surprised to hear the president has been reading my book. He hasn’t let me know what he thinks, but it’s a safe bet that he’s identifying with the portrayal of Churchill, not Chamberlain. I think Bush’s hero would be bemused; parallels do leap out – but between Bush and Chamberlain, not Bush and Churchill.

Like Bush, and unlike Churchill, Chamberlain came to office with almost no understanding of foreign affairs or experience in dealing with international leaders. None the less, he was convinced that he alone could bring Hitler and Mussolini to heel. He surrounded himself with like-minded advisers, and refused to heed anyone who told him otherwise. In the months leading up to war, Chamberlain and his men saw little need to build a strong coalition of European allies to confront Nazi Germany – ignoring appeals from Churchill and others to fashion a “grand alliance”.

Unlike Bush and Chamberlain, Churchill was never in favour of his country going it alone. Throughout the 1930s, while urging Britain to rearm, he strongly supported using the League of Nations – the forerunner of the United Nations – to provide smaller countries with one-for-all and all-for-one security. After the league failed to stop fascism’s march, Churchill was adamant that Britain must form a true partnership with France and even reach agreement with the despised Soviet Union, neither of which Chamberlain was willing to do.

Like Bush, Chamberlain laid claim to unprecedented executive authority, evading the checks and balances supposed to constrain the office of prime minister. He scorned dissenting views, inside and outside government. When Chamberlain arranged his face-to-face meetings with Hitler in 1938 that ended in the catastrophic Munich conference, he did so without consulting his cabinet. He also bypassed the House of Commons, leading Harold Macmillan, a future Tory prime minister and then an anti-appeasement MP, to complain that Chamberlain was treating parliament “like a Reichstag, to meet only to hear the orations and to register the decrees of the government”.

As was true of Bush and the Republicans before the 2006 midterm elections, Chamberlain and his Tories had a large majority in the Commons, and, as Macmillan noted, the prime minister tended to treat parliament like a lapdog legislature, existing only to do his bidding. “I secretly feel he hates the House of Commons,” wrote one of Chamberlain’s most fervent parliamentary supporters. “Certainly he has a deep contempt for parliamentary interference.”

Churchill revered parliament. He considered himself “a child” and “servant” of the Commons and strongly believed in the legislature’s constitutional role to oversee the executive. In August 1939, when Chamberlain rammed through a two-month parliamentary adjournment just weeks before the war, Churchill – still a backbencher – exploded with anger, calling the prime minister’s move “disastrous”, “pathetic” and “shameful”. He encouraged anti-appeasement colleagues to mount similar attacks, and when Ronald Cartland called Chamberlain a dictator to his face, Churchill congratulated Cartland with an enthusiastic: “Well done, my boy, well done!”

Likewise, Churchill almost certainly would look askance at the Bush administration’s years-long campaign to shut down public debate over the “war on terror” and the conflict in Iraq – tactics markedly similar to Chamberlain’s. Like Bush and his aides, Chamberlain intimidated the press, restricted journalists’ access to sources and claimed that anyone who dared criticise the government was guilty of disloyalty and damaging the national interest. Just as Bush has done, Chamberlain sanctioned the wiretapping of citizens without court authorisation; Churchill was among those whose phones were tapped.

Churchill also believed firmly in the need to protect individual liberties from government encroachment. That’s not to say that he was never guilty of infringing them. In June 1940, when a Nazi invasion seemed imminent, he ordered the internment of more than 20,000 aliens, mostly refugees from Hitler’s and Mussolini’s regimes. But as the invasion scare abated, the vast majority were released, also by his order. “The key word in any understanding of Churchill is the simple word ‘liberty’,” wrote Eric Seal, his principal private secretary. “He … reacted violently against all attempts to regiment … opinion.”

I’ve discovered that writing about Churchill and Chamberlain is like a Rorschach test. Readers draw parallels between the events of the 30s and today, according to their own political philosophies. I’ve received congratulations from people who see similarities between US woes in Iraq and Chamberlain’s disastrous conduct of the so-called phony war in 1939-40. But I’ve also had fan mail from readers who favourably compare the Tory rebels’ courageous fight against Chamberlain to the Bush administration’s campaign against those opposing the Iraq war. Among those who’ve written to me in praise of the book are outgoing Bush adviser Karl Rove and Howard Wolfson, the communications director of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The president no doubt has his own Churchill. “He was resolute,” Bush has remarked. “He was tough. He knew what he believed.” But Churchill would snort, I believe, at the administration’s equation of “Islamofascism”, an amorphous, ill-defined movement forced to resort to terrorism by its lack of military might, with Nazi Germany, a global power that had already conquered several countries before Churchill took office. Still, key members of the Bush administration have compared critics of the war on terror to the appeasers of the 30s, equating their boss and themselves with Churchill and the “troublesome young men” who helped bring him to power. During bleak days in Iraq, the administration’s hawks can be forgiven for hoping that history will show them to be as far-sighted about a gathering storm as Churchill was in the 1930s.

He believed that the US and Britain had a responsibility to serve as exemplars of democracy for the rest of the world, and both countries had to do their best to ensure that the “title deeds of freedom” were strongly safeguarded within their own boundaries. “Let us preach what we practise,” he declared in his 1946 “iron curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri. “But let us also practise what we preach.”

Muslims are obliged to make at least one trip to the holy city of Mecca during their lifetime. This pilgrimage is known as the hajj. It is mandatory for men, voluntary but encouraged for women. A basic dress code ensures that there’s no visible difference between rich and poor, weak and powerful. This simple requirement unites the faithful.

I started thinking about the hajj in the spring, when my wife and I visited nine American military cemeteries in Europe. With the exception of the Normandy American Cemetery, which attracts thousands, others are virtually devoid of visitors, especially American visitors. I wondered:

What if every American who is able to do so made an effort to visit at least one American military cemetery overseas during his or her lifetime?

Most of the cemeteries are in Europe, holding the remains of service members killed during World Wars I and II. Altogether, about 125,000 graves are maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission, and 95,000 missing soldiers are commemorated on bronze or stone. I work for the commission, yet nothing prepared me for the experience of seeing row upon row of crosses and Stars of David, maintained in absolute splendor. Walking with a cemetery superintendent who tells the stories of the fallen, my soul churned as I absorbed the extent of their sacrifice.

I’m an old soldier with combat experience. I appreciate the notions of valor and sacrifice. Still, my emotions were overwhelmed while I heard men and their exploits described so simply. There is no high-brow language. The superintendents say: Here’s who’s buried here, this is what we know about him, and this is what he was doing when he was killed.

The dead are buried without regard to rank. My gratitude flowed as I realized how many of the fallen were barely past adolescence.

We also visited several German cemeteries, including one from World War I near our Aisne-Marne American Cemetery not far from Chateau Thierry and Belleau Woods, outside Paris. With no superintendent on location, we picked up a brochure. It suggests that if visitors listen carefully, the tombstones will talk to them.

Americans visiting our overseas military cemeteries will find themselves enriched in ways I can only partially explain. At a minimum, the visit will prompt a renewed, and awesome, appreciation of those who sleep in the dust below.

Such experiences help put into perspective how our nation benefits from the sacrifice of those willing to put their lives on the line. Without such devotion to dangerous duty, the United States has little to hold itself together. Prosperity is not enough. Our history is based on service, costly service.

The notion of an American hajj has loopholes, I know. But the thought of an activity or sacrifice that draws us together has merit, and we need this coming together now more than ever.

Today is Hiroshima day, the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. As the wartime generation passes on, our sense of gratitude is increasingly mixed with unease regarding one theatre of the second world war. There is a widespread conviction that, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America committed acts that were not only terrible but also wrong.Disarmament campaigners are not slow to advance further charges. Greenpeace maintains that a different American approach might have prevented the cold war, and argues that new research on the Hiroshima decision “should give us pause for thought about the wisdom of current US and UK nuclear weapons developments, strategies, operational policies and deployments”.

This alternative history is devoid of merit. New historical research in fact lends powerful support to the traditionalist interpretation of the decision to drop the bomb. This conclusion may surprise Guardian readers. The so-called revisionist interpretation of the bomb made headway from the 1960s to the 1990s. It argued that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less the concluding acts of the Pacific war than the opening acts of the cold war. Japan was already on the verge of surrender; the decision to drop the bomb was taken primarily to gain diplomatic advantage against the Soviet Union.

Yet there is no evidence that any American diplomat warned a Soviet counterpart in 1945-46 to watch out because America had the bomb. The decision to drop the bomb was founded on the conviction that a blockade and invasion of Japan would cause massive casualties. Estimates derived from intelligence about Japan’s military deployments projected hundreds of thousands of American casualties.

Truman had to take account of this, and dropped the bomb for the reasons he said at the time. Contrary to popular myth, there is no documentary evidence that his military commanders advised him the bomb was unnecessary for Japan was about to surrender. As the historian Wilson Miscamble puts it, Truman “hoped that the bombs would end the war and secure peace with the fewest American casualties, and so they did. Surely he took the action any American president would have undertaken.” Recent Japanese scholarship provides support for this position. Sadao Asada, of Doshisha University, Kyoto, has concluded from analysis of Japanese primary sources that the two bombs enabled the “peace party” within Japan’s cabinet to prevail.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often used as a shorthand term for war crimes. That is not how they were judged at the time. Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire – and for Japan itself. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. The destruction of two cities, and the suffering it caused for decades afterwards, cannot but temper our view of the Pacific war. Yet we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.

Commemoration of war is part of our civic culture, and campaigners against Trident and the US missile defence system have every right to state their case. But those things must not be confused. The campaigners must advance independent grounds for their policy views. Dubious historical claims are not a legitimate way to advance them.

Across central and eastern Europe, nationalists are exploiting the painful history of the second world war to whip up anti-Russian feeling and rehabilitate the far right as social and economic discontent grows – and the process is mirrored in Russia. The latest in a string of such moves is the decision by the Polish authorities to block the reopening of the permanent Russian exhibition at the site of the Auschwitz death camp because of its description of some of its victims (from annexed pre-war Polish territory) as Soviet citizens. It’s difficult to imagine a more sad and cynical debate than one about the citizenship of the massacred millions. Most were of course Jewish, and in the eyes of the Nazis both Poles and Russians were regarded as Untermenschen.

The Polish decision comes after Estonian MPs decided to remove a Soviet war memorial from the centre of Tallinn a few weeks back. The act authorising its removal is the Law on Forbidden Structures Act, a rather Orwellian name for a new cold war against history. The “forbidden structure” in this case is a 2m bronze statue of a Soviet soldier erected in 1947 to commemorate Red Army soldiers killed fighting the Nazis.

Bronze and marble soldiers are being toppled across eastern Europe. The campaign began in 1989-91 with the withdrawal of Soviet troops: Soviet memorials were demolished, Russian-sounding names of streets and squares changed, and red stars from walls cast away. In some countries, the tensions calmed after the turbulent transition period, but in the Baltic republics this anti-historical cold war seems to be a permanent crusade.

The removal of the Tallinn memorial is only the tip of the iceberg. A draft bill recognises the Estonians who served in the German army, including in the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, as “fighters for Estonia’s independence”. Service in the SS is added to the record of work on retirement, while service in the Red Army as part of the anti-Hitler coalition is not.

Latvian rightwingers are also active in rewriting history. The marches of Latvian SS legions are well known – and even the most anti-communist friends of Latvia in the US and western Europe are shocked by these state-sponsored Nazi parades. Most Latvian Jews were murdered by Latvian police, and it is disgusting to read Latvian websites and books that put the blame on the Jewish victims of the Holocaust as “collaborators of Stalin”.

Of course, there are many in the Baltic republics who reject this whitewashing of the Nazi past. And there are democrats in the Estonian and Latvian parliaments (not to mention the strong left in Lithuania), the media and NGOs, who defend the anti-fascist memorials and oppose the Nazi cult rallies. The Estonian president spoke out against the “irresponsible behaviour” of supporters of the “forbidden structures” law. Many Latvians oppose the SS rallies and call for equal rights for the country’s Russian minority. These democrats need more support from western and central Europe.

Soviet memorials are respected in Berlin, and visitors to the rebuilt Reichstag can still see the graffiti carved on the old walls by Russian soldiers in 1945. Germany has set a good example on how to handle its Nazi past, but only a few eastern nations are ready to learn from it.

In my hometown, Budapest, the main Soviet memorial on the Szabadsag (Freedom) Square survived leftwing and rightwing governments. But last September, extreme rightwing rioters who set fire to the state television offices also attacked the memorial. In some Hungarian communities, newly elected rightwing mayors began their jobs by removing Soviet memorials and symbols.

In the west, the memory of the anti-fascist coalition is largely still intact, and only a few extremists claim it would have been better to have been allied with Hitler against the Soviet Union. But in the east, the fall of the Berlin wall created a vacuum in history. The new politicians and media failed to tell the complicated truth about the war, the old pro-Soviet cliches were replaced by anti-Soviet cliches. The tragedy of the Baltic republics under Soviet rule does not change the fact that the death camps of Auschwitz were created by the Nazis and liberated by the Red Army. And the crimes of the Stalinist regime do not alter the fact that millions of Soviet soldiers died for the freedom of Europe.

The Baltic republics should remember Stalin’s victims, and we have to understand their mixed feeling towards Russia. But those who sacrificed their lives against the Nazi regime should be heroes for every democrat.

I have memories of Soviet armed intervention. I was five years old during the 1956 uprising in Hungary. I played with my friends on a Soviet tank burnt out by Molotov cocktails. I know how heroic the fight against the Soviet soldiers was. They had come as liberators but, due to the geopolitical reality, they became oppressors. Opposing the occupation didn’t mean we wanted the Nazis back.

The huge sculpture of a woman on Budapest’s Gellert Hill, erected by order of Marshall Voroshilov, still welcomes the liberators from the east. The soldiers died, we remember their heroic deaths – and life goes on. That’s why we have memorials. It is a lesson across eastern Europe and the Baltic republics as well.

Konstantin Kosachev claims that Estonia now permits SS rallies – but plans to pull down memorials to those who died fighting fascism (An insult to our war dead, March 6). This is not true. Different colours can be used to paint history. For Russia the years 1941-45 mean the great patriotic war, in which the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union and were defeated. For Estonia, alongside Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, the second world war began two years earlier in August 1939, when Stalin and Hitler divided Europe into spheres of influence. As a result Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania lost their independence for 50 years.

Unfortunately, Russia does not want to recognise the words of its first president, Boris Yeltsin. In Hungary in 1992 he said that, after the destruction of fascism, another ideology of violence descended upon eastern Europe. Yeltsin, who apologised for the actions of the Soviet Union, said that one must know one’s own history, because without the complete truth justice cannot be restored, and without the complete truth there can be neither remorse nor forgiveness.

According to Kosachev, chairman of the Russian Duma’s international affairs committee, “a distinction must be made between the political realities of the day and the ordinary people who fought the war”. Russia admits to winning the second world war, but elects not to see any connection with the barbaric crimes against humanity committed by the same regime. For Estonians, the September 1944 re-entry of Soviet troops into our capital, Tallinn, only meant replacement of one occupation regime with another. The loss of human lives during the Soviet and Nazi occupations in Estonia (1940-45) was huge: proportionately, it was as if today’s Britain had lost 12 million people.

The Soviet “liberators” deported my aunt to Siberia for 17 years. To survive she had to drink her own urine. The “liberators” shot her husband without trial; the “charge” was that he was a bank director and supported a liberal market economy and she, his wife, was an accomplice. There are tens of thousands of similar stories.

The International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity, established in 1998 by the late President Meri, has published its first voluminous compendium of 1,337 pages, which describes the first Soviet occupation and the German occupation. Estonia dares face her history whereas, 60 years after the end of the war, Russia still has not.

According to Mr Kosachev, President Putin has described the plan to demolish the Tallinn war memorial as an “ultra-nationalist and very short-sighted policy”. But unlike in Russia, which recently demolished a 30-metre second world war memorial in Stavropol with full approval by the authorities, the issue in Estonia is not about dismantling a monument, but about moving it to a more suitable location (a cemetery).

There are no neo-Nazis marching in Estonia’s streets. But how is it possible that, having defeated Nazism 60 years ago, Russia today is home to more than 50,000 neo-Nazis? Such developments give cause for real concern – even Putin has admitted as much. It is in Europe’s interests to help Russia re-evaluate the past and combat neo-Nazism. Estonia is ready to lend a hand.

The marks of the second world war can be seen all over Europe, in restored buildings, destroyed neighbourhoods, war cemeteries, painful memories and memorials to the millions who died in the war against nazism. In almost all countries the memorials are treated with respect. In Normandy fallen British and German soldiers lie in adjacent cemeteries. Their graves are well kept, so that families may visit their last resting place, and new generations be reminded of the horrors of war.

But in Estonia a new law threatens the very principle of the sanctity of the war dead. The War Graves Protection Act will allow the memorial that stands in the centre of the capital, Tallinn, to be dismantled, and the bodies of unknown soldiers beneath it to be disinterred and reburied elsewhere. While Estonia’s President Toomas Ilves has for now vetoed on technical grounds the part of the act that obliges the government to demolish Soviet war memorials within 30 days, he has waved through another law permitting the reburial of the remains of Soviet soldiers who died fighting the Nazis.

The Russian government is deeply concerned as this plan threatens to upset relations between Estonians and Russians living in the country and hopes of improving our friendship as independent, neighbouring states. The children and grandchildren of men and women who fought fascism will no longer have a place in central Tallinn where they can honour those heroes. Meanwhile in Estonia, as in Latvia, it has become permissible for veterans of the Hitlerite SS not only to form associations, but to hold rallies in city centres.

In other words, it has become politically correct among some EU members to honour those who tried to bury European civilisation and were responsible for a five-year catastrophe on our continent, while they make it more difficult to honour those who gave their lives to stamp out the cancer of fascism.

Estonians argue that the liberation of their country by Soviet soldiers was in fact the beginning of a new occupation. But a distinction must be made between the political realities of the day and the ordinary people who fought in the war. The Stalinist, communist state that according to Estonian radicals occupied Estonia also brought political repression for millions in the rest of the Soviet Union. The secret protocols of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, which assigned the Baltic states to the Soviet sphere of influence, were condemned by the Soviet parliament as long ago as 1989, and declared null and void.

Moreover, the men and women who fought in the Red Army believed they were ridding the world of fascism – and that is what they did. They and their children can’t be held responsible for crimes committed later. It is unforgivable to equate liberators with occupiers.

President Putin has described the plan to demolish the Tallinn war memorial as an “ultra-nationalist and very short-sighted policy”. As a response some in Russia advocate sanctions against Estonia. But this should be an ultimate option. If the war-graves laws are not implemented, the opposite should happen: economic and trade links should be strengthened.

Before any attempt to wipe out the memory of the sacrifices that Soviet (and Estonian) citizens made to save Europe from nazism, we need a period of reflection. The second world war still strikes a deeply emotional chord in Russia, as elsewhere in Europe. As a last resort, Russia is willing to rebury the sacred remains of our soldiers in Russian soil. But let us hope that in the interests of friendship between our nations and respect for the war dead, this does not have to happen.

Art Shibayama is an American who served in the Army during the Korean War. Like many veterans, Cpl. Shibayama was not born in the United States. He was born in Lima, Peru, to Japanese Peruvian parents. Until 1942, Shibayama, his two brothers and three sisters lived comfortably with their parents and grandparents, all of whom had thriving businesses. However, after America entered World War II, his family was forcibly removed from Peru, transported to the United States and held in a government-run internment camp in Crystal City, Tex.

Like many Japanese American families, Shibayama’s family lost everything they owned. But the greater injustice occurred when his grandparents were sent to Japan in exchange for American prisoners of war. Their family never saw them again.

Shibayama and his family were among the estimated 2,300 people of Japanese descent from 13 Latin American countries who were taken from their homes and forcibly transported to the Crystal City camp during World War II. The U.S. government orchestrated and financed the deportation of Japanese Latin Americans for use in prisoner-of-war exchanges with Japan. Eight hundred people were sent across the Pacific, while the remaining Japanese Latin Americans were held in camps without due process until after the war ended.

Further study of the events surrounding the deportation and incarceration of Japanese Latin Americans is merited and necessary. While most Americans are aware of the internment of Japanese Americans, few know about U.S. government activities in other countries that were fueled by prejudice against people of Japanese ancestry.

That is why we have introduced H.R. 662, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Latin Americans of Japanese Descent Act. We should review U.S. military and State Department directives requiring the relocation, detention and deportation of Japanese Latin Americans to Axis countries. Then we should recommend appropriate remedies. It is the right thing to do to affirm our commitment to democracy and the rule of law.

This year marks the 26th anniversary of the formation of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, whose findings led to the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. It provided an official apology and financial redress to most of the Japanese Americans who were subjected to wrongdoing and confined in camps during World War II. Those loyal Americans were vindicated by the fact that not a single documented case of sabotage or espionage was committed by a Japanese American during that time. This act was the culmination of a half-century of struggle to bring justice to those who were denied it. But work to rectify and close this regrettable chapter in our nation’s history remains unfinished.

U.S. involvement in the expulsion and internment of people of Japanese descent who lived in various Latin American countries is thoroughly recorded in government files. These civilians were robbed of their freedom — their civil and human rights thrown by the wayside — as they were kidnapped from nations not directly involved in World War II. The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians acknowledged these federal actions in detaining and interning civilians of enemy or foreign nationality, particularly those of Japanese ancestry, but the commission failed to fully examine and report on the historical documents that exist in distant archives.

Today, the Day of Remembrance, marks the anniversary of the 1942 signing of Executive Order 9066 — the document that made it possible to intern thousands of Japanese Americans, German Americans, Italian Americans and Japanese Latin Americans during World War II. Though it is important that we remember what took place, it is more critical that we act, for justice delayed is justice denied. And for the dwindling number of surviving internees who became Americans, such as Cpl. Art Shibayama, justice has been delayed far too long. They deserve our attention, our respect and the official recognition of a country that is willing to heal and to make amends.

Beneath Dresden lay the catacombs. Towards the end of the second world war, the authorities decided that these cellars under the beautiful baroque Old Town could provide cover from British air raids. On February 13 1945, the bombers arrived and many civilians fled below to avoid being killed by shrapnel or crumbling buildings, or being burned alive.But, writes Jorg Friedrich in his book The Fire: the Bombing of Germany 1940-45, “this tightly meshed underground construction was a landscape of insanity”. Such was the incendiary impact of the bombing that heat, gases, flames and smoke whipped through the labyrinth. People panicked. In one underground corridor, 50 people got so wedged that their bodies were found fused together from the heat. Underneath the junction of Margarthenstrasse and Marienstrasse there was a steel door connecting two passageways at a right angle. Two groups of people ran towards the door from opposite sides, desperately seeking a way out of a huge subterranean oven. Each blocked the other group from going through the door and so they all died. Under Moritzstrasse, a man ran for an exit shaft, but the following crowd pulled him back and he was killed in the crush. Two hundred people pressed on this crowd from behind, so that the body could not be budged. Again, everyone died.

This was where most of the 35,000 victims of the RAF on February 13 and USAAF attacks the following day died.

Friedrich’s book, a bestseller in his homeland four years ago and which now appears in English, is thick with such horror stories. They were hard for him to avoid in meticulously detailing, over nearly 600 harrowing pages, how 635,000 Germans, mostly civilian, died and 7.5 million were made homeless when British and US bombs were dropped on 131 cities and towns. “For more than 50 years after the second world war,” wrote the war historian and journalist Max Hastings, “German writers remained remarkably muted about the issue of Allied bombing of their country.”

The Fire is part of a growing German literature, including WG Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, that breaks this near silence about their wartime suffering. This is no neo-Nazi apologia (Friedrich is a former Trotskyist who hitherto spent his career indicting the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe for what it did to Coventry), rather an investigation of memory repressed for more than half a century. Friedrich tells me his 93-year-old mother, who experienced the bombing of Essen, cannot talk to him about what she saw: she embodies what Sebald called a “pre-conscious self-censorship, a way of obscuring a world that could no longer be presented in comprehensible terms”. Surely, I ask as we sit in the gathering gloom of Friedrich’s Berlin apartment, your mother must dream about the past? “I don’t know. She can’t talk to me about it.”

For many, to mourn was not justified because of Nazi war crimes. Sebald wrote: “Some of those affected by the air raids, despite their grim but impotent fury in the face of such obvious madness, regarded the great firestorms as a just punishment.”

Friedrich wants not only to put the suffering on record, but to question the moral justification for the air raids. This makes English publication fraught, at least for Friedrich, who considers some of what the British did to be war crimes. He is dreading his publicity tour: “The British have simply put a defence around this bombing campaign. It is unquestionable and yet I am questioning it.”

Indeed, The Fire is being published in English by an American academic publisher, Columbia University Press. “I don’t think there is any conspiracy about this,” says Simon Winder, head of Penguin’s history division. “I think the reason is much more lazy than that – it’s just the idea of translating it may have proved too much.” Winder did see a manuscript, but with another book on the subject by the historian Richard Overy commissioned, declined to take it on.

The tenor of Friedrich’s book has irritated even British historians who regard the bombing as a mistake. “Everything he says in the book is true in terms of the details of the effects of the bombing,” says Hastings. “It is when Friedrich speaks of ‘war crimes’ that I become suspicious. What worries me about Germany, and indeed Japan, today is that there is an increasing move towards the doctrine of moral equivalence, but I think it’s important to reject that. It’s one thing to say, as I do, that the bombing of Germany was a great mistake, and another to compare it to the killings of Jews or the appalling things the Japanese did.”

Keith Lowe’s book, Inferno, on the bombing of Hamburg in which 45,000 people died, is due next year. He says: “Something we tend to forget is the suffering we put the Germans through and Friedrich highlights that in no uncertain terms. That’s a good thing.

However, the way he goes about it is not something I can agree with. When he writes about libraries being set ablaze by our bombs, he describes it as book burning; and when he writes about people killed in cellars where they were sheltered, he used the word crematoria. He thus uses the language of the Holocaust in describing our bombing of Germany. But to equate what we did with what the Nazis did is nonsense really.

“The intentions of Bomber Command were completely different from those of the SS. Arthur Harris [Air Marshall Sir Arthur 'Bomber' Harris, the commander in chief of Bomber Command] wanted to end the war as quickly as possible.”

Friedrich does more than indict the British for killing German civilians. He contends that the Luftwaffe and the RAF changed the nature of war. “The idea is that the cities and their production and their morale contributed to warfare,” he says. “So warfare is not simply the business of an army, it’s the business of a nation. Therefore everyone is a target. That is how Churchill and Hitler changed the nature of warfare. That is what Bin Laden says. The idea is we all deserve it. You and me and those German, British, and Japanese civilians in the mass graves: they all deserve it.”

I point out that the first protocol to the fourth Geneva Convention of 1977 forbids military attacks upon civilians. Civilian targets are defined as “all objects which are not military objectives”. Article 52 defines military objectives as “those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralisation, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage”. One might, see how Article 52 might justify bombing civilians, so long as they fell under the description of military objectives.

“This is all true,” replies Friedrich, “but civilians were targets irrespective of military necessity. We saw it in Dresden and we have seen it in many places since. We see it still today. Such is modern war. And from the first there was no international court to indict those such as Harris and Sir Charles Portal, the British air force chief who, in 1942, ordered the annihilation of 900,000 enemy noncombatants. Nor is there any charge of a war crime against Winston Churchill, who was in charge of the British war effort and knew what was happening.”

Should these men be charged with war crimes? “The question should at least be asked,” he says guardedly.

Even in Britain, the reputation of Harris has been controversial. In 1948, disappointed at postwar criticism and that he alone of wartime commanders-in-chief was not offered a peerage, Harris left Britain for South Africa, returning in 1953 when Churchill, re-elected prime minister, offered him a baronetcy. Even after his death in 1984, Harris was dogged by opprobrium: in 1992 the Queen Mother was jeered as she unveiled a statue outside the RAF church, St Clement Danes, in London. The statue was repeatedly sprayed with graffiti. “It is very unfair,” says Lowe. “If you’re going to blame Harris, you’ve got to blame Churchill as well.”

But, I ask Friedrich, wasn’t the loss of life in Dresden the tragic consequence of a raid premised on military necessity? The British military historian Corelli Barnett argues that Harris took a “purely operational decision to attack Dresden, a key road and rail centre behind the German divisions fighting the Red Army”, and it was “fitting that the most notorious Bomber Command attack of them all” took place a fortnight after the full horror of the Nazi extermination camps became known to the world.

Frederick Taylor, in his acclaimed Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945, argued that behind the seeming peace lay armaments factories and marshaling yards; Dresden was channelling men and armaments east to fight the Red Army.

Friedrich thinks such justifications are absurd. At that stage in the war the optical precision instruments manufactured in Dresden for submarines and fighter planes could never have been used. He cites a memo from Albert Speer to Hitler at the end of January 1945 that said: “We have eight weeks and we’re finished.” He goes on: “It is 150% evident that all those parts in Dresden would have never become weapons because of a lack of coal, a lack of locomotives and a lack of railway lines.”

He doubts Dresden was as important for the transport of troops and armaments as Taylor alleges. “Like George Bush in Iraq they had bad intelligence and made a terrible mistake. But British historians do not believe it was a mistake. They bought this argument.”

Not all Britons who reflect on the bombing of Dresden take this view. The philosopher AC Grayling, in his recent book Among the Dead Cities, argues that many of the raids were unnecessary and disproportionate. He focuses on Operation Gomorrah, the raid on Hamburg. He writes: “It clearly and unequivocally targeted the civilian population of a large city, which was carpet bombed at night to fulfil the aim, graphically described in Sir Arthur Harris’s own words … of ‘crushing Boche, killing Boche, terrorising Boche’. If Operation Gomorrah was an immoral act, then how much more so were Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Grayling’s argument is that area or carpet bombing was immoral. “Bombing attacks that were genuine attempts at precision bombing – targeting oil, V-weapon launch sites, railways lines, U-boat pens – killed people too; but here the defence applies that there was a war on and that these things happen in war. It cannot be said deliberately targeting civilians and dropping thousands of tons of bombs on them remorselessly is a side effect of war.”

Harris, whose words have the virtue of bluntness, wrote in February 1945: “I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.”

“Even if I bought that argument about supply lines,” says Friedrich, “would that justify the killing of 30,000-40,000 people? When the Germans killed 30,000 PoWs, that was treated as a war crime. Perhaps Dresden should be.”

Does he believe all bombing raids on German cities were war crimes? “We have to take it city for city. The legitimacy of Hamburg is a different question from that of Wurzburg. But regarding Dresden, even if you buy the argument about supply lines, you are entitled to look at tens of thousands of people who were killed and ask were the supply lines worth it.”

When the book first appeared, a Protestant priest told him German civilians had to die in British bombing raids, Friedrich says, “because this is the answer of heaven to the Holocaust. Philosophers, priests and poets have been the most cruel defenders of British mass killing. But how could they all have deserved it? Even the 30,000 children?”

Is there not something in this, I ask? It was the Germans who started the war and the bombing of civilians. Harris prophesied, climbing on the roof of the Air Ministry in London one night as bombs were exploding all around, “They have sown the wind, and so they shall reap the whirlwind.”

“I agree,” says Friedrich. “The Germans did start the war. And we did bomb London and the cities of the English Midlands first. It is even true that the British learned from what the Luftwaffe did. For him [Harris] Coventry wasn’t the grave of 600 persons but an innovation in warfare. He learned from it how to get at the infrastructure of a medieval city, how to make firefighters’ work more difficult by destroying water mains and so on. Then, as the war progressed, this whole method of city bombing became a combined endeavour – each side learned from the other about radar, anti-aircraft and so on. Churchill and Hitler changed during the war. They were pushed to the abyss.”

Are you suggesting Hitler and Churchill are morally equivalent? “No. That would be silly.” Rather, Friedrich is echoing the prescient wartime words of English pacifist writer Vera Brittain in Seeds of Chaos. She prophesied with “complete confidence that the callous cruelty which has caused us to destroy innocent human life in Europe’s most crowded cities, and the vandalism which has obliterated historic treasures in some of her loveliest, will appear to future civilisation as an extreme form of criminal lunacy”.

There have been many conciliatory gestures over the years. In the 60s, young people went from Coventry to Dresden, those two cities whose historic cathedrals were left in ruins, to help rebuild a bombed hospital. In 2004, a gift from the British people of a golden cross was placed on top of the rebuilt Dresden cathedral, the Frauenkirche. It had been made by a London goldsmith whose father had flown in a bomber over the city on February 13 1945.

Friedrich thinks such gestures are insufficient and believes the British head of state ought to make a symbolic gesture to recognise the suffering of German civilians. In this the Queen seems to be in a vexed position: when she visited Dresden in 2004, she did not lay a wreath at the Frauenkirche because, Canon Paul Oestericher contended in the Guardian, “her advisers feared tabloid headlines”.

What should the Queen do? “There are mass graves in cemeteries where the bomb victims lie – in Kassel for example,” Friedrich says. “Why not simply go to these mass graves of the bombing campaigns and stand there and pray? Ronald Reagan went to the SS graves. Why could not the Queen pray for Germany’s civilian dead?”

Bombers & survivors

Bill McCrea, pilot, on the raid on Hamburg of July 27 1943: ‘All I was thinking about was dropping my bombs and getting home – the same as everybody … It was an appalling sight. Every so often it was just burbling up, just like a volcano. Every so often there was another explosion, another bomb went in … there was just a whole sea, a mass of flame.’

Ted Groom, flight engineer, on the raids of July 1943: ‘Today, I would think “Poor sods”. But at the time, when you’re young, you just think “Cor, this is a damn good show tonight!” I never thought about them, because I could remember London, Coventry and all these places. To me it was something that they’d asked for.’

Gretel Simon, survivor of the bombing of Kassel, October 1943: ‘When the first bombs hit around 8.25pm, the bricks around the hole through the wall were flying around like pieces of rubble. After every close hit there was such a churning of dust and air through the cellars that you thought the building would collapse … The sound of buildings crashing down nearby was so dreadful, as was the terrible thunder of two factory chimneys that collapsed, both landing right next door. Peeking out through the cellar hole you could see only a sliver of the sky, glowing red.’

Elisabeth Gerstner, on the bombing of Bonn, July 1944: ‘I saw the aeroplanes in the sky, a whole swarm of silver birds glistening in the sun. Then I saw the bombs falling. The blast knocked me down the steep stairway to the bunker. I banged with my fists and my feet against the door and they opened up for me. Usually they don’t open up the bunker door once the bombs start falling.’

· The Fire is published by Columbia University Press in January.

· Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943, is published by Penguin in February.

Son cosas que sólo suceden una vez en la vida, casualidades irrepetibles. En este caso, asistir a la batalla de Stalingrado desde dos perspectivas opuestas, la primera situada en el frente ruso, la segunda en las líneas alemanas. En ambas ocasiones conduce la visita un guía infalible: el primero es Vassili Grossman cuya novela Vida y destino está compuesta por un mosaico de situaciones y personajes cuya vida y cuyo destino, según reza el título, se van a jugar en la ciudad del Volga. El segundo Jonathan Littell, ganador del último premio Goncourt con Les Bienveillantes, cuyo protagonista sufrirá una herida casi mortal durante el asedio, con consecuencias decisivas para su propia vida y destino. Está anunciada la próxima aparición de ambas novelas en español.

Tanto el protagonista de la ficción francesa, Max Aue, como el personaje histórico Vassili Grossman asisten a la destrucción salvaje de la ciudad, viven como ratas entre las ratas, hacinados en la noche de los subterráneos repletos de cadáveres congelados, son testigos del canibalismo de la tropa y contemplan el derrumbe de cualquier definición de humanidad por somera que se quiera. Ambos salvan la vida de milagro y gracias a ello pueden dar testimonio de un momento decisivo en la historia del mundo. No importa que estemos hablando de dos novelas. La veracidad testimonial de Grossman ha sido confirmada por Antony Beevor (Un escritor en guerra, Ed. Crítica). En cuanto a Littell, aún es pronto para conocer el criterio de los especialistas, pero hasta el momento su documentación ha suscitado el respeto de todos los expertos.

El lector que comienza por las mil páginas del libro de Grossman conoce el horror desde el lado soviético, pero cuando acaba las mil páginas del libro de Littell constata que en la zona alemana tenía lugar la misma barbaridad: los soldados morían de hambre, frío, tifus, disentería, muchos se automutilaban y eran fusilados de inmediato, otros enloquecían y asesinaban a sus compañeros. Sin embargo, los jefes y oficiales de ambos bandos, refugiados en búnkeres calentados con enormes hogueras, comían y bebían en abundancia y eran asistidos en todo momento por un nutrido grupo de putas.

Ciertamente, la estrategia militar de ambos bandos estaba a cargo de generales alcohólicos, morfinómanos o locos de atar y si alguno había que conservaba el seso era inmediatamente apartado del mando por la feroz competencia intestina entre las diversas facciones de los partidos nazi y comunista. La heroicidad aparecía de vez en cuando como desahogo de la desesperación mediante acciones suicidas individuales guiadas por la enajenación, alguna de ellas a cargo de tiradores de élite que hacían de cazadores en la jungla persiguiendo a un enemigo zoológico. En ambos bandos las condecoraciones posteriores fueron una burla vesánica contra las víctimas de aquella carnicería.

He aquí dos caras de la misma muerte, la imagen especular de dos gemelos, Stalin y Hitler. En la ciudad de Stalingrado chocaron los dos totalitarismos y a lo largo de un año rusos y alemanes se percataron de que aquel iba a ser el punto de inflexión de la guerra. Allí se decidiría cuál de las dos tiranías iba a quedarse con el mercado ideológico europeo. Ante la estupefacción del alto estado mayor alemán, los bolcheviques, aquellos primates racialmente inferiores, ganaron la batalla, seguramente ayudadospor el empecinamiento narcisista de Hitler quien ordenó resistir hasta la muerte y disparar contra todo aquel que tratara de retirarse. La destrucción del Sexto Ejército no fue una anécdota sino el cambio de signo en el hasta entonces triunfante destino del Reich. El estalinismo iba a vencer al nazismo.

Ambas novelas, aunque separadas por cuarenta años de historia, presentan a los regímenes nazi y comunista como dos posibilidades intercambiables, dos modos de inventar la sociedad futura, hipertécnica, masiva y poshumana que estaba en trance de construcción en aquel momento y sobre la que Benjamin escribió soberbias iluminaciones. Ambas ideologías compartían más elementos de los que las separaban. Ambos totalitarismos se oponían juntamente al modelo anglosajón, el verdadero enemigo todavía hoy.

Asombrosamente, Grossman esperaba publicar su inmensa novela en la URSS. Había confiado con gran candidez en el deshielo anunciado por Jruschov. A pesar de lo cual, cuando el novelista murió en 1964 aún era un comunista convencido, lo que no impidió que comprendiera la complicidad de los regímenes totalitarios. Así lo argumenta el torturador Liss, uno de los personajes más inquietantes de su novela y quizá contrafigura de Himmler, ante su prisionero favorito, Mostovskoi, intelectual del partido comunista y excelente militar cuyos rasgos recuerdan a los de Grossman.

“Somos vuestros enemigos mortales, sí, de acuerdo, pero nuestra victoria será también la vuestra, ¿comprendes? Si vosotros ganáis, nosotros sin duda seremos destruidos, pero continuaremos viviendo en vuestra victoria. Es una paradoja: si perdemos la guerra, la ganamos, continuamos desarrollándonos bajo otra forma, pero conservamos nuestra esencia”.

La fascinante conversación entre Liss y Mostovskoi se parece a la de Nafta con Settembrini, aquel encarnizado torneo dialéctico de La montaña mágica entre el totalitario y el demócrata, por ver quién ganaba el alma de Hans Castorp, el indolente enfermo europeo. Pero Thomas Mann no conocía entonces la doble faz de Nafta, con un perfil comunista y otro nazi. Por eso para Grossman y para Littell la derrota de uno u otro de los regímenes totalitarios era insuficiente y suponía el sometimiento de toda la sociedad al mismo modelo de esclavitud física y mental diseñado por intelectuales de laboratorio. Los alemanes daban mayor importancia a nociones estéticas como la Nación, la Sangre o la Tierra, en tanto que los soviéticos preferían un vocabulario seudoético: la revolución comunista, la lucha de clases, la dictadura del proletariado. Ensalmos que disimulaban el sadismo de los dirigentes, la cobardía y estupidez del aparato, la codicia de los financieros y el colosal resentimiento de una parte de la población que se consideraba agraviada.

“Los dos creemos que el hombre no elige libremente su destino, sino que se lo impone la naturaleza o la historia. Y de ahí ambos deducimos que hay enemigos objetivos, que ciertas categorías humanas pueden y deben ser legítimamente eliminadas, no por lo que han hecho o pensado, sino por lo que son. Sólo nos diferenciamos en la definición de las categorías: para vosotros, los judíos, los gitanos, los polacos, e incluso tengo entendido que los enfermos mentales. Para nosotros, los kulaks, los burgueses, los desviacionistas del partido. En el fondo, es lo mismo”.

Esto es lo que le dice el coronel Pravdine, un comunista ucraniano que ha caído en manos de las SS en Stalingrado y que va a ser asesinado de inmediato, durante su conversación con el Sturmbannführer Max Aue en una escena especular, casi idéntica a la de Grossman, quien, por cierto, era ucraniano. Sin embargo, el comunista añade una diferencia:

“La ideología bolchevique busca el bien de la humanidad, en tanto que la vuestra es mezquina, sólo quiere el bien de los alemanes”.

Esta diferencia, que deberían meditar todos los nacionalistas y en especial los más agresivos (no hay que olvidar que la reciente guerra de los comunistas serbios fue un calco del genocidio nazi), es la que acabaría dando la victoria publicitaria a los bolcheviques. Bien es verdad que era tan sólo una diferencia de intenciones y que las buenas intenciones, en política, son irrelevantes. Puede suceder que un grupo ideológico busque la felicidad universal y la bondad edénica, pero si sólo consigue ampliar el dolor, la corrupción, la violencia, la humillación y la desesperación de los ciudadanos, es tan execrable como cualquier satrapía basada en el bienestar de un puñado de mafiosos.

Es cierto, en todo caso, que la propaganda comunista era (y es) más eficaz que la publicidad nazi. Se trataba del mismo producto: vivir en una sociedad convertida en campo de concentración, con un cuerpo de verdugos y policías que acaparaba todos los privilegios. Pero el discurso nazi parecía arcaico, prehistórico, atávico: pruebas de sangre, medidas de cráneos, Madre Patria, selección lingüística, infrahumanos… En tanto que la publicidad comunista aparentaba mayor adecuación al siglo: planificación económica, paraíso del proletariado, materialismo dialéctico. Estamos ante la misma mercancía con diferente envoltorio. No obstante, nadie puede negar que el envoltorio bolchevique era de una calidad muy superior al empalagoso kitsch germánico y eso le dio la victoria.

Han pasado ya muchos años desde que cayó el muro. Anotados puntillosamente por la KGB, sabemos los millones de asesinatos que ha costado el paraíso del proletariado; el envoltorio, sin embargo, sigue embobando a la clientela. Ya nadie alardea de su pasado nazi, fascista, franquista o maoísta. Cada día, sin embargo, asistimos a la celebración y encomio de algún antiguo estalinista, de una vieja leninista, uno de aquellos que cuando yo estudiaba en la Universidad auguraban “el próximo exterminio de la burguesía”, imagen especular del “exterminio de la anti-España”. Sus escritos están en las hemerotecas, sus discursos en algunos libros. Desde aquellos escritos y aquellos discursos, ni una palabra de comprensión, ni un gesto de lucidez. Sólo el empecinamiento narcisista y la mentira sistemática sobre los hechos.

La memoria alemana ha pasado por trances difíciles resueltos con dignidad admirable. El Deutsche Bank ha publicado un enorme volumen sobre la colaboración de las grandes familias y las entidades financieras con el Reich. ¿Alguien puede imaginar algo semejante en España? Así pues, ¿de qué memoria hablamos? Sólo el día en que los representantes y seguidores de ambos totalitarismos, sin dramatismo, sin delirio confesionario, den cuenta de las atrocidades en las que colaboraron y la escasa importancia que sus buenas intenciones tuvieron para millones de asesinados, sólo entonces podremos hablar de memoria y no de publicidad para imberbes.

Here, 64 years late, are edited excerpts from a dispatch sent to The New York Times by Robert Trumbull, the paper’s correspondent at Pearl Harbor. It details a triumphant but mostly forgotten story of World War II: the salvage effort that rebuilt the Pacific Fleet after the Japanese attack.

A city of seamen, engineers, divers, carpenters, welders, pipe fitters and other industrial workers arose overnight at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard. Its slogan was “We keep them fit to fight,” and within two years the yard raised or salvaged all the damaged ships except the Arizona and the Utah.

One year after the attack, with the harbor still choked with wreckage, Trumbull wrote a 15,000-word, three-part series about the round-the-clock operation. But wartime censorship killed the articles. Like the civilian rescue workers and hardhats at ground zero, the shipyard workers dispersed, unheralded, when the job was done. Trumbull died in 1992.

PEARL HARBOR, Dec. 13 (Passed by naval censor) —

TWO of the great stories of world naval history concern Pearl Harbor. First is the stunning blow dealt the United States Pacific Fleet in the Japanese sneak attack here Dec. 7, 1941. The second, which may well be the more significant story when the world returns to the ways of peace, deals with the miracle of reclamation and repair accomplished here to undo the incredibly complex destruction wrought by the Japanese bombers.

Undoing of the Pearl Harbor damage is a story that continues today; as this is written its climax is still in the future. Its first full telling in this series of articles reveals the greatness of American industrial ingenuity, which has reached at Pearl Harbor a historic flowering.

What has been done here to put back into fighting trim the once proud warships that were unmercifully rent and shattered by bomb and torpedo, the ships pounded and broken into an unholy mess and then jammed by their own great weight into the muck of the harbor bottom, could scarcely be grasped by anyone who has not seen it.

To understand adequately the staggering problem that faced the naval engineers Dec. 7, 1941, one must go back and survey Pearl Harbor as it lay in the silence of death and ruin after the attack.

The battleship Nevada, staggered by a number of heavy bomb hits and punctured by a torpedo that struck near the bow, was able to get underway and leave the hell that was Battleship Row. It beached itself in the channel and sank back to rest with water lapping its quarterdeck.

The California, its bow burned and its insides horribly scrambled by torpedoes amidships, sank at its moorings, settling in the mud with a list of five to seven degrees. Only its high turrets poked above the water, which swirled over its stern and quarterdeck, and rushed inside the torn hole to add its own vast weight to the mass pressing into the soft harbor bottom.

Also sunk at its moorings in Battleship Row was the West Virginia, terribly wounded by both bombs and torpedoes. Like the California, it remained in an upright position. This circumstance made reclamation more readily workable, although discouragingly complicated problems remained.

The Arizona, the only battleship listed as lost — and rightfully so, as will be seen — rested on the bottom near Ford Island, devastated by fire within as well as wrecked by bombs and torpedoes.

On the opposite side of Ford Island, the Oklahoma lay capsized, 150 degrees from the vertical, its ravaged port side turned under. It was anchored to the bottom by its own masts and superstructure, which were pushed down through layers of harbor mud that closed over the masts with uncounted tons of downward pressure.

Sunk by a heavy bomb hit was the big floating dry dock, which contained the destroyer Shaw at the time. The minelayer Oglala was sunk on its side at its dock, and the two destroyers Cassin and Downes were lost in the dry dock. The Downes was literally blown in two by the explosion of its magazine. The Cassin, which lay alongside the Downes to starboard in the dry dock, also caught fire and, its hull mottled like wetted paper, fell off its blocks and leaned over wearily against the Downes.

Rear Adm. William R. Furlong, a gray, stocky Pennsylvanian, was commander of the Pacific Fleet mine force on Dec. 7, 1941. He rose early, as is his custom, that Sunday morning. He was on the deck of his flagship, the ungainly Oglala.

Admiral Furlong’s amazed blue eyes saw the first Japanese bomb dropped in the Pearl Harbor phase of the attack strike a seaplane ramp on Ford Island. He saw the second bomb hit a Ford Island hangar, setting it afire. This plane, having done its share in nullifying the fleet’s air power, circled, turned and flew back by the Oglala at eye level to the admiral. “I could have hit the plane with a potato,” Admiral Furlong said.

Thus Admiral Furlong saw the terrible damage done. Shortly, as commandant of the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, he was assigned to get it undone. He had the entire Pearl Harbor establishment at his call for a job that was heroic in its broad proportions, and which in detail was often seemingly impossible, frequently discouraging and always physically arduous, filthy, stinking and dangerous.

Nowhere in the world, according to Navy officers here, have Navy and civilian workers toiled together in such close coordination and harmony on a monumental task. Their joint achievement has never been equaled, either as a feat in mechanics or as an example of cooperation between military and nonmilitary men.

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When the subject of the West Virginia is mentioned to the men who worked on its salvage, they seldom say anything. They just whistle.

The Japanese left this $27 million beauty a model for destruction. It will be amazing and disheartening to them now to learn that it will return to the war a better ship than it was before.

The West Virginia’s 32,600-ton mass lay deep in the water when the Japanese flew away. It listed far to port, its starboard bilge hooked into the adjacent battleship Tennessee.

Seven torpedoes had hit its port side, blowing out a series of gashes above and below the armor belt 120 feet long and so wide from lip to lip that two tall men could stand, one on the other’s shoulders, in the vent.

The boat deck was a shattered mass. Bombs laid open four decks that way an earthquake might tear away the wall of a four-story building, leaving the rooms indecently exposed. Up on the bridge, Capt. Mervyn S. Bennion had lain grievously wounded, refusing to be moved, and there he died. Posthumously he was awarded his country’s highest honor, the Congressional Medal.

Japan’s dive bombers did their work well on the West Virginia. The heavy bomb abaft the bridge that had damaged all the upper works had pushed one deck clear down upon another, and a five-inch gun in a rended casemate fell a full deck below, as if sprung from a trapdoor.

The heavy armor belt showed the marks of six torpedoes. Another tore into its vitals under the stern, breaking the rudder.

Inside, the West Virginia looked as if she had been crumpled like paper in a giant hand. When the engineers went to work on the West Virginia, almost the only point in its favor was that the ship was not capsized. The great slash in its port side was too large for any patch. Delicate matching of the timber frames to the lines of its hull was out of the question, for the sides of the ship had writhed in their agony, and it no longer fitted its blueprints.

The engineers decided to use cofferdams, watertight chambers that could be built and attached to the ship. So huge cofferdams were built, their wooden sections braced with steel. They were lowered, bolted to the hull as on other ships, and meeting so as to form one tremendous outwall. The cofferdam was further secured by long steel rods running vertically upward from their attachments inside the timber structure to A-frames fastened to the deck above.

The support from the top was given by frames of steel I-beams, from which the cofferdams hung as from a coat hanger.

Now for the troublesome problem of sealing at the bottom, where a snug fitting of the wood was impracticable: Hundreds of tons of tremie concrete were poured from hoppers into funnels high above the water. This quick-setting cement, which hardens under water, oozed through thick pipes and formed about the West Virginia’s uneven crevasses far below. It hardened and made the cofferdam part of the ship watertight.

As the pumps strained to suck out the fouled sea inside, the West Virginia rose, inch by inch. Each new day disclosed a new surface ring of oil and black muck from the harbor bottom marking on the cofferdam the laborious progress of the ship’s flotation.

During this time, the workers lived close ashore in rude huts built for them so they could stay near the job. They came to work on foot, over a bridge laid on floats. These were sailors all. The “yard workmen,” civilians, had their customary quarters elsewhere, and were taken to and from the ship by boat.

When the time came to nurse the West Virginia over the sill and into dry dock, the engineers held their breath, for the battleship now was in great danger of striking some small obstruction that would rupture it again.

On the keel blocks, the West Virginia had to take rough treatment to remove the concrete. The only workable way was to blast it out with small sticks of dynamite.

This done, the job before Admiral Furlong’s big and hard-bitten organization could be stated simply, but the implications were staggering. They just had to rebuild a large portion of the ship. The compartments below decks were half-filled with rubble — rotting stuff that exuded an overpowering stench. Discoveries odd and gruesome were frequent as the men set about righting and cleansing the charnel. This work was arduous and discouraging, but the work crews, supervised by the West Virginia’s own officers and men who treated the maimed battleship as a mother would tend a sick child, carried on.

There were instances of heroism in the salvage that deserve to go permanently into the annals of Dec. 7. One day an unexploded 1,750-pound bomb was discovered, held in a section of steel that it had penetrated. An officer risked his life to unscrew the live fuses.

Another time the workers came upon the uninjured air flask of a Japanese torpedo. The officers spent an uncomfortable time searching for the warhead. They came to the conclusion that it had dropped off before the fish entered the ship. This torpedo, weirdly, was encircled, when found, by one of the ship’s barber chairs.

Workmen prowling the ruins below decks made several tragic discoveries of the type that can only be expected when a city of more than a thousand men is hurled to the bottom of the sea in a space of minutes.

An incidental point of interest is that the West Virginia yielded to the cleanup crews a fine reservoir of powder that conceivably will be used to propel missiles at the Japanese. The powder was not in usable condition when recovered, but was suitable for re-blending.

The electrical equipment, with its hundreds of miles of wiring, was also brought on deck and cleaned preparatory to overhaul. Some 50 specialists from General Electric, which had built the motors and generators, were brought from the mainland for the complex rewiring. The taxpayer may rest assured that the Navy isn’t throwing away anything that can be fixed.

Summing up the West Virginia job, Admiral Furlong said: “We built her new from the inside out. We went right to the bottom, like a dentist drilling out a rotten tooth.”

Recursos:

• Multimedia: Pearl Harbor Revisited.
• Audio: Salvaging Pearl Harbor.
• Salvage Effort Reveals American Ingenuity: Once proud warships were restored to fighting trim.
• How the Nevada Was Saved: In a miracle of reclamation and repair, the destroyed battleship returned to life.
• U.S.S. California, a Massive Challenge: The sunken Nevada was only a warm-up for the task of raising the giant California.
• West Virginia, New and Improved: Yard workers rebuilt the severely damaged West Virginia from the inside out.
• Righting the Oklahoma: Through monumental engineering, the capsized Oklahoma was slowly rolled back.
• Inside the Hull of the Oklahoma, a Dismal Hell: The Times’s Robert Trumbull gives a first-hand account of his underwater exploration of the Oklahoma.