Remembering V-E Day, 80 years ago today

Today marks the 80th anniversary of what was immediately celebrated as V-E Day—the day that marked the defeat of the Third Reich and the victory of the Allies. Just weeks before, on March 28, 1945, the 90th Infantry Division of Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army crossed the Main River near the town of Hanau to the east of Frankfurt, Germany. By that late date in the European Theatre of World War II, the Germans were sending boys and old men into combat against the Americans.

In No End Save Victory: Perspectives on World War II, Stephen Ambrose relates a story told by Capt. F. W. Norris of the 90th Division about how the Nazis had poisoned the minds of the young men fighting for Germany so profoundly as can hardly be imagined. In a brief firefight at a roadblock set up by the Germans, American soldiers had wounded several enemy soldiers. One of them was the sergeant who had led the German assault on the Americans at the roadblock.

This sergeant was badly wounded, bleeding profusely and in need of plasma. An American medic began preparing the sergeant to receive the needed plasma to keep him from dying. The German sergeant demanded to know if the blood that was about to be transfused into his body contained any Jewish blood. The medic told him that he had no idea, that Americans did not keep track of such things, nor did they care. The sergeant replied that if the medic could not confidently assure him that there was absolutely no Jewish blood about to proceed into his veins, then he would not accept the transfusion.

Ambrose reports that Norris had been overhearing this unbelievable conversation, and he couldn’t stand it anymore. In Norris’ description of what happened next: “I turned to this SS guy and in very positive terms I told him I didn’t care whether he lived or not, but if he did not take the plasma he would certainly die. He looked at me calmly and said, ‘I would rather die than have any Jewish blood in me.’” Norris then said, “So he died.”

Eighty years ago, Allied forces completed the destruction of the Nazi empire in Europe. The Germans in Italy surrendered on April 29. German forces in Denmark, Holland, and northern Germany gave up on May 4. General Alfred Jodl surrendered all remaining German forces on May 7 in the presence of General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower in the town of Reims. On May 8, German holdouts in Norway surrendered. The Red Army compelled the surrender of the Germans in the Kurland Pocket in Latvia on May 9. In America and Great Britain, May 8 was celebrated as V-E (Victory in Europe) Day.

At the close of the European war, there were 10 million German POWs and 8 million German homeless refugees. There were also 2 million Russian soldiers in Germany who had been captured by Hitler’s forces on the Eastern front. And there were 3 and a half million Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who had been liberated from the concentration camps.

Such a scale of human destruction is barely conceivable to us in 2025. The Second World War represents the greatest concentrated military, economic, social, and spiritual effort of the American nation in its history. We are all products of that effort and of its results, no matter the extent to which we understand how, or care. The questions before us as we mark this auspicious anniversary is, what kind of a nation are we, three generations later? Would those Americans who strove, fought, and perished to break the Nazi grip recognize the country they handed down to us? Have we been responsible stewards of the trust bequeathed to us by our grandparents and great-grandparents? Or have we squandered our inheritance? Have we betrayed our ancestors? Can we say that we are worthy of the victory they won on the battlefields of North Africa, Sicily, France, Holland, and Germany?

Marking the 80th anniversary of the V-E Day presents us with an opportunity for self-examination and the steeling of ourselves afresh to conserve American civilization, animated as it is by the aspirations to freedom, truth, and virtue.