Europe celebrates end of World War II

SOLEMN commemoration services and street parties drew huge crowds yesterday as Europe celebrated the 60th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat and the end of the continent’s most devastating war.

“On this peaceful May morning, we commemorate a great victory for liberty,” US President George W Bush said at Europe’s third-largest cemetery for American soldiers near Margraten in the Netherlands.

From the ceremony, Bush flew to Moscow where he and dozens of other world leaders are continuing the VE Day celebrations at a Red Square military parade that Russian President Vladimir Putin is staging on the day regarded there as a great historical date.

Russia paid the heaviest price of any nation for Adolf Hitler’s aggression, losing some 26 million soldiers and citizens.

Last night, Mr Bush and Mr Putin met privately amid an escalating fight over US pressure on Russia to own up to its wartime past.

In Britain, the Prince of Wales launched commemorations at a moving service at the Cenotaph, laying a wreath in tribute to the fallen as dozens of former servicemen watched on along Whitehall.

French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder attended ceremonies in their countries to mark the close of World War II in Europe.

At the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, Mr Chirac laid flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier watched by troops from the many nations that united to crush Hitler. They included Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Slovakia and the US.

Thousands of people, including Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, travelled to a former Nazi death camp in Austria to mark its liberation.

At the former Mauthausen death camp in Austria, thousands took part in a ceremony to remember some 100,000 inmates killed by the Nazis there. It was the last big Nazi death camp still operating when the US Third Army’s 11th Armored Division arrived in early May 1945.

Around six million Jews were murdered during World War II, which cost some 50 million lives in total.

The Nazi capitulation was signed the day before in Reims, France, a week after Hitler committed suicide in Berlin.

WWII raged on in the Pacific until Japan’s surrender on August 15.

Poland’s main VE Day celebrations took place on Saturday in the western city of Wroclaw. Yesterday Prime Minister Marek Belka paid homage to soldiers who fought in WWII in a ceremony before Warsaw’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.