80 years after Germany surrendered, we’re still learning the real lessons of World War II

Eighty years on, few people are alive who remember World War II. Anne Frank would have turned 96 this June; Senator Bob Dole, a veteran of the Italian campaign in 1945, died four years ago. But the legacy of the war remains an active, living one — and there are still lessons to learn from it, decades after the Allies declared victory in Europe on May 8, 1945.

The war is today invoked most often by the proper nouns that have come to stand in for its violence: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Dachau, Nagasaki. These places became familiar after the war as bywords for the terrible material and moral capacities of human beings.

But the awful civilian slaughter seen by these places — and many others — in the course of a war that killed as many as 70 million people around the world, was not just a contemporary moment of horror and danger. It was an announcement of more terrors to come in the future. The reason World War II remains so central to our thinking is that its victories were achieved with so much strain, and so much defeat. They displayed the brutality of combat; the failure of moral orientation; the discord of privilege and power. Those fighting against fascism could be the enemy, too.

Did we learn that lesson?

Auschwitz should have alerted the whole world to its own moral complicity in Nazi Germany’s massacre of Jews. The basic outlines of the Holocaust were well understood, worldwide, at the end of 1942. What was not known until after the Shoah’s end was the extent of the role played by local police forces in the deportation of Jews in France and the Netherlands, and the crushing indifference of Jews’ neighbors to their plight across Europe.

That depth of complicity in Europe, once understood in the U.S. and the world, prompted introspection. Only after the liberation of Auschwitz, once it was too late to save anybody, did the allies reconsider their restrictive earlier policies toward Jewish refugees.

And Hiroshima warned against the potential for technological annihilation. The extraordinary devastation it caused forced people around the world to imagine the cost of unchecked military escalation, even to the end of eradicating all human life.

Of course, the lessons of World War II didn’t just come from the sites of the most extraordinary suffering. Wherever the war was fought, it revealed “second fronts,” ethnic and political conflicts that divided civilians; rewarded collaboration and opportunism; and instigated further killing long after the regular armies had moved on. This was the wartime story in Ukraine, in the Philippines, and in China.

And then there were the broad conclusions reached through the defeat of militarist and fascist states — the reason why, despite the enormity of suffering inflicted in the conflict, we continue to think of World War II as a “good war.”

The tremendous effort to defeat Germany and Japan also counseled against appeasement — the accommodation of enemies to gain an immediate peace without long-term security. V-E Day in Europe on May 8, 1945, and V-J Day in East Asia on August 15 of the same year, cemented the importance of genuine alliances rooted in the effective coordination of military strategy. Where the Allies worked together, the Axis powers shared resentments, but hardly cooperated.

The effects of these lessons became apparent almost immediately after the war. It turbocharged the work of decolonization: A war that began in order to stand against Germany’s invasion of Poland served to legitimize opposition to the ongoing rule of several European countries across Africa and Asia. Foreign or minority rule led to “popular fronts” which waged “people’s war” against injustice everywhere.

After reporting on the indignant cries for freedom “from the Nile to the Volga and across the endless width of Asia” at the end of 1942, The New York Times could “behold men and women on the march not in one place but everywhere.”

But decolonization brought its own horrific violence. And in the U.S., too, the fight for liberty in World War II set the stage for wrenching conflicts at home.

During the war, African-Americans envisioned a “double victory,” one against Hitler’s oppression abroad, the other against racism at home — a dynamic that only intensified after the lynching of two Black boys in Shubuta, Mississippi, in October, 1942.

At the same time, white Southerners believed that fighting World War II was about protecting Jim Crow. In 1944, John Temple Graves, a newspaper columnist in Birmingham, Alabama, said on a national radio broadcast about “the race question” that U.S. participation in the war was a fight for “states rights, for the right of individual lands not to be invaded by outsiders, not to be dictated to or aggressed against.”

As he interpreted it, the defense of Poland stood, in its own way, for the defense of the poll tax.

Across the world, World War II was a point of reckoning: Individuals fought for some sort of freedom or liberty, but freedom and liberty defined in ambivalent and awkward ways. Their disagreements about what, exactly, they were fighting for would shape the history of the world for decades to come.

World War II haunted so many survivors because it showed the degree to which they were both part of the Allies and part of the Axis — they could be both oppressed and oppressors. It is this tainted inheritance that we must still try to figure out, today. The murky outcomes of the war compel us to examine why people do the things they do.

World War II was a final reckoning with Nazi Germany, but also a formative reckoning with ourselves, as neighbors, friends, enemies. Looking back at World War II, many people were corrupt, a few were brave, and most were somewhere in between. The war extends as a vast, terrifying grey zone across national borders, the common ground for our humility and self-scrutiny.

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