II Guerra Mundial (Continuación)

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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?…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

"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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »

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.…  Seguir leyendo »