D-Day in History and Memory: The Normandy Landings in International Remembrance and Commemoration

5. “Sie Kommen”: From Defeat to Liberation—German and Austrian Memory of the Allied “Invasion” of 6 June 1944

189 The Battle of the Bulge was the bloodiest battle on the Western Front in World War II. Yet the Western Allies’ invasion of Normandy “has become the symbol of World War II in Europe” and is at the forefront of the former Allies’ remembrance culture and politics of history.2 For Germans and Austrians, meanwhile, the Normandy “invasion” marked a decisive defeat; only recently have the Germans begun to talk about the beginning of their “liberation” from Hitler’s terror regime in their remembrance of the Normandy campaign.3 While American and British D-Day veterans have been flooding the beaches of Normandy, German and Austrian veterans have quietly and unobtrusively visited the bunkers of the “Atlantic Wall,” or paid tribute to their fallen comrades at one of the six German cemeteries in Normandy (in which 77,976 Germans and Austrians are interred). The largest of these is La Cambe, where 21,500 soldiers are buried.4 Austrian soldiers made up roughly one-tenth of Nazi Germany’s armed formations of approximately twelve million soldiers. Proportionally we may speculate that among these fallen German Wehrmacht and SS soldiers buried in Normandy there may be as many as 8,000 Austrian nationals. WhilethevictoriousAlliesengageincultsofintensepublicmemory regarding this decisive turning point of World War II, especially the Americans and British, there is no such intense public and institutional memory among Germans and Austrians; the German and Chapter Five “Sie Kommen”: From Defeat to Liberation—German and Austrian Memory of the Allied “Invasion” of 6 June 1944 Günter Bischof and Michael S. Maier1 D-Day in History and Memory 190 Austrian “memory booms” of World War II have concentrated on the final solution, after a long period of denial, their victimization in the bombing war, the Germans’ expulsions from the East, and the criminal campaigns of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front.5 As Robert G. Moeller has suggested, West Germans preferred to see themselves as victims in the 1950s and again in the 1980s–1990s; by and large the same is true of the Austrians.6 The Western Allies’ commemorations have constructed a distinct public memory of D-Day, with their heads of state gathering on the beaches of Normandy in 1984, 1994, and 2004, defining collective national memories in their speeches, and with thousands of veterans gathering for somber commemorations of their fallen comrades. The first German chancellor admitted to the exclusive club of D-Day victors, Gerhard Schröder, took part in 2004. Similarly, while individual memories of Allied D-Day soldiers have been collected assiduously and the soldiers’ sacrifice and patriotism defined with gusto as “the greatest generation,” the same has not been true for those who were defending the Norman coast on the morning of 6 June 1944.7 To be sure, German and Austrian Normandy veterans have often been eager to tell their stories and travel to Normandy when asked; their memories largely revolved around the enormous advantages of the Western Allies in materiel and the devastating bombardments they endured from the air, sea, and land. But no specific oral history collections of Axis Normandy veterans have been published.8 Likewise, the cultural memory landscape of Normandy is littered with American, British, and Canadian memorials, museums, and cemeteries; in fact, Normandy cemeteries have mutated to “American places.”9 Germans, in contrast, have treaded carefully with modest memorials and burial grounds. There is no distinct Austrian presence in Normandy. Major D-Day museums have been built in New Orleans and Portsmouth, defining and cultivating American and British national collective D-Day memories; Germans and Austrians have no such exquisite temples of memory. At best, the Normandy invasion might get honorable mention in national military museums and/or special exhibits. There is little German 191 “Sie Kommen” and no Austrian scholarly literature on the historical memory of the Normandy invasion.10 In this essay, therefore, we are suggesting a first outline for such a memory trajectory by analyzing the media discourses of the 1984, 1994, and 2004 commemorations toward the formation of a collective memory. We will also briefly summarize individual memories of German and Austrian veterans, and note that a public, or institutional , or collective memory of this turning point in World War II history hardly exists in Germany and Austria. Silence, Suppression, and Victimhood: D-Day in Germany and Austria There has been a “surfeit of memory” of World War II in both West Germany...