Obama at Buchenwald

I do realize that President Obama was in Buchenwald yesterday to celebrate the concentration camp’s liberation by American troops in 1945. He might, however, have given more than a split second’s attention to what happened at that camp immediately after that liberation. During the Soviet occupation of Buchenwald and the surrounding area, between August 1945 and February 1950, more than 28,000 people remained captive there, imprisoned under a regime almost indistinguishable from that of the Third Reich. More prisoners were interned in Sachsenhausen, and there were at least four other large Soviet concentration camps in eastern Germany as well. Some of these prisoners were former Nazis. But many, if not most, were arrested for their opposition to the imposition of Soviet-style communism on East Germany – or else, in true Soviet tradition, they were arrested for nothing at all. Those thousands who died – of starvation, of epidemics – surely deserved more than a brief mention by Obama.

I could make a similar point about the president’s decision to commemorate the 65th anniversary of D-Day this year, as opposed to, say, the 70th anniversary of the joint German-Russian invasion of Poland in September 1939, which in fact marked the beginning of the war. So far, there is no hint that the president, nor any other senior U.S. official, will attend the commemoration in Poland this fall.

One would think that, after all this time, we would have discarded our slanted recollection of the war. Yet most Americans still think the war ended at D-Day, and still think it concluded with the triumph of democracy in Europe. In fact, most of the fighting took place on the Eastern front, where the decisive battles were Stalingrad and Kursk. And for at least half of Europe, the war did not end in the triumph of democracy at all, but in a new form of totalitarianism.

Yes, we shut down Hitler’s concentration camps. But we also allowed Stalin’s to grow far larger: in the late 1940s they expanded numerically and geographically, not only in the Soviet Union but across central Europe. In fact, the end of the Second World War provides an excellent lesson not in the unqualified goodness of Americans, but in the unintended consequences of military action: Once you start violence, you never know how it is going to end. Which is also a lesson with contemporary significance.