Memory of World War II and the victory over Nazism: between historical truth and modernity
The Second World War has long ended, but the struggle for its meaning continues to this day. For Ukraine, the memory of it is deeply rooted in personal and family histories, but at the same time it is inextricably linked to geopolitical processes and manipulations. Our country then suffered some of the greatest losses – according to modern historians, the total number of Ukrainians killed was from 8 to 10 million people. As a result of the war, cities and villages were devastated, as well as entire generations that could not recover from what they had experienced.
Therefore, the question of how we remember the Second World War, what we talk about it to our children today, is extremely important. It determines not only the attitude towards the historical past, but also the ability of modern society to maintain respect for the facts, people and values for which an extremely high price was paid. Today, when war is raging again on Ukrainian soil, the events of 1939–1945 sound like the answer to the question of what happens when evil is not stopped. That is why it is necessary to distinguish between memory and myth, experience and manipulation, history and its political use.
World War II: the largest and bloodiest in human history
On May 8, 1945, 81 years ago, Europe heard the silence that followed World War II – the largest and bloodiest in human history. On this day, Nazi Germany signed an act of unconditional surrender, but the final end of the war occurred on September 2, 1945, when Japan surrendered, which put an end to hostilities in the Pacific Ocean and around the world.
This war burned cities, tore apart families, and left millions in mass graves, camps, exile, and slavery. The news of Nazi Germany’s surrender rang out among the ruins, where victory represented the first faint breath of hope after years of fear, hunger, occupation, and mass violence. In many cities and villages, jubilant people took to the streets, hugging strangers, and celebrating the end of the war.
According to various estimates, between 60 and 85 million people died in World War II, almost half of whom were civilians. Ukraine suffered some of the greatest losses—modern historians estimate the total number of Ukrainian deaths at between 8 and 10 million. About 3–4 million Ukrainians died fighting in the army, in partisan units, or in the underground. About 5–5.5 million civilians died as a result of the occupation, the Holocaust, punitive operations, bombings, and inhumane conditions in Nazi camps.
For decades, Ukraine celebrated Victory Day on May 9, but after 2015, and finally after the adoption of the law in 2023, the state switched to a different model of commemoration, closer to the European approach. On May 8, Ukraine remembers all those who fought against Nazism, regardless of army, nationality, or status, and along with the feat of the victors, those whom the war took forever are returned to the center of memory: the fallen, tortured, shot, deported, and missing.
After the decision of the UN General Assembly in 2004, May 8 gradually became established as a Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation, associated with the mourning remembrance and moral response of humanity to the war. Ukrainian society had a difficult time coming to its own understanding of this day, as it had to go through an internal rift between the habit of celebrating May 9 and the need to talk about the war differently. For several generations, May 9 was the official Victory Day and at the same time a family day of remembrance for grandfathers and great-grandfathers who fought, died, went through concentration camps, survived evacuation, or survived the occupation. This memory still lives on in stories, old photographs, awards, front-line porridge, “combat 100 grams,” flowers, and minutes of silence at memorials and monuments. For many older Ukrainians, this tradition still remains a part of their personal history, so shifting the emphasis to May 8 is often perceived painfully, as if the state were touching not the calendar, but family memory.
After 2014, and even more clearly after the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, a different vision has grown stronger in Ukraine: more and more people have begun to ask in what language the victory is remembered and what the solemnity around it hides. Behind the facade of the Great Victory, for a part of society, not only the front-line feat and liberation from Nazism were revealed, but also repressions, camps, fear, censorship, the return of soldiers not to freedom, but to a new dictatorship. Because of this, May 9 has become for many a sign of distorted history and mythology, which Russia has turned into a tool of modern propaganda. There is still no complete agreement between these approaches: some maintain private commemoration, others are looking for a new language of memory that can combine respect for human losses with a rejection of the old ideology.
When Ukraine is once again living in war, the memory of 1939–1945 ceases to be a distant historical plot. Destroyed cities, deportations, mass murders, occupation, torture and the struggle for survival bring back to modernity issues that seemed to have been finally mastered after the Second World War. May 8 therefore sounds like an occasion to talk about the price of war, the fragility of peace and the danger of totalitarianism, which can change language, flags and justifications, but again bring death, violence and ruins to people.
The memory of the Second World War, which is still being adapted to politics
The modern political and media space is increasingly becoming a field for historical claims, as well as disputes in society. Various states are trying to declare their “decisive” role in the victory over Nazism, treating it as part of national prestige or an instrument of influence. This trend has especially intensified in recent decades: each country that participated in the war seeks to assert its exclusivity in this victory. Moreover, public discourses contain statements that are based more on geopolitical ambitions than on historical facts. This approach risks marginalizing real victims, experiences, losses, and the complexity of situations.
In different countries, the memory of World War II was shaped not only around facts, but also around the needs of society after the war. For some states, the main thing was liberation from Nazism, for others, the memory of occupation, collaboration, loss of independence, bombing, genocide, or the post-war division of Europe. Because of this, the same war looks different in textbooks, museums, speeches, and state ceremonies. France spent a long time building its memory around the Resistance, although the issue of the Vichy regime’s collaboration with the Nazis remained a painful one. Poland emphasizes the experience of dual aggression by Germany and the USSR. Germany, after a long and difficult rethinking, placed responsibility for the crimes of Nazism at the center. Russia inherited the Soviet model, in which victory became the basis of the state myth, and complex or inconvenient facts were pushed to the background.
However, no state has the moral right to claim a monopoly on the assessment of that war. The victory over Nazism was the result of an incredibly complex and large-scale resistance, the efforts of dozens of countries, hundreds of peoples and millions of individual human destinies. In this struggle, there was no single center or linear division into the main and secondary. Victory was a shared responsibility, a collective feat and a catastrophic sacrifice. However, for Ukraine, participation in the Second World War became a total and comprehensive destruction with an unprecedented number of victims, the scale of destruction, the depth of the humanitarian catastrophe.
The German occupation of Ukraine turned out to be one of the most brutal in all of Europe. While in France, Denmark or Belgium the Nazis mainly exercised administrative control, a policy of genocide was implemented on Ukrainian lands. It was here that mass executions of civilians, the burning of villages, the execution of hostages, and the practice of total terror took place. It was in Ukraine, on the territory of the then Reich Commissariat of Ukraine, that the Holocaust took on an industrial scale: Babyn Yar, Drobitsky Yar, Kamianets-Podilskyi, and Bohdanivka are just some of the pages of a large-scale crime against humanity. People who survived the occupation perceived the liberation after the end of the war as a chance to survive, as the end of the round-the-clock threat of physical destruction. It was joy and at the same time mourning, because there was often nowhere to return, because there was a new repressive reality of the Stalinist regime.
However, the problem is not that each country has its own emphasis in the memory of the war. It arises when the emphasis begins to replace the truth, and history turns into an instrument of political pressure. The Second World War was so large-scale that it is impossible to talk about it only about one army, one group of victims, or one type of heroism. Ukrainians fought in the Red Army, the Allied forces, in the underground, survived the occupation, saved Jews, became victims of the Nazis and the Soviet regime, sometimes made tragic choices in situations where there was no safe way out. 112 thousand ethnic Ukrainians fought in the Polish Army, up to 80 thousand in the US Armed Forces, about 45 thousand in the British and Canadian armies, and 6 thousand in the French.
All these people contributed to the general fight against fascism, regardless of nationality. They were part of the global resistance, so their presence in the Allied armies is another evidence that victory cannot be appropriated by any one country. Therefore, when the interpretation of the events of those years is replaced by convenient myths, society receives not memory, but a distortion of history and a split in society.
If states interpret the Second World War in accordance with ideological narratives, they usually select from the past those episodes that reinforce the desired image. In a healthy historical culture, such accents should coexist with critical analysis. Ukraine needs a memory of the Second World War without a substitution of concepts, and this does not make history more accurate, and society less vulnerable to those who try to turn the past into a weapon.
“Never Again!”: Was Nazism Won?
There are almost no people left among us who went through the Second World War with their own lives, and not through books, films or museum exhibits. Every year the voices of veterans – those who met the war at a very young age: fifteen-year-old orderlies, seventeen-year-old riflemen, eighteen-year-old cadets – are becoming quieter. They remembered it as a great pain in the hands after bandaging, the nightly roar of artillery, the cold of the trenches and the faces of comrades who did not return from battle. For many decades, these people lived with the desire that what they had experienced would never happen again.
Many of them sincerely believed in the main post-war promise – “Never again!”. It seemed to them that the experience of World War II was so terrible, so obviously senseless in its cruelty, that humanity would no longer allow a similar catastrophe to return. Especially between the peoples who together bore the burden of that war, stood in the same trenches, liberated concentration camps, pulled the wounded out of the fire. They could hardly imagine that in a few decades the army of one of the countries of the former joint victory would come with tanks to the land of another. That the people who were recently called “brotherly people” would bring new horror, no longer under the banner of the swastika, but with the same contempt for human life, the language of a “great historical mission,” and the desire to subjugate, humiliate, and erase someone else’s identity. They could not have foreseen that missiles from Moscow and Belgorod would hit residential neighborhoods in Kyiv and Kharkiv, and that the word “denazification” would be used not to comprehend the crimes of the past, but as a justification for the current murders of adults and children.
Their graves are scattered across dozens of cemeteries across Europe, in mass graves, nameless trenches, and war memorials. Russians and Ukrainians, Belarusians, Georgians, Kazakhs, and representatives of many other nations were participants in that war that was called the Great. If they could speak today, it is unlikely that any of them would justify a new war in terms of geopolitical interests, “spheres of influence” or “historical justice”. However, there are almost no people of that generation left, and those who are still alive hear sirens, explosions and news of the dead again. They are being shot at by the grandchildren of those with whom their generation once fought against Nazism.
The Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, who came to power with his party in 1933, built a political system on exceptional cruelty, racial hierarchy and contempt for human dignity. The ideology of the Nazi party contradicted all modern principles of humanism, because it divided peoples into “superior” and “inferior” races, attributing to one the right to rule, conquer and destroy others. Not only entire nations fell under the blow of this system, but also people with a different worldview, political beliefs, health status or lifestyle that did not fit into the framework of the “correct” society imposed by the Nazis.
In 1945, the world hoped that with the capitulation of the Third Reich, Nazism would also disappear as an ideology, political practice and source of organized hatred. The Nazi state machine was destroyed, its leaders were convicted, and racial superiority, aggressive revanchism and justification of genocide were officially outlawed. However, the destruction of the regime did not mean the complete disappearance of the ideas that gave rise to it. Nazism lost the war as a state, but its logic did not disappear without a trace.
More than eight decades after the end of World War II, there are still organizations and environments in the world that openly or covertly reproduce Nazi ideology. They change their names, adapt to legal restrictions, and cover themselves up with words about “tradition,” “order,” or “national revival,” but their essence remains recognizable: hatred of others, justification of discrimination, the cult of power, and the willingness to consider violence a normal political instrument.
In many countries, such structures are banned, but bans do not always stop the spread of Nazi symbols, language, and images. The most dangerous thing is that now, while denying or minimizing the crimes of the past, a similar logic is being reproduced in new forms today — through aggression, the destruction of the graves of fallen heroes, militarism, the cult of imperial greatness, and the denial of the right of other peoples to their own existence.
