Commemorative event on May 8

To mark the day of liberation from National Socialism and the end of the Second World War in Europe, the Lord Mayor of the City of Jena, Thomas Nitzsche, invited guests to the traditional commemoration with a wreath-laying ceremony.

Speech by Jena's Lord Mayor Thomas Nitzsche on May 8th

Since Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker's speech in the Bundestag in 1985 to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of the war, May 8 has generally been regarded as "the day of liberation from the inhuman system of National Socialist tyranny". The speech was an expression of a development process in the critical examination of the National Socialist past. Coming to terms with one's own past and accepting one's own responsibility was - initially for West Germany - a long and rocky road.

Unconditional surrender

On the night of May 8-9, 1945, 75 years ago, the High Command of the German Wehrmacht surrendered unconditionally. This meant that all armed forces under German command surrendered to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces and the Supreme Command of the Red Army. The guns finally fell silent in the European theater of war.

It had been preceded by six years of the worst war the world had ever seen. An estimated 55 million people had lost their lives.

The war started in Germany

But the war also had its prehistory: on January 30, 1933, the National Socialists had taken power in Germany with the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor. The onslaught on the Weimar Republic, which had lasted more than 10 years, had reached a turning point.

The dismantling of Weimar democracy and the establishment of the National Socialist dictatorship lasted only a shockingly few weeks. On February 1, 1933, the German Reichstag was dissolved and political and democratic rights were increasingly restricted by emergency presidential decrees. Public political life was now characterized by National Socialist terror. After the Reichstag fire on February 28 and the Enabling Act of March 24, 1933 at the latest, the Reichstag had lost practically all decision-making powers. Members of parliament were now also imprisoned without trial in prisons and concentration camps, tortured and many died.

Systematic preparation for war

When we commemorate the November pogroms in front of the Westbahnhof every November, we do so because that night from November 9 to 10, 1938 was another step into the abyss. The pogroms marked the transition from the discrimination against German Jews since 1933 to a systematic expulsion as a precursor to the systematic extermination, the Holocaust, which began three years later. 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms were destroyed, thousands of stores, homes and cemeteries were looted, around 30,000 Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps and hundreds died.

The Second World War was also felt in Jena from the very beginning. With the secret general mobilization in August 1938, foodstuffs such as meat, sugar, milk and cooking fat, as well as soap and clothing, and soon bread and potatoes, were rationed here too. A food and economic office was set up in the city administration to coordinate the coercive measures. When the Wehrmacht invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, listening to foreign radio stations was banned and the newspapers were increasingly dominated by war news and propaganda against the Allies and Jews.

Shortly before the war began, 2,196 Jena citizens were members of the Wehrmacht and the Reich Labor Service. The first obituaries for fallen soldiers soon appeared in the newspapers, some carried by the grief of loss, others by National Socialist phrases. The number of war dead rose significantly after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. It is not known how many Jena residents died during the war as members of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen SS and police or the infamous Police Battalion 311. There were probably over 2,000 people.

Jena was also part of the war

Jena's civilian population increased considerably during the war years, initially due to the influx of workers and later due to bombed-out families and refugees seeking refuge in the city. The war was made visible by the more than 14,000 forced laborers who had to work in Jena for around 320 employers, including the city administration. More than three quarters of them were employed in the Carl Zeiss and Schott foundation companies. People from 26 nations had to work under sometimes inhumane conditions; the largest groups were Belgians and Soviet citizens, French and Italians. Approximately 50 camps were set up in the city area, and others were added in the surrounding villages. Mistreatment and poor care were the order of the day. Even though there are individual reports of forbidden contacts and help on the part of Jena citizens, the majority of the population supported the restrictive regulations on the treatment of forced laborers. Violence and terror increased, especially towards the end of the war. Several forced laborers were deliberately murdered in the last days of the war in Jena. During the war years, 342 deaths were registered, but the actual number of victims is probably much higher.

Jena residents were victims of the Shoa

More than 100 Jena residents were victims of the Shoa. As early as 1940, Berta and Max Meyerstein - as far as is known - were the first to be deported to concentration camps and murdered in 1941 and 1942. The planned deportation of the remaining Jews in Jena to ghettos and extermination camps in the occupied Eastern European territories began in 1942. Many of them ended their own lives to escape this fate: Clara Rosenthal, Therese Zuckerkandel, Marie Straubel, Klara Griefahn. Many of the deportees had to make the journey to their deaths from Jena's Westbahnhof train station.

From the 1930s, Carl Zeiss Jena in particular was known as a major producer of military-optical equipment for the Reichswehr and Wehrmacht, making it a prime target for the Allies. Between 1940 and 1945, there were a total of 330 air raid alerts in Jena. The first bombs fell on Jena on August 18 and 19, 1940, initially causing only minor damage. But things got much worse. During the bombing war from 1943 to 1945, Jena's city center and the sites of important armaments suppliers were hit hard several times, especially between February and April 1945. The most devastating bombing raid took place on March 19, 1945, when 197 American bombers flew a major raid against Jena and reduced a large part of Jena's city center to rubble. A total of almost 800 people died, including more than 100 forced laborers and prisoners of war. The war, which had also started in Jena, had returned with full force.

An end with horror

As the last military contingent of the Nazi regime, hundreds of Jena residents were mobilized for the Volkssturm in the spring of 1945, including employees of Carl Zeiss and the Reichsbahn. Although they hardly took part in combat operations, they murdered at least two dozen concentration camp prisoners who were driven through the city on the death march two days before the Americans marched in.

The war in Jena ended on April 13, 1945, just four weeks before the surrender, when American troops marched in.

Hopelessness and apathy

The National Socialist penetration of the city was multi-layered and deep, starting with the city administration, in Jena University, in business and industry as well as in clubs and associations and extending into the private family sphere. The end of the war in Jena was not a day of rejoicing. In Weimar, as in Jena, the citizens did not look to the future with hope in the last days of the war. This is how war correspondent Russel Hill described it in an article that appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on May 4, 1945. According to this article, apathy and uncertainty about the future were widespread among the Germans. This feeling was reinforced by the fact that the inhabitants did not know which occupation zone Thuringia would belong to in the future.

The awareness of what had happened during the National Socialist era and especially during the war years had to mature gradually. So did the awareness of the significance of May 8, 1945, the day of Germany's surrender. The guilt and shame of being partly responsible for genocide and the horror of war, even if it was through passivity and looking the other way, was too deep-seated. It took upright and courageous people like Fritz Bauer and others to confront the Germans with their own past. This also applies to the GDR, even though the "Day of the Liberation of the German People from Hitler Fascism" has been a day of celebration and remembrance here since 1950.

The end of National Socialism was not the end of contempt for humanity

The fact that the liberation from National Socialism should not be equated with the liberation from inhuman and anti-group views and deeds in our society has unfortunately become clear repeatedly over the last 76 years. Not least the acts of the NSU as well as the attacks of recent years illustrate the existing potential for violence of racist and right-wing extremist circles.

I am therefore glad that we in Jena are always daring to confront our past, the National Socialist past in the 1930s and 1940s as well as the National Socialist Underground. As "the city from which the perpetrators came", we have a responsibility to ask about the causes, look at the present and draw the right conclusions for the future. This year, 10 years after the NSU trio unmasked themselves and 20 years after the first attack, we will be setting the tone for this throughout Germany.

The fight against right-wing ideas: an ongoing task

Liberation from National Socialist tyranny, which took place with the collapse of the Nazi regime in the spring of 1945, is not the same as liberation from National Socialist ideas. This struggle remains an ongoing task for us. The fight against inhuman values, against anti-Semitism, against racism and discrimination and for our democracy is an ongoing process. We, the democrats, must stand up for the basic values of our society, based on the dignity of every human being.

With this awareness and with this intention, let us keep alive the day of liberation from National Socialist tyranny and the end of the Second World War!

I now invite you to join me in a minute's silence to remember the victims of National Socialism and those who fought for the liberation of Germany and Europe.