Kohl: Germany Should Also Mourn Own Dead Chancellor Sides Publicly On V-E Day With Conservatives In Parliament

Chancellor Helmut Kohl said Thursday this year’s 50th anniversary of the Nazis’ surrender should be a time to mourn Germany’s war losses as well as celebrate its liberation from Adolf Hitler.

Siding publicly with conservatives in Parliament for the first time, Kohl said the V-E Day ceremony in Berlin on May 8 should not just be a day of expressing gratitude to the Allies.

Along with remembering Jews, Gypsies and other Nazi victims, he said, Germans also should be able to mourn their own war dead - estimated at 5.25 million.

“Millions of (German) soldiers lost their lives. Millions were thrown into prisons,” Kohl said. “There is also good reason to remember the millions who suffered as they fled” the approaching Red Army or were expelled from former German territories in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Leftist lawmakers called his attitude wrongheaded because it was Hitler -and not the victorious Allies - who was to blame for Germans’ wartime suffering.

“May 8 must be clearly seen as a day of (German) liberation” and not a symbol of German losses, said Otto Schilly of the opposition Social Democrats.

Kohl had already been under fire for not inviting Polish leaders to attend the Berlin ceremony, and tempers flared in parliament’s lower house as he defended that decision Thursday.

Kohl announced last week that only leaders of the United States, Russia, France and Britain will be invited to the ceremonies in Berlin because those countries defeated the Nazis, oversaw Germany’s postwar division and helped with reunification in 1990.

Other countries have been asked to send diplomats.

Critics say he has insulted Poland, which Nazi Germany invaded in 1939, starting World War II. Polish leaders, pointing out that Poles also fought with the Allies, had hoped for an invitation.

Some Poles also found the decision baffling since Kohl recently had begun saying that Germany wanted a relationship with Poland as close as the German-French alliance.

What kind of neighbor a reunited Germany would be was a matter of deep concern in Europe and Washington before the 1990 unification, and the snub of Poland was seen by some as a sign of insensitivity or arrogance.