Mother's Day 2022

May 8 is the VE Day, when we commemorate the victory over Nazi Germany in Europe in 1945. But since in 2022 it is the 2nd Sunday in May, it is also the Mother's Day (in Canada, US, and many other countries). To all mothers, Happy Mother's Day!

Mother's Day Flowers

Different cultures have different traditions of celebrating mothers, but this specific type of Mother's Day is an American tradition, which was established in 1907 and passed into the US law by 1914. That celebration quickly spread to some other countries, while yet others retained their original way of marking such a day or found new ones.

However, many/most countries celebrate Mother's Day around this time of the year. Note: UK and Ireland use for this occasion the date of the old tradition of Mothering Sunday, 4th week of Lent, when people visited their Mother Church (the nearest cathedral).

Note: Czechs were switching the date according to politics of the day. In 1920's, they used the American date. During the communist times, they flipped to March 8 (the International Women's Day). Now they are back to the American date. The use of the American date in 1920's was due to the efforts of the daughter of their first president, Masaryk, who was married to an American from a prominent Brooklyn family, Charlotte. In 1923 Charlotte died on what would be the Mother's Day. That's when the Czech tradition started.

Mother's Day Dates

The VE Day, May 8, commemorates the end of WWII in Europe. Germany actually already surrendered during the night of May 6, in Rheims, France, (2:41 AM of May 7, to be precise). But then the document was signed again (slightly modified) in the evening of May 8 in Berlin, Germany. The official end of all combat operations was specified to be May 8, 11:01 pm, which was already May 9 in Moscow. So, in the countries of the former Soviet block, the end of WWII is now marked as May 9, not May 8. That's when those huge Russian military parades in Moscow happen.

War Is Over

Note: in few places in Europe, between the two fronts, fighting and atrocities continued to the last day and even beyond. For example, in Prague, Czechoslovakia, there was a revolt against the German rule on May 5. Germans then kept murdering civilians to the very last minute, even on May 9, especially Waffen-SS and the local Hitlerjugend ("Hitler Youth"), there recruited from Czechoslovak Sudeten Germans. (Hitlerjugend's slogan, etched on their knives, was "Blood and Honor". That slogan - or it's numerical shorthand, "28" - is used today by neo-Nazi groups).

The German atrocities were also committed by local German men conscripted to Volkssturm (national militia). Some of them refused to fight to the bitter end, but those were then hunted down and killed by special SS commandos.

Some Germans in Bohemia were fighting until the early morning of May 12 - the last large German battle in Europe. The main street in the nearest town is called "May 11 / 11. kvetna". (Well, there was another battle on May 15 in Slovenia, but that involved more of the Croatian and Slovenian Nazis and fewer of the German kind.)

WW II Fronts 1945

Note: Most of those war crimes remained unpunished because West Germany refused to extradite the perpetrators or bring them to justice itself. This might be because the first German Chancellor, Adenauer, demanded (and got) an "end to this sniffing out of Nazis" and issued a wide-ranging amnesty that affected about 800,000 people, including 20,000 Nazis sentenced for murder, another 30,000 for causing "bodily injury" and also about 3,000 concentration camps functionaries. About 8.5 millons of Germans, 10% of the population had been members of the Nazi Party. Going after Nazi war criminals was not something that the German government wanted to do and instead pursued a policy of willful amnesia for decades to follow. The historical myopia of West Germans was so strong that they shifted the meaning of "victim" from people suffering from Nazism to people affected by the denazification policies. They even invented a new word for them: Entnazifizierungsgeschdigten. This "triumph of silence" was finally broken between the end of 1960s and the beginning 1990s, especially after Willy Brandt's extraordinary Warschauer Kniefall (Warsaw genuflection).

Warsaw Genuflection

Note: When Brandt was the West German Chancellor, some Germans, especially those displaced from Sudetenland of pre-war Czechoslovakia, from Romania etc, considered Brandt's policies to be "high treason".

Unlike his predecessor, Keisinger, who was a conservative and a former member of the Nazi party with close connections to Ribbentrop and Goebbels, Brandt was not only a liberal, but also decidedly anti-Nazi, even in those times of mid-30s and early 40s when this could easily cost you your life. Even his name was indicative of that: it is actually a cover name which he used to evade the Nazis and which he later adopted.

While his efforts to heal the old hatreds were not popular with some/many people, his Nobel Peace Prize for those efforts was well-deserved.

  Brandt Man Of The Year

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