Events show past is not what it used to be

Sixty years after Allied forces launched their assault on German troops on D-Day, the monumental battle for the Normandy beaches is living up to the historians' maxim that the past isn't what it used to be.

The anniversary celebrations tomorrow will bring together wartime victors United States and Britain and their former enemy Germany, smaller Allied nations whose soldiers were there on D-Day and a big one whose weren't - Russia.

They won't all look back on "the longest day" as mainly a triumph of Allied military might. The Germans now talk about it as the dawn of their liberation from Nazism. Russians tend to rank D-Day below their 1943 victory at Stalingrad.

But with time moving on and veterans dying off, the daring invasion is settling back into the annals of historical events whose meaning can be moulded in the light of subsequent events.

French President Jacques Chirac set the tone for the 60th anniversary commemoration in January by saying it would stress "this community of values that unite democracies and transcend yesterday's rivalries" and announced Germany would attend.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said earlier this week it was only right that Germany should take part because it was also liberated from Nazi tyranny thanks to D-Day.

"This day is much more than victory or defeat," he said. "This invitation shows the post-war period is over and done for good."

Some US and British veterans' groups have frowned on the invitation, which President Francois Mitterrand could not extend to Chancellor Helmut Kohl for the 50th anniversary in 1994 because it could have offended the aging survivors.

US historian Jack Holl described it "a little like former slave owners attending festivities at Gettysburg," citing a major battle of the US Civil War.

But a new view was "perhaps politically necessary... the price one must pay for unity and solidarity in an uncertain world," said Holl, director of the Institute for Military History and 20th Century Studies at Kansas State University.

Germans have been speaking of their country's World War Two defeat as a liberation from Nazism since 1985, when the then President Richard von Weizsaecker made the idea the centrepiece of his speech on the 40th anniversary of the war's end.

While the commemoration's French hosts agree with presenting D-Day this way, German officials know they cannot go too far in pushing an idea that others could find offensive.

While other leaders will visit their own military cemeteries in Normandy to honour their dead, Schroeder will go to a British graveyard to pay homage to the many Commonwealth soldiers lying there and about 200 Germans buried beside them.

He will avoid the 21,000 soldiers buried at La Cambe, the largest German war cemetery in the area, because many of them were from the Nazis' hated SS units.

Nigel Steel, head of research and information at London's Imperial War Museum, said six decades of peace and three decades of European Union membership had helped Britain to turn the focus from past enmity to present partnership with Germany.

In addition, as the old soldiers die off, "attention has begun to focus a lot on individual veterans and the experiences they went through on behalf of their people.

"There is now a tolerance and respect for soldiers on both sides who were doing their duty as their country called them to do," he said.

While today's Western partners may now see the individuals behind yesterday's uniforms, war veterans in Russia complain the French hosts have overlooked the enormous losses the Soviet army suffered as it fought Nazi Germany from the east.

"No one has invited us," said Yuri Ivanov, head of the Federal Veterans Committee in Moscow. "Most likely they decided that they won the war without us and they liberated Europe."